OPED by Karan Sharma
Henry Kissinger once remarked, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” For India, this cynical observation has begun to ring truer than ever in the post-COVID global order, particularly as the contours of Indo-US relations evolve under shifting political winds in Washington.
As political polarization in the US has intensified since Donald Trump’s entry in 2017, fluctuations in US-India relations have also increased. The core policies of both the Republican and Democratic establishments towards India have begun to diverge from the consensus established since the Clinton-Bush-Obama presidencies (1993-2017).
Under an “engaged democracy” doctrine, the US under Bill Clinton began to grow closer to India after its economic liberalization; however, India’s Pokhran nuclear tests proved to be a brief aberration in the relationship, leading to Western sanctions on India.
The nuclear ostracization policy of the US took a complete U-turn under President George W. Bush, who signed the US-India Civil Nuclear Deal, which paved the way for India to grow its civil nuclear program despite not being a member of the Non-Proliferation and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaties.
Under President Barack Obama, the relationship between the United States and India grew stronger. This was partly because of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” policy.
This policy aimed for better strategic and defense cooperation with India, as well as Japan, South Korea, and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The goal was to balance the growing influence of China in Asia and globally.
In 2017, the general direction and the governing principles of the Indo-US relationship underwent a significant change; transactional diplomacy replaced value-driven engagement. At the same time, the overall emphasis shifted from shared democratic values to defense, trade, bilateralism, and counter-China positioning.
The US’s engagement with the Asia Pacific (later Indo-Pacific) region underwent major disruption when Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, this was the period when the Indo-US defense partnership grew by leaps and bounds; foundational defense agreements like COMCASA and BECA were signed.
Interestingly, under President Joe Biden (2021–2025), India’s strategic embrace of the United States was tested, especially after Russia launched its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.
While the US led a coordinated Western campaign to diplomatically isolate Russia and impose sweeping economic sanctions, India charted an independent course rooted in its longstanding principle of strategic autonomy.
India was not willing to turn against Russia, a historical and time-tested partner, under pressure from the US and EU. India refrained from condemning Russia at the United Nations, abstaining from a U.S.-backed resolution in March 2022.
More consequentially, India emerged as a top buyer of Russian crude oil, importing over 1 million barrels daily by mid-2022. Securing discounted oil has helped India manage inflation and ensure its energy security at a time when the world faced crises in fuel, food, and fertilizer supplies. India’s independent energy policy significantly softened the blow of Western sanctions on Russia.
Understandably, the US expressed apparent displeasure. During the 2022 G-20 Summit in Indonesia and again during Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to New Delhi in June 2022, Washington urged India to reduce its purchases of Russian oil.
President Biden directly conveyed that deepening trade ties with Russia were “not in India’s interest.” Nevertheless, India held its course.
This divergence extended beyond energy geopolitics to encompass tensions over values. US institutions, including the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), consistently criticized developments in India, such as the Citizenship Amendment Act and restrictions on dissent. In response, India dismissed the “democracy and human rights rhetoric” as biased and hypocritical, pointing to America’s own history of racism and xenophobia.
With Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, human rights critiques receded, but new fault lines emerged in the relationship. Chief among them: Trade.
In April 2025, President Trump declared a National economic emergency, invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose sweeping tariffs of 10% across the board and up to 27% on Indian exports, including pharmaceuticals, auto parts, and textiles. Over 87% of Indian goods to the US were impacted.
Currently, India is said to run a trade surplus of $45.7 billion with the USA, inviting Trump’s harsh criticism of India in the same bracket as China for being “tariff Kings” exploiting US markets through “allegedly” unfair trade arrangements.
However, according to the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), the US earns an estimated $80–85 billion annually from India through various channels: Indian students’ expenditure on education in the US, India’s payments for digital services, financial operations, and royalties on intellectual property, and procurement of defence equipment.
These expenditures exceed India’s trade surplus with the US by twofold, sharply contradicting Trump’s claim that India has “looted, plundered, raped, and pillaged” American markets.
Nevertheless, unlike China, India chose restraint over retaliation to Trump’s imposition of unilateral tariffs on all incoming imports. It offered to reduce its average tariff gap from 13% to under 4% and proposed eliminating tariffs on 60% of US goods under a phased trade deal.
However, Trump’s stance hardened. He repeatedly labelled India one of the “highest tariffing nations in the world” and has publicly pressured firms like Apple not to shift supply chains from China to India, warning that iPhones made in India would face a 25% tariff in the US.
Operation Sindoor And Trump
Just as trade talks writhed, a new provocation shook the Indo-US relationship: Trump’s unsolicited announcement of an India-Pakistan ceasefire following India’s Operation Sindoor—an air and missile strike deep inside Pakistan targeting terror infrastructure.
Without consulting New Delhi, Trump claimed credit for averting a “nuclear catastrophe” despite India’s emphatic denial of any US mediation.
By reviving hyphenation and refusing to condemn Pakistan’s role in the Pahalgam terror attacks, Trump rekindled longstanding Indian concerns over American reliability as a strategic partner.
Alarmingly, amidst India’s Operation Sindoor and Pakistan’s escalating retaliation, the US and G-7-led International Monetary Fund extended critical loans to Pakistan, which serves as an important fiscal lifeline for a nation on the brink of default.
During a time when India relied on the US to restrain Pakistan’s “terror ecosystem” by imposing conditions on IMF loans or, at the very least, maintaining neutrality, India observed a White House that was utterly indifferent to its concerns regarding Pakistan’s funding, training, and sponsorship of terrorism in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Moreover, the US administration alarmingly equated India and Pakistan, framing them as South Asian equals in need of an American mediator to enforce a ceasefire.
Trump’s rhetoric of using warnings over trade to steer India and Pakistan away from nuclear conflict demonstrates that the US has disregarded nuance, restraint, and careful consideration of its national interests in South Asia.
By hyphenating India and Pakistan under one umbrella — one being the world’s fastest-growing economy at $4.2 trillion and a thriving democracy like the US, and the other a struggling economy worth $0.37 trillion with its most popular leader imprisoned by the military—the Trump administration has heightened India’s wariness.
This approach has showcased the United States’ strategic unreliability and further solidified India’s discomfort with moving closer to the US.
Observers have long described the Indo-US dynamic using terms like “reluctant partners” or “friends with benefits.” However, Trump’s post-2025 policies have peeled away the veneer of camaraderie seen at mega-events like Howdy Modi and Namaste Trump. Behind the optics lies a relationship shaped less by shared values and more by transactionalism.
Trump’s “shock and awe” foreign policy, steeped in zero-sum thinking, has amplified the transactional bilateralism that Tanvi Madan warns against in her book, “Fateful Triangle.” His businesslike approach—”give and take” with no room for sentiment—has tested even Modi’s diplomatic patience.
However, this is not entirely new. As former Ambassador Meera Shankar wrote in The India-US Story, the bilateral journey has “zigzagged through the minefields of geopolitics.” The difference now is the intensity of those zigzags.
India’s willingness to be a first responder—to negotiate trade, absorb pressure, and deepen defence ties—reflects its recognition that it cannot afford to disengage. The Indo-Pacific calculus, rising China, and US technological leadership continue to make the United States a necessary partner.
However, the relationship is being recast. It is no longer framed as “natural allies” bound by democracy. Instead, it is geopolitical arithmetic—a partnership born out of necessity, not nostalgia.
As the world transitions into a multipolar and protectionist phase, India must balance its growing self-confidence with diplomatic realism. The United States must determine whether it perceives India as a genuine partner or merely as a strategic asset within its broader strategy to contain China.
Trump’s second term will pass, but the consequences of his style of diplomacy may endure. For India, the lesson is sobering: symbolic spectacles and personal rapport between leaders cannot override the deep structures of national interest and asymmetry that continue to define the Indo-US equation.
In a world order in flux, India must engage America—but never depend on it.
- Karan Sharma is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS-Pilani, Goa.
- Views personal of the author
