POWER 50 · Day 50 — Recent Developments in Foreign Policy (Part 2): The Western Arc & the New World Order

Download the PDF

POWER 50 is fifty capsules across fifty days — the whole PSIR syllabus revised once, in the order the syllabus is actually built. One topic a day: read the capsule, write the same day, and don’t break the chain. Running alongside it are PSIR Dynamics 2026 and the PYQ Vault (560 previous-year questions over the fifty days, roughly eleven a day). This is Day 50 — the final capsule. With it, the chain is complete.

Day 50 — Recent Developments in Foreign Policy (Part 2)

Part 2 takes India’s western arc and the shape of the order beyond it. West Asia is read as three separate poles India engages on their own terms — the Gulf as an economic and remittance relationship, Israel as a defence and intelligence partner, and Iran as an extended neighbour and a corridor to Central Asia — traced through India–Saudi Arabia, India–Iran, India–Israel, India–Palestine and India–UAE, up to the Twelve-Day War and the 2026 escalation. The capsule then turns to India’s vision of a new world order: multipolarity and multi-alignment, and strategic autonomy recast from Nehru’s “choice of inaction” to Jaishankar’s “choice of action”. It closes with the nuclear question and the hard-power turn — the road from Smiling Buddha (1974) to Pokhran (1998), the no-first-use and credible-minimum-deterrence doctrine, Operation Sindoor and proactive deterrence after Pahalgam, and India’s soft power and public diplomacy. Between 2017 and 2025, this stretch of the syllabus has surfaced as eight previous-year questions in the paper — one 10-marker, two 15-markers and five 20-markers.

Write before the evening:

1. What are the challenges and limitations in India – Iran relations? (UPSC 2023, 15m)
2. India continues to invoke its time-tested policy of strategic autonomy vis-à-vis both the United States of America and Russia by rejecting US’ offer of mediation on Kashmir issue and by refusing to criticize Russia in its ongoing war against Ukraine. Comment. (UPSC 2025, 20m)
3. India’s reluctance to perceive any ‘existential threat’ inevitably made the multilateral path to nuclear security a ‘default option’ until it decided to cross the nuclear Rubicon in 1998. Identify and analyze some of the major reasons behind this shift in India’s position on the nuclear question. (UPSC 2025, 20m)

If you go blank on a point, it is covered in full in the Foundation and OGP class notes and handouts — revise it, then write.