An article in the December 2024 issue of Global Affairs, published by the Argentine Council for International Relations (CARI), argues that India behaves as a Middle Power, prioritizing internal development over external ambitions. Written by Florencia Rubiolo, an independent researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and titled ‘India as an Asian Middle Power: Between Pragmatism and Regional Balance’, it argues that India remains a middle power due to its limited capacity to intervene militarily on a global level. This, alongside a mixture of domestic and international factors, prevents India from pursuing pure great power politics. As such, Rubiolo highlights a difference between India’s ambitions of global leadership and its approach as a balancer on the world stage. Rubiolo contends that India’s package of policies and strategies namely multi-alignment and evasive balancing to bolster strategic autonomy are indicators of its middle power approach. Whilst analysing contemporary foreign policy initiatives, Rubiolo also claims that there is more continuity between the current Indian government’s strategies and those of their predecessors than there is divergence. Rubiolo analyses India’s participation in the Indo-Pacific region through the strategic objectives characteristic of the Middle Powers and concludes that though India is a significant factor in global relations, it continues to function as a Middle Power.
Related Articles in India’s world:
India’s Strategic Choices: Constrained and Getting Worse by Rajesh Rajagopalan
Multi-Alignment’: Towards a ‘Grand Strategy’ for India in the Twenty-first Century by Shashi Tharoor
