India-US relations have soured due to President Trump's economic policies, including punitive tariffs and derogatory remarks about India.
This has prompted India to pursue strategic autonomy, strengthening ties with Russia and China.
The shift towards a multipolar world order is evident, with India leveraging its position to diversify its international relations.
The downturn in India-US relations has upset both the Indian strategic elite and a section of American foreign policy thinkers. They argue that two decades of efforts to improve India-US ties has been undercut by US President Donald Trump with his declaration of economic war on India.
Punitive tariffs have been accompanied by a deluge of insults on India as being a ‘dead economy’. Trump’s Trade Councillor Peter Navarro alleged India is playing a ‘double game’, the Russia-Ukraine war is ‘Modi’s war’, India cheats the US on trade, and so on.
India, on its part, has signalled that it is committed to strategic autonomy, will continue to purchase Russian oil, diversify its trade and security relations with others, and improve relations with China. However, India has also committed itself to continuing negotiations with the US to decrease trade tariffs.
The opportunity for India to show its foreign policy options has come faster than the world expected.
The meeting between China’s President Xi Jinping, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit (Tianjin, China, August 31 to September 1, 2025) showcased a power projection and shift that reflected a ‘Pivot to Asia’ but from the region itself and minus America’s presence.
The bilateral meeting between Xi and Modi on the side-lines of the SCO confirms that a process of reset in Sino-Indian relations has been initiated even as major challenges remain.
The meeting between Putin and Modi indicates that Russia-India relations are likely to go into higher gear. And Russia’s consumer market has been opened to Indian agricultural exports.
The India-China reset is a process that follows from the 24th round of meetings between the special representatives of India and China who reached a 10-point consensus on the boundary issue marking a major positive in India-China relations. This, therefore, is not a sudden turn. Many problems remain between the two.
However, Trump’s actions have speeded up the Sino-Indian rapprochement process.
The crucial questions are: How has India been able to face Trump’s tariffs and insults? Why is SCO, a regional forum founded in 2001 and barely noticed internationally, now getting so much attention?
The reason is the great power shift with the comparative decline in US power and the international system moving from a unipolar one to multipolarity.
The unipolar system emerged after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991, leaving the US as the sole superpower. This period saw US assertion in world politics, where it launched 251 military interventions worldwide between 1991-2022, conducted wars, strengthened and expanded NATO (from 12 to 32 countries) and had the capacity to exercise economic and military power with little restraint or accountability.
This was also a period when the US through its control of multilateral institutions like the World Bank and IMF re-ordered the international economic system, shifted to neo-liberal globalisation and enforced market reforms and privatisation reforms globally.
The goal was to financialise the world economy to increase profits of US / Western banks. Manufacturing was allowed to shift to countries with cheaper labour and lower standards of labour rights and lax environmental standards.
These reforms increased the profitability of large transnational companies and US banks. At the same time, the shift of manufacturing to China, Southeast Asian countries and India led to a de-industrialisation of the US and European countries.
Simultaneously, there was a rise in the industrialisation and manufacturing capacity of China, and select countries of the Global South including ASEAN and India. China was the biggest beneficiary of this shift.
The US now sees China as an economic ‘near peer’ and a strategic competitor and ‘pacing challenge’. In other words, even while the US is a global superpower, China is fast developing to parallel US economic supremacy.
Simultaneously, Russia’s stabilisation and the revival of its economy by leveraging oil revenues is seen as a threat in US National Security policy documents.
The threat of NATO expansion to Ukraine despite Russian pleas against it since 2008 and the removal in 2014 of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovich that Putin has described as a US-backed coup prompted Russian aggression and war in Ukraine.
Three years of this war has shown that Russia’s military capacity has increased and its economy has been able to sustain the war. This is a challenge to the West and Trump wants to conclude this war before a Ukrainian defeat.
The coming together of the BRICS platform where the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have made moves to increase their trade and economic ties and trade in their local currencies has led many countries to want to join this formation. The Trump administration sees BRICS as a threat.
In sum, the US empire is witnessing a comparative decline and an increase in threat perceptions.
Trump’s slogan of ‘Make America Great Again’ is an effort to arrest this decline. But his use of punitive tariffs, attacks on migrant workers and cutting down US administrative costs have not worked so far. Many economists and analysts believe that the US is on an irreversible decline.
It is in this context that the getting together of Russia-India-China needs to be viewed. It would have been logical for Trump to keep the US partnership with India intact. He, however, sees it differently and has managed to alienate India.
India is now looking to diversify its relations, increase trade with Russia and is on a path to reset relations with China. The multipolarity of the international system gave India this leverage.
The negotiations between India and the US will continue. But the US will have to accept India’s strategic autonomy, its relations with Russia and its ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy that will continue to harbour good relations with multiple countries based on Indian national interest.
India may possibly reduce some tariffs and give some concessions to the US by buying US weapons or aircraft. But the terms of engagement between the US and India have also seen a reset. Indo-US relations may improve from their current low but the earlier trust has been lost.
Anuradha Chenoy is Adjunct Professor, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat Haryana, India.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.