Journal Articles

Grand strategy, the historian John Lewis Gaddis said, is the aligning of “potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities” across “space, time, and scale.” Having witnessed the United States (US) overreach during the Cold War, Gaddis knew the costs of failing to match ends with means all too well. In a somewhat different context, India is facing a chasm between its global aspirations and the reality of its national power. A confluence of disruptive factors has now made the business-as-usual approach simply unsustainable. A course correction if not undertaken and executed sensibly could imperil India’s rise for the next generation.