On Tuesday, a report highlighted that India has decided to take matters into its own hands when it comes to countering the infrastructure that supports terrorism, without waiting for external validation. This bold move has opened up new pathways for closer Israel‑India strategic cooperation.
The report also noted that India’s shift marks the birth of a new playbook—one that the international community cannot afford to ignore.
According to John Spencer, Executive Director of the U.S.-based Urban Warfare Institute, and Lauren Dagan Amoss, a leading scholar on India’s foreign and security policy, this realignment is highly relevant to Israel. “These changes are significant for Israel. India’s fresh deterrence stance—explicitly rejecting the use of nuclear threats, erasing the boundary between proxy terror and state accountability, and showing a readiness to act swiftly and precisely—mirrors long‑standing Israeli principles,” the duo wrote for an Israeli think tank, the Begin‑Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar‑Ilan University.
They added that both countries face adversaries who blend terrorism with nuclear ambiguity. The performance of India during Operation Sindoor, where it successfully neutralised Chinese PL‑15 missiles and HQ‑9/P air‑defence systems, offers operational lessons that directly benefit Israel amid the spread of Chinese technology in the Middle East. “The convergence is doctrinal rather than merely rhetorical,” they stressed.
The experts argued that for nearly a decade, India had been abandoning the doctrine of strategic restraint. Their response patterns to major Pakistan‑linked attacks—such as the Uri 2016 strike, Balakot 2019, and Pahalgam 2025—demonstrated that predictable retaliation neither deterred cross‑border terrorism nor curbed it; instead, it enabled it. “Restraint was intended to prevent escalation with Pakistan, but in practice it had the opposite effect,” the analysts said. “Terror groups backed by Pakistani security agencies exploited the gap between terrorism and state action, assuming India would shy away from decisive retaliation or cross‑border measures. Limited responses created predictable patterns that encouraged further violence.”
Spencer and Amoss observed that India has moved from restraint to a doctrine of compellence, treating major attacks as acts of war. This pivot was clearly signaled in Operation Sindoor, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that these attacks would meet wartime responses rather than being handled solely as law‑enforcement matters.
“We no longer rely on long attribution cycles or international pressure to act,” the authors noted. “Pre‑emption is seen as a sovereign right.” During that operation, India struck early and deep, deploying long‑range fire, drone swarms, loitering munitions, and real‑time fused intelligence. “The operation broke the old pattern and signalled a permanent doctrinal shift,” they concluded.
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