James Crabtree is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Rudra Chaudhuri is the Director of Carnegie India. In this piece, the two foreign policy experts opine on how India is navigating the foreign policy mess that Trump has created. India’s response according to these two experts has three different strands to it.
Optics aside, firstly, India is trying its best to maintain a working relationship with America. Messrs Crabtree & Chaudhuri write: “The United States will under most likely scenarios remain India’s most important partner for technology and investment, no matter the current disruption in relations. The two countries are also still collaborating in critical areas: the newly established U.S. Office of Critical and Emerging Technologies is working with Indian counterparts to streamline AI infrastructure partnerships, for instance. Silicon Valley has a serious interest in India. Washington provided New Delhi with a laundry list of regulatory issues to resolve to help American tech firms to invest in data centers in India. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei visited New Delhi and Bengaluru in October with the hope of opening an office in India. And all the big U.S. tech companies will be represented in February at a major AI summit in India, hosted by Modi.
For India’s part, its pharmaceutical companies are still looking to invest in the United States despite threats of tariffs as they seek to lessen their dependence on Chinese suppliers. Indian companies have begun reducing oil imports from Russia following American sanctions on two large Russian firms at the end of October. …The first part of a trade deal between India and the United States, which has been negotiated for several months, may be completed by the end of this year or early next.”
Secondly, India is trying to repair its relationship with China so that it does not have deal with Beijing’s hostility whilst dealing with Trump’s temperamental policy changes: “With its relationship to Washington deteriorating, New Delhi was instead seeking to muddle through, not to abandon the underlying strategic calculus that led it to turn toward the United States in the first place. Planned months in advance, Modi’s visit to China was not a reaction to Trump’s tariffs but an effort to repair damaged ties with Beijing after a year of relative stability along India’s disputed border with China. What India wanted was to carefully rebuild badly damaged ties, not launch a new era of Sino-Indian alignment; Modi pointedly declined to attend the military parade to which Xi invited North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. With China, India is in essence doing little more than what many others have done now that Trump is back in the White House: managing differences and avoiding crises with China while simultaneously seeking to stabilize ties with the United States.”
Thirdly, India is embracing Europe in a way it has not done over the past decade because it realises that it shares a common interest with Europe in dealing with China’s rise and in dealing with Trump. Messrs Crabtree & Chaudhuri write:
“It is against this backdrop that a pivot to Europe makes sense. For decades, the relationship between India and Europe has underperformed its potential, especially when measured against the progress that India has made in moving closer to the United States. Europe is one of India’s largest trading partners. The sheer size of the Indian economy and its growing consumer class is attractive to European countries. The need to do more with India prompted the Council of the European Union to approve a “new strategic EU-India agenda” in October, highlighting the ambition to establish stronger technology and investment ties. Both India and the EU remain committed to climate action, even if they have differences on emissions targets. India has maintained close ties with France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, but until recently it had only limited engagement with many other significant European countries, such as Germany, and with the European Union more broadly.
But that is changing. High-level visits to Europe from Modi and External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar have established an EU-India Trade and Technology Council that is designed to bring the two sides closer together. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen travelled to New Delhi this year with the entire gamut of European commissioners, an unusual move designed to boost cooperation across multiple sectors. India’s position on the war in Ukraine—it refused to condemn Russia and has continued to purchase Russian oil—lost it friends in Europe. But Europe’s strategic reawakening since 2022 and significant military buildup following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine position it as a more credible partner in Indian eyes. It now has the potential to be a more credible security partner, too, both in terms of weapons sales and in emerging domains such as space and cybersecurity.”
Interestingly, Messrs Crabtree & Chaudhuri say that India realises that its relationship with Russia is – in the context of the geopolitics outlined above – a dead end as the Russians neither have meaningful military nor civilian tech to offer. Nor can Russia provide foreign direct investment into India.
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