Political scientists often complain they don’t know what Donald Trump will do next. The truth is – neither does Trump. But as his second term unfolds, a dangerous pattern is beginning to emerge. It’s not grand strategy. It’s not a coherent doctrine. It’s populist transactionalism, where decades-long alliances are discarded at the altar of social media optics, domestic posturing, and tactical bullying. The U.S.-India relationship, painstakingly built over two decades of bipartisan effort, is its latest and most visible casualty.
For years, India enjoyed the status of a “strategic partner” in Washington’s lexicon. The shared rising economic clout and India’s pivotal role in the Indo-Pacific were thought to insulate it from the strong-arm tactics that characterized Trump’s dealings with others. That illusion has now crumbled.
In the past month alone, Trump has:
- Imposed a cumulative 50% tariff on Indian goods (twice hiking it by 25%), one of the steepest levies faced by any U.S. trading partner, doubling down on punitive economic pressure over New Delhi’s continued Russian oil imports, while extending leniency to China.
- Threatened secondary sanctions targeting India’s energy sector, pressuring New Delhi to halt Russian crude purchases, despite the U.S. and EU maintaining their own trade ties with Moscow.
- Publicly humiliated India by claiming to have brokered a ceasefire between New Delhi and Islamabad, a narrative India had to swiftly and categorically deny on the international stage.
- Openly flirted with Islamabad, offering preferential tariff rates (19%) and joint oil exploration deals mere weeks after India accused Pakistan of orchestrating the Pahalgam terrorist attack.
- Threatened U.S. companies manufacturing in India with penalties unless they “brought jobs back home.”
This is not the behavior of a nation safeguarding a strategic partnership. This is the behavior of a populist power broker who views alliances not as long-term investments, but as negotiating chips in a perpetual game of leverage.
When Populisms Collide
What makes this friction even more combustible is that India under Narendra Modi is not a passive victim. Trump’s “America First” protectionism and Modi’s “Atmanirbhar Bharat” are both economic populisms at heart: protectionist, nationalistic, and inherently wary of foreign dependencies. While these visions were once sold as complementary, we are now witnessing their irreconcilable contradictions. When both nations aspire to be the manufacturing hub, the trade surplus holder, and the geopolitical pivot, conflict is inevitable.
India’s defiance over Russian oil imports is a case in point. With Russian crude now accounting for nearly a third of India’s imports, New Delhi has made it clear that energy security for 1.4 billion people will not be held hostage to Washington’s coercive diplomacy. The U.S., having quietly accepted China’s continued energy dealings with Russia, has decided to single out India for punitive action. This selective outrage has not gone unnoticed in the South Block.
The Ministry of External Affairs minced no words, calling out U.S. duplicity and exposing the West’s continued trade with Russia. India’s message was clear: it will chart its own path, not as a subordinate ally but as an autonomous power. Trump’s aggressive tariff strategy, now his go-to playbook for forcing negotiations, has met a red line.
Strategic Partnerships ≠ Transactional Deals
Trump’s approach reveals a seismic shift in American foreign policy: the death of strategic exceptionalism. No alliance, however historic or carefully nurtured, is immune from being reduced to a transactional exchange. Loyalty is irrelevant; what matters is compliance.
We saw it with NATO, where Trump threatened to pull out unless member states upped defense spending. We saw it with South Korea and Japan, where he demanded increased payments for U.S. military presence. India is simply the next card on the table.
But what Trump and his advisors fail to grasp is that alliances cannot survive if they are perpetually mortgaged for short-term tactical wins. Strategic trust, once broken, is extraordinarily hard to rebuild. The Indo-Pacific strategy that Washington touted as a bulwark against China’s rise is now being undermined: not by Beijing, but by Trump’s own capricious policymaking.
Everyone’s at Risk
This isn’t merely a bilateral spat. Transactional diplomacy as statecraft is destabilizing the global order itself. In an era where supply chains are interconnected, security architectures are multilateral, and economic resilience depends on trusted partnerships, Trump’s zero-sum, ego-driven approach is a recipe for loss of trust and reputation.
For India, the lesson is sobering. The days of assuming “too strategic to strong-arm” are over. Populist power politics does not recognize old friendships; it only counts immediate leverage. Modi’s government, though inclined toward quiet diplomacy, has been forced into an unfamiliar but necessary posture of defiance.
For Washington, the risk is deeper. By dismantling the very architecture of strategic partnerships that underpinned American influence, Trump is inadvertently clearing the ground for a multipolar world where nations like India, wary of U.S. reliability, will diversify their alignments, including with China and Russia when convenient.
The U.S.-India relationship was once seen as a linchpin of the 21st-century global order. But in an age where populist transactionalism masquerades as foreign policy, even linchpins are expendable. The world is beginning to understand that with Trump, no relationship is special: only situational. And when alliances are treated as disposable, the global order itself becomes dangerously brittle.
