Sarang Shidore, the Director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute argued that India has “entered the hedging space much more strongly” as tensions with the United States continue to escalate.
Speaking to Media in Washington, Shidore cited Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ongoing visit to Japan and the upcoming trip to China to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as evidence of India embracing “multi-alignment more vigorously.”
“Multi-alignment is a core part of the Indian DNA. Now it becomes more important, so I see the (SCO) summit as a significant and important step in India starting to look east, north, south, not just west,” he added.
Shidore asserted that the present situation provides India with an “incentive to actually to deepen ties” with multiple countries.
“There are options. One is Russia, which is already strong and will potentially get stronger. The other is the global south. India has assertively spoken of the global south for some years,” he said.
In his view, India should further strengthen its cooperation with other “middle powers” like Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and the ASEAN.
While acknowledging that they “cannot substitute for the US fully,” they partially offset the pain,” predicting that India’s rise in future would be “assisted by multiple relationships.”
“The US should expect an India that is more diffused in terms of its alignments and more focused on its interests and not necessarily assuming that any one partner is going to be the central node of its strategy to rise,” he explained.
On the freefall in India-US bilateral ties, Shidore emphasised that the current crisis is “unusual” but the “last chapter” in the relationship hasn’t been written yet.
“By no means is this irreversible, and we may see some recovery, but there’s no question that the trust has been broken for some years to come,” he noted.
However, he believed that the bilateral tensions would have an impact on the Quad group – a partnership of four democracies of India, the US, Japan and Australia.
“The Quad has been losing steam in the US. I just don’t see the Trump administration taking on an enthusiastic mini-lateral approach, although the irony is that Trump 1.0 really revived the Quad and made it robust,” he predicted.
Commenting on the impact of US arm-twisting allies and friends to secure favourable deals, Shidore stressed that the Trump administration is attempting to “arrest the slide of declining unipolarity” but is unlikely to succeed.
“If this trajectory continues, then we will see a US that is more disconnected from the world, and in many ways, will lose equity. I think at the end of the process, the world will be less unipolar than it is now,” he concluded.
