The Story of Iqbal:
Applied Moral Philosophy
There exists in the cultural memory of India a concept that has no precise equivalent in Western political thought. The Urdu word Iqbal encompasses something far beyond its literal translations of prosperity or success. It describes a state of grace that people or nations possess when they have earned genuine respect/ When fortune seems to follow their actions, and when their power rests not merely on force but on a kind of moral authority that others recognize instinctively.
This Iqbal behaves almost like a living presence. The folklore speaks of it as a bird that lands on the shoulder of a nation. When a country possesses Iqbal, even its mistakes somehow turn into opportunities. Its currency is trusted, its citizens can travel the world without fear, and other nations want to emulate rather than merely obey it. But this bird is capricious. It cannot be caged or purchased. It departs when a nation becomes arrogant, when it confuses seized power with earned authority, or when it grows negligent and stops innovating.
A State of Grace in Nations
China
The recent history of global powers illustrates this principle with remarkable clarity. In 2020, China appeared to be on an inexorable rise to global dominance. Yet that year marked the moment when its Iqbal departed. The lack of transparency around the pandemic’s origins created a massive trust deficit that China has struggled to repair. The shift from a policy of peaceful rise to aggressive Wolf Warrior diplomacy alienated trading partners across Europe and Asia. The cracks in the economic miracle became visible with the Evergrande collapse and demographic decline. Before 2020, everything China touched seemed to turn to gold. After 2020, even its most careful plans seemed to encounter unexpected obstacles. The world stopped looking at China with admiration and began looking at it with caution and suspicion.
USA
The United States held its Iqbal longer, but lost it more dramatically in 2025. For decades, American power rested on what might be called the sweet tongue, the ability to frame self-interest as universal values and to make dominance appear as partnership. An American passport in 1950 was more than a travel document. It was an amulet of protection, a symbol that behind you stood a power that no one dared challenge. Americans could roam the world without fear because their country possessed that indefinable quality that made harming them unthinkable.
But by 2025, the gap between America’s proclaimed values and its actual behavior had grown too wide for anyone to ignore. The capture of Venezuela’s president in January 2026 and the seizure of oil tankers in international waters marked the moment when America dropped the pretense entirely. The sweet tongue was replaced by naked coercion. The nation that had lectured the world about rules-based order was now openly violating those rules whenever convenient. The Iqbal departed not because America lost its military strength or economic size, but because it lost the respect that made that strength legitimate.
Pakistan
The Pakistan example that Pritpal Kaur articulates provides perhaps the clearest illustration of what happens when power is seized rather than earned. When Partition forced Hindus and Sikhs to flee their homes in 1947, many buried their valuables underground, hoping to return. Those who took over these homes dug up the wealth and enjoyed a windfall. But they inherited only the physical assets. The entrepreneurial knowledge, the trade networks, the accumulated trust and reputation that had made those communities prosperous, the Iqbal itself, departed with the refugees. Seventy-seven years later, Pakistan remains economically struggling despite its strategic location and resources, while the displaced communities rebuilt themselves elsewhere through the same entrepreneurial spirit that had created wealth in the first place.
Trade Barriers
This pattern explains why the current American strategy of high tariffs and asset seizures is failing. When the United States imposed a fifty percent tariff on Indian jewelry in 2025, American advisors thought they were protecting their market. Instead, Indian jewelers simply shifted their final processing to Belgium. An Indian-owned company completes the setting and polishing in Antwerp, and the product enters the American market at zero duty as Belgian goods. The craftsmanship is identical, but the paperwork has changed. The United States thought it was wielding power, but it was actually just creating a lucrative business opportunity for Belgian processors.
Similarly, when Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers found themselves blocked from the American market by hundred percent tariffs, they didn’t abandon their expansion plans. They established assembly operations in India, which can set up production facilities in six months rather than the years required in Western countries. These cars, assembled in India with Indian labor but incorporating Chinese technology, will enter the European market through the India-EU free trade agreement signed on January 27, 2026. Tesla finds itself competing with products forty percent cheaper, not because of Chinese dumping but because the natural order of efficient production has found a path around artificial barriers.
India-Europe Trade Deal
The India-EU agreement represents something more profound than a trade deal. It marks the emergence of what might be called the Bridge strategy. France had long wanted to position itself as a third pole between American and Chinese power, and even expressed interest in joining BRICS. But Russia and China blocked French participation to keep the bloc Western-free. France found a more elegant solution through strategic partnership with India. By aligning with India, France gains access to BRICS resources and Global South markets without needing a formal seat at the BRICS table. India, in turn, gains access to European technology that America had refused to fully share, like the hot section technology for jet engines that the United States kept veiled for years.
This India-EU corridor now controls approximately eighty percent of world trade when combined with the broader BRICS network. While American advisors like Peter Navarro focus on reciprocal tariffs and property-dealer thinking, they miss the fundamental shift occurring beneath their feet. They imagine they are protecting American interests by raising walls, but they are actually just forcing the world to build bridges that bypass America entirely.
19th Century Tools
The deep irony is that American leadership is approaching global trade with the mentality of someone running a 1970s-style License Raj in India, the very system America once criticized as inefficient and corrupt. They believe they can control who enters their market by holding the key in the form of tariff exemptions. But just as Indians in the 1970s responded to Indira Gandhi’s ninety-seven percent tax rates by moving wealth into gold and parallel economies, the global economy in 2026 is responding to American tariffs by creating parallel systems. Local currency settlements, GIFT City financial infrastructure, and regulatory arbitrage through places like Belgium represent the modern equivalent of that evasion. When the state’s greed exceeds people’s patience, the state doesn’t get rich. It just creates a nation of creative rule-avoiders.
The concept of Iqbal helps explain why these American strategies are failing. Taxation and tariffs are privileges that people grant to governments they respect. When a government abuses that privilege, it doesn’t generate compliance. It generates evasion and alternative systems. The United States is discovering what Indira Gandhi discovered, that you cannot force prosperity through high rates and heavy control. The tax base shrinks because people find ways around the barriers. Import volumes are falling despite the tariffs, which means the revenue America expects to fund its five trillion dollar tax cuts will never materialize.
Consequences for USA
The United States currently carries thirty-eight trillion dollars in debt, with interest payments now exceeding defense spending. The political class appears headed toward using the current president as a scapegoat, impeaching him in the spring of 2027 to declare him rogue and invite the world to return to normal relations. But this strategy misunderstands the nature of what has changed. The Iqbal has already departed. Removing one leader and installing another won’t restore the state of grace that made American dominance seem natural and legitimate.
The world is not waiting for American politics to stabilize. The fifty billion dollars in investment flowing into India from companies like Microsoft and Amazon in recent months represents something more than business expansion. It represents wealthy capital seeking hard assets outside the dollar system. By building data centers and semiconductor fabrication plants in India, these companies are converting paper wealth that could be seized or devalued into physical infrastructure protected by Indian sovereignty. The property dealer mentality in Washington thinks in terms of leverage and deals, but misses that modern industrial networks are building new circuits that simply route around American chokepoints.
Meanwhile, the domestic American population has effectively defaulted on citizenship itself. Roughly fifty percent of eligible voters don’t participate in elections, not from apathy but from a kind of rational despair. They have concluded that regardless of who wins, the debt grows, infrastructure decays, and desperate acts continue. The remaining half are not citizens in the civic sense but partisans, Democrats or Republicans first and Americans second. When you are a partisan before you are a citizen, you cheer when your side confiscates the other side’s assets or strangles their economy. You become a foot soldier for a gang rather than a guardian of a shared country.
This internal fracture explains why the comparison to Pakistan is so apt. Just as Pakistan inherited physical assets but lost the Iqbal that made those assets productive, America retains its military bases and aircraft carriers but has lost the moral authority that made those bases welcome. The expensive army remains, but the willing partnerships that made that army effective are dissolving. America is becoming a regional power with global expenses, like the late Ottoman Empire or Britain in the 1940s, possessing a world-class military that its shrinking economy can no longer afford to maintain.
The traditional trade routes are reasserting themselves in this new environment. What modern marketing calls the Silk Road was always something of a historical invention, a nineteenth-century German romanticization of difficult mountain passes through appropriated territories. The real engine of ancient trade was the maritime route from India’s western ports through the Gulf to the Mediterranean. This was the path that fed Rome and Greece, that required no single empire to control it, and that moved on the monsoon winds rather than through mountain chokepoints. The India-Middle East-Europe Corridor being formalized in 2026 is simply the modern technical upgrade of that ancient natural route. It uses high-speed rail across the Arabian Peninsula and green hydrogen shipping, but the fundamental geography is identical to what existed two thousand years ago.
The Europeans originally came to India seeking to bypass the middlemen of the Silk Road and the Levant. In a profound historical irony, the European Union in 2026 is returning to India to bypass the middleman of the American dollar and the Chinese supply chain. The pattern has repeated itself across centuries because it reflects the underlying logic of geography and natural trade flows.
Aberration of 300 Years
This returns us to the central insight of the Iqbal framework. The past three hundred years of Western dominance were an aberration in world history, a brilliant and intense departure from the normal pattern where China and India served as the largest economies and cultural anchors. That aberration is ending not through dramatic collapse but through a return to equilibrium. The bird of Iqbal has not chosen a new single master. It has instead settled on a framework of multiple power centers, each serving its own region and building partnerships based on mutual benefit rather than enforced hierarchy.
The folklore speaks of three things that drive the bird away: arrogance, when a nation thinks it is master of its own destiny and forgets the role of providence; injustice, when power is used purely to oppress; and negligence, when a nation becomes complacent and stops innovating. By these measures, both China and America have driven the bird away through different combinations of these failures. The question for the coming years is not which nation will capture the bird and restore a unipolar order, but whether the world can function in a multipolar system where the bird visits many shoulders but rests permanently on none.
Gangs Replaced with New Order
The difficulty is that USA is trying to run a sophisticated, interconnected global system using the survival logic of competing gangs. The sweet tongue is gone, replaced by naked interest and threat. The institutions built on American guarantees still exist, but the guarantees themselves are no longer credible.
We are in the messy middle period, what might be called the interregnum, where the old rules no longer work but the new rules haven’t been fully established. It always gets worse before it gets better, and the worse has only just started.
But beneath the chaos, a pattern is emerging. The eighty percent of world trade flowing through the India-EU-BRICS network, the local currency settlements that bypass the dollar, the hard asset investments replacing paper wealth, the return to ancient trade routes updated with modern technology. These are not random developments but the outline of a new order taking shape.
The winners in this transition are those who understand that Iqbal cannot be seized or demanded, only earned through consistent behavior that others freely choose to respect. The losers are those still trying to run a License Raj in a world that has already built the bridges around them.