How Trump alienated India
As for why, I don't really know
Since around about the year 2000, successive U.S. presidential administrations have generally seen the value of having strong relations with India. Part of the reason is that India is a democracy with a growing economy - the sort of country that the U.S. generally likes to be pals with. But more important is that it is an increasingly influential country in an increasingly influential part of the world. India borders China and Pakistan - both nuclear powers - and it sits astride the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Its geographic location is so significant that we now call this part of the world “the Indo-Pacific”, rather than “the Asia-Pacific”, just to emphasize the fact that we’re including India in it.
India has generally been happy to return this positive attention. New Delhi’s approach to the world is often called “multi-alignment” or “strategic autonomy”. What this basically means is that India is not going to join one great power bloc or another, but is going to try to sit between them and chart its own course. This was also the fundamental principle of India’s foreign policy during the Cold War, when it was called “non-alignment”.
So New Delhi has never been about to join some sort of Asian NATO that ties it irrevocably to the U.S., but it has always been very interested in balancing the U.S. against China. China is the big rising power of the region, one which India fought a major war against in 1962 and plenty of minor skirmishes since. Perhaps more importantly, India’s main rival, Pakistan, has what it calls an “All-Weather Strategic Cooperative Partnership" with China. Pakistan and China are very close, tied together by common - anti-Indian - security interests and economic ties.
U.S. relations with Pakistan have had their ups and downs, and there have been times when close relations with Islamabad were particularly important for the U.S. This was especially the case during the war in Afghanistan, when the U.S. tried to hug Pakistan close in order to exert influence over regional Islamist and nationalist militants. But there’s never really been much doubt that it was always India that was the more important country for U.S. interests - it just had much more clout, a more strategic position, and seemingly a future of becoming even more powerful and important.
Like a lot of things, this changed when Trump came back into office last year.
One thing after another
It seems pretty clear to me that Trump didn’t return to the White House with some sort of well-thought-out anti-India policy for which he had a strategic rationale. As usual, he just kind of did stuff. But over the past 18 months, India has found itself at the center of some of the most important policy initiatives of the Trump administration - usually in a way which was bad for New Delhi.
One example is trade. Like most other countries in the world, India got slapped with large tariffs by the Trump administration. At 50%, its rate was one of the highest in the world - a punishment for the fact that India was buying oil from Russia, which was under U.S. sanctions. China, which also buys Russian oil, did not receive the same punishment.
Another point of contention has been immigration. Early in 2025, one of the first revolts of the MAGA base against the Trump White House was a demand to clamp down on skilled immigration from India. That immigration is very important to the tech industry, so Trump’s Silicon Valley advisors - like David Sacks and Elon Musk - wanted to keep it going, while MAGA wanted to end it. The whole thing escalated into an openly racist culture war against Indians in which the now-deceased Charlie Kirk played a major role. All of this was observed and noted in India.
Then there was Trump’s claim that he had mediated a ceasefire in the brief India-Pakistan hostilities which occurred last year. The Indian government is adamant that it does not accept outside involvement in the Kashmir conflict, and Trump’s claim that he had swooped in to save the world went down particularly badly with India’s leader, Narendra Modi. Then Trump tried to get Modi to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Modi refused, and the spat grew worse.
Then there was something else, something besides which all of this paled by comparison. And that is the fact that the Indian government realized earlier than a lot of Western commentators that Trump is the ultimate China dove.
Trump hearts China
The cornerstone of growing U.S.-India cooperation has always been the perception of a shared threat from China, with Pakistan seen as to some extent a vehicle for Chinese influence. If there was one thing that seemed constant in the world, it was that the U.S. was opposed to the rise of China and would always want to lean on India as a counterweight to it. For New Delhi, this meant that the U.S. was predictably locked into an anti-China, anti-Pakistan, and therefore broadly pro-India alignment. It was extremely hard to see any of this changing.
And yet change it has, because Trump is not actually concerned about stopping the rise of China. Trump is a guy who believes that bilateral trade imbalances are extremely bad, and has noticed that America has a large bilateral trade imbalance with China. He has launched an aggressive trade policy to try to change that. But he has never been particularly interested in Indo-Pacific security issues, in the fate of China’s neighbors, or in seeing the U.S. as the defender of a “liberal international order” which China threatens.
