India's China policy: the cost of outsourcing strategy

On June 16, 2026, the US quietly reverted the name of its largest military command from the US Indo-Pacific Command to the US Pacific Command. No military assets were moved. No operational boundaries changed. Yet the decision carried considerable strategic significance.

The original renaming in 2018 reflected a particular American vision of Asia. By inserting the word "Indo" into the command's title, Washington was signalling that India would become an integral part of its strategy to balance China. The Indo-Pacific concept was built around the assumption that China could be constrained through a coalition of like-minded states stretching from the Western Pacific to the Indian Ocean, with India occupying a central position in that architecture.

Eight years later, that assumption appears to be fading.

The return to the term Pacific Command suggests that Washington is narrowing its strategic focus. Rather than constructing broad anti-China coalitions, the US is increasingly concentrating on the Western Pacific, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and direct management of its relationship with Beijing. This shift has become more apparent following President Donald Trump's renewed engagement with China and his preference for transactional diplomacy over ideological coalition-building.

The message is not that competition between Washington and Beijing has ended. Rather, it is that the US increasingly views China as a power that must be managed directly rather than through an expansive geopolitical framework that places India at its centre.

This naturally raises an uncomfortable question for New Delhi: what happens when the strategic framework that elevated India's importance is no longer central to American thinking?

For more than a decade, India invested heavily in a foreign policy that assumed a long-term convergence of interests with the US against China. The result was a gradual alignment of Indian policies with broader American objectives across the region.

Nowhere was this more visible than in India's approach towards China. India did not pursue an independent China policy rooted primarily in Asian realities. Instead, its approach increasingly mirrored Washington's assessment of China as the principal challenge to regional order.

The BRI provides one example. When China launched BRI, India chose outright opposition. It adopted many of the same arguments advanced by Washington, including concerns regarding debt dependency and Chinese influence. Yet the rest of South Asia largely ignored India's objections. Pakistan joined through CPEC. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and others expanded their engagement with Chinese-funded infrastructure projects. The result was that India isolated itself from the region's most significant connectivity initiative while China expanded its economic footprint across South Asia.

The same pattern emerged within BRICS. Although BRICS was originally conceived as a platform through which emerging powers could increase their collective influence, India frequently acted as a moderating force whenever proposals risked creating direct friction with the West. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's public observation that India had often been "on America's side" within BRICS reflected a perception that had already become widespread in diplomatic circles.

Whether one agrees with Rubio's assessment or not, the statement highlighted a larger reality: India was increasingly seen as balancing American concerns inside BRICS rather than using BRICS to balance Western dominance.

The consequences became even more apparent in South Asia. India's most consequential strategic mistake was arguably its abandonment of SAARC. For decades, South Asia's biggest challenge has been the absence of regional integration. Geography favours cooperation. Economics favours cooperation. Connectivity favours cooperation. Yet politics repeatedly prevented it.

Instead of strengthening SAARC, India gradually allowed the organisation to become irrelevant. A major reason was New Delhi's discomfort with any possibility of China acquiring a larger role within the regional framework.

The irony is striking. By preventing China from entering SAARC, India did not keep China out of South Asia. It merely pushed China towards alternative mechanisms. Beijing subsequently expanded its influence through BRI, bilateral partnerships and new regional arrangements.

Today, every South Asian country except Bhutan participates in BRI in one form or another. In attempting to prevent Chinese influence through regional institutions, India inadvertently accelerated Chinese influence through regional connectivity. This represents a broader pattern in Indian foreign policy over the past decade. Rather than competing with China through integration, India often chose competition through exclusion. Rather than shaping regional institutions, it stepped away from them. Rather than building South Asia collectively, it increasingly focused on denying strategic space to Pakistan.

That strategy has produced mixed results at best. Pakistan remains China's closest strategic partner. CPEC remains operational. Chinese influence in South Asia continues to grow. Meanwhile, India's relations with several neighbours have experienced periods of strain.

The recent India-Pakistan crisis further exposed these realities. China's support for Pakistan demonstrated the depth of the Beijing-Islamabad partnership. More importantly, it highlighted a geopolitical reality that New Delhi had spent years trying to avoid: China is now a permanent strategic actor in South Asia.

For India, the message is more sobering. The strategic importance India acquired during the Indo-Pacific era was tied to a specific American policy. As that policy evolves, so does India's relevance within it.

What remains is a more transactional relationship centred on trade, defence purchases and selective cooperation. India remains important to the US, but not necessarily in the transformational way imagined a decade ago.

This is precisely why foreign policy cannot be built around another country's strategic framework.

The lesson is not that India should have aligned with China. Nor is it that its partnership with the US was a mistake. The lesson is that successful foreign policy requires independence of judgement. Great powers pursue their own interests. The US does. China does. Russia does.

India's challenge was that it often pursued American objectives in Asia while believing they were identical to its own.