Table of Contents
Today’s brief reads three articles. Harsh V. Pant in ORF reads the new nuclear agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia as a rule bent for a partner. C Raja Mohan in the Indian Express asks whether India will ever cross from a rising power into a great power. Sumeer Bhasin in a VIF paper says the next gain in Indian power has to come from its institutions.
Washington has bent its own rule on enrichment to keep Saudi Arabia away from Russia and China.
Harsh V. Pant writes on the civil nuclear agreement signed this week by the United States and Saudi Arabia. He reads it as a turn in American policy. For years the gold standard in the Gulf was the agreement with the United Arab Emirates, which ruled out enrichment of uranium. Riyadh has not been held to it. The reason is competition. Russia and China sell nuclear plants across the developing world. If Saudi Arabia goes to them, the United States loses a market and a partner at once. So the rule gives way.
The record
- The agreement is a 123 Agreement under the United States Atomic Energy Act. It is built as a 30-year framework.
- American firms, and Westinghouse in particular, may build and run parts of the Saudi civilian nuclear energy programme.
- The agreement is reported to allow joint studies on enrichment of uranium inside Saudi Arabia. Sensitive technology would stay under American control in what the article calls a black box arrangement.
- The agreement still has to pass a 90-day review in the United States Congress. It follows the joint declaration of 2025.
- The United Arab Emirates signed what is known as the gold standard agreement. Abu Dhabi gave up enrichment and reprocessing for good. Saudi Arabia has not been held to that mark.
- The Saudi programme is to be placed under IAEA safeguards through bilateral arrangements. The United States keeps consent rights over sensitive nuclear work.
- Experts on non-proliferation and several members of the United States Congress object. They say that allowing any enrichment at all, and allowing it without the most intrusive inspection regime of the IAEA Additional Protocol, weakens a long standing American standard.
- Rosatom of Russia and the growing nuclear industry of China sell complete packages. They put together the building of reactors, the supply of fuel and long term influence.
- Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has tied the Saudi nuclear plan to the advance of the Iranian programme. Nuclear energy is also part of his Vision 2030 plan to take the economy off oil.
- The article expects Iran to read the agreement as proof of double standards. Tehran then has more reason to hold on to its own programme and to work with Russia and China.
The argument
This is a case of a rule losing to a rivalry. Non-proliferation is a regime built on rules that states accept. Here the rules give way to competition between the great powers. Use it in answers on nuclear proliferation and on how far international regimes hold when the interests of great powers run against them.
It also arms Iran with an argument. Tehran can say that one standard applies to Saudi Arabia and another to itself. The last page of this brief asks about India’s own refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Read the two together.
“Strategic competition with China and Russia increasingly demands greater flexibility toward partners, even when such accommodation complicates established non-proliferation norms.”
Harsh V. Pant
India has the size of a great power and not yet the record of one.
C Raja Mohan writes on a debate about where India stands among the powers. Two recent works put India below the front rank. He accepts a part of that case. India has scale, the largest population, nuclear weapons and a large economy. It still trails the United States and China on income, technology and industry. His own answer is that the block sits at home. What is unfinished is the work of economic and social reform, and the work of holding the country together.
The record
- Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, asked the middle powers of the world to work together. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said the label fits the treaty allies of the United States better than it fits India.
- Brendan Simms, a historian at Cambridge, places India among the almost great powers in his book The Return of the Great Powers. France, Germany and Japan are in the same group. They hold several marks of a great power and not enough of them to shape the system.
- Simms sets a material test. It asks for industrial strength, leadership in technology, military power including nuclear weapons, the power to send force beyond one’s own borders, and weight in war and peace in more than one theatre.
- India’s economy is about $4 trillion. The United States stands at $31 trillion and China at $20 trillion.
- India’s per capita income is still below $3,000. It buys much of its military technology from abroad, and its spending on research and development is modest.
- Michael Beckley of Tufts University argues in a Foreign Affairs essay called The Stagnant Order that China may be the last country to reach the front rank. Ageing, slower gains in productivity and the piling up of economic and technological power in the United States and China make the climb harder for those who come later.
- The article names what holds the rise back at home. Growth in productivity has slowed, manufacturing has done less than expected, spending on science and technology is short, and the next round of reforms has stalled.
- At Independence India was among the largest economies of the world. It then fell behind as the East Asian tigers and China surged. The reforms of P V Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh 35 years ago turned that around, and Washington began to see Delhi as a rising power.
The argument
What makes a great power is a standing question in Paper II. Simms gives you a list of tests you can apply. Beckley gives you the counter case that the door is closing on latecomers. Between them you have both sides of the answer.
The deeper use is in the determinants of foreign policy. Raja Mohan puts the cause of India’s slow climb inside India, in its economy and its politics, and not in the balance of power abroad. That is a clean line for answers on the domestic sources of foreign policy.
“Deepening political polarisation, the resurgence of feudal and pre-modern forces, and growing strains on democratic institutions at home will weaken India’s ability to deal with a rapidly changing world marked by sharpening geopolitical rivalry, less open markets, and the rise of disruptive technologies.”
C Raja Mohan
India holds strategic power already and has to build the institutions that would put it to work.
Sumeer Bhasin argues that Indian security thinking still belongs to an older age. War and peace no longer sit apart. A contest now runs at the same time through cyber attacks, sanctions, information and technology. He offers two ideas for reading this world. The first joins the whole region to India’s west into one strategic system. The second says influence flows through networks and not through territory alone. His case is that India has the power and lacks the institutions to use it.
The record
- Western Strategic Continuum is his name for a single strategic system. It runs from the Eastern Mediterranean through the Levant, the Gulf, Iran and Afghanistan to the northern Indian Ocean. Trouble in one part of it travels through the whole.
- Strategic Gravity is his second idea. Influence flows through networks of technology, logistics, finance, innovation and information. A state that shapes those networks gains weight out of all proportion to its geography.
- The gap between Indian research and Indian capability is what he calls the Strategic Innovation Gap. Institutions produce ideas and start-ups produce prototypes. Testing sites, patient capital and quick purchase are missing.
- He proposes ASTRA, that is Advanced Strategic Technologies, Resilience and Acceleration. It would join strategic finance, technology, industry and defence purchase in one structure rather than another scheme.
- ASTRA would rest on six pillars: strategic capital, technology transition, national testing and validation, a civil, military and industrial innovation network, global strategic partnerships, and export competitiveness.
- India already runs many programmes of this kind. The article names iDEX, the Technology Development Fund, Startup India, the National Quantum Mission, the Production Linked Incentive schemes and the Technology Development Board. Each ministry works to its own targets, so the line from laboratory to deployment breaks.
- Japan passed an Economic Security Promotion Act in May 2022. It stands on four pillars. They are a steady supply chain for goods such as semiconductors, safety for critical infrastructure against cyber attack, joint public and private work on new research, and patents on sensitive work that are kept out of public view.
- He would have defence spending counted as national security investment. Each rupee should also build manufacturing, research, exports and skilled work at home.
The argument
Security here is a whole of government and a whole of society job. Defence planning has to sit with finance, trade, education and science. That is a line you can use in answers on national security and on the institutions of policy making.
Both ideas travel into other answers. Western Strategic Continuum lets you write about the Gulf, Iran and Afghanistan as one theatre for India rather than three. Strategic Gravity lets you write about power that does not rest on the map, which is the ground of most questions on globalisation and security.
“The contest of the twenty-first century will not be won solely on the battlefield. It will be won by nations that can organize knowledge, capital, technology and institutions more effectively than their competitors.”
Sumeer Bhasin
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 · 20mIndia 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.Answer
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- PSIR Paper II · 2024 · 15mCritically examine India's persistent refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) despite being recognized as a de facto nuclear powerAnswer
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- PSIR Paper II · 2023 · 20m"India's Nuclear policy is deeply influenced by its cultural beliefs and the pragmatic approach of its foreign policy." Discuss.Answer