Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Tuesday pointed to the growing ability to pursue independent foreign policy choices by India’s and countries in West Asia, saying they would not necessarily align with the United States or China as the global balance of power evolves.
Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum 2026 in New Delhi, during a panel discussion titled ‘The End of Predictability’, Sunak said the international economic order was undergoing a fundamental shift, with the decline of the multilateral, rules-based system creating greater geopolitical uncertainty and risks. 61 different state-based armed conflicts around the world. “So, China is a peer competitor for the US across economic, military, and technological domains. “Countries like India, like the Gulf, now are able to chart their own course. They’re not going to always agree with the US or China. “And I think it’s no coincidence that right now there are more armed conflicts happening than at any point since World War II.
“We all grew up investing in, operating in a multilateral rules-based framework, largely enforced by US President Trump is not a cause for that; he’s a symptom of that, and the world that we’re in now is one where we don’t quite know what we’ve settled down to, and that creates an enormous amount of geopolitical uncertainty and indeed danger,” Sunak said, as quoted by news agency ANI. That is a new feature of the world economy,” he said. Against this backdrop, Sunak said countries such as India and those in West Asia were increasingly in a position to make decisions independently, guided by their own priorities rather than automatically siding with either of the world’s two major powers. They’re going to do what they want, and that’s a new feature,” the former UK prime minister said. Now I look at that, and I’m worried,” Sunak said. He also took a jibe at US President Donald Trump’s approach to international diplomacy, saying that the latter “looks at that and thinks 61 opportunities to win the Nobel Peace Prize”.
