An illustration of a tiger balancing on a red ball with the stars of the China flag which in turn is balanced on a ball with the US flag pattern on it. Illustration: Chloe Cushman The Economist
Cynical realism won’t save India from Donald Trump
India has done brilliantly by balancing America, China and Russia. Can that last?
The Economist Jul 15th 2025
IT IS HARD to knock India’s political and business elites off balance, but President Donald Trump is managing. In Delhi’s book-lined studies and the glass-walled corporate towers of Mumbai, grandees are suffering from vertigo. Normally, Indian diplomats and strategists take pride in being un shockable, remaining coolly transactional whatever a wicked world throws at them. But since Mr Trump’s return to office, elites are off-kilter.
Notably, well-connected Indians describe a mood of uncertainty since a four-day conflict with Pakistan in May. That fight, which saw Indian jets shot down and Pakistan struck by Indian missiles, was triggered by a murderous attack on Indian tourists in Kashmir that India blames on Islamist terrorists sponsored by Pakistan’s security services.
India has often fought Pakistan. This time, what shook elites—long sensitive about outsiders presuming to mediate India’s disputes with its neighbour—was how Mr Trump took credit for the war’s ending. He claimed to have forced India and Pakistan to make peace, by threatening the two countries’ trade ties with America. Worse, Mr Trump bragged that, without him, the conflict could have gone nuclear. The Indian view is that the nuclear arsenals built by India and Pakistan make the costs of escalation too awful to contemplate.
Then, just weeks after the conflict, Mr Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, for lunch at the White House. India deems him a hard line ideologue. He met Mr Trump alone, without members of the civilian government that nominally runs Pakistan. The pair discussed Iran and other affairs of state, as well as cryptocurrency deals that Pakistani interests are offering figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle. Hardest for Indians to stomach was that Mr Trump expressed no public concern about help that China offered Pakistan during the conflict, including (say people in Delhi) real-time intelligence allowing Pakistan to target Indian military assets, down to individual missile launchers.
For a decade or more, Indian foreign policy has placed great weight on the notion that America and China are locked in an ideological and economic contest that is sure to endure for years. In that context, India saw a chance to pitch itself to America as an indispensable hedge against China in Asia.
Now Indian elites are unsure how heavily China, and the need to contain its rise, weighs on Mr Trump in his second term. India “finds itself in a very difficult spot”, says a policy type in Delhi. In his telling, his country never really intended to take big risks in confronting and challenging China, a country with an economy five times the size of India’s and much stronger armed forces to boot. Rather, it was delighted to “fan the American fantasies that India might push back” against China.
Even if India’s willingness to confront China was in part a figment of America’s imagination, it was rewarded anyway. During the first Trump administration in 2020, when Chinese and Indian troops clashed on their Himalayan border, “the Americans were very generous” to India, offering real-time geospatial intelligence, says an analyst. In the Joe Biden era, India was feted in Washington as the world’s largest democracy. In the hope of strengthening such groupings as the Quad, which brings together America, Australia, India and Japan, officials quietly tolerated India buying copious amounts of Russian oil after the invasion of Ukraine. Such rewards are harder to earn now. On July 14th Mr Trump seemed to threaten all Russian trade partners with steep secondary sanctions should President Vladimir Putin not end his war in Ukraine within 50 days—though no one knows if he means it.
Meanwhile, China is growing more active in India’s backyard. Veteran Indian diplomats describe China meddling in the domestic politics of Nepal or taking sides in Sri Lanka in ways that would have been unthinkable just 15 years ago. To their relief, Indian envoys report that such Chinese swagger is a source of alarm to career officials in Washington. For their part, Indian business bosses describe deepening ties with American defence firms, and predict booming co-operation between India and the West.
For all that, policy types feel “clueless” about what Mr Trump thinks, and whether his America First worldview tilts towards confronting China or cutting deals with it. “We understand that Trump may go softer on China, that [his] fire-and-brimstone era is over, so we need to be careful,” says a foreign-policy thinker close to the government.
Trump Two: not like Trump One
India is not about to change its stance. It will still seek to balance competing powers and interests in a spirit of “cynical realism”, a tag used with pride in Delhi. Nor is India panicking. Policy types suggest that—from a national-security perspective—should Mr Trump pull back from Asia, then go-it-alone India is better placed than are formal treaty allies such as Japan or South Korea.
Still, India feels less sure-footed, especially in the economic realm. India has thrived by offering firms such as Apple a place to manufacture that is not China, responding to American calls for “friendshoring” production. But in his second term Mr Trump is often tougher on America-friendly trade partners than on adversaries such as China. At the same time, China seems warier of India’s rise. It recently ordered hundreds of Chinese engineers in Indian electronics plants to return home. Indian executives fret about reports of sophisticated Chinese-made machines being blocked from going to India. Among business and policy elites, no consensus exists about whether India should aim to decouple from China or try to accommodate its rulers in Beijing. If Mr Trump were predictable, such calculations would be easier. Because he is not, India walks on treacherous ground. ■
