To attribute this merely to Trump’s return to the White House or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would be overly simplistic and a tad ahistorical. This geopolitical depression has been in the making for some time. A desire for exclusive spheres of influence, a belief in one’s inherent superiority, the desire to moralise, the inability to rise above feel-good rhetoric, and a fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge diverse global viewpoints have all contributed to getting us where we are today — with broken promises, lost trust and growing suspicions.

But why should we be concerned about world politics and global order at all if all that matters are the interests of States? For one, because world politics, or our international life, is not merely a sum of relations among individual States but is made up of common global goals, leadership, visions, and outcomes that go beyond the narrow frames of individual State interests. World orders allow individual States to pursue their legitimate interests with more ease, and pursue common goals beyond the confines of States.

One of the striking features of the current age of pessimism in world politics is that the pursuit of global good is no longer what dominates the global discourse today. While it is true that in world politics, much of what goes on in the name of the pursuit of good is sheer hypocrisy, and yet hypocrisy allows us to have benchmarks. And benchmarks help us judge if we are on the right track.

Without a teleological direction, contemporary world politics lacks a sense of direction. Even if not always considered good by everyone, common directions still offer a sense of purpose to world politics. Examples of such global purpose include promoting liberal democracy, humanitarian intervention, nuclear non-proliferation, and economic globalisation via international institutions. All of these were flawed both in concept or execution, some even blatantly violating international law. But they provided a sense of purpose in world politics. Sometimes a faulty political purpose with a mendable design flaw is better than no purpose at all.

Amidst such collective pessimism, States are doing what they think they must. Some are scrambling to defend themselves, some are securing their spheres of influence, some are seeking to dominate others, some are finding ways to reduce dependencies, and some are learning lessons from the misfortunes of others. Across Asia, Europe, and North America, international life today lacks purpose beyond managing chaos or exploiting it. State interests have almost entirely eclipsed everything else.

Beyond such pursuit of State interests, there is a lack of consensus on what constitutes good in the global context. The rise of deglobalisation, in a sense, is due to a lack of consensus on what constitutes global good and the collective inability to realise it. Deglobalisation is not just an economic phenomenon; it also involves the erosion of institutions, regimes, norms, and values created over a long period. If the pursuit of global good was partly due to order-building motivations of great powers, there is little visionary global leadership today nor order-building motivations. There is no Gandhi, Wilson, or Mandela today.

The pursuit of global good and the desire to organise the world through consensus, however flawed such attempts in the past may have been, have both vanished from global conversations today. The United States (US), leader of the status quo, is no longer keen to preserve it; reformists like India struggle to create consensus; and China, the true revisionist at heart, is watching the US becoming its own revisionist rival.

The challenge today is not a material one, but one of ideas. The world today is more prosperous, more globalised and more technologically advanced than ever before in human history, and yet, paradoxically so, it is faced with one of the most pessimistic eras in recent history. The problem isn’t wealth, it’s the poverty of ideas.

Humanity’s current predicament is due to a lack of big ideas that can rally humanity, and the inability of global public intellectuals to provide those ideas. Ideas exist, but they are largely adversarial, parochial, and accusatory — incapable of bridging global divides. As Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings”. We are where we are today because we lack bold ideas to shape our common destiny.

What can India do? “We are a bridge, we are a voice, we are a viewpoint, a channel,” foreign minister S Jaishankar told us a few years ago. If so, this is the time to be that bridge.

Happymon Jacob teaches India’s foreign policy at JNU and is the founder of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research. The views expressed are personal.