Indian state has become too sensitive to local political turbulence to take any of the above mentioned steps. Retaliation requires political will and intent.
Useful framework, but I'd push back on how much usable leverage India actually has right now. The dependencies run deeper than the piece suggests. Our frontline fighters fly on GE engines — that's a chokehold, not a contract we can redirect overnight. The GCCs employ a million-plus Indians, which makes them as much a hostage as a weapon: restricting them hurts our own employment before it hurts the multinationals. And the entire digital foundation — servers, GPUs, desktop and mobile OS — is American.
So the honest position is uncomfortable: digitally we depend on the US, in manufacturing we depend on China. Leverage you can't pull without bleeding yourself isn't really leverage.
The almonds-and-tariffs menu is fine for sending signals, but it doesn't move the structural picture.
What would is building a third axis - and Europe is the obvious partner. Co-develop, co-use, co-export across both tech and manufacturing, so the dependence becomes mutual rather than one-directional. Europe needs the same hedge against a Trump–Xi world that India does. Durable leverage comes from being indispensable to someone, not from being able to inconvenience them.
A timely corrective, Pranay. The "India is too small to push back" reflex needed puncturing, and your seven-factor framework is a useful starting point.
What I'd build on is your own caveat on the SAMR-equivalent: that it has to be a standing, rules-based institution, not an ad hoc retaliatory mechanism. That discipline is the whole game, and I'd extend it from one item to the entire menu. Leverage is a stock, not a card. The framework describes how to spend it in a moment; the prior question is whether we've accumulated enough that the threat is credible and hard to bypass — and whether we can hold the line after we've drawn it. As an episodic reflex, confrontation invites the worst of all worlds: we provoke a retaliation we're not yet consolidated enough to absorb.
That's close to Chor Pharn's "premature importance" — becoming taxable before the internal base is built. The almond tariff works because it's cheap and reversible; the GCC and pharma levers cut both ways precisely because we haven't yet built the depth to use them without bleeding ourselves.
Two riders. First, the doctrine only works if it's blind to the flag. A leverage posture aimed at the US alone, while we wait seven months for rare-earth licences Beijing grants Detroit in six weeks, isn't a strategy, it's a grievance with one partner. The same clinical cost-imposition has to apply wherever the asymmetry favours us, or it stays episodic with extra steps.
Second, every move will have counter moves, and there are two kinds of preparations needed. One is the stock — the accumulated indispensability that makes a threat credible. The other is the civic unity we have to price in: the capacity to absorb the counter-punch. They're not the same muscle. A country that can throw the punch but can't take the answer will start a fight it has to abandon halfway — worse than never starting it. Which is why Aman's point below is well made: "willingness to absorb short-term costs" isn't a foreign-policy variable, it's a domestic-coherence one. A polity divided over who belongs in it can't hold a red line, because every absorbed cost becomes a stick for the opposition at the next poll.
Build the stock and the coherence to bear the blowback, and selective confrontation becomes strategy. Without the second, we spend the credibility and buy nothing.
Thanks Rajesh. The point about thinking of leverage as Stock is well-taken. But India already has some Stock built in; every country has some of it, depending on the density of interrelationships. Building more Stock is, of course, advisable, but I wanted to focus on what our options are *today*.
Indian state has become too sensitive to local political turbulence to take any of the above mentioned steps. Retaliation requires political will and intent.
Useful framework, but I'd push back on how much usable leverage India actually has right now. The dependencies run deeper than the piece suggests. Our frontline fighters fly on GE engines — that's a chokehold, not a contract we can redirect overnight. The GCCs employ a million-plus Indians, which makes them as much a hostage as a weapon: restricting them hurts our own employment before it hurts the multinationals. And the entire digital foundation — servers, GPUs, desktop and mobile OS — is American.
So the honest position is uncomfortable: digitally we depend on the US, in manufacturing we depend on China. Leverage you can't pull without bleeding yourself isn't really leverage.
The almonds-and-tariffs menu is fine for sending signals, but it doesn't move the structural picture.
What would is building a third axis - and Europe is the obvious partner. Co-develop, co-use, co-export across both tech and manufacturing, so the dependence becomes mutual rather than one-directional. Europe needs the same hedge against a Trump–Xi world that India does. Durable leverage comes from being indispensable to someone, not from being able to inconvenience them.
I've written more on exactly this — why India and Europe need each other as that third axis: https://rajdoot12.substack.com/p/trump-xi-2026-why-india-and-europe?r=85l1yf&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
A timely corrective, Pranay. The "India is too small to push back" reflex needed puncturing, and your seven-factor framework is a useful starting point.
What I'd build on is your own caveat on the SAMR-equivalent: that it has to be a standing, rules-based institution, not an ad hoc retaliatory mechanism. That discipline is the whole game, and I'd extend it from one item to the entire menu. Leverage is a stock, not a card. The framework describes how to spend it in a moment; the prior question is whether we've accumulated enough that the threat is credible and hard to bypass — and whether we can hold the line after we've drawn it. As an episodic reflex, confrontation invites the worst of all worlds: we provoke a retaliation we're not yet consolidated enough to absorb.
That's close to Chor Pharn's "premature importance" — becoming taxable before the internal base is built. The almond tariff works because it's cheap and reversible; the GCC and pharma levers cut both ways precisely because we haven't yet built the depth to use them without bleeding ourselves.
Two riders. First, the doctrine only works if it's blind to the flag. A leverage posture aimed at the US alone, while we wait seven months for rare-earth licences Beijing grants Detroit in six weeks, isn't a strategy, it's a grievance with one partner. The same clinical cost-imposition has to apply wherever the asymmetry favours us, or it stays episodic with extra steps.
Second, every move will have counter moves, and there are two kinds of preparations needed. One is the stock — the accumulated indispensability that makes a threat credible. The other is the civic unity we have to price in: the capacity to absorb the counter-punch. They're not the same muscle. A country that can throw the punch but can't take the answer will start a fight it has to abandon halfway — worse than never starting it. Which is why Aman's point below is well made: "willingness to absorb short-term costs" isn't a foreign-policy variable, it's a domestic-coherence one. A polity divided over who belongs in it can't hold a red line, because every absorbed cost becomes a stick for the opposition at the next poll.
Build the stock and the coherence to bear the blowback, and selective confrontation becomes strategy. Without the second, we spend the credibility and buy nothing.
Thanks Rajesh. The point about thinking of leverage as Stock is well-taken. But India already has some Stock built in; every country has some of it, depending on the density of interrelationships. Building more Stock is, of course, advisable, but I wanted to focus on what our options are *today*.