COMMENTARY – THE MAKING OF QUAD REALISM

Once again, the world is polarizing along ideological lines and this time India can neither stand aside nor stand alone. In the face of China's mounting provocations and patent military superiority, Narendra Modi knows that India has no choice but to seek security through Sino-resistant channels like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad), in league with America, Japan, and Australia. It is no accident that India's most dependable allies are liberal democracies. This puts Modi in a stupendous ideological bind. The Davos globalism he has courted in the past was so economistic that his domestic repression was all but ignored. Now, however, he is playing in a liberal international league where his style of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) autocracy will not be condoned. His fate as well as India's hinges on how he navigates a post-globalist geopolitics that is presently defined by the moral realism of the Biden Doctrine.