This is a response to Ashley Tellis’s article ‘India’s great-power delusions: How New Delhi’s grand strategy thwarts its grand ambitions’ (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2025). Briefly, the article alleges that India seeks to fabricate a multipolar world and asserts that its pursuit of strategic autonomy risks weakening its relationship with the US to the detriment of India’s security concerns over China. The article claims that India aims “to restrain not just China — the near-term challenge — but also any country that would aspire to singular, hegemonic dominance, including the United States”.

India does not “seek” a multipolar international system; the world is already multipolar. It is pragmatism that necessitates that international systems evolve to reflect this reality, not the foreign policy ambitions or “grand strategies” of any particular state. As S Jaishankar put it in his book, The India Way, “… what appeared then (the end of the Cold War era) as permanent was a transient moment of American unipolarity, as it was with other powers in history before. Larger competitiveness and political contestation proceeded to return the world to a more natural diversity.” India does not seek to “restrain” anyone but to safeguard its own sovereignty and territorial integrity — the distinction is paramount.

India’s pursuit of strategic autonomy is not because it will help India become a “superpower”. Strategic autonomy offers the space to optimally........

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