When Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President Donald Trump at the White House in February 2025, the air was thick with the celebratory rhetoric of a geopolitical romance destined to define the 21st century. For 25 years — a golden quarter-century bookended by Bill Clinton’s transformative visit to New Delhi in 2000 and that February encounter — the India-US relationship operated on a seemingly unassailable, ascendant trajectory.

This historic warming rested on several foundational assumptions throughout the first quarter of the century. There was a widespread conviction that no fundamental strategic or systemic incompatibilities existed between the two nations and their geopolitical interests, broadly defined. As vibrant democracies, it was believed that Washington and New Delhi had far more in common than their evident, mostly material and cultural, differences. The principal threat to both countries was unmistakably the same — a rising, increasingly assertive, and revisionist China. Furthermore, the United States appeared to have outgrown its Cold War-era hyphenation of India with Pakistan, clearly seeing the former’s rise as invaluable to world order and the latter as an unreliable, terrorist-enabling disruptor. Finally, emerging global trends in technology, supply chains, world trade, and investment all found India and the US on the same side as countries whose intrinsic strengths were mutually compatible. Driven by these certainties, New Delhi gradually shed its non-aligned reticence to warmly embrace a comprehensive global strategic partnership with Washington.

Then, abruptly, came the Trump wrecking ball. Over the past year, the Trump administration has systematically trashed these long-held assumptions, leaving Indian policymakers deeply shaken and confused about the basic premises of their foreign policy. Rather than treating India as an........

© Indian Express