In Brief

The new landscape of international politics is at the moment appearing before our eyes. It is being shaped by a vast redistribution of power, away from what might be called the North Atlantic world, of the US and Europe, towards particularly China and India, so it can be seen as the end of the Vasco da Gama era.

Indian scholars have long regarded the advent of the great European navigators, like da Gama , as the beginning of five hundred years of the ascendancy of the West over the non-Western world.

The power-redistribution now most evident is in the economic sphere, but it also extends into the diplomatic sphere, and will increasingly extend also into the strategic sphere. In contrast to the second half of the 20th century, which was bipolar during the 43 years of the Cold War, then marked by unchallenged US primacy during the ten years of the "unipolar moment", the global landscape of the 21st century will be multipolar.