India, March 4 -- The US participation in Israel's strikes against Iran marks a decisive escalation in an already volatile region. What began as deterrent signalling has now crossed into coordinated military action. The risk of a wider confrontation is real and immediate.

Yet this is not merely a West Asian crisis. It is part of a larger shift in global politics - one in which power is once again openly asserted as the primary instrument of statecraft.

For three decades after the Cold War, it was widely believed that multilateral institutions, economic interdependence and international law had fundamentally moderated great-power behaviour. The United Nations system, supported by global financial and trade architectures, was expected to ...