What Mark Twain once said about Richard Wagner’s music—“much better than it sounds”—applies equally to the state of India-U.S. relations. But if you follow the public discourse in New Delhi, you might be forgiven for thinking that the partnership is coming apart.
India’s post-Cold War ties with the United States have been pronounced to be in crisis with remarkable regularity. This time, the triggers are real enough. A stream of threats and insults from U.S. President Donald Trump; his false claim that he brokered an India-Pakistan cease-fire last year; the U.S. war against Iran, including Washington’s reluctance to show any contrition for the killing of Indian sailors in the Gulf of Oman; U.S. support for Pakistan’s role as a peacemaker in the Middle East; the quiet abandonment of the Indo-Pacific nomenclature that Trump himself had championed in his first term; and his talk of a “G-2” condominium between the United States and China. Together, these have created a sense in New Delhi that the relationship is now at a crossroads.
The mood is in stark contrast to 2024, when Indian public opinion was broadly rooting for Trump’s return to the White House. Then, prayers for his election victory were being held in some quarters, and there was widespread expectation that another Trump term would surely prove better than the Biden administration years.
Trump’s abrasive treatment of India following his 2025 inauguration did much to sour that goodwill. Since U.S. Ambassador Sergio Gor’s arrival in New Delhi early this year, things have quieted somewhat, but the resentment lingers. New issues keep churning public resentment. Trump’s popularity ratings have fallen in India as they have across most of the world, although they have not collapsed in the way they have in Europe. The most recent Pew Research Center survey, conducted in early 2026, put Indian confidence in Trump at 39 percent, down from 51 percent in the previous year’s poll.
Part of the problem is the emotionalism that drives India’s public debate over foreign policy in general and the relationship with the United States in particular. No country dominates contemporary India’s mind space more than the United States. Even at the height of left-wing politics in the 1970s, the Soviet Union never loomed as large. For all the elite talk of “multialignment,” Russia and China carry no popular resonance with the Indian middle class. Moscow has become steadily less salient in economic and political terms, and the challenges posed by Beijing have not diminished—they have only multiplied as China’s inexorable rise continues.
Yet the more important that the India-U.S. relationship has become, the more frequently it has appeared to be in crisis. As cooperation has expanded from narrow diplomatic engagement to encompass defense, trade, technology, energy, education, and intelligence, the opportunities for disagreement have multiplied accordingly.
Mature strategic partnerships generate friction precisely because they touch so many interests simultaneously. Washington’s closest allies in Europe and East Asia have long quarreled with it over trade, technology, burden-sharing, and military interventions without anyone concluding that their partnerships are collapsing. India and the United States have reached a similar stage in their relationship. The Indian foreign-policy elite, however, still has a steep learning curve to climb.
For much of the Cold War, India and the United States stood on opposite sides of the geopolitical divide. Pakistan was Washington’s principal partner in South Asia, while India moved steadily closer to the Soviet Union. The Soviet collapse and India’s economic reforms began to alter that equation. The dialogue following India’s nuclear tests in 1998, the civil nuclear initiative of 2005, the rise of the Indo-Pacific security paradigm, expanding defense cooperation, growing bilateral trade (along with India’s mounting surplus), and deepening technological collaboration have steadily increased the weight of the partnership. The trend line of the past quarter century is unmistakable: Every crisis has been followed by an expansion rather than a contraction of strategic engagement.
That history offers an important perspective on the turbulence surrounding the Trump administration. There is little doubt that Trump’s style has complicated the management of the partnership. His instinct for public confrontation, transactional diplomacy, and willingness to unsettle partners have eaten into the reservoir of goodwill accumulated over two decades.
Yet positive feelings for the United States have diminished without disappearing. In mid-June, a road beside the U.S. consulate in Hyderabad was renamed “Donald Trump Avenue” by the Telangana government to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence. The contrast with a previous era is instructive: In 1969, a street in Kolkata was renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani precisely because the U.S. Consulate was located on it—an act of left-wing defiance that captured the anti-American temper of that time. Hyderabad’s gesture suggests how far the political temperature has shifted.
Even as India’s irritation with Trump has grown, it has gone out of its way to deepen engagement with the U.S. government and policies. In October, India and the United States signed a 10-year defense framework agreement, the most ambitious yet in a series of defense agreements that stretches back to 2005. India has joined Washington’s technology initiatives, including Pax Silica—the U.S.-led coalition intended to secure semiconductor supply chains and critical minerals—and signed the India-U.S. AI Opportunity Partnership in February. Maritime coordination in the Indian Ocean continues to deepen.
Yet India’s foreign-policy elite oscillates between anxieties about entrapment and abandonment, seemingly unable to settle on a steadier disposition toward the United States.
Trade disputes have become more visible, but bilateral commerce has continued to expand. Talks on an interim trade deal are ongoing. U.S. companies remain among the largest investors in India’s digital economy and advanced manufacturing. Indian firms continue to deepen their presence in the American market. The H-1B visa channel remains contested in American politics, but U.S. technology companies’ dependence on Indian engineering talent is structural and unlikely to unwind quickly. Some 5 million Americans of Indian origin now connect the two societies through business, universities, scientific research, and increasingly through politics. The relationship rests on a far broader social foundation than at any previous point in its history.
Part of the anxiety also reflects a sense of entitlement within the Indian foreign-policy elite. Just like the cliché that many Indian engineering graduates believe they have a right to work in the United States, the Indian middle class seems to assume that a close strategic partnership should automatically translate into unrestricted access to the United States’ most advanced technologies. When export controls delay cooperation in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, or defense production, disappointment quickly hardens into accusations that Washington is an unreliable partner.
This misreads U.S. technology policy. The United States has always exercised restraint on the transfer of advanced capabilities, even to its closest allies. Washington now guards cutting-edge technologies far more closely than it did in the era of globalization. Japan, Australia, South Korea, Britain, and other leading European allies confront similar restrictions. India is neither uniquely disadvantaged nor uniquely privileged.
The more important question is not whether India receives unrestricted technology transfers but whether it becomes an indispensable partner in developing and producing frontier capabilities. That requires sustained investment in India’s own innovation ecosystem, stronger research universities, deeper industrial capacity, and partnerships that move beyond the traditional buyer-seller relationship. The measure of success for India should be technology co-development, not technology transfer.
Pakistan’s recent diplomatic visibility during the Iran crisis has generated another wave of concern in India. Islamabad’s role in facilitating contacts between Washington and Tehran has inevitably revived speculation about a Pakistani return to the center of U.S. strategy in South Asia. But history counsels caution. During the Cold War and the so-called war on terrorism, Pakistan was a front-line state in the U.S. strategic calculus. Today’s circumstances are fundamentally different. Washington may continue to find Pakistan useful in managing specific crises involving Afghanistan, Iran, or parts of the Islamic world.
Tactical relevance, however, is not the same as strategic centrality. By every durable measure—economic weight, technological capability, demographic scale, market potential, diaspora influence, and geopolitical significance—India’s weight in the U.S. worldview far exceeds Pakistan’s. This is easily obscured in New Delhi by the intensity of hostility toward Islamabad, but the underlying asymmetry is real. Although the United States may periodically need Pakistan, its long-term strategic investment in South Asia is overwhelmingly centered on India.
The larger strategic question concerns China. Recent developments have triggered exaggerated conclusions in the Indian debate. Trump’s occasional suggestions of a grand bargain with Beijing have revived fears of a G-2. At the same time, India’s cautious efforts to stabilize relations with China—such as renewed engagement through the BRICS grouping and quieter public rhetoric after years of confrontation—have prompted speculation that New Delhi is drifting away from Washington.
These readings mistake tactical adjustments for strategic transformation. Neither the United States nor India can escape the structural realities created by China’s rise. For Washington, periodic stabilization efforts with Beijing cannot dissolve fundamental differences over technological leadership, trade, military power, Taiwan, maritime order, and the future balance of power in Asia. Every recent U.S. administration has struggled to arrive at a sustainable China strategy. The political emphases shift from one presidency to the next—as they clearly have under Trump—but the underlying rivalry endures.
India confronts a different but equally durable set of contradictions. Participation in BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation cannot resolve the boundary dispute, Chinese military pressure along the Himalayas, Beijing’s strategic partnership with Pakistan, or the widening power asymmetry between the two Asian giants. Nor can a limited diplomatic thaw fundamentally alter India’s interest in preserving a favorable balance of power in Asia.
This is why the logic of India-U.S. strategic cooperation is likely to outlast periodic fluctuations in either country’s policy toward China. Neither a G-2 between Washington and Beijing nor a reset between New Delhi and Beijing can eliminate the structural interests that draw India and the United States together.
The precise forms of cooperation will shift: One administration may emphasize the Quad, another bilateral defense ties; some periods will prioritize supply chains and advanced technology, others maritime security or intelligence. Trump’s second term has already altered the vocabulary of U.S. strategy, softened the Indo-Pacific rhetoric, and pursued selective engagement with Beijing. These are tactical adjustments, not departures from the deeper strategic logic.
Both India and the United States seek an Asian balance in which no single power dominates the continent. They may disagree about approach, sequencing, or priorities, and they will often pursue parallel rather than identical policies. But their respective competitions with Chinese power remain strong enough to sustain long-term strategic cooperation.
The real achievement of the past quarter century is not that India and the United States have eliminated their differences. It is that they have learned to prevent those differences from overwhelming the relationship. The partnership has acquired sufficient institutional depth, economic interdependence, technological cooperation, and societal connectivity to absorb repeated shocks. It has become resilient not because the two countries always agree, but because both increasingly recognize that they have far more to lose from estrangement than from disagreement.