10 March 2026
IP26038 | India in the Age of Trump: Seeking Autonomy amid Constraints
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Indian policymakers appreciate the importance of the United States for India’s future across domains such as economic growth, military upgrading and diplomatic goals. However, there is also deep historical cautiousness about the reliability of the United States, and under Trump 2.0, these instincts have been heightened. Nonetheless, India’s leaders are attempting to find strategies to engage the United States usefully in pursuit of India’s own interests.
• India’s relationship with China has improved from a few years ago but the underlying issues remain. Indian perceptions of China’s goals in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region feed into medium- to long-term Indian strategies to deal with the perceived threat from China.
• India’s short-term aim will be to revitalise the Quad while negotiating the conflicting goals the United States and India have for the grouping. Beyond the Quad, India’s leaders will look to the Middle East, East Asia and Europe to build a wider and deeper set of bilateral relationships in these regions to supplement India’s need for close relations with the United States in the medium to long term.
COMMENTARY
The India-US relationship has come a long way since the Cold War. Today, ties with the United States represent India’s most important strategic relationship. This is not surprising as it is the case for most countries, given the United States’ overwhelming global military and economic clout. Despite issues related to trade and tariffs, the United States will continue to be India’s most important strategic partner. For the Indian economy to move up to the next level, the US role is vital, and that is one key reason that India agreed to the bilateral trade deal last month with the second Trump administration, even though the negotiations were difficult and many details of the deal remain unclear. Militarily, India wants the ability to purchase US equipment as well as greater transfer of defence technology from the United States to upgrade its domestic defence industry. Diplomatically, the United States lends strategic weight to India’s pushback against China’s perceived attempts to craft a unipolar Asia by challenging India within its proximate neighbourhoods, namely South Asia and the Indian Ocean region.
However, there has been a long-standing and consistent lack of trust in the United States across different sections of the Indian state, especially the bureaucracy and the military, as well as the political class and society at large. This lens has consistently shaped Indian perceptions of and responses to the United States. It helps to explain why the notion of “strategic autonomy”, as Indian leaders have publicly espoused since the end of the Cold War, is largely a shorthand for autonomy from the United States. The more recent term, “multi-alignment”, is thus a more forceful and active iteration of the earlier non-alignment mantra, with India aligning with many, and not only the United States, in order to preserve its autonomy in foreign policy making.
In relation to China, having viewed the Chinese people like brothers in the 1950s, Indians feel betrayed that China unleashed a war on them in 1962. That war remains a key lens through which Indian policymakers, as well as large parts of India’s population, view their northern neighbour. Indian leaders feel China does not treat India as an equal and seeks to humiliate India whenever it gets the opportunity.
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi coming to power in 2014 and Dr S Jaishankar becoming foreign secretary in 2015, India attempted to reset the relationship. This involved trying to negotiate a grand compact with China to reconfigure the relationship. From the Indian side, this involved recognising that China will remain a strategic competitor but that India and China should ensure they do not engage in armed hostilities across the border. India assumed the border issue could be shelved while both countries continued to jostle for power and influence in various sub-regions like South Asia, the Indian Ocean region and even East Asia. In return for maintaining the peace along their border, India would deepen its economic relations with China further by acceding to a long-standing goal of China to increase its investments in India.
This Indian outreach culminated in two summits between Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, first in Wuhan in 2018 and then in Chennai in 2019. These came against the backdrop of the Doklam episode, in which India pushed back against China’s construction of a road at the India-Bhutan-Tibet tri-junction. Despite these two summits, in 2020 a full-blown face-off between Indian and Chinese troops occurred, with face-to-face scuffles in the Galwan Valley. For Indian policymakers, this confrontation confirmed their belief that China did not view India as its equal and thus would not agree to a grand compact. Instead, the lesson learnt was that China wanted to demonstrate that the border was India’s Achilles heel, an area where China could, when it wanted, apply pressure, causing significant damage to India’s sovereignty and a significant blow to India’s ruling party.
With US President Donald Trump returning to the White House in 2025, India assesses that China does not want hostilities at the border, given the difficult relationship it has with Trump specifically. Indian leaders also increasingly realise that China is key to India’s economic health and thus lifted some earlier restrictions on Chinese investments in India despite their growing trade deficit with China. At this point, India’s strategy is to improve its logistics access to the border regions with China. It has embarked on a huge infrastructural project to make these border areas more accessible for military logistics so that India will be better prepared to push back against the next Chinese incursion at the border. For Indian policymakers, the question is when – and not if – an incursion will happen. Also, India will continue to compete with China for power and influence across different sub-regions of the world, and one interesting site is the competition to define the Global South, its values and its goals.
Finally, there are some possible near-term goals that India will try to pursue in the context of the second Trump presidency. First, it will want to revive the Quad, the quadrilateral security dialogue involving India, the United States, Australia and Japan. This can only happen with the leaders’ summit scheduled in India (possibly later this year). The key issue for India is that there are contrasting approaches between the United States and India on the Quad. Trump seems to want a Quad more committed to military coordination between its members, while India will baulk at any notion of joining a military alliance. India wants the Quad to focus more on non-traditional security areas. Indian policymakers will have an uphill task under the current US administration to achieve this goal, but at a minimum, they will want Quad meetings to resume and joint statements to be issued as a signalling mechanism against China.
Second, India will increasingly look to deepen its existing ties with countries in the Middle East and Europe as part of its multi-alignment strategy. The Middle East is key for India from both a remittance angle and energy security considerations. Increasingly, the Middle East is being courted for investments in India. The current conflict in the region relating to Iran will complicate India’s strategy, given its historically warm relationship with Iran. In Europe, France is India’s closest partner and will remain so, but Indian policymakers will seek to improve India’s relationship with other European countries like Germany for both economic and diplomatic reasons. The UK-India Free Trade Agreement shows India’s keen desire to seek out and deepen relations with a larger range of counties to feed back into India’s economic growth. The key will remain preserving India’s autonomy by deepening its relations with a range of countries across East Asia, the Middle East and Europe while simultaneously forging a close relationship with the United States.
Sinderpal Singh is Senior Fellow and Assistant Director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS). He is also Coordinator of the institute’s Regional Security Architecture Programme and of the South Asia Programme.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Indian policymakers appreciate the importance of the United States for India’s future across domains such as economic growth, military upgrading and diplomatic goals. However, there is also deep historical cautiousness about the reliability of the United States, and under Trump 2.0, these instincts have been heightened. Nonetheless, India’s leaders are attempting to find strategies to engage the United States usefully in pursuit of India’s own interests.
• India’s relationship with China has improved from a few years ago but the underlying issues remain. Indian perceptions of China’s goals in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region feed into medium- to long-term Indian strategies to deal with the perceived threat from China.
• India’s short-term aim will be to revitalise the Quad while negotiating the conflicting goals the United States and India have for the grouping. Beyond the Quad, India’s leaders will look to the Middle East, East Asia and Europe to build a wider and deeper set of bilateral relationships in these regions to supplement India’s need for close relations with the United States in the medium to long term.
COMMENTARY
The India-US relationship has come a long way since the Cold War. Today, ties with the United States represent India’s most important strategic relationship. This is not surprising as it is the case for most countries, given the United States’ overwhelming global military and economic clout. Despite issues related to trade and tariffs, the United States will continue to be India’s most important strategic partner. For the Indian economy to move up to the next level, the US role is vital, and that is one key reason that India agreed to the bilateral trade deal last month with the second Trump administration, even though the negotiations were difficult and many details of the deal remain unclear. Militarily, India wants the ability to purchase US equipment as well as greater transfer of defence technology from the United States to upgrade its domestic defence industry. Diplomatically, the United States lends strategic weight to India’s pushback against China’s perceived attempts to craft a unipolar Asia by challenging India within its proximate neighbourhoods, namely South Asia and the Indian Ocean region.
However, there has been a long-standing and consistent lack of trust in the United States across different sections of the Indian state, especially the bureaucracy and the military, as well as the political class and society at large. This lens has consistently shaped Indian perceptions of and responses to the United States. It helps to explain why the notion of “strategic autonomy”, as Indian leaders have publicly espoused since the end of the Cold War, is largely a shorthand for autonomy from the United States. The more recent term, “multi-alignment”, is thus a more forceful and active iteration of the earlier non-alignment mantra, with India aligning with many, and not only the United States, in order to preserve its autonomy in foreign policy making.
In relation to China, having viewed the Chinese people like brothers in the 1950s, Indians feel betrayed that China unleashed a war on them in 1962. That war remains a key lens through which Indian policymakers, as well as large parts of India’s population, view their northern neighbour. Indian leaders feel China does not treat India as an equal and seeks to humiliate India whenever it gets the opportunity.
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi coming to power in 2014 and Dr S Jaishankar becoming foreign secretary in 2015, India attempted to reset the relationship. This involved trying to negotiate a grand compact with China to reconfigure the relationship. From the Indian side, this involved recognising that China will remain a strategic competitor but that India and China should ensure they do not engage in armed hostilities across the border. India assumed the border issue could be shelved while both countries continued to jostle for power and influence in various sub-regions like South Asia, the Indian Ocean region and even East Asia. In return for maintaining the peace along their border, India would deepen its economic relations with China further by acceding to a long-standing goal of China to increase its investments in India.
This Indian outreach culminated in two summits between Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, first in Wuhan in 2018 and then in Chennai in 2019. These came against the backdrop of the Doklam episode, in which India pushed back against China’s construction of a road at the India-Bhutan-Tibet tri-junction. Despite these two summits, in 2020 a full-blown face-off between Indian and Chinese troops occurred, with face-to-face scuffles in the Galwan Valley. For Indian policymakers, this confrontation confirmed their belief that China did not view India as its equal and thus would not agree to a grand compact. Instead, the lesson learnt was that China wanted to demonstrate that the border was India’s Achilles heel, an area where China could, when it wanted, apply pressure, causing significant damage to India’s sovereignty and a significant blow to India’s ruling party.
With US President Donald Trump returning to the White House in 2025, India assesses that China does not want hostilities at the border, given the difficult relationship it has with Trump specifically. Indian leaders also increasingly realise that China is key to India’s economic health and thus lifted some earlier restrictions on Chinese investments in India despite their growing trade deficit with China. At this point, India’s strategy is to improve its logistics access to the border regions with China. It has embarked on a huge infrastructural project to make these border areas more accessible for military logistics so that India will be better prepared to push back against the next Chinese incursion at the border. For Indian policymakers, the question is when – and not if – an incursion will happen. Also, India will continue to compete with China for power and influence across different sub-regions of the world, and one interesting site is the competition to define the Global South, its values and its goals.
Finally, there are some possible near-term goals that India will try to pursue in the context of the second Trump presidency. First, it will want to revive the Quad, the quadrilateral security dialogue involving India, the United States, Australia and Japan. This can only happen with the leaders’ summit scheduled in India (possibly later this year). The key issue for India is that there are contrasting approaches between the United States and India on the Quad. Trump seems to want a Quad more committed to military coordination between its members, while India will baulk at any notion of joining a military alliance. India wants the Quad to focus more on non-traditional security areas. Indian policymakers will have an uphill task under the current US administration to achieve this goal, but at a minimum, they will want Quad meetings to resume and joint statements to be issued as a signalling mechanism against China.
Second, India will increasingly look to deepen its existing ties with countries in the Middle East and Europe as part of its multi-alignment strategy. The Middle East is key for India from both a remittance angle and energy security considerations. Increasingly, the Middle East is being courted for investments in India. The current conflict in the region relating to Iran will complicate India’s strategy, given its historically warm relationship with Iran. In Europe, France is India’s closest partner and will remain so, but Indian policymakers will seek to improve India’s relationship with other European countries like Germany for both economic and diplomatic reasons. The UK-India Free Trade Agreement shows India’s keen desire to seek out and deepen relations with a larger range of counties to feed back into India’s economic growth. The key will remain preserving India’s autonomy by deepening its relations with a range of countries across East Asia, the Middle East and Europe while simultaneously forging a close relationship with the United States.
Sinderpal Singh is Senior Fellow and Assistant Director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS). He is also Coordinator of the institute’s Regional Security Architecture Programme and of the South Asia Programme.
