From Landau to Colby: America’s careful calculus on India’s rise

In March, the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi, an Indian geopolitical forum, became the unlikely stage for one of the most candid and diplomatically jarring statements delivered by a senior American official on Indian soil in recent memory. US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said Washington would not replicate the errors of its China policy. His exact words were pointed: "India should understand that we are not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago in terms of saying, we are going to let you develop all these markets, and then, the next thing we know, you are beating us in a lot of commercial things."

Three weeks later, Elbridge Colby, the US Under Secretary of War for Policy, arrived in New Delhi for his first official visit — and the contrast in tone could not have been starker. Colby's visit functioned not merely as a diplomatic call but as a strategic corrective, an attempt to soften the alarm that Landau had set off, and in doing so, it revealed the deep and enduring tension at the heart of American strategy toward India.

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Landau's remarks, whatever their intent, landed with significant force. By portraying earlier American engagement with China as a "mistake" simply because China later became a strong commercial competitor, Landau simplified a much more complex historical process — and implicitly cast India's future economic success as a threat to be managed rather than a development to be welcomed. The damage was real. At a moment when both sides were nearing an interim trade agreement, Landau had introduced a chill — framing the bilateral relationship not as one between partners of equal standing but as one in which Washington reserved the right to calibrate, limit, and supervise India's economic ascent.

Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar, without directly naming Landau, stated that the rise of a country is ultimately determined by that country itself and that India's rise would depend on its own strength rather than on the mistakes made by others. The rebuke, delivered on the same stage, was elegantly understated but unmistakably pointed.

Into this charged atmosphere arrived Colby — a China hawk and defence strategist whose worldview is shaped by hard-nosed realism and whose rhetoric, while similarly transactional, struck a fundamentally different chord. Describing India as a "waxing power", Colby said its role was "indispensable" to maintaining a favourable balance of power in Asia, arguing that "no single country can sustain a stable balance of power in Asia" and that stability would depend on "the collective contributions of capable states". Where Landau had framed India as a potential rival to be contained, Colby framed it as an indispensable partner to be empowered. He praised Jaishankar's vision of "India First" and the "India Way", calling it "exceptionally correct", and argued that America's "America First" approach and India's own national-interest-driven foreign policy were "deeply aligned".

Colby also went out of his way to validate India's strategic autonomy — a concept Washington has historically viewed with ambivalence, since it has often translated into India maintaining relations with Russia, abstaining on Ukraine votes, and declining to join formal military alliances. Colby acknowledged that "India has its own interests, its own strategic culture, and its own priorities, and that India is not shy about advancing them", suggesting this was not an obstacle but a feature of the partnership. This was a significant departure. Rather than pressuring India to choose sides — as American officials often implicitly do — Colby appeared to accept India's multi-alignment as a permanent condition and to build a case for cooperation that did not require India to abandon it.

He was equally candid that "the United States and India will not agree on every issue" and that the two nations had not "always been partners or even friendly". This admission of historical complexity, rather than the usual diplomatic platitudes about shared values and civilisational affinities, was itself a form of strategic honesty — an effort to put the relationship on a more durable, if less idealistic, footing. Colby argued that "interests converge on fundamental issues" and that this convergence, not friendship or ideology, was the real basis for cooperation.

Yet even as Colby sought to repair the diplomatic atmosphere that Landau had disrupted, the structural tensions his visit exposed remain very much alive. The Landau episode was not a slip of the tongue; it was a window into a recurring American anxiety. Washington has consistently struggled to reconcile two competing imperatives in its approach to India: the desire to use India as a strategic counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific, and the discomfort — economic, strategic, even psychological — with the prospect of India becoming genuinely powerful in its own right. The offer of partnership has always been accompanied, implicitly or explicitly, by efforts to shape, channel, and where necessary constrain India's rise.

The broader strategic context of Colby's visit makes this tension vivid. Officials from both countries indicated that differences persist over India's continued reliance on Russian oil and its wider strategic autonomy, even as both sides sought to present a unified front. Washington wants India integrated into its security architecture for the Indo-Pacific but bristles when India refuses to follow American prescriptions on energy, trade, or its relationships with third countries. It wants India strong enough to balance China, but not so economically dynamic that it challenges American commercial primacy. It invites India to be a partner but reserves the right to set the terms.

Colby's commitments on defence co-production, including the potential joint manufacturing of F414 fighter jet engines in India, represent genuine depth of engagement, and they suggest that on the military-industrial dimension at least, Washington is prepared to invest substantively in India's rise. But defence cooperation and economic partnership are not the same thing, and it is on the economic dimension that the Landau statement continues to cast a shadow. The implicit message, that India may be welcomed as a security partner but monitored as an economic competitor, has not been withdrawn.

What Colby's visit achieved, above all, was to restore the language of mutual respect and strategic alignment that Landau had disrupted. He stated that the US views India "with deep respect — as a republic of continental scale, as a nation with a proud strategic tradition, and as a country whose decisions will profoundly shape the future of the Indo-Pacific". This is the register in which India prefers to be addressed, and Colby delivered it credibly. But language, however carefully chosen, cannot resolve the underlying ambivalence. America's India policy will continue to oscillate between embrace and hedging, between building India up and worrying about what a fully risen India might mean for American primacy. The Landau-Colby sequence of March 2026 is not a diplomatic aberration — it is a pattern. And until Washington makes a genuine strategic peace with India's rise on India's own terms, that pattern will persist.

(Hindol Sengupta is a professor of international relations and director of the India Institute at the OP Jindal Global University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)