Trump is just the messenger: Delhi must prepare for long winter in Washington

Bharat and the United States have always resembled two banks of the same river. They flow in the same direction. They speak the language of democracy, uphold a rules-based order and value pluralism. They often appear destined to converge. Yet, they never quite meet.

For decades, Delhi and Washington seemed to share the same vision of the world. However, despite this apparent convergence, they have remained little more than “friends with benefits” — to borrow the title of Seema Sirohi’s 2023 book on the Bharat-US relationship. Now, even the “benefits” are disappearing. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the relationship has lurched from one setback to another. As my Firstpost colleague and foreign affairs expert Sreemoy Talukdar argued recently, “India-US ties will collapse if Trump moves ahead with Russian oil sanctions and Section 301 tariffs.”

Last week, Washington imposed a 25 per cent tariff on Brazil under Section 301 of US trade law. Given the Trump administration’s approach, Delhi may well be next. Even more worrying is the bipartisan Bill championed by Senator Lindsey Graham, proposing 100 per cent secondary tariffs on countries such as Bharat for buying Russian oil. It remains at an early stage, but Trump’s preference for economic coercion makes its fast-tracking entirely plausible.

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For nearly 25 years, successive Republican and Democratic administrations convinced Delhi that the two countries were building an enduring strategic partnership. The logic seemed compelling at a time when the rise of communist China seemed imminent. Washington saw Delhi as a democratic counterweight in Asia.

Then Donald Trump returned to the White House. In barely 18 months, he has dismantled an illusion that took more than two decades to build: the illusion of Delhi and Washington working together to reset the rules-based world order currently under strain from Beijing’s rise. Today, it is all but obvious that America may want Bharat to become strong, but not strong enough to one day pose a China-like challenge.

However, Trump cannot — and should not — be accused of inventing this instinct. He merely said it aloud, bluntly and without diplomatic restraint.

When Trump 2.0 began in January 2025, many in Delhi expected bilateral ties to reach new heights. His rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his first term had fuelled that optimism. Instead, his second presidency has produced perhaps the deepest trust deficit since the Nixon era.

Trump’s deeply transactional approach has undone years of painstaking diplomacy that attempted to transform Delhi from a hesitant partner into a cornerstone of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy. For years, Republicans and Democrats wanted Delhi to believe that their Indo-Pacific doctrine pivoted around Bharat. Trump has exposed the condition attached to that support: Washington welcomes Delhi’s rise, but not enough to become a global power.

The contradiction was already surfacing during the Biden years. The Bharat-US relationship, quite paradoxically, reached its high point during Trump’s first term. During the tenure of his successor, Joe Biden, differences did surface, but he managed to wrap them in diplomatic niceties.

Even the Barack Obama years were hardly free of contradictions. Obama entered office with deep personal ties to Pakistan dating back to his college years. As Seema Sirohi recounts in Friends with Benefits, he travelled to Pakistan, lived with Pakistani friends in New York and remained close to them as his political career advanced. Indeed, it was to these friends that Obama first confided his ambition to become President. Only after Islamabad’s duplicity became impossible to ignore, and Delhi’s strategic importance steadily grew, did Obama embrace the “Pivot to Asia”, which relied heavily on democratic Bharat as the principal counterweight to communist China. Yet even then, Washington embraced Delhi largely because of Beijing — not because it wanted the two democracies to come together and shape the rules-based global order.

The Indo-American divide runs deeper than personalities or governments. It is civilisational. Bharat thinks in long-term civilisational terms; America thinks in immediate strategic terms. Bharat prizes autonomy and resists external prescriptions. America prefers speed, clarity and alignment. Those instincts have repeatedly produced friction.

Rudra Chaudhuri, in Forged in Crisis, argues that comparing Bharat with American allies such as Britain or France is “pointless”. He writes, “Branded a ‘sovereignty hawk’, India has come to be seen as what the historian A.J.P. Taylor calls a troublemaker: relentlessly representing the virtue of dissent. This, of course, irritates American officials in New York and Geneva.”

In the past, broad strategic convergence outweighed recurring disagreements. Under Trump, that balance has shifted. The disagreements have become impossible to ignore, while the very idea of strategic convergence is being redefined. The clearest articulation came earlier this year at the Raisina Dialogue, when US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared that America was “not going to make the same mistakes with India” that it “made with China 20 years ago”.

The message could not be clearer: Washington believes it helped create a rival in Beijing and has no intention of creating another in Delhi. That explains why, even as Trump calls Bharat a close partner and Prime Minister Modi a “great friend”, his administration continues to undermine Indian interests.

None of this means Bharat and America are destined for confrontation. They will continue to cooperate in defence, technology, maritime security and balancing China. But the relationship will remain transactional. Washington will support Delhi only so long as the latter’s rise reinforces American primacy.

To be fair, Trump did not create this reality. He says openly what many in Washington have been saying in hushed voices. He merely stripped away the diplomatic language: that Delhi may rise, but only enough to act as a counterweight to Beijing. Nothing more, nothing less. This makes it important for Delhi to come up with a post-Trump plan. For, a new President in 2029 may be less unpredictable and more diplomatic, but he would still be resisting the idea of Bharat’s rise. Delhi should be ready for a “resisted” rise. But rise it must.

(The writer is the author of ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’ and ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)