Dangerous Proximity

For decades, India watched wars in the Middle East with the distant anxiety of a spectator. While oil prices would ratchet and shipping lanes would grow uneasy, the bombs, missiles and geopolitical brinkmanship always unfolded somewhere else.

That comfortable distance has vanished after a U.S. Navy submarine torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean about 40 nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka.

With this, America’s military strikes against Iran on February 28, in conjunction with Israel, has brought the prospect of a wider war alarmingly close to India’s shores. What Washington describes as a decisive act of strategic pre-emption increasingly resembles the reckless opening of a regional conflagration.

Nearly nine million Indians live and work across the Gulf states. Even more critically, the narrow sea lanes threading through the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea carry the lifeblood of India’s economy. Roughly two-thirds of India’s crude oil imports traverse these waters. Should hostilities escalate, the disruption would not merely rattle markets; it would reverberate through Indian homes, factories and ports with startling speed.

Yet American policymakers appear curiously indifferent to such wider consequences. Washington continues to behave as though the Middle East were a strategic chessboard upon which it alone may rearrange the pieces.

America’s interventionist impulse in the region has long promised swift victories and strategic clarity. Instead, it has produced fractured states and endless turbulence. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was meant to remake the Middle East; it instead unstitched it. Long campaigns in Afghanistan and Syria were justified as necessary stabilising missions; they left behind exhaustion, insurgencies and unresolved rivalries.

For India the implications are immediate. Freight routes through the Arabian Sea may become hazardous. Naval deployments could intensify across waters that New Delhi increasingly regards as part of its strategic backyard. At a time when India is attempting to consolidate its role as a central power in the Indo-Pacific, the sudden militarisation of its western maritime flank is an unwelcome and destabilising distraction.

The United States frequently lectures the world about preserving a rules-based international order. Yet its readiness to launch strikes that risk cascading regional escalation demonstrates how fragile those rules become when great powers choose expediency over restraint.

For years, New Delhi prided itself on a careful balancing act in West Asia by cultivating close ties with Israel while maintaining civil relations with Iran and deep economic interdependence with the Gulf monarchies. It was a posture presented as strategic autonomy, proof that India could speak to all sides while committing to none. Yet the Iranian warship incident has exposed the limits of that approach

India has little appetite for such adventures. Its priorities are open sea lanes, predictable energy markets and a Middle East that does not periodically descend into flames. Washington’s latest gamble threatens all three while puncturing India’s ‘soft diplomacy’ that it has long cultivated with all countries.