Can You Put a Number on Strategic Affinity?

India and Israel have built an unusually resilient partnership. Its durability may depend on something conventional strategic models struggle to measure.

Strategic partnerships are usually explained in the language of interests. States cooperate because they need something from one another: weapons, intelligence, markets, diplomatic support, technology or help balancing a common adversary. The vocabulary is familiar because the logic is reassuringly tangible. Count the trade. Map the military exercises. Measure arms transfers. Identify the common threat. Then, with enough data, forecast what comes next.

But some relationships are harder to explain- India and Israel are one such case. The relationship has become deep, politically resilient and strategically consequential. Defense and technology cooperation are important parts of it. So are counterterrorism, intelligence, agriculture, water technology, innovation and increasingly broad diplomatic engagement. There is no shortage of material explanations.

Yet there is an oddity hiding in plain sight. India and Israel do not share a border. They do not confront the same immediate security environment. Their militaries do not operate together with anything approaching the scale or institutional depth of the United States and Israel. Nor is their economic relationship, by itself, sufficient to explain the political durability of their ties and yet the relationship has repeatedly survived changes in government, regional upheavals and differences in the two countries’ wider diplomatic calculations. Perhaps the conventional explanation is simply incomplete…

The problem with treating partnerships as transactions. Much of international-relations analysis begins with a reasonable assumption: states pursue interests. This is hardly controversial. But the analytical convenience of the assumption can become a trap. If a relationship persists, analysts look for the material incentive sustaining it. If those incentives change, they expect the relationship to change accordingly. This works particularly well when the relationship resembles a transaction.

But states do not enter every relationship as accountants.They carry histories with them. They have memories, political identities and ideas about sovereignty. Their leaders inherit stories about national survival, vulnerability and resilience. They develop impressions of other countries that are not reducible to trade balances or weapons contracts.These perceptions can influence what governments consider trustworthy, familiar or strategically tolerable.

Could perceived affinity itself become a strategic variable? This is not an argument that India and Israel are somehow “the same”. They plainly are not. Their histories, societies, political systems and regional environments are substantially different. What if part of the relationship’s durability comes from how the two countries perceive one another, rather than simply from what they gain from one another?

“Civilizational affinity” left undefined can explain almost anything and therefore predict almost nothing. So rather than treating civilizational similarity as an innate characteristic, it may be more useful to treat perceived affinity as a bundle of observable ideas.

Consider five possibilities:

1. Historical self-perception
How each country understands its own history and survival.

2. Security consciousness
How national elites interpret persistent threats and vulnerability.

3. Sovereignty
The importance attached to controlling national security decisions.

4. Resilience
The political value placed on national endurance under pressure.

5. Perception
Whether policymakers actually describe the other country as possessing comparable experiences or strategic instincts.

That creates an intriguing possibility: something normally relegated to the “soft” side of foreign policy may have the potential to be treated as data.

There is another way to approach the problem. Instead of asking whether India and Israel are “really” civilizationally similar, we can ask a more practical question: would the perception of such affinity change our assessment of what the two states are likely to do?

A conventional assessment might begin with security convergence, defense cooperation, economic interests, diplomatic ties and broader geopolitical alignment. For illustration, suppose these factors produce an initial probability of 72% that India and Israel will maintain a high degree of strategic alignment over the next five years.

Now introduce perceived strategic affinity: the possibility that shared perceptions of security, sovereignty, resilience and historical experience influence how the two states behave towards one another. The logic can be expressed through a simple Bayesian update: P(A | E) = [P(E | A) × P(A)] / [P(E | A) × P(A) + P(E | ¬A) × P(¬A)]

The important point is that we are not assigning a magical numerical value to “civilization.” We are asking whether evidence of perceived affinity contains predictive information. If it does, the assessment should change.

For illustration, an initial estimate of 72% might rise to 84% after incorporating sufficiently strong evidence of strategic affinity.That would not mean that 84% is the “correct” probability, or that affinity has been proven to cause the relationship. It would demonstrate something more modest.

A variable that conventional models tend to treat as intangible can, if properly evidenced, materially change our assessment of future state behavior.

And that is where the proposition becomes interesting: Perhaps the question is not whether strategic affinity can be quantified perfectly, but whether leaving it out makes our forecasts systematically worse. A variable that conventional models tend to treat as intangible can, if properly evidenced, materially change our assessment of future state behavior. And that is where the proposition becomes interesting. The question is not whether strategic affinity can be quantified perfectly, but whether leaving it out makes our forecasts systematically worse.

The danger of seeing affinity everywhere. There is an obvious problem. Once analysts begin looking for affinity, they may find it everywhere.States routinely speak of friendship, shared values and common histories. But diplomatic language is not necessarily strategic evidence. The real question is whether perceived affinity changes behaviour. Does a government share information it could withhold? Preserve cooperation despite disagreement? Absorb political costs to maintain the relationship? Return to cooperation after a period of divergence?

These choices are more revealing than rhetoric. After all, states reveal the strength of relationships when maintaining them becomes costly. It does not matter who benefits more from the relationship, but what each side is willing to absorb to preserve it. India must navigate its dependence on Gulf energy, trade and connectivity while managing relations in the region.  Israel, for its part must navigate its own regional vulnerabilities and the competing demands of its international partnerships. Neither country operates without constraints. Yet both have continued to invest in the relationship even when their wider strategic environments make that relationship more complicated. That reciprocity is difficult to explain through transaction alone.

The purpose of introducing a new variable, after all, is not to protect a preferred explanation. It is to make the forecast better.

International relations measures what is tangible, but often overlooks trust, identity and perception. Yet these softer factors may influence how states assess risk and decide what costs they are willing to bear. The question is not whether India and Israel are civilizationally similar. That is too broad to be analytically useful. The more interesting question is:

Does perceived affinity affect the probability that two states will continue to cooperate when their immediate interests diverge? If it does, then affinity is no longer merely a cultural observation. It becomes a strategic variable.And if strategic variables change behavior, they should change the forecast. 

….Until next time, with a thought to spare – Archie