As Iran war reshapes West Asia, Bharat perfects the art of strategic autonomy

The Iran war is not just another conflict in West Asia. It is a demolition exercise — of myths, pretensions and carefully constructed lies that have long masqueraded as geopolitical truths. It is not merely reshaping the region; it is exposing it.

Let’s begin with the most enduring fiction: Arab unity. For decades, every Arab strongman worth his salt — from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi — sold the dream of a pan-Arab/Islamic caliphate. It was never a strategy but a convenient myth to inflame passion, crush dissent, and cloak insecurity in grandiosity.

The Iran war has stripped that illusion bare. There is no Arab unity. There never was. There are only regimes anxiously watching from the sidelines as Iranian drones and missiles expose vulnerabilities.

Equally shattered is the myth of “Arab security”. For years, Gulf states were told that their strategic depth lay in alliances, advanced weaponry, and, above all, American protection. Iranian missiles and drones have not just hit targets; they have punctured the narrative of the Gulf being a fortress. It is a glass house, instead.

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What about those American bases in the region? They were supposed to be shields protecting the Arab allies of America. They now are the reason why the Gulf is being bombed and bled.

But the tremors do not stop in the region. Globally, the conflict has created a peculiar situation where almost all actors stand to lose in some way. The war has diverted international attention away from other critical theatres of conflict, particularly Ukraine. This shift provides Russia with a strategic opportunity to consolidate its position with reduced global scrutiny. Yet, here lies the paradox: a weakened Iran also weakens Russia’s hand in West Asia. So even in an advantage, there is erosion.

China, too, finds itself in a strange bind. For Xi Jinping, an America distracted by yet another ‘needless’ war might seem like a gift, potentially allowing it to advance its interests elsewhere, including in the Taiwan Strait. But geopolitics is never that simple. Iran is not peripheral to China; it is integral to Beijing’s energy security and to its West Asian ambitions. Destabilising Iran, especially after Venezuelan setback, complicates China’s long game.

As I have written in a recent article, if there is one clear winner, it is Israel. For Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran is not a rival but an existential threat. The logic is brutally simple: a weaker Iran is a safer Israel. The objective was never the romantic American fantasy of regime change. It was always about the degradation of Iranian strength.

Washington, however, appears to have misread the script. The belief that precision strikes would trigger internal collapse in Tehran was always naïve. What has emerged instead is a consolidation of power within a hardened security elite. Iran may be bruised, but it is not broken. It is fast-adapting to a long, protracted warfare.

Amid these shifting dynamics, Bharat’s foreign policy stands out. After the Ukraine conflict, the Iran war has further highlighted how the country has evolved from traditional non-alignment to a more nuanced approach called 'multi-alignment'. Bharat’s foreign policy today is not the obsessively moralistic and ideologically unbending non-alignment of the past. It is something sharper, more pragmatic and, frankly, more honest. Call it 'multi-alignment', but strip away the jargon, and what remains is this: Bharat takes sides — its own.

Under the stewardship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, New Delhi has refined this into an art form. It has perfected the art of engaging with everyone without belonging to anyone. Today, it is closer than ever to Israel. Its ties with the United States have deepened despite Donald Trump’s disruptive style and tariff frictions. And yet, Iran — just as Moscow is comfortable with Delhi’s Washington tango — continues to treat Bharat not as an adversary, but as a trusted interlocutor. This is not fence-sitting. This is strategic sovereignty.

Critics, especially in the West, misunderstand this foreign policy. They prefer a world of binaries where one has to be an ally to avoid being an adversary. Bharat rejects this with-us-or-against-us vocabulary. It operates in what might be called the “twilight zones” of diplomacy, where interests intersect without alignment becoming submission.

This, however, comes at a cost. A country that refuses to surrender its strategic autonomy must be prepared to stand alone. Bharat has faced this before — during the Ukraine war and also amid Operation Sindoor — and it will face it again. That way, multi-alignment demands resilience, patience and, of course, a willingness to endure short-term pains for long-term gains.

This is where America’s strategic understanding — one might call it common sense — comes into play. The US needs to reassess its approach to global partnerships. The traditional expectation of ‘with-us-or-against-us’ alignments no longer reflects the realities of a multipolar world, especially vis-à-vis New Delhi.

This Indian approach to diplomacy may be unsettling for the West, especially the US, but it is unavoidable. While a section of policymakers in Washington sees Bharat as another China rising in the East, the fact of the matter is that Delhi’s rise does not hinge on Washington’s approval. It will happen with or without the US. The choice before the United States is not whether Bharat rises, but whether that rise strengthens or enfeebles the Western-led order. If the alternative is Pax Sinica, shaped by China’s authoritarian model, then the answer should be obvious.

History, as always, offers perspective. In his book, The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia, Srinath Raghavan tells a fascinating story of the first American ship arriving in the subcontinent in 1784, causing “much speculation to the inhabitants what country our flag belonged to”, as surgeon Thomas Redman noted in his journal. The ship was headed to China via Mauritius. “But as Americans would repeatedly realise over the next two centuries, the passage to China often ran through the Indian subcontinent.”

That remains true. For over two centuries, the American path to China has intersected with Bharat. Not always by design, but consistently by necessity. It still does. The road to “managing” China still runs through Bharat. Not as a subordinate partner, but as a sovereign power with its own ambitions.

The Iran war only reinforces this reality. It underscores how Delhi navigates complexity, how it plays a multilateral game where even rivals acknowledge its strategic weight and moral authority. More importantly, it demonstrates that Bharat’s rise is not destabilising but one of the few stabilising forces left in a fraying order.

Delhi has aced the multilateral diplomatic game. But given the twilight zone it largely meanders along, it cannot afford to falter even once. That is the risk of a high-stakes game.

And yet, that is precisely what makes Bharat’s rise so distinctive. In a millennium where a nation’s global rise was invariably defined by conquest and coercion, and, of course, institutionalised loot, here is a power ascending without plunder, without imperial violence.

As the war in West Asia shows, Bharat has perfected the art of diplomacy that is so typically Indian: one that refuses to take sides in a deeply divided world. One that is pragmatic, and yet keeps the moral moorings intact. One that offers hope and shows the light at the end of the tunnel.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)