The finalisation of the India-US trade deal this week brings to a close a turbulent year in bilateral ties and clears the way for Delhi and Washington to focus on the broader agenda outlined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump at their White House meeting on February 13, 2025. The two leaders had emphasised the importance of a quick trade deal and called for deeper cooperation in defence industrialisation, critical and emerging technologies, and strategic coordination in the Indo-Pacific.
The trade deal announced by the two leaders on social media on Monday needs to be formalised, and there are several elements that will need to be fleshed out to mutual satisfaction. Complex negotiations and imaginative diplomatic work lie ahead in putting the bilateral commercial ties on a high and sustainable growth path.
If Trump was incredibly tough and transactional over the last year, Modi displayed resilience — tempered by patience — in weathering the tariff storm. Delhi neither capitulated nor escalated. Instead, it opted for quiet, persistent engagement.
The durability of the India-US partnership owes much to its deep structural foundation. The convergence of strategic interests and the creation of a dense architecture of cooperation in the last quarter of a century was not going to be easily wrecked by personality clashes or even serious differences on any one issue. The strategic ballast of the bilateral relationship was also critical in weathering complications other than trade over the last year. Since Trump’s return to the White House, commentators in Delhi and Washington had argued that Pakistan and Russia had returned to complicate India-US relations.
Trump’s “favourite field marshal”, General Asim Munir, appeared to successfully reverse years of White House neglect of Rawalpindi and generated a new triumphalism in Pakistan and concerns in Delhi. Meanwhile, India’s surging import of discounted Russian oil seemed set to undermine India’s ties with the US. Yet, neither Pakistan nor Russia could derail the dynamics of the US-India partnership.
Pakistan has its uses for America, but it is not a crucial pillar of US regional strategy. There is no question of Pakistan regaining parity with India in American geopolitical imagination. The economic gap between India and Pakistan is now too wide for the return of strategic parity between the South Asian twins.
The fact that Sergio Gor — US Ambassador to India and concurrently special envoy for the Subcontinent and Central Asia — played a key role in concluding the trade deal suggests new possibilities for regional collaboration between Delhi and Washington, not a return to old hyphenations.
Russia, too, remains important for Delhi, but its weight in India’s strategy has seen a relative decline over the decades. Indian purchases of discounted Russian oil were price and market-driven. Therefore, reducing oil purchases from Russia, as part of the trade deal, is not a fundamental question of principle for Delhi. India’s ties with Russia will remain relevant, but Delhi has no reason to let it clash with the high-stakes engagement with the US. Trump is eager to improve ties with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and that is in India’s interest too.
The key variable that truly matters for both Washington and Delhi is China. Despite Trump’s intermittent G2 rhetoric, the structural contradictions between the US and China remain deep and not easily overcome. The US National Security Strategy and National Defence Strategy issued by the Trump Administration in the last few weeks make clear that preventing the domination of the Indo-Pacific by any single power is a critical American objective. This aligns closely with India’s own quest for a multipolar Asia.
Trump’s tactical approach to Beijing certainly differs from previous administrations, including his own first term. That is a reflection of China’s rapidly growing economic and military heft in the region. Delhi’s own recalibration of ties with Beijing is shaped by the reality of China’s growing power. Securing a stable Asia will remain the cornerstone of the India-US partnership. The challenge is to lend greater commercial, technological, and defence depth to it.
Trump’s strong emphasis on burden-sharing adds another dimension to the India-US convergence. Trump is pressing allies and partners to assume greater responsibility for stabilising their own regions. For India, this creates a larger strategic space — and necessity — to shape outcomes in South Asia and the Indian Ocean.
Rather than oscillate between anxieties of American entrapment or abandonment, as we tend to, Delhi must focus on crafting a proactive regional strategy that leverages the convergences with the US to strengthen India’s national capacities and widen its regional footprint.
The prospect for the resolution of the trade dispute with the US reinforces a larger truth: India’s economic diplomacy is increasingly oriented toward the West. After decades of defensive trade policy, Delhi’s priority now is to strengthen commercial integration with the complementary economies of the US and Europe, as well as the imperial connections with the Anglo-Saxon nations—Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. It is rooted in the logic that India’s economic prosperity and technological modernisation depend on closer ties with Western markets and capital.
With the tariff cloud lifting, India and the United States can return to the task of advancing a partnership that will shape the balance of power in Asia and the wider world for decades to come. To get back to that agenda, though, Delhi and Washington must quickly tie up the many loose ends of the trade deal.
The writer is contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express. He is distinguished professor at the Motwani-Jadeja Institute of American Studies at the Jindal Global University and holds the Korea Foundation Chair on Asian Geopolitics at the Council for Strategic and Defence Studies, Delhi
Curated by Aisha Patel
