Continuing from yesterday - Scenario 3: A Multi-Axis World
Last week I shared some of my thoughts about what the world might look like after the latest episode of war in West Asia. I speculated the following three alternative outcome scenarios:
Scenario 1: Deglobalization
Scenario 2: The return of colonialism
Scenario 3: A multi-axis world
In my view, Scenario 3 is the most desirable, but Scenario 1 is the most plausible, under the current circumstances. And the world we actually get is probably a messy hybrid of the two, with regional flashes of Scenario 2 thrown in.
Why scenario 1 is most plausible
Deglobalization already has momentum. This is the critical point. The other two scenarios require discontinuous breaks from the current trajectory. Deglobalization does not — it simply requires the current direction to continue. The friend-shoring of supply chains, the CHIPS Act, MAGA, India’s PLI schemes, the weaponization of SWIFT, the rise of rupee-yuan-ruble trade settlement — these are not responses to the West Asia conflict. They predate it by years. The conflict is accelerating a trend, not creating one. When historians look back, 2018 (the US-China tariff war) may prove to be the actual hinge point, not 2026.
Scenario 2 is real but localized. Return of Colonialism-style behavior is already happening — in Ukraine, in the South China Sea, in Chinese debt infrastructure across Africa — but the constraints on it going global are still formidable. Nuclear deterrence is the biggest one. Great powers cannot annex each other or each other’s close allies without triggering escalation calculus that even the most reckless leaders fear. So, neocolonialism expresses itself at the margins — in small states, in failed states, in economic coercion rather than military occupation. Deeply worrying, but not a systemic reorganization of world order.
Scenario 3’s problem is the collective action trap. Everyone rationally prefers a well-functioning multilateral system. Nobody wants to pay the short-term political cost of reforming one. The UN Security Council has needed reform for forty years. The IMF quota system is visibly anachronistic. The WTO dispute mechanism has been broken since 2019. The reason none of these have been fixed is not ignorance — every policymaker knows what the problems are. It is that the beneficiaries of the current dysfunction (primarily the US and China, in different ways) have no incentive to change it, and the middle powers lack the coercive leverage to force change.
The India angle is worth thinking about carefully. India is the country with the most to gain from Scenario 3 and the most to lose from Scenario 1. A deglobalized world puts India’s IT services, its pharmaceutical export model, and its diaspora remittance architecture under serious stress. A Multi-Axis World, by contrast, is essentially designed for a country of India’s strategic positioning. This is probably why India’s foreign policy establishment has been among the most consistent advocates for multilateral reform — it is not idealism; it is self-interest correctly understood.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that the world drifts toward Scenario 1 not because anyone chose it, but because nobody chose otherwise forcefully enough. That is how most bad historical outcomes happen — not through malice but through the accumulation of individually rational, collectively disastrous decisions.
The question worth watching over the next three years: does the post-war period produce any serious institutional initiative — a genuine reform proposal, a new multilateral framework, something beyond rhetoric — or do governments simply return to their corners and manage the fragmentation? The answer to that question will tell us a great deal about which scenario we are actually in.
I shall be delighted to hear readers’ views on the post-war world, especially if someone foresees alternative scenarios far removed from the three scenarios I envisage.
Also read
Scenario 2: The Return of Colonialism
Scenario 3: A Multi-Axis World