Since Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called on the world’s “middle powers” to collaborate amid growing turbulence in the international order, the idea has animated India’s strategic debate. Official Delhi, however, has been less than enthusiastic.

Asked about Carney’s formulation, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar argued that it may be more relevant to America’s treaty allies in coping with President Donald Trump’s unpredictable policies than to India. The middle-power label, he implied, understates India’s geopolitical weight and its potential to emerge as a great power.

Yet scepticism about India’s great-power prospects is growing. In his new book, The Return of the Great Powers, the Cambridge historian Brendan Simms places India in the category of “almost great powers”, alongside France, Germany and Japan. They possess several great-power attributes, but not enough of them to be the world’s system-shapers.

Whether or not one accepts Simms’s classification, his larger argument deserves attention. He reminds us that international politics has always been driven by the interaction among great powers — through rivalry as much as cooperation. The post-Cold War hope that globalisation, markets and international institutions would tame geopolitics has proved to be short-lived. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the sharpening US-China rivalry, and the weaponisation of trade, finance and technology all point to the return of hard power as the organising principle of world politics.

What, then, defines a great power?........

© Indian Express