Category Archives: international affairs

Geopolitics, India - U.S., international affairs, Writing

The fault line in India, US ties: America doesn’t understand ‘equal’

New Delhi must respond with open-eyed diplomacy, not open-hearted sentiment.

US President Donald Trump’s visit to China may not be remembered by posterity as much as Richard Nixon’s famous trip in 1972. But it has forced Indians to confront the parallels with what was hitherto considered the darkest chapter of the India-US relationship.

Nixon, like Trump, believed that resetting relations with China was in paramount American interest. Nixon, like Trump, led a White House and establishment that was instinctively unsympathetic to Indian concerns. And Nixon, like Trump, viewed the Pakistani military leadership through rose-tinted glasses. Nobody, not even ordinary Pakistanis, has ever celebrated a Pakistani military dictator more than Nixon or Trump.

But here is what matters: The relationship between India and the United States survived Nixon. It grew and flourished. The partnership is stronger than any one person, even an enormously consequential president. It is greater than any administration, any party, any geopolitical moment. It is beneficial for both and yet it is not definitional for either. We can live without it.

In the past, India navigated a hostile White House, a hostile establishment, and an indifferent American public. Today’s position is better, even if the Trump White House returns to overt hostility from its current passive-aggressive demeanor. Large sections of the Washington establishment continue to value the bilateral partnership. People-to-people connections have deepened. And the business-to-business ties of investment, innovation and trade have already demonstrated their capacity to ignore and outlast shifts in capital markets or political fashion.

This is not to minimise divergences that are neither superficial nor personality-driven. A structural faultline has emerged in Indo-US relations. It cannot be papered over. There are, in fact, three faultlines, not one.

India’s energy security, its abiding concern in global affairs, is imperiled by American unilateralism and breathtaking double standards on sourcing fuel from Russia. Washington’s search for detente with China removes the relationship’s strategic ballast. And India has reforged its sense of self: It will, and it must, continue to refuse to play the compliant partner to a whimsical Washington. These are serious, structural disagreements. They deserve to be named as such.

But we must also recognise the institutional convergences that persist. Bilateral military-to-military cooperation. Strands of collaboration under the Quad’s umbrella that Trump dislikes and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ambassador Sergio Gor seek to cleverly sustain. The INDUS-X defence ecosystem. The TRUST initiative for emergent technology and critical minerals and multiple supply chain partnerships. All of these receive undiminished official energy, and will continue to do so. And hard words and the 50 per cent tariffs notwithstanding, a trade deal was eventually arrived at. The glue holds. Barely, but it holds.

We should think of this moment as an opportunity. The US-India relationship has always been sold as an inevitable strategic convergence. But until recently, it was something else: Two very different civilisational world-views cohabiting uneasily. What Trump’s arrival did was strip away the diplomatic veneer.

New Delhi must respond with open-eyed diplomacy, not open-hearted sentiment. It must engage all strands of thought in the United States, a democracy almost as diverse and complex as ours. Trumpism may outlast Trump — both sides of the aisle asking, if in more polished terms, the same uncomfortable questions the current administration has posed.

The truth is that this president has done us a favour. We can now rework this relationship on more honest, durable terms.

This cohabitation was in many ways an arranged marriage. The two countries were joined together by a panchayat of wise elders: P V Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Bill Clinton, Manmohan Singh, George Bush, and their generations. The arranged-marriage mantra is: Ceremony first, compatibility later. For our two nations, the strategic relationship came first. Strategic convergence was supposed to follow.

It didn’t. Our worldviews did not converge the way matchmakers anticipated. A philosophical gap, one rooted in our respective democratic cultures, has persisted: India does not understand alliances; America does not understand autonomy.

In any marriage, both partners change, compromise and build a partnership of equals. A relationship between two civilisation-states is no different. The White House cannot write the rules of marriage without co-opting India’s distinctiveness. Until Washington accepts that India is an ancient nation with its own immutable timeline and unalterable threat calculus, and not a junior supplicant seeking admission to some charmed circle, this relationship will oscillate between promise and frustration. The fact is, America does not understand “equal”.

New Delhi is not holding its breath. As the old order dissipates, India is neither dismantling nor defending it. Foreign policy and strategic autonomy have visibly been very hard work and yet an imperative. To be fair, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team are rearranging the pieces rather well. India has discovered a new and appropriate proximity and distance to the US, deeper strategic intimacy with the EU, recalibration with Beijing — while engaging Moscow in a dynamic world.

The India-US partnership will endure. It survived Nixon; it will survive Trump. But whether it matures is a different question entirely. The answer depends on one thing alone: America deciding it can accept India on mutually agreeable terms. The Trump White House doesn’t understand the question. Perhaps its successor will need to find the answer.

Originally Appeared in Indian Express. Read it here

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Geopolitics, international affairs, Writing

Six shades of leadership: A Davos barometer

As the traditional global order fractures, Davos 2026 reveals a new reality: The future no longer belongs to those with the most eloquent rhetoric, but to the leaders combining technical competence with the quiet confidence of actual delivery.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, is not merely an assemblage of elites; it is a barometer of the zeitgeist. Each year, it reveals how leaders interpret power, responsibility and risk in a changing world. This year’s interventions presented six distinct shades of leadership, conveyed through four key perspectives and embodied by two central actors. Together, they present not consensus, but a sharp study in contrast.

 The first shade was managerial stewardship, articulated by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. His address pointed to a moment of “rupture.” He argued that intensifying great-power rivalry has led countries to seek “greater strategic autonomy,” creating a “world of fortresses.”

Carney’s speech was rooted in institutional confidence. He framed the strengthening of domestic economies and collective investment in resilience as twin objectives, arguing for a world order that respects human rights, sustainable development and sovereignty. His Davos was a call to be “principled and pragmatic” rather than to re-architect the global order. This was leadership that trusts existing institutions and believes the world still has the patience to let them work.

The second shade was transactional disruption, communicated by United States President Donald Trump. His rhetoric rejected multilateral restraint in favor of bilateral leverage, presenting economic gain as an overriding priority and alliances as instruments rather than obligations. The message was clear: prosperity follows power, not process. As Trump put it, “We’re a great power […] I think they found that out.” With a focus on tariffs and trade deficits, his Davos was interested only in outcomes, not rules, in immediacy, not institution-building.

The third shade was a desire for normative leadership, expressed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She sought to reaffirm Europe’s belief that values can still anchor power, citing climate leadership, rules-based trade and responsible digital cooperation as sources of strategic strength.

Yet, there lay an unresolved tension: Europe’s influence rests on standards, but its ability to enforce them is being tested by a world that respects speed, scale and leverage more than value-based persuasion. Von der Leyen’s was a Davos of aspiration, eloquent and principled, but also one of wistfulness: “The cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not turned into reality.”

The fourth shade was a return to the principle of inclusion, articulated by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto. The conviction that “there will be no prosperity without peace” framed his speech. Prabowo highlighted Indonesia’s recognition as a “global bright spot,” a result of a legacy of “unity over fragmentation and collaboration over confrontation,” alongside a consistently unblemished record of debt repayment. His Davos was one of excellence at home and cooperation with the world on mutually beneficial terms, proving that sound domestic investment creates international gravity.

Together, these four perspectives revealed a fractured global conversation: stewardship without urgency, disruption without responsibility, values without sufficient power and peace over chaos.

The fifth shade emerged not through rhetoric but through technical confidence, embodied by Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s electronics and IT minister. Speaking on India’s progress in manufacturing and its transformational digital public infrastructure, Vaishnaw carried a quiet authority. He presented India’s story as proof of capability rather than a plea for recognition. On the AI race, he observed that producing massive large language models (LLMs) did not necessarily grant an edge; rather, the creative deployment of AI did. His understated style reminded audiences that credibility flows from delivery, not declaration, setting the stage for the AI Impact Summit in India later this month.

The sixth shade was political presence, represented by Smriti Irani at the WEF Lead Pavilion. Her engagement focused on asserting India’s voice on women’s leadership, health and enterprise through the Alliance for Global Good.

Since its launch, the Alliance has significantly scaled its coalition-building. In 2026, the focus shifted to women’s health as an “economic and national imperative.” Irani’s message, placing women at the center of decision-making, resonated across governments and business movements alike.

Together, these six shades tell a story of a leadership landscape fragmenting across temperaments: managerial, transactional, normative, inclusive, technical and political. Davos remains the stage, but it no longer writes the script. The most consequential leadership today will be provided by those who combine competence with confidence, and ambition with delivery.

 In that sense, the clarity of the Indian and Indonesian interventions signified that the future belongs not to those who speak most eloquently about the world, but to those who are steadily building it.

Originally Appeared in The JakartaPost

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BRICS, Budapest Global Dialogue, Geopolitics, international affairs, Writing

The Budapest Dossier 2025: Choices In This New World

Ed Samir Saran | Gladden J Pappin

Editors’ Note

As the world begins a second quarter of the current century, there is a clear reshaping of the global balance of power. Yet, it is not only the diffusion of power that is shifting; so is the organising logic of the global system itself, moving toward security and resilience, and carrying implications for economic integration, strategic partnerships, and institutional cooperation. For Europe, this is a moment of strategic reflection; for emerging powers, a moment of assertive arrival.

The essays in this volume probe the tensions and opportunities of a world in transition—the struggle to rebuild credible multilateralism, the race for technological and economic sovereignty, and the search for forms of connectivity and cooperation that strengthen, rather than surrender, national agency. Together, these articles compel a rethinking of inherited assumptions and remind us that legitimacy today is earned through capability, credibility, and the courage to design new compacts. The future will be scripted less by legacy alliances, and more by a wider constellation of actors—from Europe to the emerging powers—with Hungary positioned as a critical bridge in these unfolding conversations.

The Budapest Dossier 2025 captures this moment of inflection, convening scholars across disciplines and geographies to illuminate how a world in flux is recasting its political, economic, and strategic foundations.

Kwame Owino argues that global economic fragmentation—through rising regionalism and stalled multilateral reform—creates new vulnerabilities for sub-Saharan Africa’s lower- and middle-income economies. In a multipolar world shaped by larger emerging powers, Africa’s strongest anchor remains a functioning multilateral system.

Philipp Siegert argues that Europe’s geopolitical comfort zone has collapsed as the global system and global order drift out of alignment. The European Union (EU), caught between globalisation, state agency, and democracy, now confronts an intensified version of Rodrik’s Trilemma that it can no longer evade. He contends that only a shift toward “sovereign internationalism” and adaptive connectivity can restore Europe’s strategic relevance.

Márton Ugrósdy casts Hungary’s worldview as a sovereignty-first doctrine that rejects supranational presumption and globalist orthodoxy, insisting that power and legitimacy rise from the people. Everything else—EU cooperation, global partnerships, foreign policy—follows from that foundational conviction.

Péter Siklósi shows that Europe’s call for autonomy rings hollow in a moment when only NATO underwrites its security. Caught between renewed threats and insufficient capabilities, Europe remains reactive, and not a shaper of the emerging order.

Kimlong Chheng argues that Europe is caught in a crisis of identity and cohesion, where fraying values and sovereignty battles unsettle its political core. These tensions weaken Europe’s regulatory ambition and strategic confidence. Its relevance in a multipolar world, he contends, hinges on restoring trust and a coherent values-driven compass.

Philip Pilkington argues that Europe’s competitiveness crisis is being fundamentally misread: the real rupture is not technological lag but the loss of cheap energy after the eruption of the war in Ukraine. He shows that protectionism, industrial policy, and the Draghi Report all skirt the core issue, leaving Europe to drift toward de-industrialisation. Until the energy question is confronted head-on, Europe cannot reclaim economic strength nor strategic agency.

Victoria V. Panova presents BRICS as a non-Western coalition pushing for an inclusive, law-based global order grounded in equality and respect. As Western structures retreat into coercion, she argues, BRICS offers a more constructive model for a plural world.

Sunaina Kumar casts the Indo-Pacific as the heat engine of global geopolitics—an arena where great-power rivalry collides with the region’s central role in trade, growth, and climate stability. She argues that the challenge for regional actors is to balance security imperatives with deeply interdependent economic futures, using flexible coalitions and minilaterals to navigate an increasingly fractured order. The Indo-Pacific’s ability to shape the emerging system, she observes, depends on inclusive cooperation, resilient connectivity, and a shared commitment to sustainable development.

Lydia Kostopoulos argues that the fusion of AI, data, and converging technologies has turned geopolitics into technogeopolitics, forcing states to reclaim sovereignty in a domain increasingly dominated by private actors. She underscores the need for nations to invest in resilient energy and digital infrastructure, craft trustworthy regulation, and deploy agile policy tools like sandboxes to stay competitive. The future of statecraft, she writes, will belong to countries that wield technology as a deliberate instrument of national power.

Boglárka Ballester-Bólya argues that Europe’s slide in competitiveness is largely self-inflicted—driven by regulatory excess, ideological policymaking, and an energy regime that undermines industry. Hungary’s call for “less red tape, more innovation” is framed as a strategic course correction, restoring productivity, affordability, and ambition. She warns that unless Brussels embraces pragmatism over performative governance, Europe will watch the global race from the sidelines.

Matthias Bauer’s essay portrays a Europe tangled in its own rules — overregulated, under-scaled, and falling behind while others accelerate. He insists that only bold, continent-wide legal harmonisation can restore Europe’s ability to innovate, attract investment, and compete at the technological frontier. Fragmentation, Bauer warns, is not just inefficient—it is a quiet erosion of Europe’s global standing.

Stephen R. Nagy casts infrastructure as the new battleground of sovereignty, where small and medium-sized states craft manoeuvrability through diversified partnerships. Nagy argues that ASEAN and Hungary hedge through connectivity—engaging China, Japan, the United States, and others without surrendering choice or autonomy. In a divided world, he writes, infrastructure is not dependency but agency in physical form.

Jagannath Panda describes the Indo-Pacific as moving from a United States-led hierarchy to a diffuse, coalition-driven order shaped by strategic autonomy, hedging, and competing connectivity visions. As the United States’ centrality wavers and China advances its architectural ambitions, India emerges as the region’s stabilising anchor—democratic, autonomous, and increasingly central to the strategic calculations of major powers. The future, he says, will be written not by hegemonies but by networks of states unwilling to be bound by any single pole.

Szabolcs Pásztor argues that ‘slowbalisation’ has not fully fractured the world into rival blocs but propelled it into a new era of networked connectivity, where emerging economies have become hubs rather than peripheries. South–South trade, digital flows, and value-chain linkages now drive global growth, making decoupling both costly and illusory. He contends that the future belongs to bridges—open standards, cross-regional infrastructure, and cooperative institutions that keep the global system resilient and open.

These essays converge on a simple truth: the international system is being rebuilt in real time. Those who combine resilience, capability, and cooperative ambition will not only endure this transition but help define its architecture.

Read the monograph here.

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Global South, Green Technology, international affairs, Sustainable Development, Writing

Issue Brief : The Green Development Compact: Atlantic Ambition, Southern Scale

Amitabh Kant | Samir Saran

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) have shifted beyond market-led climate action toward state-backed green industrial policy, driven by competitiveness, economic security, and technological leadership concerns. Despite differences in approach, Atlantic strategies share an inward focus that positions the Global South primarily as a consumer market or supplier of intermediate inputs. Such models are politically unsustainable for developing economies and economically inefficient for achieving the scale required for the global energy transition. This brief argues for moving from competition-driven industrial policy toward co-development and shared prosperity across regions. It proposes a Green Development Compact that integrates Northern capital, innovation, and corporate capacity with Southern scale, speed, and renewable endowments. It outlines practical instruments to operationalise this framework, including long-term offtake guarantees, shared innovation commons, and financial mechanisms that reduce risk for Southern projects.

Read more here.

Source: ORF Website, January 3, 2026

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Global Governance, international affairs, multilateralism, Multipolar World, Writing

Annual Trends Report : Beyond Global Polarization: New Cooperation Wanted

Foreword by Karim El Aynaoui, Paolo Magri, Samir Saran

In 2025, the global landscape became increasingly fragmented and uncertain. Great power competition intensified, regional conflicts became protracted and exacerbated, while economic nationalism reshaped the rules of trade and development. The mechanisms for conflict resolution and cooperation that have long provided a foundation for international cooperation are now under strain due to polarization and mistrust. Even longstanding alliances, bilateral and collective security architectures at the core of international security system have not escaped these changes. While some attribute these trends to the emergence of a multipolar world order, there is no consensus whether such a transformation is occurring or on the causal link. There is agreement only on the notion that the world is moving beyond the post-cold war order and that, eighty years after the creation of the UN, institutional reform is overdue.

Yet while these challenges and the erosion of traditional mechanisms of cooperation understandably dominate the attention of the public, policymakers and the expert community, they do not tell the whole story. Amidst polarization, unilateral policies and growing calls by political leaders to adopt inward-looking policies, new and pragmatic forms of cooperation are emerging. By keeping sight of the shared interest in coordinating responses to global challenges, these efforts are, in effect, transcending some of the existing divides between nations of the North and the South. They therefore might merit recognition and sustained support, not only for their potential transformative impact but also for the message they convey: that alternative pathways are possible! It is the ultimate acknowledgement that living in a world where an increasing diversity of political, economic, and social models coexists and where differing visions of governance and development are put forward comes with difficulties. Yet this very reality also offers a great opportunity: plurality is key to finding appropriate responses to emerging challenges.

It is in that spirit that leaders and experts from over 100 countries convened in February 2025 for the AI Action Summit. The summit highlighted innovation, real-world applications, and economic prospects of AI, while also addressing wider risks. The signing by 58 nations, including Morocco, India and Italy, and various international organizations of the Statement on Inclusive and Sustainable Artificial Intelligence for People and the Planet demonstrates that a core group of countries willing to mutualize their efforts is emerging.

On the war in Gaza, the High-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and Implementation of the Two-State Solution, held in July, showed that many nations were eager to move past the deadlock in the UN Security Council and take collective action to end the war and discuss the contours of a comprehensive peace plan for the region, before the Gaza Peace Plan was signed by the parties and endorsed by the UN Security Council in early October. The New York Declaration, which is the outcome document of the July conference, was endorsed by 142 nations when they voted in favor of a UN General Assembly resolution backing the document. This stands as a reminder that coalitions can be formed across traditional divides. It is also a testament that when political will converges, pragmatic partnerships can emerge that transcend national interests, regional rivalries, or historical grievances. Unfortunately, at the moment a similar convergence has not yet fully materialized on the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Similarly, on the economic front, at a time when protectionism and economic nationalism seem to dominate the global narrative, it is important to recognize that new avenues for economic cooperation are also developing, as is the case for the Future of Investment and Trade Partnership (FITP), which brings together 14 small and medium-sized economies to support open and rules-based global trade. In sum, these efforts matter not only because they push back against the perception of an inevitable slide into isolationism or polarization into opposite camps at the international level, but also because they concretely demonstrate that pragmatic alliances that include diverse nations are still possible. Even when they operate outside traditional frameworks, such initiatives serve the broader global public interest by keeping channels of cooperation open. What stands out in these initiatives is the imagination behind them: a willingness to adapt, to experiment, and to work together in spite of differences. They reflect a simple truth: the challenges we face are shared, and the responses will only be effective if they are coordinated.

This belief is at the heart of the partnership between the Policy Center for the New South (PCNS, Morocco), the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI), and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF, India). Our three institutions coordinate a partnership that extends across regions, disciplines, and perspectives. The tripartite initiative that we launched in 2023 frames our strategic deliberations and engagement. It is an avenue for over 400 experts from three continents to meet, exchange, conduct research, and disseminate findings and cross-perspectives. One of the outputs of this joint research, the Annual Trends report, today in its third edition, seeks to provide a forward-looking analysis of global developments, to highlight areas where cooperation is possible, and to contribute ideas for a more inclusive and resilient international order.

This edition explores five key areas: global governance, security, the economy and development, energy and climate, and new technologies and the digital transition, underscoring that in a polarized world where blame and scapegoating consume valuable time, genuine progress depends on constructive engagement that brings together willing partners across regions to move beyond confrontation and build practical paths toward cooperation.

At the same time, even as new initiatives and partnerships take shape, this should not lead us to abandon the frameworks that have long underpinned international cooperation. Reforms are necessary, but they must not serve as an excuse to neglect the preservation of global public goods. These institutions remain the pillars that make cooperation possible, and investing in them is essential if we are to turn shared challenges into shared solutions.

Read the volume here.

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