By Harsh Pandey
At the outset, it is essential to note that India and the United States of America, for much of independent India’s existence, shared an uneasy relationship. The existence of a democratic plural India was an anathema for the USA, something the country itself is very proud of. In the mid-20th century, American intellectuals also feared India’s balkanization. So, in the great power competition that emerged as a byproduct of the Cold War, the USA chose Pakistan as its treaty partner, as Pakistan was largely homogenised, had a singular language, and ticked all the boxes of the European Nation State. India, on the other hand, grew more distant from the USA, first by attempting to create a third pole distinct from both the USA and the USSR, then by growing closer to the USSR. It is imperative to mention that there were serious efforts from both the American and the Indian sides to mend ties, whether under Eisenhower or Kennedy, but the significant change occurred only after India liberalised its market and the post-Soviet collapse. India’s nuclear test in 1998, while it initially created tension, also provided an opportunity for both powers to engage with each other, during which India enjoyed close strategic relations with the USA, which lasted until the term of President Joseph Biden.
While India was very enthusiastic for a second Trump presidency, unlike other US allies, that enthusiasm soon dwindled.
The disappointment is usually told as a story of wounded pride, of tariffs and insults and slights to national feeling, but that framing understates what has actually been damaged. What the Trump years have eroded is not Indian pride, which can absorb a great deal, but the institutional substance of the relationship, the predictable reciprocity and the conventions that had turned a warm rapport into a durable instrument. Consider the tariffs, twenty-five percent on Indian goods and then fifty as a penalty for buying Russian oil, steep enough that some called it an embargo in all but name; the hundred-thousand dollar fee on the visas Indians overwhelmingly hold; the repost of a screed that lumped India among the hellholes of the planet. Taken singly these are insults. Taken together with what followed, they are something more serious.
The deeper shift is structural. Trump’s repeated claim that he personally halted the May 2025 confrontation by threatening both India and Pakistan with tariffs, his hour-long courting of Pakistan’s army chief, his habit of bracketing the two countries as a matching pair, amounts to a quiet re-hyphenation of India with Pakistan after two decades of patient effort to be dealt with on India’s own terms. Alongside it ran a subtler demotion, for on the eve of the G7 the administration stripped the word Indo from its Pacific Command and reached back for an Asia-Pacific in which America is merely a Pacific nation, retiring the very concept that had once elevated India as the counterweight to China. If the Indo-Pacific was the conceptual recognition of India’s centrality, what does its quiet retirement say about how that centrality is now valued?
The bedrock that was meant to hold all this together, defence and security cooperation built over fifteen years, looked thinnest of all this June, when American aircraft killed three Indian seafarers off Oman and Washington offered not contrition but instruction, telling Delhi that all vessels must comply while its central command expressed no regret. And the coldness in the relationship was already visible before those deaths, for India had received the American Secretary of State in May with conspicuously low protocol, no senior minister at the tarmac, the External Affairs Minister telling him to his face that if Washington practised America First, then India would practise India First. That chill was not a reaction to the killings, it was a signal sent before them, a deliberate coldness expressing grievance that had been accumulating for months.
It is tempting, against all this, to reach for the comfortable conclusion that none of it finally matters, that India has no real choice but to stick with America because only Washington has the heft to balance a rising China, and that New Delhi will therefore swallow its pride and stay the course. The structural premise is sound enough. China’s economy now dwarfs India’s, none of the alternatives, a hollowed-out Russia, the middle powers of the region, a thaw with Beijing on Beijing’s terms, can substitute for American weight, and India does need the United States to manage its China problem. But the conclusion drawn from this is lazier than it looks, because dependence is not the same thing as the absence of leverage. If India needs American heft, the United States needs India just as badly to make any China strategy in Asia cohere at all, since it was India that turned a maritime contest into a continental problem for Beijing and gave the whole Indo-Pacific design its anchor and its demographic weight. To say India has no choice is to quietly drop one half of the equation and hand Washington the other for free.
This is why the G7 line, when Trump promised that America would be there if anyone attacked that man but was not so sure about a new leader, should not be read as a comment on any one prime minister’s tenure. Its real content is that the commitment has been personalised rather than institutionalised, and in the hard currency of great power competition a personalised commitment is very nearly worthless. Deterrence holds only when an adversary believes a guarantee will outlast the leader who made it, so a pledge that expires with a particular friendship is one that Beijing and Rawalpindi can discount in advance, which means it deters nothing. The line that was meant to flatter India in fact told China how shallow the foundation had become.
And this is the real cost of the comfortable view, for treating Indian patience as costless ignores that every humiliation absorbed in silence raises the domestic price of the partnership and deepens the anti-Americanism now plainly visible in Indian opinion, while teaching Washington that India can be taken for granted. India will in all likelihood stay with the United States, the structural logic does point only one way, but staying with America and accepting whatever America hands over are two different things. The work that Trump and his myopic transactional foreign policy have done to India only echoes Kissinger’s wise words, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal. While the realist logic may not grant much currency to the Middle Power Agency, there is a real thrust amongst most of America’s allies and partners, including India, to bypass what’s becoming a largely bipolar world. Till the time comes, India needs to abide by another set of wise words uttered by Deng Xiaoping, “Hide your strength, bide your time”. *Harsh Pandey is a PhD Candidate in the School of International Studies, New Delhi.