- calendar_today August 12, 2025
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For over two decades, Washington and New Delhi built what was considered one of the most successful strategic partnerships of the post–Cold War era. Now, the trust on which that relationship was based is being badly tested, as a series of moves by both countries, from tariffs to oil politics, have accelerated a strategic drift.
“The U.S.-India relationship, I think, is in a very difficult situation,” said Evan Feigenbaum, South Asia chair at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We’re in a situation in the U.S.-India relationship where the premises and assumptions of the last 25 years, and the hard work that everybody, including the president in his first term, put into building that relationship, have just come completely unraveled. The trust is gone.”
This week, in response to India’s continued purchases of Russian oil despite the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from the world’s largest democracy. Starting at 25 percent and set to double to 50 percent on August 27, the tariffs are meant to pressure India to change course. Instead, New Delhi has moved further toward Moscow and even Beijing.
Last week, India’s national security adviser visited Moscow. This week, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar also held high-level talks there. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also concluded talks in New Delhi, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi preparing for his first visit to China in over seven years. Putin is also expected to host Modi in Moscow before the end of the year. In other words, India is not just sending a signal by these visits: It is pivoting.
Indian public opinion, as reflected by its leadership, has also stiffened in the face of what it sees as the United States lecturing it on matters of sovereignty. “They’re signaling very clearly that they view that as interference in India’s foreign policy, and they are not going to put up with it,” Feigenbaum said.
It did not help, he said, that India was “hesitant at the beginning of the war,” until it was enticed to restart Russian oil purchases by discounts of 6-7 percent. India has since taken more than one-third of Russian oil imports away from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — or, to put it another way, Russia went from 0.2 percent of India’s crude imports to 35 percent after the start of the Ukraine war. Russia is moving quickly to capitalize, with Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov telling reporters this week that Moscow will continue shipping crude, oil products, thermal and coking coal, and also seeing “potential for the export of Russian LNG.”
The domestic factor
Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst at the Wilson Center in Washington, noted that while Trump’s tariffs may be hurting India, the Modi government had already signaled its intention to drive a more balanced relationship with China well before Trump took office. “We’ve seen indications for almost a year of India wanting to ease tensions with China and strengthen relations, mainly for economic reasons. But the Trump administration’s policies have made India want to move even more quickly,” he said.
To be sure, some of New Delhi’s recent actions have been more theater than substance, Kugelman and Feigenbaum said. “We should expect some sort of performative response in the near term, and I think we’re already seeing elements of it in the way that India has been doubling down on its Russia relationship in very high-profile ways,” Kugelman said.
Feigenbaum agreed. “The India-China relationship is going to get a lot warmer. India is going to double down on some aspects of its economic and defense relationship with Russia — and those parts are not performative.”
Feigenbaum also pointed out that India had already been diversifying its sources of arms, buying from U.S., French, and Israeli companies well before the Ukraine war. “But once Putin invaded, trade between the two countries in energy skyrocketed,” Kugelman said. “We have a situation in which the Indians have more or less validated for themselves that the U.S. can’t be trusted, whereas Russia can — because Russia is always going to be there for India no matter what.”
India’s domestic politics have also played a role in the latest shift in its foreign policy. Modi, amid an election year, has used Russia’s oil discounts to cast himself at home as a protector of India’s sovereignty who has delivered on his promise to safeguard the livelihoods of farmers, small businesses, and young job-seekers. As such, said Kugelman, India had already given Washington some important concessions on issues that mattered to Delhi, such as tariff reductions and bringing back migrant workers. “Because of those concessions, India needs to be careful about signaling further willingness to bend. This is one reason there was no trade deal — Modi put his foot down,” he said.
In Washington, patience is wearing thin. In an op-ed this week for the Financial Times, former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro called India’s oil purchases “opportunistic” and “deeply corrosive” to the U.S.-India relationship, even suggesting that the tariffs were insufficient and that Trump should have targeted more Indian imports.
