In 1992, the cerebral diplomat-historian, Dennis Kux, described India and the United States of America as “Estranged Democracies” in his chronicle of bilateral relations during the Cold War. Values matched, he concluded, but strategic differences drew them apart. Today, India and the US have never had greater reasons to be friends: there is an unprecedented convergence of both values and interests. And yet, we are witnessing what may be the lowest point in New Delhi’s engagement with Washington since the end of the Cold War.
Consider these announcements from Donald Trump’s White House last week. On October 9, the US president claimed to have struck a “diesel deal” with Vladimir Putin over the phone, promising that sanctions on Moscow would be lifted before the call had gone cold. Yet he has threatened India with up to 100% tariffs for buying the same Russian energy; the Lindsey Graham Act of 2026 sanctioning Russia and Iran could come into effect on October 18. The day before, on October 8, Washington shut Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCLTech out of America’s green-card pipeline, charging them with abusing the visa system. Indian talent was the one export America always seemed to want. That certainty is gone.
The fundamental convergence of interests is not in dispute. We are both large, argumentative democracies and neither of us wants a totalitarian China to dominate Asia. We have a defence relationship that would have been unthinkable a quarter of a century ago. Our economies are bound together by technology and capital flows. Our diaspora is on American campuses, on American boards and, more recently, in the mainstream of American politics. The architecture of a deep and consequential partnership is firmly in place, the strategic logic is irresistible, and the social foundations are robust.
Yet President Trump seems determined to test, strain and, indeed, undermine every pillar on which this relationship rests. The White House has embraced Pakistan’s military establishment and has repeatedly claimed that Trump mediated between India and Pakistan during Operation Sindoor. From punitive measures for buying Russian oil to seemingly endless negotiations over a trade agreement, from tariff threats to an increasingly inhospitable immigration policy (a new H-1B visa petition now carries a $100,000 fee), Trump has torn a gaping hole through the relationship.
The irony is striking. The US needs India more than ever as a partner in shaping the Asian balance of power. Almost every serious-minded analyst knows that the idea of a G-2 is a chimera. And yet the president often behaves as if India were an adversary to be disciplined rather than a partner to be cultivated.
Admittedly, the relationship has been on a roller-coaster before. There have been four earlier episodes of severe stress. The first came in the 1950s, when Dwight Eisenhower and John Dulles armed Pakistan and contemptuously described India’s non-alignment as immoral. The second came in 1971, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger backed Pakistan’s generals during the Bangladesh war and sent an aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal as a warning to India. The third came in 1993, when the then assistant-secretary of state, Robin Raphel, questioned the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India. The fourth followed the Pokhran tests of 1998, when it took two years and many rounds of talks between Jaswant Singh and Strobe Talbott before Bill Clinton could visit India in 2000.
I look back on that last period with some nostalgia. I was in several of the rooms where the groundwork was laid, in Track 2 discussions before and after the tests. One such dialogue was convened by Arun Singh, a former minister of state for defence who was then advising Jaswant Singh, and Harry Barnes, a former US ambassador to India. The Indian side included an extraordinary cohort of scientists and strategists: Raja Ramanna, Roddam Narasimha, M.K. Narayanan and K. Subrahmanyam.
No one banked on goodwill; there was none to bank on. Ramanna would sit down at the piano and play like a virtuoso, only after the day’s bargaining
was done; the warmth came after the deal, never in place of it. Nobody from India expected to be liked, and nobody from America pretended to like us; they found us preachy about everything. We discussed our interests, negotiated incrementally, and disagreed on many of the world’s problems. Yet eventually, we arrived at a breakthrough. Today, we seem burdened with affection and a common view of much of the world, yet none of what we seem to agree on gets translated into reality.
The conventional comforting wisdom in New Delhi is reassuring. Trump is an aberration. He will eventually depart, and be irretrievably bruised after the mid-term election in the US. The American deep State, its strategic community, its business establishment and its universities all understand India’s importance. The relationship will recover. Perhaps. But what if Trump is not an aberration? What if he is the most conspicuous manifestation of a deeper American transformation? Trumpism, after all, is not simply the politics of one man however narcissistic he may be. It reflects a powerful current of economic nationalism, deep hostility to immigration, scepticism towards alliances, resentment of globalisation and impatience with the constraints of an international order that America itself helped create.
More troublingly, many elements of Trumpism have outgrown Trump. Protectionism, immigration anxiety and scepticism about global commitments increasingly cut across America’s partisan divide. Waiting for Trump to disappear may therefore be less a strategy than a consolation.
India must therefore respond neither with wounded pride nor with exaggerated deference, and it must resist two equally seductive illusions: that America is an indispensable saviour, or that it has become an irredeemable adversary. On tariffs, on trade and on talent, the task is to bargain rather than beseech. That means conceding where our interests allow, holding firm where they do not, and letting Washington see that India has options in Europe, the Gulf, East Asia and the Global South, even if it has no substitute for America. Affection is not a strategy. Leverage is.
India should not abandon the American partnership. Nor should it organise its foreign policy around the hope of a different occupant of the White House. It must prepare for an America that remains immensely powerful and profoundly consequential, but increasingly unpredictable. The real question is not whether India can outlast Trump. It is whether India can build a lasting partnership with an America that may have become permanently Trumpian.
Amitabh Mattoo is Dean and Professor, School of International Studies, JNU