Donald Trump’s posture toward India in his second term has shocked and awed New Delhi. There was a noticeable shift even before his inauguration: he surprised Indians by extending an unusually early invitation to Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend the ceremony, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi received no comparable invitation. From then on, the warmth between Washington and New Delhi began to fade.
India’s strategic community is struggling to make sense of the rapidly transforming relationship. The key question animating New Delhi is whether this change is transient or whether it represents a fundamental rupture, triggering long-term and profound impacts not just on U.S.-India relations but also on India’s growth story.
For years, Delhi’s elite and media have celebrated the “personal chemistry” between Trump and Modi. When both leaders won elections in 2024, great expectations followed. New Delhi was sure that the strategic partnership would deepen and progress rapidly, and that Washington would indeed help India become a major global power ahead of schedule. This aspiration has been nurtured by the Indian strategic community for decades, especially since the July 2005 U.S.-India civil nuclear understanding.
The unease deepened after Operation Sindoor.
Washington began leaning more toward Islamabad, while the rhetoric toward India became increasingly insulting and disrespectful. India was also singled out as the only major country to be hit with punitive tariffs for trading with Russia, even though other major buyers of Russian energy — China, Turkey, and European countries — did not face the same India-specific penalty. Trump’s expected visit to India has also slipped from a likely Quad-related trip to a more distant and uncertain schedule. Meanwhile, the changing language in Washington, growing talk of a G2 understanding between the United States and China, and diminished attention to both the Quad and the Indo-Pacific strategy have all added to the disquiet in New Delhi.
India’s official response, at least initially, was to weather the storm. It did not adopt an adversarial posture toward the United States, and it continues to accommodate the eccentricities and unpredictability of Trump’s policies. Officially, New Delhi is still batting defensively, mostly leaving the balls outside the stumps and blocking only those that threaten the wicket.
The wider strategic community, however, has reacted very differently. There is anger, frustration, and disbelief at how quickly America appears to have distanced itself from India while moving closer to Pakistan. This has generated much discussion about whether India’s trust in the United States has been violated — and whether it can ever be rebuilt.
Official channels remain quiet. The media and the opposition criticize both Trump for his perfidy and Modi for his silence. The strategic community, both in Washington and New Delhi, continues to emphasize the importance of the relationship, while warning that without a course correction, this strategic partnership could be damaged, perhaps irreparably.
In Washington, veteran India hands continue to remind the Trump administration of India’s strategic value and urge it to repair the relationship. Think tank after think tank has called on Trump and his administration to take corrective steps before the damage becomes permanent. But in New Delhi, the strategic debate has taken a more interesting turn. Among former diplomats, retired military officers, prominent academics, and think tank analysts, a Track II-style conversation has emerged over whether India should merely respond tactically to the United States or undertake more fundamental changes in its grand strategy.
I spent nearly two weeks in New Delhi a few months ago. I had many interactions with members of the Indian strategic community at the India International Center (IIC), over lunch and tea. The IIC is India’s premier, and probably most important, cultural institution; on any given day, if you walk into its lounge or dining area, you are likely to run into the who’s who of New Delhi: academics, former ministers, current ministers, generals, diplomats, visiting scholars, and public intellectuals. It is, in many ways, the zip code of India’s intelligentsia.
Inevitably, every conversation I had there, in one form or another, turned on the same concern: Can we trust the U.S. anymore? How do we go forward? This was often followed by a related vexation, usually voiced as people were thinking aloud rather than directly asking me: How should India proceed? Should India rely on the U.S. going forward, or should it prepare to walk alone, to face China alone? Or should it simply wait out Donald Trump?
Nearly everyone I spoke with appeared to be deeply emotional. The sense of both betrayal and anger was palpable among those who are engaged with, or closely observe, U.S.-India relations.
Two recent articles capture the two poles of this debate, one calling for change and the other for maintaining continuity. In “A Case for ‘De-Americanising’ India’s Grand Strategy,” published in India’s World, strategic affairs scholar and founder-director of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research, Happymon Jacob, argues that the time has come for India to fundamentally rethink its grand strategy.
In “India Should Stop Panicking About Trump,” published in Foreign Policy magazine, C. Raja Mohan argues that the emotional debate within New Delhi’s strategic community is overlooking the cold, hard structural logic of U.S.-India relations.
Jacob delivers a hard-edged realist critique, arguing that it is time for New Delhi to stop “borrowing Washington’s eyes” to interpret both the current global order and China’s place in it. He frames this by advancing a new grand strategy for India that decenters America. Consequently, Jacob argues that India must purge two comfortable illusions that have compromised its strategic thinking. First, New Delhi must stop expecting America to actively or unconditionally facilitate India’s rise to great-power status. Second, he cautions against over-reliance on the Indian diaspora, asserting that despite its economic and social success, it does not possess the political leverage necessary to shape American policy. He recommends that India focus on enhancing its own capabilities and chart its path forward without dependence on the United States.
Raja Mohan, a prominent scholar of Indian foreign policy, interprets the changes in America’s posture and some of its policies toward India as understandable and realistic. He is critical of what he sees as an entitled attitude among sections of the Indian elite, especially their expectations about easy access to good jobs in America and to American technology. For him, the frictions in the relationship are not signs of growing divergence, but consequences of deeper engagement and a closer partnership. He therefore argues that, rather than declining, U.S.-India relations will endure, and that the anger and anxiety within India’s policy community are both unnecessary and unhelpful.
Raja Mohan believes that despite tactical differences in implementation, the strategic goal of the United States and India remains the same: keeping the Indo-Pacific free of hegemony. Without saying so explicitly, he is urging New Delhi to calm down and stay the course.
While Jacob believes the divergence between India and the United States has reached a point that warrants a new grand strategy, Raja Mohan’s recommendation is to ride out the storm and preserve the partnership.
Both, however, do not fully acknowledge that Indian policy is already changing. In West Asia, India has moved away from its older habits of non-alignment and its more recent posture of multi-alignment, and is leaning more clearly toward a close nexus with Israel and the UAE. India has also reached out to improve ties with China, and there has been an effort to revitalize the Russia-India-China (RIC) mechanism.
Even as this essay is being written, Modi is engaged in a diplomatic effort to shore up India’s Indo-Pacific strategy — under the MAHASAGAR rubric — through deeper ties with Japan, Indonesia, and Australia, notably without the United States at the center. Clearly, the change is neither dramatic nor profound enough to be labeled a shift in grand strategy, but nor is it simply a preservation of continuity. It appears that Delhi is searching for a path forward, but it is not yet clear either to official New Delhi or to the IIC crowd what that path is.
