From left, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif pose after signing a trilateral defense agreement in Mecca this month. Photo: Saudi Press Agency via AP
America’s traditional allies in the Islamic world are not walking away from it, but they are no longer betting everything on Washington. After decades of relying on U.S. security arrangements, they are quietly building alternative partnerships to insulate themselves from Washington’s whims.
They may still need America’s technology, intelligence and military heft, but a number of Muslim allies are determined to reduce their vulnerability to American strategic decisions over which they have no say.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed on August 7 by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, is the clearest signal yet of this shift. By committing to mutual defense (“an attack on one is an attack on all”) and establishing mechanisms for military coordination, intelligence sharing and defense-industrial cooperation, the trio is creating a strategic safety net beyond U.S. oversight.
All three members of this Sunni alliance are longstanding U.S. allies or partners. Turkey’s participation is especially momentous: As a NATO member, its decision to join a separate collective-defense alliance highlights how the desire for strategic autonomy has spread within the U.S.-led alliance system.
Another U.S. ally, Egypt, which for over 50 years has ranked as the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, actively participated in the mutual-defense discussions with Ankara, Riyadh and Islamabad, but at the eleventh hour chose to stay out of the pact. Joining an autonomous defense axis that bypassed U.S. regional leadership could have exposed Egypt to financial and diplomatic risks amid severe economic distress. It could also have been interpreted as a breach of its 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which enshrines the primacy of treaty commitments over conflicting regional defense obligations.
The trilateral pact’s explicit reference to “Islamic solidarity,” together with the choice of the Muslim holy city of Mecca as the signing venue, has lent the accord a distinctly pan-Islamic character. It appears designed, at least in part, to provide strategic insurance against an increasingly unpredictable West. It also represents an implicit rejection of the regional architecture President Trump has sought to construct around Israel and the 2020 Abraham Accords.
The Mecca axis is not the only warning to America. As U.S. credibility erodes under Trump’s second presidency, U.S. allies in the Middle East and beyond are questioning American commitments and leaning toward hedging. There is already a larger rethink among America’s longstanding Gulf allies about relying on Washington.
Trump launched the Iran war without consulting the Gulf allies, then used vast U.S. military resources to shield Israel from Iranian retaliation while leaving the six Gulf sheikhdoms to bear the consequences for enabling American strikes from the U.S. bases that they host. On May 27, Trump even threatened to “blow up” Oman, a peaceful, longtime U.S. ally, if it entered a toll-sharing deal with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz.
Against this backdrop, the Gulf monarchies — long the immovable pillars of American power in the Middle East — are fundamentally altering their geopolitical calculations. They face dual risks of depending on the U.S. as a security guarantor while bearing the consequences of helping America wage war.
Iranian reprisals threatened precisely the infrastructure on which Gulf economies critically depend, including energy facilities, desalination plants and urban centers.
In a notable shift, the Gulf Arab states are no longer prepared to automatically align themselves with the U.S. agenda. In fact, seeking to insulate their ambitious economic and national-security projects from regional conflict, these states have shifted from strict containment of Iran to actively exploring détente with Tehran, including through economic incentives.
The Mecca alliance had been in the making for some time. Turkey has longstanding military and strategic ties with both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which signed a bilateral mutual-defense agreement in September 2025. Trump’s war on Iran helped transform that accord into a trilateral alliance. The fact that sophisticated American defenses were deployed primarily to protect U.S. and Israeli assets while leaving America’s Gulf allies exposed to Iranian reprisals appears to have influenced strategic thinking in Ankara as well.
When a country embedded in the Western security system joins an Islamic alliance it sends a particularly pointed signal about its intent to hedge. Turkey’s decision suggests that it does not believe NATO membership is sufficient for its security. Its foreign minister has approvingly likened the Mecca pact’s mutual-defense provision to NATO’s Article Five.
The Mecca alliance’s architecture is striking because each member brings something the others lack. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia contributes financial power. Manufacturing powerhouse Turkey brings a robust defense industry, combat experience and NATO-trained military capabilities. Pakistan, despite being trapped in a chronic debt crisis, brings a large standing military, a nuclear arsenal and experience in asymmetric warfare, including the use of state-backed militant proxies.
Critics may dismiss the alliance as a paper tiger because its three militaries are not integrated into a single, NATO-style command structure. The pact’s aim, however, is not to create a unified expeditionary force but to make each member less vulnerable by combining Saudi money, Turkish military technology and Pakistani manpower and nuclear-weapons capabilities.
Washington has long complained that its Middle Eastern allies free-ride on American security. The Mecca alliance offers a caustic response: We will take greater responsibility for our own defense — but on our own terms.
The pact underscores a paradox: It is both a sign of declining American primacy and an opportunity to craft a more prudent and sustainable U.S. strategy. The U.S. cannot demand that its partners become more capable while it simultaneously insists they remain dependent on Washington.
America must face up to an unpalatable reality: The age of exclusive U.S. security provision in much of the Islamic world may be ending, with the Iran war serving as a catalyst. The wise response is not to fight this transition, but to shape it.
Then‑Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, then-U.S. President Joe Biden and other Group of Seven leaders and officials visit Itsukushima Shrine during their summit in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, in May 2023. | Japan’s Foreign Ministry / via REUTERS
Nearly half a century after Edward Said published his landmark book “Orientalism,” his central insight remains strikingly relevant.
Said argued that the “Orient” was often presented by Western media, academia, literature and institutions not as a collection of complex societies but as the West’s contrasting mirror image — irrational rather than rational, emotional rather than pragmatic, culturally driven rather than strategically motivated, backward rather than modern.
Japan, despite being one of the world’s most technologically advanced democracies that hosts more American troops than any other U.S. ally, has never entirely escaped the Orientalist framework. In news reporting, that framework operates through subtle narrative framing and language choices.
When The New York Timesrecently profiled Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, it described her as pursuing a “nationalist agenda” while presenting her premiership as part of Japan’s rightward political shift.
Similar Western reporting has claimed rising “xenophobic nationalism” in Japan, particularly in coverage of the Sanseito Party and debates over immigration and national identity that led this month to stricter permanent residency requirements.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with such characterization is beside the point. The more revealing question is why the lens of xenophobia and exclusionary nationalism is so rarely applied to Western politics or policies.
President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement is among the most stridently nationalist political projects in modern American history. Yet the American mainstream press discusses it principally as populism, conservatism or a battle over the country’s future rather than as evidence of a dangerous nationalist turn. Nationalism, it seems, is something practiced by others.
George Orwell recognized this distinction long before today’s debates. In his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism, he observed that patriotism is usually portrayed as defensive and virtuous, while nationalism is associated with aggression and the pursuit of power. Contemporary Western reporting frequently reproduces this divide across national borders. At home there are patriots. Abroad there are nationalists.
This may also explain why Japan’s immigration policy is portrayed as “ethno-nationalism,” while Trump’s tough immigration agenda featuring a national border emergency declaration, massive expansions of ICE detention capacity and deportation flights is described as “border security” and “enforcing the rule of law.”
Likewise, Japan’s “economic security” frameworks, India’s self-reliance strategy and Southeast Asia’s subsidizing of local manufacturing are depicted as “rising economic nationalism” and “protectionist agendas.” But America’s domestic manufacturing subsidies (via legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act), aggressive industrial policy and broad tariffs to counter foreign competition are presented as “protecting American jobs” and defending “America First.”
The asymmetry in political vocabulary extends to military modernization. When pursued by Western governments, the language is generally reassuring, such as safeguarding “national security interests.” But when carried out by a major non-Western country, it becomes “resurgent nationalism.”
The difference is more than semantic. It reflects an implicit assumption that Western states naturally act from rational strategic calculation, whereas other nations are driven by historical passions, cultural instincts or identity politics.
The pattern becomes even clearer during moments of crisis.
Following the natural disaster-triggered accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in 2011, much Western reporting quickly abandoned the language of emergency management in favor of familiar cultural imagery. Engineers and technicians working under extraordinarily dangerous conditions were transformed into “nuclear samurai,” “nuclear ninjas” or “kamikaze volunteers.” The disaster itself was frequently presented through apocalyptic imagery that evoked exotic catastrophe more readily than scientific assessment.
This framing was revealing. Few Western reporters would have described American engineers responding to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster as “modern cowboys” or British emergency personnel as “knights.” Yet Japan’s response was repeatedly interpreted through centuries-old cultural archetypes, as though contemporary Japanese society could only be understood by invoking historical imagery. Worse still, victims’ suffering was reduced to a backdrop for lurid stories about radiation.
The consequences extended beyond colorful headlines. Sensational reporting fueled public anxiety far beyond what available evidence justified. Preventive evacuations ensured no deaths occurred from acute radiation exposure, yet many foreign audiences were left with the impression that Fukushima represented another Chernobyl.
Within Japan itself, alarmist overseas coverage circulated rapidly through television and the internet, sometimes undermining confidence in official communications and complicating crisis management. The country’s international image also suffered, affecting tourism, exports and investor confidence long after the immediate emergency had passed.
These examples point to a broader structural problem: Western journalism often treats its own political culture as the universal baseline against which others are measured. Foreign politics, especially in Asia, remain vulnerable to cultural essentialism.
Japan occupies an unusual position in this narrative. It is simultaneously viewed as technologically sophisticated and culturally exotic, economically advanced yet somehow perpetually “other.” That combination makes it especially susceptible to reporting that oscillates between admiration and caricature.
During ordinary times, Japan is celebrated for efficiency, discipline and innovation. During moments of political debate or national crisis, however, centuries-old stereotypes often re-emerge with surprising speed.
Western media, especially Anglo-American outlets, double as the international media. How these organizations present the news helps shape markets, investment decisions, diplomacy, tourism flows and public trust. When reporting substitutes cultural stereotypes for careful analysis, it distorts not only public perception but also international decision-making.
Edward Said warned that representation is never simply about description; it is also about power. That observation remains pertinent today. Orientalist framing does more than mischaracterize Asian societies. It encourages the world to evaluate them by standards different from those applied to the West itself.
Brahma Chellaney, a longstanding contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.
China shapes global knowledge not just by blocking information at home, but by exporting censorship through economic coercion and diplomatic pressure. It is increasingly influencing what the rest of the world knows about its internal repression, territorial revisionism and even China itself.
Its strategy rests on three pillars. The first is corporate compliance. Beijing leverages access to its vast domestic market to make Western companies — from Hollywood studios to the National Basketball Association — self-censor topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong in order to protect their commercial interests.
The second is platform control. Chinese-owned apps such as WeChat enforce domestic censorship rules on overseas users. TikTok has faced sustained international scrutiny over its algorithms that tend to deprioritize or shadowban content critical of the Chinese government.
The third is the suppression of independent scholarship. Beijing employs economic leverage while threatening to withhold visas from Western researchers, suspend funding for overseas Confucius Institutes or curtail tuition revenue from Chinese international students. Foreign universities, think tanks, nonprofits and academic publishers have all faced targeted pressure intended to shape research on modern Chinese history and politics, including Beijing’s claims over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and the South China Sea.
Few cases better illustrate China’s campaign against academic freedom abroad than the world’s premier conference on Tibetan studies, which had been scheduled to open on August 23 in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Under pressure from Beijing, Nepal’s government suddenly scrapped the conference before the first panel could even begin.
The Chinese pressure led Nepal’s government on August 5 to cancel the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS) conference altogether. Before the cancellation, the Tibetan Policy Institute — the think tank of the Tibetan government-in-exile — had already been compelled to withdraw in an effort to accommodate Chinese concerns. Yet even that concession, along with organizers’ repeated assurances that the meeting would be purely academic, failed to prevent the conference from being scrapped. About 100 officials and supposed scholars from Chinese state institutions, including the China Tibetology Research Center, had registered to participate.
The cancellation illustrates a stark reality: Beijing’s influence now extends beyond shaping participation in scholarly debate to preventing that debate from taking place at all.
It also underscores China’s growing leverage over Nepal, wedged between Chinese-ruled Tibet and India. Beijing routinely uses economic inducements to pressure Nepal into policing Tibetan exile activities, suppressing protests and imposing strict restrictions on Tibetan exiles.
The IATS meeting, held every three to four years, is widely recognized as the leading academic conference on Tibetan history, language, culture, philosophy and religion, drawing Western Tibetologists.
The Nepal episode is a window into a broader transformation in China’s exercise of power. No longer content merely to censor discussion within its own borders, Beijing is increasingly using diplomatic leverage, economic influence and political pressure to shape who gets to speak — and who is denied a voice — on the international stage. This represents a new form of geopolitical competition: the struggle not simply for territory or markets but for authority over knowledge itself.
China is increasingly seeking to convert economic and diplomatic leverage into epistemic power — the ability to influence what others think, know or believe and which narratives acquire institutional authority. This entails controlling knowledge norms and information access.
Chinese diplomats warned Nepali officials that the conference could become a platform for “anti-China rhetoric.” The diplomatic intervention ultimately outweighed the assessments of Nepal’s own security agencies, which reportedly concluded that the gathering posed no security threat, as well as the organizers’ extensive efforts to accommodate the concerns of a country that is increasingly dependent on Chinese investment and attentive to Beijing’s political priorities.
Academic freedom depends not only on individuals’ ability to speak but also on the existence of forums where competing institutional voices can engage one another. When geopolitical pressure is used to prevent such exchanges from taking place, the marketplace of ideas itself becomes distorted.
This is why the Nepal episode should matter to Americans. The U.S. has spent years addressing Chinese influence by phasing out Confucius Institutes, increasing scrutiny on federal grant recipients for foreign ties, and tightening controls on sensitive research. Now, another dimension deserves equal attention: Beijing’s growing ability to shape the production of knowledge itself.
Knowledge is power. Whoever shapes accepted historical narratives — and determines whose voices are treated as legitimate while others are quietly erased — acquires lasting influence.
None of this is an argument for excluding researchers from Chinese state-run institutions. Robust scholarship requires intellectual exchange across political systems. The problem arises when geopolitical pressure determines whether scholarly debate can take place before it even begins.
Academic conferences should be arenas where evidence competes with evidence — not places where geopolitical power determines whether scholars are allowed to meet at all.
What Beijing increasingly seeks is to shape the global institutions that determine which arguments are heard, which voices are considered legitimate, and which histories become accepted as authoritative. Its more-fundamental objective is to encourage preemptive self-censorship, effectively narrowing what the world can say, see and study.
The larger struggle over who defines the world’s understanding of Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, the South China Sea — and China itself — is gathering pace, with universities and scholarly institutions emerging as a critical battleground in the geopolitical competition.
The US and Israel won the opening battles of the war they launched against Iran. They may yet lose the larger strategic contest. More significantly, the conflict continues to hold the global economy hostage. It has turned into an asymmetric war of attrition with mounting strategic, economic and geopolitical costs, with India one of the worst affected countries.
The war, now in its sixth month, has become a textbook example of how overwhelming military superiority does not necessarily translate into political success. Early strikes inflicted devastating damage on Iran’s military infrastructure and decapitated much of its senior leadership. Yet the Islamic Republic did not collapse. Instead, it adapted. Its leadership was rapidly reconstituted, its security apparatus remained intact, and it shifted to an asymmetric strategy that has imposed growing costs on the US and its regional allies.
Despite sustained strikes against Iranian assets, US President Donald Trump’s administration has failed to achieve one of its principal objectives: restoring secure commercial navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran continues to wield its ability to disrupt one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints, keeping global energy markets under constant pressure and prolonging a worldwide economic shock. The war has destabilized the entire Persian Gulf region.
More fundamentally, the war has exposed a central flaw in the way Trump approached the conflict. No military campaign should begin without a clearly defined political end state, a realistic strategy for achieving it, an assessment of how the adversary is likely to respond, and measurable criteria for success. Absent these, tactical victories can accumulate without producing strategic gains. That increasingly appears to describe America’s campaign against Iran—“a bombing campaign in search of a strategy,” as Joe Kent, a former top US counterterrorism official, put it.
The conflict has also expanded well beyond a bilateral confrontation. Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis and US-aligned Gulf states have all been drawn into the fighting at various stages. Repeated ceasefires have merely paused, rather than resolved, the violence, even as the financial, military and human costs continue to mount.
Trump’s war has revealed the limits of US power. Iran remains defiant, the Strait of Hormuz remains contested, and Washington’s objectives have become increasingly difficult to define. The longer the conflict continues without a coherent US political strategy, the greater the risk that Trump’s brazen military attack will be remembered not for its spectacular opening, but as a strategic liability that defined his second presidency.
Understanding how the world’s most powerful military arrived at this point—and what it means for American strategy, the Middle East, India and the global balance of power—is essential to understanding the conflict itself.
The war exposed India’s vulnerabilities
While the US risks turning military success into strategic failure, India risks becoming one of the Iran war’s biggest collateral casualties.
For more than two decades, India has carefully cultivated a policy of multi-alignment in the Middle East, maintaining close ties simultaneously with the US, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Iran. That balancing act has served India remarkably well, securing energy supplies, protecting its large diaspora, expanding trade and opening new strategic partnerships.
A prolonged US-Iran conflict, however, threatens to unravel this equilibrium.
India’s greatest vulnerability is energy. More than 80 per cent of its crude oil is imported, with roughly half originating in or transiting the Persian Gulf. Even more critically, most of India’s imported Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) also pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
As long as Iran retains the ability to threaten this maritime chokepoint, India remains exposed to higher energy prices, imported inflation, a widening current account deficit and greater fiscal pressure. Every sustained increase in oil prices ripples through the Indian economy—from transport costs and manufacturing to household cooking fuel and fertilizer production.
The costs do not end there. Higher war-risk insurance premiums and disruptions across the Gulf and Red Sea have sharply increased freight costs, eroding the competitiveness of Indian exports to Europe and North America.
At the same time, the conflict threatens the livelihoods of about nine million Indians living and working in the Gulf. Any large-scale escalation could force New Delhi to undertake a massive evacuation while further reducing remittances that sustain millions of households across states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Bihar.
The strategic consequences may prove even more enduring. The war strikes at the heart of India’s long-term connectivity ambitions.
Iran’s Chabahar Port—in which India invested heavily to obtain direct access to Afghanistan and Central Asia while bypassing Pakistan and offering a counterweight to China’s Gwadar Port—has been crippled by renewed American sanctions, US airstrikes and the reluctance of private shipping, insurance and logistics firms to operate there. Chabahar is a crucial feeder port for the broader International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) connecting Mumbai to Moscow. The Iran war has effectively frozen development on missing rail links and dry-run corridors.
Consequently, Afghanistan and the landlocked Central Asian states have been pushed back toward reliance on Pakistani routes or Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure, undermining India’s regional influence.
Simultaneously, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), unveiled with great fanfare at the G20 summit in 2023 in New Delhi as a flagship alternative to China’s BRI, has effectively been frozen. Aimed at connecting India to Europe via a sea-and-rail network passing through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, IMEC’s viability depends upon a stable Middle East and continued Arab-Israeli normalization—two assumptions that the war has shattered.
The result is more than the temporary suspension of three infrastructure projects. Together, Chabahar, INSTC and IMEC formed the key pillars of India’s westward strategic outreach, intended to integrate the country more deeply with Central Asia, the Persian Gulf and Europe while reducing dependence on vulnerable maritime routes. Their suspension narrows India’s geopolitical options just as China is expanding its economic and diplomatic footprint across West Asia.
Trump’s Iran war, illustrating how he has turned America’s unrivalled power into an instrument of unilateral coercion, is imposing mounting costs on India. The conflict threatens India’s energy security, strains its economic resilience, endangers millions of overseas citizens and undermines years of painstaking geopolitical investment. Indeed, the conflict has imposed a broad inflationary tax on the Indian economy.
In a war fought far from its borders, India may emerge as one of its principal strategic losers.
India’s new energy realism
The Iran war is forcing India to rethink not merely where it buys its energy, but the very foundations of its energy security strategy.
For decades, India’s overriding concern was ensuring that sufficient energy supplies reached its shores at affordable prices. That objective has become considerably more complicated.
The prolonged disruption of Persian Gulf supplies has demonstrated that energy security can no longer be measured simply in barrels purchased or contracts signed. It now encompasses the resilience of maritime supply routes, the political reliability of suppliers, the financial infrastructure through which payments are made, and the strategic leverage that accompanies dependence on any single power.
New Delhi’s response has therefore evolved into a multi-layered strategy designed to reduce vulnerability without sacrificing strategic autonomy.
The first line of defence is physical resilience. India has significantly strengthened its Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), maintained by Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited. Underground caverns at Visakhapatnam, Mangaluru and Padur provide an emergency buffer against sudden oil-supply disruptions, while commercial inventories maintained by public-sector refiners substantially extend national cover. The government is also expanding storage capacity at Chandikhol and Padur under Phase II of the SPR program.
These reserves cannot insulate India indefinitely from a prolonged conflict, but they buy policymakers precious time during the opening stages of a supply shock, reducing the likelihood of panic buying or abrupt economic disruption.
Natural gas presents a much greater challenge. Unlike crude oil, liquefied natural gas cannot easily be stockpiled for extended periods. India’s LNG storage infrastructure was designed for operational efficiency rather than strategic resilience, leaving the country with only a limited emergency cushion.
Because a majority of India’s imported LNG originates in the Gulf and transits the Strait of Hormuz, any prolonged disruption immediately exposes the country to shortages. The government has consequently begun encouraging additional cryogenic storage capacity while developing protocols for emergency allocation of scarce supplies. In a severe crisis, household cooking gas, city gas distribution and fertilizer production receive priority, while industrial users, power stations and energy-intensive manufacturers are required to curtail consumption or switch to alternative fuels.
The second pillar of India’s strategy is diversification. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine transformed India’s crude procurement strategy, as refiners took advantage of discounted Russian oil. Although Washington subsequently pressured New Delhi to reduce those purchases, the outbreak of the Iran war demonstrated the strategic value of maintaining multiple suppliers. Russian crude has provided an important economic hedge against volatility in Middle Eastern markets.
At the same time, India expanded purchases from Brazil, Guyana, Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela and the US, reducing the danger that instability in any single producing region could paralyze its economy.
Diversification, however, is not simply about geography. Different crude grades possess different refining characteristics. Indian refineries have spent decades optimizing operations around heavier Middle Eastern and Russian grades. Maintaining a balanced crude basket, therefore, improves both energy security and refinery efficiency, reducing dependence on any one supplier while preserving operational flexibility.
Diversifying suppliers does not eliminate another critical vulnerability: geography. Oil purchased from widely separated producers still converges upon a limited number of maritime chokepoints. The Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea remain indispensable arteries for global commerce. Even when cargoes are rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid conflict zones, transit times lengthen, freight costs increase and insurance premiums soar.
Recognizing this reality, India has quietly expanded the role of its navy. Through Operation Sankalp, Indian warships now provide escorts for merchant vessels, conduct maritime surveillance across the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden, and protect sea lines of communication vital to India’s economy. Importantly, New Delhi has deliberately maintained these operations under independent national command rather than integrating them into U.S.-led naval coalitions.
That distinction is more than symbolic. American-led maritime coalitions pursue broader geopolitical objectives, including deterrence and, when necessary, offensive strikes against hostile launch sites. India’s mission is fundamentally different. Operation Sankalp is narrowly focused on protecting Indian shipping, preserving freedom of navigation for India’s own commerce and avoiding entanglement in regional conflicts. By remaining outside formal coalition structures, New Delhi retains complete freedom to determine when, where and how its forces operate while continuing to exchange maritime information with international partners.
This approach preserves India’s longstanding policy of strategic autonomy while minimizing the risk that it will be perceived by Arab states or Iran as an active participant in the conflict.
Yet the most consequential debate in New Delhi concerns not naval deployments or strategic reserves, but the changing composition of India’s energy imports.
As American sanctions on Russia intensified and Washington pressed India to diversify away from both Russian and Iranian supplies, the US has emerged since May as India’s largest supplier of LNG and LPG. Furthermore, India, nudged by Washington, has become the largest export destination for Venezuelan oil, payments for which flow to the US Treasury rather than Caracas. The arrangement increasingly resembles a colonial relationship, with Washington controlling Venezuela’s principal source of national income.
The US-origin or US-controlled energy supplies to India undoubtedly enhance diversification, but they also introduce major vulnerabilities. More importantly, replacing one dependency with another carries its own strategic risks.
Europe offers a cautionary example. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European governments rapidly reduced their dependence on cheap Russian pipeline gas by dramatically increasing imports of American LNG. While this strengthened energy security in one respect, it also exposed Europe to higher transportation and liquefaction costs, volatile US pricing and growing political dependence upon decisions made in Washington. Energy relationships that appear commercially attractive during one geopolitical crisis can become strategic liabilities during the next.
Indian policymakers are keenly aware of this lesson. Dependence upon US-origin or US-controlled energy sources exposes India to risks extending well beyond ordinary market fluctuations. American energy exports remain subject to executive authority and domestic political priorities. Export licenses can be modified, delayed or conditioned in response to changing geopolitical circumstances. Even more significant is Washington’s demonstrated willingness to employ sanctions, financial regulations and the dollar-based international payments system as instruments of statecraft.
India experienced this first-hand as Washington repeatedly targeted Russian energy exports with sanctions. Although China remained Russia’s largest energy customer and Europe continued purchasing significant quantities, Washington focused its pressure largely on India to curtail imports and shift toward alternative suppliers, especially the US. The broader message was unmistakable: access to energy could become contingent upon alignment with American foreign policy objectives.
Such dependence sits uneasily alongside India’s longstanding commitment to strategic autonomy. For decades, successive Indian governments have sought to avoid excessive dependence upon any single great power. That principle applies as much to energy as it does to defence or diplomacy. Heavy reliance upon US-origin or US-controlled energy supplies could gradually reduce New Delhi’s diplomatic flexibility toward Russia, Iran and other non-Western partners, complicating its ability to pursue an independent foreign policy.
There are also commercial considerations. American LNG generally carries higher transportation and liquefaction costs than supplies from the Gulf, while US crude differs significantly from the heavier grades for which many Indian refineries were designed. Processing large quantities of lighter American crude requires operational adjustments that can reduce the production of diesel and other middle distillates essential to India’s transport economy.
Such import dependence introduces another layer of vulnerability. American energy transactions are denominated in US dollars, reinforcing dependence upon American financial infrastructure precisely when India has sought to diversify payment mechanisms. New Delhi’s growing interest in local-currency settlement reflects not ideological opposition to the dollar but a desire for redundancy.
The successful Rupee-Dirham framework with the UAE demonstrates how local-currency arrangements can reduce exposure to external financial shocks while facilitating bilateral trade. By contrast, the Rupee-Rouble mechanism revealed the practical difficulties created by large trade imbalances and India’s partially convertible currency. The rupee is fully convertible on the current account (for trade, services and remittances), but it has partial and restricted convertibility on the capital account to prevent sudden massive capital flight during global financial crises and to protect the currency from extreme speculative attacks by foreign entities.
The lesson is not that de-dollarization is imminent, but that financial diversification is becoming an essential component of energy security.
Ultimately, India is attempting to avoid exchanging one structural dependency for another.
Electrification of transport, accelerated adoption of electric vehicles, nationwide railway electrification, expanded ethanol blending, compressed biogas, green hydrogen for fertilizer and steel production, large-scale renewable energy deployment, grid-scale storage and expanded nuclear generation all serve a common strategic objective: reducing India’s exposure to external energy coercion.
The same logic underpins India’s search for overseas equity oil, investments in critical minerals, and efforts to develop domestic manufacturing across emerging clean-energy supply chains.
Energy security in the twenty-first century is no longer measured solely by oil wells and tanker routes. It increasingly depends upon batteries, transmission networks, hydrogen technologies, nuclear reactors and secure access to lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements.
The Iran war has accelerated this transformation. It has demonstrated that energy dependence is not simply an economic vulnerability but a geopolitical one.
For India, the lesson is clear: strategic autonomy ultimately requires energy autonomy. Complete self-sufficiency may remain unattainable for a rapidly growing major economy, but reducing dependence on any single supplier, transport corridor or financial system has become a national security imperative. The conflict has therefore reinforced a doctrine likely to shape Indian strategy for decades to come—one that seeks resilience through diversification today while pursuing genuine energy independence tomorrow.
India’s strategic awakening
The Iran war is set to leave a lasting imprint on India’s strategic thinking long after the guns fall silent.
It represents a critical defining moment, just like the 1991 Indian financial crisis, which was driven by a rapid depletion of foreign exchange reserves and external shocks like the US-led Gulf War and which compelled India to pledge gold to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and abandon the “license raj” for market liberalization.
Wars often force changes to help plug vulnerabilities. The current conflict in the Persian Gulf has done precisely that for India. It has exposed vulnerabilities that many Indian policymakers understood in theory but had never experienced on such a scale: the fragility of maritime energy lifelines, the limits of multi-alignment during great-power confrontation, the vulnerability of ambitious connectivity projects to geopolitical shocks, and the revolutionary impact of low-cost autonomous weapons on modern warfare.
The most important lesson concerns energy itself. For decades, Indian policymakers viewed energy security largely through the lens of supplier diversification. The assumption was straightforward: purchasing oil from a wider range of countries would reduce strategic vulnerability.
The Iran war has exposed the limitations of that approach. Diversifying suppliers does little if much of the country’s oil and gas imports must still pass through vulnerable maritime chokepoints. A tanker carrying American, Russian or Gulf crude offers little comfort if it cannot safely transit the Strait of Hormuz.
The lesson is that energy security is no longer simply about suppliers. It is about resilience. That requires larger strategic reserves—not only for crude oil but also for natural gas—greater redundancy in shipping routes, stronger naval protection for sea lines of communication, and a faster transition toward domestically produced energy.
India’s long-term energy strategy is, therefore, becoming inseparable from its national security strategy.
The conflict has also exposed the hard limits of multi-alignment. India has spent the past two decades cultivating close relationships simultaneously with Washington, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Tel Aviv and Tehran. That strategy worked because those relationships could largely be compartmentalized. The Iran war demonstrates what happens when those compartments collapse.
The US and Israel expect partners to tighten sanctions and isolate Tehran. Iran expects countries benefiting from access to Chabahar and the Strait of Hormuz to remain politically neutral. Gulf monarchies are simultaneously deepening ties with Asia while hedging between Washington and Beijing. In such an environment, maintaining cordial relations with all sides becomes progressively more difficult.
This does not mean India’s policy of strategic autonomy has failed. On the contrary, it makes strategic autonomy even more valuable. But autonomy will increasingly require active diplomacy rather than passive balancing. India can no longer assume that staying equidistant from competing blocs will automatically protect its interests. It will have to become more proactive in crisis diplomacy, regional mediation and coalition-building while preserving freedom of action.
The war also delivers a sobering verdict on infrastructure strategy.
The suspension of the IMEC and INSTC corridors illustrate how quickly geopolitical assumptions can collapse. Multinational corridors crossing politically unstable regions may appear commercially attractive during peacetime but can become financially and strategically untenable almost overnight.
Future connectivity strategies will thus likely place greater emphasis on redundancy rather than efficiency alone. Direct maritime access, diversified shipping routes, protected port investments and multiple transport corridors are likely to receive greater priority than ambitious but politically fragile mega-projects.
Perhaps nowhere are the lessons more striking than on the battlefield. Like the war in Ukraine, the Iran conflict demonstrates that the economics of warfare are changing. Militaries can no longer afford to intercept $20,000 drones with multi-million-dollar missiles. Drone swarms, loitering munitions, precision missiles and electronic warfare increasingly allow relatively inexpensive systems to impose disproportionate costs on technologically superior adversaries.
For India, this is not an argument against acquiring sophisticated aircraft such as the French Rafale. High-end fighters remain indispensable for establishing air superiority, conducting deep precision strikes and deterring peer competitors such as China. But the conflict demonstrates that quality alone is insufficient.
The future lies in integrating crewed aircraft with large numbers of inexpensive autonomous systems capable of saturating enemy air defences, conducting reconnaissance and absorbing attrition before high-value platforms enter contested airspace.
India’s emerging Combat Air Teaming System (CATS), indigenous stealth drones and loyal-wingman concepts point in precisely this direction. Equally important will be mass-producing low-cost interceptors, directed-energy weapons and electronic warfare systems capable of defeating drone swarms without exhausting expensive missile inventories.
The central challenge is no longer simply technological sophistication. It is achieving technological sophistication at industrial scale.
The conflict also exposes another dimension of national resilience that has often received insufficient attention: India’s overseas citizens.
About nine million Indians live and work across the Gulf. Previous crises allowed New Delhi to organize limited evacuation operations. A prolonged regional war would present an entirely different challenge. Airspace closures, damaged infrastructure and maritime disruptions could make evacuating millions of people impossible. Protecting the diaspora therefore requires a shift from emergency evacuation toward pre-crisis planning, civil-defence cooperation with Gulf sheikhdoms, resilient communications networks and stronger domestic mechanisms for absorbing returning workers without severe economic and social disruption.
Taken together, these lessons point toward a broader transformation.
The Iran war demonstrates that twenty-first-century national security can no longer be compartmentalized into separate military, economic, technological and diplomatic domains. Energy policy affects foreign policy. Financial infrastructure influences strategic autonomy. Maritime security shapes economic resilience. Industrial capacity determines military effectiveness. Critical technologies increasingly matter as much as traditional weapons systems.
For India, strategic autonomy is thus acquiring a new meaning. It is no longer simply the freedom to avoid choosing sides in great-power competition. Increasingly, it is the ability to withstand external coercion regardless of where it originates—whether through disrupted energy supplies, sanctions, financial pressure, supply-chain shocks or military intimidation.
The broader significance of the Iran war lies precisely here. The conflict, by exposing India’s vulnerabilities, has helped clarify its strategic priorities. Building larger energy reserves, diversifying supply chains, strengthening maritime power, accelerating indigenous defence production, investing in new military technologies and reducing structural dependence on imported hydrocarbons are no longer separate policy initiatives. They are becoming components of a single national strategy.
The war may ultimately be remembered not only for reshaping the Middle East but also for accelerating India’s evolution from a country managing external crises to one systematically preparing for an era in which geopolitical disruption is no longer the exception but the norm.
The Iran war marks more than a turning point for India or any other important state. It marks the emergence of a new strategic era in which resilience has become the defining currency of national strength. Countries that can secure their energy, protect their supply chains, manufacture critical technologies and withstand economic coercion will enjoy far greater strategic freedom than those that remain dependent on vulnerable external systems.
India has begun to absorb that lesson. Whether it can translate it into policy may prove one of the defining strategic questions of the coming decade.
Once admired more than feared, the U.S. is now viewed as more interventionist and less trustworthy than its main rival, China, across much of the world, according to the latest Pew Research Center survey. The findings point to one of the most consequential shifts in global public opinion since Pew began tracking international attitudes more than two decades ago. For the first time, China is viewed more favorably than the U.S. in most of the countries surveyed. The result is less a triumph for Beijing than a sobering verdict on Washington.
At first glance, the result appears counterintuitive. China continues to intimidate its neighbors, encroach on their lands and waters, use economic coercion abroad, incarcerate around one million Muslims in Xinjiang and pursue a systematic campaign to erase Tibetan identity.
Yet China’s expansionism is typically advanced by stealth — and incrementally. For example, China has turned its contrived historical claims to the South China Sea into reality by incrementally redrawing the maritime borders and quietly militarizing this critical corridor, through which one-third of global maritime trade passes. Its stealthy land grabs in the Himalayas in 2020 triggered deadly clashes and a prolonged military standoff with India that has not yet been fully resolved. Beijing seldom advertises its coercion; it prefers to conceal or blur it.
From military interventions in Iran and Venezuela and trade wars to open talk of acquiring Greenland and reclaiming the Panama Canal, President Trump has embraced a language of power politics that previous administrations generally sought to cloak in the rhetoric of international order.
The undisguised, in-your-face coercion has inflicted a heavier reputational cost on the U.S. than China’s stealthy, more gradual expansionism has imposed on Beijing. According to the Pew survey, a median of 75 percent of global respondents view the U.S. as highly interventionist, compared to 45 percent for China. Nothing better illustrates a collapse of America’s international brand than the finding that citizens even in Washington’s closest allies like Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Australia now view China more favorably than the U.S.
America’s greatest asset was never simply its unmatched hard power. It was its soft power, the ability to attract rather than compel. It created a reservoir of international goodwill that multiplied American power. But that strategic advantage is now being depleted, as Trump pursues aggressive unilateralism marked by the takeover of Venezuela (turning it into what some see as a U.S. colony), the war on another energy-rich country, Iran, escalating trade coercion, and rhetoric that openly celebrates territorial expansion and the virtues of empire.
George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq remains one of the most controversial decisions in modern American foreign policy. Yet even Bush spent months seeking UN Security Council authorization and assembling what became known as the “coalition of the willing.” He built his case around Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, claims that were later discredited.
Bush manufactured legitimacy for a reason: he understood that legitimacy mattered very much because American leadership depended not only on naked power but also on persuading others that its use of power was justified.
Trump, in contrast, increasingly treats legitimacy as unnecessary, as if legitimacy were an abstract moral luxury.
In reality, legitimacy is a vital strategic resource that lowers the cost of diplomacy, strengthens alliances, attracts investment, encourages cooperation and gives other countries reasons to align voluntarily with American leadership. Once lost, it cannot be restored quickly through military deployments or larger defense budgets.
Yet today, America faces its greatest strategic loss — the erosion of the legitimacy that transformed U.S. power into global leadership.
Whether in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, the Strait of Hormuz or the Panama Canal, the Trump administration increasingly treats American power itself as sufficient justification for unilateral action. International law, allied opinion and multilateral institutions are no longer presented as sources of legitimacy but as constraints to be brushed aside.
That marks a profound departure from the postwar U.S. tradition, in which successive administrations, even when acting controversially, generally sought to cloak the use of force in the language of international law, collective security or self-defense.
Trump’s nostalgic praise for the age of empire and use of military force in seven countries since his return clearly underscore a worldview in which U.S. power itself confers legitimacy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s praise for the imperial expansion of earlier Western powers has further reinforced the administration’s conception of international politics rooted less in post-1945 rules than in 19th-century great-power competition.
The cumulative impression abroad is that under Trump, Washington appears increasingly willing to substitute raw power for internationally accepted rules. This may help explain why America’s global standing has deteriorated.
The latest Pew survey is an early warning that the world’s confidence in American leadership is eroding. Military superiority and economic strength remain formidable pillars of U.S. power. But America’s most enduring competitive advantage has always been something less tangible: the ability to persuade others that its leadership served purposes larger than itself.
If that advantage continues to erode, no arsenal, however vast, will compensate for what has been lost. America can rebuild its credibility, but only by once again binding its extraordinary power to principles that others recognize as legitimate.
Unless it reverses course, the world will increasingly regard American power as a problem to be managed rather than a leadership to be embraced. That would constitute a strategic defeat that no military victory in Iran, and no tactical success against a globally ascendant China, could ever reverse.
Grand strategies often evolve through quiet policy adjustments long before they are openly articulated. That is what is now happening to America’s India policy, which is quietly but fundamentally being rewritten.
For over two decades, a rising, democratic India was viewed by Washington as an inherent good—an economic and military counterweight to an expansionist China. Successive US administrations forged closer ties, making the relationship a rare pillar of Washington bipartisanship.
The strategic romanticism that characterized the Indo-US partnership has given way, with Washington rewriting its India playbook. The shift is marked by coercive diplomacy, a revived US “tilt” toward Pakistan and a structural accommodation of Beijing. India’s role is beginning to shrink in American strategy.
Under successive governments this century, New Delhi invested heavily in the strategic partnership with Washington, betting that closer ties would aid India’s economic and strategic rise and translate into greater American sensitivity toward India’s concerns in its own neighbourhood.
India still sees the relationship as vital to its long-term interests. It shares important geopolitical interests with the US—from combating terrorism to managing China’s rise to preserving stability in the Indo-Pacific, a region that already generates about half the world’s GDP in purchasing-power terms and over a third in nominal terms.
Washington, in turn, has long recognized India’s importance: its size, geography astride vital sea and energy lanes, military reach, and space and science achievements make it central to any stable balance of power in Asia. At a time when other important economies are slowing, India remains the world’s fastest-growing major market—a magnet for American exporters.
Starting with Bill Clinton, successive US presidents deepened ties with India, creating one of the few reliably bipartisan threads in American foreign policy. Relations peaked during Donald Trump’s first term, helped by his rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom he visited in February 2020 for the largest rally any American president has addressed anywhere.
More consequential than the personal chemistry was the substance: Trump’s first administration gave India pride of place in its Indo-Pacific strategy, reversed 45 years of American policy by naming China a strategic adversary, and cut security aid to Pakistan over its terrorist ties.
Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 was expected to build on that legacy. Instead, ties have sharply deteriorated, as even sympathetic observers acknowledge.
A US Congressional Research Service brief notes that “President Trump since May [2025] has taken actions that observers say put the partnership at risk.” Jarringly, this shift has coincided with a more accommodating Trump approach toward China and an embrace of Pakistan—a striking reversal of his first-term posture.
Warning Signs New Delhi Overlooked
Much has been said about how Trump’s public insults and tariff weaponization have strained ties with India. But the relationship was already under pressure before his return to the White House.
The first cracks appeared under President Joe Biden. Biden’s abrupt decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan and thereby cede the country to the Pakistan-backed Taliban, followed by a US-led proxy war against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, created strains in the relationship between the world’s most powerful and most populous democracies.
India, like US partners such as Israel and Turkey, stayed neutral on the Ukraine war — as it had during the earlier US-led invasions of Iraq and Libya. Washington nonetheless tried to bully New Delhi: Biden’s top economic adviser Brian Deese warned that “the costs and consequences” for India’s neutrality would be “significant and long-term.”
India’s neutrality in the Ukraine conflict marked just the beginning of a series of disputes that roiled the bilateral relationship. Despite greater US weapons sales to India, like the $3.8 billion drone contract in 2024, it became apparent that the once-blossoming strategic partnership between Washington and New Delhi was fraying.
The bilateral tensions burst into the open when India’s governing BJP publicly accused the “US deep state” of using “false narratives” to destabilize India and its business conglomerates. Some US statements during India’s months-long 2024 national election process, by echoing Indian opposition parties’ positions, were viewed by the BJP as an unacceptable attempt to interfere in the world’s largest democratic exercise.
Biden may have praised Modi’s role in strengthening ties, but he and other prominent Democrats barely disguised their antipathy toward what they saw as his Hindu-nationalist brand of politics.
After Modi’s re-election in mid-2024, the Biden administration’s final months brought further strain, including its support for the violent overthrow of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s India-friendly government—seen by many in India as a US-sponsored “colour revolution.” Bangladesh’s descent into Islamist violence since then has threatened India’s security, given that it already hosts millions of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants.
Other US moves also cut against India’s regional interests. While propping up Pakistan’s military-backed government after the ouster of elected Prime Minister Imran Khan, Washington sought to topple Myanmar’s junta through sanctions and “non-lethal” military aid to rebels, whose cross-border arms smuggling has fuelled ethnic conflict in India’s Manipur state.
Two US indictments deepened the mistrust. In October 2024, the US filed an indictment against a former Indian intelligence officer over an alleged foiled plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a New York-based Khalistan militant wanted in India on terrorism charges. Weeks later, Pannun openly warned Air India passengers that their lives were at risk while threatening not to let the flag carrier operate anywhere in the world.
The Pannun case came after a year after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s bombshell accusation, made on the basis of US-shared raw intelligence, of a “potential link” between Indian officials and the 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, another Khalistan militant India had designated a terrorist.
Washington’s clumsiness peaked in September 2024, when the White House hosted and briefed US-based Khalistan separatists hours before Modi arrived for the Quad summit in Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, damaging strategic trust.
Weeks after the Pannun indictment, Washington charged Asia’s second-richest man, Gautam Adani, chairman of the Adani Group, with fraud centred on alleged bribery in India—a move widely read in New Delhi as an indirect strike at Modi, given the tycoon’s role in showcasing India’s global rise through major infrastructure projects at home and abroad and personal ties with the prime minister.
Together, the Adani and Pannun cases hardened a view in India that the US legal system had increasingly become an instrument of Biden-era foreign policy.
These strains in ties with Washington reinforced New Delhi’s imperative for strategic hedging. They also helped spur an agreement with Beijing in October 2024 to ease the prolonged Himalayan standoff triggered by China’s stealth territorial encroachments in eastern Ladakh in April-May 2020.
Any expectations that Trump’s return would revive the halcyon days of his first term were quickly shattered. Instead, Trump has directly overseen a rapid deterioration in bilateral ties.
The defining turning point occurred in May 2025 during Operation Sindoor—a calibrated Indian military response to a brutal Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attack. Rather than supporting a partner fighting cross-border terrorism, Trump boasted that he deployed coercive leverage to force India to halt its counter-offensive in just three and a half days.
This heavy-handed intervention shielded America’s longstanding major non-NATO ally from the consequences of its cross-border terrorism and severely undermined the foundation of Indo-US strategic trust.
Pakistan, a hub for UN- and US-designated terrorist groups, remains an epicentre of international terrorism. The US softening toward Pakistan was visible within weeks of Trump’s return. Indian euphoria over Modi’s February 2025 White House visit, however, obscured the signs.
Trump’s global aid freeze that same month carved out a conspicuous exception of $397 million in security assistance for Pakistan. His March 2025 address to Congress pointedly praised Pakistan for helping arrest a wanted terrorist. Then came an investment deal in April 2025 between Pakistan and World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm largely owned by Trump’s family. And when Trump unveiled his travel curbs targeting 39 countries, Pakistan was oddly exempted.
The classic balance-of-power playbook is being resurrected. By propping up Pakistan financially through IMF bailouts and modernizing its F-16 fleet (which also serves as Islamabad’s nuclear delivery vehicle), Washington is consciously reviving Pakistan as a subcontinental counterweight to block India’s regional pre-eminence.
Operation Sindoor thus only confirmed the return of the Cold War-era US “tilt” toward Pakistan—one dating to 1971, when President Richard Nixon’s administration was complicit in Pakistani military genocide during the Bangladesh war of liberation.
From Linchpin to Local Power
The most profound indicator of India’s strategic demotion in America’s Asia strategy is conceptual. The Pentagon’s recent removal of the prefix “Indo” from “Indo-Pacific” marks a shift from a decade of values-based coalition-building toward a narrower and more overtly transactional framework.
The colder, transactional approach to India is also underscored by Trump’s second-term National Security Strategy, which—unlike its 2017 predecessor—barely mentions India or the Quad, framing the relationship with New Delhi in narrow terms of “improving commercial relations.”
Nothing illustrates the shift better than US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau’s blunt admission in New Delhi in March that Washington will not repeat its China mistake by letting India freely develop and outcompete the US economically. According to the State Department transcript of his remarks, Landau declared: “India should understand that we are not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago in terms of saying, ‘we are going to let you develop all these markets,’ and then, the next thing we know, you are beating us in a lot of commercial things.”
For two decades the dominant Washington narrative held that a rising, democratic India was inherently good for the free world—a counterweight to an increasingly autocratic China. Landau’s remark shattered that romanticism. Washington now views China’s US-aided rise as a strategic blunder that hollowed out America’s industrial base, and it does not intend to repeat that mistake with India.
Put simply, India is no longer viewed in Washington primarily as a strategic partner to be promoted, but as a potential economic rival whose rise is to be quietly constrained, lest it threaten long-term US interests. This harder line is apparent well beyond economic and trade. Across India’s immediate neighbourhood, US policy now no longer hesitates to work against India’s regional interests.
In effect, Washington is declaring that “America First” applies to friends as much as foes.
Rather than treat India’s rise as good for Asia’s balance of power, the US now aims to manage that rise so India does not become another China. India is to be cultivated as a captive market for American weapons, energy, electronics, consumer goods and farm products, but restrained through tariffs, tech-transfer limits, regional balancing and direct geopolitical pressure from becoming an independent power that undercuts American manufacturing and strategic interests.
The “shared values” framing (the world’s oldest democracy meeting its largest) was useful for building consensus during the partnership’s build-up phase, but the current US administration has no appetite for values-based diplomacy.
The era when India could assume that deepening its partnership with Washington would guarantee advanced technology is over. This reliability crisis is vividly evident in the defence-industrial sector. The failure of General Electric (GE) Aerospace to deliver contracted jet engines has severely crippled India’s indigenous fighter programmes (Tejas Mk1A, Tejas Mk2, and Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, or AMCA).
Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) has physically built and flight-tested about 30 brand-new Tejas Mk1A airframes that are sitting on the tarmac completely finished, yet lacking engines. With fewer jets on the flight line, the Indian Air Force has been compelled to employ heavier and far more expensive twin-engine fighters like the Su-30MKI to fly routine Combat Air Patrols (CAP) over contested borders like the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China. This burns through their airframe life prematurely and stretches India’s regional aerial deterrence dangerously thin at a time when neighbouring air forces are rapidly inducting modern 4.5 and 5th-generation platforms.
The irony is bitter: while India’s deterrence is undermined by broken US commitments, Washington has actively modernized Pakistan’s F-16s, making them more lethal against India.
To a transactional Washington, India’s insistence on strategic autonomy, particularly its refusal to cut historical ties with Russia, no longer reads as a defensible diplomatic tradition. It is viewed as fully justifying Washington treating India as a giant market to be deeply penetrated, not a partner whose rise deserves encouragement. The deeper shift, then, is fundamental, not simply a loss of romanticism.
By dropping “Indo” and treating New Delhi with transactional bluntness, Washington signals that its goal is also to use India just enough to keep China occupied—without letting India rise too far.
It is thus scarcely a surprise that Washington has systematically deprioritized the Quad. It now favours newer plurilateral groupings with a clear military orientation, like the “Squad”. Unlike India in the Quad, the “Squad” members—the US, Japan, Australia and the Philippines—are all formal treaty allies explicitly aligned on hard defence.
The Quad was conceived as a strategic bulwark against Chinese expansionism. But with Trump pursuing a bilateral accommodation with Xi Jinping—symbolized by his May 2025 Beijing visit—America’s broader Indo-Pacific strategy has been quietly sacrificed.
The bluntest reality is India’s demotion in US strategy from “linchpin” of the Indo-Pacific order to “localized actor” in South Asia and the Indian Ocean.
Under the “free and open Indo-Pacific” framework championed by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and embraced by Trump’s first administration, India was elevated to a global player and treated as a necessary counterweight to China across the commons. Dropping the prefix “Indo” from “Indo-Pacific” lowers that expectation.
As Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth noted at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Washington now sees India as a strong country “acting in its own self-interest” to maintain a local balance of power in South Asia and the Indian Ocean. In other words, India is no longer a central pillar of a grand Asia-Pacific strategy, but a player confined to the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean.
For nearly a decade, New Delhi used the “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy to press Washington to respect its regional red lines, including sidelining Pakistan until it cut ties with terrorist proxies. By quietly dismantling its Indo-Pacific strategy, Washington has freed itself of the obligation to show such sensitivity. And for more than two years it has pursued policies in India’s neighbourhood that cut against core Indian interests.
Washington has gone further still, re-embracing Pakistan as a “pivot state” and signalling support for a US-China “G2” that would jointly manage the global order. Since last autumn, Trump has repeatedly referenced a “G2” framework.
The deterioration is now unmistakable—from Trump’s 2025 launch of an economic war on India by imposing 50% tariffs to the US Navy’s recent killing of three Indian sailors in international waters. Ironically, the US Navy enjoys peacetime logistical support at Indian ports under the 2016 Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA).
Washington is meanwhile pressing New Delhi to finalize a bilateral trade agreement that would open India further to American exports even as US policy weakens India’s economic strength, regional security and strategic autonomy. This leaves India little choice but to hedge by accelerating self-reliance and courting alternative partners.
Washington’s Shadow in India’s Backyard
The US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, S. Paul Kapur, has repeatedly said Washington’s primary regional objective is to prevent any single power from dominating the subcontinent—an objective many in India see as mirroring China’s own strategy of keeping India boxed in. That objective also closely fits the textbook definition of offshore balancing: a great power relying on regional proxies and strategies to check the rise of a potentially dominant regional power.
Across India’s own neighbourhood, US and Indian interests are diverging sharply—in Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Pakistan and Afghanistan alike. The paradox is stark: the two countries remain global partners, yet their interests clash in India’s own strategic backyard, raising an uncomfortable question: how can the US be a true global partner if it works against India’s core regional interests?
In India’s own backyard, Washington is positioning itself as a counterweight not only to Beijing but increasingly to New Delhi as well. One telling example is Nepal, a country linked to India by a nearly 1,800-kilometer open border, deep cultural and economic ties, and millions of resident migrants. Nepal has long been central to India’s security calculus.
Yet Washington is increasingly treating Nepal as a standalone priority rather than an adjunct to India policy, with senior US official visits to Kathmandu growing more frequent and often bypassing the customary diplomatic stop in New Delhi.
Washington’s policies in India’s immediate periphery are increasingly at odds with New Delhi. India’s regional influence has already been eroded by China’s expanding footprint across the subcontinent, and now it faces America’s lengthening shadow as well.
Washington views a more pluralistic subcontinental order as more conducive to its interests, aligning with its broader preference for balancing rising powers. It is thus staking out its own space and leverage in countries that India has traditionally seen as within its exclusive sphere of influence.
That logic helps explain why Washington endorsed Bangladesh’s 2024 regime change, even as New Delhi recognized the risks it posed to India’s eastern flank, given the porous border. Bangladesh’s slide into Islamist violence, including attacks on religious and ethnic minorities, has deepened those concerns. The February 2026 election—held after the Awami League, the party that led Bangladesh to independence in 1971, was banned outright—lacked any semblance of democratic legitimacy, yet Washington stayed conspicuously silent.
Compounding these concerns is Washington’s re-embrace of Pakistan, despite the country’s longstanding nexus with terrorist groups. As the Trump family’s crypto venture secured lucrative deals with Islamabad, Pakistani army chief Asim Munir staged what amounted to a constitutional coup. Closer US-Pakistan ties are reviving strategic dynamics that India had hoped were permanently receding into the past.
It appears that Washington is dusting off its Cold War-era balance-of-power playbook, rediscovering Pakistan’s value as a subcontinental counterweight to India, which also explained the Biden administration’s modernization of the Pakistani F-16 fleet. No wonder the F-16 modernization evoked Cold War memories of the US arming Pakistan against India and supporting the initial development of the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme.
Washington’s leverage over the IMF has repeatedly rescued cash-strapped Pakistan from default—25 IMF bailouts since 1958, including a $7 billion programme in 2024, more than any other country. With American and Chinese support, Pakistan also exited the “grey list” of the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the inter-governmental agency combating terrorist financing and money laundering.
Unsurprisingly, Pakistan’s salience in US policy has been rising, which also facilitated Islamabad’s recent role as a US backchannel to Tehran. Meanwhile, Western actors have begun rehyphenating India and Pakistan, including under the guise of promoting India-Pakistan dialogue through sponsored Track II initiatives.
Compounding the uncertainty is Trump’s more conciliatory China policy since mid-2025. Trump has largely moved away from the US strategy of countering the challenge from an expansionist China with support from allies and strategic partners. Indeed, Trump’s talk of a US-China “G2” may have led directly to the Pentagon’s name change from Indo-Pacific to Pacific, a term long preferred by Beijing, making the US decision look like a major concession to China’s worldview.
Lopping off the “Indo” and narrowing the horizon back to the Pacific conceptually pushes India out of the primary equation, moving the US closer to the bilateral, transactional theatre that both Trump and Xi Jinping are more comfortable navigating. Washington today may no longer see its role as the anchor of a vast democratic coalition, signaling instead an acceptance of a more concentrated bilateral competition and cooperation directly with Beijing.
Charting a Path Beyond Washington
The era when India could assume that closer ties with Washington would advance its economic and strategic rise and boost its regional influence across Asia and the Pacific is clearly ending.
The US, instead of continuing to view India’s rise as advantageous for a stable balance of power in Asia, is veering toward an approach intended to manage India’s rise so that it does not emerge as another big-power competitor. Washington, in short, is shedding its benign view of a rising India.
For New Delhi, adapting to the new realities, including a diminished standing in US strategy, will require a significant change in thinking and approach. US policies perceived in New Delhi as systematically undermining India’s position in its own neighborhood risk feeding tensions in a relationship still central to Asia’s future balance of power.
To advance its interests, New Delhi must urgently diversify its geopolitical portfolio and accelerate self-reliance. India’s influence in its neighborhood will increasingly hinge on sustained economic engagement, political sensitivity toward adjacent states, and the ability to deliver tangible public goods that subcontinental countries find attractive. Such an approach offers the most credible way to push back against the expanding US and Chinese strategic shadows in its backyard.
Horizontal coalitions across the Indo-Pacific are also vital for New Delhi to enlarge its influence. India’s proactive engagement with important states across the Indo-Pacific will help it to play a bigger strategic role in this vast region, which is emerging as the world’s economic and geopolitical hub.
As governments across Asia and the Pacific seek to diversify rather than choose between Washington and Beijing, India’s independent posture makes it an exceptionally attractive partner. Modi’s recent trip to Indonesia Australia and New Zealand—securing missile exports and critical mineral pacts—exemplified the demand for a powerful, independent partner that refuses to force nations into a binary choice between Washington and Beijing.
Even without the US, India can help anchor a stable Asian balance of power by deepening hard strategic partnerships with other regional powers like Japan and Australia, who similarly fear a US-China “G2” framework. Japan remains indispensable to East Asian security; Australia is a vital strategic anchor in the southern Pacific; and India alone is capable of constraining China from the latter’s southwest. No US-China “G2” can substitute for that wider strategic geometry.
Washington’s India playbook has changed, and the romanticism is effectively dead. A realist India must now treat the US not as an assumed ally, but as a powerful, transactional actor to be managed alongside the other shifting variables of a multipolar Asia.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Julay 2025 with the foreign ministers of Japan, India and Australia. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
The Pentagon’s recent decision to drop “Indo” from “Indo-Pacific” may prove to be one of the most consequential bureaucratic acts of the Trump presidency.
Officially, almost nothing has changed. The newly renamed U.S. Pacific Command retains the same area of responsibility — from America’s West Coast to India’s western frontier.
But strategy is often communicated through symbols as much as it is through policy documents. In geopolitics, names are rarely cosmetic. They define priorities, shape alliances and reveal how governments see the world.
By deleting a single prefix, Washington has raised an uncomfortable question: Is America quietly abandoning the strategic vision that has guided its China policy for nearly a decade? That vision was never really about geography.
The “Indo-Pacific” was a grand strategic concept. It recognized that the center of global power had shifted, linking the Pacific and Indian Oceans into one interconnected strategic theater. The world’s busiest shipping lanes, its fastest-growing economies, its principal manufacturing hubs and its most dangerous military flashpoints had become inseparable.
The concept’s intellectual architect had been Japan’s late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who contended that the Pacific and Indian Oceans formed the “confluence of the two seas,” requiring a coalition of maritime democracies to preserve a rules-based regional order. His vision of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” sought not to isolate China but to prevent any single power from dominating Asia.
The U.S. eventually made that vision its own.
During President Trump’s first term, a free and open Indo-Pacific became the organizing principle of American strategy toward Beijing. The long-dormant Quad — bringing together the U.S., India, Japan and Australia — was revived. China was formally identified as America’s principal strategic competitor. India assumed unprecedented importance, because its geography placed it on China’s western flank while Japan anchored the eastern one. Together, they formed the bookends of a broader balancing coalition stretching across two oceans.
President Joe Biden largely preserved that framework. Although wars in Ukraine and the Middle East repeatedly diverted American attention and military resources, the underlying strategic assumption remained unchanged: China — not Russia — represented the defining geopolitical challenge of the 21st century.
Today, however, that assumption appears increasingly uncertain.
The Pentagon’s name-change is only one indicator of a broader shift. Trump has steadily softened his approach toward China, emphasizing deal-making over strategic competition. His administration has downgraded the Quad’s prominence. And his repeated references to a U.S.-China “G2” (Group of Two) suggest an emerging vision of world politics very different from the coalition-based strategy Washington spent years constructing.
Washington’s original Indo-Pacific strategy rested on the proposition that the U.S. could prevent Chinese hegemony in Asia only by strengthening a network of capable allies and partners. A G2 rests on the opposite assumption. Instead of organizing a coalition to balance China, Washington would increasingly seek stability through direct understandings with Beijing itself.
For America’s allies, the distinction is enormous. Countries such as Japan, Australia and India accepted greater strategic risks because they believed the U.S. was committed to maintaining a favorable balance of power in Asia. They invested politically and militarily in that shared vision.
But if Washington increasingly treats Beijing not as the principal challenger to be balanced but as a co-manager of global order, those assumptions begin to unravel.
The Quad illustrates the problem. Originally conceived as a strategic counterweight to Chinese expansionism, the grouping increasingly resembles an alliance searching for its purpose. No leaders’ summit has been held since 2024. Its agenda has drifted toward relatively noncontroversial cooperation on supply chains, emerging technologies and maritime awareness — important initiatives certainly, but hardly the foundation of a grand strategy.
The contradiction is becoming difficult to ignore. If Washington itself seeks accommodation with Beijing, what exactly is the Quad meant to deter?
Alliances seldom collapse dramatically. More often, they decay quietly. That is the danger confronting the Quad today.
The consequences extend well beyond one diplomatic grouping.
The Indo-Pacific strategy recognized a geopolitical reality that remains unchanged: the U.S. cannot preserve a stable Asian balance of power by itself. It needs strong partners positioned across both ends of the continent. Japan remains indispensable to East Asian security. India, with its size, military capabilities and commanding position astride the Indian Ocean, is the only Asian power capable of imposing significant strategic constraints on China from the west. Australia acts as a vital strategic anchor in the southern Pacific.
No bilateral understanding between Washington and Beijing can substitute for that wider strategic geometry.
China must be pleased with the quiet dismantling of the Indo-Pacific concept. Beijing has long viewed that concept as a containment strategy linking China’s geopolitical ambitions to a wider coalition of democracies stretching from the western Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Eliminating “Indo” narrows that strategic horizon, symbolically moving Washington closer to Beijing’s preferred conception of Asia as primarily a Pacific theater dominated by U.S.-China relations.
Perhaps the Pentagon’s name change is merely a reversion to a terminology long preferred by Beijing. But names matter, because they reveal priorities before strategy is fully articulated.
For nearly a decade, the free and open Indo-Pacific vision represented America’s answer to China’s rise: strengthen coalitions, reinforce deterrence and preserve a favorable balance of power across Asia.
If that organizing idea is quietly giving way to an emerging U.S.-China condominium, then historians may look back on the deletion of one small word not as administrative housekeeping, but as the moment America began exchanging coalition leadership for great-power management.
The consequences would be profound. They would reshape the geopolitical architecture of the world’s most important region — and, with it, the international order that the U.S. itself helped build.
In recent years, the international community has stood idly by while China has systematically eradicated Tibetan culture and identity. With the authorities stepping up their assimilation efforts, Asia risks not only losing one of its oldest civilizations, but also facing a China that is bigger, bolder, and more powerful than ever.
The self-immolation of exiled Tibetan activist Lobga Rangzen outside United Nations headquarters in New York on July 2 was not an expression of personal despair. It was a desperate attempt to jolt the world out of its growing indifference to one of the most important international issues of our time: Tibet’s systematic erasure.
China occupied then-autonomous Tibet shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic.. The occupation is often viewed primarily through the prism of human rights, and for good reason. But it should also be understood as an effort to lay claim to one of Asia’s most valuable geopolitical assets: the vast, resource-rich Tibetan Plateau dominates the Himalayas, contains the headwaters of Asia’s great rivers, and overlooks South, Central, and Southeast Asia.
In recent decades, China has invested heavily in the Plateau—building extensive military infrastructure, constructing mega-dams on Asia’s great rivers, and expanding extraction of strategic minerals—while relying on surveillance, coercion, and security forces to suppress resistance. But physical control of Tibet is not enough for Chinese President Xi Jinping. He wants complete and lasting control over the entire Tibetan Plateau.
The best way to achieve that, Xi has concluded, is by erasing the identity of the people who inhabit it. The Tibetan people are a distinct ethnicity, with their own language, traditions, cuisine, and dress. Stripping Tibetans of their identity—ensuring that they no longer think of themselves as Tibetan—has one goal: to extinguish resistance to permanent Chinese rule over the “Roof of the World.”
To this end, China has steadily expanded its system of state-run boarding schools, channeling Tibetan children there at younger and younger ages. Beijing portrays these “residential schools” as engines of development. In fact, the curriculum is designed to erase children’s Tibetan identity and replace it with allegiance to the Chinese state.
United Nations experts report that more than one million Tibetan children aged 6-18—about 78% of the total—attend these schools. They are separated from their families and cultures for most of each year, taught in Mandarin, exposed only to Han culture and experiences, and conditioned to view their own culture, religion, and language as inferior. In other words, China is raising a generation of Tibetans to assimilate to Chinese culture—and lose their own.
China has also taken other steps to erase Tibet. Since late 2023, Beijing has systematically replaced “Tibet” with “Xizang” as the official English-language designation in its government documents, diplomatic communications, and state media. The name derives from the Manchu Qing dynasty’s imperial terminology for Tibet. Its adoption is intended to buttress Beijing’s claim that Tibet is not a distinct historical entity, but merely an appendage of China.
The international community is making this erasure all too easy. Some museums, universities, and research institutions outside China have accepted this imperial renaming. The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris has labeled Tibetan artifacts as coming from “Xizang.” The British Museum has referred to “Tibet or the Xizang Autonomous Region” in an exhibit on the Silk Road.
Now, China is taking this effort to the next level. On July 1, a sweeping new “Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress Law” took effect, codifying Xi’s drive to force the assimilation of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities to a single state-defined Chinese identity centered on loyalty to the Communist Party. By criminalizing broadly defined threats to “ethnic unity,” the legislation amounts to yet another weapon with which China can intimidate Tibetan activists, scholars, and diaspora communities. Families in Tibet already face retaliation for the activities of relatives overseas.
The timing of the new law is not a coincidence. The Tibet question has gradually faded from the global agenda in recent years. This partly reflects the international community’s preoccupation with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, tensions over Taiwan, and acute global economic uncertainty. But many governments are also reluctant to jeopardize their relations with China. So, while they rightly condemn cultural destruction elsewhere, they largely ignore the destruction of Tibetan identity.
But this calculation overlooks an inescapable reality: China’s assault on Tibetan identity is inseparable from its great-power ambitions. A permanently assimilated Tibet would consolidate China’s military advantage over the Himalayan piedmont, strengthen its control over Asia’s water resources, secure immense deposits of strategic minerals, and remove what China perceives as the last potential source of political resistance in the region. Such a China would be better equipped—and significantly emboldened—to assert more authority beyond its borders.
The international response need not be extreme. Democratic governments should sanction officials responsible for the forced-assimilation campaign, reject official pressure to refer to the region as Xizang, and expand support for Tibetan educational and cultural institutions in exile. These modest but meaningful steps would help to preserve one of Asia’s oldest civilizations while making clear that cultural erasure cannot become an accepted instrument of statecraft.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
A Tibetan exile at a rally in India in 2017. AP Photo/Ashwini Bhatia
While international attention has rightly focused on China’s mass internment of Uyghurs and other ethnic-minority Muslims in Xinjiang, a quieter but no less consequential campaign is unfolding on the Tibetan Plateau.
In Tibet, China is not merely policing dissent or curbing religious practice, but attempting something more permanent: the systematic erasure of a people’s culture, language and identity by targeting its children.
Over the past decade, Beijing has forcibly placed more than one million Tibetan children — almost four out of every five — into state-run, Mandarin-language boarding schools. Many are taken from their families at the age of four or five and kept away for most of the year.
These institutions are presented as instruments of development. In reality, they function as tools of forced assimilation, designed to sever children from their language, faith and cultural inheritance.
This is not simply a human-rights scandal, but a geopolitical project with far-reaching implications for Asia’s future balance of power.
The boarding-school system in Tibet is built on a neo-imperial premise: “Control the child and you control the future.” Children are taught — explicitly and implicitly — that Tibetan traditions are backward, their faith suspect, and their identity subordinate to a homogenized Chinese nation.
By displacing the family and monastery as the core institutions of socialization, the state inserts itself as the primary arbiter of values and belonging. The result is a generation growing up alienated from its roots, conditioned to view its own heritage through the lens of inferiority.
This is a classic colonial maneuver. Residential schooling has long been used by imperial powers to break indigenous societies from within. Western nations now acknowledge the devastating legacy of such systems imposed on Native peoples in North America, Australia and New Zealand. China, in contrast, is actively expanding this very model in the 21st century — on an industrial scale.
The silence of Western democracies in the face of this campaign is striking. Governments that routinely condemn abuses elsewhere have largely treated Tibet’s boarding schools as an internal Chinese matter and chosen to look away.
Tibet is not a peripheral region. It is the geographic and strategic heart of Asia. Often described as the “Roof of the World,” the vast Tibetan Plateau dominates the Himalayan range and overlooks South, Southeast and Central Asia.
Control over Tibet allows China to project power across the Himalayas and exert pressure on these regions, including as the upstream controller of cross-border river flows. Tibet is the source of Asia’s main river systems. In Tibet, China is currently not only constructing the largest dam ever built on earth but also rapidly extracting the region’s rich mineral resources.
Before China’s invasion and annexation in the early 1950s, Tibet was a self-governing entity. Had it remained so, it would today rank as the world’s tenth-largest country by area. Its absorption into the People’s Republic fundamentally altered Asia’s strategic geography, including its hydrological map.
The geopolitical reality is that whoever controls Tibet holds a commanding position over the Himalayan piedmont, enjoying unparalleled military, hydrological and strategic leverage. This reality explains Beijing’s tightening grip on Tibet and its determination to extinguish any distinct Tibetan consciousness that might challenge Chinese rule.
The campaign against Tibetan identity is thus inseparable from China’s broader strategic ambitions. By reducing Tibetans to a depoliticized, assimilated population, Beijing seeks to lock in perpetual control over one of the world’s most sensitive geopolitical corridors.
The assault on identity extends beyond classrooms. Beijing has also sought to erase Tibet from global consciousness by expunging its very name. It has replaced the term “Tibet” with “Xizang,” a Qing-dynasty label meaning “Western Treasure Land.”
The goal is clear: to recast Tibet not as a distinct historical entity but as an inseparable, resource-rich appendage of China.
Disturbingly, this linguistic shift is beginning to find acceptance beyond China’s borders. Some Western museums and academic institutions have started adopting “Xizang” in place of Tibet, lending inadvertent legitimacy to Beijing’s narrative. Accepting this rebranding is acquiescence in the erasure of a nation’s historical identity.
Tibetan children, meanwhile, continue to risk dangerous journeys into exile, particularly to India, in order to preserve their language, religion and culture. India, home to the world’s largest Tibetan exile community, subsidizes Tibetan-language schools. That such risks for children are necessary is an indictment of international inaction.
Western democracies cannot plausibly claim ignorance of China’s forced-assimilation goal — to eliminate a potential source of resistance in a strategically vital region. Through the forced separation of a million children, Beijing is systematically attempting to obliterate a civilization.
At a minimum, democratic governments and international institutions should abandon their posture of silent spectatorship.
First, officials directly responsible for the Tibetan boarding-school system should face targeted Western diplomatic and economic sanctions. Cultural genocide should carry consequences more tangible than the largely symbolic visa restrictions announced by the Biden administration in 2023.
Second, governments, universities, museums and international organizations must reject the enforced use of “Xizang” in place of Tibet. Preserving historical and cultural nomenclature is a small but essential act of resistance against erasure.
Third, greater material and political support is needed for Tibetan educational and cultural institutions in exile, which remain the last line of defense for this unique culture.
The fate of Tibet’s children is a bellwether for the future of Asia’s security order. To ignore their forced separation and indoctrination is to acquiesce in China’s tightening grip on Tibet — and by extension on the strategic heart of Asia.
As China accelerates its military buildup and expands its influence across Asia, its two principal regional rivals — India and Japan — face a common challenge: how to build defense institutions capable of making fast, informed decisions in an era of high-tech warfare.
Yet an intriguing paradox has emerged. Constitutionally pacifist Japan has spent the past decade modernizing its defense decision-making apparatus and empowering military professionals within government. India, despite being a nuclear-armed state confronting an increasingly assertive China along their long, disputed frontier, continues to maintain a cumbersome system that marginalizes military expertise and concentrates authority in a civilian bureaucracy largely staffed by generalist administrators.
The result is that Japan today possesses a more streamlined and operationally agile defense establishment than India.
The roots of this divergence lie in history. Following World War II, Japan feared a return to the militarism that had driven it to catastrophe. To prevent the military from ever again becoming an autonomous political force, career bureaucrats were allowed to govern the defense ministry under a doctrine known as “Bunkan Yuyu,” or civilian bureaucratic superiority.
India’s concerns were different but produced a similar outcome. As military coups swept through newly independent states across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, India’s leaders sought to insulate their young democracy by systematically downgrading the institutional role of the armed forces. The defense ministry became the preserve of civilian bureaucrats, many of whom rotated in from unrelated ministries such as agriculture, education or rural development.
Over time, both India and Japan built defense establishments in which uniformed military officers wielded little influence over policymaking. But whereas Japan eventually recognized the costs of this arrangement, India largely has not.
Confronted by China’s aggressive rise and the North Korean threat, Tokyo concluded that its clunky, bifurcated defense structure had become a strategic liability. Beginning under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan embarked on overhauling its civil-military relations.
The pivotal moment came in 2015, when Japan enacted sweeping security reforms that ended bureaucratic supremacy within the defense ministry. Uniformed officers and civilian officials were placed on equal footing, operational authority was consolidated under military leadership, and a new National Security Council helped integrate military, intelligence and political decision-making.
Tokyo did not abandon civilian control of the military. Rather, it modernized it by accepting a key distinction: Civilian control does not require bureaucratic domination.
For decades, Indian military officers have complained of being largely excluded from higher defense policymaking. Unlike most major democracies, India has never fully integrated military headquarters into the defense ministry, leaving senior officers institutionally separated from the civilian bureaucracy.
In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government created the position of chief of defense staff. The new office was intended to promote jointness among the Army, Navy and Air Force, improve strategic coordination and drive the transition to integrated theater commands.
Following the death of the first chief of defense staff, General Bipin Rawat, in a helicopter crash in 2021, New Delhi changed eligibility rules to allow retired three-star officers to be recalled to active duty and appointed to the country’s highest military post. Subsequent chief of defense staff appointments have reflected this new approach.
No public explanation has been offered for the change. Yet by selecting retired officers rather than serving chiefs, the government erodes the institutional weight and independence of the chief of defense staff position.
The change resembles what political scientists call “coup-proofing” — institutional arrangements designed to limit the emergence of a unified military leadership. Such measures may make sense in states with histories of military intervention in politics. India, however, has maintained an exceptionally strong tradition of civilian supremacy since independence. Its armed forces have consistently remained outside politics and subordinate to elected authority.
Yet India’s defense institutions continue to operate as though the principal threat to democracy comes from its own military rather than from the increasingly complex security challenges emerging beyond its borders.
The consequences extend beyond bureaucratic turf battles.
A future conflict with China will not resemble the 1962 Sino-Indian war. It will unfold simultaneously across land, sea, air, cyber and space domains, with success depending on rapid decision-making, integrated command structures, and the seamless fusion of intelligence, diplomacy and military operations — the very capabilities Japan’s reforms have been designed to strengthen.
Such requirements favor systems that elevate expertise and empower professional military judgment. They do not favor bureaucratic structures designed primarily to constrain military influence.
Here the contrast with Japan becomes especially revealing. Tokyo has concluded that effective civilian control requires informed civilian oversight, not bureaucratic gatekeeping. India, by contrast, still treats civilian bureaucratic control as a democratic safeguard in its own right.
As a result, India’s civilian bureaucracy remains the principal gatekeeper of major defense decisions, strategic planning, procurement and budgetary authority.
The irony is striking: pacifist Japan has built a more nimble and modern defense decision-making system than nuclear power India.
For years, Indian reformers looked to American models such as the Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act for inspiration. Today, however, the most relevant example may lie closer to home. Japan has demonstrated that democratic oversight and military professionalism are not competing objectives. Properly structured, they reinforce one another.
If India hopes to build genuinely integrated theater commands and prepare for the demands of a future conflict, it must finally move beyond the institutional assumptions that shaped its civil-military system in the late 1940s. The country does not need less civilian control. It needs a more sophisticated understanding of what civilian control actually means.
On that question, nuclear India may have something important to learn from pacifist Japan.
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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