Trump is full of surprises; he is both leader and entertainer. Nearly nine hours into a long flight, a journey that had to U-turn over technical issues and embark on a new flight, Trump came straight to the Davos stage and spoke for nearly two hours without a sip of water. What he spoke about in Davos is another issue, but the way he stands and talks is unique in this 79-year-old man who is defining the world for the worse. Now Trump comes up with the Board of Peace, a ticket to membership that demands a one-billion-dollar entrance fee for permanent participation. It works, for how long nobody knows, but as long as Trump is there it might. Look at how many Muslim-majority and wealthy countries accepted: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates are ready to be on board. Around 25–30 countries reportedly have already expressed the willingness to join.

The most interesting question, and one rarely asked by those who speak about Donald J. Trump, is how much he has earned during the first year of his second term. Liberal Democrats, authoritarian socialists, non-aligned misled-path walkers hail and hate him, but few look at the financial outcome of his politics. His wealth has increased by about three billion dollars, largely due to the crypto economy, which is why he pardoned the founder of Binance, the China-born Changpeng Zhao. “To be rich like hell,” is what Trump wanted. To fault line liberal democracy, Trump is the perfect example. What Trump is doing — dismantling the old façade of liberal democracy at the very moment it can no longer survive — is, in a way, a greater contribution to the West. But I still respect the West, because the West still has a handful of genuine scholars who do not dare to look in the mirror and accept the havoc their leaders created in the name of humanity.

Democracy in the Arab world was dismantled by the West. You may be surprised, but that is the fact. Elizabeth Thompson of American University, in her book How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs, meticulously details how democracy was stolen from the Arabs. “No ruler, no matter how exalted, stood above the will of the nation,” she quotes Arab constitutional writing, adding that “the people are the source of all authority.” These are not the words of European revolutionaries, nor of post-war liberal philosophers; they were spoken, written and enacted in Syria in 1919–1920 by Arab parliamentarians, Islamic reformers and constitutionalists who believed democracy to be a universal right, not a Western possession. Members of the Syrian Arab Congress in Damascus, the elected assembly that drafted a democratic constitution declaring popular sovereignty — were dissolved by French colonial forces. That was the past; now, with the Board of Peace, the old remnants return in a new form.

Trump got one thing very clear among many others: Western liberal ideology is nothing but sophisticated doublespeak dressed in various forms. They go to West Asia, which they named the Middle East, and bomb Arabs; then they go to Myanmar and other places to protect Muslims from Buddhists. They go to Africa to “contribute” to livelihoods, while generations of people were ripped from their homeland, taken as slaves and sold.

How can Gramsci, whose 135^th birth anniversary fell this week on 22 January, help us escape the present social-political quagmire? Gramsci was writing in prison under Mussolini’s fascist regime. He produced a body of work that is neither a manifesto nor a programme, but a theory of power that understands domination not only as coercion but as culture, civil society and the way people perceive their world. In the Prison Notebooks he wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old world is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena appear.” This is not a metaphor. Gramsci was identifying the structural limbo that occurs when foundational certainties collapse but no viable alternative has yet emerged.

The relevance of this insight today cannot be overstated. We are living through overlapping crises: environmental collapse, fragmentation of political consensus, erosion of trust in institutions, the acceleration of automation and algorithmic governance that replaces judgment with calculation, and the rise of leaders who treat geopolitics as purely transactional. Slavoj Žižek, in his column last year, reminded us that the crisis is not temporary. The assumption that history’s forward momentum will automatically yield a better future is a dangerous delusion. Instead, the present is a battlefield where what we thought would be the new may itself contain the seeds of degeneration. Trump’s Board of Peace, with its one-billion-dollar gatekeeping model, embodies this condition: it claims to address global violence yet operates on transactional logic, prioritizing wealth over justice and promising reconstruction without clear mechanisms of accountability or inclusion beyond those with money.

Gramsci’s critique helps us see this for what it is: not a corrective to global disorder, but a reenactment of elite domination under a new mechanism. Gramsci did not believe domination could be maintained by force alone; he argued that in advanced societies power rests on gaining “the consent and the active participation of the great masses,” and that domination is sustained by “the intellectual and moral leadership” that turns the ruling class’s values into common sense. It is not coercion alone that sustains capitalism, but ideological consensus embedded in everyday institutions — family, education, media — that make the existing order appear normal and inevitable. Trump’s Board of Peace plays directly into this mode: styled as a peace-building institution, it gains legitimacy through performance and symbolic endorsement by diverse member states, while the deeper structures of inequality and global power imbalance remain untouched.

Worse, the Board’s structure, with contributions determining permanence, mimics the logic of a marketplace for geopolitical influence. It turns peace into a commodity, something to be purchased rather than fought for through sustained collective action addressing the root causes of conflict. But this is exactly what today’s democracies are doing behind the scenes while preaching rules-based order on the stage. In Gramsci’s terms, this is transformismo — the absorption of dissent into frameworks that neutralize radical content and preserve the status quo under new branding.

If we are to extract a path out of this impasse, we must recognize that the current quagmire is more than political theatre or the result of a flawed leader. It arises from a deeper collapse of hegemonic frameworks that once allowed societies to function with coherence. The old liberal order, with its faith in institutions and incremental reform, has lost its capacity to command loyalty. The new order struggling to be born has not yet articulated a compelling vision that unifies disparate struggles — ecological, economic, racial, cultural — into a coherent project of emancipation rather than fragmentation.

To confront Trump’s phenomenon as a portal — as Žižek suggests, a threshold through which history may either proceed to annihilation or re-emerge in a radically different form — is to grasp Gramsci’s insistence that politics is a struggle for meaning and direction, not merely for offices or policies. A Gramscian approach would not waste energy on denunciation alone; it would engage in building counter-hegemony — alternative institutions, discourses, and practices that lay the groundwork for new popular consent. It would link ecological justice to economic democracy, it would affirm the agency of ordinary people rather than treating them as passive subjects, and it would reject the commodification of peace.

Gramsci’s maxim “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” captures this attitude precisely: clear-eyed recognition of how deep and persistent the crisis is, coupled with an unflinching commitment to action. In an age where AI and algorithmic governance threaten to redefine humanity’s relation to decision-making, where legitimacy is increasingly measured by currency flows rather than human welfare, Gramsci offers not a simple answer but a framework to understand why the old certainties have crumbled and how the new might still be forged through collective effort. The problem is not the lack of theory or insight; it is the absence of a political subject capable of turning analysis into a sustained force for transformation. Without a new form of organized will, the interregnum will continue, and the world will remain trapped between the decay of the old and the absence of the new.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa ✍️

Designed by the victors and led by the US, its institutions — from the United Nations system to Bretton Woods — were shaped to preserve western strategic and economic primacy. Yet despite their self-serving elements, these arrangements helped maintain a degree of global stability, predictability and prosperity for nearly eight decades. That order is now under strain.

This was evident even at Davos, where US President Donald Trump — despite deep differences with most western allies — framed western power and prosperity as the product of a shared and “very special” culture, which he argued must be defended and strengthened. The emphasis on cultural inheritance, rather than shared rules or institutions, underscored how far the language of the old order has shifted.

As China’s rise accelerates and Russia grows more assertive, the US appears increasingly sceptical of the very system it once championed. Convinced that multilateral institutions constrain American freedom of action, and that allies have grown complacent under the security umbrella, Washington has begun to prioritise disruption over adaptation — seeking to reassert supremacy before its relative advantage diminishes further.

What remains unclear is what vision, if any, the US has for a successor order. Beyond a narrowly transactional pursuit of advantage, there is little articulation of a coherent alternative framework capable of delivering stability in a multipolar world.

The emerging great powers have not yet filled this void. India and China, despite their growing global weight and civilisational depth, have largely responded tactically to the erosion of the old order rather than advancing a compelling new one. Much of their diplomacy has focused on navigating uncertainty, rather than shaping the terms of a future settlement. Traditional middle powers — Japan, Germany, Australia, Canada and others — have also tended to react rather than lead. Even legacy great powers such as the United Kingdom and France, though still relevant, appear constrained by alliance dependencies and domestic pressures.

st Asia, countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE have begun to pursue more autonomous foreign policies, redefining their regional and global roles. The broader pattern is unmistakable. The international system is drifting toward fragmentation and narrow transactionalism, with diminishing regard for shared norms or institutional restraint.

Recent precedents in global diplomacy suggest a future in which arrangements are episodic and power-driven. Long before Thucydides articulated this logic in western political thought, the Mahabharata warned that in an era of rupture, “the strong devour the weak like fish in water” unless a higher order is maintained. Absent such an order, the result is a world closer to Mad Max than to any sustainable model of global governance.

It is precisely this danger that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney alluded to in his speech at Davos on Wednesday. Warning that “if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate,” Carney articulated a concern shared by many middle powers. His remarks underscored a simple truth: Unrestrained power politics ultimately undermine even those who believe they benefit from them.

Carney’s intervention also highlights a larger opportunity. The next phase of the global order is unlikely to be shaped by a single hegemon. Instead, it will require a coalition — particularly of middle powers — that have a shared interest in stability, openness and predictability, and the credibility to engage across ideological and geopolitical divides. For many middle powers, the question now is not whether the old order is fraying, but who has the credibility and reach to help shape what comes next.

This is where India’s role becomes pivotal. India today is no longer merely a balancing power. It is increasingly recognised as a great power in its own right, with strong relations across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, West Asia, Africa and Latin America, and a demonstrated ability to mobilise the Global South. While India’s relationship with Canada has experienced periodic strains, there is now space for recalibration within a broader convergence among middle powers concerned about the direction of the international system.

One available platform is India’s current chairmanship of BRICS — if approached with care. While often viewed through the prism of great-power rivalry, BRICS also brings together diverse emerging and middle powers with a shared interest in reforming, rather than dismantling, global governance. Used judiciously, it could complement existing institutions by helping articulate principles for a more inclusive and functional order.

More broadly, India is uniquely placed to convene an initial core group of like-minded States — middle powers, and possibly some open-minded great powers — to begin a serious conversation about what a new global order should look like. This would not be an exercise in bloc-building or institutional replacement, but an effort to restore legitimacy, balance and purpose to international cooperation. Such an endeavour will require political confidence and the willingness to step into uncharted territory. History suggests that moments of transition reward those prepared to invest early in ideas and institutions, rather than merely adapt to outcomes shaped by others.

The challenge today is not to replicate Bretton Woods or San Francisco, but to reimagine their spirit for a multipolar age — one in which power is diffused, interdependence unavoidable, and legitimacy indispensable. In a world drifting toward fragmentation, India has the credibility, relationships and confidence to help anchor that effort — if it chooses to lead.

(The Hindustan Times)

(Milinda Moragoda is a former Cabinet Minister and diplomat from Sri Lanka and founder of the Pathfinder Foundation, a strategic affairs think tank. this article can read on

https://shorturl.at/HV2Kr and please contact via email@milinda.org)

by Milinda Moragoda ✍️
For many middle powers, the question now is not whether the old order is fraying,
but who has the credibility and reach to help shape what comes next

I will not dwell in any detail about the numerous other issues that engaged the Minister’s (Athulathemudali) attention. That would add up to a book in itself. What I would do would be to briefly touch upon some selected matters. A structure of a Ministry is important and relevant as a facilitator or otherwise of work. There is also, in many ways a correlation between structure and achievement. In this vital area however, there was a major deficiency. At the political level, besides the Cabinet Minister, there were two Project Ministers, Mrs. Sunethra Ranasinghe, MP for Education Services and Mr. A.C.S. Hameed, MP for Higher Education.

Mr. Hameed, a senior party man and Minister was also the Cabinet Minister for Justice. Then there was the State Minister for Education Mrs. Pulendiran, MP. Project Ministers were considered higher in status to State Ministers, but all came under the Cabinet Minister. The structural problem really arose in the area under Mr. Hameed’s purview. Mr. Hameed, a former long serving Foreign Minister, was in the

recent past the Cabinet Minister for Higher Education and Science. Now, although he was still the Cabinet Minister for Justice, he was at the same time only the Project Minister for Higher Education, responsible to a much younger Cabinet Minister.

He was now Project Minister in an area where he had been Cabinet Minister before. In practical terms, this was a recipe for conflict, and that is precisely what occurred. Higher Education encompassed both University and Technical Education. The rest of the Ministry handled the vast area of general education. Mr. Hameed could not get over the fact that he was no longer the Cabinet Minister for Higher Education. He sought to act as if he was. The geographical severance, that prevailed, with general education at “Isurupaya” in Battararmulla, and Higher Education located at Ward Place in Colombo, only helped to reinforce this trend towards separation.

Soon we found that Mr. Hameed did not attend any meetings to which he was invited by the Minister. He also kept away from the Parliamentary Consultative Committee on Education, presumably because the Committee was chaired by the Cabinet Minister. The next thing that happened was that he lost his membership of that Committee, for absenting himself without leave on three consecutive occasions. He was probably unwilling to seek leave from Mr. Athulathmudali.

The Minister on his part was of the view that this whole arrangement was deliberately devised by the President to checkmate him, and so it appeared. No other Project Minister would have got away with this kind of action. The President for his part would definitely have known what was happening, because if there ever was a President or Prime Minister, who wanted to know everything that was occurring and had a network of people all over to keep him informed, it was Mr. Premadasa. In this, and in other actions lay the seed of greater conflicts to come.

The Minister was a strong personality. He was not prepared to meekly submit to any unilateral declaration of independence. He therefore set up an office for himself at Ward Place, and made it a point to go there and hold various meetings and discussions once or twice a week. To some of these meetings he summoned Vice Chancellors and the Chairman, University Grants Commission. They were obliged to come, even though the Project Minister was unhappy.

Mr. Athulathmudali, a trained lawyer, knew his legal rights. It must be said that those in the higher education sector welcomed opportunities to meet the Minister, although it was not a comfortable position for any of them, or for that matter for any of us. As Secretary to the overall Ministry, I too was placed in a most awkward and embarrassing position. I worked for the Cabinet Minister. The offices of the Project and State Ministers had senior public servants as Secretaries. But I had the responsibility of supervising their work. In the case of higher education, when I did that, there was a distinct possibility that I would tread om ministerial toes.

Mr. Abeygunawardena, the Secretary handling that area later to become Secretary to the Ministry of Health, was a disciplined public servant, who in spite of his own difficult position never attempted to by-pass me. He regularly consulted me and kept me briefed about all relevant matters. He regularly came to “Isurupaya” to meet me virtually in secret in order to discuss important matters. We both decided, that given the ground situation it was best that I avoided holding meetings at Ward Place.

Here again, I had every right to do so. But that was not the point. As Secretary to the Ministry, my responsibility as I saw it was not to take sides in an unfortunate tussle, but to devise practical ways and means to keep the work of the Ministry going.

Therefore, although the Minister wanted me to have a room at Ward Place and work from there too, I avoided this, even though a room was found for me. The Minister was quite correct in asserting his own rights. Asserting my own, would only have added to an unhappy situation. I therefore only went to Ward Place for meetings called by the Minister at which my presence was required by him.

The Chairman, University Grants Commission was Professor Arjuna Aluvihare. The UGC shared premises with the office of the Minister of Higher Education, or perhaps it was the other way round. Here, geographical and official proximity coincided The Chairman had to work closely with Minister Hameed, although he also had to attend meetings fixed by the Cabinet Minister. Everyone worked with an underlying degree of discomfort if not strain. Sometimes, affairs assumed almost comic proportions. There was a policy move to set up University Colleges, with a view to expanding opportunities for higher education. The concept however, had to be worked on.

A Senior Level Committee consisting of the UGC, academics, the Ministry and the private sector was envisaged to study all connected matters and to make recommendations. Naturally I had to be on that Committee as Secretary to the Ministry. One day Professor Aluvihare telephoned me in some distress and with evident embarrassment told me that Minister Hameed had not wanted me on the committee. He wanted to know what to do, although the whole thing was absurd.

I suggested that under these circumstances, it would be best to proceed in a practical way. I said that I didn’t have to be on the Committee in order to make myself available for any consultations that anyone may wish to have with me, and that it would make sense for him to proceed in the already established manner, which was discussion and consultation with me without formal meetings. The Chairman, UGC apologized and agreed. I said that the immediate challenge I faced was how to keep this away from the Cabinet Minister.

Had Mr. Athulathmudali heard of this he would have insisted that I served on the committee. In the end, this was how we functioned not only on this matter, but on all matters relating to higher education. We had to find ways and means to work effectively without generating conflict. The Vice Chancellors and others telephoned me from time to time, some times during the night, at home in order to discuss various issues. But I held no formal meetings at my level. The Minister of course did so, and these meetings we attended and follow up action taken.

These arrangements worked fairly satisfactorily in the area of University education, but not so well in the sphere of technical education. Here, with the merging of some Ministries and departments, technical education was being run from Additional Secretary Mr. Abeygunawardene’s office at Ward Place. This was an integral part of the Project Minister’s office and I did not therefore have a direct input. What I could see from a distance was that the whole structure was wrong and too bureaucratic to

deliver quality technical education. Information flows, decision making processes, supervising methods, the identification and fixing of accountability, all had to be attended to. I saw it as a major task. But in the prevailing climate, with a Project Minister who was also a Senior Cabinet Minister in the system, there was little that even the Cabinet Minister could do.

This important area therefore suffered from a considerable degree of neglect. It became a victim of the structure of the Ministry. Soon, donor agencies such as the ADB realized the problem. There were officials from these agencies who met me and expressed regret as to what was happening. However, they also had gone around and had a fairly clear notion of the real problem. They too were helpless. I did try a way out of this impasse. When I met the President on one occasion I mentioned to him the importance of technical education and suggested that he Chair a meeting on the subject at least quarterly.

The President did not disagree and in my recollection, much later a meeting was held. But he probably did not have the time to do this on a regular basis. My intention on making the suggestion to the President was to construct a forum where the Cabinet Minister, the Project Minister, the Secretaries and Senior Officials could have met in neutral territory and used the President’s clout to move technical education to a sustainable track. Unfortunately it did not work out.

Growing strains between Mr. Athulathmudali and the President

Meanwhile, the Minister was getting somewhat irritated and frustrated by all this. This was aggravated by deteriorating personal relations with the President. The reasons were several. Some were quite petty. For instance, Mr. Athulathmudali’s official car was relatively old and was breaking down from time to time. Some episodes reported related to times when Mrs. Athulathmudali was travelling in the car. This was naturally very upsetting to the Minister. On one celebrated occasion, the car broke down when the Minister was on his way to Parliament, and an MP passing by had to give him a lift.

The prevailing rule was that the President had to personally clear new cars for Ministers, and although I had spoken several times to a sympathetic Secretary to the Treasury, Mr. Paskaralingam, even he could not obtain a decision. This therefore, consisted a serious irritation on a daily basis. The Minister also felt that his visits abroad were being curtailed. For instance he was not permitted to go and deliver a lecture on an invitation from a prestigious international forum dealing with Agriculture. The logic presumably would have been that he was no longer Minister of Agriculture. But this was a personal invitation in recognition of his stature in this field.

This was not all. Ministers had to declare their assets to the President. This was a time there was litigation between the SLFP Member of Parliament Mr. C.V. Gooneratne and the Minister, during the course of which certain irregularities in the purchase of ships by the Ceylon Shipping Corporation were alleged by Mr. Gooneratne, at the time when the Minister was in charge of the subject of shipping. The Minister mentioned to me that he knew that a copy of his assets declaration was given to Mr. Gooneratne by the President. The point is not whether he in fact did so or not. The point was that the Minister believed that he had done so. Probably he had some inside information.

There were more issues that surfaced as time went on. One day the Minister told me that the President was getting a special team under the direction of his personal security advisor to investigate matters in his former Ministry of Trade and Shipping. “He is trying desperately to find something on me,” he said, adding, “He thinks that he can do this without my knowing!” The fact was that the Minister was at one time also Minister of National Security, in which position he worked closely with the Armed Services and the Police. He therefore, personally knew a large number of officers from the Police and the Services, and many liked him and were personally loyal to him. Obtaining information therefore was not a problem for Mr. Athulathmudali.

(Excerpted from In Pursuit of Governance, the autobiography of MDD Pieris) ✍️