India’s traditional model of strategic restraint has given way to a sharper, more assertive security doctrine shaped by recent terror crises and shifting public expectations, according to an analysis by authors John Spencer and Lauren Dagan Amoss. Their assessment argues that India has crossed a decisive threshold in how it responds to terrorism, manages escalation with Pakistan, and signals deterrence to both Islamabad and Beijing.

The authors note that India had already begun moving away from the vocabulary of restraint over the past decade, as a series of major Pakistan-based terrorist attacks, including Uri in 2016, Balakot in 2019 and Pahalgam in 2025, showed that limited and predictable responses did little to deter cross-border militancy. They say predictability encouraged terroris

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