Order has always carried within it a quiet anxiety, for its opposite is chaos. The US-led New World Order unveiled at the end of the Cold War in 1988–89 was no exception. It promised stability, prosperity, and predictability, but it also rested on immense economic, military, and political costs that only one power was expected to bear. Today, as that order visibly erodes, the anxiety that lay dormant at its core has returned to the surface.
This was acknowledged, perhaps inadvertently, by former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who described the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a blow to the US-led world order. What she was mourning was not merely territorial aggression in Europe, but the strain on a global system built around free trade, financial dominance, Western-style democratic governance, and American military supremacy. The question is no longer whether this order is weakening, but who is positioning themselves to shape what comes next.
This reality formed the backdrop of discussions over the past two weeks on Political Zone, the geopolitical programme on Federal Post. In an episode titled “Greater Bangladesh, India’s Karma”, we examined the historical and contemporary forces shaping the surge of anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh, a country whose birth India facilitated in 1971 through military intervention. History, however, has a way of circling back. The hostility towards Pakistan once cultivated by India among Bengalis has, over time, morphed into resentment directed at India itself.
What is often overlooked in New Delhi is that the movement against Hindu-dominated central rule did not begin in West Pakistan, but in Bengal. It was A K Fazul Haq, a Bengali leader, who proposed the Pakistan Resolution in Lahore in March 1940. The resentment of Hindu political dominance ran deep and long predated the events of 1971.
Seen through this lens, recent developments in Bangladesh appear less surprising. The political upheaval beginning in August 2024, marked by the ouster of Sheikh Hasina Wajid’s pro-India government and culminating in the assassination of Sharif Osman Hadi, a young BNP leader, in December 2025, can be read not as isolated shocks, but as delayed consequences of unresolved historical fault lines.
Following the programme, Dr Hasnain Javed offered a crucial clarification that reframes how these events should be understood. Why, he asked, is China investing so heavily in infrastructure across South Asia, particularly in countries neighbouring India? Why does Beijing appear conspicuously restrained amid regional instability and increasingly alarmist global talk of a Third World War? And why are dramatic gestures, such as the unveiling of a “Greater Bangladesh” map or rhetoric about striking India from the east, premature?
The world is not descending into chaos by accident. It is doing so because too many actors are reading it wrong, mistaking noise for power, speed for strategy, and rhetoric for history
The answer lies in patience and power.
China is not in a hurry. It is a superpower in the making, content to wait while the United States stretches itself thin under the burden of global commitments. Rather than confront directly, Beijing is laying foundations, such as ports, roads, railways, and energy corridors, through its Belt and Road Initiative. History offers a familiar precedent. Britain built railways and institutions across its empire in the nineteenth century, and the United States followed with financial and security architectures after the Second World War. China is following the same playbook, adjusted for the twenty-first century.
This strategic logic helps explain Beijing’s stance on Ukraine. Statements attributed to China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, suggesting that China would not wish to see Russia lose the war, are revealing. A prolonged conflict bleeds the United States financially and militarily, keeps Washington distracted from the South China Sea and Taiwan, and gradually erodes American strategic stamina.
China’s partnership with Russia, however, is transactional rather than ideological: a marriage of convenience. Moscow has accepted a junior role, but it continues to expand its influence across Eurasia, from recognising the Taliban government in Afghanistan to deepening cooperation with Iran and reopening strategic channels with Pakistan, including plans to refurbish the Karachi Steel Mills, first established with Soviet assistance in the 1970s.
At the heart of these developments lies a fundamental problem of interpretation. We see the world not as it is, but as our chosen lens allows us to see it. Much of the Indian commentary on Bangladesh, for instance, remains trapped in retrospective narratives, such as claims of foreign-engineered coups or singular external conspiracies, rather than engaging with long-term structural shifts and regional realignments.
This matters because the global environment is becoming increasingly combustible. Tensions simmer between Thailand and Cambodia; Japan and China trade threats over Taiwan; Philippine and Chinese vessels confront each other at sea; South Asia remains locked in a permanent state of suspicion. Conflict persists in Yemen, Gaza, Syria, and Sudan. The war in Ukraine is entering a more dangerous phase, with a wavering US commitment and Europe unwilling to concede defeat. Political leaders, from Washington to Moscow, now speak openly of the possibility of a Third World War.
With so many active and potential theatres of conflict, the contours of a future global confrontation are no longer difficult to imagine. What remains uncertain is timing. What is clear, however, is China’s posture: building quietly, expanding steadily, and watching patiently, much as the United States did during the inter-war years before entering the Second World War at a moment of its own choosing.
The world is not descending into chaos by accident. It is doing so because too many actors are reading it wrong, mistaking noise for power, speed for strategy, and rhetoric for history. Those who understand this difference will shape the next order. Those who do not will merely react to it and be doomed.