A recent essay in Foreign Affairs magazine has a forceful warning: mishandling India risks squandering one of America’s most important strategic relationships.
The diagnosis is familiar—presidential grandstanding, tariff aggression, and tone-deaf diplomacy have pushed New Delhi toward resentment.
The prescription is equally clear: pull back, lower tariffs, stop talking about Kashmir mediation, and reassure India of its primacy over Pakistan.
As an argument for damage control, the January 16 essay titled ‘America Must Salvage Its Relationship With India, Or Risk Losing a Global Swing State’, is compelling.
But as a full explanation of what is going wrong, it is incomplete.
Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and Lisa Curtis, Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at CNAS, frame the current rupture as an avoidable derailment of an otherwise steady upward trajectory in U.S.–India relations.
That framing flatters Washington. The truth is harsher: volatility has always been baked into the relationship.
India has never treated the United States as an ally in the traditional sense. It has treated it as a useful but unreliable partner—valuable for balancing China, accessing technology, and amplifying India’s global standing, but never indispensable.
The present crisis is sharper than previous ones, but it is not anomalous. It is an exposure of underlying limits.
Blaming the deterioration largely on President Donald Trump’s public theatrics over India–Pakistan mediation is analytically convenient but strategically insufficient.
Trump’s boasts about brokering peace and his fixation on Nobel recognition did inflame Indian sensitivities, especially given New Delhi’s absolute rejection of third-party mediation on Kashmir.
But Indian unease runs deeper than wounded pride. What truly alarms New Delhi is not that Washington talked too much—it is that U.S. policy now appears erratic, transactional, and driven by domestic political impulses that India cannot anticipate or manage.
Tariffs imposed one month, exemptions floated the next; sanctions threatened under one administration and waived under another; strategic convergence praised rhetorically while market access disputes fester indefinitely.
From New Delhi’s perspective, this is not a Trump problem alone. It is a structural feature of American politics.
This is where Fontaine and Curtis’ prescription begins to wobble. They argue that Washington can still “go big” to repair ties—cut tariffs, finalise a trade deal, stop public mediation talk, and reaffirm India’s centrality in Indo-Pacific strategy.
Each step makes sense in isolation. Together, they assume a degree of political flexibility in Washington—and compliance in New Delhi—that history does not support.
Trade is the clearest example. The authors suggest that the United States should accept some Indian protectionism, particularly in agriculture, to clinch a deal. That advice is sound strategically and improbable politically.
India’s farm sector is politically untouchable, but so is protectionist sentiment in the United States. The problem is not a lack of goodwill; it is a lack of overlapping domestic coalitions capable of sustaining compromise.
The essay is more convincing when it turns to Pakistan—but even here, it oversimplifies. The authors rightly warn against “re-hyphenation” and argue that indulging Islamabad’s desire for mediation weakens India’s confidence and distracts it from China.
Yet they portray Pakistan as strategically marginal: economically stagnant, overly dependent on Beijing, and of limited value to Washington.
That framing underestimates Pakistan’s enduring relevance as a crisis trigger. Washington does not engage Islamabad out of affection or illusion; it does so because India–Pakistan escalation carries nuclear risks that no Indo-Pacific strategy can ignore.
The problem is not engagement with Pakistan, but the absence of disciplined prioritisation when doing so.
Where the essay arguably overreaches most is in its warning that a disillusioned India would meaningfully accommodate China.
India’s record suggests otherwise. Even amid tactical engagement with Beijing, New Delhi has consistently hardened its military posture, diversified partnerships, and resisted Chinese economic dominance.
India does not need U.S. permission—or encouragement—to view China as a strategic adversary. What it might do, however, is quietly downgrade cooperation with Washington: less enthusiasm for Quad initiatives, slower defence integration, and more hedging in global forums. That kind of drift is harder to dramatise—and harder to reverse.
But on one crucial point, Fontaine and Curtis are exactly right: trust is cumulative, memory is long, and public humiliation carries outsized costs in Indian strategic culture. Their reminder that Indian officials still reference U.S. behaviour from 1971 is not nostalgia; it is a warning. Relationships with India are not reset with statements. It needs restraint, predictability, and patience.
But that insight undercuts their own optimism. The damage done is not just rhetorical. It reinforces an Indian belief that U.S. partnership is conditional, cyclical, and vulnerable to sudden reversal. No tariff cut or joint statement can fully erase that lesson.
The uncomfortable conclusion is this: America’s India problem is not primarily about fixing a crisis. It is about accepting limits.
India will cooperate when interests align, resist when they do not, and hedge whenever Washington looks unreliable. That is not ingratitude or strategic drift; it is Indian statecraft.
The sooner U.S. policymakers stop treating India as a relationship that can be “salvaged” through course correction—and start treating it as a permanently complex, non-aligned power with its own red lines—the fewer such crises they will have to manage.
