Indian Strategic Studies

26 March 2026

Two Loops: How China’s Open AI Strategy Reinforces Its Industrial Dominance

China has opted to go all in on an open-source approach to AI. Most Chinese labs publish model source code and weights. They also charge far less to use high-end products than their global competitors. This has resulted in the acceleration of global uptake of Chinese AI and created a feedback loop where widespread adoption drives iteration, then further adoption. As of publication, Alibaba’s Qwen models accounted for the largest model ecosystem on Hugging Face, with over 100,000 derivatives.

This open ecosystem enables China to innovate close to the frontier despite significant compute constraints. Chinese labs have narrowed performance gaps with top Western large language models. They have also developed key architectural and training advances that are now industry standards.

China’s Sovereignty Paradox: Why Beijing Won’t Militarily Defend Its Close Partners

Tomaz Fares

In an effort to reassert geopolitical influence vis-à-vis China’s longstanding allies, the United States, under the Trump administration, conducted a military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and subsequently launched military operations against Iran, which have escalated into a wider conflict in the Gulf region. Why, then, has China refrained from offering direct military support to its close partners? The first thing that comes to mind is that China lacks both the inclination and the expeditionary military capacity to undertake such ventures, but this article shows it is also about political will – rooted in Beijing’s deep integration into global capitalism, its cautious adherence to non interference, which results in the absence of binding security commitments with these regimes.

Over the past two decades, several regimes positioned against Western dominance – Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and Russia – have endured in part through Chinese economic and diplomatic engagement. Beijing has become their key creditor, trading partner, and political interlocutor. This has led some observers to interpret China’s rise as the consolidation of an alternative bloc within the global order. However, while China’s support for anti-Western regimes is real, it is structurally constrained, often utilitarian and subordinated to Beijing’s broader integration within the existing international system. The very sovereignty-centred politics that attract these regimes to China simultaneously prevent Beijing from converting partnership into broader influence with durable political allegiance or security guarantees.

Could Taiwan’s military continue to fight after an Iran-like decapitation?

Lawrence Chungin

The survival of Iran’s political and military apparatus following a massive US-Israeli decapitation strike has ignited a strategic debate in Taiwan, with experts weighing the island’s ability to withstand a similar “surgical” opening to an attack from the mainland.

Military analysts and officials in Taipei are closely studying the February 28 strikes that killed Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, and Iran’s ability to sustain organised resistance in the weeks that have followed.

How the war with Iran is actually goingby Harlan Ullman, opinion contributor

While President Donald Trump has told Americans that Operation Epic Fury is “way ahead of schedule,” how well are the U.S. and Israel doing in compelling Iran to submit to our demands, no matter how confusing they may be in declaring the outcomes we seek?

According to press reports, U.S. officials confirmed five KC-135 tankers crucial to refueling striking aircraft were damaged at an airbase in Saudi Arabia. One had a mid-air collision and crashed killing its aircrew. And an F-35 was reportedly damaged but made it safely to base. In addition to three F-15’s downed by friendly Kuwaiti fire, over 200 American service personnel have been wounded or killed by Iranian missiles and drones.

The Geopolitical Implications of the Iran War

Bulent Gokay and Lily Hamourtziadou

Since the United States and Israel commenced their unwarranted and unprovoked strike against Iran, codenamed Operation Epic Fury by the US and Roaring Lion by Israel, the character of the offensive has become apparent. It constitutes a large-scale bombing campaign intended to systematically dismantle the Iranian state and subjugate the entire population. The US under Trump has started a war whose outcomes it neither anticipates nor controls. Its actions have an element of irrationality, but this irrationality is based on decades of aggression in the Middle East, and in particular against Iran.

Wesley Clark famously recounted seeing a 2001 Pentagon memo that detailed plans to “take out” seven countries over five years, culminating in Iran. Clark attributed the origin of these plans to the neoconservatives within the George W. Bush administration, specifically mentioning the influence of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) (Greenwald, 2011). PNAC was an influential think tank established in 1997, and almost all of its major figures found themselves in the George W. Bush administration after 2000. Considering US foreign policy in the Middle East since the start of this century, this attack should not be considered a surprise and is largely unrelated to the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump, who is simply implementing a longstanding project aimed at establishing complete US dominance over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East. Furthermore, American (and Western) interventions in Iran have a long history.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War in Iran Was the Truth

David Remnick

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program?

War of Distraction in Iran: Existential Anxiety and Strategic Failure

Robert L. Oprisko

Anxiety over the existentially precarious position Israel occupies in the Middle East has persisted for thousands of years, though it has grown and intensified after World War II; genocide was no longer mere theory, it had been attempted. While existential anxiety can be alleviated, mitigated, and ultimately eliminated through dedication, discipline, and intentional action, Israel’s persists. Israeli and American politicians have personally found it politically useful to maintain and leverage the eschatological anxiety of the Jewish people. Existential angst matters here: in the spectrum of conflict, it escalates everything into an absolute position, one where defeat is untenable – because there will be no tomorrow (Speier 1941).

When absolute anxiety extends beyond martial conflict and becomes internalized within any dispute or disagreement, it presents in one of two absolute or “fanatic” forms: zeal or spite (Oprisko 2010). Fanaticism generally is, “the political mobilization of the refusal to compromise” (Olson 2009, 83). Within that there is a characteristic of directionality between the self/in-group and the other/out-group; zeal is the absolute will to inflict one’s value system onto others whereas spite is the absolute rejection of others’ values being inscribed onto the self (Oprisko 2010).

Erasure as Assessment: Middle East Forum’s Analysis of Iran’s Opposition

Morteza (Mory) Gharib and Kazem Kazerounian

The Middle East Forum’s January 2026 report, “After the Protests: Who Can Lead Iran?”, does not analyze Iran’s principal opposition, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK); it attempts to erase it. That is not scholarship but political denial. No serious observer can wish away a movement that has been embedded in Iran’s political and social life for more than six decades; one that has survived two dictatorships and has paid for its resistance through mass executions and exile. Whether the MEF approves or not, the MEK remains an enduring fact of Iranian politics: discussed in the streets and in private homes, debated within the regime’s own seminaries and institutions, and raised even in Tehran’s political exchanges with foreign interlocutors.

The sheer volume of regime propaganda devoted to it, dozens of feature films and long-running television series, hundreds of books, and thousands of articles, speaks less to the MEK’s marginality than to its perceived threat. The authorities themselves understand this best: even mentioning the MEK’s name or its slogans is treated as a prosecutable offense, a red line enforced by prison and, at times, death.

Iran at War: Deterrence, National Identity, and Existential Stakes

Tewfik Hamel

To read the present conflict in Iran only through the categories of the Iran-Israel rivalry or the Tehran-Washington confrontation is to miss its most consequential dimension. For Israel, the central problem is the neutralization of a military and potentially nuclear threat. By the time of the military attacks of June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that Iran had accumulated 9,247.6 kg of enriched uranium in total; by the time of the attacks in mid-June 2025, it had also accumulated 440.9 kg enriched up to 60 percent U-235, making it the only non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT to have produced and accumulated material at that level (IAEA 2025a; IAEA 2026).

For the United States, the conflict is embedded in a broader calculus of regional security, alliance credibility, energy security, and escalation control. For several Arab states, it is principally a matter of balance, containment, and spillover management. Tehran, however, increasingly appears to read the war in a different register: not simply as another episode in a long regional struggle, but as a crisis touching the continuity of the state itself.

War on Iran and the Breakdown of the Liberal International Order

Carlos Frederico Pereira da Silva Gama

On February 28, 2026, Iran suffered coordinated missile attacks from Israel and the United States. The breakdown of diplomatic negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program was followed by heavy bombing of civilian infrastructure and military sites. The assault on Teheran victimized a girl’s school (with more than 170 casualties) as well as the highest echelon of the Islamic Republic’s administration – including its Supreme Leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was in office since the Cold War, in 1989.

This event provided the apex to a 3-year long war of mutual attrition between the regional powers, ignited by unprecedented missile attacks in April 2024. The entrance of the US into the conflict in 2025, so far, has not proved decisive. In spite of President Donald Trump’s declarations that the US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities during 2025’s 12-day war “obliterated” the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, diplomatic negotiations on the nuclear issue were still under way in the weeks leading to the February 28 attack. In hindsight, the latest Trump declarations stating that US attacks “decimated” Iranian military capacities shall be similarly taken with a pinch of salt.

As War Disrupts India’s Gulf Ties, Economy Faces ‘New Broadside’

Alex Travelli

India was one of the fastest-growing major economies, consistently outpacing its powerful neighbor, China. It had surpassed Britain to become the world’s fifth-largest economy and was within striking distance of overtaking Japan for fourth. In a world beset by risks — from the war in Ukraine to President Trump’s tariff campaign — India’s skilled labor force, fiscal discipline and strong currency reserves made it a relatively safe bet.

An underappreciated component of the momentum was India’s deepening ties to the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf. But that advantage is now turning into a liability.

Iran’s willingness to escalate this high-stakes war is its greatest weapon

Patrick Wintour

Brinkmanship, the ability to take a country to the edge of war without plunging it into the abyss, was the cornerstone of cold war diplomacy. But in our different, more unstable times – in which the line between state and non-state actors has blurred, and weapons of war have diffused – the world this week finally tipped over the edge, and suddenly it is in freefall.

The first six days of the Iran war cost the US $12.7bn (£9.5bn), but now the Pentagon is seeking as much as $200bn in military funding. Oil at $125 a barrel is no longer an Iranian, or Russian, fantasy. The crown jewel of Qatar, Ras Laffan – the world’s largest liquefied natural gas plant – may not reopen fully for five years, at a cost of $20bn a year. Other combustible oil depots in the Gulf, from Bahrain to Abu Dhabi, are exposed to Iran’s low-cost drones. Then add the human cost of 18,000 civilians injured and more than 3,000 killed in Iran alone.

United States nuclear weapons, 2026

Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, Mackenzie Knight-Boyle

The United States has embarked on a wide-ranging nuclear modernization program that will ultimately see every nuclear delivery system replaced with newer versions over the coming decades. In this issue of the Nuclear Notebook, we estimate that the United States maintains a stockpile of approximately 3700 warheads—an unchanged estimate from the previous year. Of these, only about 1770 warheads are deployed, while approximately 1930 are held in reserve. Additionally, approximately 1342 retired warheads are awaiting dismantlement, giving a total inventory of approximately 5042 nuclear warheads.

Of the approximately 1770 warheads that are deployed, 400 are on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, roughly 970 are on submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 300 are at bomber bases in the United States, and approximately 100 tactical bombs are at European bases. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: director Hans M. Kristensen, associate director Matt Korda, and senior research associates Eliana Johns and Mackenzie Knight-Boyle.

Pragmatism in the PRC’s South Asia Party Diplomacy

Shantanu Roy-Chaudhury

The International Liaison Department (ILD) of the Chinese Communist Party held 33 engagements in 2025 with representatives from South Asian countries. The department pursued particular interests in each country, reaching out to institutional, incumbent, and peripheral actors.

The greatest shift in the ILD’s South Asia strategy has been rapprochement with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This, alongside meetings with opposition and peripheral parties, as well as media, think tanks, and youth groups, suggests that the CCP views party diplomacy not merely as a tool for building influence with smaller neighbors, as in previous years, but as a mechanism for managing major power relations.

Nepal’s Electoral Transformation

Martin Duffy

As I have learnt, observing Nepal’s elections, its dual-election system all but excludes “knock-out” victory. Typically, counting continues tediously for weeks. Party bosses sit cheek by jowl, quarrelling over paltry, disputed ballots. The 5 March election was called after youth protests in September 2025 forced the resignation of K. P. Sharma Oli. This year, the Gen Z vote brought seismic change. From e-day 5 March 2026, it was apparent that the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) under rapper-turned-politician, Balendra Shah, had broken the glass ceiling. The country’s allegedly corrupt political elite and entrenched power structures fell. Symbolically, Balendra himself trounced Oli even on his home turf. Thus, the barely four-year-old RSP pulled off a decisive majority. The CPN (Nepal’s Communist Party) simply folded like a box of cards.

How did Nepal electorally transform, and why is Gen Z so important? The immediate catalyst for the unrest was the Cabinet decision on 4 September 2025 to ban major social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, and WhatsApp, citing their failure to register under new, restrictive digital laws. This digital blackout was widely perceived as an attempt to stifle dissent and stymy communication networks used by activists. In response, a leaderless movement, predominantly organised by students, erupted on 8 September 2025. Protesters converged at Maitighar Mandala and marched toward the Federal Parliament Building, demanding an end to both the digital embargo and the Council of Ministers.

Opinion – Can the BRICS Adapt to a Transactional World?

Emilio Rodriguez

Over the last 15 years, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) have become a relevant player in world politics. The origins of the bloc can be traced back to a 2001 Goldman Sachs report that highlighted the economic potential of Brazil, India, China, and Russia. With South Africa’s inclusion in 2011, the BRICS have since become an active and increasingly powerful actor in global affairs, aiming to represent the “voice” of the Global South. Led by China’s unrelenting rise in global trade, infrastructure finance, investment, technological innovation, and thirst for natural resources, the bloc has been seen as a potential counterbalance to the US-led liberal international order.

During the last decade, the commercial and financial interactions within the group have increased significantly, accounting for a significant share (20%) of the South-South trade. Moreover, the bloc has been searching to institutionalize with the creation of the New Development Bank (the so-called BRICS Bank) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), both alternatives to the World Bank and the IMF, respectively. These institutions have been accompanied by initiatives to involve their civil societies through projects focusing on education, science, sports, and culture. Indeed, the potential of the BRICS has become so appealing that various countries in the Global South have sought to become another letter in the acronym. In 2023, the BRICS invited several countries to join the bloc, and by 2026, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) became full members, while Bolivia, Cuba, Thailand, Vietnam, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uganda, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Uzbekistan became partner countries.

US intel doubts China will invade Taiwan in 2027

Gabriel Honrada

The March report, entitled 2026 Annual Threat Assessment of US Intelligence Community, says China has no fixed timetable for forcible unification and instead prefers to achieve it without force, even as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) continues to build capabilities for a cross-strait campaign.

It assesses that Chinese officials view an amphibious assault as highly risky and complex, particularly given the likelihood of US intervention. China’s approach is shaped by PLA readiness, Taiwan’s domestic politics and uncertainty over US response, with conflict carrying major global economic consequences.

Trump is showing Beijing how to seize Taiwan

Brahma Chellaney

Since returning to office last year, U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered military strikes from the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to Africa and the Middle East, targeting alleged drug-smuggling boats and suspected terrorist groups. He has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolas Maduro. And he has joined Israel in a large-scale assault on Iran that amounts to a major escalation from last year’s strikes, which supposedly “obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities. Meanwhile, he is tightening a noose around Cuba, in the hopes that the resulting humanitarian crisis will open the way for a “friendly takeover” of the island by the United States.

As Trump acts with open contempt for international law, China is taking notes. The Cuba model, in particular, offers a useful blueprint for Chinese President Xi Jinping to apply in pursuing his “historic mission” of “unification” with Taiwan. This is a live demonstration of how a superpower can strangle a country into submission.

Taiwan concerned by depletion of US missile stocks during Iran war

Kathrin Hille

Taiwan is concerned that the Iran war is depleting stocks of long-range cruise missiles that would be vital for the US to help defeat any Chinese invasion, making the country more vulnerable. The US is estimated to have fired hundreds of so-called Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) during weeks of conflict in the Middle East, as well as ship-launched Tomahawk missiles.

Defence experts said both would be crucial in any conflict over Taiwan because they can be fired from outside the range of an enemy’s air defences, diminishing the risk for an attacking aircraft or naval vessel. “My concern is first and foremost that US forces are using up a lot of munitions which one assumes they would need so that an assault on Taiwan could be blunted,” a senior Taiwanese defence official told the FT. “This erodes deterrence.”

The U.S. has the world’s most advanced military, but the unforgiving economics of wars in Iran and Ukraine show quantity has a quality all its own

Jason Ma

The U.S. war on Iran has laid bare a dichotomy in the world’s most advanced military: high-tech weapons and AI have delivered stunning blows at unprecedented speed, while defending against the swarm of missiles and drones launched in retaliation have come at unsustainably lopsided costs.

Led by a massive air campaign, the U.S. has claimed more than 7,000 strikes on key sites, with Israel conducting a comparable number of sorties, as AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude recommend targets “much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought.” The relentless bombardment has decimated Iran’s military and leadership.

But helped by the mass production of cheap drones, the forces that are left still retain enough combat power to attack Gulf neighbors and scare away commercial tankers from the Strait of Hormuz, keeping 20% of the world’s oil bottled up.

A brave Marine colonel took on the Pentagon — and paid the price for it

Shyam Sankar

Everything about how Marine Colonel Drew Cukor ran Project Maven, the Department of Defense’s upstart AI initiative, put a target on his back. He infuriated the acquisition community, which is a powerful enemy in the Pentagon. Ultimately, the firestorm of criticism triggered a series of unfounded but unrelenting IG reports that would harry Cukor until his retirement. Some of the details that follow may seem obscure, but they’re essential to understanding the bureaucratic inertia and pettiness that hold our military back.

When Cukor launched Maven in 2017, the government still bought software like it bought hardware. This posed a problem. The phases of a hardware program are research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E), followed by production and sustainment. Costs are very high initially, and then they decline. The Department of Defense treated software the same way. It paid a lot up front for a systems integrator to build software, then it paid very little when the software went into production for patches and minor security upgrades. Software was treated as a static, finished product once it entered production.

Ukrainian Air Defense Expertise: A Global Commodity

Kyiv’s deployment of air defense teams to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and a U.S. base in Jordan reflects a shift in the global security marketplace, where operational experience is as valuable as hardware, reports Reuters’ Yuliia Dysa and Max Hunder. Rostyslav Khotin, Senior Editor of the Ukrainian Service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, digs deeper into this transfer of expertise in a March 14 interview with Poland’s TVP World.

Here are a few of our takeaways from this story:

Demand Signal from the Gulf

Recent Iranian strikes have exposed gaps in Gulf air defense postures, particularly against low-cost, high-volume drone threats. In response, at least six regional actors requested Ukrainian support, according to Ukrainian officials

An air power expert explains why Iran is more powerful now than before the war

Zeeshan Aleem

President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is not going well. He began the conflict with a promise to use an air campaign to initiate regime change in as little as “two or three days.” But about three weeks in, Iran’s government, military and security forces remain highly functional. No popular uprising has emerged. And Iran’s government has seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil prices surging and Trump into a panic.

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, is one of the analysts who saw this situation coming a long way off. An expert on air power and regime change who has also taught at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Pape is exceptionally well suited to address the core dynamics underlying how the war on Iran is unfolding. His scholarship and his newsletter, “The Escalation Trap,” all point in one direction: Trump’s goal of toppling Iran’s regime from the air alone is doomed, because fighting a war only with air power is by its very nature ill suited to win hearts and minds.

AI in the information ecosystem and its impact on nuclear escalation

Herbert Lin

In recent years, analysts and scholars have noted that corruption or dysfunction in the global information ecosystem could have the effect of increasing nuclear risk.[1] In these works, corruption and dysfunction are interpreted broadly to include mis- and dis- information but also other information-related phenomena such as provocative or intemperate content, true-but-misleading information, or attentional diversions.

Now, the recent explosion in the capabilities of artificial intelligence—specifically, large language models (LLMs)—has led to the automated generation of novel text in enormous volumes and, increasingly, images and videos. For those interested in the creation of content to corrupt the information environment, there may be no better tool than a large language model. LLMs put former approaches to generating such content to shame. Also, LLM tools require far less expertise to produce and use, making the capabilities they afford much more broadly accessible and therefore expanding the number of possible threat actors as promoters of information dysfunction.

Cyber Scams and Human Security: Towards an India-Thailand-ASEAN Agenda

Sreeparna Banerjee

The rapid expansion of cybercrime and online scam networks across mainland Southeast Asia has emerged as one of the most complex non-traditional security challenges confronting the region today. What initially appeared as a digital and financial crime problem blurred the line between human slavery and organised transnational cybercrimes. For India, whose citizens are primary targets of online scams and victims of cyber slavery and are also at times complicit in the crime, this trend poses direct human security and diplomatic challenges. Within this context, India–Thailand cooperation, embedded in the broader Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) framework, assumes renewed strategic relevance as Thailand functions as a geographic gateway, key enforcement partner, and bridge within ASEAN, enabling India to address these networks more effectively at their source, transit corridors, and digital nodes rather than responding only reactively.

Beyond financial fraud, these operations increasingly generate multidimensional human security risks. Individuals trafficked into scam compounds face threats to their personal security through confinement, violence, and coercion, while victims of online fraud experience significant economic insecurity through large financial losses. At the same time, deceptive recruitment practices targeting young jobseekers and migrants expose structural vulnerabilities within digital labour markets and migration pathways across Asia.

25 March 2026

Moscow Reconsidering Europe’s Role in Ending War Against Ukraine

Pavel K. Baev

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes negotiating an end to his war against Ukraine directly with the United States will maximize his chances of success. Putin’s understanding that Washington’s attention has shifted to Iran informs his perception that the “situational pause” could be indefinite.

Kremlin narratives have long rejected European participation. Increasing diplomatic activism by actors linked to European Union initiatives and outreach by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, however, is gradually reshaping Russian expectations about negotiation formats that include Europe.

Forget Trump’s flailing — Iran’s the one without an endgame

RN Prasher

Much has been written about President Donald Trump’s alleged lack of clearly defined goals and strategic objectives in the war with Iran. But the more pressing and consequential question has received far less attention: Does the Iranian regime have an endgame at all?

So far, Iran has shown no interest in a ceasefire while doing everything in its diminished power to expand the war across much of the Middle East and beyond — in the process torpedoing the global economy. Iran’s goals, on the other hand, are less clear. Ayatollah Khamenei talked tough at the start of this war, threatening the US with a “strong punch.” A message, purportedly by his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since his elevation, rejected any talk of de-escalation and avowed to bring the US and Israel to “their knees.”

Caught Between India’s Military Ambitions and Green Promises: The Future of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

Genevieve Mallet

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands stretch across the Bay of Bengal, between the Indian mainland and the Strait of Malacca. Of the 836 islands and rocky outcrops that make up the archipelago, only 31 are inhabited, home to around 400,000 people. Known for their turquoise waters, dense forests and multicoloured pigeons, the islands are also home to six indigenous tribes, including the isolated Sentinelese.

Yet beyond their natural beauty, the islands have become central to India’s maritime strategy and development ambitions, placing them at the heart of a growing tension between environmental preservation, renewable energy goals and military expansion.

In 2021 the Indian government announced the Great Nicobar Island Development Project, a plan to construct an international Container Transshipment Terminal, a civil and military airport, a township, and a 450 MVA gas and solar based power plant by 2050. In February of this year, the National Green Tribunal cleared the way for this ₹92,000 crore (USD $10 billion) mega-infrastructure project, citing its “strategic importance”, despite the risks posed to the islands’ biodiversity and indigenous populations.

China’s National Party Congress 2026: defence remains a priority amid fiscal challenges

Lucie Béraud-Sudreau

On 5 March, Premier Li Qiang delivered his government work report at the opening session of the National People’s Congress (NPC). The speech contained economic growth targets for 2026, including for 4.5% real-terms growth in GDP, the slowest since 1991.

This more modest economic objective is unsurprising in the light of the current headwinds in the Chinese economy. As highlighted in recent IISS Charting China analysis, the government is grappling with weak consumer confidence, high urban unemployment and a falling property market. The goal also aligns with the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) projections. The IMF’s January 2026 forecasts indicated an estimated 4.5% GDP growth in 2026, followed by a slowdown to 4% in 2027.

The central bank’s governor, Pan Gongsheng, and Minister of Finance Lan Foan reportedly indicated in 2025 that China would require an annual growth rate of at least 4.17% over the next decade to become a medium-level developed country in terms of GDP per capita by 2035. GDP targets are therefore unlikely to dip significantly below 4.5% in the near term.

Iran: Relearning the Importance of Waging a War, Not Just Fighting One

James Michael Dubik

Our operations in Iran are again teaching that war involves more than fighting. Wars must be fought and waged. Fighting is a necessary part of war, and the U.S. military is very good at it. Our military won every tactical engagement in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. American citizens have every reason to ask, therefore, if we fight so successfully, why did we lose in Vietnam and Afghanistan and why was success in Iraq so limited? And will the same thing happen in Iran?

These are questions are about America’s war-waging capacity. Fighting succeeds when military forces integrate and synchronize, among themselves and with allies, seven important battlefield functions—intelligence, maneuver, fires (air and ground), protection (from enemy ground, air, cyber, and space threats), mobility/counter-mobility, sustainment, and command and control. Successful fighting requires that all seven stay in synch, as much as possible, from start to finish. This requires constant adaptation because fighting is unpredictable. Change, fear, fog, friction, and surprise are the only constants in fighting. Perfection is never the standard; being better than your enemy is. Even allowing for inevitable mistakes, the U.S. military, fighting as a joint force and usually with coalition partners, are expert professionals at fighting well.

The Stunning Failure of Iranian Deterrence

Nicole Grajewski and Ankit Panda

Although it was the United States and Israel that instigated attacks on Iran on February 28, leaders in Tehran deserve some of the blame for failing to effectively deter their adversaries. As the now deceased commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, once put it, maintaining deterrence is like riding a bicycle: “You have to keep pedaling all the time, or else the bicycle will fall.” Over the past three years, Iran has started to lose its balance; now it has tipped over.

In recent decades, Tehran developed what it believed was a system of layered deterrence. It invested in conventional forces and air defenses to protect its nuclear program and retaliate against Israel and U.S. bases throughout the region. Through a sprawling network of partners known as the axis of resistance—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthi forces in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq—Iran promised to escalate any attack on its homeland into a regional affair. And Iran’s nuclear program would function as the ultimate backstop. Tehran hoped that the mere development of an advanced civil nuclear program—not an actual weapon—would make the country too dangerous for adversaries to ignore, even as the ambiguity of the program would make it hard for adversaries to justify an attack against it. If necessary, Iran’s civilian nuclear program could be quickly repurposed for military use.

WARDEN’S FIVE RINGS AND REGIME CHANGE IN IRAN

Jacob Stoil

In 1995 Colonel John Warden published The Enemy as a System, in which he posited a five-ring model for understanding and targeting enemy states, with leadership at the center and fielded forces as the outermost ring. In between were rings representing the population, infrastructure, and resources like energy. His work followed the tradition of B.H. Liddel Hart’s The Strategy of Indirect Approach and Giulio Douhet’s Command of the Air in searching for a way to defeat an enemy without the costly and ultimately attritional endeavor of grinding down their military to achieve victory. The result of this model was the concept that when properly applied, the use of airpower could allow the United States to bypass the outermost rings and target the enemy leadership directly. This “decapitation” would at the very least cause complete strategic paralysis in the enemy and possibly even cause regime collapse but in either case, it would bring victory.

The war in Iran began with one of the most effective decapitation strikes in history, but while it may have caused temporary paralysis, it neither brought down the regime nor brought victory. This is because while Warden’s five ring model may apply, the importance of the rings changes radically based on the nature of the state and the system. Bringing down a robust regime like Iran is still possible but requires a radically different approach from defeating a fragile one.

Broader Lessons of the Middle East War

Alan Dowd

The U.S. and Europe spent much of the last 20 years trying to induce and incentivize Iran to behave like a normal country. In response, Iran trained, funded and equipped Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq; supported brutal dictators (Syria) and undermined nascent democracies (Iraq); continued its drive for nuclear weapons; locked out IAEA inspectors; harbored al-Qaeda’s leader; used proxies to kill Americans; attacked international shipping; bankrolled the beastly Hamas assault of October 7, 2023; tried to assassinate a former U.S. president; and massacred 36,000 of its own people.

In response to the U.S.-Israel air campaign, Iran would be justified to strike Israeli and U.S. military targets. But in keeping with its outlaw nature, Iran sprayed the entire region with terror weapons—striking desalination facilities in Bahrain; unfettering Hezbollah (again) to pound Israel with rockets; hitting civilian airports in Azerbaijan, the UAE and Kuwait; bombing hotels in the UAE and Iraq; attacking commercial ships; firing cluster-munitions at population centers.

How Iranian Missiles Could Secure Israel-GCC Normalization

Joseph Epstein

Three weeks ago, it would have been unthinkable for Al Jazeera to run an op-ed arguing that the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran was working. The Qatari state-funded outlet has been at the vanguard of the information war against Israel since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023. Indeed, it employed at least six journalists who simultaneously served as operatives in Hamas’ military wing and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, giving terrorist fighters cover as credentialed press.

Yet on March 16, Al Jazeera published exactly that article—written from Doha by an academic living under Iranian missile alerts. When the house organ of Qatari soft power begins making the case for American and Israeli war aims, something fundamental has shifted.

U.S. Risks Repeating Its Iraq Errors in Iran

Robert Ellis

George Santayana’s sage observation, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” has come back to haunt us. In this case, the Trump administration’s war with Iran is a repeat performance of the war with Iraq in 2003, but with a global impact.

Robert Draper’s definitive account, To Start a War, is a helpful reminder. The book deals with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s “Sisyphean quest” to bring down Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein, which culminated in the invasion of Iraq. The process involved convincing the Bush administration as well as the American public that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks and in possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

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