Extraterritorial application of domestic legislation by major powers increasingly shapes the foreign policy choices of developing countries. Discuss with reference to recent US sanctions legislation targeting purchasers of Russian oil.

Extraterritorial legislation — domestic law applied to third-country actors abroad, usually through secondary sanctions or punitive tariffs — has become a routine instrument of great-power statecraft. The US Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, 2026 [1] shows how such laws narrow, without formally removing, a developing country's policy autonomy.

How the reach is engineered

• The Act authorises duties of up to 100% ad valorem on goods imported from countries among the five largest importers of Russian-origin crude oil or natural gas [1].
• The penalty falls not on the oil purchase but on unrelated exports — textiles, gems, seafood, engineering goods — so the sector gaining from discounted crude is not the sector that pays.
• Jurisdiction rests on market access, not territory: the lever is entry into the US economy.

Constraint on India's choices

• Russia's share of India's crude imports rose from about 1% in 2018-19 to roughly 36% in 2024-25 [2], turning a commercial decision into a foreign-policy variable.
• India must weigh energy security against export competitiveness — a trade-off it did not choose.
• Its response is adaptive rather than declaratory: diversified sourcing, long-term LNG contracts and Strategic Petroleum Reserves under ISPRL [3] cushion any rapid supply switch.

Residual space for autonomy

• The 100% figure is a ceiling and an authorisation, not an automatic rate; imposition rests on presidential discretion, keeping negotiation alive.
• Since the trigger is a ranking, calibrating volumes — rather than announcing a ban — can remove exposure.
• The MEA has reaffirmed commitment to energy security for 1.4 billion people through diversified sourcing [4].

Asymmetry in democratic scrutiny

• The US legislature voted the policy (Senate 86–11; House 262–159) [1]; India's Parliament has no comparable vote, since Article 73 vests treaty-making in the executive and Article 253 engages Parliament only to implement agreements [5], confining scrutiny to committees and debate.

Extraterritoriality thus works less by compulsion than by raising the price of independent choice. India's course lies in embedding tariff relief in a written trade agreement, accelerating supply diversification and reserve capacity [3], and strengthening plurilateral rule-making — so that strategic autonomy rests on structural resilience rather than goodwill.