Indian Strategic Studies: 04/11/26

11 April 2026

Epstein Presented Himself to Indian Tycoon as a Trump White House Insider

Anupreeta Das

Anil Ambani, one of India’s most prominent businessmen, was eager in the early days of the first Trump administration to figure out where India might fit into the new president’s national security strategy. In 2017, that led him to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose fat Rolodex of politicians, diplomats and policymakers allowed him to present himself to Mr. Ambani as a White House insider and guide, according to a review by The New York Times of hundreds of messages exchanged by the men over a two-year period.

“Will need ur guidance on dealing wth white house for india relationship ad defense cooperation,” Mr. Ambani wrote to Mr. Epstein soon after their online introduction, according to exchanges released this year by the Justice Department. Mr. Epstein promised to get Mr. Ambani some “inside baseball.”

Pakistan’s Peacemaking Is a Setback for India

Sushant Singh

When Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar recently called Pakistan a dalal, or fixer, for acting as a messenger between the United States and Iran, the insult betrayed a profound sense of marginalization. In a sense, it was also an involuntary acknowledgment of reality: In U.S. President Donald Trump’s eyes, being a fixer is not a mark of shame but a badge of utility.

Trump boasts of his ability to secure the best deals in history, and he has found in Pakistani Army chief Asim Munir exactly the sort of interlocutor that he likes—a hard-power operator with direct access to the White House and a willingness to sell himself as useful. This has left Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an awkward position, relegated to receiving a single phone call from Trump about the crisis in the Middle East (with Elon Musk listening in on the line).

No Room for Maneuver: Why Structure Forces Taiwan’s Strategic Choice

Wayne Tan and Anita Chu

In the 21st century, the international system has returned to a bipolar structure and is heading toward a new “Cold War” (Tunsjø, 2018; Ferguson, 2019; Doshi, 2021; Beckley, 2022; Lind, 2024). Countless news reports and commentaries discuss how policymakers in the White House are obsessed with containing China’s economic and technological power, and how Beijing is attempting to break through this containment or undermine American influence. Undoubtedly, the United States and China are already in a situation of mutual confrontation. Conflicts will only proliferate, and the chain reactions of this great power rivalry will destabilize global markets and significantly heighten unpredictability. We have entered an era defined by pervasive risk and crisis.

For states situated in the Asia-Pacific, the sustained expansion of Mainland China’s economic and military power has triggered a perilous logic of hegemonic transition, compelling a strategic response from the United States (Loke, 2021). To be sure, this pessimistic Thucydidean perspective has faced academic challenges (Hanania, 2021). However, considering that the combined aggregate power of the two contemporary titans—the U.S. and China—already far exceeds that of the U.S. and Soviet Union during the previous century, this article contends that the strategic context of the current Sino-American confrontation is significantly more volatile and complex than that of the Cold War (Krickovic & Jaeyoung, 2025). Consequently, several developments merit close attention: First, in today’s international system, states such as Brazil, India, and South Africa exercise greater autonomy and agency than they did during the Cold War.

Iran’s Ballistic Missiles: Weapons of Terror That Have Failed to Deliver

Roman Pryhodko

Iran has developed the most powerful and diverse ballistic missile program in the Middle East. It constitutes a fundamental element of the national defense doctrine and serves as an instrument of regional power projection. Over the past decades, Iran’s military and political leadership has invested enormous resources in creating a self-sufficient missile industry. This sector compensates for the technological lag in traditional weapons systems, particularly the air force, which has long been constrained by international sanctions.

The evolution of Iran’s missile arsenal reflects a transition from simply purchasing and reverse-engineering Soviet models of the 1950s to developing complex, high-precision systems. Modern designs utilize solid propellant, guided warheads, and elements of hypersonic technology.

The Banality of Resistance: How We Keep Misreading Iran

Siamak Naficy

Western analysis of Iran suffers from a persistent, almost comforting delusion: that the Islamic Republic is fundamentally irrational. It’s easier that way. If Iran is driven by theology, fanaticism, or some opaque revolutionary mysticism, then its behavior can be dismissed rather than understood. Strategy becomes pathology. Policy becomes moral posture. But what if the opposite is true? What if Iran is not irrational—but rational in a way we refuse to take seriously? Because once you grant that premise, the last four decades of Iranian behavior stop looking erratic. They start looking disturbingly coherent.

Note that this is not an argument for sympathy. The Islamic Republic isn’t benign, and its leadership is not misunderstood in any charitable sense. But the prevailing story is analytically lazy. It replaces strategy with caricature. If you actually listen—really listen—to how Iranian leadership understands itself, a different picture emerges. Not a nicer one. A more dangerous one, precisely because it is coherent. At its core, the Islamic Republic does not think of itself as a religious project. It thinks of itself as the end of a historical condition: a century of humiliation, intervention, and subjugation. That’s the starting point. Miss that, and everything else looks like madness.

Inside the U.S. Special Operations Mission to Rescue a Downed F-15E Officer in Iran

Guy D. McCardle

A U.S. Air Force F-15E was shot down over Iran, leaving a weapons systems officer evading capture for more than 36 hours as American forces launched a full-scale rescue under fire. Seven thousand feet up, cut into rock and wind, a United States Air Force colonel sat alone with a pistol, a radio, and a beacon. He was bleeding. Not catastrophic, but enough to slow him down. Ejection will do that. The spine compresses. Limbs take a hit. You walk it off, or you don’t.

He moved anyway.

True to his SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training, he climbed out of the crash basin, away from wreckage, away from heat signatures and predictable search patterns. He found a crevice and stayed small. He keyed the beacon only when needed. Iranian forces were already moving. Civilians too. There was a bounty on his head, and state television was telling people to shoot on sight.

The Carter Doctrine and the Limits of Liminal Conflict in the Persian Gulf

Richard W. Coughlin

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is on the verge of superseding the limits of the liminal conflict. What is liminal conflict? Liminal conflict is a way in which states deploy bounded violence to shape the international order and to reproduce that order over time (Lacey 2024). Liminal conflict is oriented toward system maintenance rather than disruption. But in the case of the Persian Gulf, the regional order is now experiencing systemic disruption, which may escalate into systemic collapse. Both Israel’s geopolitical ambitions and Iran’s capacity to engage in horizontal escalation exceed the limits of liminal conflict. There are diplomatic responses to this conflict that can be characterized as entropic diplomacy. The goal is not to establish order but to minimize the disorder toward which the system tends.

The historical aspiration of the United States has been to order the international system rather than to permit the system to order itself (Bacevich 2010). This is because if the world orders itself, the U.S. position of the primacy within it will become eroded. But, of course, this primacy is already badly eroded from the point of view of technology and production, as Time Sahay and Kate Mackenzie (2026) emphasize with regard to energy production. The U.S. is still a financial and military power that exercises some degree of the structural power over the physical infrastructures of the global economy – financial networks, geopolitical and geoeconomic choke points. The Strait of Hormuz is significant with respect to the type of power the U.S. has – in particular, its long-term policies of power projection into the Persian Gulf to supply the world market with cheap energy.

Iran at War: Deterrence, National Identity, and Existential Stakes

Tewfik Hamel

To read the present conflict in Iran only through the categories of the Iran-Israel rivalry or the Tehran-Washington confrontation is to miss its most consequential dimension. For Israel, the central problem is the neutralization of a military and potentially nuclear threat. By the time of the military attacks of June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that Iran had accumulated 9,247.6 kg of enriched uranium in total; by the time of the attacks in mid-June 2025, it had also accumulated 440.9 kg enriched up to 60 percent U-235, making it the only non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT to have produced and accumulated material at that level (IAEA 2025a; IAEA 2026). For the United States, the conflict is embedded in a broader calculus of regional security, alliance credibility, energy security, and escalation control. For several Arab states, it is principally a matter of balance, containment, and spillover management. Tehran, however, increasingly appears to read the war in a different register: not simply as another episode in a long regional struggle, but as a crisis touching the continuity of the state itself.

What should be done about Iran’s potential secret chemical and biological weapons programs?

Christina McAllister, Richard T. Cupitt

Ahead of a televised address Wednesday, critics wanted US President Donald Trump to lay out a clear roadmap for ending the now month-long war in Iran and clarify the objectives for having started it. Denying that his goal was ever regime change, Trump emphasized in his speech the objective of preventing Iran from possessing a nuclear weapon. However, the future course of the conflict remains nearly as murky on Thursday as it was the previous day, as does the future of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. That’s also true of the status of possible secret chemical and biological weapons programs that appear to have received scant attention during recent events—despite years of US and likeminded-partner country concerns and sanctions.

After reportedly considering a ground-invasion to retrieve Iran’s highly enriched uranium, Trump said on Wednesday the country’s “nuclear dust” was inaccessibly buried under rubble and would be monitored by satellite (notably, the same status it was left in after last summer’s US-Israeli attacks, before this latest war). That may not reassure observers who fear that now Iran—its regime under severe stress, but expected to hold on to power—has more of an incentive to cross the nuclear weapons “threshold.”

The Real War for Iran’s Future Who Will Determine the Fate of the Islamic Republic?

Afshon Ostovar

On March 1, 2026, the Iranian government made it official. “After a lifetime of struggle,” a state broadcaster declared, “Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei drank the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom and joined the Supreme Heavenly Kingdom.” The broadcaster praised Khamenei for being “unceasing and untiring” and for his “lofty and celestial spirit.” As he read the announcement, people offscreen wailed. When he finished, he, too, broke down in tears.

Most Iranians probably didn’t cry when they learned of Khamenei’s passing. For over 35 years, Iran’s supreme leader ruled with an iron fist, repressing women, minorities, and anyone who dared

A Plan to End the Iran War?

Lawrence Freedman

This post was largely written yesterday with the aim of identifying a possible way forward to bring an end to the Iran War. This morning Reuters is reporting that Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, has been in contact ‘all night long’ with US ⁠Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to come up with a plan to be known as the ‘Islamabad Accords’. Under the proposal, a ceasefire would take effect immediately, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with 15–20 days to finalise a broader settlement. The report also notes that buy in from Iran is uncertain.

My post looks at the two alternative approaches adopted by President Trump to ending the war and why neither of them currently works, and then the challenges facing Iran. I take a critical look at the Pakistani plan and end with a suggestion that I haven’t seen made elsewhere (for understandable reasons!)

Gulf Energy Strikes Risk Catastrophic Environmental Disaster – Analysis

Gabriele Malvisi

When Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwait in 1991, they left more than 700 oil wells burning in their wake. The fires took eight months to extinguish, spewing smoke plumes that stretched some 800 miles and spilling 11 million barrels of crude into the Gulf. It was one of the largest man-made environmental disasters on record. More than three decades on, the current US-Israeli war with Iran, which has seen oil infrastructure bombed across the region, has ignited fears of a comparable catastrophe.

“The 1991 Gulf War oil fires, while concentrated in Kuwait, were on a far greater scale than what we are seeing presently,” said Doug Weir, director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK-based nonprofit.

There Is No Military Solution To Strait Of Hormuz – OpEd

M.K. Bhadrakumar

Indian media have spread misconceptions over the meeting convened by the UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper on Thursday 2nd April regarding the situation around the Strait of Hormuz. Far-fetched conclusions are drawn that the meeting marked the first step toward forming a coalition to restore safe passage; plans include clearing mines from the waterway in consultation with military planners in the coming weeks, and so on.

We should not frighten the Indian community living in the Persian Gulf region. A military confrontation with Iran is not even in the wildest dreams of anyone in Europe. The US didn’t even attend the London meet.

DW News | Ukraine’s Quiet Push – The Success Ukraine Doesn’t Want To Talk About

“Ukraine’s Quiet Push — The Success Ukraine Doesn’t Want to Talk About,” a DW News video report featuring an extended on-the-record interview with DW’s longtime Kyiv correspondent Nick Connolly, provides an assessment of several underreported Ukrainian operational successes in early 2025. Ukrainian forces have conducted an escalating campaign of long-range drone strikes against Russian oil refineries and Baltic port infrastructure, deploying larger warheads that have amplified economic disruption and complicated Russia’s ability to monetize elevated global oil prices—though Ukrainian commanders now face Western political pressure to curtail those attacks.

Ukrainian forces have also “quietly” recaptured hundreds of square kilometers in the Zaporizhzhia sector, surpassing the territorial gains of the much-publicized 2023 counteroffensive, but have deliberately suppressed public messaging about these advances to avoid the credibility damage from overpromising two years prior. SpaceX’s February 2025 decision to terminate unauthorized Russian access to Starlink degraded Russian drone operations and command-and-control links, opening tactical windows that Ukrainian units exploited along the southern front before Russia began fielding improvised antenna alternatives. Russia’s spring offensive has produced negligible territorial returns at extraordinary human cost, with combined killed and wounded estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and Connolly assesses that, absent a collapse in Western financial support, a withdrawal of intelligence sharing, or an unexpected internal rupture within Russia itself, no near-term end to the conflict is plausible.

From Bargain to Breakdown: Five Strategic Futures for the Iran War

Chase Metcalf, Michael Posey

Wars rarely end as their participants expect. Military campaigns launched to achieve clear political objectives often produce ambiguous, incomplete, or entirely unforeseen outcomes. The outcome of the conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States will shape not only Iran’s nuclear ambitions but also the balance of power in the Middle East and the security of one of the world’s most vital energy corridors.

As Carl von Clausewitz reminds us, “war is ultimately a continuation of policy by other means.” Military operations may reshape the battlefield, but the outcome of war is determined by political decisions and strategic adaptation. Rather than predicting a single outcome, strategists often explore multiple plausible futures to understand the risks and opportunities that may emerge. As President Trump took office, we offered our thoughts on potential scenarios for the Russian-Ukrainian War, and we do so here again.

The Iran Imperative How America and Israel Can Shape a New Middle East

Amos Yadlin and Avner Golov

In early 2024, the Islamic Republic of Iran was riding high. It was the dominant external actor in four Middle Eastern states: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Its missiles and armed proxies menaced and coerced Arab countries. Israel, Tehran’s main enemy, had been damaged by Hamas’s October 2023 attack and was fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies. The Islamic Republic’s nuclear program was moving steadily closer to producing a weapon as Iranian officials enriched uranium to 60 percent and expanded their ballistic missile manufacturing. Suddenly, the regime’s long-standing calls for “death to Israel” and “death to America” seemed

The Iran Shock And the Dangerous Allure of Energy Autarky

Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan

Within days of the initial U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, the world was plunged into an energy crisis. Tehran’s near shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas transit each day, amounted to the largest disruption of global energy flows in history, according to the International Energy Agency. Within the first three weeks of the conflict, oil prices rose by 55 percent. Gasoline jumped by roughly a dollar a gallon, and heating oil and jet fuel soared even higher. Many countries began to ration fuel, shorten workweeks, and close factories. It quickly became clear that until the strait reopened, prices would continue to climb, boosting inflation and dampening growth.

This crisis may appear to be unprecedented, but its contours are familiar. In 1973, Arab members of OPEC embargoed oil exports to countries supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, causing a dramatic price spike that traumatized American consumers and contributed to high inflation and slow growth. The 1973 crisis also inspired efforts to avoid another shock. Governments took steps to reduce their reliance on imports, build strategic stocks, and pursue greater cooperation and market integration. Over time, policymakers grew more comfortable trusting their countries’ energy security to global markets.

Europe’s Untapped Arsenal

Elina Ribakova

Immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, Ukrainian leaders pleaded with their American and European partners to help protect the skies over their territory. NATO’s air defense systems could protect Ukraine’s civilians, troops, and infrastructure from Russian missiles, albeit with a hefty price tag and a risk of escalation. Western leaders declined.

Today, it is Ukraine’s military assistance that is in demand. In response to a joint attack by the United States and Israel in late February, Iran began firing hundreds of missiles and drones at U.S. partners across the Middle East. The

The Next Coup Attempt

Timothy Snyder

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth are stuck in the logic of escalation, according to which the feeling of defeat today can be reversed by doing the first thing that comes to mind tomorrow. Trump is surrounded by people who are making money from the war; each day of war strengthens a warmongering lobby with personal access to the president. As the war lengthens, the chance that it will be exploited for a coup attempt increases.

Trump falling into Iran’s asymmetric resolve trap

Charles Walldorf

The Iranian people have not risen up, one hard-line leader has been replaced by another, Iranian missiles and drones keep hitting targets across the Middle East, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, driving oil and gas prices up worldwide, and in sharp contrast to Trump’s demand for “unconditional surrender,” Tehran has rejected a 15-point US plan for a ceasefire.

So how did things go so wrong?

As a scholar who researches US forever wars, I believe the answer is simple: Trump, like other US presidents before him, has fallen into what I call the trap of asymmetric resolve. In short, this occurs when a stronger power with less determination to fight starts a military conflict with a far weaker state that has near boundless determination to prevail. Victory for the strong becomes tough, even close to impossible.

In Iran, air power fails America once again

John Arquilla

When it comes to military affairs, wars sometimes act as time portals. Waged in the present, they frequently reflect the powerful pull of the past. They may also provide glimpses of the future of conflict, but too often it is the past that dominates the present. The current war against Iran is no exception, for the long American love affair with strategic bombing – which the Israelis have eagerly imported from the US military, and which is now heavily complemented by missiles – remains on full display.

Whether the war reaches a dismal conclusion or even expands with ground operations in the next few days, its lessons are becoming clearer. It should be no surprise that bombing alone has failed to defang the Iranian military or upend the ruling regime. American strategic air campaigns have regularly failed to achieve their goals for over 75 years.

A.I. Is on Its Way to Upending Cybersecurity

Cade Metz and Kate Conger

Anthropic said late last year that state-sponsored Chinese hackers had used its artificial intelligence technology in an effort to infiltrate the computer systems of roughly 30 companies and government agencies around the world. In a blog post, Anthropic said it was the first reported case of a cyberattack in which A.I. technologies had gathered sensitive information with limited help from human operators. Human hackers, the company said, handled about 10 to 20 percent of the work needed to conduct the attack.

Five months later, that remains the only known example of a cyberattack driven largely by an “A.I. agent” — technology that can write computer code and use software on its own. But as Anthropic and its chief rival, OpenAI, prepare to release new and more powerful A.I. systems, cybersecurity experts are increasingly vocal in their warnings that A.I. is fundamentally changing cybersecurity.

Cloud-Seeding a Revolution

MAJ Collin Hayward

In his excellent podcast on the Pacific War, Supernova in the East, Dan Carlin referred to the Japanese attempt to use the Indian National Army to foment a broad-based anti-colonial uprising in British India as an attempt to “cloud-seed a revolution”. This is an apt description. In cloud-seeding, scientists cannot create rain but can assess favorable conditions for it and release materials into the environment to precipitate that desired outcome. Throughout history, irregular warfare practitioners have attempted to foment unrest in adversary populations. Emerging technological trends present new opportunities to subvert and destabilize adversarial regimes by exploiting rifts in their societies. This piece outlines the process through which such a campaign could be conducted, explores why states might choose this approach, identifies the relevance of this approach to the contemporary operating environment and to Special Operations Forces, and addresses the risks and limitations of this approach.

How to Cloud-Seed a Revolution

When directed by national leadership to pursue the destabilization of an adversary regime, information warfare professionals employ a phased approach. In the first phase, they characterize the information and political environment to identify rifts in civil society, susceptible demographics, key grievances, previous protest movements, and credible local voices, as well as preferred local messaging and networking platforms. With this data, they then conduct link analysis; map networks; identify narratives, themes, messages, and symbols that would resonate with the target audience; and initiate deliberate planning. After developing an operational approach, they prepare the information environment by creating and conditioning social media accounts in key demographics or identifying existing accounts they could employ for this purpose.

France’s Efforts To Strengthen Its Drone Warfare Capabilities: Focus on the 2024-2030 Military Programming Law (MPL)

Samson Roudière Aboulkheir

Article 34 of the 1958 French Constitution establishes programming laws that set long-term policy frameworks and define multi-year budget orientations—typically spanning 4 to 7 years. The Loi de Programmation Militaire (Military Programming Law or MPL) applies this mechanism to national defense. It outlines the French armed forces’ main priorities, identifies strategic challenges, and allocates the financial resources needed to modernize the military over the designated period. The 2024–2030 MPL seeks to reinforce France’s sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Compared with the previous law, it significantly increases defense spending.

The MPL document states that the convergence of hybrid warfare and high-intensity conflict—illustrated by Russia’s war in Ukraine—requires scaling up the French Army’s equipment and capabilities and enhancing joint operations. The document outlines a major threat: “The international jihadist movement continues to present a significant security challenge for both Western states and fragile countries across the Muslim world, from Africa to Southeast Asia.” The document presents other evolving threats, including the use of proxies by competing powers to undermine French influence; mounting pressure on French overseas territories, particularly from China; and the destabilizing effects of climate change, which aggravate crises in fragile regions.

Hegseth’s War on America’s Military

Tom Nichols

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Ousted Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George says U.S. soldiers deserve "courageous leaders of character" in outgoing email

Lucia I Suarez Sang

Ousted Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Randy George, told Pentagon officials in an outgoing email that U.S. soldiers deserve "courageous leaders of character," after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked him to step down and take immediate retirement. CBS News exclusively reported earlier this week on the general's ousting, with one source saying Hegseth wants someone in the role who will implement his and President Trump's vision for the Army.

An outgoing email, attributed to George and confirmed as authentic by CBS News on Saturday, circulated online after his ousting. A U.S. official told CBS News that George sent the email to Driscoll, the undersecretary and assistant secretary of the Army, as well as to the three- and four-star generals and officers on his staff.