The old map is burning. If you spent any time listening to the hum of the Munich Security Conference this week, you’d realize the people in the expensive suits have finally stopped pretending they have the fire extinguisher.

India’s External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, took the stage and did something politicians usually find physically painful: he told the truth. He didn’t offer a roadmap. He didn't promise a new era of global harmony. Instead, he basically looked at the room of anxious Atlanticists and told them the world is messy, it’s staying messy, and nobody—especially not the old guard—has a clue how to fix it.

We call it multipolarity. That’s the polite, academic way of saying "everyone for themselves."

Jaishankar’s vibe has always been one of "strategic autonomy," which is just diplomat-speak for being the guy who refuses to pick a side at a messy divorce settlement. But at MSC 2026, his tone shifted from defiant to almost clinical. He admitted we are heading toward a world with more power centers and zero consensus. It’s a world of jagged edges. A world where the "rules-based order" feels less like a constitution and more like a TOS agreement that everyone clicks "accept" on without reading, right before they break every single clause.

Let’s talk about the friction. You can see it in the numbers. Look at the $250 billion price tag for the latest "de-risking" initiatives in the semiconductor trade. We aren't just talking about trade wars anymore; we’re talking about a complete fracturing of the silicon soul of the planet. When Jaishankar says there are no clear answers, he’s looking at the reality that you can’t just unplug a global supply chain and expect the lights to stay on.

The West wants a clean binary. Democracy versus autocracy. The Good Guys versus the Bad Guys. But New Delhi, and a dozen other capitals from Riyadh to Brasilia, aren't buying the subscription package. They see a world where they have to buy Russian oil to keep their populations from rioting, while simultaneously pitching themselves as the next big tech hub for Silicon Valley expats. It’s a cynical, exhausting balancing act. It’s also the only game in town.

There’s a specific kind of arrogance in thinking that the world’s problems can still be solved in a boardroom in Bavaria. Jaishankar basically poked a hole in that balloon. He didn't use the usual fluff. He talked about the "distortions" of the past. He pointed out that the tools we built to manage the world—the UN, the WTO, the aging architecture of the 1940s—are essentially running on legacy software that hasn't been patched in decades. They’re glitching. Hard.

The tech industry knows this feeling. It’s what happens when you try to scale a startup on a crumbling backend. You get "multipolarity." You get different regions building their own firewalls, their own payment systems, and their own versions of reality.

Think about the Red Sea. We’ve seen how a few thousand dollars worth of drones can choke off billions in maritime trade. That’s the multipolar world in a nutshell: decentralized chaos. There’s no 1-800 number to call when the shipping lanes get blocked. The U.S. can't just send a carrier group and expect the problem to vanish anymore. The math has changed. The leverage has shifted.

And yet, the MSC crowd still clings to the idea of a "unified response." It’s a nice sentiment for a press release. It doesn't hold much water when you're trying to negotiate a trade deal with a country that views your "values" as a luxury item they can't afford.

Jaishankar’s admission that there are no clear answers wasn't a confession of weakness. It was a reality check. He’s telling us that the "End of History" was just a long lunch break, and now we’re back to the grind. It’s a world of micro-alliances and temporary marriages of convenience. You don't find "solutions" in a world like that. You just manage the decline of certainty.

The most telling moment wasn't what he said, but what he didn't. He didn't offer a vision of what comes next. He didn't promise that India would step in to provide the stability that the U.S. or Europe can no longer guarantee. He just stood there, a realist in a room full of romantics, and told them the weather was going to stay bad for a very long time.

So, here we are. The global order is being rewritten by people who don't necessarily like each other, using rules they haven't agreed on yet. It’s going to be expensive, it’s going to be inefficient, and it’s going to be incredibly volatile.

We spent thirty years thinking the world was getting smaller. It turns out it was just getting more crowded, and now everyone wants their own desk.

Is there a version of this story where we don't all end up poorer and more paranoid? If there is, nobody in Munich seemed to have the password. Or maybe they just realized the server is down for maintenance, and it’s not coming back up.

How much are you willing to pay for a sense of security that no one can actually deliver?