Is Non-Aligned Countries’ Hedging Sustainable: The Case of India

This article aims to examine the sustainability of non-aligned countries' hedging strategies from the perspective of efficiency. It presents the conditions for effective hedging and analyzes India's diplomatic strategy, which led the non-aligned movement during the Cold War era and now seeks to become a leader in the Global South. Effective hedging strategies involve selecting alternatives based on the consideration of potential risks and strategic costs, issuing fair and ambiguous signals to multiple great powers, and expanding multilayered and intermediate alliances and networks. India has employed a hard hedging strategy, actively enhancing security cooperation with the United States to avoid critical risks from China. Additionally, to mitigate the costs associated with hard hedging strategies, India has sent ambiguous signals to both the United States and China, while forming multilayered bilateral cooperation and intermediate and multilateral networks. Through these efforts, India has been able to reduce the feasibility of potential risks and secure leverage while maintaining strategic autonomy as a non-aligned country. The space India has secured through hedging may expand, overlapping with the space of maneuver secured by other middle powers facing pressure from great power competition. In this regard, the hedging of non-aligned countries may be sustainable not merely as opportunistic strategies driven by pragmatism under the pretext of non-alignment, but rather as efforts to pursue a multi polar order through proactive thinking and the accumulation of strategic means, influencing the international order restructuring, with countries like India possessing capabilities and positional power at its center.