New Delhi should recognize the reality, be flexible and think strategically
Brahma Chellaney
India has long prided itself on charting an independent course in world affairs — cultivating friendships without dependence and partnerships without formal alliances. For years, that posture seemed not only principled but effective.
A nonaligned India enjoyed unusually warm ties across rival power centers. Some American strategists even described India as the ultimate “swing state” in an emerging multipolar order, capable of tilting the global balance through its choices.
Yet 2025 will be remembered as the year that exposed the fragility of these assumptions. A succession of external shocks revealed structural weaknesses in Indian foreign policy and forced New Delhi into increasingly uncomfortable strategic corners. The cumulative effect was not a single diplomatic failure but a broader loss of strategic room for maneuver.
The most jarring shock came from Washington. Under President Donald Trump’s second-term administration, U.S. policy toward a rising India turned overtly punitive. The imposition of 50% tariffs on Indian exports was more than a trade dispute; it was a political signal that the world’s largest democracy was now viewed less as a strategic partner and more as an economic rival to be squeezed.
This shift was underscored by the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy, which — unlike its 2017 predecessor — barely mentions India or the Quad and frames the relationship in narrowly transactional terms of “improving commercial relations.”
More galling for New Delhi was the document’s claim that Washington had “mediated” the May 2025 India-Pakistan ceasefire — an assertion India has vehemently rejected. For a country that has invested years in projecting itself as a net security provider and responsible regional power, the implication that it required American mediation was diplomatically humiliating.
The chill in ties was also visible at the personal level. Prime Minister Narendra Modi skipped the United Nations General Assembly and ASEAN summits, reportedly to avoid an awkward encounter with Trump, symbolizing how thoroughly the bonhomie between the two had evaporated. While the Trump administration has shown similar brusqueness toward America’s traditional allies, from Germany to Japan, the sting was sharper for India, which had grown accustomed to steadily deepening strategic ties with Washington.
If relations with the U.S. froze, India’s immediate neighborhood grew markedly colder.
For decades, New Delhi assumed that its surrounding region, though perpetually turbulent, could be managed through sustained engagement and economic outreach. In 2025, that assumption collapsed.
The most dramatic blow came with the announcement of a Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defense Pact declaring that “aggression against one is aggression against both.” For over a decade, Modi had invested heavily in cultivating Saudi Arabia as a strategic partner. The pact revealed the limits of that courtship and underscored Riyadh’s enduring security affinity with Islamabad.
At the same time, India’s own retaliatory military response to the Pahalgam terror attack ended in a ceasefire after merely three days, just as Indian forces appeared to have gained the upper hand. The abrupt halt highlighted how India’s escalation dominance is now constrained by shifting great-power calculations, narrowing its options in a crisis.
The sense of encirclement was compounded by its lingering border tensions with China, political turbulence in Nepal and Bangladesh’s slide into Islamist chaos. Rather than projecting confidence as a regional stabilizer, India in 2025 often appeared reactive, struggling to keep pace with fast-moving developments in its own backyard.
Adding to these pressures was the reemergence of a familiar and uncomfortable pattern: the U.S.-Pakistan security relationship. After two decades of Indian diplomatic efforts to isolate Pakistan internationally over its nexus with terrorist groups, New Delhi watched as Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief and revived a transactional partnership with Islamabad — highlighted by the Trump family’s lucrative cryptocurrency deal.
Perhaps most troubling was not any single diplomatic setback, but the muted domestic response to this cascade of reverses. A year marked by serious foreign-policy shocks generated surprisingly little introspection within India’s strategic community or political class.
Indian President Droupadi Murmu walks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi on Dec. 5. © Reuters
Part of the explanation lay in New Delhi’s tendency to reframe setbacks as strategy. India’s renewed outreach to Russia and tentative engagement with its principal rival, China, were presented as evidence of successful “multi-alignment.” In reality, the effort to mend fences with China was less a strategic choice than a compelled response to Western pressure. The rhetoric of strategic autonomy thus obscured a year in which India exercised less agency, not more.
A measure of hubris compounded the problem. Growing instability in India’s neighborhood exposed an inflated sense of New Delhi’s ability to shape political outcomes beyond its borders. Influence was assumed to be enduring when, in fact, it proved fragile.
If 2025 was the year of shocks, 2026 will be the year of hard decisions. India can no longer afford reactive diplomacy cloaked in reassuring slogans.
The relationship with the U.S., despite its deterioration, remains vital to India’s interests. A limited trade deal is likely, even as Indian officials insist they will not negotiate “with a gun to our head.” In reality, New Delhi already finds itself doing precisely that.
The danger is that U.S. economic coercion will extract significant concessions from India without delivering genuine strategic reassurance in return. India has now opened up its commercial nuclear power sector to private companies, including from abroad, and raised foreign direct investment in the insurance sector to 100% from 74%.
The era of lofty talk about U.S.-Indian strategic convergence has given way to cold commercial bargaining, a reality India must confront with clear-eyed pragmatism rather than wounded indignation.
India’s assumption of the BRICS presidency in 2026 will further test its diplomatic agility. Leading a grouping increasingly viewed by the Trump team as hostile will require high-wire diplomacy. New Delhi will seek to champion the Global South without endorsing the overtly anti-Western rhetoric of fellow-members China and Russia — a balance that will be difficult to sustain amid intensifying great-power rivalry.
The strategic landscape facing India has shifted decisively. The world has changed faster than India’s foreign-policy machinery has adapted.
The 2025 shocks serve as a warning to India that, in 2026, it should abandon complacency, question its own assumptions, and return to the principles that once underpinned its diplomatic success: realism over rhetoric, flexibility over dogma, and strategy grounded in hard choices rather than comforting narratives.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
Stagecraft and Statecraft 