Every time External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar steps up to a global podium, international relations pundits nod along like bobbleheads, praising his frank defense of national sovereignty and his calls for reformed multilateralism. The consensus narrative is comforting: India wants a seat at the top table, a permanent veto on the Security Council, and a cleaner, more democratic United Nations where the Global South finally gets a fair hearing.
It is a neat, diplomatic fiction that completely misses the point.
Jaishankar is not campaigning to fix a broken global governance machine because he believes it can be repaired. He is systematically diagnosing its terminal rot to accelerate its burial. If you listen closely to the speeches, the underlying message is not an appeal to save the postwar liberal order. It is an obituary.
For decades, foreign policy commentators have treated multilateral institutions like sacred architecture needing a fresh coat of paint and some structural reinforcement. Expand the Security Council. Add a couple of permanent seats for Africa and Latin America. Give India and Japan veto power. Then, everything will function the way the architects of 1945 intended.
This is dangerous delusion.
The architecture designed at Bretton Woods and San Francisco was never built for a multipolar planet. It was an Anglo-American committee room dressed up as a global parliament, designed to manage post-colonial transition while locking in Great Power privilege. When Jaishankar talks about reformed multilateralism, he is calling the bluff of a system that has calcified into institutional paralysis.
Consider the Security Council. The five permanent members possess a veto that renders the body functionally useless whenever their direct interests clash. You cannot reform a veto without abolishing it, and you cannot abolish it because the holders will never vote away their own impunity. Asking the UN to reform itself is like asking a medieval monarch to draft a democratic constitution while holding the keys to the dungeon.
We have watched this play out in real time across multiple theaters. From the bloody stalemate in Ukraine to the paralysis in West Asia, the UN Security Council behaves less like a global security guarantor and more like a high-end retirement home for obsolete geopolitical grievances.
When Jaishankar points out that a world of nearly eight billion people cannot be governed by five capitals representing a mid-twentieth-century balance of power, he is not offering a policy proposal for the UN General Assembly committee on institutional restructuring. He is laying down the moral and intellectual groundwork for alternative frameworks.
The real game is no longer about lobbying for a mahogany chair in New York. The real game is happening in bilateral corridors, minilateral groupings, and economic corridors that bypass the UN entirely.
Look at the mechanics of contemporary power projection. India does not wait for a consensus resolution from the UN General Assembly to secure energy imports, forge maritime partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, or anchor supply chains through the Quad and BRICS. When New Delhi engages Washington, Tokyo, Canberra, or smaller nations in the Global South, it operates on pragmatic transactionalism, not multilateral prayer meetings.
The diplomatic establishment hates this transition because it strips away the polite fiction of international law as an objective constraint on sovereign action. For decades, Western capitals used the language of rules-based international order to bind rising powers while preserving their own hegemony. Jaishankar has spent his tenure as foreign minister holding up a mirror to that hypocrisy, pointing out that rules written by a small club of victors cease to be universal rules the moment they stop serving universal interests.
Yet, there is a blind spot in New Delhi’s own calculus that defenders of the Indian foreign policy doctrine rarely admit.
By demanding reform while simultaneously building alternative coalitions, India risks straddling two contradictory realities. If you invest diplomatic capital in trying to modernize an institution that is structurally incapable of modernizing, you risk lending legitimacy to its ghost. The UN survives precisely because rising powers keep showing up to complain about it. Every speech delivered at the General Assembly complaining about lack of representation is free marketing for an organization that would otherwise fade into irrelevance.
True disruption does not lobby the master for a better seat at the table. It builds a competing table outside.
This brings us to the core contradiction of the current geopolitical moment. Multilateralism as a universal umbrella is dead. In its place, we are entering an era of variable geometry, where nations form fluid, task-specific coalitions based on convergence rather than shared ideology or charter obligations. You cooperate on maritime security today, compete on trade tomorrow, and disagree on human rights standards the day after.
Jaishankar understands this better than most, which is why his public critiques of the UN are so pointed. He is managing domestic and international audiences by highlighting the absurdity of the status quo while hedging India’s bets through aggressive multi-alignment.
The mistake is thinking that the ultimate destination of this strategy is a reformed UN. The destination is a world where the UN is an afterthought, remembered the way we now remember the League of Nations—an ambitious experiment that folded the moment the real world stopped paying attention.
Stop waiting for New York to fix itself. The future belongs to those who stopped asking for permission to build something better.
