A recent article suggested that Japan may cultivate Türkiye as a “secondary strategic pillar”, raising the more important question of whether such “hedging” is compatible with the long-term partnership India expects from Japan. The key issue is whether such a relationship reflects interest-based hedging, revisable, low-commitment, and functionally bounded, or identity-congruent alignment, which is more durable, harder to reverse, and carries obligations that outlast the interests that first created it.

A theoretical scaffold

Three bodies of work are useful here.

Hedging theory. Kuik Cheng-Chwee’s (2025) distinguishes hedging from balancing and bandwagoning by its deliberate ambiguity. Kuik Cheng-Chwee and, separately, Jürgen Haacke & John D. Ciorciari (2019; 2022), further note that hedging sits on a spectrum from “risk-contingency” behaviour (insurance against a low-probability but high-cost scenario) to “return-maximizing” behaviour (opportunistic diversification for gain). Japan courting Türkiye, on the continental-connectivity logic the Hudson piece describes, reads as return-maximizing hedging: a bet on Eurasian corridor economics, not a hedge against U.S. abandonment.

The alliance security dilemma. Glenn H. Snyder’s (1984) holds that allies face a permanent trade-off between fear of abandonment and fear of entrapment. Applied here, the risk to India is not that Japan abandons its own alliance commitments; it is that India could be exposed to entrapment by proxy. If Japan’s connectivity partnership with Türkiye deepens, and Türkiye’s own commitments, to Pakistan on defense sales, to the OIC bloc’s position on Kashmir, remain active, India absorbs a diplomatic externality it did not generate and cannot easily price out, simply by virtue of sitting adjacent to a partner (Japan) that is now transacting with a partner of a rival (Pakistan). This is not entrapment in Snyder’s original sense of being pulled into war; it is a softer, but real, version:........

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