“Has UN become obsolete? Why India needs its own sphere of influence”, First Post, January 10, 2026

“Donald Trump has just signed an executive order withdrawing the US from 66 global organisations, more than half of them affiliated with the United Nations. Enter the most controversial strategic neologism of this brand new year: the Donroe Doctrine.

“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, a real lot. They now call it the Donroe Doctrine,” Trump proudly exclaimed, referring to the Monroe Doctrine declared by US President James Monroe in 1823. This was a foundational American foreign policy stating that European powers should not further colonise or interfere in the freshly independent states of the Western Hemisphere, and in return the US would stay out of European internal affairs.

The United States has used this doctrine for decades to exert its influence across the Western Hemisphere, including Latin America. Now, with the so-called “Donroe Doctrine”, what America is essentially saying is that the Western Hemisphere is its backyard, to be controlled through influence. Russia, meanwhile, has its own backyard in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus region, and parts of Central Asia. China has its own sphere encompassing Taiwan, Central Asia, and parts of South-East Asia.So the obvious question is: where does India land in all of this, and is the United Nations all but dead as a sphere of influence?

The idea of the United Nations was born from catastrophe. In 1945, as the smoke of World War II still hung over Europe and Asia, the UN proposed something radical: collective security, moral restraint, and the replacement of brute force with dialogue. Eighty years later, this promise feels less like a living apparatus and more like a sepia-toned charter framed on a wall. Respected in theory, ignored in practice……”

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