Debating New Delhi’s Grand Strategy Nirupama Rao; Dhruva Jaishankar; Lisa Curtis; Ashley J. Tellis July 30, 2025

 Debating New Delhi’s Grand Strategy

Nirupama Rao; Dhruva Jaishankar; Lisa Curtis; Ashley J. Tellis

July 30, 2025

What Kind of Great Power Will India Be?

Subtitle

Debating New Delhi’s Grand Strategy

Tags

World Order

Narendra Modi

Regions

India

Topics

Diplomacy

Geopolitics

Foreign Policy

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Responses

The Liminal Power

Nirupama Rao

Ashley Tellis’s recent essay, “India’s Great-Power Delusions” (July/August 2025), offers a searing critique of the country’s strategic posture. Tellis argues that India overestimates its influence on the world stage while lacking the economic heft, military capacity, and alliances to back its great-power ambitions. He warns that India’s attachment to strategic autonomy and multipolarity risks making the country irrelevant in an era of intensifying bipolarity, when the competition between China and the United States will shape geopolitics.

This thesis is well supported by observable gaps in India’s capabilities, but it flattens the rationale behind New Delhi’s foreign policy orientation. A more nuanced critique would require understanding India not as a delusional power but as a liminal one—a state standing on a geopolitical threshold, deliberately navigating ambiguity to preserve flexibility and autonomy in a global order that is not simply cleaving in two but fracturing in more complicated ways.

India’s foreign policy is best understood through the lens of liminality, the condition of existing between worlds rather than in a fixed role or within a bloc. India is not a classic great power, but neither is it merely a regional actor. It is a titan in chrysalis, whose $4.1 trillion economy, rapidly expanding defense capacity, and influence among many countries of the so-called global South signal not delusion, but a conscious avoidance of rigid alignments. Tellis sees India’s pursuit of multipolarity as a strategic liability. Instead, it is a form of adaptive realism, an intentional pivoting strategy necessitated by geography, history, and structural constraints in the international system.

The Logic of Being In Between

India’s geography alone justifies this cautious balancing act. Flanked by two nuclear adversaries—China to the north and Pakistan to the west—India cannot afford to align too closely with the United States without becoming more vulnerable to entanglement in great-power conflicts or retaliation from regional adversaries. Its borders are not buffered by oceans, as is the case for the United States; instead, they are live fault lines. This reality mandates engagement with rivals, particularly China. India’s relationship with China is a watchful one, marked by both détente and deterrence, a formula that seeks to manage competition without inviting conflict.

Tellis is correct in observing that India’s military capabilities, while expanding, do not yet provide it with an edge in deterring China. Nor does India currently project force beyond its near seas. What he underestimates, however, is India’s strategy of “distributed leverage”: a mix of defense modernization, diversified procurement, and regional engagement. India is not standing still; it is moving forward, not by mirroring great powers, but by leveraging minilateralism—smaller-scale collaborations between a few countries—and issue-based coalitions. These include the security partnership known as the Quad, featuring Australia, India, Japan, and the United States; the I2U2 partnership with Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States; and a trilateral initiative with France and the UAE. Such groupings are not substitutes for alliances but alternatives that provide security dividends without sacrificing India’s autonomy. This is not delusion. It offers a strategic architecture in tune with liminality.

Tellis also critiques India’s aversion to formal alliances, suggesting that strategic autonomy leaves New Delhi without reliable partners in a crisis. Here, too, context matters. India’s foreign policy carries the legacy of its postcolonial and Cold War experiences, particularly its ability to maintain autonomy amid competing superpower pressures. Its desire for multipolarity today is not naive, but a reflection of the global system’s changing structure. The U.S.-Chinese binary may define global military competition, but it does not exclusively determine the ideological commitments and economic priorities of governments around the world. India’s preference for flexible engagement resonates with this broader reality and positions it as a pivotal power—one that connects blocs rather than conforms to them.

Indeed, India’s strength lies in its role as a bridge, not a battering ram; it pursues consensus-building and reform from within the system rather than forceful transformation. Its leadership in the global South, exemplified by its push to bring the African Union into the G-20 in 2023 and its climate finance pledges, suggests a form of moral and institutional leadership that transcends conventional military metrics. India is not trying to dominate the world order—it is trying to reshape it from within by leading a coalition of middle and rising powers that are uncomfortable with both Chinese authoritarianism and Western paternalism. That strategy may be imperfect, but it is not incoherent.

Patience, Not Alignment

In economic terms, Tellis is right that India’s per capita GDP, infrastructure bottlenecks, and trade protectionism constrain its rise. But the trajectory matters. India’s recent gains in semiconductor production, its fast-growing digital infrastructure (such as India Stack, a platform providing the entire Indian population with essential digital services that handle identity information, personal data, and payments), and a projected $10 trillion GDP by 2040 point to a transformation in progress. Like the United States, which remained largely agrarian until the mid-nineteenth century and then transitioned during a period of rapid and significant industrialization to become an assertive global power in the late nineteenth century, India is building the institutional and material base for a more decisive role in the international order. Until then, strategic patience—not alignment—is its rational choice.

Tellis’s warning that India may not be able to shape the international order unless it chooses sides presumes a binary that India and many other countries reject. In a world increasingly defined by fragmentation rather than consolidation, the ability to adapt may be a greater asset than any fixed alignment. India’s tightrope walk is not a refusal to grow up—it is a recognition that in today’s world, the tightrope itself may be the only stable ground. In this light, liminality is not a symptom of underperformance; it is a form of power.

Tellis valuably points to gaps between India’s ambitions and its capabilities and the risks of overconfidence in New Delhi. But India is not deluded about its power—it is deeply aware of its constraints and is crafting a foreign policy to match. Rather than misreading its liminality as indecision, he should see it as purposeful and as a refusal to be cast in the mold of great powers past. India’s moment of full assertion may still lie ahead, but its ability to bend without breaking, to engage without surrender, is not a sign of strategic failure. It may, in fact, be India’s greatest strength.

NIRUPAMA RAO was India’s Foreign Secretary from 2009 to 2011. She also served as India’s Ambassador to China and the United States. She is the author of The Fractured Himalaya: India, Tibet, China, 1949–1962.

The Nimble Power

Dhruva Jaishankar

Tellis argues that India’s grand strategy misreads the international environment, that New Delhi is misguided in striving for multipolarity, and that it is short-sighted in its aversion to an alliance with the United States and its preference for strategic autonomy. These assertions mischaracterize India’s objectives and priorities and neglect to mention efforts by successive Indian governments that more accurately reflect India’s approach to international affairs. More surprisingly, Tellis sidesteps the fact that it is the United States that is today reluctant to engage in alliance-like commitments, not just with India but with most of its long-standing treaty allies. Washington is reconsidering the terms of its security guarantees in Europe, troop levels in South Korea, defense contributions to Japan, and the transfer of submarine technologies to Australia. Unlike many other partners in Asia or the Middle East, India does not seek aid, bases, or troops from the United States. Indeed, as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby wrote last September, “India is an ally in the old sense—to be regarded as an independent and autonomous partner. We need more of that kind of [ally], rather than dependencies.”

In many respects, Tellis is harking back to a world that no longer exists. The era of the United States overseeing a unipolar order is over. To be sure, the United States remains the world’s preeminent power, with its share of the global economy remaining steady at around 26 percent from 1991 to today. But Washington is now keen on resetting the terms of globalization and renegotiating its commitments in Europe and Asia. China, which now accounts for 17 percent of the global economy, has become a near peer competitor to the United States, and the two countries’ competition is playing out in virtually every domain. Despite noteworthy defense production increases in Europe, most advanced industrial economies are struggling with aging and declining populations, discord over immigration, strains to welfare systems, slowing innovation, and military dependence on the United States. Apart from the United States, the six other members of the G-7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom) have seen their share of the global economy contract from 42 percent to 18 percent since 1991. Russia’s robust military operations in Ukraine and war-propelled economy belie the country’s frailties and a growing dependence on China. The world is witnessing a more contested Indo-Pacific, a more violent Middle East with several capable regional powers, and a multitude of countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America coming into their own.

A Strategy for the World as It Is

This is the global landscape that India will have to navigate as it rises. Since 1991, India has more than tripled its share of the global economy, to four percent, and is on track to become the third-largest economy by the end of the decade, albeit still far behind the United States and China for the near future. It has a relatively young and large workforce, even as total fertility has begun to fall below replacement levels. India’s geopolitical environment, although shifting and uncertain, is far more favorable than what it contended with in the past, when it had to deal with the partition of the subcontinent, dependence on Western powers for aid, internal separatist conflicts, and major wars without the benefits of food security, a nuclear deterrent, or global market access. Except for China and Pakistan, with which it has significant territorial disputes, India has largely cooperative partnerships with most major countries and regions, including Japan, Russia, the United States, Europe, and the countries of the developing world.

Nonetheless, challenges abound. With China, India faces a compound threat that includes a disputed and militarized border; an unsustainable trade deficit; intensifying competition in the Indian subcontinent and Indian Ocean region; broad Chinese military and diplomatic support for Pakistan; and resolute opposition at multilateral institutions, including the UN Security Council. From Pakistan, India continues to confront state-backed terrorism under the protection of Islamabad’s nuclear umbrella. Other recent developments have also shaped Indian decision-making. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in the country’s health supply chains. The 2020 border clashes with China underscored the importance of establishing greater economic independence from Beijing. The war in Ukraine highlighted India’s supply chain constraints when it came to defense production and energy and food security. These challenges have inspired determination—and purposeful action.

To address these issues, India has embarked on a strategy of domestic production and diversification intended to strengthen its security, improve its population’s prosperity and well-being, and advance critical national interests. It has redoubled defense industrialization efforts, resulting in an increase from almost negligible amounts to $2.5 billion in defense exports, including to countries such as Armenia and the Philippines. Its largest export destination for defense items is, in fact, the United States. India has also rolled out an industrial policy that includes almost $50 billion in subsidies and state-backed financing for the manufacturing and development of critical and emerging technologies. This has begun to reap dividends in the export of electronics and aerospace components, although other critical sectors, such as electric vehicle batteries, could prove more difficult to develop.

In its diplomacy, India has reprioritized its near neighborhood, extending financial, developmental, and trading benefits to other South Asian countries and revitalizing more productive regional institutions. It has attempted to counter Pakistan’s support for terrorism through both military means—by striking terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan—and nonmilitary means, such as suspending trade and water privileges. India has broadened economic, security, and connectivity cooperation with the Middle East, particularly with Israel and the Gulf Arab states, including as part of the new economic initiative known as the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor. It has been working to preserve a balance of power in the Indo-Pacific by deepening security and diplomatic cooperation, bilaterally and through organizations, with other regional powers. And it seeks to advance its global governance objectives by attempting to revitalize multilateral bodies such as the United Nations, build new institutions such as the International Solar Alliance, and engage the countries of the global South on shared priorities such as the reform of global institutions and food, health, climate, and energy security. These are the outlines of India’s major international activities over the past decade or more.

The Necessity of Autonomy

In most instances, these undertakings complement U.S. objectives. The three Indian prime ministers who have governed the country since 1998 have made strenuous efforts to deepen cooperation with the United States. The U.S.-Indian partnership now extends to most domains of international policy, from energy and technology to defense and trade. India’s other closest global partners, apart from Russia, are all traditional U.S. allies, including Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. The concern now is not diffidence in New Delhi, but diffidence in Washington. U.S. President Donald Trump has made it clear that in a world of “America first,” everyone is in it for themselves. Despite the broadening and deepening U.S.-Indian partnership, strategic autonomy is today both a necessity and an advantage for India.

Similarly, multipolarity is a natural aspiration for an India seeking to advance its own interests in a contested world. Indian policymakers see no viable alternatives: the world is not reverting to a unipolar world order led by the United States; an alliance is not on offer in a bipolar world of competing American and Chinese blocs; and a bipolar condominium of China and the United States would marginalize India. Multipolarity should also not be mistaken for a “partnerships with all states but privileged relationships with none,” as Tellis has characterized it. It means having privileged relationships with many as part of necessary diversification. India’s current priorities are evident in its flurry of recent activities and agreements, including joining the U.S.-backed Artemis Accords (regarding space exploration) and the Minerals Security Partnership (regarding critical minerals supply chains) in 2023 and concluding or advancing trade agreements with the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union this year. This is a grand strategy based not on wishful thinking but on a pragmatic reading of the evolving international order.

DHRUVA JAISHANKAR is Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation America and the author of Vishwa Shastra: India and the World.

The Quad Power

Lisa Curtis

As Tellis makes clear, India’s long-held strategy of promoting a multipolar world order has become counterproductive for New Delhi. The concept of a multipolar order is seductive to Indian policymakers, who think India would have more influence if global power were dispersed. Such calculations may have made sense 25 years ago, when India, with its rapid economic growth, seemed poised to challenge China’s influence in Asia. In the last two decades, however, China has widened the power gap with India considerably, in economic as well as military terms. That deficit means that India’s vision of a multipolar order, in which power is evenly distributed among a handful of countries, is no longer realistic. Worse, seeking such an order now plays directly into China’s hands. China and Russia both push for a multipolar world to overturn international norms and institutions that have largely kept the peace in the Indo-Pacific for the last 50 years. Far from aiding India’s rise, multipolarity would only confirm Chinese hegemony in Asia and make India more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.

A shrewder policy would have India reaffirm the importance of the U.S.-led rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region. Despite the growing economic gap between India and China, New Delhi can still play an important role in shaping geopolitical trends and acting as a counterweight to Beijing. The principal way India can both fend off China and ensure stability in its neighborhood is through the existing Indo-Pacific partnership known as the Quad.

Four the Win

The Quad, which consists of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, was first mooted in 2007 but then was brought to life in 2017 during the first Trump administration to encourage greater cooperation in dealing with the challenges of a rising China. It has since become critical to the security and stability of the Indo-Pacific as the partnership strives to maintain a free and open region in which countries are not subject to Chinese coercion. India must continue to invest in building the partnership by helping fund the Quad’s economic initiatives and by becoming more willing to support the Quad’s security-related activities, especially those that aim to ensure freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. New Delhi need not sacrifice its strategic autonomy to work closely with the Quad, but it should give the Quad pride of place in its foreign policy and deepen strategic and security ties with all three participating countries.

Notwithstanding its disruptions to the global trading system and lack of clarity on support for European security, the Trump administration is committed to advancing the Quad as a centerpiece of its Indo-Pacific strategy. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision to hold a meeting of Quad foreign ministers on his first day on the job sent a signal to China about the administration’s willingness to work with allies and partners to meet challenges in Asia. In July, the Quad foreign ministers held another meeting, in which they announced initiatives to secure and diversify critical minerals supply chains, improve cooperation on maritime law enforcement, mobilize government and private investment for port infrastructure projects, strengthen policies and regulations regarding undersea cables, and plan for global health emergencies.

India has warmed up to the Quad during the last five years, especially following the 2020 border clashes with China. It is still reluctant to advance the Quad’s military activities, and, unlike Australia and Japan, is not an alliance partner of the United States. But it should do more. The connections that run through India bridge the Indian and Pacific Oceans. New Delhi also brings economic weight and regional credibility to the partnership. The Quad’s other members should acknowledge that India feels vulnerable to China because of their ongoing border dispute; New Delhi therefore does not want the Quad to become anything that resembles a security pact. Still, the Quad can quietly engage in crisis contingency planning, as well as strengthen maritime security initiatives, which will help check China’s ambitions in the disputed waters of the South China Sea and elsewhere. The Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission that recently sailed from Palau to Guam is an example of how the four countries can work together to check unlawful and aggressive maritime activities.

India’s Best Bet

India would have a better chance of achieving its great power ambitions if it shed its attachment to the illusion that a multipolar world order would better accommodate its rise. Indian policymakers must recognize that a multipolar world order simply means the rise of China and Russia at the expense of U.S. global influence and power. Rather than supporting this process, or standing by as it unfolds, India should help the United States thwart it. The best way for India to make up for its failure to keep pace with China’s economic growth and military might is to commit more fully to a rules-based order that it can help shape but is unlikely to lead. This means getting closer to the United States and investing heavily in the Quad.

LISA CURTIS is Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for South and Central Asia at the U.S. National Security Council from 2017 to 2021.

Tellis Replies

In “India’s Great-Power Delusions,” I contend that India has made significant moves toward becoming a great power since the acceleration of its economic growth after reforms in 1991. Yet this performance has failed to match China’s post-reform record, ensuring that when both countries reach their respective centenaries as modern states around the middle of the century, New Delhi will still be substantially weaker than Beijing. Since the United States, even with conservative assumptions and despite its current dysfunction, will tower over both Asian giants, the case for New Delhi cementing a privileged partnership with Washington to balance Chinese power is compelling. New Delhi’s obsession with pursuing multiple strategic alignments to realize global multipolarity, however, undermines the forging of such a compact with the United States that would improve India’s security and elevate its status over the coming decades.

Consequently, Dhruva Jaishankar’s claim that I sidestep “the fact that it is the United States that is today reluctant to engage in alliance-like commitments, not just with India but with most of its long-standing treaty allies” may reflect a simple misunderstanding. My article focuses on the long-term trajectory of Indian and Chinese power and its resulting predicaments for New Delhi. U.S. President Donald Trump is, for the time being, certainly disdainful of U.S. alliances and partnerships. But this is his last term, and the challenges I highlighted for both India and the United States will survive Trump. Furthermore—and simply as a matter of fact—in the twenty-first century, successive U.S. administrations since that of President George W. Bush, including Trump’s first one, have sought an alliance-like relationship with India. Yet it is New Delhi that has invariably demurred for reasons that are understandable but not always defensible, especially when Indian policymakers should be concerned about the future balance of power in Asia.

Which leaves the question of what India should do still unanswered. Here, Nirupama Rao responds that India, “a titan in chrysalis,” cannot wed itself to any single great power, owing to its history and its ambitions. Rather, it must navigate “ambiguity to preserve flexibility and autonomy in a global order that is not simply cleaving in two but fracturing in more complicated ways.” But China has risen as a hostile superpower right on India’s doorstep, and India cannot protect itself by relying on either international institutions or its own resources. India, indeed, may be a titan in chrysalis, but it faces a pugnacious behemoth that it cannot deter on its own. This alone should inexorably propel New Delhi to consummate a new geopolitical alignment with Washington because the latter, too, is threatened by Beijing, albeit for different reasons and in different ways.

Rao defends India’s aversion to such a consummation by declaring that the country “cannot afford to align too closely with the United States without becoming more vulnerable to entanglement in great-power conflicts or retaliation from regional adversaries” and, as such, “seeks to manage competition without inviting conflict.” Although these fears are understandable, Rao’s contention glides over the fact that China (together with Pakistan) is already embroiled in active hostilities against India, threatening its frontiers, undermining its economic growth, and boxing it within the subcontinent. What New Delhi needs, therefore, is deterrence. The “security dividends” that Rao says may come from India’s economic and technological growth and its multiple foreign partnerships will not keep China at bay; only a clear geopolitical convergence that produces new forms of cooperative defense with the United States will allow India to stave off Chinese aggression.

And, yes, Washington remains both capable and interested—Trump’s current inhibitions notwithstanding—in exploring such an arrangement. Because U.S.-Chinese competition will outlast Trump’s presidency and will persist even if Trumpism survives his departure from office, future nationalist U.S. administrations will inevitably gravitate toward coalition strategies to neutralize Beijing. The United States, now and in the future, is still India’s best hope for successfully parrying China.

Above All Others

Jaishankar counters this argument in the first instance by describing India’s myriad efforts to modernize its economy and defense base and diversify its international partnerships. As impressive as these may be, they do not compare to China’s achievements. And that is precisely the point: India cannot balance China either on the strength of its own undertakings or in collaboration with other strategic partners—save the United States. Jaishankar then argues that New Delhi is already collaborating with Washington in historically unprecedented ways, pointing to the numerous current initiatives as proof.

But this story misses my underlying critique. Because India, even as it deepens its relationship with Washington, pursues, in Jaishankar’s words, “privileged relationships with many”—including with other U.S. competitors—the United States is inhibited from supporting India fully. Although Washington has declared its intention to treat New Delhi on par with its allies, the history of the last quarter century demonstrates that there are thresholds regarding political support, technology transfers, and intelligence sharing, for instance, that the United States simply will not cross because India often cavorts with American adversaries. Highlighting the many schemes that Washington and New Delhi have unveiled as part of their tongue-twisting declaration of a “Comprehensive Global and Strategic Partnership” ignores the fact that the United States is reluctant, and will justifiably continue to be reluctant, to aid India as long as New Delhi does not prize Washington as a select partner above all others.

Lisa Curtis drives this point home penetratingly when she observes that India’s desire to create “a multipolar world order simply means the rise of China and Russia at the expense of U.S. global influence and power.” Washington will not stand by mutely as India pursues such a policy. And Indian policymakers, being arch realists, should not expect the United States to support their country as they advance this goal. India cannot expect to come out ahead in its competition with China when the United States is inhibited in supporting New Delhi because many Indian policies run counter to American interests.

The Hares and the Hounds

Fortunately, there is a path forward, but it requires India to reconsider some elements of its grand strategy, especially its habit of running with the hares while hunting with the hounds. Great powers are marked by their capacity to make painful choices—great-power wannabes have to make tough choices, too. Attempting to constantly walk a tightrope because, in Rao’s words, it “may be the only stable ground” works only as long as the rope holds.

It should be consoling to New Delhi that a special relationship with Washington does not require an alliance centered on collective defense. Curtis emphasizes that a sturdy commitment to the Quad is itself a worthwhile first step. Yet India continues to object to what it calls the “securitization” of this coalition even though the United States and its partners are struggling to balance China militarily. It may well be that a long-term solution lies in constructing “a collective defense pact in Asia,” as Ely Ratner has argued recently in these pages. After all, if military balancing fails, little else that the Quad and others do matters very much.

But until such an Asian mutual assistance system can be institutionalized, India can work seriously with the United States to implement a strategy focused on cooperative defense aimed at checking Chinese aggression, dealing with crises, and preventing wars. Unfortunately, today, for all the transformations in the bilateral relationship during the last few decades, India is still reluctant to embark on such a course, leaving itself highly vulnerable to China.

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