N ever has there been a time when the world has been more interconnected than now. What happens in the secretive inner councils in Tehran, the mountains of south-west Yemen, the steppe of the Donbas, the still bloody wasteland that is Gaza and even the elegant boulevards of Paris and Milan have a common thread.

One cannot understand one set of conflicts without weaving them into another, and it is this very interdependence that is making each problem so contagious, layered and difficult to resolve, leaving the world to live as if trapped inside a pressure cooker on the brink of an explosion.

Each night it seems the world has reached a collective rock bottom, only to wake in the morning to the sound of knocking from below.

In this great age of noncooperation and lawlessness, the need for one crisis to be resolved before another can be addressed leads to a collective paralysis, especially in the total absence of clear leadership by the world’s leading power.

Speaking this week, the Indian external affairs…