“Trump, Xi and the dangerous transition to a multipolar world”, Firstpost, 23 Sep 2026.

“There was something dangerous but strangely predictable about the Cold War. Two superpowers dominated the international system. Each understood the other’s capabilities, alliances and broad red lines. Nuclear weapons hung over humanity like a Sword of Damocles, yet Mutual Assured Destruction imposed its own brutal discipline.

It certainly did not produce peace. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and numerous proxy wars demonstrated that. What bipolarity did produce was a degree of strategic predictability at the highest level.

The unipolar moment which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union has itself passed. Yet the multipolar order expected to replace it has not fully arrived. We are consequently living through something potentially more dangerous: the transition between international systems, producing dangerous unpredictability.

That is the larger backdrop against which Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in the US on September 23 for a three-day state visit and his second meeting with President Donald Trump in six months. The substantive question facing them is important for peace. Can the world’s two most powerful states establish sufficient stability in their own relationship to exercise some stabilising influence over an increasingly disorderly world?…….”

Read the full article at Firstpost.