‘Basic takeaway for all of us is…’: S Jaishankar on Israel-Hamas war

Any expectation that conflicts and terrorism can be contained in their impact is no longer tenable, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said. Addressing an event at Kautilya Economic Conclave in New Delhi, S Jaishankar reflected on the geopolitical upheavals in the world, saying that the ripple impact of what is taking place right now in the Middle East is still not entirely clear.

The external affairs minister said that the consequences of various conflicts in a globalised world spread far beyond immediate geographies while citing the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war.

"In different regions, there are smaller happenings whose impact is not inconsequential," he said, adding, "There is also the less formal version that is very pervasive. I am speaking about terrorism which has long been honed and practised as a tool of statecraft."

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“The basic takeaway for all of us is that given the seamlessness of our existence, any expectation that conflicts and terrorism can be contained in their impact is no longer tenable,” he said.

"A big part of this is clearly economic, but do not underestimate the danger of metastasis when it comes to radicalism and extremism," he continued.

No danger is too distant anymore, the external affairs minister warned.

Talking about US and China, the minister said, "The unipolar world is distant history. The bipolar world was even more distant in the bipolarity of US-Soviet Union. And I don't think US China will really end up bipolar. I think there are too many, as I said, too many next-run powers with sufficient clout and autonomous activity and regions of their own dominance and privacy...If you look today at what is happening in the Middle East, a lot of it is actually, in a sense, the activities are intrinsic to the Middle East... So the key regional players on regional situations are actually today going to be so dominant compared to the past that they're not going to leave that much space for global players or external players to come in. And I think you can see that happening in Africa as well."

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