What has transpired in the last few months in India’s foreign policy is nothing short of transformative, at least in terms of how New Delhi engages with major powers in the international system. This moment of reckoning, more than anything, affirms the role of power in international affairs and more particularly the constraints that power asymmetry can inflict upon India’s ability to protect and promote its interests.
India’s aspirations to move toward self-reliance across the spectrum have long been embedded in its foreign policy strategy of maintaining good ties with multiple countries, and in the process, ensuring an externally conducive environment for its unimpeded growth.
But, the recent turn of events, and more particularly, dramatic shifts in its most important strategic partner, the United States, has infused a palpable sense of urgency to widen India’s sphere of partnerships and find tactical arrangements, where feasible, including with once estranged countries.
From public insults hurled on social media at India’s foreign policy decisions and economic growth prospects by U.S. President Donald Trump and his team to simultaneous efforts at damage limitation, calling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “friend” and “a great Prime Minister,” the mercurial nature of Trump’s presidency is on full display. This is more than optics. Trump’s tariffs have genuinely affected Indian businesses, mostly micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).
That the world order was changing was already apparent. Questions of hegemony, plus the economic and security engagements inherent since the end of World War II, have been undergoing a profound transition. However, it took a land war in Eastern Europe and Trump’s second coming in the White House to literally shake and stir concurrent notions of alliances, great power dynamics and introduce a new weaponization of trade and tariffs.
The world is dealing with a Washington that is undergoing deep divisions between those who still value a rules-based international order as key to sustaining U.S. global interests, and another group that sees attaching any value to a U.S.-led rules based order as nothing but a waste of American money, allowing other countries to free ride.
When Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election, India was seen as a country that would be broadly shielded from the uncertainties and rapid changes that his second presidency was sure to bring about. While India had to brace for the knock-on effects of his ascent to power, it was not one of the countries expected to be in the direct firing line of his policies. But the worse-case scenario, one that surely would have been played out in many simulation exercises for the sheer novelty of it, has become a reality, starting with Trump’s continually escalating tariffs aimed at India.
Now, tension between the U.S. and India is not limited to the economic sector, but has seeped into political trust and habits of cooperation that both sides have invested in for years.
What does this entail for the direction of India’s foreign policy strategy to maximize gains and minimize losses? Will it lead to a substantial shift in how Delhi chooses its partners in the international system? Will it precipitate a new shift away from the West to what New Delhi calls the “non-West,” as India doubles down on its Global South strategy and South-South cooperation? Does it mean an abrupt end to the North-South bridge that New Delhi aspired to become?
Does the new geopolitical churn make it all the more prudent for New Delhi to recalibrate but reinforce its multialignment strategy with a vengeance, to protect and promote its interests in an increasingly uncertain world?
Some would call this a world between orders, where the old order is passé but the new one is yet to fully emerge and a crisis of global leadership is becoming apparent.
Although New Delhi professes India’s interest as being best served in a multipolar world, such an outcome is not preordained. India is a significant pole in the multipolar order. While it was apparent that India would have to hedge its bets among multiple poles of power exploring and expanding its strategic options, the new turn of events have reinforced that imperative and made it more complex and exigent at the same time. Confusing strategic signals are emitted from Washington and the guardrails guiding its foreign and national security policies are being dismantled with each passing day. New Delhi has had to engage in more immediate tactical maneuvers and surely a deeper introspection is underway in the corridors India power, a contemplation of how to evolve and continue to build resilience in times such as these.
Evolving an effective grand strategy should essentially rely on a better appreciation of not only India’s rising national power but also its deficiencies. While India’s national power has shown tremendous growth in the absolute sense, global negotiations are predicated on comparison with other major powers, and in that sense, the growing challenges should propel India toward a new geometry of internal and external balancing. Even as it tries to stand firm and wriggle itself out of the tariff duel with the largest economy in the world, New Delhi would have to reassess its place and role in the Asian and global economic architecture, as it reboots new bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements.
Moreover, in the crucial areas of defense cooperation, India will have to manage its defense imports and missions of co-development and co-production simultaneously with the aim to become not only self-reliant but also a net exporter of defense products. Therefore, identifying areas of mutual interest but also reducing areas of overlap and competition with prospective partners particularly in the Global South needs further introspection and action. In the realm of new technologies, and in the race for new minerals and sources of new energy supply chains, India has some hard choices to make in terms of integration, political values and efficiency.
There are risks and opportunities involved in choosing sides and not choosing sides to retain autonomy. In the last few months, India’s pursuit of autonomy has undergone a stress test unlike any it has experienced.
Peace and stability are two words certain to find their place in the vision document of any country, irrespective of their political, economic and security orientations. But, operationally, it is a complex pursuit that requires the greatest powers of the day to exercise a certain level of caution and restraint, providing the strategic space for functional international relations to operate. The U.S. and China have interdependent economies, and that suggests the presence of a shock absorber in a relationship that is otherwise spiraling toward confrontation. However, what is really worrisome in the new great power dynamics, is that despite this interdependence there is still no architecture of building a relationship of deterrence, a new understanding on arms limitations, and strategic guardrails that could prevent inadvertent mistakes and accidents.
There is clearly a new geopolitical realignment and a new debate on U.S. decline, based not so much on structural deficiencies but on leadership or rather the lack of it in Washington. Nothing that comes out of this hyper-churn in international affairs is going to be automatically either a boon or a bane for India. It is going to be messy and the lines of partnerships are going to be murkier than ever before.