In Friday’s Morning Jolt, I wrote about Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s speech to Congress and what U.S.–India relations will look like going forward. Indian minister of external affairs (equivalent to the U.S. secretary of state) S. Jaishankar gave an interview to the Economist that helps shed some more light on what Indian policy-makers are thinking.

Modi’s point to Congress is that the U.S. and India have common interests, and it makes sense to work together on those areas. This is not a promise of alliance or 100 percent support. That’s not how India conducts its foreign policy.

India led the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. India was in fact more aligned with the Soviet side, supplying its military with Soviet weaponry. The U.S. supported Pakistan. After India and Pakistan went to war in 1965, the U.S. put an arms embargo on both countries, but it lifted the embargo for Pakistan in 1975. As recently as the early 2000s, the U.S. had nearly zero arms trade with India.

Now, that defense relationship is about $20 billion per year and growing. Modi’s visit to the U.S. coincided with an announcement that GE would begin co-production of jet engines for Indian warplanes in India.

The sense in the U.S. is that this burgeoning cooperation is in large part due to the common adversary of China. India has its own border disputes with China in the Himalayas that dovetail with U.S. concerns about Chinese aggression.

But Jaishankar made clear that he sees U.S. and Indian interests aligning regardless of China. Jaishankar is 68 years old and worked for the Indian Foreign Service for nearly 40 years. He said, “The transformation of the India–U.S. relationship has been the big change in my professional life.” He told the Economist:

There’s no correlation between this set of problems I’m having with China and the development of my relations with the United States. My relations with the United States, as I pointed out, have been steadily developing for two decades, and in the last decade, have accelerated. There’s empirical data out there to show that quite independently of anything that happened on the China border, India-U.S. relations were ticking along, more than ticking along, just fine. So I won’t encourage you to make that connection at all. I think it’s a false one.

Despite closer ties with the U.S., India doesn’t plan to leave Russia behind. Jaishankar doesn’t believe it can, given geopolitical reality. He said:

For us, there are three big Eurasian powers, Russia, China, and India. That has its own dynamics. This is not transactional. This is geopolitical. When you say geopolitical, we are talking of the outcomes that happen when major powers get closer or move away from each other, or depending on the quality of their co-operation. So a lot in Eurasia will depend on the dynamics of these three powers. It’s been a cardinal principle of our foreign policy, which still remains valid, that maintaining a strong relationship and a good relationship with Russia is essential. The geopolitical logic indicates that. So I don’t want to dumb this down to military dependence. It’s one important part. But there is that larger geopolitical outlook or calculation on our side. I’m giving you an Indian perspective, we would like to have multiple choices. And obviously try to make the best of it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Every country would like to do that. Some may be constrained by other obligations, some may not. So to me this is bigger than just saying the Indians have this big military arsenal that they inherited from the past. I also look ahead, I make my calculations, I make my strategy. I look at you know, what are the costs and benefits of various relationships? And the real challenge of diplomacy is how do you reconcile that with contradictory pulls and pushes?

That’s a reasonable perspective, given India’s location. It’s not that India supports Putin; no matter who the leader of Russia is, India sees it as important to be on good terms with a major geopolitical player on its continent.

Jaishankar believes that the Ukraine war means Russia will look east in its foreign policy going forward, which will include looking to India. He said:

What I suspect this whole Ukraine issue is going to mean is that Russia, a country which was actually truly Eurasian, probably today is discovering or is anticipating that a large part of its relationship with the West will no longer work. And therefore it recalculates its priorities and its relationships. So I expect Russia to turn more towards Asia. Historically, Russia has seen itself as European. Throughout history the self-perception of Russians has been very European, not Asian. The current events may well make them turn around, reposition their priorities and look much more at what Asian or non-Western partners have to offer. So if you look at the year and a half, I think there’s a lot of evidence that this is happening. You see much greater Russian activity in Asia and Africa and the Middle East, that economic energies have got redirected elsewhere and political energies may be, too.

While India has become a major purchaser of Russian energy exports since the invasion of Ukraine, it was not a major purchaser before the war began. Germany bought far more energy from Russia than India did, and for overall trade, Jaishankar pointed out that “till a year ago, our trade with Russia was probably smaller than the trade Russia had with even a not-big European country.” Russia’s reorientation east — perhaps becoming something like a junior partner to China — represents a major shift in global affairs to which India will need to respond. Jaishankar said:

I find it hard to predict exactly what, but again, if I were to do a trend analysis, you have India today, fifth-largest economy moving towards becoming third, probably by the end of the decade, clearly an increasingly major consumer of resources, growing exporter of goods and services. So if you have a Russia which focuses more on Asia, and an India which is a bigger and bigger factor in the global economy, to me it’s common sense that the two trends intersect.

Jaishankar was descriptive about the trends he believes will occur, careful not to say whether he believes them to be good or bad. He continued:

Now this will not be happening in isolation. In the same period, I can imagine that the complementarities between India and the United States, and India and Europe, which I believe are enormous, and which I believe have been underexploited in the past, will also be realised. So I don’t want to say that we are going to shift in one particular direction, because an opportunity is coming. You will have this landscape where big changes are already beginning to happen. Those changes for different countries would feed into their outlook and their planning.

India can walk and chew gum at the same time, Jaishankar seems to be saying. India prizes its independence as a source of national pride. The independence movement against Britain is the country’s founding story, and the narrative today is that after years of colonial oppression, India has finally arrived as a major power player in global politics. Jaishankar said that spirit of independence can be a problem for conducting foreign policy. He said of his own country:

The fact is, this is an extraordinarily self-absorbed society. It needs regular reminders that there is a world out there, and that there are things happening in that world, which impacts our society and our interest very, very deeply. And therefore we should be present, we should be active, we should be a factor in what’s happening in that environment. Because if you don’t, the world will, whether we like it or not, have an increasing influence on our destiny.

That sounds similar to the U.S. in some respects, which deals with its own recurring bouts of isolationism. India does have some problems at home that could get in the way of Jaishankar’s policy agenda, however. One he mentioned unwittingly in the interview: poverty. He said that the Indian government had given food to 800 million people as an example of successful policy. But why do 800 million Indians need help getting food in the first place? Despite major progress against the most extreme forms of poverty, India still has a large poor population by the standards of developed countries. This will remain a challenge to its efforts at becoming a global power.

Despite significant challenges, India is now the world’s most populous country, with the fastest-growing major economy. It will likely be the third-largest economy in the world by 2030. A fruitful relationship with India will not include total conformity to American interests. But the U.S. and India are nonetheless “indispensable partners,” Jaishankar said. “That collaboration today can produce a magnitude of solutions for the kind of world I’m talking of, the new globalisation or re-globalisation which I think holds immense possibilities for us.”