Multipolarity Is Not Enough: What Finland Quietly Reminds in Delhi

Raisina Dialogue 2026 – President Alexander Stubb’s address (MyGov India)

I did not discover Finland yesterday at the Raisina Dialogue, when Finland’s President Dr Alexander Stubb spoke to an Indian audience from that stage. I have been a student of the Finnish way for years – from the Winter War and the evolution of operational‑level defence, to their doctrine of comprehensive security and, most recently, the decision to enter NATO. Along that path, I have come to suspect that many of the strategic and operational questions Finland has had to answer for itself will, in different terrain and at a very different scale, confront India as well. That is why listening to Alexander Stubb speak at the Raisina Dialogue felt oddly personal. A few weeks ago, I had heard his Foreign Affairs interview and had the sense that here was not just an articulate European leader, but a scholar‑practitioner who deserved to be heard carefully.

A Finnish Mirror in Delhi

Alexander Stubb was the toast of an Indian audience that included Prime Minister Modi when, amid laughter and wit, he calmly told them – without changing tone – that the era of Western dominance is over and that the Global South will decide what replaces it. The hall responded with a standing ovation.

From my perch as part of an online audience, the line that stayed with me was not the one about the “end of the Western‑led world order.” It was his warning that the alternative is not automatically better – that the world could as easily drift into a “conflictual multipolarity characterised by deals, transactions and spheres of interest” as into a fairer multilateral system.

“Multipolarity may describe where power sits. It does not tell us what kind of world that power will build.”

President Stubb’s remedy was disarmingly simple to describe and brutally hard to execute: reform, not rejection, of institutions; rules and norms that “bring stability but allow for diversity”; and a deliberate choice by India and others to push the system toward inclusive multilateralism rather than transactional blocs.

Listening to him, I realised something else. What sounded like a neat International Relations thesis from an IR scholar was actually the political expression of a much older Finnish instinct: a small state’s suspicion of great‑power cartography, and an almost obsessive preoccupation with resilience.

To understand why that matters to India, you have to leave the Raisina Dialogue venue in Delhi and go back, briefly, to the snow and forests of Finland in 1939.

The Finland Behind the Speech

Finland is not supposed to matter in the way great powers matter. It has roughly the population of Bengaluru, a harsh climate, and a geography that was often described on other people’s maps. Yet its modern strategic culture was forged in one of the most improbable military performances of the twentieth century: the Winter War.

When the Soviet Union attacked in November 1939, it expected a quick campaign. It had the numbers, the armour, the aircraft, and the ideology. Finland had forests, lakes, skis, and a political leadership under no illusions about relative power. The result was not a Finnish victory – they eventually ceded territory – but a 105‑day demonstration of what operational imagination and societal grit can do to a larger invader.

“The Winter War was less a story of heroism than of design.”

Instead of defending every metre of the frontier, Finnish commanders treated terrain as a weapon system. They allowed Soviet columns to advance along narrow, road‑bound axes, then cut them into segments – the famous motti tactics. The term motti comes from a Finnish word meaning a pile of cut firewood. In forestry, logs are cut into stacks so they can be handled piece by piece. Rather than fighting a large enemy formation head‑on, Finnish commanders cut it into smaller isolated segments and destroyed each segment separately. They accepted the loss of ground to preserve force, trading space for time, and attacking the Soviets’ real centre of gravity: logistics and cohesion.

This was not an accident of bravery. It was the beginning of what later became Finland’s doctrine of operational defence: delay, channel, fragment, exhaust and counter‑attack, rather than die gloriously on a fixed line. Over time, that military logic fused with something broader: the idea that security is a whole‑of‑society enterprise.

Comprehensive Security: Resilience as a Habit

The phrase that appears repeatedly in Finnish policy documents is “comprehensive security.” At first glance it sounds like the kind of technocratic jargon governments produce in abundance. But in practice it describes something far more demanding: a system in which the entire society – ministries, businesses, voluntary organisations, and citizens themselves – forms part of the country’s defensive architecture.

The Security Strategy for Society – yes, that is its formal title – treats the vital functions of the state as a single, integrated defence system. Ministries, municipalities, private companies, critical infrastructure operators, NGOs and ordinary citizens are all assigned roles in preparing for crises, from war to cyber‑attacks, pandemics, disinformation and supply disruptions.

“In Finland, security is not a sector. It is a way of running the country.”

The latest iteration of this strategy, updated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, pushes the idea even further. It speaks explicitly of stronger resilience, of society’s ability to respond to disruptions, and of the “key role of individuals” in enhancing security. It is, in effect, a national admission that the state alone cannot carry the burden of preparedness in a world where shocks are recurrent and hostile state activity is broad‑spectrum.

When President Stubb talks about multilateral rules, he is not doing so from an abstract liberal instinct. He is speaking as president of a country that has built, over decades, a dense web of domestic institutions designed to ensure that Finland can absorb punishment and keep functioning when the environment turns hostile.

That lens also explains Finland’s most controversial strategic choice in recent years.

Why Finland Joined NATO – And Why That Matters

When Finland entered NATO in April 2023, social media did what social media does. I remember our own Twitterati asking: what difference could a country of five‑odd million people make to an alliance that already had the United States, Britain, France and Turkey? Surely this was symbolism, not substance?

The reality is almost the inverse. Finland arrived in NATO not as a security consumer but as a security provider. It brought a large, trained reserve – around 280,000 wartime troops and a total of some 870,000 liable for service in an emergency – strong artillery, well‑prepared infrastructure, and arguably some of the best Arctic and winter-warfare expertise in the world.

“Finland joined NATO from a position of seriousness, not dependence.”

Its accession has already altered the military geometry of northern Europe. NATO’s border with Russia lengthened by roughly 1,300 kilometres. The Alliance’s ability to reinforce the Baltic states and operate in the High North improved markedly. Forward land forces are now being established in Finland as part of NATO’s eastern and northern posture, while Helsinki itself remains committed to defence spending above 2 per cent of GDP.

What interests me, from an Indian standpoint, is not the specific alliance choice but the sequence. Finland did not dismantle its territorial defence and then seek shelter under NATO. It did the opposite. It kept conscription, invested in resilience, updated its comprehensive security strategy, and only then, after watching Russia go to war again, concluded that its national system needed to be plugged into a wider institutional framework.

In other words, the alliance became an additional layer of security built on top of strong foundations at home, not a substitute for them. That is the mindset that travels well beyond Europe.

From Karelian Forests to Indian Frontiers

The terrain of Finland’s Karelian forests and lakes has little in common with India’s geography, which runs from the high Himalayas through riverine plains and plateaus to deserts and tropical coasts.

Yet the logic that guided Finnish operations against the Soviet Union – and later evolved into a doctrine of territorial defence in depth – should feel familiar to anyone who studies protracted stand‑offs in difficult terrain. Both kinds of theatre punish mass and reward endurance. Both constrain movement into narrow corridors where long columns become vulnerable rather than dominant. Both impose logistical burdens that can break a formation before an enemy bullet does: climate, altitude or distance, fragile supply lines, and limited redundancy.

Finnish commanders learned early that the decisive blows were not always those delivered at the notional “front”. They went after fuel, food, mobility and cohesion. They accepted that a smaller force could not annihilate a larger aggressor, but could disorganise it, exhaust it, and raise the cost of a campaign to the point where political objectives had to be re‑evaluated. Over time, this became an operational habit: design defence around terrain, logistics and reserves, not just around linear frontages and order‑of‑battle charts.

For India, the value of this experience lies less in tactical imitation than in operational imagination. It invites us to think of our own sensitive theatres not as strings of defended posts but as continuous operational systems in depth, in which logistics nodes, choke points, information grids and mobile reserves matter as much as corps, divisions and brigades holding individual features. The map that matters most in such a mindset is not only the map of units, but the map of roads, depots, airheads, fibre and fuel.

That, in turn, pushes us back toward questions of resilience at home: how we design infrastructure, fund logistics, train and equip reserves, and integrate civilian assets into defence. In the Finnish story, operational defence and comprehensive security are two sides of the same coin. The Indian debate on budgets, posture and institutions will eventually have to confront the same connection.

Strategic Autonomy Needs an Operating System

For decades, Indian foreign policy has used “strategic autonomy” as a navigational aid. The phrase has served us reasonably well. It captured Delhi’s refusal to be locked into Cold War camps, and it still underpins our reluctance to sign up to any alliance‑like structure even as we deepen cooperation with partners from Washington to Paris and Tokyo.

But autonomy is not self‑executing. It needs institutions, capabilities and habits beneath it. Finland’s comprehensive security doctrine is one example of how a state turns strategic intent into societal architecture: clear roles for each branch of government, explicit recognition of the private sector and citizens as part of defence, and a living strategy that is updated as the environment changes – most recently after Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Strategic autonomy without resilient institutions is little more than a foreign‑policy posture.

India has fragments of such an approach – from disaster management mechanisms to cyber frameworks and critical infrastructure protection – but they remain siloed and rarely talked about as components of a single national resilience system. The idea that national security begins with how we design cities, ports, data centres, power grids, supply chains and information ecosystems has yet to become mainstream. In that sense, the LAC is only the sharpest edge of a much broader vulnerability.

Here is where President Stubb’s two messages – about the global order and about India’s role in it – begin to converge with Finland’s own domestic practice. His call in Delhi for a “New Delhi moment”, where India convenes leaders to think about what comes after war and how to rebuild multilateralism, implicitly assumes an India that is not merely balancing others but stabilising a system.

Such a role must be played from a position of internal strength.

India Between Jungle and Order

President Stubb’s speech framed the coming decades as a choice between “law of the jungle” geopolitics and a reworked order in which rules and institutions still matter but are more representative, with India and the wider Global South as co‑authors rather than mere subjects. He was explicit that India deserves a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and that its economic and demographic momentum gives it unusual leverage over the direction of the next order.

“The world is moving; the question is whether India wants only more space, or also more structure.”

From an Indian vantage point, it is tempting to stop at the first half of that sentence. More space is attractive, giving us more room for manoeuvre, more balancing options, more platforms where our presence is courted. But Finland’s experience suggests another test: are we using that space to harden our own resilience and to shape rules beyond our borders, or merely to enjoy the temporary advantages of a crowded geometry of power?

The Finnish answer, born of hard history, has been to do both. It thinks like a small state when it comes to preparedness – conscription, reserves, comprehensive security, a cultural expectation of seriousness about defence – and like a system‑shaping state when it comes to institutions, whether European or Atlantic.

India, by contrast, has often tended to do the opposite: we talk like a system‑shaper abroad while behaving like a large but complacent state at home, assuming that size will somehow substitute for preparedness. None of this is to deny the real gains India has made in infrastructure, digital systems and military readiness over the past decade; the point is that our strategic rhetoric is beginning to run ahead of a still‑uneven foundation. We still live with chronic under‑investment in defence capital relative to stated ambitions, slow and contested progress on integrated theatre commands and genuine jointness, and visible gaps between our aspirations and the robustness of power grids, cyber defences, civil defence and emergency‑management systems. On the other side of the ledger, we have made impressive strides in digital public infrastructure, border roads, coastal security and disaster response.

The question Finland quietly puts to us is whether we are willing to treat these as pieces of a single resilience architecture or remain content with islands of excellence on a fragile base.

The contrast is striking. Finland has treated defence as a core state function that must be funded first and in a predictable manner. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Helsinki not only crossed the NATO 2 per cent of GDP guideline but is now planning to raise defence spending to at least 3 per cent of GDP by 2029, with several billion euros in additional outlays in the first few years. Crucially, that money is explicitly earmarked for critical functions, logistics, infrastructure, materiel maintenance, personnel and reserves – the depth and resilience of the system, not just big platforms – and the political system has largely converged on this as a long‑term commitment rather than a one‑year spike. That is why Finland’s choices inevitably raise uncomfortable questions about India’s own budgetary priorities. Our defence budget remains structurally weighted toward salaries and pensions rather than capital and resilience – an imbalance I hope to explore in a separate post as I get deeper into our budget choices.

A Finnish Mirror for an Indian Moment

In the end, what made Alexander Stubb’s presence at the Raisina Dialogue interesting was not the now‑routine European praise for India’s rise, or even his eloquent insistence that the era of Western dominance is over. It was the quiet Finnish realism beneath the rhetoric – the sense of a country that has lived next to a powerful neighbour, survived one world war and one Cold War, and built a culture of preparedness that does not confuse multipolarity with safety.

“Finland’s history asks India a simple question: do you want to navigate multipolarity, or to organise it?”

For India, particularly from the vantage point of the Himalayan frontier, that is not an abstract question. The choices we make about roads and airfields in Ladakh, about redundancy in our logistics, about the resilience of our power grids and data networks, and about the seriousness with which we treat civil–military trust and societal cohesion will determine how much autonomy we have when the next crisis arrives.

Multipolarity will likely be the default description of the world we inhabit for the next few decades. That is a given. What is not given is whether that multipolarity will feel, to countries like India, more like a jungle of deals and coercion or like a rough‑edged but functioning order. President Stubb’s Finland offers two quiet lessons as we decide.

First, that operational imagination – the ability to see terrain, logistics and society itself as instruments of defence – can offset structural disadvantages, whether in Karelia in 1939 or in the high Himalayas today.

Second, that rules and institutions, domestic and international, are not luxuries of the strong; they are survival tools of the vulnerable.

India today is neither small nor structurally weak. But we are entering a period in which size guarantees nothing. In such a world, Finland’s question becomes our own: will we be content to inhabit a multipolar system someone else defines, or are we willing to do the harder work of building the resilience at home and the rules abroad that turn power into order?

That answer will not be given in conference halls. It will be written, slowly and often invisibly, in our budgets, our roads, our institutions – and, one winter or summer, in the thin air of the Himalayas and on the turbulent seas that lap our shores and link us to distant markets and energy fields.