Donald Trump Risks Tanking Twenty-Five Years of U.S.-India Relations
The repoliticization of bilateral relations is a slow-motion catastrophe.
After more than two decades of bipartisan effort to transform the relationship between New Delhi and Washington, including during his own first term, U.S. President Donald Trump is now in the process of dismantling this painstakingly built relationship.
In recent weeks, the administration has:
- Halted trade negotiations with India and imposed (via social media post) a baseline 25 percent tariff while giving China another extension—a contrast between “friend” and rival not lost on anyone in New Delhi.
- Announced on August 4 that it will raise the 25 percent tariff higher still and will impose secondary penalties on India’s oil purchases from Russia. This step will be viewed in New Delhi as blunt coercion, gross interference in Indian foreign policy, impractical given India’s oil import needs, and a cynical effort to “blame India” for the West’s (and Trump’s own) collective failure to get Moscow to stop its war on Ukraine.
- Threatened still more tariffs on India for its participation in the BRICS grouping with Brazil, China, Russia, South Africa, and others. Not surprisingly, New Delhi views this, too, as gross interference and coercive.
- Criticized and threatened U.S. companies that manufacture in India—a major priority for the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—while encouraging them to invest in the United States instead or else face financial penalties. This has sharpened the intuitive and inherent contradiction between Trump’s “America First” and Modi’s “Make in India” visions.
- Hobnobbed at the White House with Pakistan’s Army chief within weeks of a terrorist attack on India while giving Islamabad a preferable tariff rate of just 19 percent and a pledge to jointly explore Pakistan’s oil reserves.
- Continued to tease a new American technonationalism in which technology sharing with foreigners is viewed with skepticism. Some around the president have a penchant for keeping American technology close to home while curtailing exports and co-innovation with foreign partners.
It is certainly easy to dismiss Trump’s threats against India, and experienced people are doing so on five grounds:
First, as former assistant commerce secretary Ray Vickery has put it, the president blusters before making deals, so at some point a Trumpian “trade deal” is likely to reduce India’s 25 percent baseline tariff rate.
Second, as my Carnegie colleague Rudra Chaudhuri has rightly written, the ecosystem of commercial, technology, and societal ties between Americans and Indians is deeper than Trump, with billions in two-way investment, numerous tech firms working together, and tens of thousands of Indian and American engineers and venture capitalists intensively engaged with one another.
Third, as leading strategic affairs analyst C. Raja Mohan notes, India needs structural reforms, so Trump’s hardnose tactics could even provide the impetus for India to reset.
Fourth, as the Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead suggests, there are persistent, enduring, and perhaps even permanent “pain points” that have caused rancor and throw up obstacles to cooperation even in the best of times.
Finally, in the real world, geopolitical threats still matter, so the shared concerns Secretary of State Marco Rubio has identified about the rise of Chinese power will invariably yield some strategic convergence.
But these caveats ignore the two most fundamental facts: domestic politics nearly always trumps foreign policy, and foreign policy arguments almost never prevail unless they are anchored by a strong domestic political foundation.
American commercial, technology, and societal ties with China became far deeper than they are with India. Yet after four decades of exponential growth and deep connections, those ties have rapidly unraveled in a few short years amid shifting strategic calculations and changed domestic politics.
Remarkably, and for the first time in two decades, Trump’s actions, statements, and coercive tone have made relations with the United States a combustible domestic political issue in India. The opposition, the media, and the Indian public have put the government on notice to avoid showing weakness in the face of Trump’s threats.
And given that large segments of the American body politic seem to follow Trump wherever he goes, can it be long before relations with India also become a football in American domestic politics? Issues that directly touch India are among the most partisan and explosive in Washington, including immigration and deportation, H1B visas for tech workers, offshoring and overseas manufacturing by U.S. companies, and technology sharing and co-innovation with foreigners.
This bodes ill for the next two decades of U.S.-India relations, because overcoming domestic politics and partisanship has been perhaps the signal achievement since the first decade of the 2000s.
And as the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state overseeing U.S.-India ties at the end of former president George W. Bush’s administration, I can personally attest that it took a hell of a lot of work by a hell of a lot of people in both countries to overcome the overhang of partisanship, politicization, and history. In fact, the last time domestic politics nearly derailed the transformation of U.S.-India relations wholesale was during this period.
In July 2008, after three years of stalling on a landmark 2005 civil nuclear deal with Washington, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) of former prime minister Manmohan Singh nearly lost a vote of no confidence when the Left Front, which supported the government from outside the coalition, withdrew its support over the deal. Indian politics fractured. And ironically, parties that had long supported closer U.S.-India ties voted against the government to bring it down. Singh survived, and the deal moved forward—but only because of votes from parties outside the UPA coalition, such as the Samajwadi Party, a regional party with a stronghold in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
Today, too few of those who rah-rah about the U.S.-India strategic partnership seem to remember how close the nuclear deal came to being lost. But these two lessons are clear: Once domestic politics gets in the way, good intentions and good ideas can fail; and trust is hard to build, harder to sustain, and hardest of all to rebuild once it evaporates in a morass of politicization.
U.S.-India relations may now become a political football, especially in New Delhi. And the core understandings that enabled closer U.S.-India relations may also be at serious risk:
One, New Delhi largely presumed that Washington would take political risks to strengthen the relationship. Trump has not and clearly will not.
Two, the United States and India often differ on Pakistan, but Washington had been sensitive to New Delhi’s equities and tried to shape U.S. policies accordingly. Trump’s fulsome praise for Islamabad and dealmaking with Pakistan’s army and government now raise obvious concerns in New Delhi that this too has gone by the wayside. And these concerns have been amplified exponentially because Trump’s moves came within weeks of the April 22 terrorist attack that killed twenty-six Indian civilians in Pahalgam and led to a new outbreak of hostilities between the two countries.
Three, both capitals mistrusted the other’s intentions with third parties but learned not to make it an obstacle to closer relations. New Delhi fretted about Washington’s dealmaking with Beijing and Islamabad. The United States was roiled by India’s ties to Iran, Myanmar, and later Russia. Trump and his administration are now moving to sanction and tariff India over its oil trade with Russia. This significantly shifts the bar for bilateral relations.
Four, despite that long-standing mistrust, both sides moderated their language and tone. Trump has done no such thing, slamming India and even calling it a “dead economy.”
Five, and most important, both sides and leaders of all major political parties worked hard to ensure a bipartisan anchor. So it is ironic that the Congress Party, which led the nuclear deal with Washington in 2005, now spearheads bashing U.S.-India relations in New Delhi, while Bush’s Republican Party successor bashes India in near-daily social media barrages.
To those who think America and India have much to gain and even more to lose in a rupture, the repoliticization of U.S.-India relations is a slow-motion catastrophe.
Evan A. Feigenbaum
Vice President for Studies