Delhi between two superpowers: India’s transactional pivot against the Sino-American squeeze
India is being courted and pressured in equal measure by Washington and Beijing. An Indian Express editorial argues Delhi must become more transactional with both — and start extracting rather than absorbing the cost.
On 1 July 2026, The Indian Express published an unsigned editorial under a headline most Western think-tanks would call naïve and most Delhi mandarins would call overdue. Titled "As US and China compete in India's neighbourhood, Delhi must become more transactional with both," the piece makes a quietly radical case: that the era of India as the wooed neutral — the strategic swing state both superpowers court but neither disciplines — is closing, and the era of India as a price-setter has to open [Indian Express editorial, 1 July 2026, ~11:52 UTC, https://ift.tt/P0N6bxK].
That argument deserves more than the polite applause it has so far received. It deserves a hard reckoning with what transactional diplomacy actually costs a country that has spent two decades branding itself as a normative, values-anchored rising power.
What the editorial actually argues
The thesis is plain-spoken. The United States and China are now competing for material advantage in India's extended neighbourhood — the Indian Ocean, South Asia, the Bay of Bengal littoral, the Gulf, and East Africa. Both capitals are offering Delhi access, investment, technology transfers, and security cooperation. Neither is offering equality. India's response, the paper argues, has been to treat both relationships as long-horizon partnerships rather than as ongoing commercial negotiations, and the cost of that posture is no longer sustainable.
"Transactional," in this context, does not mean mercenary. It means price-disciplined: each project, each platform access, each tariff line, each technology-transfer clause, each defence-procurement offset, priced and re-priced as conditions change. It means refusing the framing in which India is the supplicant in one relationship and the cautious partner in the other. It means extracting concessions when leverage exists and conceding ground where it does not — and being honest about which is which.
Why the Indian establishment resists the word
The reservation in South Block is old and partly defensible. India built its post-1991 foreign-policy identity on a refusal to be a balance-of-power bargainier. Non-alignment, multi-alignment, strategic autonomy — the vocabulary kept Delhi off the hook of having to choose. That posture served the country well in an era when the superpowers needed India's vote more than India's compliance. It looks shakier in 2026, when both Washington and Beijing have viable alternatives in India's own neighbourhood.
The cost of the old posture is now visible in the ledger. Defence imports still rely disproportionately on one superpower; trade with the other remains hostage to unresolved border tensions; critical-technology partnerships — semiconductors, AI compute, rare-earth processing, submarine cable infrastructure — are negotiated one concession at a time, usually on the supplier's preferred template. Delhi absorbs the uncertainty; the suppliers keep the option of denial. That asymmetry is the editorial's quiet target.
The structural frame
What this comes down to is power concentration in fewer chokepoints than at any time since the early 1990s. Two states now write most of the rules for advanced technology, most of the dollar-clearing arrangements that lie behind cross-border trade, and most of the maritime logistics on which India's energy and container imports depend. A third-tier power that still claims normative leadership has two coherent choices: it can either build, slowly and expensively, its own chips-and-ships capacity — the path India's PLI schemes and infrastructure corridors point toward — or it can treat both relationships as continuous commercial negotiation and extract concessions where the leverage is real. The editorial is for the second track as a complement to, not a substitute for, the first.
There is a less comfortable reading available. The deeper logic of transactional diplomacy is that you cannot be transactional about everything at once; you must choose what to monetise. India has chosen, since at least 2014, to monetise strategic access: ports, airfields, capacity-building contracts, G20 diplomacy, voice-of-the-Global-South summits. Those choices are invisible to the public ledger but very visible to both partners, and they shape what either superpower will concede when Delhi does ask. A truly transactional posture would mean periodically selling things India now gives away — and being told, by domestic audiences, that the government has "sold out."
The other neighbourhood stories
Two other Indian Express stories on the same wire give the transactional case a sharper edge [Indian Express, 1 July 2026, https://ift.tt/2qfR9Ac]. The Cabinet cleared an eight-kilometre six-lane Dwarka tunnel in Delhi and a four-lane highway in Uttar Pradesh — domestic infrastructure commitments that bind capital and political attention to projects with long lead times and immediate fiscal cost. Infrastructure-first diplomacy is a real instrument, but it is an instrument that costs the exchequer now and pays back, if at all, in a decade. That timing mismatch — fiscal cost today, geopolitical return tomorrow — is precisely what a transactional reading forces onto the table.
And then the long view. A separate Indian Express piece reminds readers that one Swedish match company shaped colonial India's commercial infrastructure, working hand in glove with imperial preferences to convert a domestic cottage industry into a captive export sector [Indian Express, 1 July 2026, https://ift.tt/F2R6lxj]. The historical lesson is not flattering to transactional diplomacy: in 1880, India negotiated as if it had leverage, and it had none. The medium-term question is whether Delhi in 2026 is genuinely in the stronger position the editorial implicitly claims, or whether the negotiating posture is running ahead of the underlying balance.
The stakes
If the transactional posture takes hold — and the precondition is India's domestic industrial and capital-market deepening — Delhi will be a more useful partner to both capitals, extracting technology access and infrastructure finance on terms that publish. If it doesn't, India drifts into the slower, more dependent version of strategic autonomy: nominally non-aligned, practically aligned with whichever side offers the cheaper dollar and the more reliable part. The Global South audience this paper is written for — note the simultaneous soft-power play of a separate Indian Express item celebrating Indian cuisine at number thirteen in a global ranking [Indian Express, 1 July 2026, https://ift.tt/HoA9QCv] — will read the transactional turn as either overdue realism or as the moment India stopped pretending to be different. Both readings are available. Neither is yet settled.
Desk note: Monexus treats this opinion piece as an editorial argument that is consistent with our default tilt — that Global-South framing belongs on the Asia desk and that the Global South's leverage story deserves plain-prose treatment rather than abstract theory. We have quoted the editorial's thesis closely; we have left room for the critique that transactional diplomacy, run too hard, becomes the politics of selling permanent assets for short-term leverage.