A Partnership Taking Shape in a Polarized World

The most consequential geopolitical partnership of the coming decade will not be announced with fanfare at a G7 summit. It will not feature a mutual defense treaty or a shared nuclear umbrella. It will be built, quietly and deliberately, in joint defense laboratories, co-production lines, and satellite uplinks stretching from the Negev to the Andaman Sea.

The convergence between India and Israel is not a story the world is paying sufficient attention to. It should be.

We are living through a period of structural polarization. On one side, the United States and its alliance architecture, offering technological access in exchange for strategic alignment, and sovereign power in exchange for dependency. On the other, China’s state-capitalist model, infrastructure without accountability, partnerships priced in political compliance, and influence embedded in every port, cable, and telecommunications contract. Two orders. Two sets of terms. Neither designed with Indian interests at the center.

India has always refused to choose. For much of the 20th century, that refusal looked like hesitation. Today, it is beginning to look like a strategy. And the India-Israel partnership is where that strategy is hardening into something real.

Complementary Strengths: Innovation and Scale

To understand why this convergence matters, one must first examine the structural strengths each country brings to the table.

Consider what each side brings. Israel has, over seven decades of existential military pressure, built a defense innovation ecosystem without parallel for its size. Its missile defense architecture, including the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and the Arrow series, represents the most battle-tested layered air defense in the world. Its loitering munitions, its electronic warfare capabilities, its military-grade AI applied to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance: these are not aspirational programs. They are combat-proven systems refined by operational feedback that no other country of comparable size can match.

India brings something different but equally formidable. Strategic geography across the Indian Ocean: importantly, the choke point – the Strait of Malacca, between Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, that accounts for 30% of global trade. Two-thirds of China’s trade and 80% of its energy imports pass through it.

Further, India offers a defense procurement market valued at over $130 billion in planned acquisition over the next decade. Its 2027 defense budget itself is valued at $86 billion. It also houses an engineering workforce of over 5.4 million that, once retooled for defense manufacturing, represents industrial capacity on a continental scale. India enjoys political credibility across the Global South that no Western power or China commands.

Put these together and you do not merely get a bilateral defense relationship. You get the architecture of a third option.

Co-Development as Strategic Autonomy

The shining expression of this emerging model lies not in rhetoric, but in engineering.

The Barak-8 missile system is the clearest proof of concept. Jointly developed by Israel Aerospace Industries and India’s Defense Research and Development Organization, it entered service with the Indian Navy and Air Force as a medium-range surface-to-air system, not imported, not licensed, but co-engineered. That distinction matters more than it appears. A jointly developed system embeds its users in the intellectual architecture of the weapon. Source code is not withheld. Production is not contingent on diplomatic weather. Upgrades do not require a third party’s political clearance.

That is what strategic autonomy looks like in practice. Not isolation. Not neutrality. Co-development.

The pipeline now includes anti-drone systems, directed-energy applications, AI-enabled battlefield sensors, and naval surveillance platforms. If even a fraction of these programs matures into production, India will enter the 2030s with a defense industrial base that is neither a copy of American platforms nor a client of Russian legacy systems, but something genuinely its own.

The Indian Ocean Theatre and the Strategic Environment

This transformation must also be situated within the shifting military geography of the Indo-Pacific.

In the Indian Ocean, the stakes of this transformation are already visible. China now operates submarines across the region with a frequency that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. It has built or acquired strategic port access at Gwadar, Hambantota, Djibouti, and a string of other locations that trace the outline of the so-called String of Pearls. Pakistan, China’s “treaty partner”, sits on India’s western flank. India’s island territories in the Andaman and Nicobar chain, positioned to monitor the Strait of Malacca, are precisely the kind of forward positions that require hardened, sovereign, locally producible air and missile defense.

Israeli technology, adapted and produced in India, addresses that requirement directly. It also does something less visible but equally important: it changes India’s negotiating posture with everyone else.

A country that can field advanced precision systems it has co-developed is no longer a customer. It is a partner of a different kind, one that Washington must take seriously as an equal rather than manage as a dependent, and one that Beijing cannot coerce with the threat of supply disruption.

The implications extend beyond two capitals.

From Bilateral Model to Middle-Power Template

Here is where the argument goes beyond bilateral: the India-Israel model may be the most credible template available for middle-power defense sovereignty in the 21st century.

Look at the Indo-Pacific and Africa. Dozens of states are navigating the same impossible geometry, too important to be ignored, too small to dictate terms, too wary of Washington’s conditionality and too burned by Beijing’s debt diplomacy to find either model attractive. They want advanced defense capability without alliance entanglement. They want to build something, not merely buy it.

India’s historical standing in the Global South gives it a credibility that no Western country or China commands when it speaks to this audience. If the systems being built through India-Israel co-development eventually flow into export markets, to Vietnam, to Indonesia, to the Gulf states, reorienting their procurement after years of volatile U.S. arms politics, then the axis extends far beyond two countries.

It becomes a model. And models, in geopolitics, are powerful things.

Recently, Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Yair Kulas, head of SIBAT at the Israel Ministry of Defense, remarked that manufacturing in India not only serves the needs of the Indian military but also positions the country as a “Gateway to Asia.” He noted that once companies produce in India, they gain access to wider regional markets, emphasizing that the opportunity extends beyond India itself to third countries across Asia.

However, no strategic shift of this magnitude is without friction.

Constraints, Frictions, and Strategic Pushback

The obstacles are real and should not be disregarded. Several Israeli high-end systems contain U.S.-origin components, which subjects them to American end-use restrictions, a constraint that requires careful navigation and, in some cases, limits transfer flexibility. India’s relations with Gulf Arab states, long complicated by Israeli-Palestinian tensions, have stabilized meaningfully since the Abraham Accords, but remain a factor in calibrating how openly India projects this partnership. And no amount of technological sophistication compensates for doctrine, logistics, or political will. Capabilities are only as good as the institutions built around them.

There is also a harder truth: China will not be a passive observer. It will respond with accelerated naval expansion, deeper ties to Pakistan, and economic pressure on Indian vulnerabilities wherever they exist. The axis must be adaptive, not static, which means investment in the full stack of military modernization, not just discrete platform acquisition.

The Emerging Order and the Question of Control

But the deeper point stands. Ultimately, the significance of the India-Israel axis lies in what it signals about the future structure of power. We are at an inflection moment in the international order. The post-Cold War assumption that technological power resided in a single dominant system, with others either joining or falling behind, is breaking down. The emerging reality is more plural, more competitive, and more open to new formations of power.

India has the geography, the market, the workforce, and now, increasingly, the strategic clarity to operate at the center of that new reality rather than its margins. Israel has the innovation culture, the combat-tested systems, and the willingness to share them on terms that respect sovereignty.

Together, they are not building a bloc. They are building leverage. Against dependency on Washington. Against coercion from Beijing. Against the obsolescence of legacy platforms from Moscow. Against the assumption that the only path to great-power relevance runs through someone else’s supply chain.

If the 20th century was defined by alliance blocs, and the early 21st by superpower competition, the coming decades may be defined by something more subtle: which countries control the technological foundations of their own defense, and which remain permanently contingent on the goodwill of others.

The India-Israel axis is a bet on the former. And it is a bet that, placed quietly and built carefully, may prove to be among the most consequential strategic decisions of our time.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)