Speaking in the Netherlands, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi rightly cautioned the world about the 2020s being the “decade of disasters” and called on the global community to take corrective measures lest advances of the recent past are frittered away. The ongoing decade has just about crossed its halfway mark and it has seen a once in a century pandemic, the most prolonged armed conflict in Europe since the end of the World War II, a lingering conflict in West Asia finally mutating into, first a great humanitarian tragedy in Gaza and then, the biggest energy shock in the history of modern capitalism. Even as these frequent gigantic disruptions continue to inflict recurring shocks on the global order, its established gamekeeper, namely the US under the second presidency of Donald Trump, has added more chaos than order.Rise in deficit and debt levels, a cutback in development aid from the advanced countries as the US bails out and Europe pivots to guns over bread, tightening liquidity conditions because of central bank action due to high inflation, are some factors which have made life very difficult for the most vulnerable countries and people in the Global South (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)The effects are not just in military or non-military fatalities or prices of critical products. The most damaging impact has been on the most vulnerable. Rise in deficit and debt levels, a cutback in development aid from the advanced countries as the US bails out and Europe pivots to guns over bread, tightening liquidity conditions because of central bank action due to high inflation, are some factors which have made life very difficult for the most vulnerable countries and people in the Global South. One of the biggest ironies of the current global order is that these countries have very little agency in geopolitics or even multilateral institutions.Undoing this rupture between geopolitics and development and resetting the world’s priorities towards advancing, not reversing, the developmental gains of the past will require a creative destruction of multilateralism rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water, which is what is happening at the moment. India and Europe must work together on this goal.