The World in Transition: Relevance of Nation State Concept in the Era of Global Interdependence
By Gen. Rajiv Narayanan
**The contents of this piece were presented at the Herat Security Dialogue – VI (13-14 October 2017). Note that references have been omitted here to help with the flow of the text.**
The extant World Order is in a state of flux in this ‘Age of Strategic Uncertainties’, with the US in strategic retrenchment and the EU in an economic slowdown and internal dissonance. In this vacuum a rising, revanchist China seeks to gain more geo-strategic and geo-political space using geo-economic coercion to achieve its phase one of the Chinese Dream – a unipolar Asia within a multi-polar World. China reckons that the ‘Shi’, i.e. the ‘Strategic Construct of Power’, is now flowing in its favour but it opines that this window is narrowing as other Middle and Rising Powers (like India, Japan, Russia, etc.) exert their own ‘Shi’ to carve out their respective space in Asia.
The recent events and trends show that the emerging World Order is tending towards multi-polarity leading to another period of jousting due to the ‘balance of power’. However the world today is very different from the previous centuries wherein such a change was preceded by a bloody carnage from a clash of arms – the ‘Thucydides Trap’. In this flux come other Middle and Rising Powers with their own national interests to guard and expand their influence creating a combustible environment.