India’s Strategic Autonomy Under Pressure: How U.S. Leverage Is Driving Multi-Alignment

India has spent decades trying to achieve something that sounds contradictory: deepen its relationship with the United States without allowing that relationship to determine its choices elsewhere.

That arrangement worked reasonably well when economic partnership and strategic alignment could move on separate tracks. India could expand defence and technology cooperation with Washington while buying Russian weapons, importing Russian oil, maintaining ties with Iran and building relationships across Europe, the Gulf and the wider Global South.

The difficulty emerges when the same partner that offers economic and strategic opportunities begins attaching conditions to them. The question for India is no longer simply how close it should be to the United States, but whether that closeness can remain compatible with independent choices on energy, connectivity, trade and regional security.

This is where strategic autonomy becomes more than a diplomatic slogan.

When partnership starts narrowing choices

Strategic autonomy does not mean avoiding partnerships. It means retaining the ability to make important decisions without those partnerships becoming binding constraints. For India, this has historically meant maintaining relationships with several major powers without allowing any one of them to become the sole centre of its external strategy.

The current pressure is different because Washington’s economic and geopolitical instruments are increasingly intersecting with decisions India considers matters of national interest. The February 2026 U.S.-India Interim Trade Agreement framework, for example, linked market access with wider economic-security cooperation, including investment and export-control alignment.

Russian oil illustrates the consequences.

India’s dependence on Russian crude expanded sharply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because discounted Russian supplies became economically valuable. Washington, however, increasingly treated those purchases not simply as a commercial decision but as part of a wider strategic disagreement.

In August 2025, the White House imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian imports in response to India’s continued purchase of Russian oil. That additional tariff was removed in February 2026 after India committed to stop direct and indirect purchases of Russian oil, with the U.S. retaining a mechanism to monitor and potentially respond to future changes.

By late 2025, Russia’s share of India’s oil imports had fallen from about 40% in 2024 to around 25%. Indian government clarifications, however, have stressed that crude procurement is undertaken by refiners on a commercial basis, while the government has encouraged diversification of energy supplies.

The significance extends beyond oil. When access to the American market becomes conditional on decisions about energy suppliers, economic policy and strategic alignment become harder to separate. A choice made in one area can carry consequences in another, narrowing the room available to India in both.

The autonomy problem is really about options

A country exercises strategic autonomy not by refusing all pressure, but by maintaining enough alternatives to respond without surrendering its core choices. For India, this has meant widening the relationships through which it can obtain markets, technology, investment, energy and diplomatic space.

Diversification, however, should not be confused with replacing the United States.

The United States remains exceptionally important to India’s economy. U.S. government trade data continues to place the American market at the centre of India’s merchandise trade relationship, with the United States remaining India’s largest export destination. Alternative partners cannot simply be treated as interchangeable substitutes for Washington.

The objective is instead to prevent dependence on any single relationship from becoming a veto over Indian choices.

India’s growing engagement with Europe and other partners matters even when those relationships cannot replicate the scale of its U.S. relationship. Agreements with Europe, the UK and other economies widen market access and create additional commercial relationships. Their strategic value lies not simply in the trade they generate, but also in increasing the number of economic channels available when relations with one major power become more difficult.

Diversification therefore creates bargaining space even when it does not create equivalence.

Yet additional relationships are useful only to the extent that India can actually use them when pressure intensifies. Chabahar illustrates this limitation.

Chabahar shows the harder side of the equation

India’s partnership with Iran around the port is not merely another commercial investment. It provides connectivity toward Afghanistan and Central Asia while bypassing Pakistan.

India and Iran signed the original agreement in 2003, and in 2016 India, Iran and Afghanistan signed a trilateral arrangement to develop the route. In May 2024, India and Iran signed a 10-year agreement concerning the development and operation of the Shahid Beheshti Terminal at Chabahar.

But U.S. sanctions have repeatedly complicated the project.

In 2018, Washington created an exception allowing India to use the route for sending food and aid to Afghanistan. That policy was subsequently followed by greater pressure on India’s economic relationship with Iran. U.S. sanctions also disrupted India’s plans for infrastructure connected to the Chabahar route.

In 2025, the White House’s National Security Presidential Memorandum on Iran directed a review of existing sanctions waivers, including those related to Chabahar. The episode illustrated the vulnerability of a connectivity project designed partly to expand India’s strategic options.

The important point is not whether India ultimately exits or remains. It is that a project intended to reduce one strategic constraint can itself become vulnerable to pressure from another power.

Having alternatives is therefore not enough. Those alternatives must remain usable.

Security creates an even sharper red line

Economic pressure can sometimes be absorbed through negotiation, substitution or diversification. Security choices are harder because they touch questions of sovereignty and regional influence that India has long resisted allowing another power to determine.

This sensitivity became particularly visible when Washington’s engagement with Pakistan intersected with India’s concerns about third-party involvement in India-Pakistan disputes.

The issue was not simply Pakistan. It was the possibility that India’s regional security decisions could again become part of a wider diplomatic framework designed elsewhere.

U.S. officials have described engagement with Pakistan as tactical and have maintained that it does not displace the India relationship. That does not remove India’s concern about external involvement in issues it regards as sovereign security matters.

India can cooperate with Washington on defence, counter-terrorism or the Indo-Pacific while still insisting that its choices regarding Pakistan, Russia or Iran cannot automatically be determined by American priorities.

At the same time, the security relationship with Washington has deepened materially. The 2025 U.S.-India Major Defense Partnership Framework established a 10-year framework covering interoperability across land, sea, air, space and cyber domains, alongside maritime security, exercises, logistics and defence-industrial cooperation.

The relationship can therefore deepen in one area while India resists alignment in another. This is the operating logic of multi-alignment: cooperation in selected areas does not require India to accept a single, overarching strategic alignment.

Multi-alignment is not the absence of dependence

There is a limit to how far this strategy can go. India cannot diversify its way out of every dependency.

The U.S. market is too important. American technology ecosystems remain important. Defence cooperation with the United States has become substantial. Alternative partnerships also create new forms of dependence.

India’s trade agreements with European partners can widen its options, but they do not reproduce its commercial relationship with the United States. Likewise, purchasing military equipment from France may diversify India’s defence relationships, but dependence on another supplier does not disappear merely because the supplier changes.

Diversification changes the structure of dependence; it does not abolish dependence.

Strategic autonomy is therefore better understood as room for manoeuvre than as complete independence. A country with several relationships can choose among them more freely than one whose critical markets, technologies, energy supplies and security capabilities are concentrated in a single relationship. But every additional relationship brings its own costs, obligations and vulnerabilities.

This makes multi-alignment more demanding than simply maintaining diplomatic relations with multiple powers. India must preserve the practical ability to work with each partner without allowing the terms of one relationship to dictate the limits of all the others.

The deeper shift is from alignment to portfolio management

This is what distinguishes India’s present strategy from simple non-alignment.

Non-alignment was largely built around avoiding bloc politics. Multi-alignment is more active: India simultaneously builds relationships with powers whose interests may conflict, while trying to extract different forms of value from each.

The United States can provide access to technology, capital, markets and defence cooperation.

Russia can remain relevant to India’s energy and defence requirements.

Iran can provide strategically important connectivity.

Europe can expand trade, technology and defence options.

Other markets can reduce the concentration of India’s export dependence.

None of these relationships has to become India’s exclusive strategic partnership. The system works precisely because they do not.

The greater the pressure exerted by any one partner, the greater the incentive to strengthen the others. Pressure intended to produce alignment can therefore increase the value of diversification.

If India believes that access to one relationship can be withdrawn or conditioned according to decisions made elsewhere, building alternative channels becomes more strategically valuable. The result need not be confrontation with Washington; it can instead be a wider network of partnerships around Washington.

Strategic autonomy therefore has a price

Diversification is not an easy escape from American pressure. India’s economic relationship with the United States is too large to replace quickly. Alternative markets cannot simply reproduce American demand. New defence suppliers bring their own dependencies. Connectivity projects can be exposed to sanctions. Maintaining relationships with multiple competing powers also requires diplomatic and economic resources.

Strategic autonomy therefore requires India to carry the costs of keeping options open.

Sometimes that means paying more for a diversified supply chain. Sometimes it means maintaining relationships that Washington dislikes. Sometimes it means accepting slower integration with a preferred partner because deeper integration could narrow choices elsewhere. And sometimes it means accepting that no option is cost-free.

India’s autonomy should not be judged by whether it can avoid every external constraint. The more meaningful question is whether it retains enough alternatives to prevent any one external relationship from determining its most important choices.

The new logic of India’s foreign policy

For much of the post-2000 period, India could deepen its relationship with the United States while maintaining substantial strategic distance from American alliance structures. Economic and strategic relationships could move along different trajectories: India could become closer to Washington without abandoning its wider network of partnerships.

The pressure of the current moment is that those trajectories are increasingly colliding.

Energy choices affect trade. Trade choices affect strategic relations. Sanctions affect connectivity. Regional diplomacy affects security partnerships.

When these areas become interconnected, strategic autonomy becomes harder to preserve through diplomatic declarations alone. It has to be supported materially through diversified markets, multiple energy suppliers, alternative connectivity routes, broader defence partnerships and the ability to maintain relationships with countries that do not share Washington’s priorities.

That does not mean India is moving away from the United States. Rather, India can remain deeply engaged with Washington while simultaneously making itself less dependent on Washington for the full range of its strategic choices.

This is the defining logic of multi-alignment under pressure.

Strategic autonomy was once largely about refusing to choose sides. Today, it is increasingly about ensuring that India has enough sides to choose from.