India Is Sticking With America—for Now
India Is Sticking With America—For Now
But Trump’s Coercion Could Force Modi’s Hand
C. Raja Mohan
August 27, 2026
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President Donald Trump, in his second term, has severely tested the U.S.-Indian relationship. The president has slapped tariffs on India, threatened to impose secondary sanctions, gotten considerably closer to Pakistan, and enthusiastically engaged with China—the country India considers its biggest long-term military threat. Yet these strains have not led to the rupture that some observers had predicted. Nor have they forced a fundamental reorientation of Indian foreign policy. Instead, New Delhi has adopted what might be called an “America plus” strategy, in which it seeks to sustain partnership with the United States while widening its engagement with other powers, namely U.S. allies.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has responded with unusual restraint to Trump’s provocations and has resisted demands to pull away from Washington. With the United States, India has continued trade negotiations, increased defense cooperation, and expanded technological and commercial ties. In addition, he has sustained the Quad, a regional security organization that also includes Australia, Japan, and the United States, drawn closer to U.S. allies, preserved relations with Russia, and sought to lower tensions with China. These efforts do not represent a retreat from the United States or a strategy of multialignment. India is trying to reduce its exposure to American volatility, but it still recognizes that Washington is its most important partner.
After all, when it comes to cultivating a great-power patron, India doesn’t have better options. China and Russia will never buy Indian goods and services on the scale that the United States does, nor can Russia help India balance China. These realities have protected the U.S.-Indian relationship so far. But if Trump continues to bully India, public opinion could force Modi to abandon his restrained approach.
GROWING APART?
Through 2024, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were excited at the prospect of Trump’s return to power. Modi had established an unusually warm personal relationship with the president during the latter’s first term. In 2019 and 2020, they headlined rallies together in Houston and Ahmedabad, expanded bilateral cooperation on defense, and developed a common approach to Asian security.
At the start of Trump’s second term, it seemed the friendly personal relationship between the two leaders would continue. At a White House meeting in February 2025, they announced an ambitious agenda for trade, defense, energy, and technology. To signal goodwill, the Indian prime minister accommodated Trump by slashing some of India’s tariffs on U.S. products and accepting a planeload of deported immigrants.
But the relationship soon soured. Trump took credit in May 2025 for ending a brief military conflict between India and Pakistan. While the Pakistanis hailed Trump’s intervention, the Indians refused to acknowledge that the president had done anything of the sort, sticking to New Delhi’s standard position that its disputes with Islamabad are purely bilateral and do not require outside mediation. Trump then took a shine to Pakistan’s army chief, Syed Asim Munir, and elevated Pakistan in the White House’s diplomatic priorities by using Islamabad as a mediator in negotiations with Iran and blessing the trilateral security pact between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
Modi has largely avoided confrontations with Trump.
Trump also became friendlier with China, another Indian rival. In his first term, he sought to build stronger partnerships with Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan to construct a new regional architecture in Asia to balance China. But in his second term, he has spent a significant amount of time engaging with Chinese leader Xi Jinping—even talking loosely of establishing a “G-2,” under which China and the United States would meet regularly to hash out global problems. Trump has also failed to hold the annual summits of the Quad, raising doubts that the United States is committed to that security partnership and to preventing Chinese dominance across Asia.
Trade tensions have also inflamed U.S.-Indian relations. When Trump punished India with high tariffs for its protectionism and for buying Russian oil, many Indians felt that their country was being unduly singled out. Washington had carved out exceptions for itself and some European countries to buy Russian oil, and the Biden administration had even encouraged India to buy Russian oil under a price cap as part of a plan to stabilize the global oil market. By late 2025, India faced some of the highest tariffs of any U.S. partner.
It is for these reasons that Indian public opinion started to turn against Trump in 2025. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi accused Modi of surrendering to American pressure. Long-standing skeptics of the United States argued that Washington had proved itself unreliable. Critics of Modi started mobilizing farmers against a U.S.-Indian trade deal by characterizing the careful opening of India’s agricultural market to U.S. goods as an overly large concession. Sections of the political class have suggested that India would be better off forging closer ties with China and Russia.
Modi has mostly ignored these calls and largely avoided confrontations with Trump. Last year, India finalized a new ten-year defense framework with the United States that deepens bilateral and regional security cooperation. When the annual summit of Quad leaders failed to materialize in 2025 because Trump refused to participate, New Delhi worked to preserve the forum by hosting a meeting of Quadforeign ministers instead. Modi also persisted with difficult trade negotiations and invested considerable political capital in overcoming the resistance of India’s traditionally protectionist trade bureaucracy. The United States, for its part, has made modest efforts to repair the relationship. In August, for example, the U.S. ambassador in New Delhi called the contested region of Kashmir “an important part of India,” signalling that Washington remains sensitive to India on this issue.
ROUGH START
Modi’s restraint comes, in part, from that fact that it took India years to build a solid relationship with the United States. For decades after India’s independence, suspicion of the United States permeated the Indian political class, defense establishment, bureaucracy, and scientific community. It was reinforced by Washington’s alliance with Pakistan and its engagement with China during the Cold War, India’s socialist leanings in the decades after its independence in 1947, and New Delhi’s close relationship with the Soviet Union.
The end of the Cold War created an opportunity to repair the U.S.-Indian relationship, but progress was slow. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s 2005 civil nuclear agreement with President George W. Bush was a decisive breakthrough. It ended India’s nuclear isolation and opened the way for a broader strategic partnership. Yet the agreement encountered intense resistance from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the communist left, and critical sections of Singh’s own Congress Party.
When Modi became prime minister in 2014, he was determined to strengthen ties with Washington. He developed productive relationships with three successive American presidents: Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden. He pressed the Indian bureaucracy, armed forces, and scientific establishment to work with their American counterparts. His government concluded long-delayed foundational defense agreements, widened intelligence and military cooperation, revived the Quad, and promoted deeper engagement with the United States in the realm of critical and emerging technologies. Modi’s political dominance at home allowed him to contain any backlash to growing ties to Washington.
By the time Trump returned to office, Indian engagement with the United States was undergirded by expanding connections with American businesses, universities, and the Indian diaspora. In a speech to the U.S. Congress in 2016, Modi declared that India had overcome its historical hesitation to partner with the United States. Today, the U.S.-Indian relationship has acquired a resilience that neither Trump’s volatility nor India’s long-standing anti-American tendencies can easily undo. India’s economic ambitions, military planning, and technological aspirations all, to some degree, now revolve around the United States.
A WANDERING EYE
To be sure, Modi has also strengthened ties with other great powers sincehe became prime minister.In 2023, for example, Russia became India’s top supplier of oil.And although Russia’s of India’s arms imports has fallen over the past two decades, it remains an important supplier of weapons to the Indian military.
Modi’s outreach also extends to China. When he came to power, he hoped that rapprochement with China was possible, but a series of military crises in 2014, 2017, and 2020 delayed those plans. Today, New Delhi is eager to lower tensions with Beijing, with the goals of reducing the risk of conflict, of seeking a boundary settlement, and of hedging against potential improvement in U.S.-Chinese relations. Since 2024, India has made it easier for Chinese professionals to get visas, resumed direct flights between the two countries, and lifted some restrictions on Chinese investments. In September, Xi will make his first visit to India since 2019.
Many analysts argue that these overtures to Beijing and Moscow constitute a strategy of multialignment—the act of balancing many partners without committing to any one bloc or country. But that is not quite right. A more apt description for this strategy would be “America plus.” India, a country that has historically hedged its relationships, now has quite a few eggs in the U.S. basket. And when it has diversified its ties, it has mostly done so with U.S. allies, such as Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and European countries. India’s growth strategy is linked to these partners more than ever before.
India recognizes that neither China nor Russia can replace the United States as similarly valuable economic partners. The United States is India’s largest market for goods and services and a critical source of capital and technology. U.S.-Indian trade, in goods and services, reached $240 billion in 2025, with a surplus in India’s favor. China is one of India’s largest trading partners, but the relationship is severely lopsided. In 2025, India ran a goods deficit of well over $110 billion with China. Beijing is an important supplier of manufactured products, but it cannot offer India a market as big as that of the United States, nor can it provide India access to the range of advanced technology that the United States does. Russia wise imports few Indian goods and is not a source of today’s advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence.
India’s ambitions, to some degree, now revolve around the United States.
India’s recent trade diplomacy reflects its “America plus” strategy. Having refused to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2019, a group dominated by China, New Delhi has signed free trade agreements with New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. It has also expanded economic cooperation with Australia and renewed trade talks with Canada. The United States and India finalized a consequential trade deal in February, the first of its kind between the two countries, which promises to increase bilateral trade to $500 billion by 2030. But Trump has yet to sign off on it and continues to look for new ways to impose tariffs on India.
India also relies on the United States and its partners for security. Tensions along the disputed Chinese-Indian border cooled after deadly clashes in 2020, but China remains India’s principal long-term adversary. The conventional military balance along the border favors Beijing. China spends four times more on defense than India does, has developed a massive military presence in the Tibet region across the Himalayas, continues to expand its naval presence in the Indian Ocean, and is deepening its defense relationship with Pakistan.
Washington provides New Delhi with access to intelligence, advanced military technology, joint exercises, and a wider network of security partnerships. The Quad continues to show potential as the regional maritime coalition that could limit Chinese domination of Asian waters. India has also expanded cooperation with U.S. allies on defense production, technology, resilient supply chains, and maritime security.
India couldn’t turn to China or Russia for these needs, even if it wanted to. India still relies on Russia for some weapons and spare parts, but Moscow’s capacity to balance China has diminished. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia is too reliant on China to be able to meaningfully curb Beijing. Nor can the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, two groups dominated by China and backed by Russia, serve as sources of that balancing.
India understands that Washington has its own economic and political reasons to stabilize relations with Beijing. New Delhi is also convinced that the underlying competition between the United States and China—over technology, maritime power, alliances, and the regional order—will not disappear. Even if Trump softens Washington’s stance toward Beijing, the structural basis for U.S.-Indian cooperation is ly to endure.
BREAKING POINT
Modi has so far managed to contain the damage caused by Trump. But there are limits to his capacity to do so. A growing section of India’s political class is itching to see New Delhi confront Washington, even if such a move hurts their country. The most immediate danger to the U.S.-Indian relationship comes from proposed U.S. legislation that would authorize tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries that buy Russian energy. If the bill becomes law—and Trump does not grant India a waiver—it would damage the Indian economy and contribute to a sense among Indians that the United States is no longer a natural partner. If the United States targets India while making allowances for other countries, a dormant anti-Americanism in India will reawaken.
Until recently, Modi’s domestic political dominance shielded his approach to the United States from domestic criticism. But recent youth protests, which began over leaked examination papers, have pierced Modi’s aura of invulnerability. If his authority at home continues to erode, he could face more backlash from both the right and the left over his perceived deference to Trump, and he may eventually find defying Washington to be politically useful.
Such anti-American sentiment may not produce a formal rupture in the relations with the United States. But it could slow defense and technological cooperation and provide more impetus to hedge. In the worst case, Modi might come under pressure to make concessions to China to stabilize the border and bring in more Chinese investment and technology. New Delhi would also have less reason to buy U.S. weapons. And India could stop playing a moderating role in the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization—for example, by no longer diluting efforts to dethrone the U.S. dollar as the world’s dominant currency.
India has not yet reached that point. Critics of Modi’s prudent management of Washington have not come up with a convincing alternative strategy for how India should handle the growing power imbalance with China. It is easy to call for more productive ties with Beijing, but China’s terms for lasting peace with India—which include a territorial settlement that favors Beijing and reducing security ties with the United States—would be too high to bear. Nor has China helped any other country rise economically or technologically. Put simply, India’s path to economic growth and technological modernization would be much harder without the United States. Strengthening ties with U.S. allies and working with Trump, for now, remains India’s best bet.
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