‘No country has overall hegemony’: Jaishankar on why future will be multipolar

The future world order in the making will be multipolar as no country today has hegemony over all the domains to be an overall hegemony.

At a session at the Raisina Dialogue 2026, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said the power in its different dimensions is spread out much more among the countries, denying any country overall hegemony that some in the pat had.

Jaishankar was joined at the session by Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who attended the Raisina Dialogue as the Chief Guest on the sidelines of his state visit to India. Stubb said that the world order will not be decided by the West but by the Global South led by the likes of India. They were part of a discussion on Stubb’s book ‘The Triangle of Power – Rebalancing the New World Order’.

Jaishankar said the distribution of powers in the world goes beyond economy and strategic capabilities.

“It will really be much more multipolar because no country today has hegemony over so many domains that it is an overall hegemony. It’s not just a distribution of GDP and capabilities. In different domains, different parts of the world will contribute more or will have more capabilities,” said Jaishankar.

As for nostalgia for the post-World War II world order that is now fading, Jaishankar flagged it was never realistic to expect it to last forever.

“This was the order by the West, for the West, from the West. Now, it doesn’t mean that others didn’t use it — smart people did, smart countries did. But when we look back at these 70 years, I think the expectation that we can freeze a 1945 or a 1989 forever was a very unrealistic one,” said Jaishankar.

On his part, Stubb outlined the three broad trends in global politics that he also analysed in his book: the evolution of the bipolarity of the Cold War into the post‑Cold War American unipolarity, which then developed into today’s multipolar chaos.

Stubb said, “For me, the Global West, at least when I wrote the book, was led by the United States, and the basic idea was that this group wanted to preserve the existing liberal world order as it was created some 80 years ago. And the opposite to this was the Global East led by China and Russia, with the idea that they wanted to create a more multipolar world order. And, for me, the thesis of the whole book is that it’s actually the Global South, led by the likes of India, that is going to decide the direction in which the world order is going to tilt.”

The 11th edition of the Raisina Dialogue was held from March 5, 2026 to March 7, 2026 in New Delhi. Firstpost has partnered with the Raisina Dialogue to bring exclusive conversations with global leaders to you.

The Raisina Dialogue is India’s flagship conference on geopolitics and geo-economics, hosted by the Observer Research Foundation in collaboration with India’s Ministry of External Affairs.