What Kind of Great Power Will India Be?

Nirupama Rao; Dhruva Jaishankar; Lisa Curtis; Ashley J. Tellis, What Kind of Great Power Will India Be?, Foreign Affairs, July 30, 2025.

The article consists of four pieces, one by each listed author, in response to an earlier aricle: Ashley J. Tellis, India’s Great-Power Delusions. I offer snippets from each piece.

Nirupama Rao, The Liminal Power:

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.

I note that that's the role for Japan that Osamu Tezuka imagined in Nextworld, the last manga in his so-called SF Trilogy, see my essay Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan.

Dhruva Jaishankar, The Nimble Power:

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.

Lisa Curtis, The Quad Power:

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.

Finally, Tellis replies to each:

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.