Ross Douthat

What does success for India look like with its less powerful but nuclear-armed rival, Pakistan, and its more powerful neighbor, China?

I'm asking you.

Okay.

And what changes the situation for the better for India?

Is it just economic growth or is there a kind of level of military power where India thinks that it could get Pakistan isolated and sort of force China to be friendlier?

How strong is India's military apart from nuclear questions?

You mentioned, obviously, it's importing weapons from Russia, importing weapons from the United States.

How significant a global force is the Indian military potentially?

I want to move to culture, but let's try and make a bridge between geopolitics and culture.

So, Narendra Modi, the Modi government has been in power for some time now.

You know, the Modi government is nationalist, Hindu nationalist.

It has a particular conception of Indian civilization rooted in Hindu religion, Hindu identity, and so on.

Is there a kind of cultural geopolitics where

Indian nationalists imagined themselves as sort of dominant in a kind of civilizational space where like all of South Asia is shaped by its Hindutva, the sort of religious ideology or political religious ideology that

So, the idea that Indian civilization is something that's born in India and then spreads around the world is obviously relevant to an age when Indians have spread around the world.

And Modi has, I think, very explicitly talked about the Indian diaspora as kind of a mode of

Indian national influence.

But let's just let's start with let's talk about the diaspora.

Yeah.

Let's talk about America.