By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Pressure is building on New Delhi to halt energy imports from Russia

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, U.S.-Indian relations were stronger than almost anyone in the twentieth century could have predicted. In the first 50 years after India gained independence in 1947, New Delhi was deeply suspicious of Washington, which it saw as an imperial power not unlike those in Europe. It repeatedly criticized the United States’ behavior and adopted a policy of nonalignment during the Cold War. But after the Soviet Union collapsed and the millennium turned, U.S. leaders realized that India could be an important partner in countering a rising China and a valuable market for American companies, and they worked assiduously to win over Indian officials. The courtship wasn’t easy: it required repeated visits and commitments to deepening defense and technology cooperation from Democratic and Republican administrations alike, spread out over the course of 25 years, alongside outreach from increasingly like-minded Indian governments. Slowly but surely, however, India and the United States forged a tight bond, undergirded by formal military agreements and increased economic ties.

But now, all this progress is at great risk. The problems began with a fit of presidential pride and pique, when Trump craved and claimed credit for ending the brief May conflict between India and Pakistan. Islamabad leaped to support Trump’s account, praising the president’s “decisive diplomatic intervention” and nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize. But New Delhi—which does not accept foreign mediation in its conflict with Pakistan as a matter of principle—denied that Washington had played such a role. Trump then angered India further by hosting Pakistan’s military chief, General Syed Asim Munir, in the Oval Office less than two months after Pakistani terrorists killed 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir and triggered the May conflict. Trump also declined to sign a trade deal with India and imposed draconian tariffs on its United States-bound exports, and in August, he called the country a “dead economy.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in turn, traveled to China—his first visit there in seven years—and appeared clasping hands with China’s and Russia’s leaders. This prompted Trump to conclude that the United States had “lost India.”

The relationship between India and the United States is not quite lost. Even as their leaders feud, the two governments have continued to cooperate in the background. But it is teetering badly, and if U.S. officials want to fix it, they will need to move quickly. The Trump administration will have to lower tariffs on Indian goods. It will need to back away from claims that the United States negotiated peace between India and Pakistan and stop offering to mediate their eight-decade conflict over Kashmir. These may be tough asks of Trump, who is fixated on cutting the U.S. trade deficit and becoming a Nobel laureate. But repairing the U.S.-Indian relationship is of paramount importance. India is a global swing state, one whose outlook and actions will disproportionately influence the international order. It shares U.S. concerns about Chinese power, and it wants to ensure that the Indo-Pacific democracies are strong and work together. New Delhi, in other words, remains an essential American partner. Washington will miss it if it’s gone.

 

Downward Spiral

Indian policymakers were initially excited about Trump’s second term in office. The president prioritized building relations with the world’s most populous democracy during his first four years, and he seemed to appreciate India’s rise. His administration elevated defense ties and stressed the positive role India could play in his Indo-Pacific strategy. Trump treated Modi to a White House dinner in 2017 at which the two spoke of their countries’ deepening friendship. The leaders even forged a personal bond, appearing before 50,000 spectators at the 2019 “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas and over 100,000 spectators at the “Namaste Trump” rally in Gujarat the following year. New Delhi expected more of the same when Trump returned to the White House.

The early days of Trump’s second term were indeed promising. During his first 24 hours in office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened the foreign ministers of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (better known as the Quad)—which consists of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—in Washington, where they jointly committed to defending the rule of law, democratic values, and sovereignty and strengthening maritime, economic, and technology security in the Indo-Pacific. In February, Trump again hosted Modi at the White House. There, the two announced a raft of defense, technology, and trade initiatives and reaffirmed their strategic partnership—one that was, according to a joint statement, “anchored in mutual trust, shared interests, [and] goodwill.”

But within months, the bonhomie was on ice. After India and Pakistan began fighting in May, the United States worked behind the scenes to help the two states reach a cease-fire, much as it has in the past. Yet unlike earlier leaders, Trump loudly boasted about Washington’s role, highlighting details of his efforts to end the fighting—including using trade threats to coerce the two sides—and pledging to work with the countries to solve their long-running territorial dispute over Kashmir. Indian leaders denied Trump’s version of events, as well as a State Department declaration issued on May 10 that said India had agreed to direct talks with Pakistan on a broad range of issues. Trump, however, added the incident to the ever-lengthening list of global conflicts he asserts that he has resolved and made it the centerpiece of his campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has refused to stop discussing it. The Times of India reported on November 22 that Trump had publicly mentioned his role in securing a cease-fire over 60 times, and he has brought it up multiple times since.

The Trump administration’s current decisions differ substantially from how the United States has dealt with past crises involving India and Pakistan. Consider, for example, the two countries’ February 2019 military standoff. In the aftermath, the first Trump administration focused on pressing the United Nations to punish the Pakistani-based terrorist group responsible for attacking India and precipitating the conflict, an effort that was greatly appreciated in India. This time around, Trump played into Pakistan’s strategy of seeking third-party mediation to upset the status quo in Kashmir.

Trump’s grandstanding is, naturally, fine by Pakistan, which won his immediate gratification by nominating him for the Nobel and thanking him for his “leadership and proactive role for peace in the region.” But it is deeply upsetting to India. Since the two countries signed the Simla Accords in 1972, after the 1971 Indian-Pakistani war, New Delhi has consistently maintained that disputes between the two countries must be handled on an exclusively bilateral basis. If Modi were to effusively praise Trump for ending the conflict, he would risk backlash not only from the political opposition but also from his own supporters. In fact, Modi does not want Trump to claim any credit for stopping the fighting.

New Delhi thus vehemently denied Trump’s assertion. “The talks regarding cessation of military action were held directly between India and Pakistan under the existing channels established between both militaries,” India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, said in June. “India has not accepted mediation in the past and will never.” It was a statement that seemed to sit poorly with the White House. In August, Trump rejected a proposed trade deal between the two countries and slapped 50 percent tariffs on Indian products. He and his team began loudly criticizing New Delhi’s trade practices, in particular its purchases of Russian oil. New Delhi was set to host this year’s Quad summit in November. But after it became clear that Trump would not attend, India postponed the gathering.

 

Mend It, Don’t End It

The current impasse is hardly the first crisis in U.S.-Indian relations. In 1998, Washington imposed short-lived sanctions on New Delhi after it tested nuclear weapons. In 2013, federal agents arrested the Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade on charges of visa fraud and exploitation of a domestic worker, creating huge tensions. During his first term, Trump claimed that Modi had requested U.S. mediation on Kashmir (he had not), and U.S. lawmakers threatened to sanction India for its 2018 purchase of Russian S-400 air defense systems. During the Biden administration, relations were strained when the United States uncovered an Indian plot to assassinate an American Sikh activist in the streets of New York City. But it will be harder to recover from this crisis than from those incidents. Modi has taken a major domestic political hit from the current deterioration of ties, and Indian public opinion has turned against the United States. Indian social media commentary, once effusive about the Trump administration, has turned acerbic. Posts repeatedly mock and condemn the United States.

Nevertheless, there are signs of a modest thawing. New Delhi recently signed a one-year agreement to increase imports of liquefied petroleum gas from the United States. The two governments have completed a deal for India to purchase $93 million worth of Javelin antitank missile systems and precision-guided artillery and signed a nearly $1 billion contract for the maintenance of the Indian Navy’s U.S.-made MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopters. The annual Malabar naval exercise involving Australia, India, Japan, and the United States took place off the coast of Guam in mid-November.

But these are small steps. If Washington wants to really repair the relationship, it will have to go big. It can begin by finally concluding a trade deal that lowers the massive U.S. tariffs, even if it means accepting some protectionism in India’s agriculture sector, which still employs almost 50 percent of the country’s population. Thankfully, Trump has been softening his stance on tariffs as a result of increasing concerns about rising prices in the United States. The Trump administration, for example, recently cut levies on imports of 200 food items, some of which are imported from India.

The White House also needs to more clearly understand the roles that New Delhi and Islamabad play in the Indo-Pacific, particularly in the context of strategic competition with Beijing. An India that is more capable of defending its border with China and is more active in the surrounding ocean can stretch Chinese resources and complicate Beijing’s planning. U.S.-Indian technology cooperation can assist the United States in outcompeting China, particularly in artificial intelligence as American tech giants are pouring billions into the Indian market. And the United States and India can strengthen their diplomatic positions by taking them together, particularly within the Quad framework.

Islamabad, by contrast, has a strong and growing military and economic relationship with Beijing that it will not sacrifice to help Washington counter Chinese power and influence. Moreover, the Pakistani economy is stagnant and lacks opportunities for United States investment and trade. (Pakistan’s GDP growth rates and social indicators lag behind those of Bangladesh.) Warming U.S. relations with Islamabad could even draw New Delhi’s attention away from Beijing by emboldening Pakistan to take a more aggressive stance toward India, building up its military forces along their shared border, and encouraging more terrorist attacks on Indian soil. The United States can seek better counterterrorism cooperation with Islamabad against mutual threats like the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, and the Islamic State (or ISIS-K). It can forge some new investment ties, especially in information technology, to counter Beijing’s growing hold on this sector. But stronger relations with Pakistan should not come at the expense of Washington’s relationship with New Delhi, as they increasingly seem to be doing today.

The Trump administration should thus make clear that it does not seek to rehyphenate India and Pakistan (in other words, to put the two countries on equal footing) and that it does not seek to mediate their dispute over Kashmir. The United States can continue to play a role behind the scenes in trying to keep tensions between the two neighbors in check. But preventing another round of hostilities requires a sober approach that prioritizes quiet diplomacy aimed at reducing tensions and encouraging bilateral dialogue, not bold offers of mediation or resolution. Officials should certainly not repeat what Trump attempted in June, when the president suddenly invited Modi to visit the White House while Munir was in Washington, perhaps in hopes of staging a dramatic in-person meeting.

The Trump administration also should not conclude that just because Washington and New Delhi share concerns about China’s rise, taking a tough line on India will have no consequences. New Delhi will always see China as a strategic adversary, and it will not join an axis with Beijing and Moscow. But India has handled relations with China over the last 65 years on its own. It would rather have U.S. support in matters related to Beijing, but if it views the United States as an unreliable partner, it will accommodate China on border disputes and on trade and investment. It would, in other words, shift from being a competitor to Beijing in the Indo-Pacific to being a more agreeable neighbor. Chinese officials would then toast their good luck.

 

Long Memory

Washington isn’t solely to blame for its deteriorating relations with India. Some of the United States’ grievances, such as New Delhi’s close ties to Moscow, are legitimate. India has started reducing its imports of Russian oil, which peaked in 2025 at around two million barrels per day, but it can and should speed up the process. It can find other suppliers: before the invasion of Ukraine, after all, Russian oil amounted to less than one percent of Indian imports. Now that Trump has endorsed bipartisan legislation that would increase tariffs on India and other countries that import Russian oil, the pressure is building on New Delhi to finally halt all energy imports from Russia. Indian officials will also need to internalize the reality that the United States is a democracy and that its policies on Russian oil, tariffs, Iran, and many other issues will change between, and sometimes during, administrations.

Yet Washington cannot afford to be belligerent. And after over eight months of recriminations, it will have to be patient in regaining New Delhi’s trust. Even if the two sides move quickly to patch things up, the current dustup will have lingering effects. Indian policymakers still remind their American counterparts about the dispatch of a U.S. naval detachment to the Bay of Bengal during the 1971 war. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose, especially between two countries that spent the entirety of the Cold War essentially estranged. It will likely take years to repair the damage that has already been inflicted.

But that is all the more reason to act now. The longer the current crisis lasts, the harder it will be to restore the relationship and the more likely it is that the two countries will lose an entire generation of progress. It is therefore time to right the ship.

 

 

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