By: Salman Rafi Sheikh
The honeymoon might be over. Barely a week after signing a decade-long defense pact with India, Washington has reminded New Delhi that “strategic partnership” in Trump’s America means little more than leverage. If the US-India partnership was meant to anchor the Indo-Pacific, Washington just yanked the anchor loose. Trump’s new Asia policy – flirting with Pakistan, ignoring the Quad, and lecturing India on trade – signals that America’s grand bet on India as China’s counterweight is over.
For all the talk of “shared values” and “democratic alignment,” Washington’s latest moves reveal a much colder calculus. The Trump administration is reviving transactional diplomacy in Asia – cutting deals, not building alliances. Pakistan’s rare-earth minerals, its purchase of American oil (the first shipment arrived earlier this week), and geostrategic geography suddenly matter more than India’s uneasy rivalry with Beijing. By skipping India on his Asia tour, Trump made clear that New Delhi is no longer the pivot. Rather, it’s just one player in a crowded game.
For India, this is less betrayal than demotion. The partnership endures on paper, but the dynamics and the context against which it endured for decades in the past have significantly shifted. Washington wants access, alignment and markets, not another partner with its own regional and global ambitions. The age of strategic romance is giving way to one of hard bargaining because Washington, by uncritically pampering India too much, does not want it to become “another China.”
In Washington’s calculus, the goal is not to build another China, but to ensure that India never becomes one. Hence the turn to pressure, conditionality, and selective engagement: a partnership recalibrated to keep India useful, but never uncontrollable.
This recalibration to keep India ‘under control’ shows up in multiple ways. In September 2025, US trade officials told their Indian counterparts that progress on a US-India trade deal was conditional on New Delhi cutting back its purchases of Russian crude oil. Similarly, the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused India of “arbitrage” – buying discounted Russian oil, refining it and exporting the product – and warned that this behavior was “unacceptable” in the context of Washington’s push to isolate Moscow.
On the Indian side, S. Jaishankar, India’s External Affairs Minister, responded at a press briefing that India is “perplexed” by the US criticism of its energy trade with Russia, reminding Washington that New Delhi’s energy sourcing is driven by its 1.4 billion-plus population’s security and affordability needs.
These exchanges are anchored in a clear message from Washington to New Delhi: prove your usefulness on US terms or risk being sidelined. For India, this means a sharper choice between preserving strategic autonomy and accommodating transactional demands. If New Delhi opts for autonomy, it must tolerate margin-erosion in its ties with Washington. If it leans toward alignment, it must accept being treated more like a client state than a co-equal. In either case, the nature of the “strategic partnership” is changing from one driven by mutual trust and common purpose to one defined by conditions, leverage, and contracts.
Delhi knows it can’t abandon Moscow. Despite mounting US pressure, India continues to deepen defense and energy ties with Russia. In August, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told his Indian counterpart that Moscow is not only willing to keep supplying discounted oil to New Delhi but is interested in joint energy extraction projects in Russia’s Far East and Arctic. In short, while Washington demands alignment, India signals autonomy.
At the same time, India quietly flagged openness to resurrecting the long-dormant trilateral format with Russia and China – the RIC trilateral dialogue – stating it would act “in a mutually convenient manner.” The message is blunt: if the US insists on telling India what to do, India will lean where it still sees strategic benefit, even if that means complicating Washington’s calculus.
Washington is busy reshaping the regional architecture from the ground up without India leading the charge. Case in point: the landmark deal between the US and Pakistan on rare-earth and critical minerals. In September, the two countries signed a US$500 million pact; by October, Pakistan dispatched its first shipment of rare-earth elements – copper concentrate and neodymium-praseodymium – marking the US’s pivot to Pakistan as a supply-chain partner in Asia. In strategic terms, what matters is that Washington is now hedging its bets: instead of choosing India as its linchpin in Asia, it is building alternative alliances, going for modular partnerships rather than long-term strategic entanglement.
Trump’s latest Asia tour made this recalibration impossible to ignore. Skipping New Delhi entirely, he began in Malaysia for the Asean summit, cutting trade and critical minerals deals, and then flew to Seoul, where he held a much-publicized sit-down with Xi Jinping. Instead of grand talk of shared democratic values or long-term strategic alignment, Trump’s diplomacy was ruthlessly transactional -- peace deals in Southeast Asia, trade leverage in Korea, and a pragmatic thaw with Beijing. In strategic terms, this is Washington building modular, interest-based partnerships across Asia rather than tying itself to a single power with its own ambitions.
In New Delhi, the optics of Trump’s itinerary were hard to miss and harder to digest. Indian officials put on a brave face, insisting that the defense pact signed days earlier “speaks for itself,” yet the diplomatic unease was palpable. Indian media described Trump’s absence as a snub. Even Jaishankar’s recent remarks carried a sharper edge than usual.
“Recent experience has taught us not to depend on a single supply chain or a single market,” he said, widely read as a veiled jab at US pressure on trade and oil purchases. He followed that with an even more pointed observation: “Principles are applied selectively and what is preached is not necessarily practiced.” For a government that had built its foreign-policy narrative as Washington’s indispensable Indo-Pacific partner, the realization that America’s new Asia strategy is not about trust but about transaction has been sobering. Modi’s “strategic autonomy” rhetoric suddenly looks less like a principle and more like a shield, an attempt to mask the growing asymmetry in what was once sold as a partnership of equals.
The illusion of the US-India “strategic partnership” was always that shared democracy would translate into shared destiny. That illusion has now worn thin. What remains is a relationship stripped to its transactional core – useful but not romantic, enduring but not equal. What we are witnessing is not the end of US-India cooperation but the end of its illusions.
The “world’s largest democracies” are finally learning that partnership in the age of power politics is not a marriage of values, but a negotiation of limits. For India, the challenge ahead is whether it can turn this moment of demotion into one of reckoning that helps it shed the comfort of being flattered as a “partner” and face the harder task of acting as an autonomous power.
Dr Salman Rafi Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He is a long-time contributor on diplomatic affairs to Asia Sentinel