How to Survive in a Multialigned World

As the United States reevaluates its global commitments and questions the existing international order, longtime American allies and partners are seeking alternatives to foreign policy strategies that rely heavily on Washington. Canada, South Korea, and the European Union have all talked about building ties with a wider range of countries. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are hedging against U.S. unpredictability by cementing other partnerships; the Saudis, for instance, recently concluded a security deal with Pakistan. Such efforts aim to make countries less vulnerable to sudden changes in any single bilateral relationship and give them more options and greater autonomy in foreign policy decision-making.

Although many of these countries are only now pursuing diversification in their external relations, India has long adhered to this strategy. Balancing a variety of partners without committing fully to any one country or bloc has been the core of Indian foreign policy since the country achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Over the years, this policy has been given different labels—nonalignment, bi-alignment, multialignment, even omnidirectional engagement—but the approach has been the same. When successful, a diversified strategy has enabled New Delhi to avoid acquiescing to any one partner’s decisions and to play countries off one another to strengthen its own position.

Throughout the Cold War, India sought to strike a balance in its relations with the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as with several smaller powers and nonaligned countries, because it feared that one or both superpowers might be unreliable or coercive when New Delhi found itself in need. In the post–Cold War period, India has maintained its overall approach of avoiding full reliance on any one partner. Like an investor managing a complex portfolio, India has constantly rebalanced its set of relationships as new opportunities and risks have arisen. At times, this has meant significantly increasing its exposure to some partners—as it has arguably done in recent years by aligning itself with the United States on several security, economic, and technology issues.

But pressure from the second Trump administration is now leading India to adjust the relative weight of the United States in its portfolio of partners. President Donald Trump’s tariffs of up to 50 percent, calls to parley with Pakistan, and demands to reduce India’s oil imports from Russia have increased doubts about American reliability. These actions have also raised questions about whether New Delhi has aligned itself too closely with Washington. For many Indian policymakers, the uncertainty caused by Washington’s actions has reinforced the importance of diversification and bolstering other partnerships—not only with U.S. allies, such as France and Japan, but also with U.S. adversaries, including Russia.

With diversified foreign policies becoming the new global norm, India’s experience offers lessons for a world no longer shaped by American unipolarity. New Delhi’s pursuit of multiple partnerships helped India maximize its autonomy amid the superpower politics of the Cold War and has continued to do so in the U.S.-led order that has dominated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But policymakers around the world considering diversifying their own foreign ties must also understand the challenges of such a strategy. India has learned that it requires constantly cultivating, assessing, and rebalancing different relationships. Maintaining a diversified portfolio of partners also provides less of a safeguard against aggression than formal alliances do, so India has had to spend more on its own defense, develop a nuclear deterrent, and sometimes pull its punches against rivals. Without learning from India’s experiences, countries that now find themselves looking to adopt a similar strategy may end up merely exchanging overreliance on one country for overreliance on many.

DEPENDENCE AFTER INDEPENDENCE

India’s foreign policy orientation was forged when, like today, transformative technologies and great-power competition were upending existing global dynamics. The country emerged out of the partition of British India in 1947, at the dawn of the nuclear age and the advent of fierce competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The leaders of independent India, wary of inviting new forms of colonial domination, wanted to be self-reliant. But they quickly realized that sourcing military supplies, economic aid, and technical assistance required partnering with or depending on other countries. They feared, however, that an alliance with either the Soviet or the American bloc would be a straitjacket rather than a security blanket. Instead, New Delhi hoped that multiple partnerships would preserve Indian autonomy by preventing any one country or bloc from being able to force India to submit to its preferences.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, welcomed help from the United States, which hoped that a democratic India might counterbalance communism in Asia. In the early 1950s, New Delhi used American concern about the “loss” of China to the communist bloc to solicit economic and food assistance. Nehru also reached out to Moscow, but he initially found that the Soviet Union had little interest in India—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin believed India was too close to the West.

The downsides of having no partner with which to balance the United States were soon evident. Aiming to establish a peaceful periphery, New Delhi tried to engage rather than contain China, which angered American policymakers. They criticized India’s recognition of the Chinese communist regime and New Delhi’s unwillingness to fully support the United States and its United Nations allies during the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953. U.S. legislators saw India’s nonalignment as immoral and akin to siding with the Sino-Soviet bloc. They tried to make any assistance contingent on India curbing its engagement with the communist bloc or giving the United States access to Indian raw materials and critical minerals such as manganese. Congress eventually passed a food assistance bill for India, in 1951, without requiring New Delhi to change its foreign policy or give resources to the United States, but it came with the expectation that India would not offer strategic materials to the communist bloc.

Geopolitical changes in the mid-1950s gave New Delhi more room to maneuver. Seeking influence among countries that were not aligned with the United States or the Soviet Union, Moscow offered India diplomatic, economic, and military assistance—on terms that India found attractive, including support for India’s state-owned industrial sector—and tolerated New Delhi’s insistence on refusing to side with any one bloc. Nehru felt that if India had better ties with the Soviet Union, the United States would take India more seriously. Indeed, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations chose to strengthen ties with India. The United States became invested in ensuring that democratic India wouldn’t fail while communist China succeeded. With both Moscow and Washington now interested in working with New Delhi, Indian policymakers believed that their gambit had succeeded. They had played the two powers against each other and garnered economic assistance, military supplies, and technical knowledge—which not only helped New Delhi’s nation-building efforts but also bolstered its autonomy by allowing India to diversify its dependence.

STRINGS ATTACHED

But diversification did not bring deterrence. In 1962, India suffered a humiliating defeat after China attacked as part of a dispute over the two countries’ shared border. During the war, Moscow sided with China, its ally, over India, merely its friend. The United States and its allies aided India militarily, but New Delhi found that the help came with strings attached: Washington subsequently tried to pressure India to reach a settlement with Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir, to limit its defense budget and spend more on development, and to cease its military acquisitions from Moscow. If the United States had remained its only option, India might have had no choice but to accede to these demands after the war, but the growing Sino-Soviet split ensured that Moscow again wanted to work with India. Instead of making Indian leaders reconsider their aversion to alliances, this entire experience made it even clearer that any single partner could be unreliable, as the Soviet Union had been, or coercive, as the United States had been.

India’s 1965 war with Pakistan further reinforced the wisdom of its diversified strategy. New Delhi again turned to the United States when China threatened to intervene on behalf of Pakistan. Washington warned Beijing against getting involved, but it also suspended military and economic aid to both South Asian belligerents to pressure them to reach a cease-fire. Yet India still had access to Soviet military supplies, which policymakers in New Delhi saw as a vindication of an approach based on securing multiple partnerships.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who came to power in 1966, sought to further expand India’s portfolio of partners. She reached out to countries that shared India’s concerns about China, including Australia, Japan, and Singapore. Worried about waning U.S. interest in India and Soviet overtures to Pakistan, Gandhi also tried to reduce India’s need for either superpower by going so far as to try to normalize relations with rival Beijing in the late 1960s, albeit unsuccessfully. Moscow offered India a formal treaty to establish closer relations and provide more assistance, but Gandhi declined because of concern about overdependence on any single partner. Only when India needed to deter China from intervening in another war with Pakistan, in 1971, did New Delhi sign this treaty, tilting India’s overall balance toward the Soviet Union after Washington switched from containing to engaging Beijing.

India’s foreign policy approach does not exempt it fully from picking sides.

The Soviet Union provided military supplies and diplomatic support to India in its war with Pakistan, but Soviet help, too, came with limits—Moscow pressed Gandhi to meet with the Pakistani leader to avoid a war and later declined an Indian request to publicly warn the United States against intervening. To offset potential overreliance on the Soviet Union, Indian policymakers wanted to repair ties with Washington, in the 1970s. But the United States no longer needed a counterweight to China—which after rapprochement in 1971–72 was now working with the U.S.-led bloc against the Soviet Union—and wasn’t interested in India economically. So India looked for other partners, including in the developing world, and redoubled its efforts to build a nuclear program, which could provide an independent deterrent and help hedge against overreliance on the Soviet Union.

Such an approach weathered domestic convulsions. When the Indian National Congress lost power in 1977 to the opposition Janata coalition, Indian leaders still pursued a diversified foreign policy. Prime Minister Morarji Desai criticized Gandhi, his predecessor, for making India too dependent on the Soviet Union. He proposed a program of genuine nonalignment in which India would simultaneously maintain ties with the Soviet Union, repair relations with the United States, normalize ties with rival China, and strengthen domestic economic and military capabilities. When Gandhi returned to power in 1980, she also followed this policy.

But Indian governments faced a problem as they tried to diversify: many potential partners, especially those in the West, did not see India as important to their objectives and thus had limited interest in engaging New Delhi. As a result, in the 1970s and 1980s, India continued to depend heavily on the Soviet bloc. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, India had no backup plan. Facing foreign policy and financial crises, New Delhi had to once more rebalance its portfolio of partners.

TILTING TOWARD WASHINGTON

In the post–Cold War period, recalibrating has meant investing in new partnerships and reviving old ones. In 1992, India established full diplomatic ties with Israel, which New Delhi had previously not done because of its ties with the Arab world and solidarity with the Palestinian cause. And India renewed partnerships in East and Southeast Asia, including with countries such as Japan and Singapore, whose strong economies could help India grow. India’s liberalizing reforms and, subsequently, its 1998 nuclear tests, bolstered its economic outlook and defensive capabilities. These moves also increased global interest in India, widening New Delhi’s options for partners—including, once again, the United States.

As in the twentieth century, India’s foreign policy approach in the twenty-first century has remained consistent no matter which parties have held power in New Delhi. In 2003, the foreign minister in the coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party noted a “desire for balance, for noninterference, and for independence of action” as the motivation for India’s strategy. That government and the subsequent coalition led by the Congress party strengthened ties with the United States while also exploring economic and multilateral cooperation with China. India also joined issue-based groups, including the Quad, with Australia, Japan, and the United States, and BRICS, alongside Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa.

The current BJP-led coalition government has continued to pursue diversification. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in power since 2014, has looked to several different partners for diplomatic support, defense equipment, markets for Indian goods and services, commodities (including energy and critical minerals), investment, jobs, and technology. Like its predecessors, the current government has also actively tried to reduce overreliance on any one partner in key sectors. For instance, Russia has gone from being the source of 76 percent of Indian defense imports in terms of value between 2000 and 2004 to 36 percent between 2020 and 2024.

Even as India’s broader approach has been consistent, the depth and breadth of its partnerships have changed as the country’s interests—and available collaborators—have evolved. In the early 2000s, India saw promise in a closer partnership with China, but New Delhi has adopted a warier posture after military standoffs in 2013, 2014, 2017, and especially 2020, when the first fatal military clash in 45 years occurred along the disputed Chinese-Indian border. India has shifted from looking to China to offset its growing ties with the United States and Europe to finding ways to balance against Beijing as tensions have risen. Russia, which has itself deepened its dependence on China, has become a less relevant strategic partner than in the past. Although New Delhi will not break its ties with Moscow, the benefits of close relations with Russia have diminished as India prioritizes accessing and developing advanced technologies.

In contrast, in the last decade, Modi’s government has continued to expand India’s defense and security, economic, and technological cooperation with the United States based on a shared desire to counter China’s growing assertiveness. This U.S.-Indian strategic alignment has resulted, for instance, in increasingly sophisticated military exercises, including a recent antisubmarine drill off the coast of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, and technology collaboration, such as Google’s plans to build a $15 billion artificial intelligence hub in India.

Tilting toward Washington has not meant abandoning diversification, however. Even as India has moved closer to the United States, its leaders have pursued balance by deepening other partnerships. The Modi government has invested in ties with Indo-Pacific partners, such as Australia and Japan, which share India’s concerns about China. It has renewed relations with traditional European partners, including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and made new efforts to build ties across other parts of Europe. To balance the increasing weight of the West in its portfolio of partners, New Delhi has also explored opportunities across the developing world. India, for instance, sold antiship missiles to the Philippines, signed an economic agreement to boost trade with the United Arab Emirates, and is working to obtain critical minerals such as lithium from Argentina.

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

India believes this diversification has paid off. Being able to pick from a menu of countries has helped it counter rivals and extract benefits from partners. It has also allowed India to hedge against the risk of overreliance when a partner’s foreign policy priorities change. When Moscow abandoned India during its 1962 war with China, when Washington did the same during India’s 1971 crisis with Pakistan, or when Moscow stayed neutral in the 2020 border clashes between China and India in the Himalayas, New Delhi could turn to other options for support.

More significantly, drawing support from multiple sources has been crucial to building India’s domestic capabilities, which, in turn, have made it a more attractive partner. India’s domestic space sector, for instance, benefited from partnerships with multiple powers. France and the United States enabled India’s access to expertise and technology in the 1960s; then, after Washington imposed export controls, the Soviet Union stepped in to support India’s space ambitions. Today, India is a strong player in the space domain in its own right. It sent a Mars orbiter into space, helps other countries launch satellites, and has collaborated with NASA on an observation satellite and the U.S. Space Force on a proposed semiconductor fabrication facility.

Policymakers have learned that this approach requires being pragmatic rather than perfectionistic about autonomy. Although leaders want full control over their own choices, achieving India’s objectives often requires them to exercise restraint or make tradeoffs. For instance, India refrained from condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or publicly criticizing Trump when he imposed tariffs on India, prioritizing the need to maintain advantageous partnerships over the desire to express opposition. India’s foreign policy approach also does not exempt it fully from picking sides. In critical and emerging technologies, for instance, when India must choose between Chinese or Western infrastructure, it has opted for the West. This is not to curry favor with the United States but because India does not want to increase its vulnerability to its rival China.

Diversification is a high-maintenance strategy.

India has also discovered diversification’s downsides. When it has managed diversified relationships poorly, India has pleased none of its partners and annoyed all of them. Early in the Vietnam War, for instance, Washington wanted India to criticize U.S. actions less, while Moscow was unhappy it would not criticize the United States more. In addition, in sectors in which India has not developed its own capabilities, a diversified strategy may make it reliant on multiple counterparts. Then, with each partner navigating its own constantly shifting priorities, India’s dependencies can leave it exposed not only to a single country but also to a wider range of rivalries and geopolitical risks. This has been the case in the Middle East, where multiple countries—often fighting one another—are key diplomatic partners for India and provide oil, natural gas, investment, military equipment, and jobs to India and its citizens.

Diversification can also lead to suboptimal choices. Unwilling to be fully dependent on one country, the Indian military looks to several countries to procure defense platforms, some of which are incompatible. Buying defense products from Russia can limit India’s ability to acquire more advanced technology from the United States. Although these practices might not maximize military effectiveness, India has persisted with them in part to preserve its autonomy.

An even bigger disadvantage is the questionable deterrent effect of diversification compared with formal alliances. It is debatable, for instance, whether China would have attacked in 1962 had India been under the security umbrella of either the Soviet Union or the United States. Recognizing this shortcoming in its diversification strategy, New Delhi subsequently signed an air defense agreement with Washington in 1963 and pursued the treaty with Moscow in 1971, both of which called for consultations in the event of a Chinese attack. These agreements sent a signal to Beijing and offered India insurance in exchange for ceding some autonomy. In recent years, India has drawn closer to the United States to counter a rising China, but New Delhi would likely still refuse any offer of an alliance with Washington because it believes its conventional and nuclear weapons can help offset diversification’s deterrence disadvantage without tying its hands.

Ultimately, diversification is a high-maintenance strategy. India’s leaders must constantly assess how each of the country’s relationships affect its other partnerships. For instance, India has had to limit its connections with Iran to stay in the good graces of Israel, the United States, and the Gulf states. Sometimes India’s balancing act falters. In September 2025, for example, the Indian military participated in a Russian military exercise that simulated a nuclear attack against Europe, upsetting EU member states at a time when Brussels was attempting to convince them to approve a trade deal with India. At least two of those states—Poland and Romania—have since set up diplomatic and defense meetings with India’s rival Pakistan.

READY TO RECALIBRATE

Many countries besides India are now trying to craft foreign policies that allow them to hedge without fencing themselves in. They would do well to study India’s successes in playing partners off one another to improve its national security, accelerate its domestic development, and deal with partners’ unreliability. But they should also analyze diversification’s potential weaknesses, including how it can leave a country exposed to multiple partners’ shifting priorities, miss out on cooperation opportunities to prioritize autonomy, and limit deterrence compared with a strong and secure alliance.

Despite these shortcomings, India’s experience continues to reinforce its desire to establish multiple partnerships over a great-power alliance. In the face of unexpected pressure from the United States in Trump’s second term, New Delhi is now seeking to diversify even further. This strategy will look different than it did during the Cold War, when India could balance the Soviet Union and the United States. Such clear options are not available today given India’s comprehensive rivalry with China. Instead, New Delhi has made significant overtures to Europe, including accelerating efforts to conclude trade agreements with the United Kingdom and the European Union. It is also deepening defense and economic security partnerships with Australia and Japan; exploring new areas of cooperation with South Korea, including on shipbuilding; and repairing relations with Canada. And it is maintaining its partnership with Russia while trying to stabilize ties with China, which was on display when Modi met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a regional forum in China, in August 2025.

But even as India persists with diversification, it does not want to fully replace its partnership with the United States. India will continue to try to maintain and, in certain areas, even reinforce its connection to Washington. New Delhi understands that ties with the United States still enable India to enhance its own capabilities and give it leverage with its rivals and partners. For instance, U.S. investments have been indispensable in India’s efforts to boost its semiconductor manufacturing industry. What India gains from working with the United States is crucial for India to make itself a desirable partner—to Washington and to the growing number of countries looking to diversify their own partnership portfolios.

Countries that want to diversify their foreign policy strategies will likely find themselves in a situation like India’s. Rather than decoupling from the United States, whose power and influence remain significant, these countries can reduce risk and improve their resilience by developing closer relations with a variety of partners and speeding up efforts to build their own economic and security capabilities. But countries that adopt this strategy not only face the promises and downsides of a diversified approach; they also make the whole web of international relationships exponentially more intertwined. Any geopolitical change could set off a chain reaction of consequences as countries simultaneously rebalance their own carefully calibrated portfolios of partners. When these countries move beyond alliances to multialignment, how effectively they manage their multiple relationships will determine whether a diversified world will tend toward safety and stability or be thrown into bouts of upheaval.