By Prof Sudhanshu Tripathi

The almost two-year-long ongoing Russian-Ukraine war, followed by the Israel-Hamas war in West Asia, appears to have instigated a series of turmoil in many parts of the world due to several alignments and realignments among most of the global powers. While Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran have come close to forging a powerful axis against the US with a view to displacing it from the centre of global hegemony, the western powers under the NATO banner, led by America, are making all-out efforts to maintain and consolidate their unparalleled global supremacy intact. This is in order to control and even direct almost the entire dynamics of international and global relations, wherein economic and international trade and commerce, environmental crisis, and international conflicts today reign supreme.

In fact, most of the international wars are the outward manifestations of the below-the-surface economic reasons as reflected in imperialist policies accompanied by assertions and expansions, as in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war and the long-continuing Chinese imperialist aggressions in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, with few exceptions where racial bitterness accompanied by terrorism has promoted international war, as may be seen in the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.

In the similar discourse, China’s militarist aggression and assertion over the South China Sea and thereon to the larger water-terrain of Indo-Pacific is a virtual challenge to the global north as well as south, including Australia, as regards the free passage of international trade and commerce through naval channels. Not only that, China’s consistent efforts to overpower Taiwan is another grave threat in the region, and so is North Korea dictator’s missile, even nuclear ones, tests to South Korea and Japan in the Far East.

Furthermore, the four-month-long ongoing battle between Israel and Hamas has already jolted the entire West Asian region, wherein Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen, with behind-the-curtain instigation of Iran, have turned the continuing war into an almost endless venture of cultural annihilation.

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