As the United States reevaluates its global commitments and questions the existing international order, longtime American allies and partners are seeking alternatives to foreign policy strategies that rely heavily on Washington. Canada, South Korea, and the European Union have all talked about building ties with a wider range of countries. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are hedging against U.S. unpredictability by cementing other partnerships; the Saudis, for instance, recently concluded a security deal with Pakistan. Such efforts aim to make countries less vulnerable to sudden changes in any single bilateral relationship and give them more options and greater autonomy in foreign policy decision-making.

Although many of these countries are only now pursuing diversification in their external relations, India has long adhered to this strategy. Balancing a variety of partners without committing fully to any one country or bloc has been the core of Indian foreign policy since the country achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Over the years, this policy has been given different labels—nonalignment, bi-alignment, multialignment, even omnidirectional engagement—but the approach has been the same. When successful, a diversified strategy has enabled New Delhi to avoid acquiescing to any one partner’s decisions and to play countries off one another to strengthen its own position.

Throughout the Cold War, India sought to strike a balance in its relations with the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as with several smaller powers and nonaligned countries, because it feared that one or both superpowers might be unreliable or coercive when New Delhi found itself in need. In the post–Cold War period, India has maintained its overall approach of avoiding full reliance on any one partner. Like an investor managing a complex portfolio, India has constantly rebalanced its set of relationships as new opportunities and risks have arisen. At times, this has meant significantly increasing its exposure to some partners—as it has arguably done in recent years by aligning itself with the United States on several security, economic, and technology issues.

But pressure from the second Trump administration is now leading India to adjust the relative weight of the United States in its portfolio of partners. President Donald Trump’s tariffs of up to 50 percent, calls to parley with Pakistan, and demands to reduce India’s oil imports from Russia have increased doubts about American reliability. These actions have also raised questions about whether New Delhi has aligned itself too closely with Washington. For many Indian policymakers, the uncertainty caused by Washington’s actions has reinforced the importance of diversification and bolstering other partnerships—not only with U.S. allies, such as France and Japan, but also with U.S. adversaries, including Russia.

With diversified foreign policies becoming the new global norm, India’s experience offers lessons for a world no longer shaped by American unipolarity. New Delhi’s pursuit of multiple partnerships helped India maximize its autonomy amid the superpower politics of the Cold War and has continued to do so in the U.S.-led order that has dominated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But policymakers around the world considering diversifying their own foreign ties must also understand the challenges of such a strategy. India has learned that it requires constantly cultivating, assessing, and rebalancing different relationships. Maintaining a diversified portfolio of partners also provides less of a safeguard against aggression than formal alliances do, so India has had to spend more on its own defense, develop a nuclear deterrent, and sometimes pull its punches against rivals. Without learning from India’s experiences, countries that now find themselves looking to adopt a similar strategy may end up merely exchanging overreliance on one country for overreliance on many.

India’s foreign policy orientation was forged when, like today, transformative technologies and great-power competition were upending existing global dynamics. The country emerged out of the partition of British India in 1947, at the dawn of the nuclear age and the advent of fierce competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The leaders of independent India, wary of inviting new forms of colonial domination, wanted to be self-reliant. But they quickly realized that sourcing military supplies, economic aid, and technical assistance required partnering with or depending on other countries. They feared, however, that an alliance with either the Soviet or the American bloc would be a straitjacket rather than a security blanket. Instead, New Delhi hoped that multiple partnerships would preserve Indian autonomy by preventing any one country or bloc from being able to force India to submit to its preferences.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, welcomed help from the United States, which hoped that a democratic India might counterbalance communism in Asia. In the early 1950s, New Delhi used American concern about the “loss” of China to the communist bloc to solicit economic and food assistance. Nehru also reached out to Moscow, but he initially found that the Soviet Union had little interest in India—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin believed India was too close to the West.

The downsides of having no partner with which to balance the United States were soon evident. Aiming to establish a peaceful periphery, New Delhi tried to engage rather than contain China, which angered American policymakers. They criticized India’s recognition of the Chinese communist regime and New Delhi’s unwillingness to fully support the United States and its United Nations allies during the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953. U.S. legislators saw India’s nonalignment as immoral and akin to siding with the Sino-Soviet bloc. They tried to make any assistance contingent on India curbing its engagement with the communist bloc or giving the United States access to Indian raw materials and critical minerals such as manganese. Congress eventually passed a food assistance bill for India, in 1951, without requiring New Delhi to change its foreign policy or give resources to the United States, but it came with the expectation that India would not........

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