Nothing captures India’s long-standing dedication to strategic autonomy greater than the nation internet hosting the leaders of three main world powers—Russia, China, and presumably the US—in brief succession. Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to go to India in December, making it his first go to to the nation because the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Chinese language President Xi Jinping is more likely to be in India subsequent 12 months when the nation hosts the BRICS summit. This 12 months’s summit of the Quadrilateral Safety Dialogue—a grouping that features the US—was scheduled to happen in India this month however was postponed amid the downturn in India-U.S. relations. If the assembly is rescheduled to subsequent 12 months, U.S. President Donald Trump may additionally go to India.
There’s a flip facet to this narrative, nevertheless. India’s equidistant international coverage is usually perceived as distant or aloof. This grew to become obvious when Trump levied 50 % tariffs on India, punishing the nation for its commerce imbalance and purchases of Russian crude. In the meantime, different nations that keep a bigger commerce surplus with the US or a major dependence on Russian crude weren’t focused to the identical diploma due to their significance to world provide chains (e.g., China) or their standing as U.S. alliance companions (e.g., Japan, Turkey). The differing therapy displays India’s lack of strategic indispensability within the worldwide system. A key lesson for India is the necessity to develop a extra proactive, fairly than passive, strategic autonomy.
Nothing captures India’s long-standing dedication to strategic autonomy greater than the nation internet hosting the leaders of three main world powers—Russia, China, and presumably the US—in brief succession. Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to go to India in December, making it his first go to to the nation because the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Chinese language President Xi Jinping is more likely to be in India subsequent 12 months when the nation hosts the BRICS summit. This 12 months’s summit of the Quadrilateral Safety Dialogue—a grouping that features the US—was scheduled to happen in India this month however was postponed amid the downturn in India-U.S. relations. If the assembly is rescheduled to subsequent 12 months, U.S. President Donald Trump may additionally go to India.
There’s a flip facet to this narrative, nevertheless. India’s equidistant international coverage is usually perceived as distant or aloof. This grew to become obvious when Trump levied 50 % tariffs on India, punishing the nation for its commerce imbalance and purchases of Russian crude. In the meantime, different nations that keep a bigger commerce surplus with the US or a major dependence on Russian crude weren’t focused to the identical diploma due to their significance to world provide chains (e.g., China) or their standing as U.S. alliance companions (e.g., Japan, Turkey). The differing therapy displays India’s lack of strategic indispensability within the worldwide system. A key lesson for India is the necessity to develop a extra proactive, fairly than passive, strategic autonomy.
2025 has arguably been probably the most troublesome foreign-policy 12 months for Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he assumed energy in 2014. A terrorist assault in Indian-administered Kashmir in April was adopted by a four-day battle between India and Pakistan in Might. Whereas transient, the battle marked the worst interval of hostility between the 2 nations in a long time.
The India-Pakistan battle additionally grew to become a catalyst for the downturn within the India-U.S. relationship as Trump claimed credit score for the cessation of hostilities—a story refuted by New Delhi however one which Islamabad was solely too glad to echo. Including insult to harm, relations deepened between Islamabad and Washington, with the White Home internet hosting Pakistan Military chief Asim Munir twice because the battle. Modi and Trump had a cellphone dialog in June, throughout which Trump reportedly provided to host Modi and Munir on the White Home. Modi rebuffed Trump’s supply in keeping with New Delhi’s long-standing aversion to third-party mediation on India-Pakistan tensions and the Kashmir dispute particularly. This was adopted by a cooling of the India-U.S. relationship, as evidenced by the 2 leaders not talking once more till September.
Within the interim, the bilateral relationship underwent a speedy deterioration as each nations have been unable to seal a commerce deal by a stipulated deadline in August, which was adopted by India going through the very best of Trump’s tariffs. Trump’s insults of India as a “lifeless” financial system that does little or no enterprise with the US, which was supplemented by his commerce advisor Peter Navarro’s acerbic feedback referring to India as a “laundromat for the Kremlin,” additional eroded belief within the bilateral relationship.
Latest conciliatory statements by each leaders alludes to a de-escalation of tensions and a commerce deal finally being reached between each nations. Nonetheless, the sooner irrational exuberance in New Delhi in regards to the India-U.S. relationship, as evidenced by Indians being among the many most constructive a few second Trump time period, has pale. So have claims that Modi and Trump maintained a particular or privileged relationship. Modi prided himself on sustaining a customized international coverage of cultivating shut relations with key world leaders. Nonetheless, this was unable to discourage the wrath of Trump’s fickle and transactional international coverage.
At a extra basic stage, current developments level to broader challenges going through India’s international coverage. India’s long-standing dedication to strategic autonomy has been each a boon and a burden for the nation’s international coverage. On the one hand, it gives India with flexibility. This grew to become obvious when China-India relations deteriorated following border clashes in 2020. New Delhi responded by deepening cooperation with Washington, as evidenced by India embedding itself extra deeply within the U.S.-led institutional structure—by its upgraded engagement with the Quad, for instance.
This multialigned and diversified international coverage has provided India the benefit of not being beholden to anybody nation. Requested about this on the Munich Safety Convention in 2024, Indian Exterior Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar famous that India must be admired for sustaining “a number of choices” in its international coverage.
Nonetheless, the occasions of the final 12 months display the hubris of this place. Sustaining strategic autonomy turns into more difficult when India is compelled to decide on between main powers. That is what occurred when the Trump administration imposed secondary tariffs on India for its purchases of Russian oil as a way of making use of strain on Moscow to comply with a peace deal in Ukraine. As Russia-U.S. relations soured, New Delhi’s relations with Moscow got here below rising scrutiny in Washington.
Strategic autonomy has its roots within the Chilly Struggle idea of nonalignment. When India joined the worldwide group of unbiased nation-states in 1947, the scars of colonial rule made the nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, desperate to keep away from any entanglements that threatened the nation’s autonomy and independence. At its essence, nonalignment and strategic autonomy are about sustaining flexibility whereas pursuing relations with all main poles of affect within the worldwide system.
Nonalignment didn’t at all times work in observe. In the course of the Chilly Struggle, India’s strategic flexibility eroded when it confronted any existential risk, which compelled it to show to one of many superpowers for help. This grew to become obvious in 1962, when New Delhi contemplated nearer alignment with the US on the top of its struggle with China. It occurred once more in 1971, when India concluded a peace treaty with the Soviet Union forward of a struggle with Pakistan through which Islamabad aligned with China and the US.
Within the post-Chilly Struggle interval, strategic compulsions compelled India to desert the precept of nonalignment. New Delhi acknowledged that it wanted to reorient its exterior relations because the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the lack of key markets and preferential barter preparations. This fueled New Delhi’s rapprochement with the US. However India’s dedication towards sustaining an omni- or multialigned international coverage remained unchanged. If something, it grew to become extra pressing because the unipolar second following the top of the Chilly Struggle pale and great-power competitors returned to the fore.
However the current downturn in relations with the US exhibits the necessity for India to develop a extra proactive strategic autonomy. Modi’s participation within the current G-20 summit in South Africa and the conclusion of a trilateral expertise and innovation partnership with Australia and Canada display New Delhi’s ambition to be a voice of the worldwide south, a key associate of the West, and bridge between each. The Modi authorities has referred to India as a “Vishwamitra,” or buddy of the world. But there’s a distinction between being a buddy to the world and serving to the world make pals with each other. Regardless of sustaining shut relations with each Russia and the US, and each Iran and Israel, New Delhi has performed a restricted position in attempting to de-escalate current conflicts in Ukraine and the Center East (in contrast to different nations akin to Qatar, Turkey, Brazil, and even China). Have been India to play such a job, it could be in keeping with the necessary mediating position it as soon as performed when it was sarcastically a a lot weaker energy. Within the Nineteen Fifties, India was a outstanding voice in quite a few world conflicts—from the Korean Struggle to the Taiwan Strait crises.
As an alternative, India has chosen to stay distant. This grew to become evident with Modi’s absence from two necessary gatherings in October: the Gaza peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh and the East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur. Regardless of being invited to each, Modi selected to not attend. The truth that each conferences occurred in what India refers to as its “prolonged neighborhood” of East and West Asia (the Center East) illustrates New Delhi’s aloofness on the world stage.
Apparently, India’s archrival Pakistan provides a lesson in learn how to conduct a extra proactive international coverage. Islamabad is training its personal type of strategic autonomy, with outreach to China, the US, Russia, Iran, and the Gulf Arab states. Whereas New Delhi seeks to maintain its distance from geopolitical flashpoints, Islamabad is glad to leap in—from its position in serving to to facilitate the Sino-U.S. rapprochement within the late Sixties to allying with the US to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan within the Eighties and within the world struggle on terrorism within the 2000s to supporting the Center East’s safety structure by its lately concluded protection pact with Saudi Arabia.
Whether or not Pakistan has the means to maintain that is one other query, given the inherent contradictions of its international coverage—providing port tasks to each China and the US, for instance. Given instabilities internally and alongside its borders, how does Islamabad anticipate to supply prolonged deterrence to nations within the Center East? Nonetheless, this provides an instance of learn how to observe a extra proactive type of strategic autonomy than what is usually seen by New Delhi.
India must redefine what strategic autonomy means in a world of rising geopolitical uncertainty. This 12 months’s downturn in India-U.S. relations revealed that even the perceived certainty of India as a “pure ally” of the US can’t be taken without any consideration. India is below rising strain to make selections that it has to this point been reluctant to make. Making itself extra strategically indispensable to the worldwide system will make India much less susceptible to the whims of the US below Trump—or another nation. The Trump administration’s absent and generally destabilizing position in world boards, together with on the current COP30 and G20 summits, has created a void in world management. It couldn’t be a extra opportune second for India to step up.
