At the beginning of 2025, if you asked someone in New Delhi, you probably would have heard a response of cautious optimism. India seemed well-positioned to deal with the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Trade talks were likely to be difficult, but there was a sense of possibility. The strategic logic of the relationship, one assumed, was robust enough to ensure close engagement.

But today, the relationship feels deeply strained. We’ve arrived at an odd inflection point, one where deep strategic convergence coexists with growing political friction. There’s a bitterness in the air that hasn’t been seen for a long, long time.

To make sense of this moment, and to step back and look at the bigger picture of India’s place in the world, I reached out to someone who knows the craft of diplomacy inside out. Nirupama Menon Rao has had a remarkable career: she has served as India’s ambassador to both the United States and China, and high commissioner to Sri Lanka. She was also only the second woman ever to hold the post of India’s Foreign Secretary.

This is a wide-ranging conversation, from the personal to the geopolitical, from Washington and Beijing to New Delhi. We dig into the challenges and opportunities in India–US relations today, the balancing act with China and Russia. We also zoom out further, to ask: Are we truly in a new era of great power competition between the US and China? Or is this turbulence the messy reality of multipolarity?

Ambassador Rao offers an insightful and poetic take on the world today, comparing it to a revolt in the Orchestra. The conductor has lost some authority. The concertmaster is challenging him for leadership. And the percussion section is drumming its own beat. So, how does one navigate this environment?

As always, I hope you enjoy the conversation. Please like, share, subscribe and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, feel free to reach out to me on my email.

About: The Great Power Show is a bi-weekly podcast featuring candid conversations and thought-provoking interviews with leading scholars, thinkers and practitioners on the geopolitical and geo-economic changes shaping our world.

Over the past few months, I’ve often found myself overwhelmed by the pace and nature of global events. Each day seems to bring something that overturns long-held assumptions—norms I had internalised growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s been disorienting. At times, it feels as if we’ve entered a new nihilistic and transactional world.

It was in this frame of mind that I stumbled upon Prof. Steven Smith’s Open Yale Course on Political Philosophy. The series offered not just a masterful survey of Western political thought, from Socrates to Tocqueville and his contemporaries, but also a welcome opportunity to step back from the churn of headlines and reflect on the enduring debates they echo.

How are economic globalisation and the resurgence of populism and nationalism reshaping the relationship between the individual, the community, and the state? How did earlier thinkers grapple with these tensions, and how are today’s societies addressing them? What does justice mean in our time? Does it inevitably imply a march towards progressivism? How should liberalism engage with patriotism? And to what extent is contemporary nationalism a reaction to the perceived failures of liberal cosmopolitanism?

With these questions in mind, I reached out to Prof. Smith, who graciously agreed to discuss them, along with his views on the current trajectory of American politics.

As always, I hope you enjoy the conversation. Please like, share, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, feel free to reach out to me on manoj@takshashila.org.in.

If you are interested in Prof. Smith’s recent works, do check out his books:

• Modernity and Its Discontents – Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow

• Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes

About: The Great Power Show is a bi-weekly podcast featuring candid conversations and thought-provoking interviews with leading scholars, thinkers and practitioners on the geopolitical and geo-economic changes shaping our world.

India’s global profile is rising. By the end of this decade, India will be the world’s third-largest economy. Diplomatically, it is also far more active as a member of key multilateral groupings. Arguably, India’s foreign policy today plays a bigger role in domestic politics than at any time since the Nehru years.

All of this is changing how Indians think about world affairs, leading to an increasing number of young people studying International Relations. In fact, over the past 25 years, there’s been a visible expansion of Indian universities offering IR courses. The discipline itself evolved from the margins of political science to the heart of it.

For decades, IR theory has remained anchored in Western experiences and epistemologies. But does that lens still suffice? Or is there a need to think through new, perhaps more rooted, ways of conceptualising power, order, and change?

In this episode, I speak with Atul Mishra, Associate Professor of International Relations at Shiv Nadar University, in India. Atul is a refreshingly original voice in the world of International Relations. His perspective is incisive, anchored in rigorous theory, yet deeply informed by empirical realities.

Our conversation begins by tracing his personal and intellectual journey before turning to bigger questions: What is theory for? Who is it serving? And does IR theory need to become fragmented accounting for culture and civilisation experiences? In other words, is there a need for an Indic IR or an IR with Chinese characteristics? From there, we take stock of the global order and the state of the idea of liberal democracy. Are the ideas of liberalism passé amid the rising tide of authoritarianism and under the weight of present-day realpolitik?

As always, I hope you enjoy the conversation. Please like, share, and rate the episode. And if you’d like to support the show or the work I do, feel free to reach out to me.

• - Atul’s Substack IR Wire

  - Atul’s Lecture on What is a liberal democracy?

• About: The Great Power Show is a bi-weekly podcast featuring candid conversations and thought-provoking interviews with leading scholars, thinkers and practitioners on the geopolitical and geo-economic changes shaping our world.