The question often asked is: Does Donald Trump care about India? It is a rather personal question for a relationship built over a quarter-century by governments, businesses, armed forces and citizens. Yet, today it is an unavoidable question. Xi Jinping has received the honours of a state visit to Washington. Trump has shared a clip of Shehbaz Sharif’s UN speech, in which the Pakistani prime minister praised him for ending the India–Pakistan conflict while advancing claims New Delhi rejects. Mr. Trump has also signed a sanctions law that could expose India, as a major purchaser of Russian energy, to steep tariffs.
The present difference between India and the United States is about more than oil. There is perhaps a deeper disagreement over the meaning of partnership. Washington often treats strategic convergence as a reason to demand political compliance. In New Delhi partnership is understood as cooperation between sovereign powers that will continue to differ over Russia, Iran and the management of China. Once those differences are revealed as public tests of loyalty, diplomacy yields to theatre. Accommodation becomes harder precisely because it is made to look like submission.
For much of the past quarter-century, the relationship was founded on the belief that a stronger India served a larger American purpose. India’s rise could sustain an Asian balance, diversify supply chains and give heft to a free and open Indo-Pacific. There were always differences, but the strategic argument seemed large enough to withstand them. It is becoming harder to assume that it will.
Trump’s treatment of Xi is an example. The ceremony of their Washington summit should not be mistaken for an end to the competition between the United States and China. Yet Trump approaches Xi as the leader of a powerful nation with which he must negotiate directly on trade, technology and security. The two governments can quarrel fiercely while seeking understandings that affect the rest of Asia. India need not regard every US–China conversation as a bargain made over its head. It must, however, ask whether its interests will receive due attention when Washington and Beijing are ostensibly expanding common interests.
Pakistan presents a different problem. Neither Shehbaz Sharif nor Field Marshal Asim Munir can offer Trump China’s economic weight or replace India’s place in the Indo-Pacific. They have, however, understood the value he attaches to his account of himself as a peacemaker. By crediting him with ending the India–Pakistan fighting, Sharif endorsed a claim India has resisted. Trump’s decision to circulate the speech does not prove that he intended to offend New Delhi. It shows that the likelihood of doing so did not prevent him.
India’s reaction has a longer history. New Delhi spent years working to escape the old American habit of treating India and Pakistan as a single regional problem. Trump’s repeated claims about mediating their conflict return the conversation to that familiar frame. The objection is more than just a matter of pride. India has global economic, technological and maritime interests that cannot be understood chiefly through the narrow prism of its quarrel with a neighbour. But old habits of thought can survive decades of diplomatic effort, particularly when they serve a President’s political obsessions.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar articulated the Indian position with unusual directness in New York this week. Speaking at the Asia Society, he said India wanted its relationship with the United States to move upwards, but that a partner’s failure to understand one of India’s primary security concerns would affect the relationship. Terrorism from a neighbouring country, he said, had been a deliberate policy pursued over decades. His point was not that Washington must cease all dealings with Pakistan. It was that American warmth towards Islamabad cannot be insulated from the experience of a country that has borne the consequences of Pakistan-based terrorism. He also identified the prolonged trade negotiations as a source of strain, even as he suggested that the two sides were close to an understanding.
The Russian sanctions law makes the disagreement even more concrete. It authorises tariffs of up to 100 percent on major purchasers of Russian energy, while leaving the President considerable discretion over their use. India and China are both potentially exposed. It is not yet known whether Trump will impose such tariffs on either country. Still, New Delhi must ask whether he would be as willing to disrupt a negotiation with Xi as he might be to pressure India. The danger lies not only in the tariff, but in the likelihood of different treatment for similar conduct.
Some analysts have urged India to stop explaining away each such episode as a feature of Trump’s personality. They are right to draw attention to Congress. In February, the US Supreme Court held that the emergency statute Trump had invoked did not itself authorise his sweeping tariffs. The sanctions law gives him a separate authority from Congress, passed with support across party lines. A strategic consensus built over twenty-five years did not prevent legislators from placing powerful economic leverage in the President’s hands, even when India might be among its targets. They can regard India as a partner and still disregard the prospect of imposing serious costs on its choices.
There were warnings of this harder American gaze before the events of September. At the Raisina Dialogue in March, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the United States did not intend to repeat what it sees as its mistake with China: extending economic advantages that helped a partner become a formidable commercial competitor. He acknowledged India’s rise and spoke of partnership, but insisted that its terms must answer to American workers and voters. India’s growth was welcome; American willingness to accommodate it would be closely protected.
Peter Thiel’s view of India is harsher and carries no official authority. In a 2023 interview, he spoke dismissively of India’s institutions and questioned whether it would be a dependable partner against China, saying he would rather count on Japan and Australia. His comments should not be confused with policy. They matter because they challenge an assumption sometimes made in India: that our size, democracy and differences with China make our value self-evident to influential Americans. In parts of the American technology and policy sphere, countries are judged by what they can build, invent and reliably deliver.
Landau and Thiel are not saying the same thing, and there is no straight line from Thiel’s opinions to Trump’s decisions. Together, their words reveal a climate in which partnership is assessed with far less sentiment and more calculation. India’s population and market attract interest; its geography gives it strategic weight. Washington also asks whether India can become a trusted manufacturing centre, strengthen critical supply chains and generate technological capability of its own. It may value India’s potential while resisting the concessions that would help realise it. India is valued, but not without a price.
Yet the relationship cannot be understood through its frictions alone. Marco Rubio’s visit to New Delhi in May, soon after Trump’s earlier summit with Xi in Beijing, offered a measure of reassurance. The Quad foreign ministers’ meeting advanced practical work on maritime awareness, energy security, critical minerals and emerging technologies. These interests have institutions and participants beyond the White House. They show why India–US cooperation retains substance even when its political atmosphere deteriorates. They also show why India, Japan and Australia should help sustain the Quad through their own efforts, rather than leave its promise wholly dependent on Washington’s changing priorities.
There is, nevertheless, a contradiction in the American approach that cannot be waved away. Washington wants India to contribute to an Asian balance favourable to the United States while sometimes treating independent Indian judgment as an obstacle to be overcome. It cannot seek a stronger India and simultaneously insist upon a more obedient one. The freedom to make difficult choices is part of what makes India a consequential strategic actor.
India’s answer need not be wounded nationalism. The real measure of strategic autonomy is not the vehemence with which pressure is denounced, but the extent to which the country can withstand it. That requires diversified defence supplies, greater energy security, technological capability, manufacturing strength and institutional resilience. Autonomy without those foundations would be rhetoric resting upon dependence. India must understand the costs it could bear and build the means to bear them.
None of this calls for a retreat from the United States. India needs American technology, investment and cooperation in sustaining a favourable Asian balance. The United States, for its part, needs an India capable of resisting Chinese predominance. Both countries have reason to preserve what they have built, and neither gains when each disagreement becomes a public referendum on the relationship.
Trump may care about India insofar as it matters to the purposes before him. China commands his attention as a power with which he seeks a direct bargain. Pakistan has made itself useful to his account of his own diplomacy. But the question for India reaches beyond Trump: can the United States accept a partner whose judgment it cannot control? India has not lost its strategic importance. It must now turn that importance into capability, while making clear that partnership is not a euphemism for deference.
