SS: Just some excerpts I think are important here:
>For 20 years, Western governments have described India as indispensable to the 21st-century order. US President George W. Bush crystallised an emerging rapprochement in 2005 (Opens in new window), breaking with American orthodoxy to remake the relationship. But the West treated the breakthrough as diplomatic realignment, not the beginning of an industrial rebalancing.
>The political pivot occurred. The capital pivot did not.
>**For more than three decades – accelerating after China entered the World Trade Organisation in 2001 – Western capital helped compound China’s industrial advantage. Each new factory strengthened logistics, deepened supplier networks and expanded technical capability. The conditions that attracted capital were increasingly the product of capital already invested.**
>What served Western commercial optimisation has come to align with Chinese strategy. Beijing seeks to reduce its exposure to foreign technology and disruption while preserving China’s centrality to global manufacturing (Opens in new window). The result is asymmetric dependence.
>Modi has spent more than a decade trying to convert India’s demographic and geopolitical scale into industrial power, with promising but uneven results. But India cannot become a second centre of industrial gravity through domestic reform alone.
>The West is trying to correct a compounded strategic error by relying on incremental corporate decisions. Companies are encouraged to adopt “China plus one”, but they face incentives that favour China. China has the ports, suppliers, components, skills and industrial density that rising industrial powers are still trying to build.
>Industrial advantage is cumulative. In 2025, India’s FDI inflows were only about 37% of China’s (Opens in new window). Even if India eventually overtook China in new inflows, closing the inherited gap could take decades. Building a genuine alternative requires governments to alter the conditions under which private investment becomes commercially rational at scale, not to direct individual investments.
>**Western policy often treats India as a participant within an architecture designed by the United States and its allies. That is a category error.** Middle powers such as Australia and Canada exercise influence through alliances, specialist capabilities and coalition-building. India is an independent strategic pole with the scale to become an industrial one: the world’s most populous country, a nuclear-armed continental state, an Indian Ocean power and an economy projected to become the world’s third largest by the end of the decade (Opens in new window).
>Yet India is too often judged against the standards of a compliant ally. Will it follow Washington on Russia? Will it subordinate other relationships to a common strategic program? It will not. India will bargain, hedge, dissent and pursue its own interests.But no perfectly aligned industrial counterweight is waiting elsewhere. The strategic autonomy that frustrates Washington also constrains Beijing.
>**The West is demanding greater alignment from the country it needs to strengthen than it demanded from the adversary it allowed itself to depend upon. That is not prudence. It is a failure to distinguish control from advantage.**
>India is not yet the anchor of an industrial alternative capable of balancing China. But it is the only country with the scale to become one.
smcstechtips on
An industrially strong India would naturally be aligned with the West against China given China’s attempts of sabotage.
minimirth on
The framing of alignment with the west as a moral choice without much real strategic benefit sounds hollow and somewhat hypocritical.
HoveringMango on
I think US is just unable to move past the Cold War era dynamics, their strategic partner in the region is still Pakistan. Forget investments, even defence related collboration is just not happening. Any serious country would propose inter operable surveillance systems and navy across Indian Ocean with India, Japan and Australia to counter China.
4 Comments
SS: Just some excerpts I think are important here:
>For 20 years, Western governments have described India as indispensable to the 21st-century order. US President George W. Bush crystallised an emerging rapprochement in 2005 (Opens in new window), breaking with American orthodoxy to remake the relationship. But the West treated the breakthrough as diplomatic realignment, not the beginning of an industrial rebalancing.
>The political pivot occurred. The capital pivot did not.
>**For more than three decades – accelerating after China entered the World Trade Organisation in 2001 – Western capital helped compound China’s industrial advantage. Each new factory strengthened logistics, deepened supplier networks and expanded technical capability. The conditions that attracted capital were increasingly the product of capital already invested.**
>What served Western commercial optimisation has come to align with Chinese strategy. Beijing seeks to reduce its exposure to foreign technology and disruption while preserving China’s centrality to global manufacturing (Opens in new window). The result is asymmetric dependence.
>Modi has spent more than a decade trying to convert India’s demographic and geopolitical scale into industrial power, with promising but uneven results. But India cannot become a second centre of industrial gravity through domestic reform alone.
>The West is trying to correct a compounded strategic error by relying on incremental corporate decisions. Companies are encouraged to adopt “China plus one”, but they face incentives that favour China. China has the ports, suppliers, components, skills and industrial density that rising industrial powers are still trying to build.
>Industrial advantage is cumulative. In 2025, India’s FDI inflows were only about 37% of China’s (Opens in new window). Even if India eventually overtook China in new inflows, closing the inherited gap could take decades. Building a genuine alternative requires governments to alter the conditions under which private investment becomes commercially rational at scale, not to direct individual investments.
>**Western policy often treats India as a participant within an architecture designed by the United States and its allies. That is a category error.** Middle powers such as Australia and Canada exercise influence through alliances, specialist capabilities and coalition-building. India is an independent strategic pole with the scale to become an industrial one: the world’s most populous country, a nuclear-armed continental state, an Indian Ocean power and an economy projected to become the world’s third largest by the end of the decade (Opens in new window).
>Yet India is too often judged against the standards of a compliant ally. Will it follow Washington on Russia? Will it subordinate other relationships to a common strategic program? It will not. India will bargain, hedge, dissent and pursue its own interests.But no perfectly aligned industrial counterweight is waiting elsewhere. The strategic autonomy that frustrates Washington also constrains Beijing.
>**The West is demanding greater alignment from the country it needs to strengthen than it demanded from the adversary it allowed itself to depend upon. That is not prudence. It is a failure to distinguish control from advantage.**
>India is not yet the anchor of an industrial alternative capable of balancing China. But it is the only country with the scale to become one.
An industrially strong India would naturally be aligned with the West against China given China’s attempts of sabotage.
The framing of alignment with the west as a moral choice without much real strategic benefit sounds hollow and somewhat hypocritical.
I think US is just unable to move past the Cold War era dynamics, their strategic partner in the region is still Pakistan. Forget investments, even defence related collboration is just not happening. Any serious country would propose inter operable surveillance systems and navy across Indian Ocean with India, Japan and Australia to counter China.