Ukraine crisis vindicates core tenets of India's foreign policy

‘Will Asia’s future be like Europe’s past?’ was the question asked for decades, as a metaphor to warn Asian statesmen to learn the lessons from European catastrophes a century ago. We might be tempted to now rephrase that notion by asking, will Asia’s future be like Europe’s present?

- ZORAWAR DAULET SINGH

At the heart of the European crisis is the idea of managing power transitions and reforming an order once the balance of power has significantly changed. Without recounting the whole history here, let’s just say that the end of the Cold War did not pave the way for an accommodation of the other side into the postwar settlement. Indeed, the framework developed was one-sided and the core interests of the socalled ‘defeated power’ — Russia — brushed aside. In the past decade, however, the power balance, particularly the military balance, has been shifting to a point where US and EU-defined security ideas relating to the European continent had become simply unsustainable. This zero-sum like situation has been developing for 15 years and the warning signs were not taken seriously, until the explosion in February.

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