The post-Cold War international order – built on the twin pillars of American unipolarity and liberal institutionalism – is unravelling with conspicuous speed. In its place, a more contested, multipolar architecture is emerging, one defined by systemic rivalry between the United States and China, the resurgence of a revanchist Russia, and the ascent of middle powers seeking agency in a world no longer organized around a single hegemon. It is within this volatile structural environment that India’s foreign policy doctrine of “multi-alignment” – or what Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has termed “strategic autonomy” – deserves not merely sympathetic re-reading, but serious scholarly vindication.

Multi-alignment, broadly understood, is the deliberate cultivation of substantive partnerships across competing geopolitical blocs without the binding obligations of formal alliance membership. It is neither the non-alignment of Jawaharlal Nehru’s era – which carried an ideological and often anti-Western coloration – nor a cynical equidistance that pretends all relationships are morally equivalent. It is, rather, a sophisticated, interest-driven hedging strategy premised on the recognition that in a multipolar world, exclusive alignment with any single power centre would exact prohibitive costs on Indian sovereignty, development, and security. The argument advanced here is simple: multi-alignment is not an evasion of hard strategic choices – it is itself the hard strategic choice, and the right one.

To understand why multi-alignment is rational, one must first understand India’s unique geostrategic position. India occupies the hinge of the Indo-Pacific, sharing land borders with two nuclear-armed rivals – China and Pakistan – while commanding the most critical maritime chokepoints of the Indian Ocean Region. It is simultaneously a rising power with aspirations to permanent membership on the UN Security Council, and a developing economy still managing significant internal vulnerabilities. This combination of attributes – regional centrality, nuclear status, great power ambitions, and developmental constraints – makes India fundamentally unsuitable for the kind of entangling alliances that Western strategic orthodoxy often prescribes.

Structural realism, in its neo-classical variant, would predict precisely what India has done: a rising middle power, buffered between two rival poles, will hedge rather than bandwagon, preserving optionality until the balance of power clarifies. Kenneth Waltz’s logic of balancing is instructive here, but incomplete – India is not simply balancing against China; it is managing a multi-vector threat environment while simultaneously pursuing economic partnerships with the very states it must balance against. This is not strategic incoherence; it is strategic sophistication.

No serious analysis of Indian foreign policy can sidestep the China question. The 2020 Galwan Valley clashes, which resulted in the first combat fatalities on the Sino-Indian border in decades, fundamentally altered New Delhi’s calculus. Since then, India has dramatically deepened its security ties with the United States, Australia, and Japan through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), accelerated procurement of advanced weapons systems, and pursued aggressive border infrastructure development along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

And yet, India has not severed economic ties with China, nor has it joined Western-led sanctions regimes targeting Beijing. Critics in Washington and Brussels interpret this as fence-sitting or moral ambiguity. But this misreads India’s strategic reality. China is India’s largest trading partner, and decoupling entirely would impose severe economic costs at precisely the moment India needs sustained growth to fund its military modernisation. Multi-alignment allows India to sharpen its military deterrent vis-à-vis China through QUAD cooperation, technology transfers, and intelligence-sharing, while avoiding the escalatory dynamics that formal alliance membership with Washington could trigger. This is not appeasement; it is calibrated deterrence – a classical realpolitik approach that minimises provocation while maximising preparedness.

India’s continued engagement with Russia – most visibly its refusal to condemn the invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations and its continued purchase of discounted Russian crude oil – has provoked considerable friction with Western partners. From a normative standpoint, the criticism is understandable. From a strategic standpoint, India’s position is defensible on several grounds. First, Russia remains India’s most significant defence supplier. Approximately 60 per cent of India’s legacy military hardware is of Soviet or Russian origin, and abrupt disengagement would create catastrophic operational gaps that neither the United States nor Europe could fill in the near term. New Delhi is actively diversifying its defence procurement – towards Israel, France, and domestic production under the “Atmanirbhar Bharat” initiative – but this is a decade-long process, not one achievable through diplomatic gesture.

Second, pushing Russia irreversibly into China’s orbit would be strategically disastrous for India. A fully Sino-Russian entente, coordinated on the Himalayan front and in the Indian Ocean, represents a nightmare scenario for Indian planners. Maintaining a live diplomatic relationship with Moscow, however uncomfortable, preserves a degree of friction within that axis and keeps channels open for future realignment. This is not moral relativism. It is the application of Bismarckian logic to a regional context: never surrender a diplomatic option you may need later.

Multi-alignment also positions India uniquely as a leader of the Global South – a constituency of nations that, like India, resent being compelled to choose sides in great power contests that do not reflect their own developmental priorities. India’s presidency of the G20 in 2023 was a masterclass in leveraging this positioning, enabling New Delhi to frame itself as a bridge between the industrialised West and the developing world on issues ranging from climate finance to digital public infrastructure. To reduce this to mere soft power vanity would be fallacious. Leadership of the Global South serves concrete Indian interests: it enhances India’s claim to a reformed, permanent seat on the UN Security Council; it builds coalitions that can collectively resist coercive pressure from either major power bloc; and it gives Indian diplomacy a normative vocabulary – “one Earth, one family, one future” (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam) – that resonates across the developing world in ways that purely transactional diplomacy cannot.

The strategic reset is not without its vulnerabilities, and intellectual honesty demands acknowledging them. The strategy works best in a bipolar or multipolar order with stable, predictable rival blocs. A world in which US-China competition sharpens into outright confrontation – a “shooting war” scenario in the Taiwan Strait, for instance – would force India into genuine binary choices it has thus far evaded. The architecture of optionality has its load-bearing limits. Domestic critics argue that multi-alignment is a continuation of Nehruvian ambiguity rebranded, and that India should simply align with the democratic West against authoritarian powers. On the other hand, the ideological Left argues it enables Indian complicity in great power competition. Neither critique fully holds. The former ignores the very real costs of entangling alliance commitments for a country with China on its doorstep. The latter romanticises the possibility of genuine neutrality in an era of intense geopolitical competition.

India’s multi-alignment doctrine represents the maturation of its foreign policy from a post-colonial, ideologically coloured non-alignment to a hard-nosed, interest-driven strategic calculus suited to the realities of the 21st century. It is grounded in a lucid assessment of India’s capabilities, vulnerabilities, and objectives – the classical trifecta of sound grand strategy. The international system is not organised for the benefit of any single nation, and India’s history offers ample warning against the costs of misplaced idealism in foreign policy. Multi-alignment acknowledges this truth without surrendering to cynicism. It enables India to build military deterrence against China, sustain legacy defence ties with Russia, deepen strategic partnership with the United States, maintain strong military and intelligence ties with Israel, lead the Global South, and pursue economic partnerships wherever they are available – all simultaneously.

In a world where every great power demands loyalty and punishes independence, the ability to resist that demand is itself a form of strategic power and depth. India’s multi-alignment policy is, at its core, the institutionalisation of that independence. PM Modi’s recent five-country visit which included a brief stopover in UAE, at the epicentre of the West Asian great game; felicitations in the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Italy; and his February 2026 trip to Israel, to the chagrin of domestic critics, mainly from the opposition parties, points towards calculated risk-taking. In the disorder that defines contemporary world politics, that may prove to be the most prudent foreign policy doctrine of all.

The views expressed in the piece are personal and do not reflect those of either of the institutions.