By speaking of America’s World War II alliance with China in a way that connects it to Chinese communist rule, Trump not only walked into Xi’s diplomatic trap but also is unwittingly helping Beijing appropriate history. Such historical distortion is only one part of the problem. Trump’s inclination to treat Taiwan as a negotiating asset underscores the larger challenge.
The most troubling message coming out of Washington for Taipei is not any single statement but the cumulative effect of a series of signals suggesting that US President Donald Trump is rethinking Taiwan’s strategic value while viewing the US-China relationship through the lens of a transactional great-power bargain. The danger behind Trump’s new softness toward Beijing is a potential US-China bargain that undermines Taiwan’s core interests.
During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) recent state visit to Washington, Trump and Xi appeared to rewrite the history of World War II.
In a Sept. 25 fact sheet on Xi’s visit, the White House said, “The two leaders recalled that the US and China were allies in World War II and fought side by side to win the war.” At a welcome ceremony for Xi on Sept. 24, Trump claimed that the pursuit of “common interests … even made us allies in World War II.” Xi echoed the theme later at the state dinner, contending that China and the US had fought “shoulder to shoulder against fascist aggression” by Japan.
America’s wartime ally, however, was the Republic of China, then governed by Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The communist People’s Republic of China did not emerge until October 1949, more than four years after the war ended. Chinese communists did participate in guerrilla warfare against imperial Japanese forces as part of the nominal “Second United Front” with the KMT. But Washington’s diplomatic recognition, military assistance and formal alliance were with Chiang’s government, which later relocated to Taiwan.
By speaking of America’s wartime alliance in a way that connects it to Chinese communist rule, Trump not only walked into Xi’s diplomatic trap but also is unwittingly helping Beijing appropriate history. Such historical distortion is only one part of the problem. Trump’s inclination to treat Taiwan as a negotiating asset underscores the larger challenge.
Taipei naturally is concerned that Washington has delayed pending foreign military sales to Taiwan, or has discussed the scope of such arms sales with Xi, as leverage in negotiations with Beijing over tariffs, trade, technology and rare earths. No less striking is US Ambassador to China David Perdue’s confirmation that Trump had floated the idea of selling American military equipment to China, America’s principal strategic rival.
The message this sends Taiwan is that US security commitments may no longer be insulated from US-China economic bargaining.
The contrast with the Biden administration is also worth noting. Former US president Joe Biden repeatedly said the US would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacked. Trump has instead emphasized the physical distance separating America from Taiwan, asking why Americans should fight a war “9,500 miles away.” He has also urged Taiwan to “cool it” and warned against steps toward formal independence, effectively echoing Xi’s own rhetoric.
At the same time, Trump’s economic rhetoric has challenged another pillar of Taiwan’s security: its semiconductor industry.
For years, Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance has been described as a “silicon shield.” This is because the global economy’s dependence on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) makes Taiwan’s security a vital interest for the US and other democratic nations.
But Trump has repeatedly complained that Taiwan “stole” America’s chip business and has suggested that Taiwan should effectively pay the US for its defense. His administration has also used tariffs to extract trade and investment concessions from Taipei.
Taipei thus faces a jarring paradox: The very economic strength that was supposed to make Taiwan indispensable is increasingly being portrayed in Washington as evidence that Taipei has benefited at America’s expense.
Meanwhile, Trump’s demand that Taipei raise military expenditure dramatically is adding another layer of uncertainty. Taiwan is already starting to do more to defend itself. But when such a demand is accompanied by ambiguity over the durability of US security commitments, it risks creating an impression that American protection is conditional.
These developments point toward “strategic transactionalism” — a shift from viewing Taiwan principally through the prism of democratic values, regional stability and a rules-based order toward seeing its security as one variable in a much broader US negotiation with Beijing.
Trump has already elevated China to America’s peer. By repeatedly framing the US-China relationship as a G2, or Group of Two, Trump is implicitly granting China recognition as an equal great power. Xi has long promoted a “new model of major-country relations” in which the US and China co-manage global affairs while respecting each other’s “core interests,” a term that for Beijing includes Taiwan.
If Washington were to accept such a framework, Taiwan could find itself caught on the wrong side of a great-power bargain. The danger is not an explicit American abandonment of Taiwan but a subtle and gradual normalization of the idea that the US and China have separate spheres of influence.
That scenario could also weaken the coalition on which Taiwan’s security depends. Taiwan’s deterrence depends on the ability of the US, Japan, Australia, European democracies and other partners to convince Beijing that aggression would impose prohibitive costs. If Washington increasingly conducts bilateral deals with Beijing without consulting its allies, those partners may become less certain that their own interests will be protected in a Taiwan crisis.
Against this backdrop, Taipei needs to draw the appropriate lesson and strengthen its own capacity to deter aggression. That means accelerating the implementation of an asymmetric defense strategy built around mobile, survivable and mass-producible systems. It means strengthening reserves, civil defense and critical infrastructure so that Taiwan can withstand a blockade, cyberattacks and other forms of coercion.
Diversifying trade and supply chains, particularly across the Indo-Pacific, can likewise reduce Taiwan’s vulnerability to economic pressures.
If Taiwan is to become less exposed to the vagaries of any one president, whether in Beijing or Washington, it should make itself harder to coerce, harder to isolate and harder to bargain away.
Brahma Chellaney, professor emeritus of strategic studies at the independent Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
India’s role in U.S. strategy is being downgraded, as is apparent from the White House’s latest National Security Strategy, the Pentagon’s 2026 National Defense Strategy, the State Department’s 2026-2030 Strategic Plan, the dropping of the prefix “Indo” from “Indo-Pacific,” and the Quad’s marginalization in American strategy. Trump has accelerated a structural shift that began under Biden and stripped away much of the diplomatic cushioning that once softened bilateral differences.
Washington does not want to make the same mistake twice.
Having helped China become an economic and technological powerhouse, only to create its greatest strategic rival, Washington now appears determined to approach India’s rise differently.
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau made the point during his New Delhi visit earlier this year. Landau stated bluntly that America would not make its China mistake again by allowing India to “develop all these markets” and capabilities, only to discover that India was “beating us in a lot of commercial things.”
The remarks echoed a broader reassessment in Washington of India’s rise. Two months earlier, the State Department’s five-year strategic plan made only one reference to India and declared that Washington would “seek partnership with growing regional economies such as India but on terms that advance U.S. security and economic interests and avoid repeating past mistakes.”
For two decades, Washington saw a rising democratic India as inherently good for the free world, especially as a counterweight to an increasingly autocratic and expansionist China. A stronger India also meant a larger market for American companies and a more capable Indo-Pacific partner. India was thus given pride of place in America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, first unveiled in 2017.
Now, the administration no longer appears to view India’s rise as entirely benign. India’s role in U.S. policy is being downgraded, especially as President Trump adopts a more conciliatory approach to China, including recognizing it as America’s principal strategic peer.
The White House’s latest National Security Strategy, unlike previous iterations, demotes India’s role by making only a passing reference to the country. The Pentagon’s 2026 National Defense Strategy, for its part, does not mention India at all, although New Delhi holds more annual military exercises with America than any other country. In another signal of India’s strategic downgrading, the Pentagon in June dropped the prefix “Indo” from “Indo-Pacific.”
India’s eroding salience in U.S. policy is also weakening the Quad, America’s strategic coalition with India, Japan and Australia. Increasingly marginal to U.S. strategy, the Quad risks strategic irrelevance. No Quad leaders’ summit has been held since 2024. Trump’s trade war against India derailed last year’s summit, and none has been scheduled this year. Trump’s own National Security Strategy reflects the Quad’s diminished standing, giving the grouping a single passing mention and only in relation to India.
Much of India’s strategic establishment still sees Trump merely as an aberration. They view his tariffs, pressure tactics and transactional approach to New Delhi as the excesses of an unusually disruptive president. Once Trump leaves office, the thinking goes, the U.S. and India can return to the trajectory that preceded him.
But that assumption mistakes a structural shift for a presidential interlude. The deeper shift in Washington’s thinking about India began in the latter half of Joe Biden’s presidency and is likely to outlast Trump.
As India’s power grew, disagreements over trade, U.S. policies in South Asia and New Delhi’s Ukraine-war neutrality spurred tensions. Trump has accelerated that shift and stripped away much of the diplomatic cushioning that once softened bilateral differences.
India, however, is no longer a relatively weak power whose strategic policies Washington can shape. India’s economy has almost quadrupled in real terms since 2000. India has also developed its own industrial ambitions, energy strategy, technology policies and geopolitical relationships. As a rising power, India seeks to preserve the freedom to make its own strategic choices.
Strategic autonomy is not uniquely Indian. Every major power safeguards its freedom of action, and America is no exception.
The problem, then, is not strategic autonomy itself. It is the growing tension between Washington’s expectation that India’s rise should reinforce American strategic objectives and New Delhi’s determination to ensure that its growing power expands rather than narrows its freedom of action.
Bilateral trade negotiations are currently deadlocked. India wants to become a manufacturing powerhouse, reduce external dependence and protect strategic industries. The U.S., on the other side, wants greater access to India’s enormous domestic market, the world’s largest and fastest-growing.
The tensions, however, are manageable, provided Washington does not mistake partnership for alignment and New Delhi does not confuse strategic autonomy with strategic defiance.
Washington’s experience with Beijing helps explain the renewed China analogy: It has changed how U.S. policymakers view economic interdependence. The old assumption was that helping a rising power become wealthier and more integrated into the global economy would make it a more responsible stakeholder and perhaps even a strategic partner.
The lesson Washington is drawing today is not necessarily that India’s rise should be stopped, but that America should be more careful about the terms on which it helps another major power rise. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to visit India early next week for the second time in five months.
The irony is that China is also taking steps to constrain India’s rise. This year, Beijing has imposed India-specific export curbs, widely seen as efforts to slow India’s emergence as an alternative global manufacturing hub. Leveraging its dominance of global supply chains, China has restricted exports to India of manufacturing equipment, industrial components, lithium-ion and battery technologies, and critical minerals.
India and the U.S. still need each other, but the relationship must be built on a more realistic foundation. For New Delhi, the test is to manage U.S. expectations without sacrificing its own interests. For Washington, it is to accept that a genuinely powerful India will sometimes make choices America dislikes.
Washington should recognize that a powerful India can be a valuable partner precisely because it is capable of acting independently. With the Trump administration asking U.S. allies to take greater responsibility for their own security, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby declared, “India is a model ally that takes its own defense with utmost seriousness.”
America’s China lesson could ultimately strengthen the U.S.-India relationship. But that will happen only if Washington learns to distinguish an independent partner from a prospective rival, and New Delhi shows that autonomy need not preclude collaboration.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Trump pose for photographers as they arrive to view documents at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., on Friday, September 25, 2026, as a part of Xi’s state visit.
China has long sought peer validation from the only country whose recognition would carry decisive strategic weight — the U.S.
President Trump has now handed Beijing that prize. By repeatedly framing his summits with Chinese President Xi Jinping as a U.S.-China “G2” or “group of two,” Trump is granting China recognition as America’s principal strategic peer.
In fact, by hosting Xi last week for a state visit while world leaders gathered at the United Nations, Trump effectively portrayed the U.S.-China relationship as the axis of a bipolar world — a depiction that risks alienatingU.S. allies and partners, such as Japan, India, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea and NATO members.
The symbolism surrounding the latest Trump-Xi summit was hard to miss. In an unprecedented departure from American diplomatic practice, Trump personally traveled to Joint Base Andrews, Md., to greet the arriving Xi with a lavish ceremony, which included a red carpet lined by U.S. service members and a military flyover featuring two B-1 bombers.
The following morning, a 479-member military honor guard greeted the Chinese leader during a White House arrival ceremony, capped by a flyover of a B-2 Spirit bomber escorted by four F-22 Raptors. Besides a state dinner, the visit also included a Trump-escorted tour of the National Archives.
These ceremonial flourishes communicated a powerful message: The leaders of the world’s two preeminent powers were meeting as equals.
More revealing than the pomp and pageantry of the summits with Xi has been Trump’s own language. He has repeatedly described his meetings with Xi as the G2. Before last October’s summit in Busan, South Korea, he announced on Truth Social, “THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!” Afterward, he celebrated “My G2 meeting with President Xi.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also echoed the summit encounter as a “historic ‘G2 meeting.’”
Trump revived the G2 terminology during his Beijing visit in May, as if to highlight the formal end of the unipolar age. While previous American presidents carefully avoided legitimizing China’s claim to peer status, Trump’s use of the G2 concept during press encounters projected that the U.S. was now treating China as its true peer.
Trump has also been displaying a strikingly deferential posture toward America’s principal geopolitical rival. In the run-up to Xi’s Washington visit, Trump dismissed or excused reports of China’s actions against the U.S., such as providing Iran satellite imagery to target American assets, while portraying the Chinese leader as a personal friend, claiming he had “never gotten along better” with Xi.
Beijing has long rejected American hegemony while simultaneously seeking equal treatment from Washington. Beijing’s preferred phrase has been a “new model of major power relations” — a formula that seeks mutual respect for each side’s core interests, including China’s communist system and its territorial claims, including on Taiwan and the South China Sea.
The objective was not to establish a formal G2 institution but to normalize the idea that no major global issue could be decided without China. Trump’s summit diplomacy has brought Beijing much closer to realizing that objective.
The latest summit may have achieved little in concrete terms, with no agreement on any of the contentious bilateral issues and the truce in the trade war extended only by two months.
But for Xi, the visit was a propaganda coup, conveying to the Chinese people and the wider world that, under his leadership, China has become America’s equal. The optics indeed reinforced Beijing’s narrative of Xi-led national rejuvenation. Trump’s summit diplomacy has also helped Beijing advance one of the key objectives of its broader strategic messaging: demonstrating to domestic and international audiences that the U.S. can no longer dictate terms unilaterally.
Trump’s courtship of Xi represents a remarkable evolution from Trump’s first term, when tariffs, sanctions and technological restrictions were presented as instruments for reshaping China’s behavior. Today, Washington’s objective is no longer to transform China but to manage strategic rivalry through direct leader-to-leader bargaining, even if it means accepting the world’s largest autocracy as a co-equal on the global stage.
China is still not America’s equal in terms of economic, diplomatic or military power. But peer competition has never required matching strengths. The defining characteristic is the capacity to resist coercion and independently shape international outcomes. When Beijing last year responded to American tariffs by restricting rare-earth exports, it not only showed that economic interdependence cuts both ways but also demonstrated its capacity to impose retaliatory costs on the U.S.
The problem is not engaging a powerful rival to help avert costly miscalculations, but the public elevation of China into a privileged bilateral condominium. The real losers are likely to be America’s own allies and partners, whose interests could be subordinated to Washington-Beijing bargains, forcing them to hedge against U.S. unreliability.
The prospect of a U.S.-China duopoly, in which Washington and Beijing negotiate the rules of global governance while everyone else adjusts to the outcome, is a strategic nightmare for U.S. friends in Asia in particular. They want a stable balance of power, not a Sino-centric Asia.
History offers ample reason for their anxiety. Major powers have repeatedly sought stability through exclusive understandings while middle powers and smaller states absorbed the consequences.
The White House’s accommodative approach will likely gain greater salience as Trump has indicated that he will meet Xi again in November and December — first at the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Shenzhen, China, and then at the G20 summit in Miami.
China’s greatest diplomatic victory in recent years has been won not on the battlefield or through economic coercion, but in Washington, where Trump has validated Beijing’s claim to peer status. For Xi, no concession could have delivered a more valuable prize than America itself recognizing China as a co-leader of the international system.
One of the biggest geopolitical stories of the 21st century is the emergence of a broad coalition of countries determined to dilute the West’s monopoly on global governance.
That coalition is officially known as BRICS, an acronym for its five original members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Although BRIC began as an investment term for four emerging economies, the group expanded to include South Africa and held its first BRICS summit in 2011.
Since 2024, BRICS has expanded into an 11-member grouping that includes states as diverse as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia and Iran.
To many Americans, BRICS is little more than an anti-Western talking shop. But it is a mistake to dismiss a coalition that represents nearly half of humanity (the Group of Seven accounts for less than 10 percent), a growing share of global output, and an increasingly influential voice of the Global South. Whereas the G7 share of the world economy has steadily declined since the 1990s, BRICS’s share continues to rise.
Its growing influence reflects a profound reality: much of the non-Western world wants greater strategic autonomy and deeper economic cooperation beyond Western-led frameworks.
So the real question is not whether BRICS matters, but whether it can catalyze the development of a genuine alternative to the current U.S.-led world order. Its summit in New Delhi last weekend offered an illuminating answer.
The summit concluded with a 140-point New Delhi Declaration. Despite deep divisions, India brokered consensus among rivals by grounding the text in established U.N. legal frameworks and other standard multilateral principles.
But the summit also underscored a central paradox: BRICS members agree that the international system is unfair because it does not reflect today’s distribution of economic and political power. Yet they disagree deeply about what should replace it — or even how to begin overhauling it.
India and Brazil advocate reforming institutions such as the U.N. Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to give developing countries greater representation. They want to keep BRICS as non-Western but not to let it become anti-Western.
China and Russia, in contrast, are often more interested in building parallel structures to curtail Western influence altogether.
And then some newer members, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, maintain close security ties with the U.S., even as they deepen engagement with BRICS. The Emiratis and Saudis even host American military bases. Being part of BRICS allows these countries to diversify their geopolitical options and build alternative partnerships to help insulate themselves from Washington’s policy swings.
BRICS’s initiatives include local currency settlements, alternative payment mechanisms, and development financing through its New Development Bank. They are designed not so much to directly challenge the dollar’s global dominance — which in any case is eroding — as to reduce vulnerability to unilateral Western sanctions. BRICS essentially functions as a geopolitical hedge.
From Washington’s perspective, BRICS is best understood not as an anti-American alliance but as a coalition of countries seeking to reduce dependence on U.S.-led institutions. For many member states, BRICS is largely about expanding their diplomatic and economic choices.
Yet the New Delhi Declaration also exposed one of BRICS’s major weaknesses: its own double standards.
The declaration strongly condemns “unilateral coercive measures,” language aimed primarily at U.S. sanctions and trade levies such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. That criticism resonates across much of the non-Western world, where many governments view such unilateral action as something the Western-dominated international system makes possible.
But the declaration had one conspicuous omission: China is increasingly employing export restrictions on rare earths, critical minerals, manufacturing equipment and key industrial components as instruments of geopolitical leverage, including against its own BRICS partners.
For example, Beijing has recently imposed formal and informal India-specific export curbs, which have been widely interpreted as efforts to slow India’s emergence as an alternative global manufacturing hub. If unilateral economic coercion is objectionable when practiced by Washington, how can it be ignored when practiced by Beijing?
The answer has much to do with the mechanics of consensus diplomacy. Every BRICS declaration requires unanimous approval. So members are willing to collectively criticize external powers, but they have little space to name coercive behavior within their own ranks.
That, in turn, reveals an uncomfortable truth: BRICS is often united more by what it opposes than by what it practices — or by any shared vision of the alternative international order it hopes to build.
None of this means the U.S. should underestimate the organization. BRICS has already succeeded in signaling that the era of Western dominance is drawing to a close. More than three dozen countries have formally applied or expressed interest in joining BRICS, including states that remain close U.S. allies, such as Bahrain and Turkey, a NATO member.
The attraction is that BRICS helps broaden international options for governments, many of which increasingly want multiple centers of economic and diplomatic influence rather than reliance on a single superpower.
For Washington, ignoring legitimate demands for greater representation in global institutions would be counterproductive to its own interest in upholding the present international order. A willingness to reform multilateral governance may prove more effective than attempting to preserve structures designed in and for 1945.
The New Delhi summit may have demonstrated both the promise and the limits of BRICS. It is an influential coalition but not yet a unified alliance. It can coordinate diplomatic messaging but struggles to reconcile rival national ambitions. Its members share strong dissatisfaction with the current order but remain divided over the architecture of the next.
Such underlying strain does not diminish BRICS’s significance. The future order will likely be shaped by a diverse group of middle powers seeking a multipolar world in which no single nation or bloc writes all the rules, East or West.
If the promise of the BRICS was to establish a monetary union, a single market, or a tightly integrated political alliance, it has not been fulfilled. But if it was to build a platform for emerging economies to cooperate while advancing their own strategic autonomy, the BRICS has exceeded expectations.
Twenty years ago this month, the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China held the first meeting of the BRICs. Since then, the grouping has been formalized—the first BRIC summit took place in June 2009—and expanded, with South Africa joining in 2011 and several more countries later coming on board, either as full members or official partners. Today, the BRICS represents a highly consequential experiment in international cooperation, which epitomizes the gradual rebalancing of global power away from the West and the emergence of a multipolar order.
Few acronyms have undergone as dramatic an evolution as the BRICS. Coined by Jim O’Neill, then of Goldman Sachs, in 2001 to encapsulate four fast-growing emerging markets, the “BRICs” grouping has developed into the BRICS, an 11-country political and economic coalition and an increasingly influential voice for the Global South.
Since adding Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to its ranks in 2024-25, the BRICS accounts for nearly half of the world’s population and about 40% of global GDP (in purchasing-power-parity terms). By contrast, the G7 accounts for less than 10% of the global population and less than 30% of world GDP. And whereas the BRICS’ share of the global economy continues to grow, the pace of productivity and economic growth in advanced economies has been declining steadily since the 1990s.
This economic reversal is increasingly matched in the geopolitical domain, with Western global dominance giving way to a more diffuse distribution of power and influence. Amid this transformation—the likes of which occur only once every 50–100 years—the BRICS has challenged the assumption that global governance should remain centered on the Western-led institutions established after World War II.
For non-Western countries, the BRICS represents a hedge against rising economic and geopolitical uncertainty—generated, not least, by a United States seemingly bent on withdrawing from global leadership—and an institutional platform for advancing strategic autonomy and broadening economic cooperation. Small wonder there has been such enthusiasm for joining: more than three dozen countries have formally applied or expressed interest in becoming members, including Turkey, a NATO member, and Bahrain, the primary operational hub for US naval forces in the Middle East.
The BRICS also has ten “partner countries”—Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam—which can participate in summits. This framework helps to expand the BRICS’ network for cooperation and strengthen its ability to represent the Global South, without jeopardizing cohesion.
The BRICS is much more than a symbolic grouping—merely a message to the world that the era of Western dominance is coming to an end. The grouping has made tangible progress on institution-building. The New Development Bank (NDB) is the first multilateral development bank with global scope conceived and led solely by emerging economies, with the founding BRICS members holding equal shares and voting rights. By contrast, the United States is the largest shareholder at both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, where it holds effective veto power. Unlike these US-led institutions, the NDB does not attach political conditions to its infrastructure financing, allowing borrowers to retain greater policy autonomy.
The BRICS has also been working to reduce vulnerabilities within the international financial system. Contrary to speculation, a single BRICS currency akin to the euro is not on the agenda. Instead, the upcoming summit will focus on expanding trade settlement in national currencies, improving interoperability among members’ digital-payment systems, linking central-bank digital currencies, and developing alternative cross-border payment infrastructure. The goal is not to upend the global financial system and supplant the US dollar, which still accounts for about 57% of foreign-exchange reserves held by central banks worldwide, but rather to strengthen resilience against external financial shocks.
As much progress as the BRICS has made over the last 20 years, however, the grouping also faces significant headwinds, rooted not least in its exceptional internal diversity. The BRICS includes liberal democracies and authoritarian states, leading energy exporters and major energy importers, manufacturing powers and commodity economies. The grouping also includes geopolitical rivals: China and India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and Ethiopia. Divisions exist even among its founding members, with Brazil and India generally advocating reform of existing international institutions, while China and Russia seek to challenge the US-led world order.
Diversity brings different ideas and advantages to the table, and ideological uniformity and close strategic alignment are not necessarily prerequisites to cooperation. But a highly diverse grouping, with sharply divergent priorities and geopolitical concerns, will always struggle to forge consensus. Every round of enlargement compounds the challenge, even as it raises the BRICS’ profile as a broadly representative international coalition.
As the group convenes in New Delhi for its 18th summit, one might ask whether it has lived up to its original promise. If that promise was to establish a monetary union, a single market, or a tightly integrated political alliance, the answer is plainly no. But if it was to reshape international relations, broaden the space available to emerging economies on the world stage, strengthen South-South cooperation, and increase pressure for reform of existing international institutions, the BRICS has exceeded expectations.
More fundamentally, the BRICS has normalized an idea that once seemed impossible: that emerging economies can cooperate with one another, build their own institutions, and change how the international order is organized. That is no small feat.
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.
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.
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