Srinagar, July 22 -- World politics and international relations are in a profound churn.

Be it Trump tariffs, an echo of 21st century neo-mercantilism that seeks to bring back national power home, the ill-conceived hostility and war on the Islamic Republic of Iran, the dissipation of the QUAD, the return of China with Russia as a secondary great power, and so on, the post-Second Great War liberal world order and the regimes designed as a scaffolding for it are in their dying throes.

In the main, these developments are sanguine. One significant aspect of the fraying and breakdown of the post-war order is the Nuclear Proliferation Regime (NPT).

The NPT, designed to keep nuclear weapons development and possession restricted to a club, was...