Why Bharat Matters Chapter 4: As National Security Balances Globalization

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As National Security Balances Globalization

Receding Certitudes: From Globalization’s Optimism to Strategic Caution

Until the mid-2010s, much of India—like large parts of the world—treated globalization as a structural reassurance. The European integration project appeared to validate notions of irreversible interdependence, and the prevailing policy wisdom prized efficiency-enhancing linkages in technology, finance, trade, and resource flows. That optimism rested on assumptions about the benignity of interdependence and the declining salience of geopolitics.

Those assumptions have since unraveled. A succession of shocks—political, economic, technological, and security-related—has forced a recalibration in which sovereignty, security, privacy, and values must be weighed against the benefits of openness. The result is not deglobalization but a more conditional, strategically hedged integration: the search for resilient and reliable supply chains, trust-based digital regimes, and reduced concentration risks in critical technologies. This moment is defined by a structural tension: the same linkages that create prosperity also transmit shocks and generate vulnerabilities. Navigating that contradiction—rather than denying it—now sits at the heart of national security policy.

The drivers of this rebalancing are both material and political. Concentrated dependencies in key sectors (from semiconductors and rare earths to pharmaceutical ingredients) revealed systemic exposure to coercion, disruption, and manipulation. Efficiency-focused offshoring hollowed out local manufacturing bases and communities, producing domestic backlash and altering the political economy of trade. Competitiveness pressures after China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO)—amplified by scale asymmetries, industrial policy, and subsidies—exacerbated dislocations in many societies. In a highly connected world, these domestic effects fed back into global politics, reshaping state preferences toward protection of employment, technology, and data.

Cognitive and institutional inertia compounded the problem. Early warning signs were often discounted—by vested interests that benefited from the status quo, by international actors lulled by short-term gains, and by a human propensity to expect stable continuities. When shocks came in quick succession, the policy balance tipped decisively toward strategic caution.

Shock Timeline and Structural Inflection Points

Several episodes since the late 1990s set the stage for today’s rebalancing:

  • The Asian financial crisis (1997–98) and the global financial crisis (2008–09) demonstrated how efficiency-oriented globalization could transmit and amplify shocks systemically within a decade. The lesson was clear: interconnectedness without adequate safeguards magnifies risk.

  • China’s accession to the WTO (2001) catalyzed a distinctive model of integration that, given differences in scale and approach, produced profound political and social repercussions elsewhere. Many economies struggled to compete with a combination of industrial policy, massive subsidies, and global supply-chain integration on terms that were difficult to replicate or counter.

  • The 9/11 attacks (2001) set the direction of global security politics for two decades. The subsequent intervention in Iraq generated unstable outcomes across West Asia, while the long war in Afghanistan absorbed US attention and bandwidth, altering the relative strategic space available to other powers.

  • In the mid-2010s, political markers signaled a sharper national-interest turn. The election of Donald Trump and the articulation of “America First” reflected and reinforced domestic disenchantment with globalization’s distributive effects. The China–US tussle, initially treated by many as tactical bargaining, morphed into a structural contest across technology, security, and ideology.

  • The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the extent to which “just-in-time” efficiencies had hollowed out resilience. Critical medical supplies, ingredients, and electronics bottlenecks highlighted concentration risks. The resulting consensus on resilient supply chains, digital trust, and transparency was perhaps the most significant policy shift of the decade.

  • Security shocks compounded the pivot. The abrupt exit of American troops from Afghanistan closed one era but opened uncertainties that reverberated regionally. The Ukraine conflict then underscored how deeply integrated energy and financial systems transmit war’s effects worldwide, from grain prices to shipping insurance. Meanwhile, the long-simmering West Asia tinder box ignited into a higher level of conflagration, reminding policymakers that regional crises can have global consequences for energy, trade routes, and diaspora safety.

By the end of the second decade of the century, these trend lines pointed to greater turbulence and intensified big-power rivalry. The world is new, but not brave: earlier certitudes have given way to a pragmatic, risk-aware sensibility.

Economic and Technological Reconfiguration

Interdependence still creates value; it has not been abandoned. But its governance logic is changing in three ways.

First, resilience is now a policy objective alongside efficiency. States are diversifying suppliers, near-shoring or friend-shoring critical inputs, and mapping single points of failure. The goal is not autarky but redundancy—an insurance premium against choke points in semiconductors, critical minerals, energy logistics, and health supplies.

Second, digital governance has moved to the center. Data protection, cyber hygiene, and the safeguarding of critical technologies are treated as national security priorities. “Digital trust and transparency” is no longer rhetorical; it is the basis for norms on cross-border data flows, platform accountability, algorithms, and cloud localization. Export controls, investment screening, and technology partnerships are increasingly calibrated to protect innovation ecosystems without severing useful flows of talent and capital.

Third, the political economy of globalization is being rebalanced. The distributive costs of rapid integration—particularly after China’s WTO entry—generated enduring social repercussions in exposed sectors and regions. The policy response is not merely tariffs; it includes active industrial policies, workforce skilling, and incentives to rebuild advanced manufacturing capacity. The lesson from the progression of crises since the late 1990s is straightforward: open systems require buffers, circuit breakers, and public investment to prevent the privatization of gains alongside the socialization of losses.

Security Dynamics and the Return of Geopolitics

The mood of the early post–Cold War decades—in which “old” geopolitics appeared to recede—has given way to its vigorous return. Big-power contestation has widened from trade and finance to technology standards, digital infrastructure, and maritime security. The post-9/11 arc—Afghanistan, Iraq, counter-terrorism architectures—shaped two decades of security priorities and incidentally afforded strategic space to other actors. But the hasty endgame in Afghanistan, the grinding conflict in Ukraine, and escalations in West Asia together demonstrate the layered nature of contemporary insecurity.

For national security planners, the coexistence of deep economic integration with heightened strategic rivalry creates complex trade-offs. The sovereignty-security nexus manifests in debates over energy dependence, payment systems, shipping lanes, and the weaponization of interdependence. States are updating doctrines to mitigate exposure to sanctions, supply disruptions, and cyber intrusions while still leveraging global markets and technology networks. The resulting policy posture favors autonomy in the strategic core, disciplined interdependence at the periphery, and active coalition-building in issue-based formats.

Implications for Governance and Cooperation

Three implications follow for the organization of national and international order:

  • Strategic recalibration within states. Governments are building resilience into supply chains, hardening critical infrastructure, and institutionalizing digital norms that protect data and intellectual property. Economic ministries and security establishments increasingly work to common risk maps, recognizing that employment, technology protection, and privacy are inseparable from external posture.

  • Prospective redesign of international cooperation. From the current messy landscape, a different architecture could emerge—flexible, issue-specific coalitions that align values and interests, but also attend to employment and cultural concerns. Standards-setting in technology, critical minerals clubs, and plurilateral trade arrangements suggest forms of cooperation that are more contingent and politically sustainable than universalist templates.

  • Acceptance of open-ended turbulence. The frequency and magnitude of shocks since the late 1990s caution against complacency. Strategic foresight must assume a wider cone of uncertainty, including simultaneous economic, technological, and security disruptions.

In short, the operative grammar of globalization is being rewritten to integrate risk management into the fabric of openness.

India’s Recalibration: Resilience, Autonomy, and Engagement

India’s own perspective has shifted in tandem with global currents. Until 2014, policy debates often mirrored global enthusiasm for liberalization’s stabilizing effects. The subsequent sequence of shocks—US–China contestation, the pandemic, Afghanistan’s denouement, the Ukraine conflict, and escalations in West Asia—reinforced the necessity of balancing integration with strategic autonomy.

Policy priorities now reflect this synthesis:

  • Resilient supply chains and industrial capacity. India has sought to diversify inputs in pharmaceuticals, electronics, and clean-tech components; use calibrated incentives to rebuild manufacturing depth; and participate in trusted supply chain frameworks. The aim is to reduce concentration risks without retreating from global markets.

  • Digital trust and technology protection. A concerted effort is underway to safeguard data, strengthen cyber resilience, and shape credible accountability regimes for platforms and AI. Protecting critical technologies—through export controls, investment screening, and trusted partnerships—sits alongside an emphasis on open innovation and talent mobility.

  • Strategic autonomy amid major-power rivalry. India’s diplomacy hedges against binary alignments: engaging purposefully with the United States and like-minded partners on maritime security and critical technologies; sustaining dialogue with China while managing the boundary and competitiveness; and preserving issue-based cooperation with Russia. This multi-vector approach is reinforced by active participation in plurilateral formats across the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia.

  • Regional contingency planning. The implications of Afghanistan’s instability, Ukraine’s global ripple effects on energy and food, and West Asia’s volatility for Indian diaspora safety, energy security, and sea-lanes are now routine inputs into planning. Evacuations, sanctions navigation, and energy diversification have become operational competencies.

  • Values, employment, and culture in external policy. Trade and technology engagements are increasingly calibrated to domestic employment goals and to preserving the cultural and democratic substrates of India’s digital public sphere. This aligns external economic strategy with internal social cohesion.

The aggregate effect is a pragmatic posture: anchor resilience at home, reduce single points of failure abroad, and shape external environments through coalitions that are attentive to both interests and values. India’s strategic culture—traditionally cautious, autonomy-seeking, and adaptive—thus finds new expression in a world that is certainly new and, by experience, not a particularly brave one.

SHARPENING GREAT POWER COMPETITION

Recalibrating American Power

The centrality of the United States to the contemporary international system remains undisputed, yet the cumulative costs of its two “forever wars” have reshaped its strategic posture. Afghanistan, plagued by conceptual confusion between counter-terrorism and state-building, and Iraq, widely judged as avoidable, have left the US worse off—irrespective of continuing debates over their original rationales. The political, financial, and moral burdens of these engagements have fed a wider reassessment: what kind of global role can be sustained, at what cost, and toward what ends?

A parallel reckoning has unfolded with the globalization model the US championed after the Cold War. The very dispersion of production and supply chains—originally justified by efficiency and market access—has eroded elements of America’s manufacturing capacity and dulled some of its technology leads. The dislocations first surfaced as a political backlash against perceived elite consensus, and then hardened into a national security concern as dependencies in critical sectors became too visible to ignore. An economic model that seemed inexorable now survives as much on the inertia of embedded dependencies as on conviction about its benefits.

The Trump presidency marked a turning point in this strategic reassessment. What began as unconventional policy moves and rhetoric evolved under the Biden Administration into a more systemic posture. Export controls, supply-chain “de-risking,” industrial policy in strategic sectors, and new alliance expectations reflect a broader attempt to rewrite the terms of engagement the US offers the world. This is not a sudden turn. Since 2008, Washington has displayed growing caution in projecting power and persistent efforts to address overextension. Across three Administrations there is continuity in recalibrating footprint, levels of involvement, and the nature of activities. The outcome is a qualitatively different America—still pivotal, but more conscious of limits and costs.

The emerging US approach favors a more cost-effective pursuit of global objectives. Increasingly an off-shore balancer across regions, Washington seeks to protect influence while limiting risks and trading permanent commitments for flexible arrangements. This posture is accompanied by a search for better equilibrium between domestic revival and external obligations. It also reflects heightened recognition of multipolarity and expanding strategic autonomy among partners and rivals alike. Traditional relationships are being consolidated, but new options are also being tested, often through issue-based coalitions.

The strategic question at the heart of this transition concerns the US capacity to reassess and reinvent itself. Doing so requires diplomacy attuned to constraints—valuing broader, contemporary partnerships without presuming deference. For India, the significance lies in engaging a United States that is structurally more selective, transactional in some domains, yet willing to invest in consequential partnerships that align with its revised grand strategy.

The Distinct Rise of China and Asian Turbulence

The recalibration of American strategy is inseparable from the rise of China. Unlike the USSR, China is ideologically and culturally distinct from the Western mainstream while enjoying deep salience within the global economy. Its growth has externalized an internal “seamlessness”: the integrated application of political, economic, technological, and military instruments now shapes connectivity, standards-setting, and trade, alongside an assertiveness in territorial disputes. Power has been redefined to encompass platforms, protocols, supply-chain centrality, and data governance, even as it retains classical military and territorial dimensions.

Across Asia, earlier understandings are fraying. Maritime tensions in the East and South China Seas, more insistent claims around historical “rights,” and the questioning of previous agreements are symptomatic of the shift. On the Himalayan frontier, India’s 2020 experience underscored how quickly longstanding arrangements can be challenged. These developments are not episodic; they reflect a structural change in the region’s power geometry, wherein China’s capabilities and ambitions alter the incentives and anxieties of neighbors, forcing recalculations of posture, partnerships, and preparedness.

For the United States and China alike, fortunes are increasingly correlated: Washington’s attempts to preserve primacy intersect with Beijing’s drive for recognition and space. The resulting competition differs from post-1945 binaries. China’s centrality to global production and markets constrains decoupling; interdependence both disciplines and complicates rivalry. The region’s response—balancing, hedging, and diversifying—intensifies the premium on strategic autonomy, particularly for states like India that seek to shape, rather than merely endure, the transition.

Multipolar Asia as Strategic Imperative

Establishing a multipolar Asia is foundational to realizing a multipolar world. The urgency is sharper than before because the regional distribution of power is shifting faster than global institutions can adapt. Multipolarity in Asia dilutes the incentives for dominance, creates space for middle powers, and conditions great powers to compete within rules that reflect a wider set of interests.

The evolution of great power competition will not be linear. The interplay of security dilemmas, technological rivalry, and geo-economic realignments ensures a messy trajectory. Recognizing this, India’s strategic calculus emphasizes options—diversified partnerships, minilateral arrangements, and resilient economic policies that reduce exposure to single points of failure. The objective is not equidistance but calibrated alignment: shaping outcomes to preserve agency, deter coercion, and enable development.

Ramayana as Analytic Lens: Ambition, Validation, and Provocation

The Ramayana offers instructive allegories for contemporary rivalry. The contest between King Kaushika and Sage Vasistha illuminates themes of ambition, restraint, and recognition. Kaushika’s attempt to seize Vasistha’s particularly productive cow—an emblem of prosperity and latent power—culminates in the destruction of his sons and army. Overreach, particularly when power is still consolidating, exacts a punitive cost. Unfazed, Kaushika acquires formidable weapons through penance, yet fails again to defeat Vasistha. Only by intensifying his spiritual discipline and transforming his character does he ascend the hierarchy of sages.

Kaushika’s besetting weakness is anger: he repeatedly dissipates power on immediate provocations. His enmity with Vasistha renders him susceptible to distractions—some deliberately introduced to derail his ascent. Even when Lord Brahma recognizes him as a rajarishi, Kaushika remains dissatisfied until Vasistha himself acknowledges him as a brahmarishi. The desire for validation—specifically from the entrenched authority—becomes the final benchmark of status.

Mapped onto current affairs, rising powers often measure themselves against established standards and seek recognition as equals. Historical humiliations may sharpen the urge to “win at any cost,” complicating the consolidation of a rules-based order. The allegory cautions that mere accumulation of power is insufficient; transformation—of institutions, behavior, and restraint—is essential for durable ascent. It also reminds us that entrenched powers possess deep, resilient influence that is not easily displaced: norms, networks, and institutional memory can blunt direct challenges.

Another Ramayana episode highlights the permanence of political suspicion. Even close partners scrutinize one another for contrary signals. Bharata’s absence from Rama’s coronation is read by Queen Kaikeyi as a portent for her and her son’s future. Manthara’s intervention—invoking two unredeemed boons granted to Kaikeyi—pushes the queen toward unreasonable demands. A smaller actor with an independent agenda exploits a larger power’s insecurity, redirecting outcomes disproportionate to its intrinsic weight. In regional politics, analogues abound: minor players, leveraging fear and promise, can tilt alignments or trigger crises that reshape larger equations.

Stripped of personalities, the substrate of international relations remains competition and benefits. Despite the rhetoric of globalization and common good, states calculate interests unsentimentally. Technologies may change and economies integrate, but the essential logic—of advantage-seeking, relative gains, and hedging—persists. The epics remind strategic communities to read beneath narratives, identify vulnerabilities to provocation, and invest in self-discipline as a form of power.

Implications for Indian Statecraft

  • Engaging a different America: India should treat the United States as a consequential partner undergoing disciplined reinvention. New terms of engagement—on supply chains, technology, and security responsibilities—are designed to be more reciprocal and cost-conscious. Effective Indian diplomacy will selectively align with convergences while protecting strategic autonomy in areas of divergence.

  • Managing China’s externalized capabilities: The externalization of China’s “seamlessness” into connectivity, standards, and trade demands Indian responses that are as much regulatory and technological as military. Building resilient manufacturing, fostering innovation ecosystems, and shaping digital and physical connectivity norms are central to creating leverage and avoiding vulnerability.

  • Learning from 2020 and beyond: The border crisis underscored the limits of prior understandings. Credible deterrence, infrastructure parity, and domain awareness must be complemented by diplomacy that minimizes space for miscalculation while not conceding on core interests. The lesson is to combine firmness with predictability, avoiding provocations that dissipate power without advancing objectives.

  • Pursuing multipolar Asia: Multipolarity is a strategic objective, not a descriptive label. It is advanced by diversified partnerships—ASEAN centrality, minilaterals, and issue-based coalitions—that expand India’s options and distribute risk. A rules-based regional order must be thickened through practical cooperation on maritime security, critical technologies, and resilient logistics.

  • Guarding against the provocation trap: The Kaushika–Vasistha allegory warns against impulsive escalation and highlights the importance of strategic patience. India’s ascent requires institutional deepening, economic scale, and societal cohesion; forceful responses must be purposeful rather than performative, calibrated to cumulative advantage rather than immediate emotive payoff.

  • Anticipating third-party manipulation: The Kaikeyi–Manthara episode cautions that smaller actors can exploit insecurities of larger ones. India’s neighborhood policy must be alert to external instigation and local elite incentives, coupling firmness with incentives that reduce the appeal of opportunistic balancing against India. Transparency with partners mitigates mistrust; economic and connectivity offerings reduce vulnerability to leverage.

  • Anchoring realism with principle: Even as competition intensifies, India’s strategic culture gains by anchoring interests in principled conduct—predictable commitments, treaty fidelity, and restraint in the use of power. This enhances credibility, attracts partners who value autonomy, and denies adversaries easy narratives.

In a system where the US is rebalancing its ambitions and China is reshaping the metrics of influence, India’s task is not to emulate either model but to internalize the enduring lessons: power must be husbanded, recognition earned through transformation, and vulnerabilities to provocation minimized. Multipolar Asia—pursued with urgency and sobriety—offers the widest margin for Indian agency amid sharpening great power competition.

Rebalancing Power: US–China and the New Interdependence

The global order is undergoing a redistribution of power that is wider and subtler than a US–China zero-sum contest. Post-colonial economic emergence, together with the political choices of established and rising powers, has reweighted influence without producing a straightforward substitution of American systemic reach by China. The United States, grounded in universalism and openness, has historically leveraged diversity and talent attraction to maintain a wide aperture of engagement. China, by contrast, defines itself as singular, has globalized without universalizing, and fuses external leverage with the construction of autonomous capabilities at home. Each side is increasingly alert to the possibility that its strengths—openness for the US, scale and state-orchestrated coordination for China—could be exploited by the other.

A diminishing convergence in their worldviews is reshaping the operating environment. Uncertainty and friction are likely to intensify across sensitive domains: supply-chain resilience, data governance and cross-border data flows, maritime security regimes, global health responses, and counter-terrorism norms. The test, particularly for these two powers, is whether enlightened self-interest can still marshal collective action to safeguard the global commons in an era when interdependence has been politicized. For others—including India—this is producing a post-Westphalian diplomatic culture characterized by leverage, hedging, and the weaponization of routine economic and connectivity flows. The grammar of statecraft is thus less about alignment and more about exposure management, redundancy, and the calibration of dependencies.

Structural changes in who wields power and how they conceive of self-interest are recasting global governance. Choke points are emerging not only in maritime straits and semiconductor supply chains but also in standard-setting bodies, payment systems, logistics networks, and digital platforms. These are simultaneously technical and political, forcing states to treat seemingly mundane choices—port operators, cloud providers, undersea cables, payment rails—as strategic variables.

Regional Transformations: West Asia, Europe, and the Afghanistan Paradox

West Asia epitomizes the coexistence of flux and continuity. The US exit from Afghanistan opened an indeterminate strategic landscape in which normative concerns articulated in multilateral forums—terrorism and radicalization, the treatment of women and minorities, freedom to travel, and inclusive governance—must coexist with hard-nosed regional recalculations. Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme and regional influence remain a pivotal variable whose outcome will alter security postures from the Gulf to the Levant. The Abraham Accords created optimism around normalization, economics, and connectivity, yet terrorist attacks on Israel underscored the fragility of these foundations and reintroduced hard security as the gating factor for political economy projects.

Within this paradox, economic pragmatism is generating new platforms. The I2U2 grouping embeds practical cooperation on food security, technology, and infrastructure that can expand India’s role in regional supply chains and logistics. Saudi Arabia’s more pronounced Asian orientation intersects with the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which promises connectivity, logistics, and energy linkages that revive a “return of history”: the reactivation of India–Arabia–Europe routes as strategic arteries. The region’s future relevance for external actors will be determined by the balance it strikes between entrenched politics and emergent economics, with corridors like IMEC potentially redefining modalities of engagement.

Europe’s trajectory complements these shifts. Even before the Ukraine shock, the European Union had begun moving beyond a fortress mentality, signaling an outward recalibration through its Indo-Pacific and connectivity policies. The Ukraine crisis then transformed individual and collective European security outlooks, fast-forwarding strategic globalism as Europe reframed the conflict and its responses in a global context. Yet tensions persist: Europe’s cushioning from sharper economic pain—exemplified by its energy imports from Russia before the war—has sat uneasily with advocacy of hard options that impose costs on poorer countries, and similar contradictions are visible in trade, subsidies, and standards policy.

For India, the European vector now involves watching a recalibration across the Atlantic and towards the Urals that will likely prompt revisions in Europe’s Asia policy. Major imponderables include the evolution of Germany’s posture, built over two decades of economic interdependence and political restraint, and whether others will exploit Berlin’s current dilemma. Rising risk awareness will not necessarily align Europe with the US in Asia; unlike Washington, Brussels and key European capitals are not defending global supremacy. Their outcomes will be compromises between immediate compulsions (security, energy, industrial policy) and medium-term calculations (market access, diversification, and geopolitical balancing).

The United States’ Economic Statecraft in Transition

As bellwether of change, the United States is reassessing its economic posture under the pressure of domestic politics and international competition. Influential voices argue that a less globally dominant America cannot sustain the economic generosity of earlier eras. Skepticism now extends beyond mega-free-trade agreements to the architecture of supply chains, critical technologies, and the embedded risks of asymmetric dependencies. Washington is seeking innovative ways to intensify foreign economic engagement while aligning with domestic imperatives—reshoring, friend-shoring, and rebuilding industrial capacity.

The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), launched on the sidelines of the 2022 Quad Summit in Tokyo, exemplifies this approach. By design, it is modular and non-tariff, addressing pillars such as supply-chain resilience, clean economy, and fair economy. By the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting, participants had advanced agreements on supply-chain cooperation and related workstreams, indicating progress without the political baggage of market-access concessions. In parallel, the US strategy in the Ukraine conflict has showcased contemporary leverage: sanctions, export controls, financial restrictions, and technology-denial regimes that exploit network centrality. This underscores a defining feature of power today: the capacity to weaponize interdependence faster and with fewer inhibitions.

A core test of American primacy remains bandwidth—the ability to address multiple major challenges simultaneously while sustaining alliance confidence and domestic support. The coupling of heightened strategic-competition awareness with the need to “build and protect better” at home is producing transformational effects on global economic governance, standards-setting, and the geography of production.

Beyond Westphalia: Weaponized Interdependence and Digital Governance

The late Cold War produced a tacit compromise: systemic competition over values coexisted with post-colonial sovereignty sensitivities, leading to an international order that (selectively) respected non-interference. Economics, in that milieu, operated with a transactional logic that treated societies as black boxes; commercial choices were impersonal and often dismissed as “just business.” Globalization overturned these premises. Deep interpenetration of societies—foreign firms operating onshore, supply chains threading through domestic regulatory space, and platforms mediating social and political discourse—has made internal norms, transparency, and trust unavoidable concerns of international engagement.

The digital age, with AI as its cutting edge, further amplifies anxieties about asymmetric restraints and non-reciprocal governance regimes. Firewalls, data localization, algorithmic opacity, and divergent standards turn commercial interfaces into national security questions. Market share and interdependence, once purely economic, now confer geopolitical leverage. Exposure levels have therefore become security variables. Over the last decade, the routine has been weaponized—trade restrictions, tourism curbs, connectivity rerouting, and financial exclusion have migrated from the toolbox of last resort to normalized instruments of statecraft. This marks the end of political agnosticism in economic relations and the emergence of a more coercive, less inhibited diplomatic culture, one that demands comprehensive hedging and supply-chain risk mitigation as default settings.

Afghanistan’s Parable of Misread Dependencies

Afghanistan offers a cautionary tale about the perils of misreading logistics and politics. Post-9/11 critics often decried intrusive nation-building, yet the deeper flaw was not ambition but the strategic paradox of relying for critical logistics on the very country that enabled the insurgency. For two decades, Pakistan functioned as both enabler and spoiler; even the discovery of Osama bin Laden on its soil did not catalyze a definitive policy correction. The Pakistani military adroitly shaped perceptions, leaving US military and political leaders with scrambled friend-or-foe (IFF) identification in their decision-making loop.

The international community’s current hope is narrowly pragmatic: that domestic developments in Afghanistan will not generate negative externalities—terrorism and radicalization, refugee outflows, or egregious violations of women’s rights—that spill across borders. Yet the episode highlights a stubborn problem in international relations: reconciling sharply divergent political cultures within an increasingly integrated world, where geography, logistics, and cross-border flows limit the feasibility of neat strategic decoupling.

Implications for India’s Strategic Culture

For India, this environment reinforces long-standing tenets of strategic autonomy while demanding new instruments. The US–China rebalancing is not a binary choice but a management problem across contested commons and politicized networks. Indian statecraft must preserve policy space by building redundancy in supply chains; shaping data and AI governance regimes that protect sovereignty without isolating the economy; contributing materially to maritime security and global health responses; and nurturing counter-terrorism cooperation that aligns with domestic priorities.

Westward, the agenda is simultaneously opportunity-rich and risk-laden. India should leverage I2U2 for practical projects in food, technology, and logistics; push IMEC as a platform that connects manufacturing nodes in India to energy and transport corridors through Arabia into Europe; and engage a Saudi Arabia that is leaning into Asia’s growth story. Yet these prospects must be balanced against turbulence from terrorist shocks, the unsettled trajectory of Iran’s nuclear file, and the enduring possibility that Afghanistan’s internal politics generate regional externalities.

In Europe, New Delhi should anticipate differentiation from US positions in Asia. It must monitor and shape Europe’s recalibrations across the Atlantic and towards the Urals, assess the evolution of Germany’s posture, and insert Indian priorities into Europe’s connectivity and standards initiatives. Europe’s heightened risk awareness will open doors for diversification and India–Europe partnerships, even as contradictions in energy and trade policy produce episodic friction.

With the United States, India can use IPEF and related dialogues to co-develop resilient supply chains, green technologies, and trusted digital architectures. This cooperation must be framed with clear-eyed recognition that Washington’s economic statecraft is now resilience-driven and leverage-aware; India should expect partners to manage dependencies—and to expect the same from India. Across the board, New Delhi must plan for a less agnostic, more coercive diplomatic–economic environment by hedging exposures, strengthening logistics sovereignty, investing in standards and certification capacity, and aligning domestic reforms with external partnerships. The strategic discipline required is not merely to choose partners but to curate vulnerabilities.

Key Terms and Concepts

  • Rebalancing: A structural redistribution of power and influence beyond a US–China zero-sum, driven by post-colonial economic emergence and political choices.
  • Universalism versus singular globalization: The US’s openness and talent attraction contrasted with China’s self-definition as singular and its fusion of external leverage with autonomous capability-building.
  • Enlightened self-interest and the global commons: The capacity of major powers to sustain collective goods amid divergent worldviews and politicized interdependence.
  • Strategic globalism (Europe): Post-Ukraine reframing of Europe’s security and economic posture with global implications, including Indo-Pacific engagement and connectivity initiatives.
  • Weaponizing of the routine: The use of trade, tourism, connectivity, and finance as instruments of coercion, signaling the end of political agnosticism in economic relations.
  • I2U2 and IMEC: Emerging West Asian platforms for Indian involvement in connectivity, logistics, energy, and technology, aligned with a historical re-linking of India, Arabia, and Europe.
  • IPEF and APEC: US-led economic engagement recalibration; IPEF launched at the 2022 Quad Summit in Tokyo, with supply-chain and related progress by the 2023 APEC meeting.
  • Friend or foe (IFF) systems: A metaphor drawn from the Afghanistan–Pakistan paradox to describe muddled ally–adversary identification in strategic decision-making.

Open Questions and Imponderables

  • How far will divergence in US and Chinese worldviews limit cooperation on supply chains, data governance, maritime security, pandemics, and counter-terrorism—and will enlightened self-interest suffice to protect the global commons?
  • Where will negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme and regional influence land, and how will that outcome reshape West Asian alignments already destabilized by terrorist attacks on Israel amid the promise of the Abraham Accords?
  • Can Europe reconcile strategic globalism with material constraints and its past “change through trade” ethos, especially regarding energy and commerce ties with Russia, and how will Germany’s two-decade posture evolve?
  • To what extent can the US manage multiple simultaneous major challenges while reshaping supply chains and economic engagement without eroding alliances or overextending domestic capacities?
  • Can the international system evolve governance norms—especially on AI, data, and interdependence—that restore transparency and trust, reduce coercive leverage, and stabilize a post-Westphalian diplomatic culture?

Interdependence, Decoupling, and Strategic Vulnerability

The contemporary debate on “decoupling” is often framed in maximalist terms that obscure the real texture of interdependence. Comprehensive separation is neither practicable nor desirable in a global economy whose connective tissue—finance, data, supply chains, standards, people-to-people flows—has become structurally dense. Strategic competition, however, is intensifying and cannot be wished away. In a climate of limited trust, any two-way link—trade corridors, resource dependencies, digital connectivity, pipelines, or financial rails—tends to be better leveraged by the harder state or by the one that has planned the relationship with strategic foresight. The very openness that spurs creativity and growth also generates exposure: vulnerabilities in critical minerals, semiconductors, pharmaceutical inputs, or maritime choke points can be exploited or disrupted at will. States are therefore pursuing a dual-track response—strategic autonomy and safeguarding in select areas, alongside redundancy, diversification, and reliability-building in others.

These impulses are reshaping export controls, technology sharing, and intellectual-property regimes, with chips and semiconductors emerging as the paradigmatic case. Controls and counter-controls cascade through equipment, software, research cooperation, and talent flows, with sociopolitical consequences that will reverberate across academia, business, research partnerships, and even travel over the next decade. Political economy and orthodox security concerns now intersect: an export-control decision can reconfigure a value chain, redraw research ecosystems, or alter the labor mobility calculus. The policy question, for India as for others, is who gains or loses when the external environment turns less favorable—how power differentials assert themselves through chokepoints, standards, or access—as well as how misreadings of strategic cultures produce unintended outcomes. The present world is at once more connected in some domains and more contested in others, a hybrid condition that creates an unfamiliar policy landscape for all players.

A Looser Architecture and the Rise of the “Others”

Structural shifts are evident. The post–Cold War architecture has loosened under the weight of the United States’ relative limitations and China’s rise, opening space for additional actors—an expanding set of “others”—to exert influence. The resulting configuration includes two major powers at different levels of capability and legitimacy, yet still falls short of classical bipolarity. In this widened middle, autonomous players—ranging from established regional powers to rapidly growing economies and pivotal geographies—exploit gaps and arbitrate great-power competition. Their choices remain filtered through their own biases, historical affinities, and material interests; they are also increasingly adept at using the ambivalence of more distant powers and the diversity within alliance systems to enlarge their room for maneuver.

Alliances, historically products of specific circumstances, are not infinitely replicable. The United States’ broad, resilient network of treaty allies is the cumulative outcome of unique geopolitical, economic, and ideational conditions; no other power can easily reproduce it. As the world experiments toward a new hierarchy, novel partnership models—lighter in legal form, more transactional in practice, and often anchored in economic integration or supply-chain interdependence—are proliferating. Economic dependency itself can become a determinant of security alignment, even as alternative arrangements remain conceivable. The arrival of the “others” thus signals a wider spread of power with less structural rigidity: it encompasses states with deep traditions of power projection, those with immediate situational relevance, aspirants to future leadership, and actors striving to preserve past advantages.

In a globalized system, countries no longer require comprehensive, all-round capabilities to stand out. Domain-specific strengths—hard military power, natural-resource endowments, significant financial capital, strategic location astride sea lanes or data cables, cutting-edge niche technologies, or influential diplomatic platforms—can each, separately or in combination, deliver outsized influence. This dispersion of usable power is rebalancing agendas and reopening questions about hierarchy, influence, and policy autonomy across multiple regions.

Regionalization and Domain-Specific Power: West Asia as Exhibit

The prominence of such mid-level and niche powers is most visible in heightened regionalism. Across Africa, West Asia, the Gulf, and Oceania, disputes, adjustments, and bargains are increasingly addressed locally. External powers still hold stakes but show diminishing inclination or capacity to intervene decisively. The resulting space for agency is significant enough to be leveraged even by smaller nations if they possess financial heft, energy resources, logistical nodes, or convening power.

West Asia illustrates this regionalization vividly. Conflicts and tensions—from Yemen to Gaza—are increasingly driven by resident players, both large and small. External actors retain interests, but their ability to compel outcomes has eroded. At the same time, innovative applications of technology—cheap precision munitions, unmanned systems, cyber tools, and surveillance architectures—have reshaped operational realities, altering threat perceptions and deterrence thresholds. This technological diffusion intensifies regional competition among middle powers while enabling more agile diplomacy: de-escalation channels, normalization efforts, and cross-regional economic linkages can coexist with sharp tactical rivalry. For India, whose energy security, diaspora welfare, and connectivity ambitions are deeply bound to West Asia, the growing self-determination of regional actors mandates a policy that is nimble, non-ideological, and prepared to transact across divides without being trapped by inherited binaries.

From Multilateral Fatigue to Minilateral Practice

The proliferation of agile actors operating with fewer constraints inside an interdependent world makes pragmatism compelling. Shared interests—energy security, connectivity corridors, resilient supply chains, green transitions, digital standards—regularly trump ideological or systemic divides. Cooperation for individual gain is not a departure from principle; it reflects the structural reality that unilateralism by any single power is untenable and that the policy latitude of the 1990s cannot be recreated, even by rising states.

Bilateral relationships, while indispensable, are increasingly insufficient as regular solution providers for complex problems. Multilateralism remains a reference point for legitimacy and norm-setting, but too often functions at the lowest common denominator, is deferential to vested interests, and struggles to deliver timely action. The vacuum invites arrangements of convenience—results-oriented formats tailored to specific issues and timelines.

This environment fosters minilateralism—small, flexible, purpose-built coalitions that cumulatively cultivate a culture of plurilateralism. Earlier, regional proximity shaped cooperative institutions such as the EU, ASEAN, SAARC, and the GCC, while issue-driven collaborations took root in maritime security, counterterrorism, export controls, non-proliferation, and climate change. BRICS, spanning four continents, emerged as a different kind of rebalancing instrument, signaling a preference for multipolarity. The contemporary difference is breadth of agenda and purposive design: groups like the Quad operate with low overhead—no treaties, alliance obligations, permanent establishments, or rigid disciplines—making diplomatic frugality a virtue and speed an asset. For India, such minilaterals align with a strategic culture that values autonomy, diversified partnerships, and tangible outcomes without entangling commitments.

Multipolarity in Practice: An Indian Mapping of Domains

Multipolarity should not be reduced to a headcount of large states. It is the interplay of diverse credible powers, each wielding domain-specific capabilities, that produces outcomes through complex, often non-linear interactions rather than through a singular global hierarchy. India’s vantage point underscores how different maps of influence overlay one another without coinciding perfectly.

  • Political multipolarity: The actors that matter politically include the P-5 of the UN Security Council, collectives such as the EU and ASEAN, and regionally significant states across multiple theatres. The cast is broad, the relationships are heterogeneous, and influence is exercised through agenda-setting, convening capacity, and rule-shaping.

  • Economic multipolarity: India’s largest trade accounts cluster around key hubs—the EU, the United States, China, the Gulf, and ASEAN. This distribution does not mirror political weight precisely, reminding policymakers that trade exposure and political alignment must be managed as related but distinct variables.

  • Energy interdependence: India’s energy partners—most prominently Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the UAE, and the United States—form a configuration unlike its political or trade maps. Price dynamics, logistics, payment arrangements, and sanctions environments complicate choices, but diversification and opportunistic procurement have delivered resilience.

  • Technology partnerships: Critical technology linkages tilt towards Western economies, where cutting-edge capabilities, standards bodies, and platform companies are concentrated. Export controls and standard-setting politics, therefore, bear directly on India’s innovation ecosystem, talent mobility, and scale-up pathways.

  • Mobility and skills: The Gulf commands significant weight in India’s mobility matrix because of labor demand and geographic proximity, while the West offers higher-value addition in education, R&D, and advanced services. Policies on skilling, credentialing, social security portability, and consular protection must accommodate both realities.

Multilateral outcomes and global issues—from climate finance to digital governance—create a worldwide constituency in which voting patterns often organize by blocs or fluid caucuses. India must tailor its appeal accordingly, recognizing that as a large, rising power it cannot strategize linearly or with limited variables. Every nation now pursues its own matrix of interests; India’s task is to align coalitions across domains without presuming that preferences in one space will automatically carry over into another.

BRICS Expansion 2023: Rebalancing Without a Single Axis

The expansion of BRICS announced in South Africa in August 2023 was widely narrated as an anti-West gesture. In reality, it reflected intricate internal negotiations among existing members to identify common ground while accommodating independent calculations and overlapping interests. The six invitees—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina—already possessed strong relationships with India and with other BRICS states. Their inclinations toward multipolarity broadened BRICS’s appeal and scope, enlarging its geography, sectoral relevance, and financial heft.

The expansion coincided with a groundswell of pressure for UN Security Council reform, which catalyzed a notable evolution in the collective BRICS position. Aligning current and potential members around the principle of institutional change altered the discourse from generic dissatisfaction to a more specific agenda, one that resonates with India’s long-standing advocacy of a reformed multilateralism that reflects contemporary realities. Another salient convergence lay in promoting trade settlements in national currencies—a practical step toward financial diversification and risk mitigation consistent with multipolar objectives, even if not a near-term substitute for the dominant reserve currency system.

This moment underscored a broader truth: the international system is moving in more independent and multiple directions than binary frames suggest. Interpreting such developments exclusively through an anti-Western prism is misleading. Agency and complexity among the “others”—their calculations, capabilities, and constraints—are the critical drivers of the emerging order. For India, engaging this mosaic demands calibrated flexibility: issue-based coalitions, domain-specific partnerships, and a disciplined pursuit of autonomy that is cognizant of interdependence.

A POST-COVID WORLD

Globalization Disrupted and Mindsets Reset

Covid-19 was unprecedented not merely in its human toll but in the systemic disruption it unleashed on a tightly coupled world economy. Compared to the Spanish Flu, the density of interconnection today amplified contagion and contagion-response alike, raising public expectations of anticipatory governance, rapid international collaboration, and seamless delivery. What had functioned for the last three decades—a globalization model optimized for efficiency, lean inventories, and just-in-time flows—proved brittle under stress. The pandemic catalyzed a decisive shift in mindset from uncritical confidence in interdependence to a risk-aware approach that privileges resilience and redundancy alongside efficiency.

This recalibration does not signal the end of globalization. Its breadth is too deep, its supply, finance, and knowledge networks too embedded to be unwound without incurring prohibitive costs. Rather, the imperative is to de-risk its current incarnation: diversify sources, shorten and friend-shore some links, and rebuild buffers while simultaneously pursuing rapid economic recovery. The experience also underlined that pandemics are not black swans but recurring features of an interconnected age. The aggregation of existing national capabilities was insufficient; effective response demands a reengineering of global cooperation on a scale not previously contemplated. These disruptions have widened debates on supply-chain architecture, global governance, corporate social responsibility, and ethics, compelling more objective assessments of risk and preparedness.

Security Redefined: From Health to Manufacturing

The pandemic expanded the ambit of national security beyond the traditional triad of defence, politics, and intelligence—even beyond earlier extensions to energy, resources, and technology. Health security, food security, and manufacturing security have moved to the core. Shortages of PPE, ventilators, APIs and medicines, oxygen, and other essentials exposed how leverage could be exercised, commitments dishonoured, and logistics blocked when the system was under duress. The external efficiencies that appeared rational in normal times became unreliable in crises, and shortages themselves were weaponized.

States reacted with policy shifts variously labeled buying nationally, middle-class reassurance, dual circulation, or self-reliance. While these signifiers differ by political economy, they reflect a common judgment: security must be defined more broadly and hedged more deliberately. India’s debate on Atmanirbhar Bharat fits this pattern, not as autarky but as strategic capacity-building in critical nodes. The geoeconomic stakes are substantial: where a nation locates its production, which standards it adopts, how it manages critical stockpiles, and which technologies it indigenizes will shape its vulnerability profile and bargaining power for years.

Opacity, too, imposed costs. The early months of Covid-19 made clear that gaps in transparency—of data, of supply availability, of financial exposures—translate quickly into systemic risk. Pandemic-induced financial distress created additional vulnerabilities, including predatory acquisitions and debt traps targeting weakened firms and sectors. In this setting, strategic autonomy must be reimagined as a composite of calibrated self-sufficiency, stronger and more reliable partnerships, and an expanded menu of options to mitigate risk. As S. Jaishankar has argued, autonomy today is exercised not by standing apart but by standing on multiple platforms with the capacity to choose.

Behavioural, Cultural, and Technological Dynamics

Crisis stress narrowed definitions of self-interest and exposed wide gaps between rhetoric and behavior. Many actors departed from collective endeavours; some ceased even to articulate universal norms, revealing a tension among culture, interests, and values. Yet pluralistic societies—by virtue of their internal diversity and institutional openness—often remained more engaged with the world and displayed more resilient solidarity. Actors that treat the world as a workplace rather than merely a marketplace—that invest in communities, capabilities, and norms—have a deeper stake in staying connected even under pressure.

Simultaneously, the digital domain accelerated at remarkable speed, safeguarding service delivery but magnifying concerns about privacy, surveillance, and cyber vulnerability. The gathering momentum of AI and other critical and emerging technologies, alongside revolutions under way in energy, mobility, and communications, complicated the security calculus. The promise of digitization was real, but so were network risks, data monopolies, and technological dependencies. Governance for this domain must reconcile innovation with safeguards, openness with trust, and interdependence with sovereignty.

Supply Chains, Trusted Partnerships, and Trade Architecture

A central task is to ensure that the reconfiguration of supply chains does not create new single points of failure. For India, the answer has been to construct trusted ecosystems, combining domestic capacity with diversified external linkages. New arrangements have emerged at multiple levels: bilaterally with the United States on resilient and trusted supply chains; trilaterally with Japan and Australia to reinforce diversification; and collectively through the Quad to promote standards, transparency, and resilience across critical sectors. In parallel, the India–EU Trade and Technology Council adds a structured channel to align trade, technology, and security in tandem.

This emphasis reflects a broader convergence: in uncertain times, market economies and democratic societies offer certain institutional reassurances—rule-of-law protections, contractual reliability, regulatory predictability—that embed political trust within economic partnership. For India, whose major industrial and infrastructural build-out lies ahead, Free Trade Agreement choices should be aligned to strategic direction. Careful sequencing of FTAs can secure technology access, resources, and markets while avoiding asymmetric dependencies. In practice, this means placing a premium on partners with whom trust can be institutionalized, data safeguarded, and standards co-developed.

The Global South’s Compounded Crises and India’s Role

For much of the Global South, the trauma of Covid-19 was compounded by the Ukraine conflict, which aggravated 3F—food, fuel, and fertilizer—insecurity and disrupted trade and tourism. Open-market homilies persisted amid mounting shortages, and the memory of vaccine inequity—queue-jumping, export controls, and hoarding—generated a reasonable fear of repetition across other domains. Perceptions of insensitivity among developed countries deepened distrust and sharpened calls for equitable solutions.

India’s response combined domestic production capacity with diplomatic mobilization. It acted for itself—refusing, under pressure, to sacrifice citizen interests on vaccines, medicines, and energy—and also as a rallying point for the Global South. Its approach to energy security, including demand-side protection and supply diversification, resonated well beyond national borders as a template for balancing ethics with equity. The underlying logic was consistent: a civilizational polity like Bharat serves its people best when it builds capacity at home and voice abroad, leveraging both to widen the negotiating space for the South.

Strategic Competition, Systemic Flux, and Policy Implications for Bharat

The post-1945 world order, now in its eighth decade, shows clear signs of having run its course. Rebalancing and multipolarity are reshaping hierarchies of power even as the operating environment becomes more interdependent, tech-centric, and borderless. A pandemic surpassing any in living memory, a conflict that jolted the most complacent continent and rippled globally, a power vacuum in Afghanistan, and both departures and reaffirmations in a volatile West Asia together mark a phase of overlapping strategic competitions—a disorder under the heavens requiring stamina, prudence, and adaptability.

For India, the cause-effect lessons are unambiguous. Tight connectivity magnifies shock and therefore compels risk-aware design. Efficiency-obsessed supply chains generate fragility; resilience requires domestic depth and diversified alliances. Digital acceleration and AI expand capability but also attack surface; governance must embed privacy and security by design. Vaccine inequity and geopolitical leverage underline the primacy of trust and transparency; strategic autonomy is best advanced through self-sufficiency in critical nodes, broader partnerships, and optionality across domains.

Policy priorities flow from these insights:
– De-risk globalization by building resilient, transparent, and trusted supply chains with the United States, Japan, Australia, and the Quad, while advancing structured alignment with the EU through the Trade and Technology Council. Safeguard privacy and security across digital and AI ecosystems.
– Embed strategic direction into FTA choices and external economic engagements, aligning trade architecture with national security and technology goals; pursue calibrated self-reliance where vulnerabilities are acute and partnerships where scale, speed, and innovation require it.
– Lead and rally the Global South on equitable access to essentials—vaccines, food, fuel, and fertilizer—while maintaining principled stances that protect citizens’ interests. Project energy security policies as globally relevant public goods.
– Invest for a protracted era of multiple competitions: strengthen industrial and technological capabilities, deepen trusted partnerships, and advocate governance reforms that reflect an interdependent, tech-centric, multipolar world.

In sum, the post-Covid milieu ties together geopolitics and geoeconomics more tightly than before. For Bharat, strategic culture must internalize this fusion—treating pandemics as recurring systemic shocks, trust as a hard asset, and autonomy as a function of capacity, partnership, and choice.