Few elites around the world welcomed the re-election of Donald Trump as U.S. President in late 2024 more than in India. That enthusiasm appeared justified by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s highly productive engagement with President Trump at the White House in February 2025. India’s optimism on Trump however, has quickly soured into anxiety after the India-Pakistan conflict of April-May 2025—amid Trump’s repeated claims for credit in ending hostilities and brokering a ceasefire.
The precise details of this episode—widely debated in the Indian media—need not detain us here. Despite the irritation and disquiet in Delhi, Trump’s pronouncements do not amount to a fundamental reversal in the India-U.S. relationship, which has steadily deepened over the past quarter century. The economic, technological, and military stakes in the India-U.S. strategic partnership are substantial for both nations—and they are not going to be undone by a few pro-Pakistan remarks.
Delhi must resist the temptation to view the U.S. or the world solely through the prism of its protracted conflict with Islamabad. The structural gap between the two countries is widening, with India’s GDP now roughly ten times larger than Pakistan’s. That reality won’t be altered by any clever diplomatic play from Islamabad in Washington.
While the deep structure of India’s partnership will endure and survive Trump’s second term, Indian diplomacy has its task cut out in navigating the current turbulent moment with the Trump White House. After all it is the job of diplomacy to continuously grapple with unpredictable external variables. These can only be anticipated to a degree, and must be managed when surprises arise. Indian diplomacy has coped with far more challenging moments with the U.S. over the last three decades.
It is a pity that the Indian elite has largely failed to invest in understanding the United States. There is a troubling absence of institutional and intellectual focus on studying America—its society, economy, and political system. Much of the Indian discourse on America is reactive, driven by daily headlines and social media outrage
For India, the problem is less about Pakistan and more about coming to terms, intellectually, with the nature of Trump’s second presidency and its broader global implications. This demands a clearer grasp of both the personal and political drivers shaping Trump’s worldview—and a more nuanced understanding of the domestic political forces currently roiling the U.S.
Trump’s first term (2017–21) is a poor guide to his second. If he leaned towards India in its conflicts with Pakistan and China during his first term, Delhi cannot assume similar alignment this time around. That unpredictability isn’t an aberration—it’s a pattern. Trump is openly undermining long-standing U.S. alliances, from NATO to the Five Eyes intelligence partnership with Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand—institutions forged in the crucible of the Second World War. Why, then, in such a disruptive mode, should India expect Trump to remain wedded to the principle of “de-hyphenation” between Delhi and Islamabad?
There is also an unusual disjunction in Washington today between Trump’s daily pronouncements and the signals emanating from the broader U.S. policy system. Rather than being rattled by every presidential statement, Delhi should stay focused—and intensify its engagement with the vast American bureaucracy to safeguard and deepen the bilateral gains built since the turn of the century.
It is a pity that the Indian elite has largely failed to invest in understanding the United States. There is a troubling absence of institutional and intellectual focus on studying America—its society, economy, and political system. Much of the Indian discourse on America is reactive, driven by daily headlines and social media outrage.
This edition of India’s World is a modest attempt to reflect on the complexity of the Trump factor. But the Indian strategic community, its universities, think tanks, and media must do a lot more to track and interpret the structural shifts reshaping U.S. foreign policy and its implications for India. After all, the U.S. is likely to remain India’s most important partner for the foreseeable future.
