Pakistan, June 21 -- For the last several years, India's ruling elite and its cheerleaders in the strategic community sold one grand idea to the world: that India was no longer merely a South Asian state, but the central pillar of a new Indo-Pacific order. Washington, especially during Trump's first term, appeared willing to indulge this imagination. The renaming of the old US Pacific Command as Indo-Pacific Command in 2018 was treated in New Delhi as more than bureaucratic symbolism. It was read as a certificate of elevation, a recognition that India had arrived as America's principal regional counterweight to China and as a future net security provider from the Indian Ocean to the Western Pacific.

But diplomacy, like war, eventually te...