Table of Contents
Today’s brief reads three articles. Robert A. Pape in Foreign Affairs argues that cheap drones have taken away the American power to settle a war quickly. Imran Khurshid in Firstpost sets out why every Indian opening to Pakistan has ended in an attack. Shashi Tharoor in The Hindu says India should neither surrender to China nor depend on the United States.
The war with Iran has closed the age of quick and cheap American victories.
Robert A. Pape sets two wars side by side. In 1991 the coalition drove Iraq out of Kuwait in about a hundred hours. That victory taught governments and markets that American force could settle any question quickly and at low cost. Pape argues that the war with Iran teaches the opposite. The parts needed for precision warfare are now sold in ordinary markets. A weaker state can now raise the cost of a stronger state’s plans without winning a single battle. The rules of power that held after the Cold War have gone.
The record
- In 1991 the coalition freed Kuwait in roughly 100 hours. American combat deaths came to 147. More than 300,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait were defeated, captured or forced to flee.
- One Iranian Shahed drone costs $20,000. Iran used one in June to destroy an American Apache helicopter worth $35 million.
- The Shahed is built from navigation chips, satellite receivers, processors and software made for civilian electronics. Pape says the point is not that it is advanced. The point is that it is not.
- Trade as a share of world output rose from about 38 percent in 1990 to about 60 percent two decades later.
- Sales of chips passed $790 billion in 2025. Sales of chips for artificial intelligence alone passed $200 billion that year.
- Chinese officers studied the Gulf War closely. China cut its armed forces from nearly 3.5 million in 1990 to two million a decade later, and put its money into missiles and information technology.
- In 2024 and 2025 the Houthis in Yemen attacked ships in the Red Sea. Shipping firms sent vessels round the Cape of Good Hope instead.
- About one fifth of world sea trade passes through the Taiwan Strait. Nearly 40 percent of China’s gross domestic product rests on trade, and most of that trade goes by sea.
- Pape asks the reader to picture Taiwan as one large launch platform with thousands of drones that reach up to 750 miles. The ports of Shanghai, Ningbo-Zhoushan and Shenzhen all lie inside that range.
The argument
Pape separates two things that answers often run together. A state can destroy targets and still not decide the outcome. The United States keeps the power to punish. It has lost the power to compel at low cost. Take that distinction into any answer on national interest, security and power.
The article is a fresh case for the topic on the collapse of the Soviet Union, unipolarity and American hegemony. Pape shows that the order after 1991 rested on belief as much as on force. States did not have to feel American power. They only had to believe in it. When that belief goes, the order goes with it.
There is a second use in answers on globalisation. The same open markets that spread cheap chips and cameras also spread the means of precise attack. Pape calls the war with Iran a second precision revolution. The strong made the tools. The weak now buy them.
“Most wars disappear into history. A few divide history into before and after.”
Robert A. Pape
“The geopolitical strength of a great power, such as the United States, is less a measure of its capacity to control others than a reflection of the confidence others have in the systems that it maintains and anchors.”
Robert A. Pape
Every Indian opening to Pakistan has been followed by an attack.
Imran Khurshid writes on the twenty seventh Kargil Vijay Diwas. He goes through the record of talks between India and Pakistan and finds one pattern in it. India offers a hand. A war or a terrorist attack follows. Khurshid holds that the offers came from Pakistan’s civilian leaders, while the army worked against them. That is why New Delhi now asks for action against cross-border terrorism before it will talk.
The record
- More than 527 Indian soldiers died in the Kargil War and 1,363 were wounded.
- Pakistani soldiers dressed as local terrorists crossed the Line of Control and took Indian Army posts left empty for the winter. Pakistan called this Operation Badr.
- Their object was to cut the link between Kashmir and Ladakh, to cut off Indian troops on the Siachen Glacier, and to force India to settle the Kashmir question.
- Pakistan had tested nuclear weapons less than a year earlier. Its generals expected that the fear of nuclear war would keep India’s reply small.
- Indian forces took the heights back by 26 July 1999 under Operation Vijay. They did not cross the Line of Control. The old position was restored.
- Atal Bihari Vajpayee went to Lahore in February 1999 on the first Delhi to Lahore bus. The Lahore Declaration was signed on that visit. The Pakistan Army was already planning Kargil.
- In December 1999 Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 was hijacked on its way from Kathmandu to New Delhi. India released Maulana Masood Azhar, who then founded Jaish-e-Mohammed.
- The Agra Summit of 2001 failed. Vajpayee later said that Musharraf wanted terrorism to be called a freedom fight.
- On 22 April 2003 Vajpayee told Parliament that India was opening the doors for talks. The Composite Dialogue followed in 2004. Then came the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, in which 164 people were killed and 308 injured.
- Narendra Modi invited Nawaz Sharif to the ceremony at which he became Prime Minister in 2014. He later made a surprise visit to Pakistan. Within weeks terrorists attacked the Pathankot Air Force Station.
- India then let a Pakistani Joint Investigation Team visit Pathankot and look at the evidence. Uri in 2016, Pulwama in 2019 and the recent Pahalgam attack followed all the same.
The argument
This gives a candidate the dates in order for any answer on India and Pakistan. Lahore in 1999, Agra in 2001, the Composite Dialogue of 2004, Ufa, the visit of 2015. Each opening is followed by a name every examiner knows. Kargil, IC-814, 26/11, Pathankot, Uri, Pulwama, Pahalgam.
The argument is about the two centres of power in Pakistan. The civilian government makes the promise. The army breaks it. Nawaz Sharif himself admitted the breach at Kargil. That is the strongest reply to any question that treats the trouble as a run of separate incidents.
Khurshid also gives India’s present rule for talks. Pakistan must first take action against cross-border terrorism that can be believed, checked and not reversed. Use it in answers on terrorism and on India and South Asia.
“On May 28, 1998, Pakistan carried out five nuclear tests. After that Vajpayee Saheb came here and made an agreement with us. But we violated that agreement… it was our fault.”
Nawaz Sharif, quoted in Firstpost
“The Kargil war was not merely a military conflict but a defining moment that exposed the limits of peace without trust.”
Firstpost
An unreliable Washington is no reason to hand Beijing the terms.
Shashi Tharoor answers a demand now heard in New Delhi. Business voices want India to drop the guard it raised against China, because the United States has become an unreliable partner. Tharoor accepts the first half and rejects the second. Washington is an unreliable partner. That does not make Beijing a safe one. He argues that an economic embrace that China would not return would deepen India’s dependence and take away the little bargaining strength India holds.
The record
- China’s annual trade surplus over India is now more than $100 billion.
- The Trump administration put punitive tariffs on Indian steel and aluminium, took away India’s preferential trade status, made the H-1B visa rules harder and renewed its ties with Islamabad.
- Tharoor reads Depsang in 2013, Chumar in 2014, Doklam in 2017 and the deaths in the Galwan Valley in 2020 as one settled policy and not as separate border incidents.
- China claims the whole State of Arunachal Pradesh, gives new names to places inside it, and issues stapled visas to residents of Jammu and Kashmir and of Arunachal Pradesh.
- China has held back machinery and industrial inputs during disputes, and has used its hold over rare earths and tunnel-boring machines the same way.
- During Operation Sindoor in May 2025 China gave Pakistan real time tactical satellite data and intelligence.
- China has used its veto in the Security Council to protect terrorist organisations based in Pakistan. It has blocked India’s claim to permanent membership of the Council and to membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
- The restrictions India placed on Chinese apps, investments and telecom infrastructure after Galwan were not only an answer to anger. Tharoor calls them diplomatic bargaining strength that cannot be won back once given away.
- His remedy is at home. Build supply chains that can take a shock, spread trade across Europe, East Asia and the Global South, and raise domestic manufacturing, even at the cost of higher prices for a time.
The argument
This is the argument for strategic autonomy stated in its sharp form. Tharoor does not ask India to pick a side. He asks India to build the strength that makes picking a side unnecessary. That is the line to carry into answers on India and the USA and on India and China.
The piece also tells a candidate what economic dependence does to foreign policy. A state that cannot make its own components cannot take its own decisions in a crisis. Trade with China is not only trade. It is a hold on India’s freedom to act.
Both this writer and the last one end at the same test. Words and meetings count for little. What counts is whether the other side changes what it does.
“We do not have to “tilt” either way. We must, instead, develop the strength to walk straight.”
Shashi Tharoor
“Beijing does not view New Delhi as a peer, nor does it desire India to become one.”
Shashi Tharoor
Where this belongs in your syllabus
Open the note and read the full topic.
The questions this feeds
Questions from earlier years that today’s reading speaks to. Where the answer is written, the red link opens it. The full set is in the PYQ Vault.
- PSIR Paper II · 2025 · 15m“Trump's return to the White House is a jolt to push the European Union to invest in its own defence and economic and technological revival.” Comment.Answer
- GS-2 · 2025“With the waning of globalization, post-Cold War world is becoming a site of sovereign nationalism.” Elucidate.
- PSIR Paper II · 2025 · 10mWould you agree with the contention that India's inclination to lean on a ‘more aggressive hyper-realist posture’ has gained a new momentum in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terrorist strike? Comment.Answer
- GS-2 · 2024 · 15mTerrorism has become a significant threat to global peace and security. Evaluate the effectiveness of the United Nations Security Council's Counter Terrorism Committee (CTC) and its associated bodies in addressing and mitigating this threat at the international level.
- PSIR Paper II · 2025 · 20mIndia continues to invoke its time-tested policy of strategic autonomy vis-a-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.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2024 · 15m“India and USA have become such strong strategic partners that they need not become formal allies.” Comment.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2024 · 15m“India has of late, chosen to debunk non-alignment in its pursuit of multi-alignment.” Comment.Answer