The Cage of Equidistance

The Illusion of “Will Not”

India today projects itself as a master of balance. Its diplomats speak the language of multipolarity. One week, the Prime Minister embraces Vladimir Putin, the next he hosts American defense executives, while quietly signaling détente with Beijing through resumed tourism, expanding trade, and muted diplomatic exchanges.

On the surface, this looks like confident choreography: India will not abandon Russia, nor will it disengage from China.

But the truth lies beneath the pageantry. India doesn’t merely say “will not.” It cannot. Not because of superior strategic will, but because of structural limits. India lacks the full-spectrum economic and military capacity to sever those ties without penalty. Sovereignty may be the idiom, but dependency is the architecture.

At the same time, India cannot rise – militarily, economically, or technologically – without closer alignment with the United States. That, too, is not a concession. It is the price of ambition.

The Cage of Equidistance

India’s desire to avoid binary alignments is neither new nor illegitimate. What began in the nonaligned era as a tactical posture, leveraging distance to extract concessions, has hardened in recent years into something closer to orthodoxy. Strategic equidistance, elevated to principle, ceases to be leverage and risks becoming a cage.

Recent U.S. tariff measures sparked familiar speculation that Delhi will be driven into the arms of Moscow and Beijing. But that narrative is as performative as it is predictable. India cannot “go East” in any meaningful strategic sense, not because it doesn’t want to, but because neither Russia nor China will ever treat it as an equal. The anxiety that India is slipping away from the United States misunderstands both India’s compulsions and its ambitions.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Delhi’s stance toward Russia and China. What looks like balance is often a form of accommodation, born not of choice but of constraint. India insists on hedging, but the cost of keeping those hedges intact is rising.

Russia: Dependency Without Leverage

Russia, long cast as a “time-tested partner,” is now less a fulcrum of nonalignment than a fading dependency India cannot afford to provoke. Its defense posture is still reliant on Russian spares and platforms. Over 60 percent of India’s conventional military systems remain of Russian origin, from submarine propulsion to missile defense. The war in Ukraine has not disrupted this reliance because Delhi cannot allow it to.

India continues to import discounted Russian oil, purchase S-400 missile systems, and emphasize legacy defense dependencies even as Moscow drifts deeper into Beijing’s orbit. These energy imports surged after Ukraine, driven less by strategy than by discount pricing and private-sector lobbying.

In multilateral forums, Moscow still functions as a diplomatic shield, blocking hostile coalitions from forming. Yet dependence brings reputational blowback and long-term risk: India is locking itself to a declining power with narrowing options of its own.

India’s engagement with Russia, then, is not nostalgia. It is necessity: dependency without leverage.

China: Deference in Disguise

With China, the predicament is more paradoxical. No other power has weaponized economic interdependence so effectively. India depends on Chinese inputs across its economy: pharmaceutical ingredients, mobile handsets, solar infrastructure, consumer electronics. Bilateral trade continues to break records, with China now India’s second-largest trading partner.

India now imports more from China than from any other country, a reality that sits uneasily beside calls for strategic decoupling. Hawks in Delhi warn of digital infiltration and economic blackmail, but market realities dilute the rhetoric. The framework of India’s consumer economy, from cheap smartphones to life-saving medicines, is made in China.

The border issue, long in stasis, now resembles a fait accompli: with both sides opting to “reset” ties through trade, tourism, and quiet disengagement, even as trust remains elusive. While both sides speak of “peace and tranquility,” the Line of Actual Control has hardened into an accepted asymmetry, even as flights and trade links resume. The standoff has not been resolved; it has simply been routinized.

This posture is not the expression of parity, but of necessity. It is strategic deference dressed in the language of poise. Some see this as evidence of India leaning East. But China offers no path to parity, only a hierarchy where Delhi is junior. To mistake structural discomfort for strategic alignment is to misread the signals India itself cannot fully control.

The Tariff Mirage

U.S. tariffs are often portrayed as triggers for India’s strategic drift. But this is a misreading of both motive and consequence. Tariffs are stumbles, not exits. Delhi has endured far worse from closer partners: Russia’s oil discounts come with hidden costs; China’s trade surplus has ballooned despite open hostility at the border. By comparison, U.S. tariffs are disputes of policy, not betrayals of strategy.

Delhi tends to shrug off American pressure like mosquito bites in summer, irritating, inevitable, but rarely fatal. To mistake these squalls for a storm is to confuse passing weather for climate.

A Partnership, Not a Dependency

The argument that tariffs will push India into the arms of Russia or China misses a deeper truth: economic pain alone does not tilt Delhi’s compass. The U.S. is now India’s largest trading partner, with over $130 billion in annual trade.

For all its performance, India cannot advance – militarily, economically, or technologically – without U.S. partnership. This tilt is not ideological; it is infrastructural. Access to jet engine technology, maritime surveillance, space situational awareness, precision strike systems, and secure communications flows only through U.S.-led cooperation. From semiconductors to critical minerals, artificial intelligence to undersea deterrence, no other partner offers the range of enablers India needs to compete.

India’s domestic defense-industrial reforms cannot replace these dependencies overnight. Nor can its innovation ecosystem or capital markets substitute for the scale and dynamism that American networks provide. Even in sectors once touted for self-reliance, U.S. alignment has become the fulcrum of progress: co-developing drones, digitizing battlefield awareness, producing aircraft components. Through INDUS-X, the U.S. and India have created a strategic innovation bridge that brings this infrastructure to life.

What America offers is not dependency but scaffolding: the means to translate ambition into capability.

When Performance Becomes Drift

India’s insistence that it belongs to no bloc may be politically useful, but it clashes with today’s realities. For decades, Delhi could hedge: buy arms from Russia, export software to the West, and claim solidarity with the Global South. That world is vanishing.

India cannot trade like a member of the West, buy arms like a member of the East, and posture like a member of the South forever. At some point, the performance of autonomy begins to erode its substance. The refrain that India might “drift East” whenever Washington applies pressure obscures the truth: Eastern ties are born of constraint, not conviction.

The very tools India relies on to preserve its autonomy – Russian arms, Chinese trade, carefully cultivated ambiguity – are themselves fraying. Russian weapons arrive late, or underperform in Ukraine. Chinese supply chains entrench vulnerabilities. Ambiguity extracts reputational costs in export-control regimes and defense collaborations.

India’s balancing act is not unprincipled, but it is unsustainable. Equidistance between a revanchist Russia, an assertive China, and a strategically aligned United States is less a sign of genius than a symptom of drift.

The Autonomy Spectacle

What India presents as strategic autonomy increasingly resembles choreography of constraint. It cannot abandon Russia, not from loyalty, but because its military doctrine is still wired to Soviet systems. It cannot sever trade with China, not from partnership, but because the lattice of its consumer economy is made in China. And it cannot substitute American support, because no other partner brings the full-spectrum capabilities needed to sustain its ambitions.

The refusal to name China in multilateral forums, to join sanctions on Russia, or to sign binding defense pacts with the U.S. are not assertions of sovereignty. They are symptoms of limitation. Even the recent thaw with Beijing, through trade, tourism, and pageantry, unfolds under an unspoken bargain: that the border will be managed, not resolved.

India’s display of autonomy is thus less a renunciation of the American-led order than a carefully rehearsed spectacle of sovereignty: performed at home as principle, projected abroad as poise, and designed to suggest choice, even as choices narrow.

The Stakes of India’s Choice

None of this diminishes India’s agency. Delhi does not have to choose between America and autonomy. But it does have to choose between two futures: one in which its ambitions are enabled by alignment, and another in which autonomy becomes a cage.

The United States is not a perfect partner – no great power is – but it remains the only one both willing and capable of underwriting India’s rise across multiple domains: security, technology, infrastructure, geoeconomics. What Washington offers is not just platforms and access. It offers time to shift away from Russian legacies, deterrence against Chinese coercion, and trust in the form of sensitive technology, intelligence, and private capital that no other partner will provide at this scale.

These are not symbols of dependency. They are the scaffolding of strategic maturity.

India’s rise will depend not just on the friends it keeps, but on the illusions it lets go: that it can balance indefinitely, that Russia is still a great power, that China can be compartmentalized, and above all, that autonomy is a substitute for strategy.

In today’s world, autonomy is no longer the absence of alignment. It is the mastery of interdependence.