The US Will Regret Throwing India Under The Bus

President Donald Trump just threw India under the bus. After months of affronts and barbs, Washington now treats New Delhi more as foe than friend, undermining a relationship that several American administrations — including Trump’s first — tried to strengthen, not least to contain China in the Indo-Pacific. Instead, India will now distance itself from the US and draw closer to Russia and even China.

By diplomatic standards, the deterioration has been abrupt. Contrast the vibe between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on two occasions this year. In February, Modi visited Trump in the White House, and the pair looked like two populist peas in a pod. Gushing about his MAGA host, Modi pledged to Make India Great Again and promised that “MAGA plus MIGA becomes a mega partnership.”

Fast forward to recent days, as Trump first slapped a draconian tariff of 25% on India, then doubled that to 50% to take effect later this month as punishment for India’s ongoing imports of Russian oil. “I don’t care what India does with Russia,” Trump taunted. “They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.” India’s economy is in fact booming. Nothing about this sounds mega.

Trump’s ire against India is “mystifying” and “shortsighted,” Lisa Curtis at the Center for a New American Security told me. She’s worked for almost three decades to deepen the relationship between the US and India, most recently on the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. Like his Democratic predecessor and successor, Trump at that time also wanted to enlist the world’s most populous democracy as an ally to help resist the looming autocratic axis of China and Russia.

During the Cold War India remained proudly “non-aligned” but bought its weapons mainly from Moscow, whereas its arch-rival, Pakistan, mostly used American arms. In recent decades, though, these relationships inverted, with India nowadays buying more military kit from the US and other Western countries than from Russia, and Pakistan getting more weapons from China than the US. Other bonds between the US and India have also been thriving — just think of the Desi diasporas in Silicon Valley or academia, or the vice president’s in-laws.

The US, and Curtis, had especially high hopes for a budding quasi-alliance among the US, India, Australia and Japan. Called the Quad, it seeks to deepen cooperation in the Indo-Pacific to manage and protect maritime commerce, undersea cables, critical minerals and much else. It never prevented India from also maintaining ties with Russia and China — within the so-called BRICS format, notably. But Washington envisioned the Quad evolving into another of America’s “minilateral” alliances for mutual defense in Asia, with China in the role of bogey.

Events are taking a different turn. In May, a terrorist attack in Kashmir sparked the latest clash between India and Pakistan. Worried about escalation between the two nuclear powers, the Trump administration urged both sides to stand down, which they eventually did. Then the narratives diverged.

Trump repeatedly claimed full credit for being a peacemaker, even suggesting that he threatened India to make it climb down. Modi, and many Indians, were shocked. In previous crises, the US also calmed tempers behind the scenes, but India has always rejected official third-party mediation in its conflict with Pakistan.

Now Modi felt humiliated. His government took the unusual step of publishing the minutes of a call between Trump and Modi, clarifying that “at no point” was there any mediation by the US and that the ceasefire discussions “took place directly between India and Pakistan.” Other Indian pundits were less diplomatic and almost poetic in their outrage over this “typical Trump overreach.”

Trump wasn’t pleased. He was all the more delighted, though, when Pakistan praised his peacemaking prowess and hinted that it would nominate the president for the Nobel Peace Prize he openly covets. Trump then hosted Pakistan’s top military official — whom India considers the mastermind of the recent terrorist attack — for lunch, and Pakistan promptly made the Nobel nomination official. Subsequently, Pakistan also bargained down the new American tariffs on its goods from 29% to 19% — relatively meek next to India’s rate.

None of this means that the US-Indian relationship is irredeemably broken. Trade negotiators are slated to meet again this month, and a deal remains conceivable. Still, Indians have taken note that Trump is cracking down hardest against India, a putative partner, for buying oil from Russia, and not on China, allegedly America’s main adversary, which imports even more Russian oil. Nor are they thrilled about the surging deportations of Indians illegally in the US, the harassment of Indian and all foreign students on American campuses, and much else.

The Quad, meanwhile, still exists. Its foreign ministers met just the other day, and India will host a summit of the four leaders this fall. But Trump’s attendance is now in doubt. “If the rhetoric remains acerbic, I have difficulty in seeing him going,” Curtis told me. His former rapport with the Indian leader is gone, she added: “Prime Minister Modi is just not going to trust President Trump anymore.”

That doesn’t mean Modi will throw himself into the arms of Beijing — as my colleague Karishma Vaswani points out, India has other friends in Asia to help it keep an eye on China. But Modi is suddenly making plans to visit China for the first time in seven years, in what appears to be a diplomatic thaw. Meanwhile, the Russian president is arranging a trip to see Modi.

America’s strategy for more than a decade has been to pull India closer into the Western and democratic orbit as a counterweight to its main autocratic rivals and adversaries. Whether the result of design, neglect or whim, Washington’s turn away from New Delhi cannot be seen as anything other than counterproductive

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