The Latest Modi-Trump Summit Showcased India’s Multi-Alignment Strategy

By always keeping its options open, India hopes to motivate other partners to offer it even better deals, ultimately deciding upon whichever proposal is best for its objective national interests as its leadership sincerely considers them to be.

Modi and Trump met in DC last week, but their meeting was largely overshadowed in the media by Trump’s call with Putin several days prior, which led to them initiating peace talks on Ukraine. Many observers might have therefore missed how this latest summit showcased India’s multi-alignment strategy. Their joint statement can be read here while RT summarized the key takeaways here. The main outcomes are that India and the US plan to cooperate more closely on trade, military, and energy.

These plans were agreed to at a crucial moment in the global systemic transition whereby multipolarity has finally become inevitable but the final form thereof has yet to take shape. The US wants to remain the most important player in global affairs while India wants to play a greater role commensurate with its demographic and economic size. These goals aren’t mutually exclusive since they agreed to work together in pursuit of them as can be understood by their joint statement.

Unlike the Biden Administration that sought to geopolitically contain India and meddle in its internal affairs, which was analyzed here last year, the Trump Administration wants to repair the damage that its predecessor dealt to their ties so that India can serve as a partial counterweight to China. The quid pro quo though is that India has to rebalance its trade with the US by reducing tariffs on American products, though it’s being incentivized to do so by promises of closer military and energy cooperation.

To that end, the US is dangling the possibility of offering India F-35 fighter jets and becoming its leading fossil fuel supplier, though this openly competes with Russia’s leading roles in each Indian industry. Nevertheless, India’s acceptance of these long-term goals shouldn’t be misinterpreted or spun as anti-Russian, but rather as yet another example of its multi-alignment between competing poles. To explain, India will never turn down friendly proposals, but it also won’t accept such as a snub to anyone else.

By always keeping its options open, India hopes to motivate other partners to offer it even better deals, ultimately deciding upon whichever proposal is best for its objective national interests as its leadership sincerely considers them to be. In this context, India is accepting the US’ olive branches extended by Trump to help repair the damage that Biden dealt, all without having tangibly committed to any of this in an irreversible way since the only thing that was agreed to was the intent to move in this direction.

There’s still some trouble in Indo-US ties too, not least of which is Trump’s demand that Modi drastically lower his country’s famously high tariffs, as well as the American leader’s continued sanctions on Russian oil and his threat to modify or rescind his first administration’s sanctions waiver for Iran’s Chabahar Port. These factors might slow down the rapprochement that he sought to initiate during their summit and could even backfire if India defiantly scales up oil imports from Russia and trade with Iran.

After all, replacing Russia’s leading roles in India’s military and energy industries risks forcing its decades-long strategic partner into a relationship of potentially disproportionate dependence with China out of desperation to replace this lost revenue, which India has hitherto done its utmost to avert. That scenario could lead to China leveraging its senior position to coerce Russia into curtailing the export of military spares and new equipment to India as part of power play for resolving their border disputes in its favor.

If India let that happen, then it would essentially agree to ceding its hard-earned strategic autonomy by making its security dependent on the US deterring China on its behalf, which can’t be taken for granted and is the whole reason why India defied US pressure thus far to distance itself from Russia. Modi might therefore propose some compromises from Trump such as sanctions waivers on Russian oil imports and investment together with extending the existing one for Chabahar without any significant modifications.

Trump and his team might not realize it, but India is indispensable to his stated goal of “un-uniting” Russia and China insofar as preventing the first from becoming the second’s junior partner as was explained, but this might still have to be explicitly communicated to them by the Indian side. The Russian-US peace talks on Ukraine could therefore include US incentives of the sort proposed at the end of this analysis here by which India’s role as a partial counterweight to China could be strengthened.

These could take the form of sanctions waivers for India’s continued purchase of Russian oil and forthcoming investments in its LNG industry with the intent of replacing China’s role in both for the purpose of alleviating Russia’s potential disproportionate dependence on it and advancing US goals. That arrangement would meet Russian, Indian, and US interests, but Trump and his team have to show the requisite political flexibility, which can’t be taken for granted at this point and could thus foil these plans.

In any case, observers shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the Modi-Trump Summit’s impact on Indo-Russo relations since Delhi has proven the deftness of its diplomacy and has never agreed to anything at Moscow’s expense, so it’s premature to speculate that the US will drive a wedge between them. Some members of Trump’s team might hope to do so, but they’d risk ruining his planned rapprochement with India, which could end up dealing even more damage to bilateral ties than Biden did if that happens.