Has the United States Really Lost India?

In a post to Truth Social, President Donald Trump lamented that the United States had “lost India” to China. The September 5 post featured a photo of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping—as if a new troika had emerged from their Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. A few days earlier, Xi and Modi had held a bilateral meeting—during the latter’s first trip to China after a seven-year drought—and expressed their intentions to work as “partners, not rivals”. Some analysis suggests that this rapprochement, paired with a downturn in US-India relations, might presage a major shift in global affairs. That analysis is overstated.

The China-India rivalry will likely persist due to fundamental disagreements and distrust over economic coercion, border aggression, Pakistan relations, and technology stacks. Meanwhile, the US-India relationship is likely to stabilize and rebound due to a much deeper and more substantive defense partnership.

There remains an iron ceiling to the India-China relationship, which is shaped by behavioral and structural factors. Prime Minister Modi’s mending of fences with Xi at the SCO summit must not be interpreted as more than risk mitigation and opportunistic posturing. Although the two countries seek to restore normal relations on their border and build economic ties, the outcomes of India-China bilateral engagements appear more tactical and rhetorical than strategic. The two leaders agreed on so little that, after the meeting, they issued separate statements that often sidestepped or conflicted with each other. The few deliverables were paltry in nature: nothing more than potential action on people flows through direct flights, visa facilitation, border trade, and access for pilgrims.

The readouts of the leaders’ meeting revealed deep fault lines on strategic and defense issues. These included divides on whether border peace serves as the foundation of the relationship, whether China can countenance a multipolar Asia, whether terrorism and its state promoters are a challenge for the relationship, and whether there is a meaningful mechanism for addressing the stark trade deficit between the countries.

China’s adversarial behavior in recent years and months ensures that the rivalry will continue. India reengaged China bilaterally in part to relieve Chinese coercive pressure stunting Indian economic growth. Beijing has weaponized critical supplies and components for India’s growth through restrictions on the exports of rare-earth magnets and minerals, specialized fertilizers, and tunnel-boring machines. This has harmed Indian farmers, automotive industry, and crucial infrastructure projects. China has also restricted the flow of Chinese engineers and technicians to Apple supplier Foxconn’s  new Indian production facilities, impeding the growth of India’s electronics manufacturing.

Indian leaders will not forget China’s military aggression on their disputed border. India is still seething over China’s 2020 military mobilizations and territorial seizures, which resulted in clashes in Galwan that killed 20 Indian troops and forced New Delhi to surge over 60,000 troops to the border. While a level of disengagement began last fall, a year later there has been no progress toward the next benchmarks India has set forth: de-escalation through the pullback of forces several kilometers from the border and de-induction of forces back to pre-2020 levels. Absent those steps, Indian territory remains acutely vulnerable to People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aggression.

China’s unprecedented “battlefield collusion” with Pakistan during an 87-hour war in May also hinders meaningful India-China reconciliation. China’s once background support for its longtime ally and Indian adversary was forced out of the shadows as Beijing armed, trained, and wired Pakistani military capabilities, and then helped target them on India. Indian military officials have explicitly called out China’s role in providing “live inputs” to the Pakistan military’s intelligence, surveillance, targeting, and reconnaissance efforts, effectively serving as an over-the-horizon combatant.

Despite this clear rivalry, India’s economy (like the United States’ and Europe’s) still depends on Chinese inputs to grow. But even as India expands trade with China and professes multi-alignment, it will remain deeply distrustful and wary of Chinese companies coming near its core and critical technology infrastructure. This sentiment dates back to 2021, when India’s telecom ministry effectively excluded Huawei and ZTE from the country’s 5G trials, and it seems likely to extend to its digital spine—including undersea cables, data centers, commercial satellites, and telecommunications networking equipment. While India has committed to an indigenous technology stack, Indian leaders have explicitly described the West as India’s “natural tech partner”. Chinese companies are not trusted entities. Evincing a deep distrust of the rival Chinese technology stack, India will likely prevent Chinese companies from building or investing in anything to do with Indian data—such as connected vehicles, smart city technology, or large language models—that embeds China into its economy.

Russia will remain a technology partner to India in narrow legacy domains such as nuclear energy, propulsion, and defense products. It has little to offer in critical and emerging technologies such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, remote sensing (from space), or quantum computing.

Despite existing political tensions in the US-India relationship (that may already have peaked), there remains a strong ballast built on routinized defense cooperation between the US and Indian militaries and defense industrial ecosystems that could endure for some time. While Prime Minister Modi was at the SCO summit, US and Indian army troops were beginning to conduct the 21st iteration, in Alaska, of an annual exercise called Yudh Abhyas (Hindi for “Preparing for War”). This was one of the most complex US-India exercises ever, and included artillery live-fire exercises, heliborne operations, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and counter-UAS operations, mountain warfare, and the integration of artillery, aviation, and electronic warfare. India has also embedded itself into Western coalition deterrence missions such as the Combined Maritime Force and the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness. A renewed and more robust US-India ten-year defense framework is waiting for a ceremonial signing. A contract for joint production of GE 414 engines is expected to be signed this fall, and India also appears poised to make tens of billions in defense purchases from the United States in the coming years—including the Javelin anti-tank guided missiles, aka “the Russian tank killer”. US-India industrial teaming may expand to compete for hundreds of billions in Indian defense procurements over the next decade. Investors are betting on this future with a collective of US and Indian venture capitalists announcing a $1 billion alliance for investment in India’s deep-tech sector.

Undoubtedly, a rebound in US-India relations or the convening of a Quad Leaders summit in New Dehi this fall are not foregone conclusions. They will require a lot of work, including a reining in  of ad hominem attacks, clear and trusted communication channels abetted by a new US ambassador to India, some new political-economic sweeteners, and a dealmaking spirit on both sides—possibly some pause in US sanctions tariffs to give India time and political space to reduce Russian oil purchases.

Even more revealing than Modi’s well-choreographed photo with Xi and Putin was India’s notable absence from the military parade that served as an anti-Japan exhibition. Instead, Prime Minister Modi chose to stop in Tokyo on the way to Tianjin to sign a ten-year joint vision statement and a joint declaration on security cooperation between India and Japan. These included agreements and mechanisms far more significant and substantive than anything India announced with China.

It should be a comfort to the West that even when US-India relations suffer a downturn, India’s instinct is to deepen its ties with the United States’ closest allies. Despite President Trump’s worries, the United States is not losing India, nor is India any closer to trusting China.