When Neutrality Becomes Silence

In a recent column in The Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta argued that many contemporary wars resemble spectacles rather than instruments of policy. Military force, he suggested, is increasingly deployed less to achieve clear political goals than to display power and test the next generation of weapons. The point is unsettling because it hints at a deeper erosion in the moral grammar of international politics.

For decades, the guiding maxim of foreign policy has been reassuringly simple: states have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. The phrase carries the authority of political realism. Yet in the present moment, it often functions less as wisdom than as an alibi. Governments seem to invoke it to justify diplomatic silence when violence escalates.

Modern conflict has acquired characteristics that make this silence harder to defend. Military campaigns now double as demonstrations of technological prowess. Missiles, drones, cyber capabilities, and artificial intelligence systems are showcased in live theatres of war. Officials speak about deterrence, escalation ladders, and strategic signalling. The vocabulary sounds analytical, even clinical.

This technological framing increasingly shapes how wars are discussed in the media and across social platforms. Much of the commentary gravitates toward the sophistication of missiles, the range of drones, the algorithms behind targeting systems, or the tactical brilliance of battlefield innovations. The humanitarian dimensions, civilian suffering, displacement, and the long-term destruction of societies often recede into the background.

Yet beneath this language, something older persists. The display of military strength can become an end in itself. Conflicts risk turning into platforms for technological exhibition, where innovation and dominance matter as much as the political objectives that once justified war.

At that point, the line between strategy and warmongering becomes thin.

Many countries have responded to this environment by retreating into ambiguity. Strategic autonomy has become the preferred posture of large emerging powers. It allows governments to maintain relationships across rival blocs while avoiding overt alignment. As a tactical approach, it is understandable in a fractured geopolitical landscape.

Yet strategic autonomy, when stripped of principles, begins to look less like prudence and more like silence.

The post-war international order, for all its flaws, rested on a handful of shared assumptions. Aggressive war carried a stigma. Sovereignty mattered. Civilian protection was acknowledged as a norm. These principles were imperfectly enforced but widely invoked.

Today, that vocabulary is fading. Major powers increasingly test the limits of those norms. Others respond by declining to judge.

That raises a more basic question: whether these principles now need to be restated rather than merely assumed.

This is where middle powers could play a more consequential role than they often imagine. Countries such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil are not bound by rigid alliance structures. Their legitimacy rests on economic scale, democratic aspirations, and their influence across the developing world.

That position gives them a quiet but meaningful task: to articulate a minimal code for the conduct of war when the best, complete avoidance of war or skirmishes, can’t be avoided.

Such principles need not be grand. War should be fought only in defence of sovereignty, not as a technological theatre. Civilian protection must remain non-negotiable. Conflicts that exist primarily to demonstrate military supremacy deserve scepticism rather than silent acquiescence.

The point is not moral grandstanding. It is to ensure that technological sophistication does not steadily lower the political cost of violence.

Power politics will not disappear. Nations will continue to pursue their interests. But interests can still be bound by principles.

If rising powers want to shape the next phase of the international order, neutrality alone will not suffice. They will have to say, clearly, what kinds of violence the world should refuse to legitimise.