India Is Sticking With America—for Now

Foreign Affairs  |  C. Raja Mohan

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces severe strategic friction with the United States following President Donald Trump’s second-term policies, including unilateral tariffs, threats of secondary sanctions, renewed engagement with Pakistan, and diplomatic outreach to Beijing. Rather than breaking key security ties or realigning with hostile blocs, New Delhi has responded by adopting a pragmatic "America plus" foreign policy.

Strategic necessity dictates continued partnership with Washington. This hedging posture balances core alignment with the United States against expanded multilateral engagements across Eurasia and the Global South to offset potential coercion. China remains India's primary long-term military threat, reinforcing New Delhi's operational reliance on Indo-Pacific defense cooperation despite trade disputes. Consequently, Indian diplomats are diversifying commercial and security relationships with middle powers while working to absorb trade shocks from Washington. This delicate balancing act preserves foundational U.S.-India security ties, yet leaves room to adjust if American pressure intensifies further.

Comment

The rise of open-weight architectures such as DeepSeek's R1 highlights a key weakness in hardware-focused export controls set by the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security. Developers use distillation pipelines and Mixture-of-Experts parameter routing to reach strong reasoning performance even on limited hardware like Nvidia H800 accelerators. These efficient algorithms reduce the computing power needed to train advanced models, making it possible to scale capabilities without relying on high-end silicon supply chains.

This shift in architecture moves the main area of tech competition from chip factories to open software platforms like Hugging Face. Old export sanctions aimed at TSMC's advanced chip-making do not stop the spread of new algorithms. Limiting high-bandwidth memory hardware also does not stop other defense sectors from using customized versions of Qwen or DeepSeek R1.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If trade coercion dilutes political trust, can technological co-development under the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology remain isolated from broader diplomatic friction?

The trajectory indicates that high-technology transfers require sustained institutional trust that economic disputes inevitably erode. While foundational military-to-military linkages persist out of shared concern over Chinese expansion, operational co-production under iCET is likely to slow as New Delhi hedges against policy volatility in Washington.

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