I also think we need to question the idea that Trump’s America First agenda is unprecedented, that the U.S. imperium—whether under Republicans or Democrats—has not continuously violated international norms. Didn’t Barack Obama threaten to renegotiate NAFTA? Didn’t George W. Bush put Iran in the “Axis of Evil” and openly scorn France and Germany for failing to join his misadventure in Iraq? It has become too easy since Trump’s ascension to say that the United States once advanced liberal democracy and freedom. This was never the view from India or Pakistan, let alone Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The United States was and is a self-interested global hegemon; it has supported the world’s worst despots when they seemed to protect U.S. interests. The only difference is that Trump openly repudiates emollient rhetoric and does not hesitate to alienate U.S. allies.

There are no public intellectuals really in the real sense of the word, which implies a kind of intellectual and spiritual integrity that is rare in the public sphere. There are opinion-makers, security experts, hacks, ambitious academics and most of them are compromised by their proximity to political power.

Understandably, many people blame religion for all the ills of the world. But, as Gandhi suggested, it may be wiser to realize how the men claiming divine sanction only work out—if often more crudely than their agnostic counterparts—the nihilist logic of a purely secular morality: that nothing is sacred in the battle for worldly power, and that nation-states with economies built around the endless multiplication of individual desires are likely to wage the most destructive wars in order to impose or preserve their hegemony.

Living through the great moral disasters of modernity—Western imperialism in Asia and Africa, the world wars between rival nations and empires, and the rise of totalitarianism—Gandhi could see how the civic spaces of nation-states, which had been marked off as a secular realm, were increasingly dominated by elites swearing by the cold, amoral rationality of economic self-interest and national security.

It is why Gandhi wished to reintroduce religion into politics. This sounds as perverse now as it did to the many Indian admirers of Nehru. But then religion for Gandhi was inseparable from the practice of austerity, tolerance, and compassion.