Geopolitics moves in long cycles, and the last few years have offered a rare, compressed view of one turning. Three of the world’s most consequential powers — the United States, Russia, and China — are each, in their own way, discovering the limits of their strength. The fourth, India, is quietly doing the opposite.
Start with Washington. The United States remains the only true hyperpower on paper — no rival matches its combined military reach, financial centrality, and alliance network. But raw capability and the ability to convert it into outcomes are different things, and by that second measure the record of the last two decades is not flattering: Afghanistan ended in shameful withdrawal, Iraq in a strategic vacuum filled by Iran, and successive administrations have struggled to translate primacy into durable wins.
Iran is the latest example, where the US has so far been unable to end the conflict with a strategic victory, even with a regime that has been under US sanctions for over four decades and is undoubtedly an authoritarian regime that represses its own people. A hyperpower that keeps failing to close out the wars it enters isn’t demonstrating strength, it’s revealing the gap between potential on paper and execution.
Russia, the world’s second most significant military power, has spent the better part of four years consumed by a war in Ukraine it expected to win in weeks. Whatever the eventual settlement, the war has already done the damage that matters strategically: it has tied down Russian materiel, manpower, and diplomatic bandwidth for almost half a decade and pushed Moscow into a subordinate economic relationship with Beijing it would never have accepted a decade ago.
China’s brittleness and the Emperor’s new clothes
China is the most interesting case, because it is still widely assumed to be on the rise. The numbers tell a more complicated story.
China’s total debt across government, corporate and household balance sheets is now estimated at over 300% of GDP — a level that constrains the very stimulus tools Beijing has historically used to paper over slowdowns in property, exports and local-government finance.
Xi Jinping’s response to mounting internal pressure has been to tighten his grip, with unprecedented purges extending into the People’s Liberation Army’s top ranks. He also abolished the presidential two-term limit and is now serving his third term.
The scale of the purge in the last three years is remarkable even by China’s standards: five of the seven senior figures in the Central Military Commission have now been removed — He Weidong, Xi’s hand-picked number two; Zhang Youxia, once regarded as one of Xi’s most trusted generals; Liu Zhenli, the PLA’s senior operational commander; Miao Hua, its former top political commissar; and Li Shangfu, the former defence minister. US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates the actual number potentially caught up in the purge could be as high as 101. Qin Gang, the former foreign minister, was also abruptly removed in 2023.
In another stunning incident, in October 2022, China’s former president and Xi’s immediate predecessor Hu Jintao was unexpectedly escorted from the closing session of the Communist Party Congress. The precise reason remains ‘unknown’ but the optics appeared deeply humiliating for a former Chinese president. This is not the behaviour of a confident state, but of a weak leader increasingly paranoid about losing his grip on power.
Then there was the bloody nose China got in Galwan. It was the first serious pushback to China against its ‘salami slicing’ tactics against its neighbours. In June 2020, Chinese and Indian troops clashed in the Himalayas. India lost 20 soldiers — a toll New Delhi acknowledged within days. China’s response was silence, followed by denial, followed, eight months later, by a grudging admission that it had lost precisely four men, even as Indian and Western intelligence estimates at the time put Chinese casualties to around 40 or more.
It is worth remembering how the leadership of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao operated: patient accumulation of leverage, avoiding premature confrontation and letting economic growth do the talking. Xi’s China behaves differently — more brittle, and increasingly prone to what might be called emperor’s-new-clothes syndrome, where no one is willing to tell the leadership when they are jumping off a cliff.
None of this erases what China achieved. It rose largely because the United States opened its markets, capital, and technology to it after the Cold War, and Beijing deserves real credit for using those decades of access more effectively than any other developing economy in history.
But while a one-party system can mobilise resources and create infrastructure with a speed democracies envy, there are always serious limitations to that system, especially if a dictator with delusions of grandeur becomes the leader. If Xi Jinping does not course correct, he could take China on an irreversible downward spiral. Trying to bully your neighbours all at once including superpowers like India and Russia, in order to distract from internal weaknesses, will not bode well for China. It also will have to, sooner or later, deal with the issue of occupied Tibet. Tibetan freedom will come; the question is not if but when.
Operation Sindoor: 21st century’s most successful military campaign
Against this backdrop, Operation Sindoor in May 2025 stands out. On May 7, the Indian Air Force struck terror infrastructure deep inside Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir after the Pahalgam terror attack. India initially focused solely on terrorist infrastructure, deliberately not targeting Pakistani military installations, to give Islamabad an off-ramp. But Pakistan did not take it.
Pakistan threw much of its arsenal at India over the next two days, including ballistic missiles. But India’s layered air-defence network largely neutralised the attacks, denying Pakistan any major success against Indian military or civilian targets. This is particularly striking given that even advanced air-defence systems in the US and Israel have faced successful penetrations in recent conflicts, arguably making India’s air-defence the best in the world so far, when judged by demonstrated combat performance.
By May 10, India decided to end the conflict decisively and it did. There is a lesson here for the United States and Russia as well. It hit eleven Pakistani air bases — Nur Khan, Rafiqui, Murid, Sukkur, Sialkot, Pasrur, Chunian, Sargodha, Skardu, Bholari, and Jacobabad across the length and breadth of Pakistan. Given this strategic decimation, Pakistan sought a ceasefire, and India being a responsible superpower that it is, decided to end the conflict. While India has long been regarded as the world’s fourth most powerful military, the scale and depth of its hard power still took some by surprise.
India’s economic success, meanwhile, has been well documented. It has posted the fastest average GDP growth rate among G20 economies over the last decade, a run no other large economy in the group can currently match. It also has the highest decade-long CAGR (compound annual growth rate) in the G20.
Together, these factors also help explain something that has puzzled observers of the US-India relationship: a partnership once described as the most consequential bilateral relationship of the century has recently encountered unexpected friction. That friction is not really about one issue in particular — it reflects the structural discomfort that inevitably arises when an established power is adjusting to relative decline while a rising power is coming into its own.
A press that won’t call it straight
Part of why this rise appears to be contested in the western mind, rather than acknowledged, is that a large share of the international press and Western academia is not a neutral referee. Much of the same legacy media that struggled, even after October 7, to call Hamas a terrorist organisation outright is hardly positioned to describe India’s actions with any more honesty — an establishment reluctant to name a movement that massacred civilians is not one equipped to speak plainly about a democracy defending itself.
It should surprise no one, then, that the more India rises, the more contested and, at times, hostile the coverage from parts of the Western press and academia becomes. China, by contrast, spent years buying favourable column space directly — state-run China Daily purchased paid advertising supplements inside The New York Times and The Washington Post for years, packaged to resemble editorial content. India, being an actual democracy with no equivalent state propaganda budget for foreign newsrooms, doesn’t do this, and largely wears the coverage it gets, favourable or not.
That does not make every criticism of India wrong. Nor does it mean that the world’s oldest continuous civilisation and its largest secular democracy does not have major socio-economic challenges that need to be overcome. But it does mean that the information environment surrounding a rising India deserves to be examined with the same scepticism applied to every other major power.
What It Means for Australia
For Australia, sitting in the middle of the Indo-Pacific with China as its largest trading partner and one of its biggest strategic anxieties at once, this churn isn’t an abstract academic exercise.
A more brittle Beijing, a United States less reliably decisive, and a rising India increasingly willing to act unilaterally when required, reshape the strategic map for Canberra.
India’s role is already extending beyond its own borders. Its navy has increasingly taken on maritime-security responsibilities across the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, while India has repeatedly undertaken evacuation missions involving civilians of multiple nationalities from conflict zones such as Yemen and Ukraine, and provided disaster assistance across countries including Nepal and Venezuela.
In January 2021, India became the first major vaccine-producing country to launch a dedicated global COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy initiative, Vaccine Maitri, using its vast production capacity to supply vaccines to countries around the world.
The strategic logic for Australia is therefore becoming increasingly straightforward.
India and Australia share core political values — democracy, freedom, secularism and the rule of law — even if, like all democracies, they may differ on individual policies.
So, a deeper, more sophisticated and more ambitious Australia-India strategic relationship is a no-brainer.
On India’s 80th Independence Day, it is also worth asking just how improbable the current moment would have seemed to the people who witnessed August 15, 1947.
Who could have imagined — amid a horrific partition of India which resulted in millions of deaths, mass displacement, poverty — that within a few generations India would build one of the world’s largest technology sectors, become a nuclear power, send missions to the Moon, become one of the world’s most powerful militaries and emerge as one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing major economies?
What is visible right now is a churn of the kind the world sees perhaps only once every few centuries. The real question is, how will the ascent of an ancient civilisational power, rising from the wounds of history to reclaim its place at the forefront of the global order, reshape the world.
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