At the Capitol in January, India’s foreign minister was seated in the front row for President Trump’s inauguration, a sign of the deepening ties that a generation of American presidents have attempted to forge with the world’s most populous nation.
Now, just months later, Mr. Trump is publicly lamenting that India has abandoned him for the embrace of China, Washington’s strategic rival.
“Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning, as he posted a photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The three leaders met in China earlier this week.
“May they have a long and prosperous future together!” he wrote.
It was a rare acknowledgment that Mr. Trump’s attempts at blunt-force diplomacy, not to mention punishing tariffs, were having some unintended consequences. The uneasy partnership to create an alternative to the West’s global leadership that began with China and Russia, then expanded to North Korea and Iran, may now be about to incorporate — at least episodically — India, the world’s largest democracy.
It is too early to predict whether Mr. Modi’s visit to China, the first in seven years, marks a real shift or just a warning shot to Washington. During the Cold War, India led the nonaligned movement, and it is skilled at playing superpowers off against each other. This may be one of those moments.
Later on Friday, Mr. Trump tried to downplay his rift with India.
“I’ll always be friends with Modi. He’s great,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I just don’t like what he’s doing at this particular moment. But India and the United States have a special relationship. There’s nothing to worry about. We just have moments on occasion.”
Devashish Mitra, a professor of economics at Syracuse University, said that Mr. Trump’s oscillating statements about India underscore the country’s concerns about its relationship with the United States.
“Right now, India feels that the U.S. is not a very reliable partner,” Mr. Mitra said. “They thought the U.S. was an ally. If India is moving towards China, it’s a friendship of convenience.”
In his social media post, the American president made no mention of his own role in alienating India. But while Russia and China have been growing closer for years, the shift in the relationship with India has been on Mr. Trump’s watch — and in large part because of his own actions.
In open pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Trump claimed that he had “solved” the military conflict between India and Pakistan, angering New Delhi, which denies he had anything to do with a recent cease-fire between the two countries. It’s long been of the utmost importance in Indian politics that outside countries play no role in the delicate relationship between New Delhi and Islamabad.
On top of that, Mr. Trump imposed heavy tariffs on India that he says were partly a punishment for purchasing oil from Russia. But China is a larger importer of Russian oil, and Mr. Trump has not imposed a similar tariff on Beijing, presumably because it has so many ways of striking back.
“President Trump likes to back his allies into a corner and then use that leverage to extract concessions,” said Joshua T. White, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “Even if he succeeds in doing so with Prime Minister Modi, it could leave lasting scars on a relationship that is undeniably consequential to the United States.”
Mr. Trump learned strong-arm negotiation tactics during his ascent in the New York real estate world, and he has successfully used them to take over the G.O.P. And while many countries have rushed to sign trade deals, visit the White House and lavish praise and gifts upon Mr. Trump, some of the White House’s attempts to pressure other countries appear to have backfired, sending would-be allies into the embrace of China.
The biggest evidence of how Mr. Trump has pushed countries that have been fundamentally pro-American into China’s camp came at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting this week. That is where Mr. Modi, visiting China for the first time in seven years, held hands and laughed with Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi, and held a long conversation with the Russian leader in the back of his Russian-built luxury limousine.
But he was hardly alone. The leaders of Egypt, Turkey and Vietnam, all of which have been hit by the Trump tariffs, were also at the meeting. Each has been a significant, if sometimes reluctant, partner of the United States. And Mr. Trump has alienated Brazil, largely out of pique over the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom he views as a political ally. Mr. Trump has punished South Africa, another nation the U.S. had grown closer with, after complaining that white South Africans were being discriminated against by a new land law. At a moment when he is expelling illegal immigrants, he has invited the white South Africans to come to the United States.
Mr. Trump’s post was a change in tone from earlier this week, when he sounded nonchalant about China’s military parade in Beijing to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of the World War II. Even so, Mr. Trump made clear he was paying close attention to the gathering of world leaders. On Tuesday night, he sarcastically posted for Mr. Xi to “give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”
It was one of the first times that the president had acknowledged the alignment of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — one of the biggest geopolitical developments of recent years. Until now, the administration had largely dismissed the alignment of these powers or spoke about vague desires to pull Russia away from China, perhaps exploiting their long-running rivalry. If anything, Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi seem closer than ever; they spent the better part of three days together. When Mr. Trump met Mr. Putin in Anchorage last month, the session was cut short after a little more than three hours, and the Russian leader left without sampling the seafood lunch the White House had prepared.
There is little question that the approach Mr. Trump has taken over the past seven months in office has helped drive this aggregation of aggrieved states. These forces were at work before he took office for his second term, but they are accelerating as nations and leaders look for alternatives to tying themselves to the American camp.
In that regard, the scenes that emerged from China this week are a warning that a reshaping of power is already underway, and America needs a strategy to deal with it.
The former Biden officials Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan, writing in Foreign Affairs this week, warned that strained U.S.-India relations could cede the innovation edge to China.
“The current trajectory risks a split that would be difficult to mend, to the great detriment of both countries,” they warned. “As Modi’s chummy appearance over the weekend with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin made clear, the United States could end up driving India directly into its adversaries’ arms.”
India’s history under British colonial rule also has contributed to an aversion to being bullied.
In response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, Shashi Tharoor, a member of the Indian National Congress and the chairman of its Committee on External Affairs, said in a televised interview: “I know there’s very serious anger, because the Indian public — don’t forget, after 200 years of colonialism, Tom, we are not prepared to be dictated to by any foreign power.”
Rajesh Rajagopalan, a professor of international politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said India was not keen to form a partnership with China.
The two countries recently had a deadly skirmish over their shared border, and China has blocked India’s push for inclusion on the U.N. Security Council.
“The U.S. hasn’t really lost India,” Mr. Rajagopalan said. “Trump is trying very hard, obviously, to push India away, because, obviously, the claims that he’s making are difficult for any Indian leadership to accept. But outside of that, I think India is very keen on having a close relationship with the United States. If he wants India, he can get it back.”
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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