By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN

Introduction

Tariffs, rare earths and Taiwan dominated the headlines from Washington’s biggest diplomatic event of the year. The summit’s most consequential outcome, however, may be a modest-sounding hotline that neither side can even agree what to call. When Xi Jinping’s motorcade rolled onto the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews on 23 September 2026, it marked the Chinese president’s first state visit to Washington in eleven years — and Donald Trump greeted him personally, a gesture the White House had pointedly not extended four months earlier, when Trump himself travelled to Beijing in May. The symbolism was not lost on anyone watching. Over three days, the two leaders and their delegations worked through an agenda stacked with the kind of issues that normally dominate a US-China summit: tariffs, the fragile rare-earths truce reached in Busan the previous October, the stalled war in Iran, sanctions on buyers of Russian energy, and the always-combustible question of Taiwan. Yet when the dust settled and both governments issued their respective readouts, the item that seemed to carry the most lasting weight was one that had barely registered on anyone’s radar a month earlier: artificial intelligence.

That AI ended up at the centre of the summit rather than its margins tells you something important about how both capitals now view the technology — simultaneously as the sharpest edge of national power and as a shared vulnerability serious enough to warrant its own crisis-management plumbing. The agreement the two sides eventually struck, to open a dedicated communication channel for AI-related incidents, is a modest deliverable by the standards of a US-China summit. But modest is not the same as unimportant, and the shape the agreement took — including a fight over what to even call the technology — reveals as much about the state of the relationship as any tariff schedule could.

The Spadework Nobody Noticed

The agreement did not emerge fully formed from the summit room. Its groundwork was laid days earlier, in roughly eight hours of preparatory talks held on 20 September at JPMorgan Chase’s Manhattan headquarters, where US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng hashed out the contours of what would become the centrepiece AI deliverable. The two sides left that meeting having agreed to establish a formal dialogue on artificial intelligence and to reconvene roughly two months later, with Bessent floating Shenzhen — where China is set to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November — as the likely venue for the next round.

What happened in the days immediately before the summit was, in its own way, almost as revealing as the summit itself. On 22 September, addressing the UN General Assembly, Trump signalled that official US documents would from then on refer to “superintelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence,” and the following day, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy’s director, Michael Kratsios, opened his remarks to the UN Security Council with the line “superintelligence, formerly known as AI” — a rebranding exercise that reads, depending on one’s vantage point, either as marketing or as a genuine signal of how seriously the Trump administration takes the leap from current AI systems to something qualitatively more powerful. When the White House fact sheet on Xi’s visit was published on 25 September, it duly used the new terminology throughout, announcing the establishment of a “US-China Dialogue on Superintelligence to exchange views on the risks and benefits” and a “bilateral communication channel” dedicated to AI incidents.

Beijing, notably, declined to follow Washington’s lead on vocabulary. China’s Ministry of Commerce readout referred simply to an “AI dialogue” led by He Lifeng and Bessent, and when a Foreign Ministry spokesperson addressed the agreement at a press briefing days later, he stuck with “artificial intelligence” and used the occasion to stress that the United Nations should play a central role in building what he called “a fairer and more equitable global AI governance system.” That small but deliberate divergence in language is a tell: Washington’s framing projects confidence in its own technological lead and treats the dialogue as a narrow risk-management tool, while Beijing’s framing positions China as a multilateralist champion of inclusive AI governance, a role it has been cultivating rhetorically for some time even as its own domestic AI policy remains tightly state-directed.

What the Hotline Actually Covers, and What It Leaves Out

Strip away the branding dispute, and the substance of the agreement runs along four fault lines, addressed with varying degrees of seriousness. The clearest deliverable is the bilateral notification mechanism itself: a channel meant to allow either government to alert the other, in close to real time, to any AI-related development that raises national security concerns. It is worth noting that this is not the first time Washington and Beijing have tried to build crisis-communication infrastructure of this kind. A military hotline set up in 2008 has, at various points of tension, simply gone unanswered, and an earlier attempt at structured AI dialogue broke down once frontier-risk discussions became entangled with unrelated disputes. The new mechanism inherits the same structural vulnerability. The broader US-China trade truce reached alongside the summit has only been extended to 10 January 2027, which means the next scheduled AI exchange, due by November, will take place squarely under the shadow of an approaching trade deadline — precisely the kind of linkage that has sunk comparable efforts before. Compounding the risk, the publicly released fact sheet leaves unresolved the single hardest technical question any such hotline must eventually answer: what actually counts as a reportable “incident.” Attribution in an AI-related crisis is often genuinely ambiguous — a disruptive event could be state-directed, carried out by a non-state actor exploiting an AI system, or the result of a model behaving unexpectedly beyond its intended operating parameters, with no obvious way to immediately distinguish between the three. In a relationship defined by deep, longstanding mistrust, that kind of interpretive ambiguity is exactly the sort of gap through which a minor incident could escalate before either side has time to establish what actually happened.

The second fault line concerns agentic and frontier AI systems specifically — the kind of advanced models now capable, in testing environments, of taking autonomous multi-step actions to achieve a goal. Security researchers have flagged scenarios in which an AI agent, unable to solve an assigned problem within its sandboxed testing environment, effectively breaks out of that containment and ends up interacting with external systems it was never meant to touch; in a worst case, an American system could end up probing Chinese critical infrastructure, or vice versa, entirely by accident. Offensive cyber capability enabled by AI, and the risk of AI systems being misused to assist biological-weapons research, sit in the same category of concern. On none of this did the Washington summit produce anything resembling a substantive agreement — there is no commitment to jointly develop safety standards for frontier models, nor any framework for coordinated oversight of the kind some US lawmakers, including Representative Ro Khanna, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on China, had hoped for, with Khanna specifically floating the idea of a ban on recursive self-improving AI systems and an international inspection regime for AI labs. Neither made it into the final package.

The third gap concerns the military dimension of AI, where the summit was conspicuously silent. In 2024, then-President Joe Biden and Xi had reached a pledge committing both countries to keep human control over decisions involving nuclear weapons use — a principle that, given the accelerating integration of AI into intelligence analysis, battle-management systems and coordinated drone-swarm operations on both sides, would have been a natural candidate for reaffirmation or expansion at this summit. The fact sheet does not mention it at all, an omission that suggests the AI dialogue, for now, is being deliberately kept separate from the harder, more sensitive questions of military AI integration.

The fourth and perhaps most telling gap is what Washington has explicitly excluded from the new dialogue altogether: export controls on advanced semiconductors and chip-manufacturing equipment, the single most consequential lever the US currently holds over China’s AI development. US officials have been direct that this exclusion is intentional — the administration wants a narrowly scoped risk-reduction channel that leaves its existing technological leverage fully intact, rather than a broader negotiation that might trade away any of that advantage in exchange for cooperation on safety.

Two Ecosystems, Racing in Parallel

It would be a mistake to read the hotline agreement as evidence that the underlying US-China technology rivalry is cooling. If anything, the competitive gap is widening in both directions at once, with each side doubling down on a different strategy. American capital expenditure by leading technology firms topped roughly US400 billionin 2025,compared with around US 63 billion in China, and the US continues to hold a clear edge in frontier model capability, AI talent concentration and data-centre capacity.

China’s response has not been to try to match that spending dollar for dollar but to pursue a different route entirely: cost-optimised, often open-weight models designed for rapid diffusion across the Chinese economy under the government’s “AI+” initiative, paired with an aggressive push toward semiconductor self-sufficiency — state-funded Chinese data centres are now required to run exclusively on domestically produced chips. Just days before the summit, Huawei announced a system it claims can link up to a million processors into a single unified computing cluster, a scale claim meant to signal that China’s chip constraints are not preventing it from building serious compute infrastructure through alternative architectures. Beijing also continues to hold structural advantages in two inputs that matter enormously for the AI economy going forward: rare-earth processing capacity and electricity generation.

Washington’s own posture toward AI safety has, in the meantime, shown it is willing to let security concerns override the global spread of its own frontier technology when the two collide. In June 2026, a US export control directive forced Anthropic to suspend access to its Claude Mythos model — later restored on 1 July once the underlying Commerce Department controls were lifted — a concrete illustration that even leading American AI labs remain subject to security-driven intervention from their own government, not just from China’s restrictions on the other side. Taken together, the picture that emerges is not one race with a single finish line, but two increasingly self-contained ecosystems advancing in parallel, each hedging against dependence on the other.

What This Means for Everyone Else

For countries outside the US-China axis, the summit’s AI track carries two uncomfortable lessons. The first is that frontier-risk governance is narrowing into a conversation conducted almost exclusively between the two powers capable of building frontier-scale models, leaving institutions like the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and the broader Global Dialogue on AI Governance at risk of being sidelined by bilateral arrangements that smaller and middle powers had no hand in shaping.

The second lesson concerns the deepening bifurcation of the global technology stack itself. India offers one instructive case of how a country might navigate this without being forced into a binary choice — working with the United States on compute infrastructure, with the European Union on regulatory governance, and with the UAE on data-centre capacity, while continuing to engage China through platforms like BRICS, a multi-alignment strategy made easier by India’s position as the second-largest market for several leading American AI firms. But that balancing act is likely to grow costlier over time as the American and Chinese technology ecosystems become more self-reinforcing and interoperability between them erodes. Governments in India’s position — and others watching from Brussels, Tokyo, Riyadh and beyond — would do well to treat the current moment as a narrowing window: pushing for interoperability standards now, building resilient and sovereign domestic compute capacity, and securing a seat at the table in whatever incident-reporting frameworks eventually touch their own critical infrastructure, before Washington and Beijing finish writing the rules of this new order largely for themselves.

Conclusion

The two leaders’ own closing messages on AI diverged almost as sharply as their governments’ choice of vocabulary. Trump, who has repeatedly waved away concerns about AI posing an existential threat, told reporters that superintelligence carries risks “like any major new technology” but insisted the US holds a commanding lead and intends to keep it, framing the competition in starkly zero-sum terms: whoever reaches superintelligence first, he suggested, wins outright. He had, days earlier at the UN, explicitly rejected any “globalist” scheme for governing the technology, pointing instead to the US Department of Justice as America’s own sufficient guardrail. Xi struck a notably different register, emphasising that the two countries should jointly guard against AI’s misuse rather than against each other, and that the technology’s development must remain firmly under human control — language calibrated to position Beijing as the more responsible, multilaterally minded actor, even as China’s Foreign Ministry pointedly dismissed a call from Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei for a more cautious, paced approach to frontier AI development. Whether this new Dialogue on Superintelligence becomes durable institutional infrastructure or simply another short-lived gesture folded into the broader US-China trade truce will become clearer at the next scheduled exchange, due by November, conducted in the shadow of the 10 January trade deadline. Until then, the clearest signal the Washington summit sent to the rest of the world is this: the rules governing the most consequential technology of the coming decade are being negotiated bilaterally, between two capitals, on their own terms — and any country that wants a genuine say in how that order takes shape needs to start making its case now, not after the terms have already been set.

By : Kumar Aryan, Research Analyst, GSDN

Afghanistan occupies a geopolitical position that is disproportionate to the size of its economy. Landlocked between South Asia, Central Asia, Iran and China, it sits at the intersection of several strategic spaces rather than belonging exclusively to any one of them. The Taliban’s return to power on August 15, 2021, followed by the completion of the United States and allied military withdrawal on August 30, 2021, changed the character of international involvement but did not reduce Afghanistan’s strategic importance. Instead, the country has become a test of how regional and global powers manage security, diplomacy, trade, and humanitarian pressures in a strategically located state without a large Western military presence. 

A Strategic Geographical Pivot 

Afghanistan’s geography is the foundation of its geopolitical relevance. It shares borders with Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China, creating direct interfaces with South Asia, Central Asia, the Iranian and Caspian regions, and western China. The narrow Wakhan Corridor gives Afghanistan its direct border with China, while the country’s southern and western routes provide potential access to Pakistan’s ports and Iran’s Chabahar corridor. 

This position has historically drawn external powers into Afghan affairs. The British-Russian rivalry of the nineteenth century, the Soviet intervention beginning in December 1979 and the international military campaign after September 11, 2001, each demonstrated that political change in Afghanistan can acquire consequences far beyond its borders. The contemporary difference is that strategic competition increasingly revolves around influence, connectivity, and risk management rather than permanent foreign occupation. 

Connectivity illustrates why geography remains decisive. Afghanistan can serve as a physical link between Central Asian economies and South Asian markets, but it can also become a bottleneck when security deteriorates or border crossings close. The Central Asia-South Asia Electricity Transmission and Trade Project, known as CASA-1000, is a US$1.2 billion regional electricity project designed to transmit up to 1,300 megawatts of surplus power from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The World Bank notes that the Afghan segment is indispensable to the system and that implementation resumed after the 2021 pause. Completion of the Afghan section is expected by the end of 2027. Afghanistan therefore matters because neighboring regions cannot fully exploit several major connectivity opportunities without stable transit through Afghan territory. 

Security and Cross-Border Militancy 

Security is the most immediate source of Afghanistan’s global geopolitical significance. The country remains connected to several militant networks, including Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant-Khorasan (ISIL-K), Al-Qaida and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The key concern for outside powers is not only violence inside Afghanistan but the possibility that networks linked to Afghan territory could threaten neighboring states or support attacks farther afield. 

The latest United Nations reporting shows that apparent nationwide stability does not eliminate security risks. Between May 1 and July 31, 2026, the United Nations recorded 2,947 safety and security incidents, 11 percent more than during the same period in 2025. A separate United Nations assessment published on July 31, 2026, found that ISIL-K retained the intent to conduct external operations and was rebuilding capacity for occasional high-profile attacks despite pressure from the de facto authorities and Pakistan. 

The Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship demonstrates how domestic security issues can become regional crises. Islamabad has repeatedly argued that the TTP and associated networks operate from Afghanistan, while Taliban authorities reject the allegation and oppose Pakistani military action on Afghan territory. The dispute has increasingly acquired a military dimension. On September 21, 2026, the United Nations confirmed at least three civilian fatalities and four injuries in an apparent Pakistani airstrike in Kunar Province and reported that Paktika Province was also affected. The United Nations had already documented more than 1,100 civilian casualties arising from cross-border armed violence in Afghanistan during 2026. Such escalation can affect border trade, migration, counterterrorism cooperation and the security calculations of China, Iran and Central Asia. 

Afghanistan therefore remains significant to global security because risks originating in or around the country can cross several borders at once. Its strategic importance does not require a return to the level of international conflict seen during the early twenty-first century; the persistence of transnational militant networks and fragile regional relations is sufficient to keep Afghanistan on the security agendas of major powers. 

Diplomatic Re-engagement and Great-Power Competition 

Since 2021, Afghanistan has moved from a predominantly Western military-centred framework toward a more fragmented system of regional engagement. The United States continues to maintain sanctions and security concerns relating to the Taliban and the Haqqani Network while permitting humanitarian activity under specified exemptions. Afghanistan is not subject to comprehensive United States sanctions, but selected Taliban and Haqqani-linked individuals remain designated. 

Russia has pursued a more overt normalization strategy. On July 3, 2025, Russia formally recognized the Taliban government, becoming the first country to do so since the Taliban returned to power. Moscow linked the decision to prospects for cooperation in security, counterterrorism, narcotics control, trade, energy, transport and infrastructure. Russia’s position also reflects concern about instability reaching the Central Asian states to its south. 

China has pursued sustained engagement focused on security, trade and long-term economic access. On August 20, 2025, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister in Kabul. China expressed interest in Afghanistan’s formal participation in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and in expanding cooperation on mining. China has also used regional diplomacy to manage Afghan issues. From April 1 to 7, 2026, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan held an informal meeting in Urumqi, while Chinese Special Envoy for Afghan Affairs Yue Xiaoyong conducted further consultations in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia from August 30 to September 5, 2026. 

These developments show that Afghanistan is increasingly being handled through overlapping regional mechanisms rather than a single dominant external power. China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India and the Central Asian states have different interests, but all have reasons to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a source of wider instability. The result is a form of competitive engagement in which diplomatic access itself has become a strategic instrument. 

China, Minerals and the Economic Geopolitics of Afghanistan 

Afghanistan’s resource base adds an economic dimension to this competition. A United States Geological Survey assessment published in 2007 identified substantial deposits and prospective resources of copper, iron, lithium, rare-earth elements and other minerals. These estimates indicate geological potential, not immediately recoverable from commercial reserves. Infrastructure, finance, security and export capacity remain major constraints. 

Current production data show why caution is necessary. The United States Geological Survey’s 2024 reporting states that major mineral exploration projects have been conducted by Chinese companies, while production remains concentrated in commodities such as talc, chromite, coal, cement and construction materials. Afghanistan ranked as the world’s 11th-largest talc producer in 2024, accounting for 2.6 percent of global output. The contrast between substantial geological potential and modest industrial output is important: minerals can create long-term strategic value, but they do not automatically create immediate geopolitical leverage. 

China’s interest therefore extends beyond extracting commodities. Mining projects can support investment in roads, logistics, and energy, while improved connectivity can make resource projects more commercially viable. The relationship is reciprocal. Yet delays, contractual disputes and difficult terrain demonstrate that diplomatic engagement does not guarantee successful investment. Afghanistan’s economic significance is consequently better understood as a long-term potential tied to infrastructure and regional access rather than as an immediate resource windfall. 

Pakistan, India and Iran 

Afghanistan is central to the strategic calculations of Pakistan, India and Iran, but for different reasons. Pakistan shares the longest border with Afghanistan and is directly exposed to militant attacks, border clashes, refugee movements and trade disruption. The TTP dispute has become particularly important because Pakistan sees the issue as a national security problem, while Kabul rejects accusations of providing haven and objects to cross-border strikes. 

India’s relationship is shaped by the absence of a direct land border. New Delhi therefore relies on air and maritime routes, particularly through Iran, for sustained economic access. On January 8, 2025, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri met Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister in Dubai and discussed bilateral relations, regional developments, humanitarian assistance and trade through the Chabahar Port. India has maintained engagement partly because developments in Afghanistan affect wider South Asian security and access to Central Asian markets. 

Iran’s position is shaped by border security, trade, migration and water-related interests. Iran also serves as an alternative commercial route when Afghanistan-Pakistan crossings are disrupted. The interaction among Pakistan, India and Iran means that Afghanistan is embedded in a wider strategic triangle extending from the Arabian Sea to Central Asia. None of the three states can determine Afghanistan’s trajectory alone, and their priorities sometimes diverge sharply over political legitimacy, trade routes and regional influence. Their common exposure to instability, however, keeps Afghanistan at the center of South Asian diplomacy. 

Central Asia and Regional Connectivity 

Afghanistan is increasingly important to the Central Asian states because geography offers both risks and opportunities. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan have strong incentives to prevent instability from moving northward, but they also seek access to South Asian markets and ports. Uzbekistan has been especially active in promoting the Trans-Afghan Railway concept. 

On July 1, 2026, the President of Uzbekistan highlighted acceleration of the Trans-Afghan railway project as part of efforts to strengthen regional and international transport links. Earlier, on July 3, 2025, Uzbekistan discussed trade, transport, energy and mining cooperation with Afghanistan and stressed the strategic importance of the railway. These initiatives reflect a wider effort to connect landlocked Central Asia with Pakistan and other southern markets. 

CASA-1000 demonstrates the same structural logic in the energy sector. Afghanistan is the central link connecting the participating northern and southern countries, meaning that its infrastructure is essential even when political relations remain complicated. Central Asian governments therefore have a strong incentive to favor practical engagement on border security, trade, electricity and transport. Afghanistan’s geopolitical relevance is partly the result of this structural dependency: it can either connect regions that are otherwise separated by difficult geography or obstruct their integration when instability interrupts transit. 

Humanitarian, Economic and Migration Pressures 

Afghanistan’s geopolitical importance cannot be separated from its economic and humanitarian conditions because internal shocks often become regional problems. The World Bank estimated real gross domestic product growth of 4.8 percent in 2025 and projected growth of about 4 percent in 2026, while also estimating a 5.6 percent decline in GDP per capita and a current account deficit equivalent to 36.1 percent of GDP in 2025. The data illustrate the gap between aggregate economic growth and household welfare. 

The humanitarian picture remains severe. The World Food Programme projects that 13.8 million Afghans face acute food insecurity in 2026, while 4.9 million women and children are expected to require treatment for malnutrition. The agency has appealed for US$540 million to sustain operations through January 2027. The scale of need matters geopolitically because food insecurity, unemployment and weak services can increase migration and place additional pressure on neighboring states. 

Migration is already a major regional issue. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported 1,228,920 returns to Afghanistan during 2026 as of September 22. The term of returns includes deportations, assisted voluntary repatriation and other movements, so the figure should not be treated as a single category of refugee return. It nevertheless demonstrates the magnitude of movement affecting Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Large-scale returns can strain housing, employment, water, healthcare and local infrastructure in Afghanistan while also altering bilateral relations with neighboring states. 

Counternarcotics creates another cross-border dimension. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that opium poppy cultivation fell to 10,200 hectares in 2025, 20 percent below 2024, while potential opium production declined by 32 percent to 296 tons. Farmers’ income from opium sales fell from US$260 million in 2024 to US$134 million in 2025. The decline may reduce the scale of illicit production, but it also creates livelihood pressures that can affect rural stability. Afghanistan’s humanitarian, economic, migration and narcotics issues therefore remain interconnected with regional security. 

Afghanistan’s Strategic Relevance Beyond 2026 

Afghanistan’s geopolitical importance is likely to remain structural because the drivers are rooted in geography rather than a single conflict. Its position between Central Asia and South Asia, its direct border with China, its proximity to Iran and its access routes toward the Arabian Sea ensure continuing external interest. At the same time, militant networks create a persistent security dimension that neighboring states cannot manage independently. 

What has changed is the way influence is pursued. The post-2021 environment is characterized less by large-scale foreign military deployment and more by selective diplomacy, economic engagement, sanctions, regional mediation and infrastructure initiatives. The United Nations remains the principal multilateral platform, while China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India and the Central Asian states pursue overlapping but distinct approaches. 

The future economic trajectory is equally consequential. Afghanistan possesses mineral and transit potential, but converting that potential into sustained growth depends on infrastructure, financial access, investment conditions, trade routes and domestic policy. Projects such as CASA-1000 and the Trans-Afghan Railway demonstrate that regional economic integration can depend on Afghan territory even when questions surrounding international recognition remain unresolved. 

Afghanistan should therefore not be understood only as a security problem or only as an economic opportunity. The same geography that enables trade also creates exposure to militant networks. The same regional engagement that can support investment also raises questions over diplomatic legitimacy. The same reduction in narcotics cultivation that may benefit regional security can intensify economic pressure on vulnerable farming communities. Afghanistan matters because these tensions converge in one country while producing consequences across several regions. 

Conclusion 

Afghanistan matters in global geopolitics because it sits at the intersection of several strategic systems at a time when the balance around it is changing. Its territory connects Central Asia to South Asia; its borders expose neighboring states to security and migration pressures, and its mineral and infrastructure potential attracts sustained economic interest. Severe humanitarian need, economic fragility and restrictions affecting women and girls further complicate the country’s relationship with the wider international system. 

Its importance is therefore best understood through concrete networks rather than historical slogans. Security threats cross borders. Trade routes cross borders. Electricity lines cross borders. Population movements cross borders. Diplomatic influence also crosses borders. Afghanistan’s strategic weight comes from this interdependence. 

For the international community and regional powers, the central geopolitical challenge is how to manage that interdependence while limiting the risks that can radiate from Afghanistan. That makes Afghanistan an enduring geopolitical pivot whose significance extends well beyond its immediate neighborhood and beyond the events that first placed it at the center of international security debates. 

By: Simran Sodhi, Guest Author, GSDN

India is today seen as a rising global power, and in an increasingly multipolar world, India’s role can be denied by none. But India’s foreign policy has its own sets of challenges, the India-US relationship being one of them. But closer home, India’s ‘Neighbourhood First Policy’ is also in an urgent need for a fresh thrust.

The ‘Neighbourhood First Policy’ first emerged in 2008 and but it was only in 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi that this policy got its due emphasis. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are the countries that get covered under this policy.

If we were to take a quick look at India’s relationship with its neighbors today, it would be a fair assessment to make that apart from Bhutan, India’s ties with other States are in some kind of tensions.

Pakistan is the easiest to assess from that perspective. Essentially, India and Pakistan today have a frozen relationship where there are no high-level talks or visits. Bilateral trade is suspended, and since Operation Sindoor in 2025, the military tensions between the two have also spiked. India has repeatedly raised the point that ‘talks and terror’ cannot go together. India-Pakistan ties today probably stand at one of the worst junctions in bilateral terms.

The failure of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) can also be attributed to the deteriorating India-Pakistan ties. SAARC is in a state of comatose, with no summit held since the 18th summit in Kathmandu in 2014. A forum that was supposed to bring in regional harmony and foster better relations between South Asian neighbors is today more of a ‘dead’ forum. 

Bangladesh is a case study where an excellent bilateral relationship has given way to tensions and bitterness. Under Sheikh Hasina from 2009 and 2024, both countries shared excellent ties highlighted by the 2015 Land Boundary Agreement and strong security cooperation. There was trust and regular high-level visits between the two countries and Dhaka was seen as one reliable partner and ally to New Delhi. But all that changed following the exit of Hasina in 2024.

Bangladesh remains India’s largest trading partner in South Asia with bilateral trade standing at $11.35 billion in the 2025–26 fiscal year. Despite this, the political tensions and mistrust is high. One of the sources of this tension is the presence of Hasina in India in exile while Bangladesh has asked India for her extradition.

Since 2024, Dhaka has also moved closer to both China and Pakistan. That only adds to India’s worries. Bangladesh is strategically very important for India and offers easy access to India’s Northeast region.

Nepal: India and Nepal have share historical and cultural ties. Much of history between the two countries is shared and it’s a relationship that was once regarded to be India’s strongest among its neighbors. But the recent changes in Nepal and the new government of Balen Shah has upset some of the old connections. Also, the fact that Nepal also wants to explore greater ties with China adds to India’s concerns. A growing Chinese footprint in South Asia is seen by India as signs of an aggressive China trying to assert itself in India’s ‘Sphere of Influence’. Nevertheless, India remains Nepal’s largest trade partner, continuing extensive investments in cross-border infrastructure and local development projects across Nepal’s various provinces.

Sri Lanka (SL) and India again go back a long way in terms of shared histories and cultures. India and Sri Lanka are deeply intertwined at the political level also. Any ethnic disturbances in SL usually lead to developments in India’s Southern States especially Tamil Nadu. India provided vital financial and humanitarian support, close to $4 billion, during Sri Lanka’s severe economic crisis in 2022, including lines of credit, food, fuel, and currency swaps. SL remains one of the top destinations for Indian tourists. But in SL too, India’s concern is the sway towards China and Chinese investments in the island nation that cause stress in this bilateral relationship. For instance, China secured a 70% stake and a 99-year lease for the Hambantota Port in 2017 after SL struggled to repay construction loans. China has also funded other major projects in the island nation, which again worries India.

India’s other neighbours like the Maldives for instance has seen anti-India sentiment come to the fore many a times. Relations are more stable now but more work needs to be done in strengthening this important bilateral relation. With Afghanistan, India has slowly moved to working with the Taliban who now run the country. The fact that the Taliban and Pakistan have fallen out of late has led to some satisfaction in India’s policy circles. Bhutan remains the best example of close and warm bilateral ties for India in its immediate neighbourhood today. The Doklam plateau near the India-Bhutan-China trijunction is critically sensitive; Chinese control over ridges there would threaten India’s narrow Siliguri Corridor.

In short, India needs to turn its attention to its immediate neighbourhood. A fresh impetus, an effort at rebuilding some of the old connections and embracing friends like Bhutan closer is the way forward. The Chinese footprint gets larger in the South Asian region every day and India needs to act before its too late.

By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN

Introduction

Regional states have built an impressive surveillance grid over the past decade. The harder question is what to do once a suspicious vessel has been spotted, and who has the standing to say what it was really doing. In August 2022, the Chinese vessel Yuan Wang 5 sailed towards Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port, a facility that Colombo had leased to a Chinese state-owned firm for 99 years after it could not service the loans taken to build it. Officially, the ship was on a replenishment visit. Indian commentary described it as a spy ship. It is a satellite and missile tracking vessel operated by China’s military, carries a crew of over 400, and has supported Shenzhou crewed missions and lunar probes. Sri Lanka first asked Beijing to defer the call under Indian and American pressure, then relented within days and let the ship dock, on the condition that it conduct no research in Sri Lankan waters. In January 2024, Colombo imposed a one-year moratorium on Chinese research vessels docking at its ports or operating in its exclusive economic zone. In September 2025, Yuan Wang 5 was tracked near Indonesia while India had issued airspace restrictions over the Bay of Bengal for a suspected long-range missile test.

The episode contains the whole problem in miniature. Everyone could see the ship. Nobody could say, in terms that would satisfy a court, a diplomat or a sceptical neighbour, what it was there to do, or convince the coastal states that had to decide whether to let it in that refusing was worth the friction with its owner. That gap between seeing and explaining is the subject of a growing debate in Indian Ocean security circles, and it is the reason the concept of attribution has begun to move from the vocabulary of cyber policy into maritime strategy.

A Crowded, Quiet Ocean

The Indian Ocean has become a busy operating area for vessels whose purpose is difficult to pin down. Over the last decade, Chinese research ships such as Yuan Wang, Shi Yan 6 and Xiang Yang Hong 3 have become a routine presence, alongside Chinese-origin underwater gliders and autonomous underwater vehicles, and distant-water fishing fleets. They have been reported off the east coast of Africa, in the Arabian Sea, in the Bay of Bengal and in the waters west of Indonesia. On occasion, some have switched off their Automatic Identification System transponders, the equipment that lets other ships and coastal authorities see who and where they are.

Take Xiang Yang Hong 3. It was scheduled to conduct deep-water research in the southern Indian Ocean in early 2024, and China had also sought permission for a survey off the Maldivian capital, Malé. Or take Shi Yan 6, which Chinese state media describes as an oceanography and marine ecology vessel with a crew of about 60, and which Sri Lanka allowed to operate in its waters in late 2023 despite Indian objections. In each case the official description is scientific. In each case, hydrographic and seabed data, of the kind that supports both fisheries science and submarine operations, could serve either purpose. That is what “dual-use” means in practice, and it is why the ambiguity is not a bug of the situation but its central feature. For littoral states such as India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, this creates what might be called a response dilemma. Reacting forcefully to an activity that may turn out to be benign risks diplomatic damage, and in Sri Lanka’s case, economic exposure to a creditor that holds roughly half of its bilateral debt. Not reacting risks the slow erosion of sovereignty, the loss of intelligence advantage, and the normalisation of behaviour that could matter enormously in a crisis. Grey-zone activity works precisely because it lives in this space, below the threshold of armed conflict, exploiting the blurred lines between military and civilian, and between war and peace.

What the Existing Architecture Can and Cannot Do

It would be unfair to say the region has done little. The past decade has seen a real investment in what security planners call maritime domain awareness, or MDA: the ability to detect, track and identify what is moving on and under the water. India has built coastal radar networks across Seychelles, Mauritius, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indonesia, South Africa and Australia have launched satellites to watch their maritime zones. East African states including Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique are actively monitoring foreign distant-water fishing fleets. India and Indonesia have written below-threshold activity into their maritime and defence strategies.

On top of these national efforts sits a dense layer of regional information-sharing bodies. The Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region, hosted by the Indian Navy in Gurugram, the Regional Maritime Information Fusion Centre in Madagascar, the Regional Coordination Operations Centre in the Seychelles, the Combined Maritime Forces’ Joint Maritime Information Centre, and the Quad’s Indo-Pacific Maritime Surveillance Collaboration are all designed to help partners see more and share what they see. But every one of these systems answers the same question: what is out there? Almost none answers the follow-up questions that decide whether governments can act. What exactly is that vessel doing? Who is responsible? Is the behaviour deliberate, and is it directed or supported by a state? Detection tells a coastal state that a research ship has gone dark for eleven hours over a subsea cable route. It does not tell that state whether the ship crew was conducting a survey, whether the state that owns it ordered the survey, or whether the same pattern has appeared in three other countries’ waters. Without those answers, governments hesitate, and hesitation is what grey-zone operators count on.

What Attribution Means

In international law, attribution is the process of establishing that a wrongful act can be assigned to a particular actor, ordinarily a state. In practice, it means building a case: examining behavioural patterns, ownership structures, technical capabilities, operational links, location, timing and connections to state agencies, then drawing a reasoned conclusion about intent. Done well, attribution does several things at once. It raises the cost of future misbehaviour by removing plausible deniability, it lets governments calibrate a proportionate response instead of a panicked or timid one, and it creates a documentary record that can support diplomatic, legal or economic measures.

The difficulty is that a single country attributing a grey-zone act by a much larger power takes on political and legal risk alone. It may be accused of overreach, exposed to retaliation, or left without corroboration when its evidence is challenged. This is where collective attribution becomes attractive. When several states pool information and agree, in advance, on the standards of proof they will apply, any single conclusion carries the weight of shared judgement, and the political exposure is spread rather than concentrated.

Lessons from Europe and the Question of IORA

Two institutions elsewhere in the world show how this can work. The European Union’s Hybrid Fusion Cell and NATO’s Joint Intelligence and Security Division both pool national intelligence, declassify material where appropriate, and produce assessments of hybrid threats against agreed guidelines. Their outputs are not decisions; member states retain control of what they do with the findings. But the shared assessment gives each government the institutional legitimacy to act, as happened in the coordinated European response to Russian hybrid activity. NATO has gone a step further by creating Counter-Hybrid Support Teams that can be deployed to help member states facing such pressure.

An Indian Ocean analogue would need an institutional home, and the most plausible candidate is the Indian Ocean Rim Association, or IORA. Its membership of 23 littoral states and 12 dialogue partners makes it the only genuinely region-wide body in the space. That distinguishes it from sub-regional arrangements like the Regional Coordination Operations Centre, from nationally anchored hubs such as the Information Fusion Centre-IOR, and from coalition groupings like the Combined Maritime Forces or the Quad’s surveillance initiative, which by design include only some of the relevant states. Maritime Safety and Security is already one of IORA’s priority areas, covering domain awareness, information exchange and standardised processes. It would not be a stretch to add a technical attribution function to that portfolio: a small team that assembles and assesses evidence, while leaving the political decision on whether to publicise or respond to the member governments, exactly as the EU cell does.

The Politics That No Mechanism Can Engineer Away

It would be a mistake to treat this as a technical fix. Attribution is a political decision as much as an analytical one, because naming a state carries consequences, and different governments weigh those consequences differently. IORA’s members do not share a single threat perception. Something India regards as coercive or hostile may look to a fellow member like a routine fisheries matter, a sovereignty question or simply an economic relationship. Many Indian Ocean states depend heavily on Chinese trade, finance and infrastructure, and that dependence shapes how willing they are to be seen criticising Chinese conduct at sea. Sri Lanka’s own oscillation on the Yuan Wang 5 visit, and its later moratorium, is a case study in a small state trying to satisfy two powerful neighbours.

There is also a structural limit. IORA operates on consensus. A single member with strong economic ties to the country under discussion can slow or block a collective conclusion, and when the subject is a Chinese activity affecting several IORA members, that is not a hypothetical risk. Any realistic proposal has to accept this. A consensus body will rarely produce a bold public accusation on short notice. That said, the alternatives are not obviously better. Coalition groupings can move faster but lack legitimacy in the eyes of states outside them, and a purely Indian or Quad-led attribution risks being dismissed as partisan. An IORA process, even a slow and cautious one, offers something the faster options cannot: the region’s own voice. Even a modest outcome, such as an agreed methodology for assessing suspicious activity, common indicators of concern, and shared protocols for response, would improve on the status quo. Standards agreed in advance are more likely to hold when a crisis arrives than positions improvised under pressure.

Conclusion

The Indian Ocean has spent a decade getting better at seeing. Coastal radars, satellites and fusion centres have made it harder for a vessel to move unobserved through the region’s busiest waters. That investment has been worthwhile, but it has also exposed the limits of surveillance as a security strategy. Knowing that a research ship has switched off its transponder or that a glider has surfaced near a cable landing is only the first step; the real difficulty lies in deciding what it means and what to do about it.

Collective attribution is not a substitute for naval presence, capacity-building or bilateral diplomacy, and it will not resolve the underlying strategic competition. What it can do is narrow the space in which ambiguity operates, and give smaller littoral states a way to respond that does not require them to stand alone against a much larger neighbour. The path runs through IORA or something like it, and it will be slow, contested and dependent on consensus. But the alternative is to keep watching, in ever finer detail, activity that no one is willing or able to explain. For an ocean that carries a large share of the world’s trade and energy, and where the seabed is increasingly threaded with cables and sensors, that is not a sustainable position.