India’s Strategic Autonomy and Rapprochement with the US

The debate around strategic autonomy offers a conceptual framework to understand how India, as an emerging power, tries to negotiate autonomy in its security and military relationship with the United States. In the context of Indo-US rapprochement, the dynamics of power relations are not commensurate with India’s will to keep an acceptable degree of autonomy. Consequently, the concept of strategic autonomy, which is a realist mutation of the traditional non-aligned posture, can be described as a set of strategies aiming to balance independence in both foreign policy and security decision-making processes with the imperative to forge close strategic ties with the US.