Indian foreign policy today is a prisoner of three triads that not only subvert its grand strategy of pursuing strategic autonomy but also shape its day-to-day diplomacy. A close examination of various foreign policy choices made by India in recent years indicates that the grand strategy that truly guides India’s policies is not a quest for strategic autonomy but a calculated effort to mitigate its strategic vulnerabilities.

Against this backdrop, the recent diplomatic moves by India are revelatory. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the first India and Gulf Cooperation Council (GGC) Foreign Ministers meet in September, External Affairs S. Minister Jaishankar spoke eloquently about the tragic death of civilians in Gaza, called for an immediate ceasefire, and reiterated India’s support for the two-state solution. But India continues to sell weapons to Israel, which are used indiscriminately to kill Hamas fighters in small numbers and women and children in larger numbers. Also, India abstained from voting on the UN General Assembly resolution calling Israel to leave the occupied Palestinian territories. This was perhaps because the resolution also called for a ban on weapons transfer to Israel.

When it comes to the Palestinian crisis, India talks like South Africa but acts like the US. Its words are from the Global South but its actions are of the Global North. On the issue of Gaza, it is South Africa that has taken Israel to the International Court of Justice, and not India in spite of its frequent claims that it is the voice of the Global South. Such contradictory positions are explained by the Narendra Modi government either as a confident India pursuing India’s national interest or as India’s new multi-alignment policy.

Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Moscow in July and his literal embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin had put him at odds with the US, which was clearly displeased both by the visit and its timing. It overlapped with the NATO summit in Washington, DC, designed to shore up support for Ukraine and further isolate Russia. Modi’s visit signalled to the world that neither was Putin isolated nor was Russia at odds with all democracies. After all, the leader of the biggest democracy and one of the leaders of the Global South was intimately engaging him.

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After a strongly worded rebuke by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and a carefully articulated criticism by US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Modi visited Ukraine in August and raised the possible issue of India playing the role of a peacemaker in the conflict. Modi repeated this offer again at the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia. So far there are no takers. The visit to Moscow was perhaps designed to signal that India would continue to exercise its strategic autonomy in spite of Modi’s poor performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. His party failed to win a majority, and he now leads a much-weakened coalition government with two partners known for their independent and maverick-like conduct. But his visit to Kyiv signalled that India, despite its claims to major power status, was sensitive to strong criticism by the West and could be pressured by the US.

The evolving Quad strategy

The Modi government has shown great enthusiasm for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) and its potential to both contain China and bring India into intimate military partnerships with the US and its allies. But India also continues to resist the militarisation of the Quad, thus not only limiting its scope as an anti-China coalition but ostensibly compelling the rest of the Quad members to reinvent a more militarised Quad with Philippines called the Squad. The recent September meeting of the Quad leaders in Wilmington, Delaware, US, highlighted the steady hollowing out of the military potential of the Quad.

The Foreign Ministers of India and China met twice in July, and along with the talk in India of the need for more trade and investments from China, it appears that the Modi government has decided that mending fences with China is preferable to joining a US-led alliance to contain China. This policy shift was announced in dramatic fashion just before the BRICS summit when the Ministry of External Affairs announced a breakthrough in border normalisation talks, opening the door to a Modi-Xi Jinping bilateral in Kazan.

These are strong signals being sent by India, but what do they say about its evolving foreign policy? To a casual observer, it may appear that India is deliberately moving away from the West and realigning with the two powers challenging Western hegemony in Europe (Russia) and in Asia (China). But why would India reverse its strategic trajectory after investing the past five years in building a comprehensive partnership with the US?

To understand what India is trying to achieve, we must examine the evolution of its grand strategy. Since its independence, India has maintained the same grand strategy principle that has guided its foreign policy under both the Congress and the BJP governments. That principle is an intense unwavering desire to maintain its strategic autonomy. All postcolonial states that gained independence in the 20th century have jealously guarded their sovereignty. Strategic autonomy is essentially the extension of guarding sovereignty in matters of foreign relations. Becoming a client of a powerful patron would be tantamount to sacrificing strategic autonomy and putting state sovereignty in jeopardy.

But strategic autonomy does not mean the same to the followers of Nehruvian ideology and those who follow Hindu nationalist ideology. Under the Nehruvian ideology, strategic autonomy meant a form of neutrality that prevented alignment with existing great powers and staying outside the contest for global hegemony. India was weak and poor, and it felt that by remaining neutral it could potentially benefit from both camps—the Western bloc led by the US and the Eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union—that dominated world politics at the time. And India did benefit from them both.

But in the current era, India has become a rising global power with the fifth highest GDP, the largest population, a huge consumer market, a global diaspora, and nuclear triad capabilities. This growth in national power has allowed the current dispensation to completely upend the meaning of strategic autonomy. It now does not mean neutrality or avoiding engagements with competing global powers but rather multi-alignment, engagement with all major powers, and building both economic and military partnerships with all of them.

Well, that is what New Delhi wants the world to think. A more powerful India is pursuing an India first policy and thus it has good relations with the West and yet buys and resells Russian oil at profit. It is part of the Quad, but China remains its biggest trading partner. It laments the death of Palestinian civilians and yet sells arms to Israel. It is my contention that rather than enjoying the fruits of this new approach—strategic autonomy as multi-alignment—India is actually trying to balance its multiple dependencies.

Triads shaping India’s foreign policy

I submit to you that rather than enjoying strategic autonomy, India’s foreign policy is a prisoner of three triads that dominate the country’s geopolitical universe. The three triads are India-US-China, India-US-Russia, and India-Russia-China.

Consider the triad India-US-China. The fear of China’s aggression on its borders in 2020 and 2022 is driving India into a close partnership with the US. It needs US military and technological support if it must fight a war with China to preserve its territorial integrity. The US sees India as an important potential ally in containing China. The US has been investing in India to ensure a long and enduring partnership. A fully committed India will make the Quad a formidable barrier to China’s hegemonic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region. India shares the goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific with the US, but its primary driver is not regional balance of power but its immediate need to balance the threat that China poses to its territories in Ladakh as well as in Arunachal Pradesh. The Prime Minister talks endlessly about Atma Nirbhar (self-reliant) Bharat in matters of defense but buys advanced drones from the US and hopes to acquire a 40-year-old US technology to build next generation jet fighters. Additionally, there is an enduring distrust of the US in India’s strategic community, and so it rankles India that it depends on the US to balance China.

In the India-US-Russia triad, India is working to balance its dependencies vis-a-vis Russia and the US. For a long time, India was heavily dependent on Russia for its armaments and weapons systems. Even as the Quad was gaining momentum, India placed a major order for Russian S-400 anti-aircraft defence systems. This would have automatically triggered sanctions against India as they did against the NATO ally Türkiye, but the US held back. But in recent years, India has reduced that dependency significantly and diversified its shopping habits to include France, the US, Israel, Italy, and Germany. Clearly moving more into the Western weapons ecosystem and away from its overwhelming dependence on Russian arms. India has reduced its dependence on Russian arms imports from 75 per cent a decade ago to 36 per cent at present.

But the war in Ukraine and the option to buy Russian oil at a deep discount gave India an excellent opportunity. Buying Russian oil despite the threat of sanctions and refusing to adopt the US posture towards the Russia-Ukraine war as its own, as have other US allies (Europe, Japan, and South Korea), has enabled India to flaunt its strategic autonomy. But in reality, it is trying to balance its growing dependency on the US for advanced weapons and military technology (jet engines, advanced drones, cold weather outfits, and real-time strategic intelligence) by maintaining a charade of close relations with Russia. By leaning towards Russia symbolically, India hopes to maintain the claim that it has options. This is not strategic autonomy; it is indeed strategic dependency on both Russia and the US, except the dependence is more balanced and less lopsided than before.

Now consider the final triad, India-China-Russia. India depends on Russia for weapons, which it is slowly trying to escape by diversifying its weapons supply chain. India now has also come to the realisation that for a while it will remain dependent on exports from China, especially in the electronics, computers, and green technology areas until its own domestic manufacturing capacity begins to match that of China in quality and cost.

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But what worries India the most is the growing dependency of Russia on China for exports and weapons supply. The longer the Russia-Ukraine war lasts and Western economic sanctions on Russia remain in place, the deeper the Russian dependency on China will become. India fears that Russia as a vassal state of China can potentially turn against it, and then it will have to deal with two Chinese proxies that are also nuclear powers: Pakistan and Russia.

Modi’s trip to Moscow, the growing urgency to normalise the border with China, and the reduction in the military dimension of the Quad are all efforts to ensure that Russia does not become a complete lackey of China. India will depend on Russian weapons, service, and ammunition supplies for its current Russian armament for a long time. It cannot become free of Russia immediately and this vulnerability could give China a huge strategic advantage over India. Thus, Modi’s trip to Russia was not just to flaunt India’s autonomy but to plug this dangerous hole in its ability to face China.

I see the complex diplomatic manoeuvres by New Delhi as neither contradictory nor perplexing. They are the moves of a proactive player caught in a web of multiple dependencies using its growing capabilities to balance these dependencies and reduce its geopolitical vulnerabilities. India will only be able to truly practise its grand strategy of strategic autonomy after it reduces its external dependencies and builds up its military self-reliance. Until then, its grand strategy is not about maintaining strategic autonomy but managing strategic dependencies. 

Dr Muqtedar Khan is a professor of International Relations at the University of Delaware and a Fellow of the Ibn Khaldun Institute in Washington, DC. He also hosts a multilingual YouTube show on geopolitics called Khanversations.

The Kremlin has denied reports that claimed the US President-elect Donald Trump has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin where the American leader reportedly urged Putin to not escalate the war in Ukraine.

Casting the media reports as “pure fiction”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday said Putin has no specific plans to speak to Trump at the present.

“This is completely untrue. This is pure fiction, it’s just false information. There was no conversation,” Peskov told reporters.

“This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is being published now, sometimes even in fairly reputable publications,” Peskov said.

Asked if Putin had plans for any contacts with Trump, Peskov said: “There are no concrete plans yet.”

The Washington Post first reported that Trump held the call from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Thursday, just days after his stunning election victory over Democratic rival Kamala Harris.

The Post, quoting several people familiar with the call who spoke on the basis of anonymity, reported that Trump reminded Putin of the US military’s sizeable presence in Europe. They said he also expressed an interest in further conversations to discuss “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon”.

Reuters news agency also said the call took place, citing sources who were not authorised to reveal their identities to the media.

Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, did not confirm the exchange, telling the AFP news agency in a written statement that “we do not comment on private calls between President Trump and other world leaders.”

Meanwhile, authorities in Ukraine on Monday issued a countrywide alert and introduced preventative power blackouts across several cities over threats of a new large-scale Russian attack.

“Attention! Missile danger throughout Ukraine! MiG-31K takeoff,” Ukraine’s air force said in a post on Telegram. “The air alert is related to the launch of cruise missiles from Tu-95MS strategic bombers,” it added.

Capital Kyiv’s military administration ordered an emergency blackout for the city, saying the power outages were due to imminent missile attacks. Ukrainian media reported similar orders for Mykolaiv, Cherkasy, Sumy, Zhytomyr, Kirovohrad, and Kharkiv.

Social media footage showed large numbers of people gathering in the city’s metro stations, which have served as bomb shelters since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine in February 2022.

However, by 06:30 GMT, the missiles had not arrived. According to some Ukrainian military bloggers, the Russian bombers performed flights imitating the launch of missiles.

Monday’s air alerts wailed after Russian air attacks killed at least six people in southern Ukraine, and a day after Moscow and Kyiv launched record overnight drone attacks on each other.

Five people were killed in the southern city of Mykolaiv, according to the regional governor. About 300km (186 miles) to the east in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine’s state emergency services agency said Russia carried out three air attacks that killed another man, wounded more than a dozen people and damaged multiple buildings.

Trump’s election is set to have a major bearing on the almost three-year Ukraine conflict, as he insists on a quick end to the fighting and casts doubt on Washington’s multi-billion-dollar support for Kyiv.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke with Trump on Wednesday, with the Republican’s billionaire backer Elon Musk also notably joining them on the call.

The outgoing Democratic administration of President Joe Biden has confirmed that it will send as much aid as possible to Ukraine before Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

On Sunday, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the White House aims “to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position on the battlefield so that it is ultimately in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table”. This would include using the remaining available $6bn of funding for Ukraine, Sullivan said.

While Trump has not gone into detail on how he plans to end the conflict, his incoming Vice President JD Vance has offered a rough vision.

“What it probably looks like is the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine, that becomes like a demilitarised zone,” Vance said on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast in September.

Now in their 15th year together, the original BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have achieved little. Yet at this summit Mr Putin hopes to give the bloc heft by getting it to build a new global financial-payments system to attack America’s dominance of global finance and shield Russia and its pals from sanctions. “Everyone understands that anyone may face US or other Western sanctions,” Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said last month. A BRICS payments system would allow “economic operations without being dependent on those that decided to weaponise the dollar and the euro”. This system, which Russia calls “BRICS-Bridge”, is intended to be built within a year and would allow countries to conduct cross-border settlement using digital platforms run by their central banks. Controversially, it may borrow concepts from a different project called mBridge that is part-run by a bastion of the Western-led order, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

The talks will shine a light on the race to remake the world’s financial plumbing. China has long bet that payments technology—not a creditors’ rebellion or military conflict—will reduce the power that America gets from being at the centre of global finance. The BRICS plan could deliver cheaper and faster transactions. 

Those benefits may be enough to entice emerging economies. In a sign the scheme has genuine potential, Western officials are wary that it may be designed to evade sanctions. And some are frustrated by the unintended role of the BIS, a Swiss-based organisation known as the central bank for central banks.

America’s dominance of the global financial system has been a mainstay of the post-war order. It reflects its economic and military heft, but also the fact that dollar-denominated assets such as Treasuries are seen as safe from government confiscation and inflation and are easy to buy and sell. Though central banks have diversified their holdings, including into gold, around 58% of foreign-currency reserves are in dollars (see chart) and the network effects of the dollar put American banks at the centre of the world’s payments systems. Sending money around the globe is a bit like taking a long-haul flight; if two airports are not directly linked, passengers will need to change flights, ideally at a busy hub where lots of other planes connect. In the world of international payments the biggest hub is America, where many of the world’s banks swap foreign currencies from those making payments into dollars and then into the currencies in which the payments are received.

The centrality of the dollar provides what Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, two scholars, call “panopticon” and “choke point” effects. Because almost all banks transacting in dollars have to do so through a correspondent bank in America, it is able to monitor flows for signs of terrorist financing and sanctions-evasion. 

That provides America’s leaders with an enormous lever of power—one that they have been keen to pull as an alternative to going to war. The number of people under American sanctions has exploded by more than 900% (to around 9,400) in the two decades to 2021. America has demanded that some foreign banks are disconnected from SWIFT, a Belgium-based messaging system used by some 11,000 banks in 200 countries to transfer funds across borders. In 2018 SWIFT cut off Iran.

All this paled in comparison with the ferocity of the financial attack on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The West froze $282bn of Russian assets held abroad, disconnected Russian banks from SWIFT and prevented them from processing payments through America’s banks. America has also threatened “secondary sanctions” on banks in other countries that support Russia’s war effort. Even European policymakers, who support sanctions, were alarmed at how fast Visa and MasterCard—two American firms that the euro zone relies on for retail payments—closed shop in Russia. 

And the tsunami crashing over Russia has prompted America’s adversaries to accelerate their efforts to move away from the dollar, and pushed many other governments to look at their dependence on American finance. China views it as one of its biggest vulnerabilities.

Mr Putin is hoping to capitalise on this dollar dissatisfaction at the BRICS summit. For him creating a new scheme is an urgent practical priority as well as a geopolitical strategy. Russia’s foreign-exchange markets now almost exclusively trade yuan, but because it cannot get enough of this currency to pay for all of its imports, it has been reduced to bartering. In October Russia agreed to buy mandarins (the citrus fruit) from Pakistan paid for with chickpeas and lentils. According to some reports these liquidity strains are growing.

Mr Putin hopes to make life outside the American system more bearable by laying some financial plumbing of his own. BRICS officials have held a flurry of meetings ahead of the summit in Kazan. They have discussed creating a credit-ratings agency to rival the main Western ones, which Russia sees as “susceptible to politicisation”. They also examined creating a reinsurance firm to sidestep Western ones that are blocked from reinsuring some tankers transporting Russian oil, and a payments system to replace Visa and MasterCard. Mr Putin has pushed for creating a common BRICS currency for pricing trade, based on a basket of gold and other non-dollar currencies, but Indian officials objected to this in recent weeks.

By far the most serious initiative is a plan to use digital money backed by fiat currencies. This would place central banks, not correspondent banks with access to the dollar clearing system in America, in the middle of cross-border transactions. In decentralising the financial system, the proposal would mean that no one country could disconnect another. Since commercial banks would transact through their own central banks, they would not need to maintain bilateral relationships with foreign banks, side-stepping the network effects of the current correspondent-banking system.

The “BRICS Bridge” plan was outlined in a report by the Russian finance ministry and central bank in October. Running to 48 pages it critiques Western finance and states that “a new multinational platform for the purposes of cross border settlement needs to be examined in further detail due to its novelty, associated risks, and, potentially, game-changing economics”. With its focus on digital currencies run by central banks it appears to be at least partially inspired by an experimental payments platform called mBridge, which was developed by the BIS alongside the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. Chinese state media say that the new BRICS plan “is likely to draw on the lessons learned” from the mBridge project by the BIS.

That BIS experiment was innocent in design and initiated in 2019, before Russia’s full-scale invasion. It has been stunningly successful, according to several people involved in the project. It could cut transaction times from days to seconds and transaction costs to almost nothing. In June the BIS said mBridge had reached “minimum viable product stage” and Saudi Arabia’s central bank joined as a fifth partner in the scheme. Some 31 other members are observers. By creating a system that could potentially be far more efficient than the current one—and which would weaken the dominance of the dollar—the BIS has unwittingly stepped into a geopolitical minefield.

“If someone is transacting outside of the dollar system for political reasons, you want that to be more expensive for them than the dollar system,” says Jay Shambaugh, a senior treasury department official. The efficiency gains of new kinds of digital money may erode the use of the dollar in cross-border trade, according to the Fed. Reciprocally they could boost China’s currency. Speaking to bankers and officials about mBridge in September, a Hong Kong official said it “provides another opportunity to allow the easier use of the renminbi in cross-border payment, and Hong Kong as an offshore hub stands to benefit”.

Is it possible that mBridge’s concepts and code may be replicated by the BRICS, China or Russia? The BIS doubtless views mBridge as a joint project and believes that it has the ultimate say over who can join. Yet some Western officials say that participants in the mBridge trial may be able to pass on the intellectual capital it involves to others, including participants in the BRICS Bridge. According to multiple sources China has taken a lead on the software and code behind the mBridge project. The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, leads the project’s technology subcommittee and, according to comments made by a BIS official in 2023, its digital ledger “was built by” the PBOC. Perhaps this technology and know-how could be used to build a parallel system beyond the reach of the BIS or its Western members. The BIS has declined to comment on any similarities between its experiment and Mr Putin’s plan.

The BRICS’s foray into the payments race reveals the new geopolitical challenges facing multilateral organisations. At a meeting of the G20 group of large economies in 2020, the BIS was given the job of both improving the existing system and, at China’s urging, of experimenting with digital currencies. Earlier this year Agustín Carstens, its boss, called for “entirely new architectures” and a “fundamental rethink of the financial system”. Yet as different members of the organisation have rival objectives, staying above the fray is getting harder. The world has become more difficult to navigate, acknowledges Cecilia Skingsley, the boss of the BIS Innovation Hub. But she says it still has a role to play in solving problems for all countries “almost independent of what other kind of agenda they might have”.

One option for America and its allies is to try to hobble new payment systems that compete with the dollar. Western officials have warned the BIS that the project could be misused by countries with malign motives. The BIS has since slowed down its work on mBridge, according to some former staff and advisers, and is unlikely to admit any new members to the project. Another option is to improve the dollar-based system so that it is as efficient as new rivals. America is already gearing up to compete. 

In April the New York Fed joined six other central banks in a BIS project aimed at making the existing system faster and cheaper. The Federal Reserve may also link its domestic instant-payments system with those in other countries. SWIFT said this month that it plans to conduct trials of digital transactions next year, leveraging some of its incumbent advantages including strong network effects and trust, says Tom Zschach, its innovation chief.

Any rival BRICS payments system will still face huge challenges. Guaranteeing liquidity will be difficult or require large implicit government subsidies. If the underlying flows of capital and trade between two countries are imbalanced, which they usually are, they will have to accumulate assets or liabilities in each others’ currencies, which may be unappealing. Distrust of China runs deep in India, a key BRICS member. And to scale a digital-currency system, countries must agree on complex rules to govern settlement and financial crime. Such unanimity is unlikely to win the day in Kazan.

Yet, for all that, the BRICS scheme may have momentum. There is a broad consensus that the current cross-border-payments system is too slow and expensive. While rich countries tend to focus on making it quicker, many others want to overturn the current system entirely. 

At least 134 central banks are experimenting with digital money, mostly for domestic purposes, reckons the Atlantic Council, a think-tank. The number working on such currencies for cross-border transactions has doubled to 13 since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This week’s BRICS summit is no Bretton Woods. All that Russia and its pals have to do is move a relatively small number of sanctions-related transactions beyond America’s reach. Still, many are aiming higher. 

Next year the BRICS summit will be held in Brazil, chaired by its president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who fulminates over the power of the greenback. “Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar,” he said last year. “Who was it that decided?”

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