For three decades, successive American presidents have invested enormous diplomatic capital to cultivate a friendship with India.
Bill Clinton, who laid the foundations of the modern U.S.-India partnership, called the two democracies “natural allies.” George W. Bush described them as “brothers in the cause of human liberty.” Barack Obama and Joe Biden both cast the relationship as one of the defining global compacts of this century.
To Washington, India was a vast emerging market, a potential counterweight to China, a key partner in maintaining Indo-Pacific security and a rising power whose democratic identity would bolster a rules-based international order. For its part, India — mistrustful of the West after nearly a century of British colonial rule — shed its Cold War suspicion of Washington, which had armed and financed its archnemesis Pakistan for decades, and moved steadily closer to the United States.
It took Donald Trump one summer to obliterate these gains.
In May, he claimed credit for ending a brief military conflict between India and Pakistan. This incensed India, which regards its dispute with Pakistan as strictly bilateral, and humiliated Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had touted his closeness to “my friend Donald Trump.” Mr. Trump proceeded to have lunch at the White House with Gen. Syed Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief and former head of the country’s spy agency, which the United States has accused of supporting international terrorist groups. He also called India’s economy “dead” and imposed punishing 50 percent tariffs on Indian imports to the United States.
This abrupt falling-out has profound implications. Mr. Trump’s insults have, to some degree, united India’s permanently clashing political parties — a striking development in a country where Mr. Modi’s divisive rule has left little political common ground. For the first time in decades, the United States is the common foe of almost every political faction in India.
No nation is entirely safe from Mr. Trump’s unstable temperament. But India had been lulled into the delusion that it was uniquely protected by the supposed special bond between Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi, two self-aggrandizing men who have subordinated their nations’ foreign relations to their personalities.
Mr. Modi has built a formidable cult of personality at home, burnished in part by claims that Mr. Trump and other world leaders adulated him. When Mr. Trump was elected in November, pro-Modi Indian media personalities exploded with a mawkish mixture of triumphalism and schadenfreude. They declared that with Mr. Modi’s friend back in the White House, India’s adversaries were on notice and rhapsodized about the chemistry between the two men. In 2020, Mr. Modi even trampled on the nonpartisan nature of India’s relationship with the United States by endorsing Mr. Trump for a second term.
Mr. Biden overlooked this slight during his presidency. His administration continued to treat New Delhi as a vital partner while occasionally raising concerns about the deterioration of democracy under Mr. Modi. The Indian leader’s supporters believed that Mr. Trump, rather than lecture New Delhi, would squeeze the country’s enemies and accelerate India’s rise.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Mr. Trump has jeopardized the bilateral relationship and dismantled, almost overnight, Mr. Modi’s meticulously crafted image as a globally venerated statesman — something his rivals in the Indian political opposition have been unable to do.
The United States is India’s largest trading partner, and the tariffs are expected to devastate businesses across a range of sectors, causing factory closings, job losses and slower growth.
Mr. Trump at first applied a 25 percent tariff on Aug. 1 as part of his global assault on U.S. trading partners. Days later, he announced an additional 25 percent levy to punish India for buying Russian oil. The latter outraged and puzzled Indians — it was Washington, after all, that had initially encouraged India to purchase Russian oil to help stabilize global prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China, which imports more Russian oil, and Europe, whose overall trade with Russia is larger than India’s, have not been penalized for that.
The tariffs are now being challenged in U.S. courts. And in the long run, with the world’s fourth-largest economy, a vast domestic market and strong global trade and investment links, India is likely to withstand the blow anyway. Sooner or later there will be an effort to repair the relationship with the United States. But the trust that took 30 years to build will not easily be restored. Indian resentment will burn for a long time.
For New Delhi, this is a defining moment. Should it submit to Mr. Trump in hopes that the United States will strengthen the partnership against China or pursue a pragmatic rapprochement with Beijing to safeguard trade, investment and long-term strategic stability in Asia? After all, how can India be certain that Washington will not abruptly weaponize their strategic partnership, just as it has weaponized trade?
Indian hedging against such risks may have already begun. This weekend Mr. Modi is making his first visit to China in seven years for a regional summit, where President Xi Jinping will personally welcome both him and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The Indian and Chinese armies clashed on their disputed border in 2020, and this visit is a potentially momentous opportunity to reset India-China relations, finesse lingering disputes over their border, trade and regional security, and — for China — to begin drawing India away from Washington’s orbit.
Ultimately, the United States may have the most to lose in this landscape. It’s unclear whether anyone in Washington ever really expected fiercely independent India to serve as a frontline ally in a future conflict with China. But India mattered because after decades in which Indians regarded America with deep suspicion, the United States was beginning to enjoy genuine good will in the world’s most populous country, a democracy that happens to border on China.
This extraordinary achievement now lies in tatters. Mr. Modi and Mr. Trump, colossal figures today, will inevitably fade away. India and the United States will be left with the task of emancipating themselves from the legacy of these two leaders.
Kapil Komireddi is an Indian journalist and the author of “Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India.” He is working on a global history of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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