India’s Tightrope in a Post-American World Order

As American dominance wanes and rivalries sharpen, India must resist the lure of alignment and instead master the art of multipolar manoeuvre.

India has long prided itself on strategic autonomy. From Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment during the Cold War to Narendra Modi’s more supple rhetoric of “multi-alignment,” Indian leaders have sought to avoid the trap of becoming an appendage to one great power’s ambitions. That instinct is being tested anew. America’s primacy, once assumed to be the foundation of the global order, is fraying. China’s rise, Russia’s defiance, Europe’s weakness and the turmoil of West Asia are producing a world that is neither unipolar nor orderly. The temptation to cling to a single patron is strong. The wiser course is harder: to keep many relationships in play while never surrendering independence.

This tension is not new. As India’s first prime minister, Nehru helped found the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 1950s. He hoped to chart a middle path between Washington and Moscow, insisting that newly independent states should not be dragged into rival blocs. Indira Gandhi, his daughter and successor, tilted more openly towards the Soviet Union in the 1970s, particularly after the 1971 Bangladesh war, when American support for Pakistan left Delhi wary. By the late 1990s, Atal Bihari Vajpayee began steering India closer to the United States, a course deepened by the 2008 civil nuclear deal. Yet through all these turns, one thread remained: the insistence on room to manoeuvre.

That thread is once again under strain. The Ukraine war has exposed the contradictions of Western diplomacy. Washington and Brussels speak of defending sovereignty, but they have long been reluctant to admit their own role in sowing mistrust with Moscow. NATO’s eastward march in the 1990s, dismissed at the time as benign, left Russia convinced that its security had been betrayed. Works like Mary Elise Sarotte’s meticulous history ‘Not One Inch’ have conclusively demonstrated how NATO’s post-Cold War eastward expansion, while celebrated in the West, was seen in Moscow as a betrayal of assurances given to Mikhail Gorbachev. The American hand in Ukraine’s 2014 revolution further hardened the Kremlin’s view that confrontation was inevitable. The result is a brutal war with no easy end.

For India, which still relies on Russian arms even as it courts American technology, the lesson is that peace is not sustained by slogans but by recognising the interests of all sides. A ceasefire that ignores Russia’s security anxieties is unlikely to endure. To align unquestioningly with one camp is to risk inheriting its quarrels and its blind spots.

The unreliability of America as a partner is another recurrent theme. The recent tariffs imposed under Donald Trump (some of them maintained under Joe Biden) is likely to hit Indian exporters hard. The much-hyped notion that global supply chains will seamlessly migrate from China to India is, in truth, peripheral to Washington’s calculus. Despite grand talk of a ‘Indo-Pacific partnership,’ American trade policy is shaped less by strategic logic than by domestic politics. Indian firms, from steel producers to IT companies, know that a Congress in thrall to protectionist lobbies can upend carefully cultivated ties overnight.

Yet India cannot afford to spurn America either. Defence cooperation, intelligence-sharing and access to cutting-edge technologies make Washington an indispensable partner. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, brings India together with the US, Japan and Australia in an emerging architecture to counterbalance China in the Indo-Pacific. Naval exercises in the Indian Ocean signal both deterrence and solidarity. But the danger lies in mistaking tactical alignment for strategic convergence.

China itself presents a conundrum. Skirmishes along the Himalayan border, most recently in Ladakh, have poisoned public opinion. Suspicion of Beijing’s global designs is widespread. Yet the arithmetic is unavoidable: together, India and China account for nearly 40 percent of humanity and a rising share of technological capability. To treat the relationship solely through the lens of military rivalry is to miss the larger stakes. A boundary settlement, however remote today, would free both sides to shape a genuinely multipolar order. It would also strengthen India’s case for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council - an omission that many see as the most glaring defect in the current system.

Elsewhere, global trade patterns are shifting in ways that favour nimble powers. The fastest growth in commerce lies not in the transatlantic economies but in Africa, West Asia and Southeast Asia. The BRICS bloc, once mocked as a mere acronym, is acquiring heft as it experiments with new financial mechanisms and explores alternatives to the dollar-dominated system. For India, this underscores the importance of diversifying export markets and investment destinations beyond the West.

Europe offers little reassurance. Leaders in Berlin, Paris and Brussels may grumble privately about the costs of American strategy but rarely act on their own. Their economies bear the brunt of energy shocks and sluggish growth, while their diplomacy remains tethered to Washington. India cannot pin its future on a continent so risk-averse and indecisive.

Nowhere is the peril of over-alignment more evident than in West Asia. America’s unqualified support for Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, condemned by much of the world as collective punishment, is driven less by principle than by domestic lobbies and evangelical politics. India, which has long balanced ties with both Israel and the Arab world, cannot afford to follow Washington blindly. Millions of Indian workers in the Gulf and the steady flow of oil tankers from the region make neutrality, however uncomfortable, a strategic necessity.

Underlying all this is a paradox of power. America is, by geography and strength, the most secure nation in history. Yet it squanders that security through overreach, plunging into conflicts that sap its credibility. India’s risk is different but related: as its economy and influence expand, so will the temptation to conflate confidence with invulnerability. Strategic autonomy requires constant vigilance against hubris.

What then should India do? Three rules stand out. First, treat every great power with caution. Washington, Beijing and Moscow will always put their own interests first; India must do the same. Second, diversify relentlessly. Partnerships with American tech firms, Russian defence suppliers, Middle Eastern energy exporters, African markets and Southeast Asian allies all serve as hedges against dependency. Third, think beyond today’s conflicts. A genuinely multipolar world will not emerge by default. It must be shaped through coalitions of the willing, where India, as one of the few countries able to talk to all sides, is uniquely positioned to lead.

History provides reminders of what such balancing entails. In the 1950s, Nehru’s policy of non-alignment sought to steer India clear of Cold War entanglements, only for the 1962 war with China and the 1971 treaty with the Soviet Union to expose its limits. Later, India’s economic liberalisation of the 1990s was catalysed by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, forcing New Delhi to look westward. Each inflection point illustrates the truth that India adapts not out of choice but out of necessity, and it survives by keeping its strategic options open.

The old slogans of non-alignment may sound dated, but their logic remains. The global order is shifting from American tutelage to something messier and more dangerous. India’s task is not to stand aside but to engage on its own terms as neither supplicant to Washington nor as Beijing’s satellite, but an independent power which is shaping the rules rather than accepting them.

That is a hard path, requiring dexterity abroad and discipline at home. Yet it is the only one worthy of a country that aspires to be a principal architect of the 21st century.

(Dr. Kishore Paknikar is the former Director, Agharkar Research Institute, Pune and Visiting Professor, IIT Bombay. Views personal.)