How India's Multi-alignment Strategy Vexes Trump 2.0

The Tianjin Summit may have been the most talked about Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in memory, but it also evoked differing responses in the US and India. In India, rhetoric proclaimed India’s multi alignment amidst tensions with the US. In the US, there was a tendency to dismiss the summit as one of autocrats with little substantive output. In a social media post, US President Donald Trump stated: “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” The reality as always is somewhere in the middle.

After three and a half decades of a steady evolution of US-India partnership, the recent public fracas has resulted in India reverting to its default mode of multi alignment. India’s ideal world order is a multipolar world order as it is the only one in which India can exert its leverage.

Geopolitical and geo economic chaos resulting from a semi-isolationist and mercurial American presidency has led to talk of a reset in India-China relations and a renewed rhetoric about a ‘Russia-India-China’ trilateral. Despite closer alignment with the US and its Western and Asian allies, the former non-aligned country has maintained ties with Russia and China. In the summer of 2023, India’s top diplomat S. Jaishankar stated in an interview to The Economist that “there are three big Eurasian powers, Russia, China, and India... This is not transactional. This is geopolitical”.

Ever since the 2020 Galwan Valley clashes, relations between the two countries have been fraught on the diplomatic, economic and security fronts. The last high-level summit meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping took place in 2018. The two have avoided meeting at any multilateral venues—when India hosted the G20 summit in 2023, Xi did not attend.

Ever since the start of the second Trump administration, there has also been an improvement in India’s relations with China, something that has not escaped the notice of Washington. The two countries announced resumption of flights after five years, granting of visas, and the re-opening by China of access to a Hindu religious pilgrimage, the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra.

Further, after years of avoiding bilateral meetings with his Chinese counterpart, Modi attended the SCO Summit, and the Indian side played up the meetings with both Russia President Vladimir Putin and President Xi. In their bilateral meeting, the two countries referred to each other as “development partners not rivals”, and spoke of the need for “mutual respect, mutual interest and mutual sensitivity”.

For years, India has been seen as part of the US-led effort to diversify or decouple from China. Economic pressure from the current administration has led to the thawing of India’s ties with China. China is one of India’s top trading partners, but India runs a massive trade deficit with China. As India seeks to build its industrial base, it is also dependent upon the factory of the world for supplying everything—from spare parts to industrial equipment.

Post-Galwan India heightened its scrutiny of Chinese investments and banned TikTok and other Chinese apps. China too recalled Chinese engineers working at Apple factories in India and prevented the export of any industrial equipment and other industrial byproducts to India. In July 2025, after five years of export curbs on industrial equipment and byproducts critical to India’s manufacturing, China agreed to lift these curbs on fertilisers, rare earth magnets and minerals, and tunnel boring machines. If the current American administration moves away from the policy of friendshoring, then India may hedge by being open to more investment from China, in limited sectors of its economy.

Despite American pressure, and maybe because of it, India has also doubled down on relations with Russia. There is talk about a visit by Putin in December. India’s decades-old relationship with Russia has long exasperated American leaders, but under the second Trump administration, these ties are grating the bonds that underlie the US-India partnership.

In the eyes of the second Trump administration, Russia is a ‘dead economy’, and India’s purchase of oil and defense is enabling the Ukraine conflict. For India, however, Russia remains critical for strategic reasons. Every country’s geography dictates its foreign and security policy. Ever since the Sino-Soviet split of 1966, Russia—Soviet or post-Soviet—has remained India’s counterbalance to China on the Asian continental landmass.

India will thus continue to purchase defense equipment and energy from Russia. Over the last few decades, India has built a basket of defense suppliers—France, Israel and the US—but Russia remains one of the top defense suppliers. Since 2000, the Russians have sold India nearly $40 billion in arms, while the US has sold around $24 billion since 2008.

India also maintains close ties with Russia, at both multilateral and regional fora, including BRICS, SCO, and G20—both to prevent Chinese dominance and ensure Russia keeps India’s interests in minds in these largely non-Western fora.

However, Russia is a shadow of the erstwhile Soviet Union and heavily dependent on China. India’s worst nightmare would be a Sino-Soviet relationship reminiscent of the early 1960s. While India can purchase cheaper defense equipment from Russia, it is not compared to the state-of-the-art American equipment. However, even if the strategic relations with the US fray, India will turn to American allies in Europe and Asia, like France and Japan, instead of doubling down on Russian equipment.

Similarly, India seeks to manage its relationship with China. However, its northern neighbour was and remains India’s key threat and rival. Even if the US-led Indo-Pacific strategy and the Quadrilateral grouping—the Quad—itself are weakened, India will continue to work with its friends and partners in the region as the end of the day, this is India’s historical and geographical sphere of influence.

At the end of the day, both Delhi and Washington understand that India is not spearheading any anti-Western (or American) grouping. India’s interests lie in a closer strategic partnership with the US, just as any American administration that seeks to achieve global ambitions cannot ignore the world’s most populous country that is in a critical geography and has economic and military potential.

(Views expressed are personal)

Aparna Pande is director of the initiative on the future of India and South Asia at the Washington-based Hudson Institute.