Raphael Harkham
The post–Cold War unipolar order – with the United States as the unquestioned, unchallenged hegemon – is over. While the great power rivalry between the U.S. and China is still in its formative stages, another state will exert disproportionate influence on how that competition ultimately unfolds.
India – the world’s most populous state – is a democracy that shares a 2,100-mile border with China. Having experienced Beijing’s expansionist ambitions firsthand, India views China as both a strategic competitor and a direct threat. With vast but still underdeveloped industrial capacity, India offers the most credible counterweight to China in the region, if not globally. It also presents an increasingly attractive economic alternative for countries and investors seeking growth and diversified supply chains. Yet strategic centrality does not automatically translate into strategic capability, and India is still widely understood to be decades away from great-power status.
India faces persistent challenges in attaining such status. Labor productivity, industrial structure, innovation depth, and infrastructure efficiency remain binding constraints. These limitations make external partnerships not optional accelerants, but structural prerequisites to India’s ascent. Indeed, India is fortunate to possess a broad and diverse network of partners to which it can turn.
A cornerstone of India’s foreign policy is “strategic autonomy,” a tradition rooted in resisting alliances that might constrain diplomatic flexibility. This approach has enabled India to cultivate an eclectic portfolio of relationships and explains how, since the end of the Cold War, it has developed deep ties with the United States and Israel while maintaining longstanding relations with Russia, the Arab world, and Iran. While this posture has delivered maximal flexibility, it now limits India’s alignment clarity at a critical juncture: when its approach to the Chinese threat must be cohesive and coordinated with partners that share its concerns. Within this increasingly strained framework of strategic autonomy, Israel occupies a distinctive position.
Over the past 35 years, Israel and India have been moving on an unmistakable trajectory toward a “special relationship.” Since 2020, India has been Israel’s largest defense customer, and Israel is consistently one of India’s top weapons suppliers. Beyond defense, India is Israel’s second-largest trading partner in Asia, with bilateral trade approaching $4 billion. While a free-trade agreement is still under negotiation, cooperation between the two countries is already comprehensive, all-domain, and expanding, spanning cyber, intelligence, industry, AI, agriculture, water, high-tech, and R&D.
India–Israel relations rest on what Prime Minister Narendra Modi has described as “convergences and commonalities.” Both states are modern incarnations of ancient cultures, and see sovereignty as an expression of distinct civilizational value. As former British outposts founded in the wake of World War II, both are heavily influenced by British political culture, and both were forged through partition, a bloody war and refugee crisis – all of which inform current domestic and regional tensions. Both face intrinsic, enduring challenges due to what Modi called “complex geographies” – Israel with its Arab neighbors, India with Pakistan, and each with significant Muslim minorities. Each has contended with jihadist terrorism since its establishment. These convergences do more than foster diplomatic affinity – they create the conditions for deeper strategic cooperation.
For Israel, the meaning of “strategic autonomy” has shifted sharply since October 7 and its aftermath. The costs of overreliance on the United States – particularly in critical areas such as munitions and war materiel – were exposed in stark terms. At the same time, China – Israel’s largest source of imports – has adopted increasingly hostile diplomatic positions since October 7 and continues to provide staunch support and weaponry for Iran. Taken together, these pressures compel Israel to reconsider how its alliances are structured – and to move from relationships of dependence toward relationships of interdependence.
With India confronting the Chinese specter and Israel seeking alliance diversification, a moment of convergence has emerged. Israel – possessing a unique and potent set of competitive advantages – can act as an “early investor” in India’s ascent, cultivating a degree of indispensability to a future superpower that is has not hitherto known.
As a small state, Israel is inherently constrained in the level of interdependence it can generate. But by acting deliberately it can embed itself within India’s decision-making architecture, so that at the moment of India’s superpower arrival it will have become an essential partner in a more durable alliance and secured greater autonomy. Crucially, this approach does not seek to erode India’s strategic autonomy. On the contrary, by strengthening India’s internal capacity and strategic coherence, it would enhance India’s autonomy as a fully realized great power.
Systemic indispensability rests on a simple asymmetry: the smaller state must possess non-scalable, high-leverage capabilities that the larger power cannot easily replicate. India’s advantages lie overwhelmingly in scale – its labor force, resources, digital platforms, and strategic geography. Its constraints are concentrated in execution: infrastructure delivery, innovation absorption, manufacturing quality, and complex systems integration.
Israel’s leverage lies precisely in these domains. Its strengths include precision technologies, short R&D cycles, advanced systems integration, and intelligence fusion. To date, these capabilities have underpinned cooperation in defense-grade AI, autonomous systems, cyber offense and defense, missile defense, desert agriculture, and water security. While technology transfer and co-production have brought the two countries close, a drive to systemic indispensability requires Israel to think in decades rather than transaction cycles. Because when India reaches superpower status, it will dwarf Israel in every quantitative metric, internalize capabilities, and learn fast. And since doctrine is far harder to replicate than hardware, Israel’s future focus should shift from arms sales toward policy co-formation.
The objective is not Indian policy capture, but the establishment of consultative norms, co-authored frameworks, and coordinated planning processes that shape how decisions are made at critical junctures like crises, escalations, and force-structure design. Core focus areas that are already primed for this type of cognitive embedding are Indian defense planning and doctrine; Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) fusion; missile defense doctrine; and border conflict management.
India’s recent military actions provide an early proof of concept. For decades, India adhered to a doctrine of strategic restraint in its conflict with Pakistan, responding to cross-border terrorism with calibrated force designed to deter attacks while containing the conflict. Operation Sindoor, launched in response to the Pahalgam terror attack in May 2025, marked a decisive shift to what Modi described a “new national security doctrine,” one that is more independent, proactive, and even preemptive: treating future terror attacks as acts of war attributable to their state sponsors. India also signaled that it would no longer accept international mediation as a constraint on defending its sovereignty and citizens. As John Spencer and Lauren Dagan Amos recently noted, this shift mirrors fundamentals long embedded in Israeli counterterror doctrine and reflects a convergence that is not rhetorical but doctrinal. It’s highly likely that India’s new posture is influenced by Israeli defense doctrine, suggesting an existing and meaningful level of systemic impact.
Indian resistance to deeper doctrinal imprinting from a small foreign power is foreseeable. Yet the magnitude of the China challenge and Israel’s unique alignment with India suggest a trade-off worth managing. Such concerns can also be addressed by ensuring that cognitive embedding is modular, domain-specific, and clearly bounded.
Effectuating this level of integration requires sustained elite-to-elite engagement: Israeli participation within Indian policy and defense institutions, jointly authored classified doctrine, and permanent joint working groups. In technology and systems production, Israel should pursue institutional lock-in by making its contributions structurally difficult to replace. While India may diversify hardware suppliers, replacing Israeli software logic, iteration speed, and systems architecture would be far more difficult. This logic applies across air and missile defense, ISR systems, and AI-enabled platforms, where Israeli firms can plug directly into Indian procurement and doctrine cycles.
Beyond defense, Israel can play a catalytic role in transforming India’s industrial competitiveness. By providing manufacturing intelligence layers – advanced automation, rapid prototyping, and yield optimization – Israel can help build factory “nervous systems” that vastly improve efficiency, productivity, and export reliability. Similar systems-integration expertise can be applied to other areas critical to India’s ascension to superpower status, like power-grid resilience, food security, and water management. While India builds and operates the infrastructure, Israeli firms would provide the architectural logic that is far harder to substitute than physical components.
For Israel’s indispensability to endure, its advantage must remain cognitively dynamic and continuously adaptive. That means Israel must continue to transfer knowledge faster than India can replicate it while preserving an innovation edge through constant iteration. This is a demanding standard, but one Israel has sustained since its establishment – first through its “qualitative military edge” and more recently through a burgeoning qualitative technological edge.
An Israel–India partnership aimed at counterbalancing China is both feasible and strategically consequential. But with China already entrenched as one of the two global economic centers, India must catch up quick. An alliance grounded in interdependence would strengthen both states – accelerating India’s rise while granting Israel scale, strategic depth, and durable alliance security. Properly constructed, such interdependence would not dilute autonomy for either state, but anchor it.
*Raphael Harkham is a political adviser and a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Bar Ilan University. His work has been published in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, the Jerusalem Post, and the American Spectator, among others.
