By any historical measure, India is reluctant to bow to coercion. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, championed the cause of nonalignment, and his successors have sworn by variants of strategic autonomy. Yet recently India has swallowed more provocations and offered more concessions to China than at any point since the two countries’ 1962 border war.
In the last six months, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar have all visited China. Each trip culminated in a pledge to normalize relations, even amid Chinese provocations. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is preparing for his own trip to China in September, seemingly completing a progression of Indian officials accepting Chinese terms.
The trigger for this shift is not a sudden loss of national nerve. It is the return of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose “America First” diplomacy has stripped India of strategic cover. In the months since Trump took office, China reportedly provided Pakistan with military intelligence, withdrew engineers from factories in India, continued to restrict access to Indian soldiers on the disputed border in Ladakh, and officially renamed sites in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
Meanwhile, India has maintained its silence and avoided confrontation to preserve normalization talks. On the new Indo-Pacific chessboard, New Delhi’s calculation is evident: Accommodating Beijing now costs less than betting on Washington’s assured support. This shift represents a fundamental realignment in geopolitics, as India’s strategic autonomy gives way to pragmatic submission to China.
[BREAK]
There was ample evidence of New Delhi’s capitulation to Beijing during the India-Pakistan conflict in May, when China reportedly provided Pakistan with live satellite intelligence on Indian deployments, even as cease-fire talks between the two belligerents were ongoing. India’s deputy army chief has said China treated the conflict as a “live lab” for its weapons systems, with 81 percent of Pakistani military hardware procured in the last five years sourced from China.
Yet India publicly condemned Pakistan without mentioning China’s role. This suggests that Modi is acutely aware that an escalation with Beijing without assured U.S. backing risks political embarrassment.
China now presents a more direct military challenge to India, too. In the past, Jaishankar argued that India’s bilateral ties with China could only be “normal” if the situation on their disputed border in eastern Ladakh was normal. Despite an understanding reached along the border last October, Indian soldiers are still unable to access “temporary and limited” buffer zones set up after a deadly clash in Galwan in 2020. There has been no reduction in additional soldiers on the border by either side, and China refuses to acknowledge the need for further de-escalation.
However, this month, during Jaishankar’s first visit to Beijing since the clash, he avoided using the phrase “return to status quo ante on the border,” as was India’s aim in 2020—instead praising a “positive trajectory” in bilateral ties. The Modi government seems to have accepted this new normal as a fait accompli.
In early July, Bloomberg reported that Taiwanese multinational Foxconn had recalled more than 300 Chinese engineers from its iPhone manufacturing plants in southern India—stalling Apple’s strategic initiative to significantly increase the assembly of iPhones in India and diversify its supply chain. India dismissed the news as an issue between Apple and Foxconn, ignoring reports of likely Chinese state pressure to remind multinationals that their supply chains still answer to Beijing.
The Foxconn move followed China’s tightening of customs clearances on rare-earth magnets, tunnel-boring machines, and specialty fertilizers—items critical to India’s push on electric vehicles, the bullet train corridor between the cities of Mumbai and Ahmedabad, and food security, respectively. Rather than threatening coercive action, India has restricted itself to “monitoring the situation” while importers scramble for other options.
India’s willingness to absorb these economic shocks rather than risk outright confrontation with China illustrates a new realism: Beijing’s economic leverage has become too costly to challenge openly. The Indian government’s chief think tank, NITI Aayog, has reportedly put forward a proposal to relax rules that currently require extensive scrutiny for investments in India by Chinese companies, intending to reinvigorate faltering foreign investment, strengthen the manufacturing sector, and selectively benefit from Chinese capital and expertise.
Finally, to further assert its territorial claims, China’s Civil Affairs Ministry in May released its fifth batch of renamed sites inside Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls South Tibet. India rejected the nomenclature but slapped no costs on China. Then, Beijing officially warned New Delhi not to interfere in its internal affairs as the Dalai Lama celebrated his 90th birthday in Dharamsala, India, in July—referring to the question of the Tibetan spiritual leader’s succession.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally admonished Modi, while the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi warned Indian commentators against using the issue of Tibet—including public support for the Dalai Lama or advocacy for Tibetan autonomy—as political leverage in bilateral relations. India responded with silence, lest harsh words derail the ongoing process of normalization.
Taken together, these episodes illustrate an unmistakable pattern. China tests, pushes, and even embarrasses India, while Indian officials press on for normalization. The Modi government once intended to reduce reliance on Beijing but is now giving way to a pragmatic acceptance of Chinese dominance in key areas of trade and security.
The ground has shifted, in large part because Trump has upended the cost-benefit analysis that once guided Modi’s strategy: maximize strategic autonomy, hedge between the United States and other friends, and lean on Washington when core interests come under pressure from Beijing. Unlike the U.S. foreign policy of the last 25 years, Trump’s America First doctrine deprioritizes regional strategic partnerships, making exceptions when they advantage the United States in the short term.
Under Trump, Washington has grown less deferential to New Delhi’s interests. Faced with these signals, Indian policymakers have concluded that the United States will not underwrite any high-stakes confrontation between India and China.
Trump’s second term has shredded India’s safety net with respect to China in a few ways. On April 9, the White House imposed a universal 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports to the United States, following threats of additional punitive tariffs for countries, including India, that in its opinion pursued “unfair trade practices.” Indian and U.S. negotiators have met multiple times without clinching an exemption or a so-called mini-deal; the United States demands sweeping concessions on agriculture, cars, and digital trade before it will talk relief.
Russia supplies roughly 40 percent of India’s crude oil imports, and Trump has now threatened 100 percent secondary tariffs on buyers of Russian oil unless the Kremlin agrees to a cease-fire in Ukraine according to U.S.-written terms. India is currently subject to the baseline 10 percent tariff and a suspended 26 percent country-specific tariff, but the new threat introduces substantial uncertainty. Suddenly China, not the United States, looks like the easier economic partner. India’s overall trade with both countries is at similar levels, but it has a trade surplus with the United States and a large trade deficit with China.
In June, Trump hosted Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir at the White House and then boasted that he had “stopped a nuclear war” in South Asia and stood ready to mediate over Kashmir. The U.S. president has snubbed Modi by repeatedly claiming to broker peace between India and Pakistan, signaling that Islamabad still enjoys entrée in Washington. India has interpreted Trump drawing equivalence between Munir and Modi and bringing Kashmir to the discussion table as a pivot away from privileging Indian interests in the region.
Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department has asked both Australia and Japan for explicit plans on what they would do in the event of a war over Taiwan, a request that “caught Tokyo and Canberra by surprise,” according to a source in the Financial Times, and underscored Washington’s new pay-to-play posture. India likely worries that it could hear a similar demand from the Trump administration: either commit boots or expect higher tariffs.
The United States could also push India to increase its defense spending, something that Trump has already demanded from NATO allies, by using tariffs as leverage. Urging New Delhi to increase defense spending would signal that Washington expects partners to shoulder a larger share of the regional security burden. India currently spends 1.9 percent of its GDP on defense and hopes to reach 2.5 percent by 2030. Matching Trump’s NATO benchmark of 5 percent, for example, would gut social spending concessions that underpin Modi’s electoral base.
Meanwhile, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—is sliding from strategic ballast to a diplomatic afterthought, with less emphasis on coordinated deterrence and more on bilateral dealmaking by individual countries, including with China. The Quad is flexible and lacks a formal treaty structure; Trump favors clear and quantifiable commitments that he can leverage for reciprocal gains.
Foisted on India in barely six months, these shocks have recast the United States from an indispensable partner to an unpredictable acquaintance. That would be troubling for India in ordinary times; facing a truculent China, it is destabilizing.
India is accommodating China not because it underestimates the risks of such a posture but because it calculates that the cost of resistance without U.S. support is simply too high. This approach is as much capitulation born of military and technological weakness after 11 years of Modi’s rule as it is realpolitik under duress. India hopes to manage Chinese coercion just short of humiliation while waiting out a U.S. election cycle that might restore equilibrium.
From India’s perspective, strategic autonomy now means choosing which dependency hurts less. Navigating between the two superpowers while preserving sovereign space depended on both China and the United States seeing value in restraint. A lopsided relationship with China at least comes with predictable red lines. India must respect China’s core interests—Tibet, Taiwan, and disputes in the South China Sea—and the two sides can pretend as if bilateral ties are normal. With China, accommodation earns stability.
The United States under Trump offers no comparable certainty; deference earns nothing, while defiance invites penalty. India is not conceding because it trusts China. It is conceding because it no longer trusts the United States to assume part of the burden of resistance in the Indo-Pacific. In his second term, Trump has achieved for China what years of salami-slicing along its disputed border with India in the Himalayas could not: He has made pragmatic submission appear cheaper than strategic defiance.
The bill will come due, not just for India but for every country that once counted on U.S. power to balance Chinese ambition. Unless the United States relearns the art of reassurance, India’s reluctant capitulation will be remembered as the canary in the coal mine.