July 30, 2025

What Kind of Great Power Will India Be? | The Quad Power

By: Lisa Curtis

This article was originally published on Foreign Affairs.

As Tellis makes clear, India’s long-held strategy of promoting a multipolar world order has become counterproductive for New Delhi. The concept of a multipolar order is seductive to Indian policymakers, who think India would have more influence if global power were dispersed. Such calculations may have made sense 25 years ago, when India, with its rapid economic growth, seemed poised to challenge China’s influence in Asia. In the last two decades, however, China has widened the power gap with India considerably, in economic as well as military terms.

That deficit means that India’s vision of a multipolar order, in which power is evenly distributed among a handful of countries, is no longer realistic. Worse, seeking such an order now plays directly into China’s hands. China and Russia both push for a multipolar world to overturn international norms and institutions that have largely kept the peace in the Indo-Pacific for the last 50 years. Far from aiding India’s rise, multipolarity would only confirm Chinese hegemony in Asia and make India more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.

Read the full article on Foreign Affairs.

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