Why world leaders are blaming the past, but failing the present

As the world reels from climate change, political uncertainty, and war, current world leaders are retreating to blaming “historical villains,” particularly since they seem unable to address the crises shaping our global reality.

In India riots broke out over Aurangzeb, described by historians as the last “great Moghul” who ruled in the 17th century.

Or take Russia. With Vladimir Putin in power since 2000, the country annexed Crimea from Ukraine nearly a decade ago, setting the stage for the attack of Ukraine and the war that started in 2022.

It’s no secret that Putin sees himself as righting historical wrongs done to Russia, motivated by a desire to restore the power and status once enjoyed by the Soviet Union. Putin’s actions in Crimea were widely popular with Russians, who chanted, “Crimea is ours.”

Putin is a “silovik” (Russian for strongman or “man of force”), leading a band of siloviki who believe they are restoring Russia’s self-respect. Whether this pursuit will lead to a new “iron curtain” over Eastern Europe is the existential dilemma now facing Europe, cut adrift by the United States under President Donald Trump.

If visual proof was needed, we had the unprecedented optics of a televised meeting with Ukraine’s beleaguered leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, where an angry Trump and his Vice-President J.D. Vance berated Zelenskyy and publicly pressured him to sign a peace deal.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, widely unpopular and accused in serial corruption cases, overlooked the biggest security breach on October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other Palestinian groups launched coordinated armed incursions into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip - the first invasion of Israeli territory since the 1948 war.

Netanyahu used his own failure as an alibi to stay in office and launch a brutal war against the Gazans, treating civilians as combatants and throwing the Geneva convention out of the window. Violating the ceasefire, Netanyahu has continued attacks against the hapless Gazans in the fasting month of Ramadan, all to perpetuate his hold on power - another politician leveraging bitter history for a brazen power grab.

Even Donald Trump is tapping into America’s historical strain of isolationism, a recurrent theme that saw the US reluctant to engage in European affairs, politics, treaties and wars, particularly in the years between World War I and World War II. When it came to acting as the global policeman, the US never had any great enthusiasm - and now under Trump, that reluctance is being fully embraced.

Europe clearly lost its memory muscle during the years post-World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and simply forgot about securing its borders against a brooding Putin. Now as Trump makes US disengagement explicit, Germany, France and more urgently Poland are sensing an existential threat, feeling abandoned by the US.

Trump’s desire to annex Greenland and take back control of the Panama Canal - gifted to Panama by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 after the US spent billions of dollar building it - is also rooted in a sense of historic grievance that the president wants to tap into.

Meanwhile, the other real superpower China under Xi Jinping, who has been the paramount Chinese leader since 2012, is also animated by a sense of historic wrongs. Xi is keen to reestablish China’s preeminent place as the “kingdom of heaven” in the world. China believes democracy is an outdated concept arguing that and its economic success under a one-party system is an illuminating success story.

Can history ever be re-litigated? As a student of history I can only say that it cannot. The only thing history can do is help us learn from our past. With the world poised on the brink, one only hopes ideas for a peaceful and prosperous future prevail. As I often say, Aurangzeb died more than 300 years ago. He defines nothing in India today.