The debate over the future of US–India relations carries a lesson that reaches well beyond Washington and New Delhi. If the strategic assumptions that shaped South Asia for two decades are shifting, the region has to face a harder question: should South Asia remain one of the least integrated regions on earth?

For years, South Asian states have viewed their economic and security futures through partners outside the region. India built strategic ties with the United States. Pakistan deepened its links with China and the Gulf. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal cultivated several external partners at once to balance competing pressures. That logic suited an era of expanding globalisation, stable alignments, and a United States willing to underwrite regional order. That era is closing.

In a recent Project Syndicate column, The US and India Have Become Regional Rivals, Brahma Chellaney sets out a shift that policymakers across the region cannot ignore. Washington still values India as a counterweight to China, he writes, but it is wary of any single power dominating South Asia.

He points to specific examples: American endorsement of regime change in Bangladesh after Sheikh Hasina's ouster, more direct US courting of Nepal that skips the customary stop in New Delhi, pressure on Myanmar's junta along India's north-eastern frontier, and, above all, Trump's embrace of Pakistan.

One senior US official put the economic edge bluntly, warning that Washington would not repeat its China mistake by letting India build up markets and then outcompete it. The pattern, in Chellaney's reading, is a United States that prefers a plural South Asia to one organised around Indian primacy, even while it keeps India as a global partner.

Chellaney's conclusion is the starting point for my argument. India, he writes, can no longer count on Washington to sustain its regional influence and must instead cultivate that influence through economic engagement, sensitivity to its neighbours' concerns, and public goods that smaller states actually value. He intends this mainly as a way to hold the smaller capitals against Chinese inroads, and he........

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