Representative image. | Hive 42.
“Might makes right” and the flawed argument of “pre-emptive” attacks under International Law (Article 51, UN Charter) has thrown the global order into incessant chaos. India must leverage its strategic partnerships to channel peace, security and stability.
Despite challenges and miscalculations, India has continued to prove its detractors wrong since 1947 to be in its current position. This era offers a historic test for its evolving global standing and statesmanship. More than choosing sides, the onus is on India, to choose its role going forward.
Introduction
Be it the outcome of Great Power Competition giving rise to geopolitical multipolarity or the emergence of new (middle) powers preferring multilateralism leading to friction, the past few years have come to be characterized by a state of constant global conflict and a pervasive sense of insecurity across the world. The last few weeks came as a further shock for the international system’s faltering recent track record.
No reasonable citizen of the world can condone the extent of Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 7, 2023. A grave humanitarian crisis, owing to a criminally disproportionate response to the dastardly terrorist attack on its soil by Hamas that claimed over a thousand civilian Israeli lives. It has been denounced internationally and led to increased isolation of Israel’s strongman Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel has opened fronts with Iran’s proxies – Hezbollah (Lebanon) and the Houthis (Yemen) – and Syria, alongside, all of whom have long engaged in terrorizing Israel’s encircled existence over the years. Even if politically and militarily ambitious, it is an understandable course of action in light of the ensuing regional tensions. However, to conduct an unprovoked, unilateral attack on a sovereign nation, Iran, under the pretext of “self defense”, must be considered nothing short of impunity-led hegemonic overreach. One consistently backed by the US Congress and more specifically – the Israel lobby and neoconservative ideology in America – as renowned diplomacy and peace proponents have long cautioned against and offered reminders on.
The US itself has foregone significant moral authority within the global order over the last two decades. Pursuing the “Bush Doctrine” of using (unprovoked, unilateral) preventive wars against sovereign states, offering the justification of pre-emptive strikes meant to protect itself and its (perceived) reputation as the sole custodian of the global order – it has fallen for the “Credibility Trap” – by blatantly violating international law, repeatedly, and isolating itself instead.
In comparison, for example, responsible-rising powers like India have time and again shown calibrated choice and strategic restraint, with a healthy regard for international norms, despite being flanked by revisionist neighbors.
In India’s case, one of which (Pakistan) – long recognized in the international community for harboring state-sponsored terrorism and issuing threats of “death by a thousand cuts” towards India – was dealt with sternly in a high-intensity, open and public military conflict in May2025.
The latest US-Iran fiasco
Amid growing international concern over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear enrichment program, the US and Iran were due to hold their sixth round of negotiations towards signing a new nuclear agreement on June 15, 2025. Two days prior – on June 13, Israel – the US’ key ally and primary beneficiary in the Middle East, and Iran’s staunch adversary in the last two decades – initiated pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s main nuclear and missile facilities. In fact, Israel’s act of aggression, called Operation Rising Lion, targeting key Iranian nuclear scientists and military leadership, claims to have eliminated the lead negotiator on the US-Iran deal in its first wave of attacks.
A stunned Iran justifiably pulled out of the proposed talks in Muscat, Oman. By June 17, US President Donald Trump was using his social media to publicly threaten Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s assassination. On June 22, the US itself pulverized three of Iran’s main nuclear-program related facilities via a highly coordinated and secretive bombing operation code-named Midnight Hammer.
US Department of Defence press conference on Operation Midnight Hammer. | The Daily Guardian.
Both Netanyahu and Trump base their latest actions and apprehensions (over Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities) on a recent IAEA report which looks at Iran’s progress towards building a bomb, its level of cooperation with UN inspectors and its stockpiles of enriched Uranium. The report concludes that the IAEA could not ascertain whether Iran’s civil nuclear program was exclusively civilian, but notably, does not confirm that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon either. The latter specification comes despite most stakeholders in the US and Israel equating Iran’s current 60% enriched Uranium stockpile reaching a volume of nearly 400 kg to a potential conversion towards weapons-grade capability of developing up to 10 nuclear bombs in a very short time.
Notwithstanding Iran’s long standing, secretive, but on-and-off efforts towards developing nuclear weapons, even the US’s own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 25, 2025 that the US Intelligence Community (IC) did not believe Iran was developing a nuclear weapon.
She did warn though, that in the past years there seems to have been “an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus”, and added: “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
A crumbling global order
It is important to look at the above case in the context of the current US President Donald Trump, in his first term in 2018, unilaterally exiting the 2015 US-Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Also known as the “Iran deal”, agreed upon under former President Barack Obama, the JCPOA called for greater international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear facilities, an Iranian pledge against developing weapons-grade nuclear material and sanctions relief for Iran’s heavily stunted economy.
The UK, France, Germany, Russia and China also participated as co-signatories in that deal. Despite being accountable to the UNSC and the IAEA, the US’ unconditional exit from the agreement (by announcing sanctions on Iran) prompted Iran – a signatory to the nuclear NPT since 1968 – to pursue its nuclear-energy ambitions on its own accord. French president Emmanuel Macron’s warning at the time, “The nuclear non-proliferation regime is at stake”, seems to be coming of age in this particular scenario.
To many, Iran’s case is a grim reminder of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, under the pretext of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), ending with the assassination of Saddam Hussein and a regime change in Baghdad. Another example of the ‘West’ disallowing a sovereign nation aspiring to strengthen its own security by building deterrence, from doing so. Then there is the case of smaller nations willingly relinquishing their nuclear weapons, as with Libya in 2003 and Ukraine in 1994, only to be invaded eventually by the US in 2011 and Russia in 2014 and 2022 respectively.
Where does this leave Iran, a country with a proud civilizational history and a powerful regional presence, now? Many observers shocked by the recent turn of events believe Israel and the US’ illegal, unwarranted military aggression will make Iran’s long-held aspirations to develop a nuclear-weapon led deterrence permanent. It will come as no surprise if Tehran chooses to exit the IAEA-administered NPT altogether. After all, Israel, known to have a stockpile of anywhere between 90 to 400 nuclear warheads, does not officially admit to it, and has never been a party to the NPT’s rules and regulations.
At a time when the world order is reeling through an “Era of War” – what with Russia’s similar “pre-emptive” invasion of Ukraine in its fourth year, and nuclear-neighbors India and (China-sponsored) Pakistan having come to the brink of a serious escalation in May 2025 – one would expect more moral, not just strategic clarity from the responsible, rules-based order preaching nations of the world. Particularly the likes of the US, UK, and France, who comprise the UNSC, besides its revisionist members Russia and China.
Given the nature of its current leadership, the US has clearly hit a wall in its moral and strategic prerogatives. However, to see the likes of Europe’s leading powers fumble on this front, already facing the indirect brunt of the Russia-Ukraine War and Donald Trump’s unprecedented cold-shoulder towards their sacrosanct transatlantic relationship, is simply unwarranted.
Is it just their historically imperial attitude at play? For them to have condemned Russia’s actions over the last three years in the harshest terms and then come out in support of Israel’s continued belligerence in June 2025 deserves calling out.
As Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi puts it, “To Britain and the EU High Representative, it is Iran which must “return” to the table. But how can Iran return to something it never left, let alone blew up?”
Indian Foreign Policy
India, which considers both Russia and Israel its ‘brother-in-arms’, specifically in the context of their all-weather defense partnerships and current ideological alignment, has not come out and endorsed either of their unilateral regional aggression campaigns formally. Despite looking out for its own geopolitical interests, justifiably, India has consistently cautioned restraint in both battlefields, across international forums.
These are testing times for India’s over-stretched diplomatic corps. China’s increasing influence in Bangladesh and Myanmar is challenging India’s interests from evolving in Southeast Asia and similar Chinese maneuvers in Afghanistan and Iran are looking to do the same in West Asia. New Delhi is already dealing with the repercussions of the two-front war across both its northern borders in the east and the west. However, having engaged in extensive backchannel diplomacy with both close partners – Russia and Israel – and the wider international community in recent years, it is unfortunate that India does not have more to show (if not claim) on the ground across either crises in Europe and West Asia.
In the case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, there is the added risk of India’s economic exposure – given its continued engagement with Russia’s oil and energy sector, as highlighted by the latest round of EU sanctions; and security exposure – given its significant reliance on Russia’s defense sector, as highlighted by the impending delivery of the two remaining units of the crucial S-400 missile systems at a time of heightened regional tensions.
A serious impact at the global high-politics table at this juncture would certainly boost India’s role of being the responsible-rising power that it is. Especially with the US President continuing to undermine India through his unabashed, Nobel Peace Prize-courting – but false – claims of “achieving a ceasefire between two nuclear-armed countries about to go to all out war”, in reference to the recent India-Pakistan truce. Pakistan is certain to use Trump’s transactional approach for its own economic, diplomatic and geopolitical survival, leaving India red-faced at times.
India has much to leverage in its own favor though. Having historic civilizational, trade, and energy ties with the Iranians for instance, India is perhaps the only country in the world with goodwill to tap into in Tehran, Tel Aviv and Washington D.C. Its engagement in the I2U2 Group strategic partnership (also known as the Indo-Abrahamic Alliance, featuring India, Israel, the US, and UAE), and IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Corridor) economic project makes it a growing stakeholder in the region.
In the case of Gaza, India has long supported the case for Palestinian dignity and liberation through a two-state solution with Israel, a stance borne out of its history, freedom struggle and Constitution. For a country striving to be the voice of the Global South, the ‘mother of democracy’ has pioneered development, dialogue, inclusion and peace, all core ethos of a reeling international system. It is therefore imperative for India to show moral leadership in the face of nearly 60,000 civilians massacred, a majority of whom were women and children.
Conclusion
Can India evolve its long-standing doctrine of principled non-alignment, now driven forward as engaged “strategic autonomy” – to a more influential version of global leadership? Already a crucial voice in powerful global groupings like the BRICS, G20, and Quad – its bilateral and multilateral relations allow its growing economy and market to gain access routes to Russian oil and defense deals, American weapons, investments and high-technology, Israeli arms and intelligence, Iranian energy and connectivity, French fighter aircraft and nuclear submarines, Chinese electronics and chemicals, and now a trade agreement with the UK.
A well-known strategic affairs expert in Washington D.C. recently criticized India’s grand strategy, blaming its current structural approach towards growing its national power – including a transactional foreign policy – for what he labels as “India’s Great Power Delusions”.
Despite challenges and miscalculations, India has continued to prove its detractors wrong since 1947 to be in its current position. This era offers a historic test for its evolving global standing and statesmanship. More than choosing sides, the onus is on India, to choose its role going forward.
(Exclusive to NatStrat)
