Ashley J. Tellis
Ashley Tellis’s recent essay, “India’s Great-Power Delusions” (July/August 2025), offers a searing critique of the country’s strategic posture. Tellis argues that India overestimates its influence on the world stage while lacking the economic heft, military capacity, and alliances to back its great-power ambitions. He warns that India’s attachment to strategic autonomy and multipolarity risks making the country irrelevant in an era of intensifying bipolarity, when the competition between China and the United States will shape geopolitics.
This thesis is well supported by observable gaps in India’s capabilities, but it flattens the rationale behind New Delhi’s foreign policy orientation. A more nuanced critique would require understanding India not as a delusional power but as a liminal one—a state standing on a geopolitical threshold, deliberately navigating ambiguity to preserve flexibility and autonomy in a global order that is not simply cleaving in two but fracturing in more complicated ways.
India’s foreign policy is best understood through the lens of liminality, the condition of existing between worlds rather than in a fixed role or within a bloc. India is not a classic great power, but neither is it merely a regional actor. It is a titan in chrysalis, whose $4.1 trillion economy, rapidly expanding defense capacity, and influence among many countries of the so-called global South signal not delusion, but a conscious avoidance of rigid alignments. Tellis sees India’s pursuit of multipolarity as a strategic liability. Instead, it is a form of adaptive realism, an intentional pivoting strategy necessitated by geography, history, and structural constraints in the international system.
India’s geography alone justifies this cautious balancing act. Flanked by two nuclear adversaries—China to the north and Pakistan to the west—India cannot afford to align too closely with the United States without becoming more vulnerable to entanglement in great-power conflicts or retaliation from regional adversaries. Its borders are not buffered by oceans, as is the case for the United States; instead, they are live fault lines. This reality mandates engagement with rivals, particularly China. India’s relationship with China is a watchful one, marked by both détente and deterrence, a formula that seeks to manage competition without inviting conflict.
No comments:
Post a Comment