In this episode of Interpreting India, Dinakar Peri speaks with Vince Cable, former member of Parliament and leader of the Liberal Democrats, and author of Eclipsing the West: China, India and the Forging of a New World, on where the global order is headed, what India’s rise means for the rest of the world, and what trusted partnerships look like in an era of technological competition. This episode explores: • Cable’s book presents three possible scenarios for the global order—an expanded West (incorporating rising powers like India), rival spheres of influence, or reformed multilateralism. As the West’s share of the global economy shrinks, which of these three scenarios is most plausible? • In a world dominated by U.S. and China technologically, how does a country like India navigate the choice of who to work with? • What does trust mean in an era of technological competition, and what would trusted partnerships actually look like? • What is India’s growth outlook, and what would it take for India to dominate the next generation of global economic shifts?
This episode is part of our curtain raiser series ahead of the tenth edition of the Global Technology Summit, Carnegie India’s flagship annual event, co-hosted with the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, to be held in New Delhi from December 2 to 4, 2026.
Since 1990, the West’s share of the global economy has fallen from roughly 60 percent to just under 40 percent. While China has driven much of that shift, Cable argues that India will dominate the next generation of this transition. He presents three scenarios for what comes next: a reinvented global West that incorporates rising powers like India, a multipolar order of competing spheres of influence, and a reinvented multilateralism that reflects the new structure of global power. The scenario he finds most alarming is the one of multipolarity, where no single actor is responsible for the global commons and coordination on climate, trade, and crisis management becomes exponentially harder.
On technology and trusted partnerships, Cable points to a study suggesting China is ahead in the majority of upstream technology areas tracked, with the U.S. and China the only two countries with anything like technological dominance at the frontier. The challenge for countries like India is not just who to work with, but how to balance competition and cooperation, particularly in areas like medicine and renewable energy where collaboration makes more strategic sense than rivalry. On India’s growth outlook, Cable is notably optimistic, pointing to infrastructure investment, a strong digital backbone, a unified domestic market, and a large-educated workforce as the foundations of a fundamentally different trajectory from China, whose structural problems are now very real constraints.
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