India’s Strategic Partnerships in an Era of U.S. Unpredictability
Article by Rashi Randev
Richard Nixon had a theory. If your adversaries genuinely cannot tell whether you are rational or reckless, they will hesitate. They will concede things they would never concede to a predictable opponent. Nixon called it the madman theory, and he used it to keep Hanoi and Moscow permanently off balance. Donald Trump has not invented anything new; he has simply rediscovered the same playbook and applied it to a world far more interconnected than Nixon’s.
The difference is that Nixon’s unpredictability was largely a performance, calibrated and contained. Trump’s is structural. It reaches into trade policy, alliance commitments, and strategic signalling simultaneously. And for countries like India, which spent the better part of two decades carefully building a relationship with Washington, that structural unpredictability is a serious problem.
The Washington Recalculation
India’s foreign policy instinct, going back to Nehru, has been to keep its options open. Non-alignment was not simply an ideological position; it was a survival strategy for a newly independent country that could not afford to be anyone’s client state. That instinct never fully disappeared, even as India moved closer to the United States after the Cold War ended.
By the 2010s, the relationship with Washington had become genuinely substantive — defence cooperation, technology transfers, intelligence sharing, and a shared interest in managing China’s rise. India was not formally allied with the U.S., but it was close enough that its strategic planning increasingly assumed American reliability. The Quad, for instance, only makes sense if Washington is a consistent partner.
That assumption is now harder to hold. The Trump administration imposed tariffs of up to 50 per cent on certain Indian exports, among the steepest applied to any country that Washington simultaneously calls a strategic partner. The message was clear enough: the relationship is transactional, and India should not mistake goodwill for a guarantee.
Russia: The Partnership Washington Dislikes
India’s relationship with Russia is old, deep, and genuinely awkward for American policymakers to accept. Soviet-era defence ties created dependencies that never fully unwound; a significant portion of India’s military hardware still traces back to Russian origins. New Delhi has been buying Russian oil at discounted rates since the Ukraine war began, and it has resisted Western pressure to isolate Moscow in multilateral forums.
In May, when Foreign Minister Jaishankar met his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in New Delhi, the joint language about multipolarity and strategic diversification was pointed. Both sides know that “de-risking from Western unpredictability” is what that language actually means. Washington reads it the same way and does not like it.
The pressure on India to choose sides in the Russia-West rivalry has grown under Trump’s second term, partly because the U.S. wants to cut off the revenue streams that sustain Russia’s military. India’s position on buying Russian oil, maintaining defence ties, and refusing to condemn the invasion sits uncomfortably with its simultaneous role as a Quad partner. New Delhi has not shown any inclination to resolve that discomfort by abandoning Moscow. It has instead doubled down on the argument that strategic autonomy is non-negotiable.
China: Managed Rivalry, Not Friendship
The border standoff that began in Galwan in 2020 and consumed five years of diplomatic energy has not been resolved so much as carefully set aside. India and China have restored some normal functioning, like direct flights and resumed border trade discussions, Modi’s first visit to Beijing in seven years on the horizon, but nobody in New Delhi is under any illusion that the underlying competition has softened.
What has changed is the calculation. Trump’s erratic approach to both India and China has had one unintended consequence: it has given the two Asian giants a quiet incentive to reduce mutual friction, at least on the margins. Neither wants to fight a two-front strategic contest simultaneously. The border remains tense, the rivalry in the Indian Ocean is real, and China’s relationship with Pakistan adds another layer of complexity. But escalation serves neither side right now, and both governments appear to understand that.
India’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean reflects a more assertive reading of its own interests. Roughly 95 per cent of India’s trade by volume moves through these waters. China’s expanding port infrastructure across the region, what analysts call the ‘string of pearls’, is a direct challenge to India’s sense of primacy in its own maritime neighbourhood. New Delhi has responded by deepening partnerships with island nations, expanding coast guard cooperation, and signalling that it sees itself as the region’s primary security provider. That is a significant shift in posture for a country that historically preferred restraint.
The Indo-Pacific and the Mid-Power Play
India’s recent moves with the Philippines are worth noting precisely because they do not fit neatly into any great power framework. The Philippines is not a major economy or a military heavyweight, but it sits at the edge of the South China Sea, it has its own territorial disputes with Beijing, and it has been leaning into its American alliance while simultaneously looking for additional partners. India fits that bill.
This strategy is part of a broader pattern. India is building relationships with mid-sized countries across ASEAN, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America that are similarly trying to navigate a world where the U.S. is powerful but unpredictable and China is powerful but alarming. India’s pitch to these countries is essentially: we are not asking you to choose sides, and neither are we. BRICS gives India one multilateral home for this approach; the Global South framing gives it a political identity that does not depend on Washington’s approval.
What Strategic Autonomy Actually Costs
It is worth being honest about the tensions in India’s position. Maintaining deep defence ties with the U.S. while buying Russian oil creates real friction. Engaging cautiously with China while building the Quad creates a strategic ambiguity that sometimes serves India and sometimes confuses its partners. Leading the Global South while sitting in the G20’s wealthy-country conversations involves a degree of double positioning that other countries notice.
None of this is disqualifying. Most major powers manage similar contradictions. But India’s balancing act is more visible than most, and it becomes harder to sustain as the pressure to choose sides intensifies. The Trump tariffs are partly about economics, but they are also a signal: relationships that look like partnerships from a distance need to actually deliver when Washington calls.
India’s answer, so far, has been to spread its bets further rather than resolve the tension. More partners, more forums, more frameworks. The logic is sound: a country with diverse relationships is more resilient than one dependent on any single alliance. But resilience is not the same as influence, and India’s ambition is not merely to survive U.S. unpredictability but to emerge from this period as a genuinely decisive actor in global affairs.
The Bottom Line
The world India is navigating in 2026 is messier than the one it planned for a decade ago. Washington is unreliable. Beijing is ambitious. Moscow is isolated but still essential to India’s defence supply chain. The Global South is a useful platform but not a substitute for hard power.
India’s response — deepen ties with Russia, stabilise the border with China, build mid-power partnerships, and refuse to let any single relationship become a dependency — is the right instinct. Whether it is enough depends on whether India can convert strategic flexibility into something more durable: the kind of institutional weight and independent capability that makes other countries want to stay close regardless of what Washington does next.
That is the work in front of New Delhi. The partnerships are being built. The harder question is what India intends to do with them.
