On August 27, President Donald Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on India, some of the steepest he has imposed on any country in the world, went into effect. The levies mark an astounding rupture between the world’s two largest democracies—and a setback for a partnership whose geopolitical significance had been growing.
The cooperation that took root between India and the United States at the turn of the 21st century centered on shared values: The two countries could together help shore up democracy and human rights in a world where the influence of authoritarian powers, specifically Russia and China, held ever greater sway. Former President Barack Obama described the relationship between the two nations as potentially “one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century.” That was before the politics of both countries began traveling in a more authoritarian direction.
Trump has brought new turbulence to relations between the U.S. and India. Back in May, the president claimed to have brokered a cease-fire between India and Pakistan following a brief conflict between the two nations. Trump then repeated that claim more than 20 times. Any form of mediation in India’s relationship with Pakistan is a delicate subject in New Delhi, understood as an assault on the nation’s sovereignty; Trump’s boasts opened Prime Minister Narendra Modi to vociferous criticism and boxed him into a defiant, nationalistic position.
Then, on July 30, Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on India, with additional unspecified penalties on account of India’s purchases of Russian oil and weapons. Modi, in part because he was keen to demonstrate Indian autonomy, showed no inclination to halt those purchases. Trump’s response came a week later, on August 6: He doubled the tariffs to 50 percent.
Before all this, India and the United States had been growing steadily closer for nearly three decades. Pakistan had been America’s Cold War ally on the subcontinent, but during the Global War on Terror, Washington came to see Islamabad as unreliable and instead drew closer to New Delhi. A partnership between two continent-size democracies seemed to many policy makers organic and necessary—all the more so as competition with China intensified. America cultivated India both as a counterweight to China and in recognition of the country’s growing economic heft.
India is now the world’s fourth-largest economy, and projected to become its third before the end of this decade. Trade between India and the United States stands at about $130 billion annually, making America India’s largest trading partner. India now exports more iPhones to the American market than China does, and its mammoth pharmaceutical industry provides 40 percent of America’s generic drugs. The country has secured an important place in the interconnected web of global commerce. Unpolished gems, sourced from Africa, for instance, might arrive in Surat, a diamond hub in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, before crisscrossing the globe to be shown to buyers in America; after the buyers make their choice, the diamonds are flown back to India to be cut and polished before the final product is shipped to America.
Some of Trump’s grievances are legitimate: He has derided India as a “tariff king,” calling some of its trade barriers “obnoxious,” and in fact India imposes higher tariffs than America’s other top trading partners. The country’s protectionism has roots in its colonial history: India was conquered not by the British empire but by the East India Company, perhaps the first multinational corporation in the world.
Since embracing free-market economics in the early 1990s, India has liberalized large sections of its economy, but the country’s distrust of global trade remains deeply entrenched. High tariffs protect an array of influential groups from global competition: farmers—a constituency no Indian politician can afford to alienate—but also domestic oligarchs, who bankroll much of the country’s politics. “Indian economic policies created a creamy layer of big business who were assured of a large internal market,” Aditya Balasubramanian, a historian of the Indian economy, told me.
During the first Trump administration, India appeased the United States by reducing barriers on American products such as bourbon and Harley Davidson motorcycles. But it never closed a trade deal that would have required it to make major concessions. Still, Trump and Modi appeared to have enjoyed a warm, natural chemistry during those years. In 2019, during a joint rally appearance in Houston, Modi broke diplomatic protocol by advocating for Trump’s reelection. Trump traveled to India the following year on a state visit, and the Indian prime minister rolled out the grandest of receptions, packing out the world’s largest cricket stadium, with a capacity in excess of 100,000, in Gujarat.
Trump, not particularly fussed about minority rights and democratic backsliding under Modi, overlooked transgressions that few previous American presidents would have. During Trump’s visit to New Delhi, violence instigated by Hindu-nationalist mobs led to the deaths of 53 people, mostly Muslims. Trump did not condemn the Indian prime minister or his political movement for the violence.
But the bromance withered after Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. The Indian prime minister was one of the first world leaders to congratulate the new president-elect, and he avoided meeting the defeated Republican again, spurning several invitations to Mar-a-Lago during his visits to America. A source with knowledge of these events told me that officials in India’s foreign ministry advised Modi against being seen with Trump during the Biden years, on the grounds that he’d already angered the administration with his Houston endorsement.
Last September, Trump was once again a presidential candidate. He announced a plan to meet with the Indian leader later that month, describing Modi as “fantastic” but labeling India “a very big abuser” in matters of trade. Perhaps fearing a backlash if Kamala Harris won the presidency, Modi changed his mind about the meeting, which never took place.
“Modi has been quite reckless,” Siddharth Varadarajan, a prominent foreign-policy commentator, told me. Perhaps to make amends, Varadarajan said, Modi sent his foreign minister to Washington in January to angle for an invitation to the inauguration. None came. Still, the following month, Modi was among the first world leaders to visit the White House, where Trump pointedly did not receive him at the entrance, as he has done for other foreign leaders.
The relationship between Trump and Modi reached its nadir with the India-Pakistan conflict in early May. After four days of fighting, Trump unilaterally announced a cease-fire on Truth Social, before either New Delhi or Islamabad had confirmed an end to the hostilities. Trump went on to boast that he had brokered the cease-fire—a narrative that struck at Modi’s domestic strong-man image.
During a tense phone call a month later, on June 17, Modi told Trump that America’s role had had little bearing on the cease-fire, which was directly negotiated between India and Pakistan. He also said that New Delhi would never accept mediation in its relationship with Islamabad. The next day, Trump met with Asim Munir, the chief of the Pakistani army, in a striking departure from protocol: No American president had previously hosted the leader of Pakistan’s army without a civilian contingent present. But Munir had curried favor with Trump by calling for the American president to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the India-Pakistan conflict. As an elected leader beholden to a constituency, Modi simply could not have engaged in such obsequious flattery.
Nonetheless, despite the tensions between Trump and Modi, Indian negotiators remained confident that the two countries would reach a trade agreement. On July 24, India’s commerce minister stated that the countries were making “fantastic progress” on a deal. That the tariffs followed six days later was perplexing—and the penalties for India’s purchases of Russian oil were even more so, given that Trump had seemed to be courting better relations with Moscow. Moreover, Washington didn’t penalize China or Turkey for purchasing Russian oil—only India.
Modi has responded by reinforcing relations with other foreign leaders. After the tariff announcement, he spoke with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to talk about boosting bilateral trade and arrange for Lula to make a state visit to India next year. Modi also invited Vladimir Putin for a visit to New Delhi later this year.
Most striking is that at the end of August, Modi made his first visit to China in seven years: He attended the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a Eurasian bloc often seen as anti-Western, in the northern-Chinese city of Tianjin. A photo from the summit shows Putin, Modi, and China’s Xi Jinping clustered together, chatting ebulliently in the marked absence of their American rival. While in Tianjin, Modi held a bilateral meeting with Xi, who called for the “Dragon and the Elephant to come together”—less than four months after Pakistan fought India largely with Chinese weaponry.
The relationship between India and the United States could still recover. But New Delhi has come to view the Trump administration as a mercurial, unreliable actor—not without reason, given the mixed messages coming from Washington. On Fox News, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the Tianjin conference as “largely performative” and expressed confidence that the trade impasse between the U.S. and India would be resolved. But Trump followed with a more ominous message on Truth Social on September 5: “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” The very next day, in remarks at the White House, Trump said that the U.S. and India had a special relationship and that he and Modi would always be friends. The Indian prime minister posted favorably on X in response.
A succession of American presidents and Indian prime ministers, along with diplomats and influential people from both countries, has spent nearly three decades carefully forging an alliance. Now New Delhi is recalibrating—and returning to what is understood in Indian parlance as “strategic autonomy,” a multilateral orientation honed during India’s long decades of nonalignment in the Cold War. What was once envisioned as a vital partnership of the 21st century is fraying—and becoming another source of uncertainty in a world order that seems to be unraveling.
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