India, Sept. 21 -- The Gulf States are on high alert after the US issued warnings over travelling to the region. Other nations, too, are petrified about the prospects of runaway oil prices. Wars are back. Exhausted by two World Wars, humanity created institutions like the United Nations. Today, however, the hallowed institution presents a sad picture of its growing irrelevance. History will record this era as one of Machiavellian politicians and their victims - the ordinary citizens of the world. Between 1936-39, the Rome-Berlin Axis, Anti-Comintern Pact, Munich Agreement, and Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were tearing the League of Nations apart in the name of creating a new global order. The US always stayed away from the League. This gave despots such as Hitler and Mussolini a chance to discredit the beleaguered organisation. You can view Quad and the Mecca Pact through similar lenses. The League's incompetence can be gauged from the fact that in 1931, Japan, frustrated by the Great Depression, annexed Manchuria. Italy overran Ethiopia and Hitler was itching to gobble up Czechoslovakia. Financially, hard-pressed England and France were pleading with both dictators to stop their predatory expansion. Under the Munich Treaty, they agreed to hand over Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Germany. But Hitler's greed knew no bounds. Isn't the situation today reminiscent of those times? Russia and Ukraine have been fighting for the last four years. There's no let-up in Israel's excesses in Gaza. The US-Israel attacked Iran thinking they would effect a regime change within a few days; Iran's drones and missiles instead wreaked havoc on more than 20 US bases in the Gulf region. The war has seriously depleted US firepower. As a result, the Pentagon had to summon missiles and other military hardware from its bases in South Korea and Japan. This rattled Seoul and Tokyo. Both countries are left wondering about their own security and safety. Like Europe and the Gulf States, they too outsourced their security to the US. The Donald Trump regime continues to claim that it has won the war. Iran is making identical claims. The reality is lost in the fog of war. The US media insists Russia and China are waging a shadow war against the US using Iran as a proxy - proxy wars were invented by the US during the Cold War. In geopolitics, predators becoming prey is not uncommon. Both the US and Iran have lowered the intensity of fighting but have not ended it. Iran expanded the theatre of war using its proxies such as the Houthis, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi militia. The Houthis have captured Yemen's coastal areas and two strategic islands near the Bab-el-Mandab strait. The Saudis are alarmed. Like their neighbour, the UAE, their oil trade has been disrupted. Close to 12% of global trade and 30% container traffic passes through Bab-el-Mandab. The Iran-dominated Strait of Hormuz has already become a chokepoint. This is the reason world crude prices are once again above $100 per barrel. Let's leave aside developing countries such as India; the world's three most powerful economies (the US, China and Japan) are under extreme stress; 90% of Japan's crude oil moves through Hormuz. Japan is now forced to sell US treasury bonds to pay for its fuel bill. The US is forced to buy back its bonds to save its reputation. Wall Street is feeling the stress. Fuel price hikes have led to inflation in food and essential items. The Federal Bank felt forced to hike its interest rates after a gap of three years to cushion the impact of inflation. The situation isn't vastly different in other nations. Angry with the chaos, Thomas Massie, the Republican representative from Kentucky, has proposed impeaching the US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth. Even Trump has come under heavy criticism due to the prolonged war and rising prices. His gamble to impose 100% tariffs on India and other nations seems to be backfiring. In 1930, the US Congress passed the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act, imposing a record import duty on more than 20,000 goods. Many countries reacted with a barrage of retaliatory tariffs. It worsened the US's economic pain. Is the country repeating its mistakes? Global systems, beset by change and distress, have drawn exasperation worldwide and have fuelled the expansion of regional conflicts. The world is feeling the heat of more than 50 armed struggles or conflicts. This is the reason that, on International Peace Day, I want to remind you with a lot of sadness of Plato's words: "Peace is merely an interval between two wars." Maybe we have crossed the Rubicon and the last peaceful interregnum is behind us....