India, Jan. 29 -- Every few decades, when global turbulence intensifies, a familiar phrase resurfaces in diplomatic drawing rooms and elite conclaves: World Order. In recent weeks, following a series of provocative statements and actions by US President Donald Trump, the phrase has returned to fashionable currency - now repackaged as the promise or peril of a 'New World Order.'

Yet history offers little comfort to those who imagine that such an order ever existed, or that it will materialise in the foreseeable future. There has been no world order in the past, there is none today, and there is unlikely to be one tomorrow. The idea itself is a utopia - seductive, moralistic, and fundamentally divorced from the complex grammar of power tha...