By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN

Africa’s energy problem has never really been a shortage of promises. In the fourteen years since the first big Western climate-finance package was unveiled for the continent, pledges have piled up faster than power lines. What has not kept pace is delivery. The International Energy Agency’s most recent World Energy Investment report puts a hard number on the gap: global energy spending is on track to hit roughly $3.4 trillion in 2026, and Africa — home to nearly a fifth of humanity — will capture only about 3 percent of it, some $110 billion, even as almost 590 million Africans still live without electricity. Closing the access gap alone would require an estimated $150 billion over the next decade, more than $15 billion a year; actual tracked financing for new connections has recently run below $2.5 billion annually. Against that backdrop, it is worth asking not just who is offering Africa money for its energy transition, but whose money is actually landing.

That question has become sharper in the past eighteen months because the most publicised Western answer — the Just Energy Transition Partnerships struck with South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and Senegal from 2021 onward — has run into serious trouble. And it is in the space opened up by that trouble that a quieter, less heralded model of cooperation, built by India over three decades of trade and lines of credit, is starting to look more durable than its modest scale would suggest.

Where the marquee model stalled

South Africa’s JETP was the template. Announced at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 with an initial $8.5 billion pledge from a group of wealthy governments, it was billed by President Cyril Ramaphosa as a watershed and by then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a “game-changing partnership.” Three more countries signed similar deals over the following two years, and the combined pledges across all four eventually approached $47 billion.

The follow-through has been thin. Independent trackers found that as of late 2024, only around $308 million of grant-funded South African projects had actually reached implementation, out of a pledge that had by then grown to $13.8 billion on paper; across all four JETP countries, only about $18.6 billion of the roughly $47 billion envelope had reached legal close by April 2026 — a completion ratio under 40 percent, more than four years into the programme. Much of what has moved is not new decarbonisation spending but commercial loans and policy financing, some of it redirected to projects, like Jakarta’s mass transit system, that were never really part of the original climate remit. Then, in March 2025, the United States formally withdrew from South Africa’s JETP altogether, pulling out $56 million in grants and $1 billion in prospective development-finance lending. The remaining partners issued a statement of continued commitment, but the exit of the JETP’s largest non-European backer was a blunt signal about how fragile these pledges can be once domestic political winds shift in donor capitals.

None of this makes JETP-style finance worthless — where it has landed, it has funded real grid and renewables work — but it has exposed a structural mismatch: large, headline pledges built on complex multilateral governance, denominated mostly in commercial or semi-concessional debt, disbursed against conditions that assume institutional capacity African utilities frequently do not have. China’s alternative, heavy infrastructure lending under the Belt and Road umbrella, has filled some of that gap with speed, but at the cost of debt burdens that have become politically toxic in several recipient states, and with far less emphasis on the distributed, off-grid solutions that reach the rural and peri-urban populations who make up the bulk of Africa’s 590 million unconnected people.

The case for a third, smaller model

India’s energy engagement with Africa was not designed as an answer to either of these problems — it grew out of a much older trade and development relationship, with bilateral trade now running at roughly $82–100 billion a year and cumulative Indian investment on the continent near $80 billion since 1996. But its architecture happens to sidestep both of the failure modes visible in the JETP and Belt-and-Road experiences.

The financing runs primarily through concessional lines of credit under the Indian Development and Economic Assistance Scheme, administered by the Exim Bank of India, supplemented by grant-funded technical training through the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme. New Delhi has extended more than 190 such lines of credit worth over $10 billion to 41 African countries, a large share of it directed at power generation, transmission and rural electrification — smaller in aggregate than either the JETP pledges or Chinese infrastructure lending, but structured to move faster because it does not depend on assembling a multi-donor governance committee for every disbursement.

The technology side leans in the same direction. Where JETP financing has gone disproportionately toward utility-scale grid and coal-transition projects, India has built its own domestic renewable programme — over 50 percent non-fossil share of installed power capacity, reached five years ahead of its own climate-pledge target, alongside roughly 172 gigawatts of annual solar-module manufacturing capacity — around decentralised, household- and farm-level deployment. The rooftop solar scheme PM Surya Ghar had installed more than four million systems domestically by August 2026, and the PM-KUSUM programme has done similar work subsidising solar irrigation pumps for farmers. Both are now being pitched, through the International Solar Alliance that India co-founded with France, as templates for African electrification. The ISA now counts roughly 39 African members, and is channelling that experience through instruments like the MIGA-ISA Solar Facility and a partnership with the African Development Bank’s Desert to Power initiative — positioning India less as a builder of large plants and more as a supplier of de-risking finance and small-footprint technology suited to dispersed, weak-grid populations, which is precisely the segment the IEA’s numbers show is being underserved by both Western and Chinese capital.

Two different countries, two different tests

South Africa and Ethiopia illustrate how differently this model plays out depending on what a partner country actually needs.

South Africa is the industrial test case. As a fellow BRICS member, it deals with India roughly as a peer rather than as an aid recipient, and the relationship has moved toward critical minerals and green hydrogen — South Africa’s platinum-group metals, used in electrolysers, are a natural complement to India’s own hydrogen ambitions, which depend on imported catalysts and battery inputs. The India–Southern African Customs Union Preferential Trade Agreement, signed in August 2026, is explicitly framed around securing supply of platinum-group metals, manganese and copper for India’s electric-vehicle and hydrogen industries, while a BRICS Joint Report on Hydrogen Value Chains released this year singles out South Africa and India as having complementary solar, wind and mineral endowments. This is a genuinely two-way commercial relationship, not a donor-recipient one, which is also why it sidesteps a criticism increasingly levelled at South Africa’s JETP — that it asks the country to choose between industrial growth and decarbonisation. India’s engagement, by contrast, treats South African industrialisation and green-hydrogen ambition as the same project.

Ethiopia is the harder test, because it is the kind of low-capacity, high-need market where all three financing models — JETP-style pledges, Chinese debt, and Indian concessional credit — have struggled in different ways. More than 45 percent of Ethiopians still lack electricity access, and the grid is roughly 90 percent hydropower-dependent, which leaves the country’s power supply exposed to drought. India elevated its relationship with Addis Ababa to a “strategic partnership” in December 2025, with energy and critical minerals named as priority areas, and Ethiopia has become one of the largest recipients of Indian development credit on the continent, alongside a roughly tenfold increase over the past decade in training slots offered to Ethiopian officials under the ITEC programme. Ethiopia was also among the earliest African members of the International Solar Alliance, with rooftop solar and solar irrigation pumps identified as the most transferable pieces of India’s domestic experience.

But Ethiopia is also where the limits of India’s concessional-lending model are most visible. In February 2024, the Indian government had to pay Exim Bank roughly ₹9,014 crore (close to $1.1 billion) after invoking sovereign guarantees on a set of underperforming lines of credit across several African markets — a category that reportedly included Ethiopian projects. That episode is a useful corrective to any narrative that presents Indian development finance as inherently more effective than its Western or Chinese counterparts. It is not immune to the same problem that has slowed JETP implementation: weak project preparation, patchy execution capacity on the recipient side, and financing structures that assume a level of institutional follow-through that does not always exist. India’s advantage is not that its credit always performs. It is that the amounts are smaller, the bureaucracy is thinner, and the technology is often simple enough — a rooftop panel, a solar pump — that failure is more localised and less likely to derail an entire multi-billion-dollar partnership the way stalled coal-plant financing has slowed the JETPs.

Scaling through multilateral platforms, not bilateral ambition alone

India’s own numbers make clear it cannot close Africa’s financing gap by itself. Cumulative Indian investment of roughly $80 billion since 1996, spread across four decades, is smaller than the annual investment the IEA says is needed just to close the electricity-access gap. What India brings instead is a set of multilateral levers it can pull as the 2026 chair of BRICS. The bloc’s New Development Bank has already shown what this can look like in practice, approving a $180 million loan to South Africa’s Eskom in 2019 for grid integration of renewables; a newly launched BRICS Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage is meant to extend that kind of technical cooperation across the bloc’s African members, including South Africa and Ethiopia, following commitments made at the June 2026 BRICS Energy Ministers’ meeting under India’s presidency. India’s own Global Biofuels Alliance, of which South Africa is a member, offers a further channel that could matter for a country like Ethiopia, where reliance on traditional biomass for cooking remains widespread and where the IEA estimates the clean-cooking financing gap for sub-Saharan Africa alone runs to roughly $4 billion a year.

None of this amounts to India displacing Western or Chinese capital in Africa; the scale gap is too large for that to be a realistic ambition, and it is not the one New Delhi appears to be pursuing. What India’s approach does offer, at a moment when the marquee Western model has just lost its largest backer and Chinese debt-financed infrastructure has generated its own political backlash, is a demonstration that smaller, faster-moving, technically modest cooperation — concessional credit lines administered without a multi-donor steering committee, and decentralised solar technology suited to the populations who are hardest to reach — can deliver results in the specific segment, off-grid and rural electrification, where the biggest pledges have struggled the most.

The limits of a model built on modesty

There is a temptation, in comparing India’s record against a stalled JETP and a reputationally damaged Belt-and-Road, to overstate the case for the Indian approach simply because it has generated fewer high-profile failures. That comparison is partly an artefact of scale: a $10 billion credit book spread across 41 countries produces far less catastrophic-sounding news than a single $47 billion multi-country pledge falling short, even if the smaller programme’s success rate, project for project, turns out to be no better. The Exim Bank’s need to invoke sovereign guarantees on underperforming loans in 2024 is proof that Indian concessional finance carries the same underlying risks — poor project preparation, weak recipient-side execution capacity, currency and political risk — that have slowed every other model of development finance operating on the continent. What differs is exposure: because Indian lines of credit are disbursed in smaller tranches to individual countries rather than bundled into headline multi-billion-dollar partnerships, a stalled project in one country does not derail a global narrative the way South Africa’s JETP shortfall has coloured perceptions of the entire Just Energy Transition concept.

There is also a question of durability that cuts the other way from the JETP comparison. Western climate pledges are vulnerable to shifts in domestic politics, as the US withdrawal from South Africa’s JETP demonstrated — but Indian development finance is not immune to its own version of that risk. The Exim Bank’s LOC guarantees are ultimately backed by the Indian exchequer, and a government facing its own fiscal pressures, or a shift in New Delhi’s strategic priorities toward, say, the Indo-Pacific or its own domestic energy build-out, could just as easily see African lending slow. What has protected the relationship so far is less institutional permanence than the fact that India’s stakes in Africa’s critical minerals, and its interest in African markets for its own solar manufacturing base, give it a commercial reason to stay engaged that is somewhat more durable than a purely aid-driven relationship would be.

That commercial logic, more than any claim to a superior development model, is probably the more honest explanation for why India’s Africa engagement has kept expanding even as Western climate finance has stalled and Chinese lending has become more selective. New Delhi needs South African platinum-group metals and Ethiopian rare-earth potential for its own battery and hydrogen ambitions; it needs African markets to absorb the excess capacity of a solar-manufacturing sector it has built up to roughly 172 gigawatts a year. Framing this as development cooperation is not wrong, but it understates how much of the relationship’s resilience comes from mutual commercial interest rather than altruism — which may, in the end, be exactly why it is proving more durable than pledges that depended on the goodwill of donor electorates thousands of miles away. Whether that model can be scaled without losing the speed and simplicity that make it work — and without succumbing to the same execution risks that undid a chunk of its own lending in Ethiopia — is the real test of India’s 2026 BRICS presidency, and of its Africa policy for the rest of the decade.

By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN

For a concept that has been “about to happen” for eighteen years, the idea of a D10 — a formal club of ten leading democracies built around the G7 — keeps resurfacing at exactly the moments when the world’s democracies feel most outnumbered. This September is one of those moments. Within the space of ten days, New Delhi hosted the 18th BRICS summit with eleven member states and a clutch of partner countries at its table, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation had already met in Bishkek, and the UN General Assembly’s marathon session in New York opened against the backdrop of a much-anticipated Trump-Xi meeting on artificial intelligence. Against that backdrop, it is tempting to look at the G7’s expanding guest list — India, Australia, South Korea and others showing up summit after summit — and conclude that an informal D10 already exists in all but name, and that formalising it is simply a matter of political will.

That is a more contestable claim than it looks. A closer look at how the G7’s 2026 summit in Évian was actually assembled suggests the opposite lesson: the “coalition of democracies” that shows up at G7 tables each year is not consolidating into a stable ten-member club. It is doing something messier — expanding, contracting and reshuffling by host-country preference, which is precisely why, after nearly two decades of advocacy, no G7 government has been willing to give it a name.

An idea older than most of its supporters remember

The D10 concept did not emerge from a single dramatic proposal. It was assembled in stages, each one responding to a different anxiety about the durability of the post-Cold War order. Its earliest articulation came from within the US State Department’s policy-planning staff around 2008, where officials began sketching what a values-based grouping of the G7 plus Australia, India and South Korea might look like as a complement to — not a replacement for — existing institutions. The idea then migrated to the think-tank world: the Atlantic Council opened a “D10 Strategic Forum” in 2014, running informal, official-level dialogues that have continued annually since, drawing in observers from India, Indonesia, Poland and Spain along the way.

It took a very specific technological panic to turn the idea from a seminar topic into a headline. In 2020, as governments across Europe debated whether to strip Huawei out of their 5G networks, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson floated a “Democracy 10” as a vehicle for jointly developing alternative telecoms suppliers — a proposal to use collective democratic weight to break a single company’s, and by extension a single state’s, grip on critical infrastructure. Johnson subsequently used the UK’s G7 presidency to invite the leaders of Australia, India and South Korea (along with South Africa) to the 2021 Cornwall summit as guests, a pattern that has essentially held ever since, chair by chair.

What is notable is how narrow the original justification was. The D10 was conceived as a project about supply chains and standards — 5G first, later semiconductors, critical minerals and AI governance — not as a security alliance or a diplomatic bloc with its own foreign policy. That framing matters for judging what has, and has not, actually converged in the years since.

The convergence case, and its limits

There is a real trend line to point to. At the 2023 Hiroshima summit, G7 leaders spent unusual amounts of time on economic coercion and supply-chain resilience — an implicit China conversation conducted mostly in the language of “de-risking” rather than decoupling. At Kananaskis in 2025, the grouping launched a critical-minerals action plan and pushed forward on AI governance with Australia, India and South Korea in the room, prompting commentary that every member of the Quad — the US, Japan, Australia and India — had effectively sat at a single table. Canada’s Mark Carney made the strategic logic explicit at the time, describing India’s inclusion in terms of its centrality to global supply chains rather than shared political values, which is itself telling about how the invitations are actually justified.

But 2026 complicates this narrative more than it confirms it. France’s Évian summit in June, held under President Emmanuel Macron, did not simply reconvene the “G7 plus three” formula. Paris invited five partner countries to the Sherpa track and the leaders’ sessions — Brazil, Egypt, India, Kenya and South Korea — while Australia, a charter member of every D10 proposal since 2008, was left off the guest list entirely. In its place came Kenya and Egypt, neither of which features in any version of the D10 concept, plus a separate cluster of Gulf and Middle Eastern leaders (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Ukraine) invited for sessions specifically framed around the war in Ukraine and Middle East stability rather than democratic solidarity. The unifying theme of Évian, according to the French hosts, was “Forging New Partnerships and Rebuilding International Solidarity” — a title that speaks to French diplomatic priorities around Africa, the Gulf and the Global South, not to a consolidating club of democracies.

This is not a minor scheduling quirk. It reveals what the G7 outreach list has actually become under successive presidencies: a mirror of each host nation’s own foreign-policy priorities, redrawn every year. Germany’s 2022 and Italy’s 2024 presidencies invited India alone, notably leaving out Australia and South Korea — a choice widely read in Berlin and Rome as reluctance to appear to be building an anti-China bloc on European soil. France’s 2026 list swapped in African and Gulf partners instead of the Indo-Pacific triad. The pattern is not a democracy club slowly hardening into ten permanent seats; it is a rotating cast whose composition tracks whichever G7 capital happens to be hosting, and whatever crisis — Ukraine, the Middle East, African debt, AI — that capital wants to headline that year.

India is the one genuine constant. It has now attended G7 outreach sessions in some form for seven consecutive years, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi used his 2026 Évian appearance to press a Global South argument about trust deficits and underrepresentation in global governance — a message aimed as much at reforming existing institutions as at joining a new democratic bloc. That consistency is real, and it is the strongest empirical case that India, at least, has become indispensable to the G7’s outward-facing agenda. But indispensability to one country’s invitation list is different from the existence of a ten-member coalition with defined membership, and the 2026 guest roster is proof that the “ten” in D10 is, at best, aspirational.

Meanwhile, the rival bloc keeps meeting too

It is worth setting this against what happened in New Delhi the same week this piece went to print. The 18th BRICS summit, chaired by India under the banner “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” produced a New Delhi Declaration running to some 140 paragraphs, adopted unanimously by all eleven members despite sharp internal disagreements — the summit had to paper over divisions between members on both sides of the Iran conflict and could not bring itself to name the United States directly even while criticising tariff wars. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were both present. The declaration touched on local-currency payment systems, the New Development Bank, AI governance and counter-terrorism language that pointedly referenced the 2025 Jammu and Kashmir attack — a notable diplomatic win for India within a bloc it does not fully trust.

The point is not that BRICS is more coherent than the G7’s democratic outreach — by most independent readings, BRICS remains a coalition of convenience held together more by shared grievance against Western-dominated institutions than by any positive common project, and analysts described this year’s outcome as “modest” precisely because so many members had reason to want it to fail. The point is that both blocs are, in their own ways, loose and improvised, and India sits inside both of them simultaneously, extracting leverage from each without formally committing to either. A formal D10 would require India to make a choice that its own diplomacy has spent a decade avoiding.

Why formalisation keeps stalling — and why that might be the right call

None of this means the D10 idea is worthless. The functional cooperation it has produced — on critical minerals, on 5G and telecoms security, increasingly on AI governance — is real and useful, and it has grown steadily each summit cycle regardless of what the grouping calls itself. But three structural obstacles explain why, after eighteen years, no G7 government has actually proposed making it permanent.

The first is continental Europe’s persistent unease. Germany and Italy’s decisions to invite India without its Indo-Pacific partners, and France’s 2026 substitution of African and Gulf outreach for the Australia-South Korea axis, both reflect a European preference for keeping China-adjacent messaging implicit rather than explicit. A named D10, with China unmentioned but unmistakably the subtext, would be harder to keep deniable.

The second is the unpredictability of the United States itself under the current administration, whose bilateral, transactional approach to allies sits uneasily with the idea of binding itself into a standing multilateral body with fixed membership and shared positions — the same unpredictability that has scrambled G7 unity on tariffs and Ukraine policy over the past two years.

The third, less discussed, is opportunity cost. Every year the G7’s outreach list is redrawn to fit that year’s crises — Ukraine and the Middle East in 2026, critical minerals and AI in 2025 — democracies retain the flexibility to build ad hoc coalitions suited to the problem at hand, rather than being locked into a fixed roster that might not fit the next crisis. Kenya and Egypt’s presence at Évian, driven by African debt and Middle East diplomacy rather than any democratic credential test, is a feature of that flexibility, not a bug to be engineered away.

A named D10 would trade this adaptability for clarity and symbolic weight — useful currency in a summit season this crowded, but not obviously worth the diplomatic cost of formally declaring a democratic bloc at a moment when the G7’s own hosts cannot agree on who belongs in it. The more realistic near-term outcome is what has actually been happening: growing functional cooperation on specific files — minerals, AI standards, supply-chain resilience — carried out by whichever subset of democracies has skin in that particular game, dressed up each year in whatever coalition the host capital finds diplomatically convenient. That may be less tidy than a named club of ten. It has also, so far, proved more durable than any of the formal proposals sitting in Atlantic Council file drawers since 2014.

What a more honest middle path looks like

If naming the coalition is politically premature, the alternative is not to abandon the project but to be more precise about what is actually being built. Advocates on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to conflate two different things: a security-and-values alliance modelled loosely on NATO’s political solidarity, and a narrower, technocratic coalition built around specific chokepoints in the global economy — telecoms equipment, semiconductor supply chains, rare-earth processing, AI safety standards. The second project has actually delivered results, from the critical-minerals action plan agreed at Kananaskis to the emerging AI-governance conversations that dominated both Kananaskis and Évian. The first project — a values-based alliance with a permanent secretariat, of the kind the Atlantic Council sketched out as far back as 2019 — has delivered almost nothing, precisely because it asks capitals to commit to a shared foreign policy they do not actually share, on China, on Russia, or on how confrontational to be with either.

Treating these as one project is what keeps stalling formalisation. A functional D10 — a standing, sherpa-level coordination mechanism for supply-chain and technology-standards cooperation among a flexible set of capable economies, without the language of a democratic bloc or a shared security posture — would be far easier for continental Europe to sign onto, since it avoids the anti-China framing that Berlin, Rome and Paris have each resisted in different summit cycles. It would also suit India, which has consistently sought the economic and technological benefits of closer G7 alignment while refusing anything that reads as bloc alignment against Russia or China, given its BRICS membership, its dependence on Russian energy and defence equipment, and its own unresolved border tensions with Beijing that require careful management rather than open confrontation.

This is, in effect, close to what has already been happening under different names each year — but making it durable would mean giving the functional cooperation a standing institutional home, independent of whichever country holds the rotating G7 presidency, so that critical-minerals and AI-governance work does not have to be re-negotiated and re-justified every twelve months depending on whether the host capital that year prioritises the Indo-Pacific, Africa or the Gulf. That is a far more modest ambition than the “alliance of democracies” that Atlantic Council reports and British prime ministers have periodically proposed. It is also, on the evidence of Évian’s scrambled guest list, a great deal closer to what G7 governments are actually willing to build.

By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN

Introduction

In June 2026, Belgium granted one-day visas to a five-member Taliban delegation so it could hold talks with European Union officials in Brussels — the first time since the group’s 2021 return to power that an official Taliban delegation set foot on European soil for direct engagement with the bloc. The European Commission was careful to insist the meeting, focused on migration and the repatriation of Afghan nationals, did not amount to recognition. That insistence, however, is becoming a familiar refrain across capitals that have, in practice, been moving toward normalisation with Kabul for years while studiously avoiding the word that would make it official. The EU’s migration-driven engagement is not an isolated European story; it is the latest data point in a broader, remarkably consistent global pattern — recognition arriving in instalments, justified each time by narrow technical necessity, while the cumulative diplomatic reality shifts underneath the official position of non-recognition.

This pattern deserves to be examined as a pattern, because looking at any single country’s engagement in isolation misses what is actually happening: a coordinated-in-effect-if-not-in-intent, multi-track normalisation of the Taliban that has left the group governing with more international engagement in 2026 than at any point since 2021, even as the formal diplomatic status of the Islamic Emirate remains unresolved almost everywhere.

The Baseline: Russia’s Formal Break from the Pack

Russia crossed the threshold nobody else has, on 3 July 2025, becoming the first state to formally recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, following the Russian Supreme Court’s decision to remove the group from its list of terrorist organisations that April. Moscow’s justification was explicitly functional rather than ideological: shared concern about Islamic State-Khorasan Province, which claimed responsibility for the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack that killed 145 people, alongside stated interest in trade and economic opportunities in energy, transport, agriculture, and infrastructure. Bilateral trade between Russia and Afghanistan had already reached roughly $1 billion in 2024 even before formal recognition, with Moscow functioning as a primary supplier of oil, gas, and wheat to Afghanistan throughout the period when the relationship was still technically unrecognised.

What is notable about Russia’s move is less the recognition itself than how unremarkable it turned out to be diplomatically. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomed the decision within a day, describing Afghanistan as one that “should not be excluded from the international community” — a statement that reads less like surprise at an ally’s unilateral step and more like a chorus member picking up a cue.

China’s Quieter Version of the Same Move

China had, in fact, already taken the substantive step eighteen months earlier without using the word “recognition.” In December 2023, Beijing became the first country to accredit a Taliban-appointed diplomat as an ambassador — full ambassadorial status, the highest rung of diplomatic representation short of the word “recognition” itself — while its foreign ministry simultaneously and explicitly denied that the move constituted recognition. This is the precise manoeuvre that has since become the template followed, with local variations, by the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Türkiye, and Pakistan, all of which have upgraded their diplomatic relations with Kabul to ambassadorial level while maintaining the same formal disclaimer.

China’s approach has been consistent with its broader Belt and Road logic: engagement calibrated to protect and expand infrastructure and investment interests, while security concerns about Uyghur militant groups operating from Afghan soil give Beijing the same counter-terrorism justification Moscow has used. At least seventeen countries now maintain embassies in Taliban-run Afghanistan, and Taliban-appointed diplomats represent the country in most Asian capitals, generally at the chargé d’affaires level — a rank just below full ambassador that has become the diplomatic community’s preferred way of maintaining substantive relations while keeping a technical fig leaf over the recognition question.

India’s Parallel Track: From Evacuation to Embassy

India’s trajectory illustrates the pattern’s incremental logic especially clearly, because it started from the furthest distance. New Delhi evacuated its diplomats from Kabul entirely in August 2021 and cancelled visas for Afghan citizens, reflecting decades of Indian wariness toward a Taliban movement historically backed by Pakistan’s intelligence establishment. Within a year, though, India had quietly redeployed a “technical team” to Kabul to coordinate humanitarian aid delivery — food and medicine — without any of the political engagement that would follow later.

The real shift began on 8 January 2025, when India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri met Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in Dubai, the first substantive high-level contact of the post-2021 era. Telephone diplomacy followed, then, in October 2025, Muttaqi made a six-day visit to India — the first by any senior Taliban official — after the UN Security Council’s sanctions committee granted him a temporary travel exemption. During that visit, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar announced the upgrade of India’s technical mission in Kabul to the status of “Embassy of India,” while pointedly stopping short of language that would imply formal recognition of the Taliban government. India also agreed to let the Taliban post its own diplomats to the Afghan embassy in New Delhi, and by January 2026 a Taliban-nominated chargé d’affaires, Mufti Noor Ahmad Noor, had taken up that post. India’s 2026-27 budget subsequently raised Afghan aid from Rs 100 crore to Rs 150 crore, and a Taliban trade delegation led by Industry and Commerce Minister Noorudin Azizi visited India in November 2025 to discuss mining, agriculture, and infrastructure investment.

India’s own strategic logic mirrors the pattern’s functional justification elsewhere, but with a distinctly regional inflection: New Delhi’s outreach intensified precisely as Pakistan-Taliban relations deteriorated into open border clashes over Islamabad’s accusations that Kabul harbours Pakistani Taliban (TTP) militants — clashes serious enough to close the Torkham and Chaman crossings and require Qatari, Turkish, and Saudi mediation for a ceasefire in October 2025. That backdrop let India frame its embassy upgrade not merely as bilateral outreach but as positioning itself as a stabilising alternative to Afghanistan’s overreliance on Pakistan, while simultaneously working to blunt Chinese and Pakistani influence in Kabul — a reminder that even within a broadly similar pattern of engagement, each state’s specific calculus remains shaped by its own regional rivalries as much as by any shared theory about Taliban governance.

The EU’s Version: Necessity Dressed as Technicality

Set against this backdrop, the EU’s Brussels meeting looks less like a diplomatic breakthrough and more like Europe arriving, three to four years late and under domestic political duress, at a position Russia, China, India, and several Gulf and Central Asian states had already reached by other routes. The EU’s proximate driver was overwhelmingly domestic: twenty of the bloc’s twenty-seven member states have pushed for stricter migration policies and firmer legal pathways for deportations, against a backdrop of roughly one million Afghan asylum applications received between 2013 and 2024, about half of them approved — making Afghans one of the EU’s largest single migrant cohorts. Germany and Austria had already been negotiating deportations bilaterally, with Berlin going so far as to allow two Taliban officials to work inside the Afghan diplomatic mission in Berlin specifically to facilitate the process — a striking illustration of how migration management pressure can produce de facto working relationships with a government whose legitimacy the same states publicly refuse to acknowledge.

The EU’s own framing — that the talks were “technical” and did not amount to recognition — is structurally identical to the disclaimers used by Beijing after its 2023 ambassador acceptance and by New Delhi after its 2025 embassy upgrade. European Parliament member Hannah Neumann’s critique, that the talks represent political normalisation without securing any accountability from the Taliban in return, could be transposed almost word for word onto criticism of China’s or India’s engagement, and has been by human rights observers in each case.

The Facilitators: Gulf and Central Asian Corridor States

Beneath the headline moves by Russia, China, India, and the EU sits a second, quieter layer of the pattern: the Gulf and Central Asian states that have functioned less as principals and more as connective tissue, making the larger normalisation possible in the first place. Qatar’s long-standing political office in Doha, established originally as a venue for the 2020 US-Taliban talks, has since evolved into the Taliban’s default diplomatic address for engaging with the wider world — the channel through which Muttaqi’s UN travel exemptions and shuttle diplomacy are routinely arranged, including the mediation Doha provided alongside Turkey and Saudi Arabia during the October 2025 Afghanistan-Pakistan border crisis. The UAE, for its part, upgraded to ambassadorial-level relations with Kabul early in the same wave as China, and it was Emirati facilitation that produced the January 2025 Dubai meeting between India’s Foreign Secretary and Muttaqi — the meeting that effectively opened India’s own normalisation track.

Central Asian states have played an equally structural, if less visible, role. Uzbekistan has hosted Taliban delegations to discuss the proposed trans-Afghan rail link connecting Central Asia to Pakistani ports, a project that requires treating the Taliban as a stable enough counterpart to negotiate decades-long infrastructure commitments with. Turkmenistan and Tajikistan have pursued comparable, if more cautious, economic and border-management engagement. None of these corridor states has made a symbolically loaded move like Moscow’s formal recognition; instead, their contribution has been to normalise the logistics of engaging Kabul — travel routes, mediation venues, trade corridors — that larger powers then use without having to build that infrastructure themselves.

This division of labour matters because it means the normalisation pattern is more resilient than any single government’s policy choice. Even if one capital reversed course, the underlying infrastructure of Gulf mediation and Central Asian trade corridors would remain in place, available to the next state ready to take its own incremental step.

Why the Pattern Persists Despite Almost Nobody Endorsing It

What makes this global pattern notable is that it is not being driven by any state’s positive assessment of Taliban governance — the Taliban’s restrictions on women and girls, its ranking of 142nd out of 143 countries on the Rule of Law Index, and the fact that roughly seventeen million Afghans, about a third of the population, remain food insecure according to the UN World Food Programme, are acknowledged by essentially every engaging government, including Russia’s and China’s. Instead, the pattern is being driven by the simple durability of the fact that the Taliban is the only entity actually governing Afghan territory, which makes it the only available counterpart for anything states actually need done there: counter-terrorism cooperation against ISKP, deportation and repatriation logistics, mineral and infrastructure investment, or humanitarian aid delivery.

This is precisely the dynamic that produces recognition by increments rather than by declaration. Each individual government can plausibly claim its own engagement is narrowly functional and reversible — an ambassador is not recognition, an embassy upgrade is not recognition, a migration MoU is not recognition — while the cumulative diplomatic environment the Taliban operates in has unmistakably thickened since 2021: seventeen-plus embassies, ambassadorial relations with several major and middle powers, one outright formal recognition, and now direct European engagement on its own soil. The Taliban’s own foreign ministry has been explicit about reading this correctly — spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid described Russia’s recognition as a “positive message to the rest of the world,” predicting other states would follow, and each subsequent upgrade elsewhere has functioned as exactly the kind of incremental validation Kabul is counting on.

Conclusion

The question worth asking, looking at the EU, Russia, China, and India together, is not whether any single engagement constitutes recognition — by design, none of them individually do — but whether the distinction between formal recognition and accumulated functional normalisation still matters in practice once enough states have crossed enough of these thresholds. For the Taliban, the answer is clearly no: functional engagement delivers most of what recognition would, embassies, trade, aid, counter-terrorism cooperation, and diplomatic visibility, without requiring any single government to answer politically for having granted it. For the states doing the engaging, the salami-slicing approach lets each preserve a technical position on non-recognition that increasingly describes a diplomatic reality none of them, from Brussels to Beijing to New Delhi, actually still inhabit.

By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN

There is a particular kind of symbolism in flying five helicopters in tight formation over El Alamein. The stretch of Egyptian coastline west of Alexandria is remembered, above all, for a battle — the one fought there in 1942 that Winston Churchill later described as a turning point of the Second World War. Eight decades on, the same desert sands are hosting a very different kind of spectacle: the second edition of the El Alamein International Airshow, running from September 8 to 10, and among its headline attractions is an Indian Air Force unit that has spent more than two decades turning helicopter flying into an art form.

The Sarang Helicopter Display Team touched down in Egypt in the first week of September, its five Advanced Light Helicopters (ALH) Dhruv having made the long transit from their home base to join air forces, aerospace companies and defence industry professionals from around the world at El Alamein International Airport. For India, the visit is being framed as more than an aerobatic engagement. It is being read, deliberately, as a statement about how far the country’s indigenous aerospace programme has come — and about a defence relationship with Egypt that has been quietly deepening for several years.

A Team Built From a Test Flight

Sarang’s story does not begin with aerobatics at all. It begins with a far more mundane task: proving that an experimental Indian helicopter actually worked. In March 2002, the Aircraft and System Testing Establishment in Bengaluru raised an evaluation flight for the Advanced Light Helicopter, the aircraft that would later be named Dhruv, meaning “unshakeable” or “pole star.” The unit’s job was to put the new helicopter through its paces before it entered frontline service with the Indian armed forces.

It was only after that evaluation was complete that someone in the Air Force decided the aircraft’s handling was impressive enough to be worth showing off. The evaluation flight was repurposed to build a display profile, and a three-helicopter formation began developing manoeuvres that had rarely, if ever, been attempted by military helicopters anywhere. A fourth aircraft joined a year later. The team made its international debut at the Asian Aerospace show in Singapore in 2004, and by 2005 it had been formally constituted as No. 151 Helicopter Unit, based first at Yelahanka near Bengaluru before relocating to Sulur Air Force Station in Tamil Nadu, where it remains today.

The name chosen for the unit was Sarang — Sanskrit for peacock, India’s national bird — a nod to grace and vivid colour rather than raw power. It has not been an entirely smooth two decades. The team suffered its first fatal accident in February 2007, when one of its helicopters crashed during a rehearsal ahead of Aero India, and there have been other close calls over the years, including a crash-landing in 2010 that caused no injuries. Yet the unit has grown rather than retreated, expanding from three aircraft to four and, earlier this year, formally graduating to a five-helicopter formation — a configuration the Air Force describes as unique in the world for a rotary-wing display team. Over more than two decades, Sarang has flown upward of a thousand displays at several hundred venues, appearances that have taken it well beyond Indian airspace to events such as the Farnborough Airshow in England.

The Aircraft Doing the Talking

What makes Sarang’s story matter to more than aviation enthusiasts is the aircraft itself. The Dhruv was designed and built by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, developed in partnership with the German firm MBB (now part of Airbus) from the mid-1980s, with its prototype first taking to the air in August 1992. It is a twin-engine, multi-role helicopter in the roughly five-and-a-half-tonne class, built with a hingeless rotor system that gives it unusually sharp manoeuvrability for an aircraft its size — precisely the quality that makes formation aerobatics possible in the first place. More than 400 Dhruvs have been built to date, flying in the colours of the Indian Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard, and the type has also been exported to a handful of foreign operators, making it one of the more visible symbols of India’s push toward defence self-reliance.

That push has a name — India’s “Atmanirbhar Bharat” or self-reliance programme — and a set of figures the government likes to cite whenever an indigenous platform performs on an international stage. Domestic defence production is now estimated to meet roughly two-thirds of the country’s annual military equipment needs, and Indian-made defence products are today exported to more than 80 countries. A helicopter that started life as a test-flight subject and is now performing synchronised stall turns over the Mediterranean coast fits that narrative rather neatly, and Indian officials have not been shy about drawing the connection.

What the Crowd Will See

Sarang’s display profile typically runs around fifteen minutes and packs in a sequence of manoeuvres that sound almost more suited to fixed-wing jets than to helicopters: an entry in a “wineglass” formation, transitions between diamond and line-astern shapes, a “cross-over break,” a “level mesh” and a “level cross,” pair manoeuvres, and a formation called the “Sarang Split.” The signature move, though, is one the team calls the Dolphin Leap — a synchronised stall turn in which the helicopters appear to arc upward and flip back on themselves in unison, the closest a rotary-wing aircraft comes to mimicking a dolphin breaching water.

At El Alamein, the team is adding something new to that repertoire: a manoeuvre billed as the Spot Stall Turn, performed for the first time in front of an international audience. Details of exactly how it differs from the team’s existing stall-turn sequence have not been spelled out publicly, but its debut alongside the now five-helicopter formation suggests the team has spent the months since its formation upgrade refining a genuinely expanded show rather than simply adding an extra aircraft to the old one. Precision of this kind demands constant radio discipline between pilots and split-second judgement of spacing, since the aircraft often fly close enough that a small miscalculation would have serious consequences — which is presumably why the unit’s motto, “Apatsu Mitram,” translates roughly as “a friend in time of need.”

A Relationship Being Built One Exercise at a Time

The airshow appearance did not happen in a vacuum. India and Egypt elevated their ties to a Strategic Partnership in 2023, and the years since have seen a steady accumulation of smaller, more technical engagements that rarely make headlines individually but add up to something substantial. The two countries run an annual joint special-forces exercise called Cyclone, whose fourth edition was held at Anshas in Egypt in April this year, involving Indian Para Special Forces training alongside Egyptian commandos in desert and semi-desert conditions. India also sent more than 700 Army, Navy and Air Force personnel to Egypt’s multinational Exercise Bright Star in 2025 — its largest contingent ever for that drill.

Institutionally, the relationship runs through the India-Egypt Joint Defence Committee, whose eleventh meeting took place in Cairo in April 2026. That gathering produced a defence cooperation roadmap for 2026-27 built around expanding military exercises, deepening joint training and strengthening maritime security cooperation, and it also marked the first-ever Navy-to-Navy staff talks between the two countries. India used the occasion to highlight its defence manufacturing growth — production now exceeding $20 billion annually, with roughly $4 billion in exports — and both sides discussed possibilities for co-development and co-production of equipment. Air force cooperation featured too: India’s Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh, visited Egypt in December 2025 at the invitation of his Egyptian counterpart, a visit that appears to have helped set up the Sarang team’s appearance at El Alamein months later.

The Indian Embassy in Cairo marked the team’s arrival with an event on defence collaboration, attended by India’s Ambassador to Egypt, Suresh Reddy, alongside the Sarang team’s commander and pilots, who spoke about the ALH Dhruv and their preparation for the show. Egyptian officials have, for their part, described the aerial display as a major highlight of the wider airshow programme — a signal that the reception on the ground has matched the choreography in the air.

More Than a Photo Opportunity

It would be easy to read all of this as pageantry — five red-and-white helicopters looping over a foreign airfield, a press conference, a diplomatic handshake. But air displays of this kind have long functioned as a genuine instrument of statecraft, precisely because they compress a country’s technological capability, its pilots’ training standards and its willingness to project itself abroad into a fifteen-minute spectacle that a general audience can actually watch and understand. A submarine deal or a satellite-launch agreement rarely draws a crowd; a synchronised helicopter formation performing a Dolphin Leap against the backdrop of the Pyramids, as Sarang was photographed doing in the run-up to the show, draws exactly that.

For Egypt, hosting a second edition of an international airshow that pulls in air forces and defence manufacturers from multiple continents is itself a statement of ambition — a bid to establish El Alamein, historically synonymous with wartime destruction, as a venue associated instead with aerospace commerce and international cooperation. For India, sending a five-helicopter team flying an entirely indigenous aircraft is a way of putting its “Make in India” defence narrative in front of an audience that includes potential customers, partner air forces and its own diaspora, all at once.

None of this guarantees any particular commercial or strategic outcome. Airshow appearances do not, by themselves, translate into export orders or new defence agreements. But they do tend to open conversations, and in a relationship that has been advancing steadily through joint exercises and committee meetings rather than through single dramatic announcements, a well-executed display can do useful work simply by being memorable. When the Sarang team lifts off from El Alamein International Airport over the coming days, the immediate audience will be watching for the Dolphin Leap and the new Spot Stall Turn. The longer-term audience — in defence ministries in New Delhi and Cairo — will be watching for what comes next.

There is, in the end, a quieter story running underneath the aerobatics. A helicopter that once existed only to be tested is now the face of a country’s aerospace ambitions abroad. A stretch of desert once defined by loss is, this week, defined by formation flying and diplomatic handshakes instead. Nothing about that transformation was inevitable — it took two decades of pilots, engineers and negotiators doing unglamorous work out of the spotlight. The Dolphin Leap only looks effortless from the ground. Everything that made it possible happened long before the helicopters ever left the runway.

By : Prachi Kushwah, Research Analyst, GSDN

Introduction 

The question of whether the world can de-dollarize has moved from an academic debate to a strategic economic question. The United States dollar has served as the principal international currency for decades, functioning simultaneously as a reserve asset, a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a funding currency. Yet the international monetary system is changing. Geopolitical tensions, sanctions, concerns about dependence on the United States financial system, the expansion of emerging economies, and the search for alternative payment arrangements have encouraged governments to diversify away from the dollar. 

De-dollarization, however, should not be understood simply as replacing the dollar with another single currency. It can also mean a gradual reduction in the dollar’s share of reserves, trade invoicing, financial contracts, and cross-border payments, accompanied by a wider use of several currencies. On this broader definition, some de-dollarization is already taking place. The more difficult question is whether this diversification can develop into a systemic transformation in which the dollar loses its position as the leading global currency. 

The available evidence suggests that a substantial shift away from the dollar is possible, but a complete displacement of the dollar is unlikely in the foreseeable future. The most plausible outcome is a more diversified and partially multipolar monetary system in which the dollar remains the leading currency but faces stronger competition from the euro, the Chinese renminbi and a group of other reserve currencies. 

Why the Dollar Became Dominant 

The attraction of the dollar is reinforced by network effects. International users prefer the currency that is already widely used because it reduces transaction costs and makes it easier to find counterparties. A company invoicing exports in dollars can trade with customers in multiple countries without maintaining numerous bilateral currency arrangements. Financial institutions can borrow, lend, and hedge in a market where liquidity is abundant. Central banks also value dollar assets because United States Treasury securities provide a large pool of highly liquid assets that can be used in reserve management. 

Evidence of De-Dollarization 

There are nevertheless clear signs of diversification. The International Monetary Fund’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves data showed that the dollar accounted for 57.74 percent of allocated global foreign exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2025, marginally below 57.79 percent in the previous quarter. The decline is not dramatic, but the longer-term direction matters. The dollar’s share has gradually fallen from the levels observed in the early 2000s, while reserve managers have increased allocations to several non-traditional currencies. 

The foreign exchange market also demonstrates that diversification has limits. According to the Bank for International Settlements’ April 2025 survey, the dollar was on one side of 89.2 percent of all foreign exchange transactions. That figure was higher than in 2022. Foreign exchange markets therefore remain deeply dollar-centric even while central banks diversify their reserves. 

The same pattern is visible in trade and international finance. The Federal Reserve has noted that the dollar is overwhelmingly important in trade invoicing outside Europe, where the euro is more prominent. Dollar-denominated international banking, debt securities, and cross-border payments also remain extensive. This suggests that reserve diversification is occurring more rapidly than a structural replacement of the dollar in day-to-day global finance. 

Why Countries Want to De-Dollarize 

There are both economic and geopolitical motivations behind de-dollarization efforts. First, dependence on a dominant currency can create vulnerability to monetary policy decisions made in another country. When the United States Federal Reserve changes interest rates, the effects can spread rapidly through exchange rates, capital flows, commodity prices and debt-servicing costs in emerging markets. An appreciation of the dollar can tighten financial conditions in economies with substantial dollar liabilities. 

Second, countries concerned about sanctions and financial restrictions have stronger incentives to develop payment mechanisms that rely less on the United States financial system. The freezing of Russian central bank reserves following the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, intensified international debate about the security and political implications of holding reserves in currencies linked to Western financial institutions. The lesson drawn by some governments was not necessarily that dollar assets are unsafe, but that the geopolitical availability of those assets cannot be separated entirely from foreign policy. 

Third, emerging economies have an interest in reducing currency conversion costs in regional trade. Direct settlement in local currencies can, in some cases, reduce the need to convert a local currency into dollars and then into another currency. Regional financial arrangements, currency-swap agreements, and interoperable payment systems can gradually make such transactions more practical. 

These motivations are significant, but they should not be confused with the existence of an immediately available substitute. Building a currency’s international role requires more than political will. It requires trusted institutions, deep capital markets, financial openness, convertible assets, reliable payment systems, and a large supply of safe and liquid securities. 

The Rise of the Renminbi and Other Alternatives 

China is the most frequently discussed challenger to dollar dominance. Its economy is large, its trade relationships are extensive, and Chinese authorities have encouraged greater use of the renminbi in international trade and finance. China has also supported cross-border payment infrastructure and bilateral arrangements that facilitate settlement in its currency. 

Yet the renminbi faces structural constraints. International reserve currencies need to be widely accessible and supported by highly liquid markets. Capital-account restrictions, regulatory uncertainty and concerns about the predictability of policy can limit the willingness of global investors to hold very large renminbi positions. The currency’s relatively small share of global reserves reflects these constraints. A country can become a major trading power without automatically becoming the issuer of the world’s preferred reserve asset. 

The euro is in a stronger institutional position, because it is already freely traded and supported by large, sophisticated financial markets. The European Central Bank’s 2025 assessment placed the euro at around one-fifth of global official foreign exchange reserves at constant exchange rates. Nevertheless, the euro also has limitations. The European Union does not have a single federal fiscal authority comparable in scale and structure to the United States Treasury market, and the euro area’s political and fiscal architecture can complicate the creation of a sufficiently unified pool of safe assets. 

Other currencies are gaining attention as well. Reserve managers can diversify into the Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Swiss franc, Singapore dollar and Nordic currencies. This matters because de-dollarization does not require one challenger to defeat the dollar. A broader distribution of reserve holdings across several currencies could gradually reduce the dollar’s relative dominance while leaving it in first place. 

BRICS and the Push for Alternative Payment Systems 

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) grouping has become a prominent political forum for discussing financial diversification. At the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, held from October 22, 2024, to October 24, 2024, leaders supported the greater use of local currencies in financial transactions between member countries and their trading partners. They also encouraged work on the BRICS Cross-Border Payments Initiative and discussed the feasibility of connecting financial market infrastructures. 

However, the BRICS agenda also shows the limitations of the de-dollarization project. The group is economically and politically diverse. Its members have different inflation rates, exchange-rate regimes, capital controls, financial systems, and strategic interests. A common BRICS currency would therefore require an extremely demanding level of economic and institutional coordination. The more realistic objective is to create additional channels alongside the existing international system rather than replace them immediately. 

The Limits of De-Dollarization 

The biggest obstacle to rapid de-dollarization is the international demand for safe and liquid assets. A reserve currency must offer investors’ confidence not only in the value of the currency but also in their ability to enter and exit large positions quickly. The United States has an unmatched stock of highly liquid government securities and a large, integrated financial market. These qualities create advantages that cannot be reproduced by a new payment system alone. 

There is also a distinction between settlement of currency and reserve currency. Countries can settle a greater share of trade in local currencies while still holding dollar assets as reserves. Similarly, a digital payment platform can reduce the need to use dollar-based correspondent banking for a transaction without reducing the underlying demand for dollar securities. De-dollarization in payments therefore does not automatically translate into de-dollarization in asset holdings. 

Another limitation is the problem of trust. International currency status depends heavily on institutional credibility. Investors want predictable monetary policy, enforceable contracts, transparent regulation, and confidence that capital can move when necessary. Political disagreements or restrictions on capital mobility can limit the international usefulness of a currency even when the issuing economy is large. 

Can the World Really De-Dollarize? 

The answer depends on what is meant by de-dollarization. If the goal is to reduce the dollar share of global reserves, increase local-currency trade, develop alternative payment systems, and strengthen the international role of other currencies, then de-dollarization is both possible and already under way. If the goal is to make the dollar cease to be the world’s leading reserve and transaction currency, the challenge is far greater. 

A gradual transition toward a more multipolar monetary system is the most credible scenario. The dollar may remain the largest international currency while the euro, renminbi and several smaller reserve currencies gain market share. Regional arrangements could become more important, and digital payment technologies could reduce dependence on traditional correspondent banking. Central banks may increasingly manage reserves as a portfolio of currencies rather than a predominantly dollar-based pool. 

Conclusion 

The world can de-dollarize, but probably not through a single dramatic replacement of the dollar. The international monetary system is more likely to evolve through incremental diversification. The dollar share of reserves may continue to decline; alternative currencies may gain limited but meaningful roles, and new payment systems may allow countries to conduct more transactions without passing through dollar-based infrastructure. 

Yet the dollar possesses powerful structural advantages. Its dominance is supported by the scale of United States financial markets, the liquidity of dollar assets, its extensive use in international trade and finance, and strong network effects. These advantages mean that even countries seeking greater monetary autonomy often continue to rely on the dollar. 

The central issue, therefore, is not whether the dollar will disappear. It is whether the global monetary system will become less dependent on a single currency. On current evidence, the answer is yes. The emerging order is likely to be more diversified, more regional and somewhat more multipolar, while the dollar remains at the centre of the system. De-dollarization is consequently better understood as a gradual reduction in monetary concentration than at the end of the dollar era. 

By: Amisha Mohan

The 18^th BRICS Summit to be hosted by India in New Delhi on September 12-13 serves as a litmus test for contemporary multilateralism. Bringing together 11 full member states- including recent additions- Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia- alongside an expanding array of partner nations, the summit solidifies BRICS as the definitive powerhouse of the Global South.

The BRICS Summit takes place against the backdrop of shifting trade regimes, West Asian security crises, Trump administration’s trade and tariff policies and growing structural divergence within the bloc. As PM Modi prepares to welcome fellow heads of state, New Delhi faces a serious test of transforming the organization from a forum of declarations to a more representative global order.

Why BRICS 2026 is historic?

• This year marks exactly two decades since the establishment of the original BRIC framework in 2006. India is the BRICS Chair for the 2026 edition, which it formally assumed on 1^st January, 2026, succeeding Brazil.

• The BRICS chair is guided by the theme: ‘Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.’ According to the Ministry of External Affairs, the theme reflects PM Modi’s vision of a people-centric approach rooted in the spirit of ‘Humanity First.’ Under India’s chairmanship this year, over 350 meetings and high-level engagements have already been held in over 25 cities across India to further strengthen the BRICS strategic partnership across three fundamental pillars- political and security, economic and financial, cultural and people-to-people exchanges.

• The New Delhi Summit is also significant as it is the first BRICS leaders’ summit hosted by India since the grouping’s expansion to 11 members.

Walking a diplomatic tightrope: What India seeks to achieve through its BRICS chairship?

Positive agendas

• India’s broad objective is to make the forum more development oriented.

• India is also pushing for greater quota reforms at the IMF and an expansion of the New Development Bank’s capital base.

• Laying stress on creating a more integrated innovation system, India has additionally proposed a BRICS Startup Innovation Fund to catalyze financing for early and growth-stage startups.

• In economic governance and trade, the alliance has advanced the strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership 2030 while reaffirming support for a robust multilateral trading system with the WTO at its core. To fortify trade corridors, member states have adopted the BRICS Global Value Chains Action Plan 2026-2030, alongside guiding principles designed to assess export-oriented MSMEs.

• Energy security remains a key focus given the alliance’s combination of major energy producers, consumers and industrializing economies. Following the BRICS Energy Ministers’ meeting in Gurugram, member nations adopted guiding principles on smart grids and launched the BRICS Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage to foster pilot projects.

• India is also advocating for accelerated collective efforts towards climate action, green finance, energy transitions and sustainable development, aligned with national and global priorities.

The Shadow of Challenges

As New Delhi hosts 2026 BRICS Summit, it needs to navigate geopolitical tensions with major world powers while focusing on broader economic and multilateral outcomes.

• Managing internal geopolitical rivalry with China: China’s level of engagement will be particularly important given the increasingly competitive India-China relationship. Persistent border disagreements and conflicting regional priorities have adversely affected bilateral ties. Amid this, the future trajectory of India-China relations will be closely watched for signs of border stabilisation and trade normalisation.

• Russia dynamics: Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov highlighted that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to India for the BRICS Summit later this week will provide an opportunity for the two countries to discuss bilateral relations. However, amid diplomatic sensitivities and Western sanctions, New Delhi will try to carefully navigate future dimensions with Russia.

• The political consensus on West Asia will be under intense scrutiny. This becomes more significant for India as West Asia is central to its energy security, trade and diaspora interests. Any prolonged disruption in the region can adversely affect India.

For India, the challenge would be to gather regional agreement on important issues, with the need to strike a balancing act because the expanded BRICS includes both Iran and the UAE, which have opposing interests in the Middle East.

This is the third summit to be hosted by the Narendra Modi government, following the editions in 2016 and 2021. Under its chair, New Delhi hopes to emerge with a stronger voice for Global South and advocate for a more practical, inclusive and development-oriented forum. The chair sets forth a vision for a peaceful, multipolar world order grounded in strategic autonomy and economic resilience.

By : Dr. Gayathri Pramod Panamoottil

The signing of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye on 7 August 2026 represents an important development in the evolution of West Asian security architecture. Concluded in Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the agreement establishes a framework under which an armed attack against one of the three states is to be regarded as an attack against all three. The agreement explicitly invokes the right of individual and collective self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The three governments have simultaneously stressed that the arrangement is defensive, does not identify a particular adversary and remains open to other friendly states.  

The significance of the Mecca Pact, however, should not be exaggerated. Describing it as an “Islamic NATO” captures some of its political symbolism but risks overstating its present institutional and military capabilities. NATO has developed over decades into a highly institutionalized organization with integrated military commands, common planning structures, standing forces, and established mechanisms for consultation and collective action. The Mecca framework, by contrast, is at an early stage. Its principal achievement is the creation of a political commitment to collective deterrence and deeper defence cooperation rather than the immediate creation of an integrated military alliance. Reporting the agreement indicates that the precise form of assistance in a crisis would depend on circumstances and on the nature of the assistance requested by the state under attack.  

Its importance nevertheless goes beyond symbolism. Saudi Arabia is attempting to reduce the risks associated with excessive dependence on a single external security provider while continuing to maintain its strategic relationship with the United States. Türkiye is seeking a larger autonomous role in regional security while remaining a NATO member and expanding its defence-industrial footprint across the Gulf and wider Muslim world. Pakistan, meanwhile, is transforming a long-standing Saudi security relationship into a broader trilateral strategic platform that connects South Asia, the Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean. 

The agreement therefore reflects a broader movement toward strategic diversification. West Asian states increasingly appear unwilling to assume that security must be guaranteed exclusively by an outside great power. Instead, they are building overlapping networks involving regional military powers, defence industries, intelligence relationships, economic partnerships, and bilateral security arrangements. This does not mean that the United States is being expelled from the region. Indeed, Washington retains enormous military, technological, financial, and diplomatic influence. Rather, regional actors are attempting to ensure that their security does not depend entirely upon Washington’s willingness to intervene in every crisis. 

The timing of the pact is critical. The agreement was signed amid heightened tensions surrounding the US-Israel confrontation with Iran and concerns over attacks, missiles, drones, energy infrastructure and maritime routes. The regional environment has demonstrated how quickly a conflict involving Iran can affect Gulf security and international commerce. The Strait of Hormuz, Red Sea, Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea form a connected strategic system in which developments in one theatre can generate consequences across another.  

The pact also creates a complicated strategic equation for Iran. Although Turkish and Pakistani officials have explicitly stated that the agreement is not directed against Iran, Tehran cannot ignore the implications of a closer relationship among Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia brings financial strength and geographic proximity to the Gulf; Türkiye contributes a large conventional military and rapidly expanding defence industry; and Pakistan contributes substantial military experience and nuclear capabilities. The combination is therefore significant even if the agreement does not create a unified force. For India, the most important implications are not that a new military bloc has suddenly emerged against New Delhi. The pact does not name India as an adversary, and Saudi Arabia has strong economic and societal ties with India. The more important issue is the expansion of Pakistan’s diplomatic and strategic networks. Islamabad now possesses an additional platform through which it can cultivate relationships with Ankara and Riyadh and potentially internationalize regional and bilateral issues. India must therefore distinguish between an immediate military threat and a longer-term structural challenge. The appropriate Indian response should consequently be one of strategic recalibration rather than alarm. New Delhi should deepen bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, expand maritime-security cooperation, strengthen defence-industrial partnerships, maintain productive relations with Israel and the United States without becoming dependent on either, preserve its engagement with Iran and Russia, and accelerate indigenous defence capabilities. 

Ultimately, the Mecca Pact is best interpreted as an early manifestation of a more networked and multipolar security order in West Asia. Its future importance will depend on whether the three signatories develop regular exercises, intelligence-sharing mechanisms, defence-industrial projects, institutional structures, and credible procedures for responding to crises. If those elements develop, the pact could become considerably more consequential. If they do not, it may remain primarily a political declaration of strategic solidarity. 

The central lesson for India and other outside powers is therefore clear: West Asian security is moving from a predominantly hub-and-spoke model centered on an external guarantor toward a more complex network of regional partnerships. States that adapt early to that transformation will possess greater strategic influence; those that continue to view the region through older alliance structures at risk becoming reactive rather than influential. 

 Background and Origins 

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement did not emerge in isolation. Its origins lie in a longer process of strategic recalibration in West Asia, intensified by the security crises of the past several years and accelerated by the escalation surrounding Iran in 2026. The agreement signed on 7 August 2026 brought together three states that had already developed substantial bilateral relationships but had never previously converted those relationships into a formal trilateral defence framework. The result is a new strategic mechanism connecting the Gulf, Anatolia, and South Asia.  

For decades, the security architecture of the Gulf rested heavily upon American military power. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies depended upon US intelligence, air defence, naval power, logistics, weapons systems and extended deterrence. The arrangement was mutually beneficial: Washington acquired influence over a strategically vital region and access to energy and maritime routes, while Gulf partners obtained security guarantees and advanced military technology. 

Yet the model also generated structural vulnerability. The more regional security depended upon a single external power, the more exposed regional states became to changes in that power’s political priorities. Questions concerning the durability of the American commitment became especially important as Washington periodically signaled a desire to reduce its military footprint or shift attention toward other strategic theatres. Even where US forces remained present, uncertainty over the circumstances in which Washington would use military force encouraged regional governments to develop additional options. 

Saudi Arabia therefore increasingly pursued strategic hedging. Hedging does not mean abandoning an alliance; it means avoiding dependence on one partner by maintaining several relationships simultaneously. Riyadh has continued its close relationship with Washington while simultaneously strengthening ties with China, Russia, Türkiye, Pakistan and other regional actors. The Mecca Pact fits naturally within this strategy. It gives Saudi Arabia another layer of deterrence without requiring the Kingdom to sever or downgrade its relationship with the United States. 

The regional conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran in 2026 provided a powerful catalyst. The conflict demonstrated the potential for an attack directed at Iran to generate consequences across the Gulf and surrounding maritime environment. Gulf states faced the possibility that their territory, energy infrastructure or shipping routes could become targets even if they were not themselves direct participants in the war. Such circumstances encourage states to ask whether existing security arrangements are sufficient in a rapidly changing crisis. 

The Mecca agreement is therefore partly a response to uncertainty. It does not necessarily indicate that Saudi Arabia has lost confidence in the United States. Rather, it indicates that Riyadh wants more than one strategic option. distinction is important. A state can remain an American security partner while simultaneously developing independent or complementary security relationships with other powers. The bilateral Saudi-Pakistani relationship provided the initial foundation for this development. Pakistan has maintained a long history of military cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including defence training, deployments and institutional links. The relationship has periodically extended beyond conventional diplomacy into questions of strategic security. Pakistan’s large armed forces, extensive military experience and nuclear capability make it an unusually valuable security partner for Saudi Arabia. Türkiye adds another dimension. Unlike Pakistan, Türkiye is a NATO member and possesses a large conventional military-industrial base. Its defence industry has become increasingly important in the Middle East, particularly through unmanned aerial systems, missiles, electronic warfare technologies, and other platforms. Ankara has also pursued an independent foreign-policy posture that seeks greater regional influence while retaining its Western alliances. The three countries therefore offer complementary assets. Saudi Arabia provides financial resources, geographic position and strategic importance. Türkiye offers industrial and technological capabilities and a major conventional military. Pakistan provides military manpower, experience and strategic depth. The agreement attempts to turn these complementary strengths into a political deterrence framework. 

The choice of Mecca as the venue is also significant. Mecca possesses enormous religious and symbolic importance across the Muslim world, and holding the summit there inevitably gave the agreement a wider political resonance. Yet the signatories have been careful to avoid presenting the pact as a sectarian alliance. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and other officials have stressed that no common adversary is identified in the agreement. President Erdoğan similarly stated that the arrangement targets no country and is open to other states seeking regional peace and stability.  

This distinction reflects the sensitivity of the Iranian question. Saudi Arabia and Iran have historically competed for regional influence, but Riyadh has also pursued periods of diplomatic accommodation with Tehran. A treaty explicitly directed against Iran would therefore constrain Saudi diplomacy and potentially undermine efforts at de-escalation. By defining the agreement in general terms as collective deterrence, Riyadh and Ankara retain greater diplomatic flexibility. The agreement also has a post-October 7 context. The broader Middle Eastern security environment has been transformed by the wars and crises that followed the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. Regional governments have had to balance relations with Israel, the United States, Iran and domestic public opinion. The subsequent expansion of missile, drone, proxy and maritime threats has made traditional distinctions between domestic, regional and external security increasingly difficult to maintain. The Mecca Pact thus represents the convergence of several trends: Saudi strategic hedging, Pakistani efforts to expand its diplomatic relevance, Turkish regional activism, the growth of indigenous defence industries and uncertainty over the future shape of the American security role. 

Its origins should therefore not be reduced to a single Iranian threat or a single crisis. The agreement is better understood as the institutional expression of a longer-term transformation. Regional powers are increasingly attempting to build security capabilities themselves rather than relying exclusively on external guarantors. The crucial question is what comes next. If the agreement produces regular exercises, intelligence cooperation, defence-industrial integration and permanent coordination mechanisms, it could gradually develop into a significant regional security institution. If implementation remains limited to political declarations, its practical impact will be smaller. The origins of the pact therefore explain both its importance and its uncertainty: it is the product of a changing security environment, but its final institutional character has yet to be determined. 

What the Pact Contains — and What It Omits 

The significance of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement lies as much in its wording and institutional design as in the political circumstances surrounding its signing. At its core is a collective-deterrence principle: an armed attack against one of the three signatories is to be regarded as an attack against all. The agreement also reaffirms the right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. This provides the pact with an established international-law reference point rather than creating an entirely novel legal formula. The collective-defence clause is undoubtedly the most consequential element. Deterrence depends partly on an adversary’s uncertainty about the consequences of aggression. If an opponent believes that an attack on Saudi Arabia, for example, would remain a bilateral confrontation, the costs of aggression may appear manageable. If the same opponent believes that Türkiye and Pakistan could become involved, the strategic calculation becomes more complicated. However, collective-defence language does not automatically create an automatic military response. This is one of the most important distinctions between the Mecca Pact and NATO. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan indicated that a state under attack would request assistance and specify the form of support required. That leaves room for political decision-making regarding whether the appropriate response should involve troops, intelligence, logistics, air defence, weapons, diplomatic support, or other forms of assistance.  This flexibility is both an advantage and a weakness. It is advantageous because the three governments retain national control over escalation. Saudi Arabia may not want to enter every conflict involving Pakistan, and Pakistan may not want to become involved automatically in every confrontation involving Saudi Arabia. Türkiye, as a NATO member with its own complex relationships with Russia, Iran, Europe and the United States, also has reasons to preserve freedom of action. The weakness is that ambiguity can reduce deterrence. An adversary may question how far the other members are actually prepared to go. Effective collective defence requires not merely political declarations but credible planning, logistics, interoperability and political will. The agreement also aims to deepen defence cooperation. Official Turkish statements emphasize collective deterrence, defence-industry projects and counterterrorism cooperation. The three countries have substantial opportunities for cooperation in drones, air defence, electronic warfare, intelligence, cyber capabilities, and military training.  

Defence-industrial cooperation could eventually prove more important than the treaty of language itself. Türkiye has developed a substantial indigenous defence sector, especially in unmanned systems and aerospace. Pakistan possesses significant experience in co-production and military manufacturing. Saudi Arabia has enormous financial resources and has sought to increase domestic defence production. A triangular industrial relationship could therefore create supply chains that connect Saudi capital, Turkish technology and Pakistani manufacturing and manpower. Nevertheless, it is important not to assume that every possible defence project has already become operational under the pact. Defence-industrial integration is a process rather than an immediate condition. Joint production requires agreements concerning intellectual property, financing, technology transfer, export controls, training, maintenance, and supply chains. The future strategic value of the pact will therefore depend heavily on whether the signatories translate political cooperation into actual industrial capacity. 

The same applies to intelligence-sharing. Sharing intelligence can substantially improve deterrence and crisis response, but it requires secure communications, compatible procedures, trusted institutions, and confidence among intelligence services. Regular intelligence cooperation could help the three states identify missile launches, drone activity, maritime threats, terrorist networks and cyber operations. But the sensitivity of intelligence means that cooperation is likely to develop incrementally. One major omission is the absence of a NATO-style integrated command structure. NATO’s operational effectiveness is partly derived from decades of institutional development. Its members have established headquarters, planning mechanisms, command relationships, and interoperability standards. The Mecca Pact currently lacks comparable publicly disclosed structures. A second omission is the absence of a standing joint force. The agreement does not establish a permanently deployed trilateral military formation. This means that military cooperation would have to be assembled when required. Such an arrangement can work, but mobilization and coordination would take time. A third major difference concerns financing. There is not publicly established common defence budget comparable to NATO’s institutional financial mechanisms. Saudi Arabia may finance major projects, Türkiye may contribute industrial capabilities, and Pakistan may contribute personnel or expertise, but this is different from maintaining a shared alliance budget. Another important omission is an explicit nuclear-sharing arrangement. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state, but the agreement does not publicly establish a mechanism by which Pakistani nuclear capabilities become an alliance nuclear umbrella for Saudi Arabia or Türkiye. Any assumption of automatic nuclear protection would therefore go beyond the publicly available text and official statements. 

Geographic scope is also important. The agreement does not publicly establish a detailed map defining every circumstance that would activate collective defence. This creates ambiguity over attacks on bases, ships, cyber infrastructure, diplomatic facilities, proxies, or forces operating abroad. The overall structure is therefore best understood as a flexible deterrence framework. It establishes political solidarity and a commitment to expanded defence cooperation while leaving substantial discretion to the member governments. This may actually be intentional. A highly rigid alliance would impose obligations that could constrain Saudi diplomatic flexibility, Turkish autonomy and Pakistan’s delicate relationship with Iran. The Mecca Pact instead provides a middle ground between complete bilateralism and a fully institutionalized military alliance. Its future trajectory will depend on implementation. Regular military exercises, intelligence mechanisms, defence-industrial projects, and institutional coordination could gradually convert the agreement from a political signal into a more capable security organization. Until then, its principal effect is psychological and strategic: it changes an adversary calculation by demonstrating that aggression against one state could involve two additional regional powers. 

 Mecca Pact vs. NATO: A Structural Comparison 

The description of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement as an “Islamic NATO” is politically powerful but analytically imprecise. The comparison is useful because NATO is the world’s best-known example of collective defence, and the Mecca Pact contains an attack-on-one-is-an-attack-on-all principle that resembles NATO’s Article 5. Yet the institutional structures, military capabilities, and political commitments of the two arrangements are presently very different. 

NATO emerged from the strategic circumstances of the early Cold War and has evolved continuously since its creation in 1949. It possesses decades of accumulated institutional experience, permanent political structures, integrated military commands, defence planning mechanisms, exercises, interoperability standards, and common funding arrangements. It has also expanded its original membership into a large multinational organization. The Mecca Pact, by comparison, was only established in August 2026 and currently consists of three states.  The first major difference is institutional depth. NATO is an organization with permanent bureaucracy and political decision-making machinery. The Mecca Pact is presently better described as a treaty-based framework for collective defence and cooperation. Although reports indicate the possibility of a permanent secretariat, its institutional architecture remains at an early stage compared with NATO’s extensive structures.  The second difference is command integration. NATO members operate through an integrated command system that enables military forces from different countries to plan and conduct operations together. The Mecca Pact has no publicly established equivalent integrated command. Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani armed forces therefore remain nationally controlled. This distinction matters greatly during war. A political declaration can be made rapidly, but military operations require detailed planning. Air forces need compatible communications and identification systems. Navies need procedures for coordinating patrols and logistics. Ground forces need interoperable command systems. Intelligence agencies need secure information-sharing networks. Without such structures, collective defence can remain largely political. The third difference concerns standing forces. NATO’s members maintain national forces that are assigned or made available to alliance missions through established mechanisms. The Mecca Pact does not create a standing trilateral military force. Any joint military response would therefore need to be assembled from national capabilities. 

The fourth difference concerns common funding. NATO possesses institutional financial mechanisms that support shared activities. The Mecca framework has no comparable common defence budget publicly established. This does not prevent Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan from financing joint projects, but it makes their cooperation more dependent on bilateral and trilateral decisions. The fifth difference is nuclear deterrence. NATO has a nuclear-sharing arrangement involving the United States and certain European members, although the details differ from a simple promise of automatic nuclear retaliation. The Mecca Pact does not publicly establish nuclear sharing. Pakistan’s nuclear capability is therefore a national strategic capability rather than an officially declared collective nuclear umbrella for the other members. The sixth difference is the nature of the common threat. NATO was built largely around a clearly identifiable strategic adversary during the Cold War. The Mecca Pact deliberately avoids identifying a common enemy. Turkish officials have explicitly said that the agreement is not directed against Iran or any other country.  This ambiguity is politically useful but strategically consequential. Alliances are easier to institutionalize when members agree about the principal threat. Saudi Arabia may prioritize missiles, drones and maritime threats from the Gulf; Türkiye may focus on terrorism, regional instability and strategic autonomy; Pakistan may focus on South Asian security and its relationship with India and Iran. Their threat of perceptions overlap but are not identical. Membership also differs. NATO has a defined membership process and institutional rules for expansion. The Mecca Pact has been described by its signatories as open to other friendly states seeking peace and stability. This could eventually transform it into a wider regional framework, potentially involving other Muslim-majority states. But expansion could also make consensus more difficult because new members would bring different threats of perceptions and foreign-policy commitments. 

Nevertheless, the comparison to NATO is not entirely misplaced. Both arrangements use collective defence as a deterrence mechanism. Both seek to persuade potential aggressors that military action against one member could generate a wider response. Both can therefore produce strategic effects before a single shot is fired. The key difference is maturity. NATO’s strength is not simply Article 5; it is the enormous institutional ecosystem built around Article 5. The Mecca Pact currently possesses the political principle but not the same institutional machinery. It is therefore more accurate to describe the agreement as an embryonic regional collective-defence framework. If the three states gradually develop joint exercises, command-and-control arrangements, shared intelligence systems, defence planning, and industrial integration, the pact could acquire greater resemblance to a formal military alliance. For India, this distinction is especially important. Treating the Mecca Pact as an already operational NATO equivalent would lead to exaggerated threat assessments. Conversely, dismissing it as mere symbolism would also be a mistake. Institutions often begin with political declarations and acquire practical depth over time. The appropriate analytical position is therefore between these extremes. The Mecca Pact is not an Islamic NATO today. It is a political and strategic framework that could, depending on implementation and future membership, evolve into something substantially more consequential. 

The Religion Question 

Religion is an unavoidable dimension of the Mecca Pact, but it should not be confused with the entire logic of the agreement. Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan are all Muslim-majority states, and the decision to sign the agreement in Mecca gives the arrangement an unmistakable symbolic dimension. Yet the governments involved have deliberately rejected the idea that the pact constitutes a sectarian alliance directed against Iran or another state. This distinction matters because West Asian politics is already shaped by overlapping religious, national, ideological and geopolitical identities. An alliance perceived as a Sunni military bloc against a Shia-majority Iran could deepen existing sectarian tensions even if its architects intend otherwise. The choice of Mecca carries considerable symbolic weight. Mecca is the spiritual center of Islam and therefore provides the agreement with a geographical symbolism extending far beyond conventional diplomatic venues. Pakistani officials have emphasized the shared faith and historic ties of the three states, while Turkish officials have described the agreement in terms of regional peace, stability and collective deterrence.  The Organization of Islamic Cooperation also welcomed the agreement as an important step in strengthening regional and international cooperation. That reaction demonstrates how the pact can be presented as part of a broader concept of Muslim solidarity rather than as a narrowly military bloc.  Nevertheless, perceptions matter as much as official intentions. Iran is a Shia-majority regional power with significant influence across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Tehran therefore has reasons to scrutinize any arrangement that brings Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan into a closer security relationship. 

The danger is the security dilemma. A security dilemma occurs when one state’s defensive measures are interpreted by another as preparation for offensive action. Saudi Arabia may argue that the pact is designed to prevent aggression. Iran may nonetheless perceive a larger network of hostile or potentially hostile military capabilities near its borders. Tehran could then respond by strengthening missiles, drones, proxies, cyber capabilities, or military partnerships. Those responses could reinforce Saudi perceptions of threat, generating further military cooperation. 

The same dynamic could work in reverse. If Iran interprets the Mecca Pact as an offensive alliance and adopts more aggressive deterrence measures, the signatories may respond by institutionalising their cooperation. The result would be a cycle in which defensive intentions produce offensive perceptions. This is why the signatories’ repeated insistence that the pact targets no country is strategically significant. Turkish officials have specifically emphasized that there is no written common enemy. Pakistan has similarly described the agreement as purely defensive.  The absence of a named enemy gives pact diplomatic flexibility. Saudi Arabia can maintain channels with Iran. Türkiye can continue its complicated relationship with Tehran. Pakistan can avoid being drawn into an unnecessary conflict with its western neighbor. All three can therefore claim that the agreement is about deterrence rather than containment. Yet religion may still influence the political narrative surrounding the pact. Public opinion in Muslim-majority countries can respond strongly to questions involving Palestine, Israel, Iran and regional conflict. Governments therefore face a delicate task: they may use shared Islamic identity to generate political legitimacy while simultaneously avoiding sectarian mobilization. 

The sustainability of the pact will depend partly on whether the three governments can maintain that balance. If it becomes framed primarily as a Sunni military alliance, its ability to attract additional members could decline and relations with Iran could deteriorate. If it remains a broad collective-security framework open to peaceful regional cooperation, it could acquire greater legitimacy. The question also has implications for the wider Muslim world. There are significant differences among Muslim-majority states. Some are closely aligned with the United States; others maintain strategic relationships with China or Russia. Some have strong ties with Iran; others view Tehran as a major security challenge. A single religious identity does not eliminate these divergent interests. The Mecca Pact therefore demonstrates the limits of religion as a foundation for military alliance-building. Shared identity can facilitate trust and political symbolism, but it cannot substitute for strategic convergence. Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan must still reconcile different threat perceptions, geographic priorities and foreign-policy interests. For India, the religious dimension should be handled carefully. New Delhi has extensive relationships with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and Indian interests in the region are overwhelmingly strategic, economic and societal. Treating the Mecca Pact primarily through a religious lens would risk misunderstanding the more important drivers: security diversification, defence-industrial cooperation, regional autonomy and strategic hedging. The broader lesson is that identity can accelerate alliance formation but cannot guarantee alliance cohesion. The durability of the Mecca framework will ultimately depend on whether its members can build practical mechanisms of cooperation while avoiding a narrative that transforms regional competition into a sectarian confrontation. A successful collective-security system in West Asia would ideally reduce insecurity rather than reproduce it. That requires maintaining diplomatic channels with Iran, supporting regional dialogue and ensuring that collective deterrence does not automatically become collective confrontation. 

 Strategic Motivations by Signatory 

The Mecca Pact is easier to understand when the motivations of Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan are examined separately. Although the three countries share important interests, they are not entering the agreement for identical reasons. Their strategic calculations overlap sufficiently to permit cooperation but remain distinct enough to shape how the pact develops. 

Saudi Arabia 

For Saudi Arabia, the central motivation is strategic hedging. Riyadh does not appear to be abandoning its relationship with Washington. Rather, it is attempting to reduce the risks associated with excessive dependence on any single external guarantor. The Saudi leadership has spent years developing a more autonomous foreign-policy strategy. Economic transformation under Vision 2030 requires regional stability, secure trade routes, and predictable investment conditions. A major war that damages energy infrastructure or shipping would threaten these objectives. Saudi Arabia therefore has strong incentives to develop multiple security partnerships. Pakistan is particularly valuable because of the longstanding military relationship between the two countries. Pakistan provides military expertise and has historically contributed personnel and training to Saudi security. Türkiye offers a different asset: advanced and increasingly indigenous defence technology. The combination gives Saudi Arabia access to both manpower and industrial capabilities. Riyadh also benefits politically from bringing Türkiye into its security network. Ankara is a major regional power with its own strategic autonomy and a substantial military-industrial base. A relationship with Türkiye gives Saudi Arabia additional options beyond American and European defence suppliers. 

Türkiye 

Türkiye’s motivation is closely connected to its broader ambition for strategic autonomy. Ankara remains a NATO member, but it has increasingly sought to establish itself as an independent regional power capable of influencing developments in the Middle East, Caucasus, Central Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean. The Mecca Pact reinforces that strategy. Türkiye can present itself as a provider of regional security rather than merely a consumer of Western security guarantees. The defence-industrial dimension is particularly important. Turkish companies have achieved major international visibility in drones and other defence technologies. The agreement potentially creates additional markets and industrial partnerships in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. 

For Ankara, the pact also provides a bridge between geographical regions. Türkiye occupies a unique position between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Its relationship with Pakistan connects it to South Asia, while its relationship with Saudi Arabia strengthens its position in the Gulf. At the same time, Türkiye must avoid turning the pact into an anti-Iran or anti-Western bloc. Its economic and security interests require relationships with multiple powers. The insistence that the agreement targets no country therefore serves Turkish interests. 

Pakistan 

Pakistan’s motivations are particularly complex. Islamabad has a long relationship with Saudi Arabia, but the Mecca Pact allows it to transform that bilateral connection into a broader regional role. Pakistan gains diplomatic visibility by participating in an arrangement that includes two major regional powers. Türkiye provides Islamabad with another influential partner, while Saudi Arabia provides economic and political weight. Pakistan may also see an opportunity to strengthen its position as a security provider within the wider Muslim world. Its nuclear status and large conventional military give it a unique profile among Muslim-majority countries. However, this opportunity also creates risks. 

The most important risk is Iran. Pakistan shares a border with Iran and cannot afford to become automatically involved in a Saudi-Iran confrontation. Islamabad therefore has a strong incentive to ensure that the Mecca Pact remains defensive and does not develop into a formal anti-Iran coalition. Pakistan also must manage its relationship with India. The agreement could strengthen Islamabad’s diplomatic networks, particularly through Türkiye and Saudi Arabia. However, an excessive emphasis on India-related security could alienate Saudi Arabia, which has significant economic interests in India. The three motivations therefore converge around strategic autonomy but differ in emphasis. Saudi Arabia seeks diversified security guarantees; Türkiye seeks regional influence and defence-industrial expansion; Pakistan seeks strategic relevance and diplomatic depth. This divergence may actually help the pact survive. Because the agreement is not based on a single common enemy, it can accommodate different national priorities. The challenge will prevent those differences from becoming sources of friction. A crisis involving Iran could expose Pakistan’s constraints. A crisis involving Türkiye could raise questions about Saudi and Pakistani willingness to support Ankara. A conflict involving Saudi Arabia could force Türkiye and Pakistan to balance solidarity against their wider interests. The durability of the pact will therefore depend not on whether the three countries have identical interests, but whether their interests overlap sufficiently to sustain cooperation during crises. 

 Implications for Major Powers 

The Mecca Pact affects the strategic calculations of all major powers with interests in West Asia. Its consequences for the United States, Israel, Iran, China and Russia are different, but the common theme is the gradual emergence of a more diversified regional security system. 

United States 

For Washington, the agreement is both reassuring and challenging. On one level, regional burden-sharing is consistent with an American preference for partners to assume greater responsibility for their own security. If Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan invest more in collective defence, the United States may be able to reduce some of the burdens associated with regional security. On another level, however, the agreement could gradually weaken America’s position as the indispensable security provider. If regional states develop alternative defence networks, Washington’s ability to shape regional security decisions could decline. This is particularly important for arms sales, intelligence cooperation, and crisis diplomacy. A Saudi Arabia with multiple capable security partners has greater bargaining power with Washington than a Saudi Arabia dependent almost entirely on American support. The Mecca Pact therefore does not represent immediate American strategic defeat. Instead, it contributes to a long-term diffusion of influence. 

Israel 

Israel must consider the emergence of a new network involving Türkiye, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The pact does not identify Israel as an adversary, and there is no evidence that the three signatories have created the agreement specifically to confront Israel. Nevertheless, Israeli planners must account for the combined capabilities of the three countries. Türkiye is a major conventional military power; Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons; and Saudi Arabia possesses substantial financial resources and strategic geography. The pact could therefore complicate Israeli calculations concerning deterrence and regional military balances. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s interests are not identical to Türkiye’s or Pakistan’s, limiting the likelihood of automatic strategic alignment against Israel. 

Iran 

Iran faces the most direct strategic challenge. Even though the agreement is officially non-targeted, Tehran must consider the possibility that aggression against Saudi Arabia could now produce a broader regional response. This may strengthen deterrence. An Iranian decisionmaker who previously considered a limited strike against Saudi infrastructure might now have to consider Turkish and Pakistani involvement. But deterrence can also produce unintended consequences. If Tehran concludes that conventional confrontation has become more dangerous, it could increase reliance on indirect methods such as cyber operations, drones, missiles, or regional partners. The pact therefore creates both stabilizing and destabilizing possibilities. 

China 

China benefits from the pact’s potential contribution to regional stability. Beijing has major economic interests in Gulf energy supplies and maritime trade. It also maintains a close strategic relationship with Pakistan. China does not need to become a member of the pact to benefit from the deeper connectivity it may create. Greater Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani cooperation could indirectly strengthen Chinese economic and strategic networks, especially where they intersect with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. However, Beijing is unlikely to want the agreement transformed into an anti-Iran or anti-American bloc. China maintains relationships with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye and therefore benefits from multipolarity rather than polarisation. 

Russia 

Russia faces a more complicated equation. Moscow has important relationships with Iran, Türkiye and Gulf states, but those relationships are not identical. A stronger Türkiye-Saudi-Pakistan framework could reduce Russian influence in some areas while simultaneously creating opportunities for Moscow to engage with additional regional actors. Russia’s principal interest is likely to be avoiding a major regional war that disrupts energy markets and threatens its relationships. Moscow therefore has incentives to encourage a balance among competing regional powers rather than support the emergence of a rigid anti-Iran coalition. Overall, the Mecca Pact contributes to a broader trend in which major powers no longer possess exclusive influence over regional security. Instead, they must operate within a network of overlapping regional partnerships. 

Implications for India 

The Mecca Pact does not constitute an immediate military threat to India. None of the three signatories has identified India as an adversary, and Saudi Arabia in particular has substantial economic and strategic interests in maintaining strong relations with New Delhi. The principal implications for India are therefore diplomatic, geopolitical and structural rather than an immediate requirement for military countermeasures. The first concern is Pakistan’s expanding strategic platform. Islamabad now has a formal trilateral security relationship involving Saudi Arabia and Türkiye. Both states possess substantial diplomatic influence and extensive international networks. Pakistan can potentially use these relationships to amplify its diplomatic positions on issues such as Kashmir and broader South Asian security. India should not automatically assume that Saudi Arabia or Türkiye will adopt Pakistan’s positions. Saudi Arabia has its own economic interests in India, while Türkiye’s foreign policy is driven by a much wider set of calculations. Nevertheless, Pakistan’s increased access to influential partners gives Islamabad additional diplomatic space. 

The second concern involves connectivity. India has invested heavily in projects linking the country with the Gulf, Europe and the wider Mediterranean. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor concept depends on political stability, maritime security and cooperation among multiple states. A closer Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani relationship could complicate some aspects of India’s regional connectivity strategy, especially if the emerging security architecture develops independently of Indian initiatives. This does not make the Mecca Pact inherently anti-IMEC. Rather, it means India must ensure that its connectivity projects are embedded within a sufficiently broad network of bilateral partnerships. The third issue is maritime security. India depends heavily on the Arabian Sea, Gulf of Oman, Red Sea and Gulf routes for energy and trade. Any deterioration in the security environment directly affects Indian economic interests. The Mecca Pact could contribute positively if it strengthens regional maritime security. It could become problematic if it contributes to militarization or confrontation. India should therefore prioritise practical maritime cooperation with Gulf partners rather than view regional security exclusively through alliance competition. The fourth issue is counterterrorism. Pakistan’s deeper defence relationships may increase its conventional and diplomatic confidence. India should consequently maintain strong intelligence, border-security and counterterrorism capabilities. At the same time, New Delhi should avoid interpreting every development in the Mecca framework through the India-Pakistan lens. Saudi Arabia’s relationship with India provides an important balancing factor. India has a large diaspora in the Gulf, extensive energy ties and growing investment and trade relations with Gulf economies. These connections create incentives for Riyadh to maintain strategic autonomy. India should therefore deepen its relationship with Saudi Arabia independently rather than treating Saudi policy as a function of its relationship with Pakistan. 

The same principle applies to Türkiye. Ankara and New Delhi have differences, but Türkiye is too strategically important to ignore. India should seek areas of practical cooperation while managing disagreements through sustained diplomacy. India should also preserve its relationship with Iran. This is especially important because Iran provides geographic access toward Central Asia and Afghanistan and remains a major actor in the Gulf. India’s engagement with the Chabahar corridor gives the relationship a strategic dimension beyond bilateral diplomacy. A balanced Indian strategy should therefore avoid choosing between Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, the United States and Russia. India’s interests require simultaneous relationships with all of them. 

The Mecca Pact also reinforces the importance of indigenous defence capability. India’s response to changing regional alliances cannot rely solely on diplomatic partnerships. Credible strategic autonomy requires national capabilities in air defence, missiles, drones, electronic warfare, cyber operations, satellites, naval power, and intelligence. The aggregate military figures associated with Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan should also be interpreted cautiously. Adding national personnel, tanks, aircraft and naval platforms does not produce a unified military force. Different doctrines, geographic priorities, logistics systems and command structures limit the extent to which raw numbers translate into collective combat power. 

India should therefore monitor the evolution of the pact rather than immediately treat it as an existential threat. The key indicators will be joint exercises, permanent institutions, intelligence-sharing arrangements, defence-industrial projects, and the entry of additional members. If these mechanisms deepen, the pact could become more strategically consequential. If they remain limited, its influence will remain primarily political. The correct Indian response is consequently one of strategic diversification. New Delhi should become more deeply embedded in the Gulf’s economic, technological and maritime networks while maintaining autonomy in its relations with Iran, Israel, the United States, Russia and the wider Indo-Pacific. The Mecca Pact should therefore be understood as a reason for India to become more active in West Asia, not less. 

Path Forward: A Strategic Response Framework 

The emergence of the Mecca Pact requires a forward-looking response based on strategic adaptation rather than alarm. The central lesson is that West Asia is moving toward a networked security environment in which regional powers increasingly combine bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral arrangements. For India, the priority should be deepening bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia. Riyadh should be treated not merely as a Gulf state or energy supplier but as an independent strategic center of power. India should expand cooperation in energy security, investment, technology, infrastructure, digital systems, defence and maritime security. 

The objective should not be to compete with Pakistan for Saudi favor. Such a strategy would be unnecessarily narrow. Instead, India should make its relationship with Saudi Arabia so broad and mutually beneficial that it remains valuable regardless of Riyadh’s relationship with Islamabad. Second, India should expand maritime-security cooperation. The Arabian Sea, Gulf of Oman, Gulf of Aden and Red Sea should be viewed as parts of a connected security environment. India’s navy has a central role in protecting commercial shipping and energy flows. Cooperation with Gulf and Indian Ocean partners can strengthen maritime domain awareness, anti-piracy capabilities and crisis-response mechanisms. Third, India should diversify its Gulf partnerships. The United Arab Emirates remains important, but India should simultaneously deepen relations with Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait. Each has different strategic priorities, and bilateral relationships allow India to avoid overdependence on any single regional grouping. Fourth, India should maintain its relationships with Israel and the United States while avoiding excessive strategic over-identification. These relationships are valuable for defence technology, intelligence, innovation, and regional diplomacy. But India’s interests are not identical to those of either country. Strategic autonomy requires the ability to cooperate without becoming automatically aligned. Fifth, the Iran channel should remain open. India’s relationship with Tehran is complicated but strategically important. Iran’s geography provides potential access toward Afghanistan and Central Asia, and connectivity projects such as Chabahar remain relevant to India’s continental strategy. India should therefore maintain diplomatic engagement even during periods of intense regional rivalry. Sixth, India should engage Russia proactively. Russia retains influence in West Asia and Central Asia and has important relationships with Iran and Türkiye. Rather than allowing Russian, Chinese, Pakistani and Turkish interests to converge in ways that reduce India’s strategic room, New Delhi should maintain independent engagement with Moscow. Seventh, India should accelerate indigenous defence capabilities. The changing security environment demonstrates the limitations of relying entirely on foreign suppliers. India needs stronger capabilities in drones, counter-drone systems, long-range precision weapons, air and missile defence, electronic warfare, cyber defence, satellites, maritime surveillance and intelligence. Indigenous capability does not mean abandoning international defence partnerships. On the contrary, partnerships can accelerate technological development. The objective should be to ensure that external relationships supplement rather than replace national capability. Eighth, India should invest in strategic intelligence on the evolution of the Mecca Pact. Monitoring statements is insufficient. New Delhi should track exercises, procurement, command arrangements, intelligence cooperation, defence-industrial projects and potential membership expansion. 

The possibility of additional members is particularly important. If countries such as Egypt or others eventually join, the geographic and strategic significance of the framework could increase considerably. Turkish officials have already described the agreement as open to other friendly countries. Ninth, India should develop stronger regional crisis-management mechanisms. The more interconnected the Gulf security environment becomes, the more important communication channels will be during crises. India can contribute through diplomatic engagement, maritime coordination and humanitarian assistance. Finally, India should avoid overreacting. Security competition is not inevitable, and the Mecca Pact does not automatically translate into an anti-Indian bloc. Saudi Arabia’s economic relationship with India, Türkiye’s commercial interests and Pakistan’s own need to manage its relationship with Iran all create constraints on the pact’s evolution. The objective should therefore be strategic resilience. India should build enough diplomatic, economic and military capacity that changes in West Asian alliances do not threaten its core interests. The Mecca Pact should be treated as an indicator of a changing system. India’s task is not to prevent that system from changing but to ensure that New Delhi remains one of the actors shaping its evolution. 

By :  Pratyush Raj, Research Analyst, GSDN

For years, Iran has lived with the possibility of a direct confrontation with Israel and the United States. While such a conflict was once largely seen as a possibility, growing tensions in the Middle East have made it a much more serious strategic concern. Iran has therefore spent years preparing for the possibility that it could be forced to fight on more than one front at the same time. 

But how does a country prepare to face two militarily superior adversaries? Iran’s answer has not been to compete with them weapon for weapon. Instead, it has built a strategy around missiles, drones, asymmetric warfare, regional partnerships, and the ability to absorb an initial strike while retaining the capacity to retaliate. 

This article attempts to examine how Iran prepared for the possibility of a two-front war with the United States and Israel, the strategic thinking behind these preparations, and the extent to which they have helped Iran withstand and respond to such a conflict. 

Introduction: Preparing for and Fighting a Two-Front War 

Iran is no longer preparing for a possible war with the United States and Israel it is already fighting one. The conflict that began on February 28, 2026, after the United States and Israel launched major strikes against Iran, has turned into a wider and much more serious confrontation. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks against Israel and U.S. military positions in the region, while the fighting has also affected the wider Gulf. 

For Iran, this is the kind of situation it has been preparing for over many years. Tehran has always understood that it would face a major disadvantage in a direct conventional war with the United States and Israel. Both countries have stronger air forces, advanced intelligence and surveillance systems, and far greater military resources. Instead of trying to match them directly, Iran has built its military around missiles, drones, air defence, underground facilities, naval forces and other forms of asymmetric warfare. 

The importance of these preparations can now be seen during the ongoing war. Iran has used its missile and drone capabilities to strike targets far beyond its borders, while its military infrastructure and underground facilities are designed to help it continue operating even after heavy attacks. Its ability to produce weapons domestically has also become important as the war continues, and access to foreign supplies remains limited. 

The Strait of Hormuz has become another major part of the conflict. Iran has used its position around the waterway as a source of pressure against the United States and its regional partners. The fighting and restrictions around the strait have also affected international shipping and global energy supplies, showing how a conflict centered on Iran can quickly create consequences far beyond the Middle East. 

Iran is also not fighting only from its own territory. Its long-standing relationships with armed groups and partners across the region have created additional pressure points for the United States and Israel. This regional reach has become an important part of Iran’s wider strategy, allowing the conflict to extend beyond a simple Iran-versus-US-and-Israel battlefield. 

What makes the current war important, therefore, is that it provides a real test of the military strategy Iran has spent years developing. The missiles, drones, protected facilities, naval capabilities, and regional networks that were built as tools of deterrence are now being used under actual wartime conditions. The conflict is showing both the strengths of this strategy, and the serious challenges Iran faces when confronting two technologically superior military powers at the same time. 

Iran’s Military Preparation: Building for a Long War 

Iran has spent many years preparing for the kind of war it is facing today. It knew that it could not compete with the United States and Israel in terms of fighter jets, advanced technology or overall military power. So instead of trying to build the same kind of military, Iran focused on weapons and strategies that could help it survive a long conflict and continue attacking its opponents. 

Missiles and Drones: Iran’s Main Weapons 

Missiles have always been one of the most important parts of Iran’s military strategy. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Iran has the largest and most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East. Its missiles include short-, medium- and longer-range systems that can reach targets across much of the region. 

Iran has also built a large drone programme. Drones are relatively cheaper than fighter aircraft and can be used for surveillance as well as attacks. This gives Iran another way to strike targets without having to depend on its ageing air force. 

This focus on missiles and drones is partly because Iran knows that its air force cannot compete directly with the United States or Israel. Instead, it has invested in weapons that can be launched from the ground and used against targets at long distances. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has assessed that Iran’s missile forces can reach targets at distances of up to around 2,000 kilometers. 

Underground Facilities: Protecting What Matters 

Iran has also spent years building underground military facilities. This is important because one of the biggest advantages of the US and Israel is their ability to carry out powerful air strikes. 

By placing missile launchers, weapons and other important equipment underground or in protected locations, Iran makes it harder for an enemy to destroy everything in a single attack. These facilities do not make Iran completely safe from air strikes, but they can help some of its military forces survive the first wave of attacks. 

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has previously described Iran as having a large network of underground military facilities, including sites connected to its missile programme. 

Building Weapons at Home 

Another important part of Iran’s preparation has been producing more weapons inside the country. Years of sanctions have made it difficult for Iran to buy many advanced weapons from foreign countries. As a result, Iran has tried to develop its own missiles, drones and other military equipment. 

This has become especially useful during a long conflict because Iran cannot simply depend on new weapons arriving from abroad. If it can continue producing missiles and drones at home, it has a better chance of replacing some of the weapons it uses. 

SIPRI estimated that Iran spent about $7.4 billion on its military in 2025. SIPRI also reported that planned funding for Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization, which is involved in ballistic missile production, increased by 44% in Iran’s 2025 budget. Funding for Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company, which produces aircraft and drones, increased by 50%. 

These figures show that Iran has continued investing in its missile and drone programmes even while dealing with economic pressure and sanctions. 

The Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s Geographical Advantage 

Iran also has an important advantage that does not come from weapons it comes from geography. The Strait of Hormuz lies between Iran and Oman and connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. It is one of the most important oil routes in the world. 

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, around 20.7 million barrels of oil per day passed through the Strait of Hormuz in 2024. That was about one-fifth of global petroleum consumption. 

This gives Iran a powerful source of pressure during a war. Any serious disruption in the Strait can affect oil supplies, shipping, and prices far beyond the Middle East. In the current conflict, the importance of the Strait has become even clearer as shipping through the area has been heavily disrupted. 

Preparing to Keep Fighting 

All these preparations point to the same basic idea. Iran does not need to be stronger than the United States or Israel to make a war difficult for them. It needs to make sure that it can survive the first attacks, continue launching weapons, and keep the conflict going. 

Missiles and drones give Iran the ability to strike at long distances. Underground facilities help protect important military assets. Domestic production helps it continue making weapons despite sanctions. And its position around the Strait of Hormuz gives it another way to put pressure on the global economy. 

The current war is now testing whether these preparations can actually work under real battlefield conditions. Iran built many of these capabilities over decades. The question now is how well they can help the country continue fighting against two much stronger military powers. 

Iran’s Two-Front Strategy: Fighting on Multiple Fronts 

Iran is fighting a difficult war because it is dealing with two much stronger military powers at the same time. Israel is attacking targets inside Iran, while the United States is also involved in the conflict. Instead of putting all its strength into one type of attack, Iran is trying to create problems for both countries in different ways. 

Keeping Pressure on Israel 

Missiles and drones are at the centre of Iran’s attacks on Israel. Iran’s air force is much weaker than Israel’s, so it cannot depend on fighter aircraft to fight at the same level. Missiles give Iran a way to attack from a distance without sending its aircraft deep into Israeli airspace. 

Iran has one of the largest missile programmes in the region. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says that Iran has the largest and most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East, including missiles with ranges of up to about 2,000 kilometers. This gives Iran the ability to reach Israel and other targets across the region. 

Drones add another layer to this strategy. They are generally cheaper than missiles and fighter aircraft and can be used in large numbers. Even when many of them are intercepted, they can force Israel to use its air-defence systems and expensive interceptor missiles. 

So, for Iran, the purpose is not only to hit a target. It is also to keep Israel under pressure and make it spend resources on defence. 

Making Things Difficult for the US 

Iran is also trying to put pressure on American forces in the region. The United States has military bases and troops across the Middle East, which gives Iran several possible targets and pressure points. 

Iran does not have to destroy these bases to create an effect. Even the threat of repeated attacks can force the US to increase security around its bases, move military equipment, and use more defensive weapons. 

The cost of defending against Iranian attacks can also become significant. Reuters reported in August 2026 that the US had used almost all of its long-range ATACMS and PrSM missiles during the conflict, along with large numbers of Patriot and THAAD interceptors. 

This shows one of the less obvious parts of Iran’s strategy. Iran is not only trying to damage its opponents; it is also trying to make them use up valuable military resources. 

Bringing Pressure from Outside Iran 

Iran’s influence in the region gives it another tool. For years, Tehran has maintained relationships with armed groups in countries such as Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. These groups have their own military capabilities and have been part of Iran’s wider regional strategy. 

This means that the conflict does not necessarily stay inside Iran or between Iran and Israel. Pressure can appear in different parts of the Middle East. For the US and Israel, this makes the situation harder to manage because they must watch several areas at the same time. 

However, this strategy also has risks for Iran. The more conflict spreads, the more difficult it becomes for Tehran to control what happens. Regional groups have their own interests and decisions, so Iran cannot always control every action taken in its name. 

Why the Strait of Hormuz Matters 

Iran also has an important advantage that comes from its location. The Strait of Hormuz, which lies between Iran and Oman, is one of the world’s most important routes for oil shipments. 

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, around 20.7 million barrels of oil per day moved through the Strait in 2024. That was roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum consumption. 

This makes the Strait extremely important during the war. If shipping through the area is seriously disrupted, the effects can be felt far outside the Middle East. Oil prices, shipping costs and energy supplies can all be affected. 

For Iran, the Strait therefore becomes more than just a military location. It gives Tehran a way to create economic pressure on countries that may not even be directly involved in fighting. 

A Strategy Based on Pressure, Not Direct Superiority 

Iran knows that it cannot win a traditional military competition against the United States and Israel. Its approach is different. It is trying to use the weapons and advantages it does have to make the conflict harder and more expensive for its opponents. 

Missiles and drones allow Iran to attack from a distance. Its regional connections create pressure in different parts of the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz gives it an important economic advantage. Together, these tools allow Iran to fight a much stronger opponent without having to match its military power directly. 

The biggest question now is how long Iran can maintain this strategy. The war is using large amounts of weapons and resources on all sides, while Iran is also dealing with damage to its military infrastructure. Its ability to replace weapons, protect its remaining forces and continue putting pressure on both the US and Israel will be an important test of the strategy it has built over many years. 

By : Soumya Dutta, Research Analyst, GSDN

On July 20-21, 2026, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) helicopter and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) crossed into the Taiwan Strait median line, a significant boundary for escalation control between China and Taiwan and stayed for roughly 9.5 hours inside the Taiwan’s restricted R9 zone east of the line. It has not been the first publicly reported case of the PLA using its air assets and testing Taiwan’s response thresholds but they typically consisted of fighter jets that stayed for a few minutes and headed back, however using a helicopter that hover at a lower altitude and for such extended period sets a dangerous precedent. Combined with a reconnaissance UAV, it points to a more coordinated use of troops for a possible cross-Strait action. 

These operations by China has been generally understood as strategic signaling, but these expanded efforts point towards a more ‘operational conditioning’, whereby these external actors are normalizing their presence in what Taiwan claims as its sovereign domain, rehearsing access corridors and incrementally changing the baseline for acceptable airspace behavior. These actions are far more consequential than what coercive messaging would have done, precisely as no codified law is being violated. The Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) along with the median line do not carry any international legal status, so what is under attack is not a statute but the acceptable measures of restraint, whose erosion as Taipei fears may very well lead to a reunification as Beijing claims under its ‘One China’ policy. 

Therefore, the legal distinction regarding the routine PLA operations around Taiwan is crucial to understanding the significance of these incursions. The clearest legal boundary for Taiwan is its 12 nautical-mile territorial airspace, where an entry by Chinese military aircraft would be considered a substantial violation of Taiwan’s sovereignty. This framework is grounded in international agreements, most notably the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, which established the principle of state sovereignty over national airspace. Most PLA aircrafts, however, remain outside this boundary and within the ADIZ, which acts an early-warning and identification buffer along with the median line, which is an informal military demarcation established during the Cold War with US support to reduce the risk of military incidents, but neither China nor Taiwan has formally agreed to it. With room to manoeuvre, Beijing has gradually expanded the frequency and duration of its operations, normalizing a more persistent PLA military presence around Taiwan. 

A Long-Arc of Taiwan Strait Crisis 

These patterns that continued for over a decade have been marked by a few trigger points, most notably the 2022 visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi which was perceived as a breach of the narrative, that Taiwan is an inalienable province of China, culminating into the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis. This prompted China to launch large-fire military exercises, conduct drone and maritime assault operations, thereby effectively rehearsing a blockade of the island. Similar Chinese military response has followed Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with US Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 and then Vice President Lai Ching-te’s layover in US, with Beijing conducting increasingly extensive exercises around the island. This pattern has thus continued through the Joint Sword series and Justice Mission-2025, which increasingly focus on encirclement, blockade, strikes on critical infrastructure and establishing anti-access/anti-denial (A2/AD) capabilities to constrain the ability of external actors to intervene directly. 

Against this backdrop Taiwan Strait has remained a geopolitical flashpoint, with its narrow corridor placed at the centre of tensions between Taiwan and mainland China. The current phase of heightened tensions can be understood as a continuation of a recurring pattern of crises in the strait, dating back to the First Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1954-55. It began, when Beijing shelled the Taiwan-controlled offshore island of Kinmen and Matsu, bringing China and the United States close to direct military confrontation. Soon after, the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis followed in 1958, when China again bombarded the island, prompting US military intervention and raising fears of a wider conflict, including the possible use of nuclear weapons. The Third Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995-96, nearly four decades later saw Beijing conduct missile tests and military manoeuvres around Taiwan in an attempt to pressure Taipei ahead of its first presidential election. This escalation then prompted Washington to deploy two aircraft carrier groups to the region. 

With each episode leaving behind a precedent that Beijing has turned into a new operational normal, this baseline has been reinforced by China’s equipping of all its five theatre commands with the J-20 fifth generation fighter jets and undertaking joint military exercises and normalizing a persistent air presence. What makes the recent development interesting, is also the deliberate shift in strategy, after the detected Chinese fighter sorties dropped to a three year low in the first half of 2026 to 1334 a result of the Trump-Xi Summit in Beijing earlier this year and perhaps since Beijing has already established the behavioral thresholds, which it can now maintain with lower operational costs and also reduce the international attention spikes arising from observers. 

What Beijing Gains Now and Later 

The question therefore arises on this apparent resurgence and what does China hope to achieve? In this context, these developments are not a renewed aggression but a validation of the precedent it has gained while slowly redefining the strait status quo. Moreover, Beijing aims to achieve certain short term as well as long term goals through this. Firstly, repeated ADIZ incursions result in a cumulative strain on Taiwan’s air defence system and erode its response efficiency and threshold. Secondly, this enables the PLA to rehearse its blockade and access-denial tactics in a peacetime setting. Third exceptional actions now tend to appear routine. In the longer term, rather than avoiding escalation Beijing is learning to author it. This has been a sequence however not unique to Taiwan, but visible in the South China Sea and in the East China Sea around the Senkaku Islands, administered by Japan. The aim of unification then carriers a more consequential effect than coercion itself. 

A Red Line or not? 

The response of the stakeholders therefore becomes important on how they interpret these developments. China has repeatedly asserted its territorial integrity and emphasized its commitments on achieving the ‘One China’ principle while blaming countries like the US for breaching its pledge to maintain ‘unofficial only’ relations with Taiwan, as highlighted by Pelosi’s visit and even releasing white papers on reunification. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has described China’s actions as a violation of the “rules based international order” and “international norms,” even condemning similar airspace intrusions in regions like Japan while updating its engagement rules and declaring that any Chinese aircraft that enters its sovereign airspace of 12 nautical miles of the coasts, in contrast to median line (25 miles) will invite a military response.  

These developments also coincide with the so-called Davidson Window which anticipates China’s militarily actions against Taiwan by 2027. However, Beijing has not articulated a specific public deadline for achieving reunification. Instead, the CPC has consistently framed it as part of its broader ambition of “national rejuvenation”, associated with the 2049 centenary of the PRC. What matters more is however the method, as Beijing is not preparing for a single decisive moment but incrementally redefining what counts as acceptable behavior in contested airspace, one uncontested incursion at a time. As key actors from Washington to Tokyo and Manila observe these developments, India too must pay closer attention to the implications of such incremental normalization for airspace management and crisis stability in contested theatres, particularly along its sensitive frontiers. The deeper risk therefore lies not simply in misreading Beijing’s signals, but in misjudging the baseline itself failing to notice when yesterday’s exception has quietly become today’s norm.