■ 국문 영상 및 전문으로 바로가기 [Go to Korean Video & Transcript]

 

The U.S. Retreat and the “Status” Reordering of International Society

 

Inhwan Oh: Thank you for joining us, Professor Mukherjee. All right, so the first question has to do with the current status of the politics of international institutions and status.

 

You said in your previous interview with LSE that the real tragedy of great power politics lies in the reluctance of established powers to admit new rising powers into their club. And that institutions ignoring status claims of those rising powers may end up undermining themselves, but on the other hand, your recent Carnegie essay describes something different, such as the Security Council passing its fewest resolutions since 1991, a UN in liquidity crisis that has to do with the U.S. not paying its contribution as well as China postponing its payment of contribution. And Washington withdrawing from more than 66 international organizations. So the recent crisis today seems to be less about the club refusing new members than about one of its founding members, United States in particular, walking out or taking a step back. So when the question shifts from reforming the order to whether it survives or whether it will be sustainable or when both questions arise at the same time, what happens to the international politics of status you've been researching, how do you make of the recent trend?

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Great, thank you so much for having me here to talk about these issues. It's a great question and a very important one. When I wrote my book, things were not as challenging as they are today, so I think things have really changed and you've picked up exactly on the thing that is different in the international order today. The framework that I sort of developed in my work was built to explain how rising powers treat an order that is maintained and established by other great powers who are above them in the hierarchy as it were, and the present situation actually is the opposite, it's an inversion of that arrangement because the dominant power of the United States is degrading the institutions that make up that order, it's exiting them, it's undermining them, it's underfunding them and so on.

 

I would still say that status politics does not disappear as a result of these actions. They just shift in their emphasis to some extent and here I think separating the order from the actions of the hegemonic country is helpful, analytically helpful, but also practically helpful because the order itself is this vast, complex web of institutions. You can think about the UN Security Council, the General Assembly, the G20, the Nonproliferation Treaty, even the WTO. But you know, U.S. withdrawal does not erase this overnight, right, there's still a significant sort of practice and habits and actual institutions of cooperation. Even the WTO has developed interim arbitration mechanisms because the U.S. was not letting the dispute resolution mechanism function. So institutions adapt and they continue to exist in some form.

 

And so the order then, it's not just an extension of U.S. foreign policy, it is actually a distinct and multifaceted set of arrangements that has been around for 80 years. Countries are very accustomed to cooperating within it. So when the U.S. exits this order, which benefits many countries, actually both in material terms, but also in terms of their status, it actually weakens the U.S.'s status while creating opportunities for those who have been waiting in the wings for global leadership, right, so what people call legitimacy, reputation, image, status, the U.S.'s global presence in those domains has taken a hit, right, with these exits and undermining and so on.

 

You know, status is, as we understand it, a positional good, a social good and requires an audience that gives you recognition and a hierarchy in which rank is measured. These conditions still exist in the international order in all these institutions, but now what's different, I think, is this: there's no single power that has the willingness and the ability to underwrite the entire thing, and so the main change that I think we will see and we are seeing is a fragmentation of that international society. You can call it a market for status, you can call it different things. I think recognition will increasingly come from smaller arrangements, plurilateral clubs, regional arrangements, bilateral endorsements and so on, things like the G20, the BRICS, the SCO, issue-based coalitions, even the Quad, and now what is known as the Squad, which is the Philippines plus Quad members without India and so on, rather than there being one universal hierarchy.

 

And so I think rising powers will still pursue status and rank across this order, but now in several venues at the same time and this will be less efficient and more prone to inconsistency. That's sort of how I understand it. And so sustaining the order then becomes partly a collective action problem among second-tier and rising powers who still value the recognition that institutions provide, but they individually lack the capacity or the will to underwrite the entire system, but this still remains an opportunity.

 

Inhwan Oh: Yeah, I think I agree on the points you just made. And we may have to differentiate actions of a hegemon from the sustainability of international institutions, as Bob Keohane has already noted before in his book After Hegemony. His argument was that institutions will stay, but probably not in the way that he has described in his book, but it will stay, and then the United States taking a step back from these existing institutions has undermined its own status but also has created some room for other middle powers and other smaller states to form some kind of minilateralism. And so the conference we just held today was on NATO-IP4, as Quad and other forms of minilateral institutions that the middle powers and non-great powers or rising powers may want to put forth and press for. I think I really agree on the points you just made.

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Just to add one thing, it's very interesting that you can see the effect of what's going on in the way that U.S. officials and academics and scholars are now talking about middle powers. Elbridge Colby in the Department of Defense or Department of War recently posted on Twitter saying that this whole thing about middle powers is overblown, it's exaggerated, they still have to depend on the United States and so on. Professor Michael Beckley wrote in Foreign Affairs as well that middle powerness is false, it's an illusion. So in a sense, the fact that this conversation is even happening and that these arguments are coming out of the United States tells you that something is changing.

 

Inhwan Oh: Yes, definitely, otherwise they wouldn't have to talk about the middle powers in the first place, so there are some actions and some activities done by middle powers outside the U.S. And although we're all just hoping to see the United States back in some form, the United States is still a member of NATO, although it's not paying its contribution to the UN as much as it used to now. So I think the fact that people are talking about insignificant middle powers actually tells something about the middle powers and connections. That's exactly right.

 

China’s Status Strategy

 

Inhwan Oh: The second question is about China's status policy. So in the same LSE interview back in 2023, you mapped China's behavior across institutions very properly: cooperating in the UNSC, WTO and G20, pushing reform at the IMF and in maritime law, challenging the human rights regime. Now, it is 2026, three years later, Washington has gutted the WTO appellate body, blockaded an international strait and even asked Beijing and other allies to help clean up a war it started in Iran, which obviously China declined and condemned from the sidelines.

 

Does your cooperate-reform-challenge framework, or rising power status policy, still describe Beijing's approach? Do you think China has moved to a different strategy, like not cooperating, reforming or challenging the order, but simply outlasting it? I think China recently at least seeks to do more than what Randy Schweller and Pu Xiaoyu referred to as a shirker strategy about 15 years ago, in which China merely takes advantage of the existing institutions without assuming serious responsibility. Personally I think that era is over. China is trying to do something, so what's your take, what's your interpretation of China's status policy recently?

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Yeah, I think that's right, which is that it's gone beyond shirking, which is what Randy and Xiaoyu talked about, you know, 13 years ago now. China has come forward in many ways and tried to claim leadership in different areas. So if you think about, for example, peacekeeping is one area where China has increasingly sought to control mandates, to have more leadership in deployments and so on. You can think about the BRI as an attempt by China to project itself as a different kind of international development finance provider, infrastructural development provider and so on. In the UN Security Council, China still continues, at least rhetorically, to support the UN as the most legitimate and representative body of global governance and has continuously maintained that position for as long as we can remember.

 

So there are many aspects of the order where China is sort of stepping forward. Its own climate commitments have now put it ahead of many other countries in terms of curbing its emissions and transitioning to a more green economy. Now, of course that is being done on a more unilateral basis than a multilateral basis, but it is still ultimately contributing to global climate targets and so on. So there are many different aspects in which China continues to seek and project leadership in the order.

 

It's also the case, the framework that I sort of worked on earlier looks at two things, right. One factor is whether an institution treats a country like China, which used to be a rising power, now arguably a rising great power, it's almost, you know, nipping at the heels of the United States, whether that institution or the order treats China as a procedural equal, and whether the institution is open to China's leadership. And so China cooperates where both these conditions hold, in a way that the institution is open to leadership and it treats rising powers fairly and equally to the great powers, and there are various parts of the global order that still have those characteristics. I think the G20 is one of those, the Security Council is one of those as well. And in other areas that are lacking, China tries to reform them, and so the IMF quota is one example, or you can think of just the IFIs (International Financial Institutions) in general.

 

And of course when reform has stalled, China has set out to create its own institutions, and so we see this proliferation of the AIIB, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS Bank, the NDB, New Development Bank. The BRICS have several other mechanisms, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement and so on. So there's an investment in alternative forms of order that are much weaker and lower in their capital allocations than the existing institutions, but they are there because they allow China to be number one in those settings. China gets to be the top country in the SCO, in the AIIB, in the NDB and other places, and so where the U.S. does not allow China, China has now found new routes to having some kind of status, major power status, great power status.

 

But yeah, I think you're right about the way Washington has disabled the WTO, and so in some sense then there is this, what you call, a strategy of sitting on the sidelines and trying to outlast the damage the U.S. is doing to the global order. And this is, I would borrow from Stacie Goddard and Ronald Krebs, who had a great special issue a couple of years ago on order-consistent versus order-challenging contestation. Some types of contestation can actually reinforce an order and make it better because it's aimed at improving the order, and other types of contestation can undermine the order.

 

And I think China is engaging in a fair amount of order-consistent contestation. That is, you don't break things, but you are conserving your resources, you're declining to come forward in other areas and replace the order with anything new, and you just sit back and allow the global distribution of power and status to now move in your favor. That is actually quite an efficient strategy, right, so the incumbent power's retreat opens this low-cost status approach for China to project itself as the defender of institutions that the United States is abandoning. And so condemning the Iran War from the sidelines without actually helping to resolve it allows China to capture that reputational benefit of appearing responsible without actually incurring any costs of maintaining global order. And so it's also a rational strategy in that way.

 

And this is not unique to China. I mean, the U.S. itself did this in the 19th century. Britain was undertaking the cost of policing the maritime commons back in the 19th century, and the U.S. was selectively embracing or rejecting different parts of international law depending on what kind of standing it had or was given even in those settings. So I think my overall assessment, therefore, is China's emphasis has shifted a little bit from active reform to patiently waiting out the damage that the U.S. is doing, but that doesn't mean that it's not trying to take leadership in other areas.

 

Inhwan Oh: So you're saying that your framework still applies to some behaviors of China, but then when, for example, reform has stalled in some issue areas, some institutions, China has been looking for some other ways to get around it or to create more alternative forms of order or alternative institutions, or even, as we just discussed, China sitting on the sideline and outlasting the order when developing circumstances are taking a toll on the United States, and allowing the distribution of power to move in favor of China. I think I agree with what you just said about China's behavior and institutions.

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Yeah, and for me, I think the main lesson in all of this is that there's not a single way in which China approaches international order. It really depends on the area that we're talking about and China's own position within the social hierarchy of that area, as well as the benefits—we can't ignore material benefits—that flow from the order. So it's a complex calculation that China is making. One can see the pattern to some extent.

 

Inhwan Oh: Yeah, I think the interesting point you just made is that in alternative institutions, alternative forms of order, China can enjoy the number one status, like in the SCO and other alternative forms of institutions. So the baseline argument we all sort of agree on, which is that rising powers seek to enhance their status, is still applicable to those cases. And also it will be really interesting to see how this divergence in the climate change agenda between the United States and China will unfold in the coming decades, because the United States has been dismantling its climate change agenda while China is really actively integrating its climate agenda into its industrial policies. Hopefully the United States might get back on track. We'll see how that goes.

 

India’s Status Strategy

 

Inhwan Oh: All right, so the third question is about India's status policy. So India seems to keep embedding Security Council and IMF reform commitments into its new agreements with the EU, UK and Canada, and within BRICS, the 2025 declaration endorsed Brazil and India for UNSC reform, but pointedly not South Africa after objections from the bloc's African members. So scarce status seems to be operating among the aspirants. And if that's the case, what does India hope to achieve through status policy? Is New Delhi banking recognition to cash in when the system is rebuilt, or investing prestige in a depreciating asset? And relatedly, how can a Global South coalition that cannot agree on who deserves elevation carry on its campaign going forward?

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Yeah, that's a great question, thank you. I think the headline for me is that India is doing both these things together, right, which is it is banking recognition as insurance, you know, for the future, while at the same time the thing that it seeks, the prize that India seeks, at least nominally is losing some of its value, right. So if you think of it as like investing in the stock market, if you had a winning strategy and the stock you bought was doing well, after a point when it starts to dip, you want to diversify your resources and hedge against that dip. You don't necessarily want to get out of it entirely because in the future it might go up again, right. It's the uncertainty itself that encourages a strategy of hedging, as it were, institutional hedging we can call it.

 

Right, for India, so it is rational in that way, and the embedding of these—Security Council reform, IMF reform, Bretton Woods and so on—into partnership documents with the EU, the UK, Canada is a way of banking that recognition, to say that, look, we're not asking right now for you to reform these institutions, just codify your commitment to doing so in these agreements, right. It converts that contested claim that India has to recognition and a seat at the table, and puts it on record that these important countries in the international system are supporting it. I would say it's a form of symbolic capital that can survive the change of government in the future in places like Canada, UK and so on, because these agreements will remain alive.

 

The value of that symbolic capital, of course, depends on whether there is actually a functioning order that India can lead in the future if it wants to, right. A permanent seat on the Security Council is worth less when the Council, as you put it earlier, is least active in decades, and then the U.S. is sort of withdrawing from that system. So in some sense, India's claim is to something that is, I guess, depreciating, but at the same time, it is trying to hedge against that by getting these commitments for the future.

 

And so the answer then in practical terms is to diversify the status portfolio, to carry on the analogy of the stock market, right. And rather than betting solely on the Security Council, India, you know, very much went into the G20 presidency with a lot of energy, a lot of funding, tried to project itself as a global leader in 2023 when it held the G20 presidency. It makes claims to leadership within plurilateral clubs, if you think about climate change caucuses of the UN or even the Quad. India has been quite, you know, enthusiastic of late because of its deteriorating relations with China, and also it's India's self-framing: since 2015 or so India has sort of framed itself as a leading power or desired to become a leading power in the international order. And also I think Prime Minister Modi is engaged in a lot of energetic bilateral diplomacy with various countries. So all of this, I think, confers some kind of rank on India through channels that do not require fundamental reform of the UN, so it's hedging against this possibility that that reform may never happen, that the UN may in 50 years not even be a relevant institution.

 

On the question of the Global South, it's a really great question. So there is status scarcity among aspirants to global leadership. UN Security Council expansion has been on the agenda for decades, and it's hard even for the so-called G4 countries, so Brazil, India, Germany and Japan, because they are opposed by members in their own regions. So Argentina or Pakistan or Italy will oppose these things precisely because it confers on these other countries a kind of recognition. Argentina doesn't want just Brazil to be on the Security Council, it wants itself to be on the Security Council. But these, I would say, are disagreements to be resolved through bargaining and politics, right, it's not necessarily a sort of unusual thing, I guess.

 

And so in some sense I agree that the Global South coalition cannot on its own carry any single member's campaign for status, but I would also say that that is not necessarily the purpose of the Global South, right. The Global South does not agree on many things. It reflects, I think, a general position that the international order has been unfair, and there are disagreements, though, within Global South countries about how to reform that order. They don't agree on everything. So yes, I take your point fully, but perhaps would qualify it by saying that this is a matter of negotiation, it's not necessarily a done deal.

 

Inhwan Oh: Yeah, I mean, even among friends, disagreement and competition is very natural, but they can still get along and they can still cooperate on the bigger cause that they both pursue.

 

Continuity of India’s Strategic Autonomy

 

Inhwan Oh: I have a follow-up question on the first answer. You said that India actually does both, which you refer to as sort of institutional hedging. And I wonder, would you say this has to do with the traditional or conventional template of India's foreign policy, its pursuit of strategic autonomy, in the area of international institutions? I don't know whether you would say it in that way.

 

Because, I mean, we also did an interview with Manjari, and she sort of said that the historical root of the pursuit of strategic autonomy can go all the way back to the Cold War period, when India was supportive of the Non-Aligned Movement. So would you say that, or is there something different?

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Yeah, I think that more knowledgeable practitioners of Indian foreign policy, such as former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, for example, who wrote a book a few years ago now, which opened with the very claim that strategic autonomy has been the cornerstone of Indian foreign policy right from the beginning, right from independence. And so in a sense, non-alignment is a form of strategic autonomy, just as today what the current government calls multi-alignment is a form of strategic autonomy, right. I think they are both essentially two sides of the same coin. I think in one case, it was more about staying above the so-called bloc politics of the Cold War, that India refused to take sides and wanted to decide every issue case by case on its own merits, and so that led to certain types of relationships that India had during the Cold War, particularly with the Soviet Union. Right, so in some sense India was not nonaligned after a point, right, it was aligned, not allied, but aligned with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

 

And today multi-alignment just takes a different form, which is to say that India is open to alignments with all. In that sense it is still that position: India will not take a position. If you look at the war in Ukraine, if you look at Gaza, if you look at Iran, India doesn't take a position, and this is deeply frustrating for a lot of India's partners and friends. But it is, as I think Manjari rightly pointed out, a deeply ingrained foreign policy trait in India of trying to be autonomous of the pressures and the pulls and pushes of global politics, to try and chart an independent course, as it were. I think there is this long tradition at play.

 

Inhwan Oh: Yeah, I think your answer sort of naturally segues into the next question on the future of India's foreign policy. So looking past Modi, you note it's genuinely unclear whether he runs again in 2029, and you sketched two different successors in your views. You know, bear with my pronunciation, but Adityanath's Hindu nationalism, suspicious of both China and America, and Rahul Gandhi's civic nationalism, which treats China as the primary threat and invites the West into a joint democratic vision of production, and the latter seems to be not much in line with India's traditional foreign policy. So for India's partners in the region, those are two quite different Indias, I guess. Does the deeper continuity you just identified, the shared commitment to strategic autonomy and great power status, or leading power status as you just mentioned, mean the next India will look much like this one, regardless of who is going to lead it? Because leaders, once they take office, sometimes shift their position and stick to the existing policy for various reasons. What would you say?

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Yeah, I mean, so I actually think there's a lot more in common between these two figures, Yogi Adityanath and Rahul Gandhi, than we might imagine, between this sort of hardline Hindu nationalist position and what I call the civic nationalist position of Gandhi. They do converge on certain key things, such as Indian exceptionalism and that commitment to strategic autonomy. They also both consider China as a major external threat, and there's this desire to pursue great power status within multipolarity, right, so there are lots of things in common. And even though foreign policy making in India is centralized and therefore the traits or the dispositions of a leader matter, there are still shared parameters in which these decisions are made. There are traditions and ideologies and ways of thinking about India's place in the world that continue, and Manjari Miller and Kate Sullivan de Estrada have written about that tradition of constraint that exists even for a leader like Modi.

 

Now, I think there are differences, substantial differences, at the level of domestic politics, and I talk about that separately. They have very different visions of what India is and what it should be domestically. And this does spill out to some extent, or may spill out, in a future government under Adityanath, who is a hard sovereigntist, more uncompromising towards India's Muslim minority and its Muslim-majority neighbors. So if you think about Bangladesh, Pakistan, Maldives, there might be more frictions in the future under an even more Hindu nationalist government.

 

Whereas Rahul Gandhi is more willing to frame cooperation with the West as some kind of joint democratic vision of countering China, but even in that, Rahul Gandhi has been very clear that that does not come at the cost of India's sovereignty, right. So this falls back on that older position, which is: sovereignty matters above everything, India will not be a subordinate actor to any great power, not even the United States, right. So in some sense then the constant is that no future government will subordinate Indian priorities to Washington. Even in opposition, Rahul Gandhi has backed the Modi government where core interests have diverged from the U.S. So for example, on Pakistan as well as on relations with Russia in the context of Ukraine and other issues, Rahul Gandhi has openly backed the government's position. So in that sense there is agreement and there is continuity, and strategic autonomy kind of ties it all together in some sense.

 

Inhwan Oh: Yeah, so they have more in common than we might expect from their political rhetoric at the domestic level. And it is also not unusual to see an elected politician sort of fall back on the traditional position once they are in power. So I have a small follow-up question on strategic autonomy, because recently the United States Department of Defense, or Department of War, changed the name of its Pacific Command from Indo-Pacific Command to just Asia-Pacific Command. The first Trump administration changed it into INDOPACOM, and now, I think it was around June 17th or something, they went back to just Asia-Pacific Command. It may be some repercussion from the U.S.-Iran war, but I'm wondering whether that has to do with some people's speculation or accusation that India is the sort of weakest link within the Quad, or this alignment that the United States wants to push forward to counterbalance China in the long term. What's your take on the comment that India may be the weakest link within the Quad, partly because of strategic autonomy probably?

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that, from the perspective of the United States and its allies, so those who are in the Quad, Australia and Japan, India has always been reluctant to apply a harder military edge to the Quad. There's this allergy to the idea that it might become an Asian NATO, which is actually language that comes out of Beijing, right. And this speaks a little bit to India's economic dependence on Beijing as well, which is there. You can only push it so far before you risk the weaponization of interdependence, at least from the Chinese side. Korea has experienced this already, Australia has experienced it as well, other countries, even small countries like the Maldives, have experienced it. And so there is this risk aversion when it comes to being ambitious with something like the Quad in Asia, and that does therefore make India the weaker link.

 

And the other two countries have been U.S. allies from the beginning in this order, right from the 1950s. India has never been a U.S. ally; in fact, it was on the other side of the Cold War in its alignment, at least, and then only through a process of rapprochement and normalization after 2000 has it now become a close partner of the U.S. So it's just not the same kind of actor as Australia and Japan are, and therefore naturally is more reluctant to tie itself to the U.S. in a way that requires India to subordinate—and I use that word repeatedly, but the way the U.S. approaches alliances is that it is the senior partner. And India, with its great power ambitions, does not want to ever be the junior partner to any other country. So I think you're right, which is partly why the brakes have been applied on the Quad a little bit, because while the U.S. under the second Trump presidency has tried to make it a more militarily focused grouping, India has been more reluctant to engage in that.

 

Meanwhile, because of the downturn in India-U.S. relations over tariffs, over Russia, over Pakistan in the last year or so, India and China are now actually engaged in a rapprochement, right. Flights have resumed between the two countries, there's a gradual disengagement taking place in their border standoff, and there are now greater voices within the policymaking establishment publicly advocating that India may need to welcome more FDI from China to sustain the trade deficit, right. You need to have some currency exchanges take place given that there's such a big trade deficit, and so a way to do that is to make China a source of FDI into India. So now creative thinking is emerging about India's relationship with China precisely because the U.S. is unpredictable. Now, that is a two-way street. If India is a weak link, the U.S. is also, for India, not a reliable actor, and so it's ultimately international politics, and that's kind of what we see play out here.

 

Inhwan Oh: Yeah, I mean, that's very understandable, because the United States has become increasingly unpredictable for every partner, right, whether that be allies or just partners like India. And interestingly, China has relatively become more predictable, although they could become somewhat aggressive in their economic retaliation.

 

Implications for South Korea

 

Inhwan Oh: So I mean, South Korea has also experienced economic retaliation from China after the deployment of the missile defense system, THAAD, I believe in 2016, 2017 or so, so we are aware of that risk, too. So South Korea also has been trying to, you know, strike a very delicate balance between cooperating with NATO and the EU and other partners and also the United States, without unnecessarily provoking China in a counterproductive way. That being said, I will ask the final question, which is about the implications of Indian strategic autonomy for South Korea. So for a middle power like South Korea, which has been deepening its special strategic partnership with India while navigating its own path between the U.S. and China, as I just described, what lessons or implications might India's pursuit of strategic autonomy offer? Sometimes I hear Indian partners argue that South Korea's foreign policy can be more strategically autonomous. Is it a template that middle powers can adapt for diversifying in the midst of U.S.-China competition, or a reminder that this kind of autonomy may be a luxury only an aspiring great or regional leading power can afford?

 

Rohan Mukherjee: Yeah, it's a very good question. So I think India's autonomy rests on certain structural conditions that are not present in South Korea, right. India is a very large country, it has a large domestic market, it has the largest population in the world, and both China and the U.S. want either to do business with India or to develop strategic partnerships with India, right. India has an independent nuclear deterrent and it is often described as a swing state. I don't necessarily think that's the right terminology, but it is essentially an important player in global order, as it were, and this gives India space to refuse alignment that a smaller treaty ally of the U.S. that is also dependent on exports, like Korea, does not have, right. And so in a sense, materially, South Korea's position is very different. It is adjacent to China, it has a nuclear-armed rival to the north in North Korea, and it is integrated in supply chains that go through both the U.S. and China. So for South Korea, full strategic autonomy in the Indian way, it's exactly what you call it, it's a luxury.

 

But there is a logic to what India does that is potentially transferable: the logic of diversification. I don't think South Korea needs to become an independent pole in global affairs at all for it to have a successful foreign policy. I think issue-based rather than bloc-based alignment is a good practice that one can transport from India to other contexts, hedging across different partners, investing in indigenous capabilities to reduce one's dependence in various directions. These are all lessons that other middle powers can adapt without requiring the scale of India, right. And the present environment is one in which perhaps the greatest incentives exist for this kind of behavior because, as we've already discussed, the U.S. is retreating from its managerial role in the order, and second-tier states are building coalitions, they're creating options between themselves.

 

EU-India is one example, the Korea-India partnership is also growing. And so, you know, the distinction I was drawing then is between strategic autonomy as an end in itself, which is, I think, what India does, versus strategic diversification as a means to reducing single-partner dependence, which other middle powers like Korea can pursue. And so in that sense there is something to be learned, but it doesn't have to be the exact same lesson. India's experience shows how you can create room for maneuver through diversification, but ultimately it also shows that autonomy depends on your size and your military capabilities. It's not simply a policy choice, it's actually a structural condition.

 

Inhwan Oh: Yeah, I agree. I believe South Korea's foreign policy is sort of aiming at enhancing its agency as a middle power and trying to punch above its weight, as Singapore has been doing as a small city-state. And I think we recognize that the major force driving current international politics is basically U.S.-China competition and there's no way to really get away from it. But then I also agree on your point that there's a certain logic in India's pursuit of strategic autonomy that can be learned and adapted to the Korean context in some way, but not necessarily in the exact same way. Sometimes I was told by some South Korean diplomats that when they visit India, Indians are like, why can't you be more strategically autonomous? You guys have more leverage and you guys are in a better position than some other middle powers in certain aspects. That's very interesting feedback from a regional leading power like India.

 

And it's very fascinating to learn more about India's foreign policy and India's pursuit of status in this era of transformational international order. I think we have used up our time for the interview. It was enlightening and it was very great to have you speak on these issues, drawing on your research expertise as well as your regional expertise, including China's status policy and India's foreign policy and their implications for South Korea.  ■ 

 

■ Rohan Mukherjee is a Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

 

■ Prepared by: Sangjun Lee, EAI Research Associate
    For inquiries: 02 2277 1683 (ext. 211) | [email protected]