AA Edit | India-US Ties May Never Be Same

The push for a G-2 domination of global geopolitics was made clear in US President Donald Trump playing up to China during Mr Xi Jinping’s visit. The optics may have seemed greater than the outcome from the second US-China meeting this year. But, as two more meetings are to follow, at APEC and G-20 summits before the 2026 calendar runs out, the emerging message is that the world’s two biggest economies have agreed to manage their rivalry constructively.

While the complex binary of global politics heads towards a convergence that could be mutually beneficial, what remains irksome is the US view of the India-Pakistan binary which dictates that the dictatorial army chiefs of Pakistan should be eternally preferred partners rather than the truly democratically elected leaders of India.

When foreign minister Jaishankar spoke in New York about the US not fully empathising with India even as it was taking periodical blows from state-sponsored terrorism from across the border, he was stating a bigger truth which is that India’s ties with the US are not going to reclaim any of the old levels so long as Mr Donald Trump is in office to the end of 2028.

The India-US trade deal negotiations are dragging as India, with its concerns swelled by small farm holdings and hundreds of millions of individual dairy farmers, finds it impossible to make compromises to seal an agreement that has long been on the horizon. Meanwhile, Mr Trump, who went to war with Iran in tandem with Israel, goes on and on about how he brought the India-Pakistan military exchanges to a halt in May 2025.

Regardless of the friendship Mr Trump professes with Prime Minister Modi, the truth is that he is sold on Pakistan, with the nation’s sweet talkers covering up their doubtful peace-making skills that have been seen to go nowhere in settling the Iran conflict, not to mention a sweet deal for the Trump family in cryptocurrency personally melded by the decorated field marshal.

India can do little to shake Pakistan’s hold on Mr Trump but the greater challenge may be to find a balance that keeps strategic ties with the US in Quad as well as its military supplies intact. Accepting that middle ground in global geopolitics is all that India may have left. As a middle power in a world riven with distressing conflicts, India must accept that it needs to look after its own strategic and trade interests worldwide first before it takes up the larger cause of the Global South.