India and the Rebalancing of Asia

Few regions have transformed as consequentially as Asia in the twenty-first century. In recent decades, China has risen faster than its neighbours and today outranks its major proximate competitors – India and Japan – on economic and defence indices by huge margins. The United States’ interest in balancing against China is especially significant for India, because the contradictions between New Delhi and an increasingly assertive Beijing are the sharpest in the region.

In this Adelphi book, C. Raja Mohan delineates the prospects for an Indian role in structuring a new Asian geopolitical order. Grounding his analysis in the (often neglected) evolution of modern Indian foreign and security policies from the colonial era to the twenty-first century, Mohan argues that China’s rise has compelled India to discard its traditional ambivalence about Chinese power and counter Beijing by strengthening its own national power and developing partnerships with other states, primarily the US. In addition to considering potential challenges to the emerging US–India strategic relationship, the book evaluates India’s likely contributions to a new Asian security, political and economic order in the light of both New Delhi’s enduring regional interests and the policy changes envisioned by the second Trump administration.

C. Raja Mohan is a Distinguished Professor at the Motwani Jadeja Institute for American Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University, Delhi. He is also a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) at the National University of Singapore and was previously the Director of ISAS. Mohan was the founding director of Carnegie India, the sixth international centre of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He also set up the Asia Society Policy Institute branch in New Delhi. He was associated with several Indian think tanks, including the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, the Observer Research Foundation and the Centre for Policy Research. Mohan was a Professor of South Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He served on India’s National Security Advisory Board. Mohan was the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center at the US Library of Congress in 2009–10. He convened the India chapter of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from 1995 to 2005. Mohan has published widely on India’s foreign and security policies, Asian geopolitics and the global governance of advanced technologies. He is the co-author of the IISS Adelphi book, Asia’s New Geopolitics: Military Power and Regional Order, published in 2021. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy and the Indian Express.