A ceasefire has been declared and Europe’s leaders can breathe a sigh of relief. They can now get back to business.

The European Union’s recent courtship of India is one of the more telling developments in global politics — not because of what’s being promised but because of what both sides are trying to avoid.

The Pahalgam terror attack shocked much of the world and drew an immediate pledge of solidarity from the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen: “Europe will stand with you,” she wrote on X. But when India responded with force and the possibility of escalation loomed, the tone in Brussels — and across the rest of Europe —shifted quickly from solidarity to diplomacy. In the United Kingdom, too, which had just inked a long-awaited and ‘historic’ free trade deal with India, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, urged “de-escalation” and protection of civilians. France, Germany, and Italy followed suit, issuing cautious statements.

The recent conflict between India and Pakistan exposed just how the EU is caught in a bind. It wants to maintain its economic weight without depending too heavily on either the United States of America or China. But with Washington drifting further into protectionism and tariffs under a second Donald Trump administration, and with Beijing tightening its grip on global supply chains, Brussels is now searching for an alternative. India, with its scale, its economic growth, and its anxieties about China, seems like an obvious answer.

The momentum is there. India is a vital partner, the largest South Asian economy, and a plausible alternative to China in the green technology supply chain. Ursula von der Leyen made this position official by making her first bilateral visit of her second mandate to India. With US-EU trade tensions rising under Trump 2.0, and Europe caught in the crossfire of the US-China trade war, Brussels is trying to diversify its options before the next explosive Trump tweet.

As a result, negotiators from the EU and India have been working to finalise a long-delayed free trade agreement. Officials speak of shared goals in green technology, semiconductors, and Artificial Intelligence. There is good reason for this engagement: the EU wants new markets, and India offers abundance — not just in terms of raw materials but also people. Young, educated, and numerous, India’s population is an increasingly valuable resource in a world where both demographics and supply chains are tightening.

But as the recent weeks have shown, India is not just a promising partner — it is also a volatile one. Just as the trade talks were heating up, India and Pakistan appeared on the brink of an armed conflict. A deadly terror attack in Pahalgam was met with Indian retaliation, which triggered Pakistani counterstrikes. And for a brief, deeply unsettling moment, two nuclear powers seemed poised to test the world’s capacity for de-escalation.

The situation has stabilised. A ceasefire has been announced. President Trump has claimed credit, though neither side acknowledged American mediation. But the episode underscored a deeper tension: India’s promise as an economic partner exists in the same space as its peril as a security actor. And Europe — whose foreign policy remains fragmented and whose defence capacity is limited — cannot afford to treat those two realms as separate.

Europe’s economic overture to India depends on a key assumption: that India is a safe, or at least stable, bet. It is not yet clear that this is true. India’s position on Ukraine, for example, has already strained European patience. Russia is India’s largest arms supplier and accounts for over 30% of Russia’s total arms exports. The Narendra Modi government has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, maintained close energy ties with Moscow, and largely avoided alignment with Western sanctions. These positions reflect long-standing strategic relationships but they sit uneasily with European foreign policy priorities.

So far, the EU has been willing to bracket those differences in the name of trade. But that calculus could shift quickly. A military conflict between India and Pakistan —especially one that risks nuclear escalation — would force Europe to make a choice it is neither prepared for nor equipped to make: between securing trade and avoiding entanglement. If push comes to shove, there is little reason to believe that Brussels would — or even could — step in to protect EU-India economic relations amid regional war.

This is the central asymmetry in the relationship. Europe wants to decouple from China, diversify away from America, and hedge against instability. India offers a path to do all three — at least on paper. But India wants something else: strategic autonomy. As India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, writes in his book, The India Way, the country’s foreign policy is about managing relationships rather than choosing sides. “Engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia” — this is a strategy designed for flexibility, not loyalty.

And that flexibility is both India’s greatest strength and the EU’s biggest risk.

India is not choosing Europe. It is positioning itself as an alternative to both the US’s and China's spheres of influence, a pivot point rather than a partner. Modi’s model of Atmanirbhar Bharat — national self-reliance — is about economic and technological independence, not integration. That is a perfectly rational approach. But it means that any economic deal between Delhi and Brussels will rest on unstable political ground. It is hard to build durable trade when one side insists on optionality, and the other demands reliability.

That may be the lesson Europe is slowly beginning to internalise. For Europe, it is not enough to find new partners. Those partners must be capable of weathering geopolitical storms. In the current global system, abundance is power — but only when paired with predictability. India has the first. The past few weeks have raised real doubts about the second.

If the EU wants India as a core trade partner, it may have to prepare for the strategic commitments that come with it. That means developing clearer foreign policy tools, deeper defence coordination, and greater political will to support its economic interests abroad. Right now, those capacities don’t exist. And, so, Europe continues to pursue trade as if it can be separated from geopolitics.

The India-Pakistan standoff was a warning. Trade does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a world where conflicts escalate, alliances shift, and nuclear risks reassert themselves. The EU may want India. But unless it can offer more than memoranda and market access, it may not be able to keep it — especially when the stakes go far beyond a bottom-line deal.

Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany, and is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C.