Washington’s India Policy

THERE APPEARS TO BE a great deal of heartburning and soul-searching in Delhi over a certain misreading of the Donald Trump administration. To be more precise, the inability to read the tea leaves governing Washington’s India policy has affected that section—disproportionately supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—that defied the liberal consensus and banked on a Trump victory in November 2024. As far as I could make out from random conversations in Lutyens’ Delhi and its extension across the Atlantic, the old Establishment that had served Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi well, hoped for a Kamala Harris victory.

The reasons were complicated and ranged from echoing what their children and grandchildren settled in the US felt to a belief that the Democratic establishment was more comfortable with Congress than BJP.

All that is now history. The reality, which often tends to be constantly rewritten, is that governing circles in India reposed a lot of hope on the Trump administration aligning both countries closer together. There was a belief that Trump’s Sinophobia would lead to the strengthening of the Quad, maybe even see its evolution into a defence partnership of sorts, at least as far as the Indo-Pacific was concerned. It was also assumed that the amoral pragmatism of Trump would lead to a greater understanding of India’s ties with, say, Russia and Iran. It was also felt that the foreign policy realism advocated by the stalwarts of the National Conservatism movement would ensure that the needless intrusiveness of the US in the internal affairs of countries in India’s neighbourhood, such as Bangladesh and Myanmar, would cease. Implicit was the belief that these countries would be left to the overriding influence of India. Since the competition was from China, it was also assumed that the US would give India a leg-up.

True, there was understandable apprehension of what Trump’s ‘America First’ economic policies could mean for Indian business. But that was a bridge our policymakers believed could be crossed later, once the contours of the Trump administration were better understood. From a purely global perspective, the greatest measure of optimism over a new, energised Trump administration came from two other quarters.

First, there was the European right that was waging a battle with the Eurocrats in Brussels over issues of national sovereignty and permissive immigration policies that had altered the social character of the continent, sometimes unrecognisably. The principal opposition parties in countries, such as Germany and France, not to mention the ruling parties in places such as Italy, Austria and Hungary, hoped that Trump would undermine the inclination of the likes of the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to drag Europe into a big conflict with Russia. The European right (maybe not so much Poland) wanted Russia to be a part of Europe while the existing EU establishment still nurtured Cold War perspectives.

Second, there was an explosion of what subsequently proved to be irrational exuberance in Israel. Going by the experience of Trump’s first innings when the US had taken the enormously bold step of recognising Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, there was a hope that the constraints on Israel’s war plans by the Biden administration would be put aside. Moreover, it was assumed Trump would derail all the nuclear plans of the regime in Tehran and, who knows, this could trigger the collapse of the entire Islamic state in Iran.

The systematic way in which the expectations of both the European right and Israel have been left unfulfilled and even derailed by Trump corresponds to the disappointment in Delhi over the White House’s post-Pahalgam behaviour. The equivalence with Pakistan and the explicit message to India that it has overshot its capacity and is behaving above its station, especially in demonstrating its strategic autonomy, proved very jarring to those expecting more supportive messages from Washington.

Of course, it is possible to see the dip in India-US relations as a diplomatic failure of the Modi government. This should be resisted. Israel’s relations with the US are far closer and deeper than anything India can ever hope for. The hold over its establishment by American Jews is enviable. Yet, if Israel can
feel wrongfooted by Trump, India’s miscalculations appear minor by comparison. There is a strong case for India comparing notes with the political (as opposed to the diplomatic) establishment of Israel and with the European right. Unfortunately, the Modi government doesn’t appear to have invested too deeply in the political relationships that are distinct and separate from the government-to-government links that the Ministry of External Affairs handles.

Hopefully, we would have learnt a lesson or two from our disappointment.

Donald TrumpgeopoliticsIndia-US relationsNarendra ModiUS-China