Continuing from yesterday - Scenario 2: The Return of Colonialism
Scenario 3: A multi-axis world
A multi-Axis world is the most optimistic outcome of this war, in my view. Unfortunately, it may not be the most likely outcome. Optimism in geopolitics requires more than goodwill — it requires institutional capacity, distributed leadership, and the willingness of major powers to accept constraints on their own behavior in exchange for systemic stability. History suggests these conditions are rare.
Nonetheless, the Multi-Axis World scenario is not wishful thinking. It has strong intellectual foundations and some precedents in the existing architecture of global governance. More pertinently, it represents the trajectory that the world’s middle powers — including India — have the strongest interest in pursuing, and the most agency to shape.
The core argument of this scenario is that the US-Iran conflict, rather than destroying the globalized order, forces it to evolve. The shock is severe enough to delegitimize the old architecture — US-led unipolarity, dollar hegemony, a rules-based order in which the rules were largely written by the powerful — but not severe enough to collapse it entirely. What emerges is not a simpler world but a more complex one: a world of multiple overlapping coalitions, negotiated interdependencies, and reformed institutions that more accurately reflect the distribution of actual power.
What the Experts Say About Multipolarity
The Multi-Axis World draws heavily on the international relations (IR) tradition of complex interdependence, developed by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in the 1970s and refined through subsequent decades of scholarship. Their central insight — that in a world of deep economic integration, military force becomes less effective as an instrument of foreign policy, and the costs of disrupting interdependence become prohibitively high — remains one of the more empirically durable propositions in IR theory.
The argument is not that conflict disappears. Keohane and Nye were not naifs. Their claim was more specific: that certain types of conflict — interstate territorial war between economically integrated states — become rarer and more costly. The European Union is the most successful real-world experiment in this proposition. Despite deep historical enmities, Western European states have not fought each other since 1945. The mechanism is precisely the complex web of economic interdependence that makes the cost of war with a trading partner prohibitive.
More recent work by Erik Gartzke on the capitalist peace, and by Bruce Russett and John Oneal on the Kantian peace, adds further layers. Democratic governance, trade interdependence, and membership in international institutions are individually associated with lower conflict probability; together, they are strongly reinforcing. The Multi-Axis World scenario is essentially a bet that these mechanisms survive the shock of the West Asia war and reassert themselves in a reformed institutional architecture.
The Architecture of Overlapping Coalitions
The defining structural feature of the Multi-Axis World is not the absence of blocs — it is the overlapping and partially contradictory nature of those blocs. States belong to multiple groupings simultaneously, with different memberships for different purposes. Trade blocs are not the same as security blocs. Technology coalitions cut across both. Mobility frameworks — governing the movement of people — have their own logic entirely.
This is not a hypothetical. The current world already exhibits this structure in embryonic form. India simultaneously participates in QUAD (a security dialogue with the US, Japan, and Australia), SCO (a security and economic grouping dominated by China and Russia), BRICS (an economic forum that includes both China and the West’s adversaries), I2U2 (a technology and infrastructure forum with Israel, the US, and UAE), and G20 (the broadest legitimate forum for global economic governance). India is in all of these simultaneously, and its memberships create both constraints and leverage.
In the Multi-Axis World scenario, this pattern generalizes. Most major and middle powers build portfolios of overlapping memberships. The result is that no single great power can afford to rupture its relationships with others — because doing so would cascade through too many shared institutional memberships. This is complexity as deterrence: not military deterrence, but systemic deterrence. The cost of unilateral action rises with the density of the interdependence web.
Democracy Survives — But Changes
One of the more counterintuitive claims in this scenario is that democracy not only survives the post-war shock but actually strengthens over the medium term. This requires explanation, because the short-term trend clearly runs the other way: the West Asia conflict has boosted nationalist and authoritarian politics in multiple countries, as crises typically do.
The longer-run logic, however, draws on the democratic resilience literature. Research by Milan Svolik at Yale on the survival of democracies under stress suggests that democracies facing external threats tend to consolidate — both internally, as citizens rally around institutions, and externally, as democratic states deepen security cooperation with each other. The post-war period, in this scenario, becomes a catalyst for democratic solidarity rather than democratic retreat.
The more plausible mechanism is economic. The multi-axis world is one in which growth returns, trade recovers, and middle classes expand — particularly in the large developing economies that successfully navigate the transition. Historically, sustained economic development is the single strongest predictor of democratic consolidation. South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile all made democratic transitions at income levels that India, Indonesia, and Nigeria are now approaching. If the multi-axis world delivers development, democracy follows.
The Demography Dividend — Managed This Time
The demographic dimension of the Multi-Axis World scenario is among its most interesting and most practically important features. The scenario posits material demographic shifts driven by regulated immigration from developing to developed countries.
This is not just a hopeful extrapolation — it is a structural necessity. The developed world faces a demographic crisis of its own making. Europe’s total fertility rate has fallen to 1.5, well below the 2.1 replacement level. Japan’s population has been declining in absolute terms since 2008. South Korea’s fertility rate, at 0.72 in 2023, is the lowest ever recorded for any country. Without immigration, these economies face unsustainable dependency ratios: fewer workers supporting more retirees, with cascading effects on pension systems, healthcare, and GDP growth.
The developing world, meanwhile, has the opposite problem: abundant young populations and insufficient domestic capital and institutional capacity to employ them productively. The match is obvious in theory. The challenge is political. Immigration has been one of the most destabilizing political forces in Western democracies over the past decade, and for understandable reasons — rapid, unmanaged demographic change produces genuine social disruption.
The Multi-Axis World scenario’s bet is that the post-war shock creates the political conditions for a new social contract around managed migration. Not the chaotic, crisis-driven flows of the 2015 Syrian refugee wave, but structured bilateral agreements — skilled labor corridors, circular migration schemes, and portable social security arrangements — that meet the developed world’s labor needs while preserving the sending country’s human capital base through remittance flows and diaspora investment.
The Neutral Currency Question
Perhaps the single most consequential institutional change in the Multi-Axis World scenario is the emergence of a neutral global reserve currency — one that is not the liability of any single sovereign state and cannot be weaponized through sanctions or exclusion.
The dollar’s dominance has been both an extraordinary privilege for the United States and an increasingly resented asymmetry for the rest of the world. The use of dollar clearing as a sanctions mechanism — most dramatically against Russia in 2022 — has convinced virtually every non-Western central bank that holding reserves in dollars is a geopolitical risk as much as a financial asset. The search for alternatives is now serious and well-funded.
The academic literature on reserve currency transitions — including Barry Eichengreen’s work on the dollar’s exorbitant privilege — suggests that transitions are rare but not impossible. Sterling’s loss of reserve status in the mid-twentieth century is the relevant precedent. What replaced sterling was not another national currency — it was a multilateral institution, the IMF’s SDR system.
In the Multi-Axis World scenario, a reformed and genuinely representative IMF administers a reserve asset — whether an enhanced SDR, a commodity basket, or a jointly-managed digital currency — that provides a neutral settlement mechanism for cross-bloc trade. This is technically achievable. The political obstacles are formidable but not insurmountable, particularly if the US calculates that losing the reserve currency privilege through geopolitical overreach is worse than negotiating an orderly transition.
Reforming the Institutions That Failed
The United Nations Security Council structure, designed in 1945 to reflect the power distribution of a world that no longer exists, has been one of the most persistent sources of institutional dysfunction in global governance. A council in which the US, China, Russia, the UK, and France each hold a veto was barely functional during the Cold War and has been increasingly paralyzed in the post-Cold War era.
The Multi-Axis World scenario requires reformed global institutions that command genuine legitimacy — which in practice means institutions that give adequate voice to the world’s emerging powers. India, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, and others have been making this argument for two decades without result. The West Asia conflict, by demonstrating the limits of the existing system so dramatically, may have created the political window for reform that decades of incremental advocacy could not.
What would reformed institutions look like? The proposals are not new — they have been debated in academic and policy circles for years. Expansion of the Security Council’s permanent membership to include regional powers. Weighted voting in the IMF that reflects current economic realities rather than 1945 GDP shares. A reformed World Trade Organization dispute settlement mechanism. A genuine global climate governance body with binding enforcement. The content of reform is less uncertain than the political will to achieve it.
What India Stands to Gain — and Lose
For India, the Multi-Axis World scenario is the most congenial of the three. It is a world that rewards India’s existing strategic architecture: a country too large and too democratic to be a client state, too pragmatic to be confined to a single bloc, and too development-hungry to accept the deglobalization scenario’s growth penalty.
India’s ambition to be a Vishwaguru — a civilizational anchor — fits naturally into a multipolar world where no single power dominates the normative agenda. India’s diplomatic tradition, from Nehru’s non-alignment through the current strategic autonomy doctrine, is essentially a bet on a world like this. India has been preparing for the Multi-Axis World for seventy years. If it arrives, India is better positioned than almost any other country to benefit.
The risks are internal rather than external. A Multi-Axis World that rewards institutional quality, democratic governance, and human capital development will expose India’s internal contradictions more sharply than either of the other scenarios. Governance quality, judicial independence, minority rights, and the rule of law are not just domestic concerns in a multi-axis world — they are competitive assets that determine how seriously other members of the system take you.
The Most Hopeful Bet
The Multi-Axis World is the hardest to achieve of the three scenarios. It requires institutional innovation, distributed leadership, and the willingness of major powers to accept genuine constraints. These are demanding conditions. But the alternatives are more costly, and the major powers know it. A deglobalized world imposes large economic losses on everyone. A neocolonial world risks escalation to great-power conflict. The Multi-Axis World, for all its complexity, is the outcome that all major powers can rationally prefer — even if none of them is willing to lead the way to it.
In 1945, after the worst war in human history, the major powers built the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, and the Marshall Plan. These were imperfect institutions, designed partly to serve the interests of the powerful. But they also reflected a genuine, hard-won understanding that the alternative — a world of pure great-power competition — had just killed fifty to eighty million people.
The West Asia conflict has not killed tens of millions. But it has reminded the world of what unconstrained great-power competition looks like. That reminder may be enough.
Concluding part on 5th May 2026.
Also read
Scenario 2: The Return of Colonialism
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