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Trump tariffs On India: The relationship between India and the United States,long described as one of the world’s most consequential partnerships is facing its roughest patch in years, with former US officials cautioning that President Donald Trump’s tariff offensive on New Delhi risks undoing decades of bipartisan diplomacy. Former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, in an interview with British broadcaster LBC, said that despite Trump once sharing a “very good personal relationship” with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “that’s gone now.”

“Trump sees international relations through the prism of his personal rapport with leaders. If he has a good relationship with Putin, then the US has a good relationship with Russia—that’s obviously not the case,” Bolton remarked, adding that India is now being “pushed closer to Russia and China” due to Trump’s tariff measures and public jibes. Trump in recent weeks has slapped a additional 50 per cent levy on Indian imports, justifying it as a crackdown on New Delhi’s continued purchases of discounted Russian crude oil. The move has sparked sharp unease in New Delhi, with trade talks hitting a deadlock and Indian officials describing the US stance as “short-sighted.”

In a joint editorial for Foreign Affairs, Jake Sullivan, who served as National Security Adviser under President Joe Biden, and Kurt M. Campbell, former Deputy Secretary of State, warned that the US risks ceding strategic ground to China if the current trajectory persists. “Tariffs, Russian oil purchases, and renewed tensions regarding Pakistan have caused a rapid and regrettable downturn in the US-Indian relationship, replete with public insults and recriminations,” they wrote, stressing that Washington should not forget why India has emerged over the last generation as “one of the United States’ most important global partners.” The two officials argued that closer alignment with India has historically deterred “reckless Chinese adventurism” in the Indo-Pacific. “If Washington allows the relationship to spiral, it will lose not just a trade partner but also a strategic bulwark against Beijing,” the editorial noted.

Modi’s SCO Engagement Raises Eyebrows

Adding to Washington’s anxiety, Prime Minister Modi was recently seen alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit. Photographs of the three leaders together were widely shared, prompting US commentators to warn that “America could be driving India directly into its adversaries’ arms.” Indian officials, however, have publicly downplayed the optics, insisting that New Delhi’s participation in the SCO is consistent with its “multi-aligned” foreign policy. Still, Bolton argued that Trump’s erratic tariff policy had “overturned years of patient US diplomacy to decouple India from Cold War-era alignment with Moscow.”

Pakistan Angle Rekindles Old Frictions

The situation was further complicated when Trump, in July, welcomed Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir to the White House and announced a new trade deal with Islamabad. The US also signaled support for Pakistan’s energy sector, even as it tightened tariffs on India. “Washington must avoid falling back into an ‘India-Pakistan’ policy lens,” Sullivan and Campbell cautioned, adding that while the US has enduring interests in Pakistan such as counter-terrorism, “these pale in significance compared to America’s multifaceted and consequential interests regarding India’s future.”

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The two officials suggested that the way forward must involve a ten-year action plan focusing on shared development in critical technologies including artificial intelligence, semiconductors, biotechnology, quantum computing, clean energy, telecommunications, and aerospace. “The goal is to build a common technology ecosystem with like-minded democracies. This will ensure that the US and its allies do not cede the innovation edge to competitors such as China,” they wrote, underlining that both “promote” and “protect” agendas must go hand-in-hand—through joint R&D investments as well as stronger cyber and export control frameworks.

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In New Delhi, Prime Minister Modi has so far avoided direct references to Trump’s tariff moves, but in Parliament, he underlined that “no world leader had asked India to stop Operation Sindoor,” in what was seen as a subtle rebuttal of Trump’s repeated claim that he had personally stopped an India-Pakistan war. With tensions running high, diplomats on both sides privately admit that the “strategic convergence” that defined the India-US relationship over the last two decades is under severe strain. Whether Washington and New Delhi can arrest the slide or whether the rift deepens will be closely watched not just in Beijing and Moscow, but across the Indo-Pacific region.