India and the United States

06 Dec 2025 Share on:

For most of my life, India–US relations were a story you heard about only when something went wrong.

A nuclear test.
A war with Pakistan.
Some new sanctions.
A US president lecturing India on something.
An Indian PM “aligning” with Non-Aligned Movement.

Today the relationship is everywhere and nowhere at once. It is in H-1B visas and OCI cards, in TikTok bans and chip fabs, in Quad communiqués and tariff notices to the WTO. It is no longer an exotic foreign policy file. It is infrastructure.

This is my attempt to trace that long arc, from 1947 to the current round of tariff drama that started under Trump and simply refuses to go away.

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Non-alignment, nuclear tests, and the Cold War hangover

India became independent in 1947 and partition ripped through the subcontinent. The US, fresh out of the Second World War and already looking at Moscow, wanted allies. India wanted space. Nehru’s trip to the US in 1949 produced warmth in photos and distance in policy. Soon after, India formally planted itself in the Non-Aligned Movement, which Washington always read as “nice words for not being on our side”. ¹²

The first big fracture was 1971. As Pakistan tore itself apart and Bangladesh was born, India intervened decisively and signed a 20-year Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union. The US, busy courting China via Pakistan, tilted towards Islamabad even as reports of atrocities in East Pakistan piled up. ¹³

Then came 1974. India tested a nuclear device at Pokhran and declared itself, very politely, a country that would not be told where its nuclear red lines lay. The US response was predictable for that era: non-proliferation laws, nuclear technology cut-offs, and a long season of frost. For more than two decades, “estranged democracies” became the default label for India and the US. ¹²⁴

The relationship in that phase was transactional and narrow. Food aid during the Green Revolution. Some cooperation, some lectures. A lot of mutual irritation. Very little trust.

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1991: when economics finally crashed the party

The real reset started not with a summit, but with a balance-of-payments crisis.

In 1991, Narasimha Rao’s government and a then-little-known finance minister called Manmohan Singh opened the Indian economy under duress. Tariffs fell. Markets opened. Foreign investment stopped being a dirty phrase. That single move changed how Washington looked at India, and how Indian business looked at the world. ²⁴

Suddenly, India was not just the country that tested nukes and talked about moral leadership. It was also a place where American companies could sell planes, computers, telecom equipment, and consulting services. It was a place that had cheap, well-educated engineers.

Y2K, offshoring, and the IT services boom did what no amount of diplomacy had managed. They created a dense mesh of everyday connections. Indian engineers in US suburbs. US customers on the other end of a phone line in Bangalore. Companies with more Indians in their org chart than some Indian PSUs.

Even the nuclear argument began to bend. Pokhran-II in 1998 triggered another round of US sanctions, but this time they did not last. By 2000, President Clinton was in India and people were already talking about “warmed ties” instead of “estrangement”. ³⁴

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The nuclear deal and the strategic turn

The real political signal came in the mid-2000s.

Between 2005 and 2008, India and the US negotiated and passed the civil nuclear agreement. India separated its civilian and military nuclear facilities, accepted IAEA safeguards on the civilian side, and in return the US worked to tear down a three-decade-old moratorium on nuclear trade with India. ⁵⁶⁷

You can argue about the exact economic value of that deal for hours. What matters for this story is something else. It told the world that Washington now saw Delhi as a long-term strategic bet, not a charity case to be managed with aid and occasional scolding. ⁶⁸

Around the same time, the US declared India a “Major Defense Partner”. Defense trade went from almost zero to billions. Malabar exercises grew in scope. The Quad slowly crawled out of acronym limbo and acquired ballast. ³⁸

Terrorism, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia – these remained real areas of friction. But the big axis had shifted. The primary shared headache had a different name now: China. ²⁸

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Trump, tariffs, and the mini trade war

Then came Trump, and with him, tariffs as a lifestyle choice.

In 2018, the US used the “national security” provision to slap tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminium from a long list of countries, India included. Those duties hit hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Indian exports, a couple of percentage points of what India sold to the US. ⁹¹⁰

In 2019, Washington went a step further and yanked away India’s GSP status – the preferential trade program that gave duty-free access to a basket of Indian exports. That decision affected more than 6 billion dollars of trade and triggered what economists politely called a “mini trade war”. India retaliated with higher duties on selected US goods. ¹⁰¹¹

Trump’s messaging was blunt and on brand. India was a “tariff king”. The US was being taken for a ride. Tariffs were justice. ⁹

If you lived in the diaspora, you got used to this strange split-screen. On one side, “Howdy Modi” in Houston and “Namaste Trump” in Ahmedabad – full stadiums, warm hugs, and talk of “natural allies”. On the other side, steel tariffs, GSP removal, and a constant drumbeat of trade complaints.

What held through that turbulence was the strategic layer. Defense cooperation deepened. Intelligence sharing increased. The Indo-Pacific became a more explicit frame. The two militaries worked together more. The Chinese PLA’s behaviour on the LAC made sure of that. ²⁸

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After Trump’s tariffs: less romance, more plumbing

Changing presidents did not magically reset the economics.

Under Biden, some of the sharp edges were filed down. Trade talks restarted. There was more predictable messaging. The tone softened. But the age of painless access to the US market was clearly over. Tariffs and “national security” in trade policy are now a permanent part of the furniture. ⁹¹⁰

At the same time, the strategic and technological embrace accelerated.

In 2023, Modi’s state visit to Washington produced an unusually dense joint statement. It covered everything from clean energy to space, from AI to critical minerals. The two sides pushed the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET), agreed on deeper cooperation in 5G and 6G, advanced chip partnerships, and moved forward on co-production of jet engines and other defence technologies. ^12131415

Trade numbers quietly told the same story. The US emerged as India’s largest trading partner in goods, while India climbed into the top tier of US trading relationships. Services, digital trade, and investment deepened the connection further. ¹⁰¹¹

Yet the tariff saga did not die. It mutated.

In 2025, Washington expanded its use of steel and aluminium tariffs again, doubling duties in the name of national security. New orders raised headline rates and widened the coverage. ¹⁶¹⁷

Delhi responded by formally notifying the WTO that it was considering retaliatory duties on a fresh list of US products, as a suspension of earlier concessions. The filing put the potential impact at about 7.6 billion dollars of Indian exports. ¹⁸¹⁹

The situation further deteriorated when US imposed 25% ban on Indian goods in August with additional 25% soon after, citing New Delhi’s continued imports of Russian oil as the trade talks between the two nation resulted in a “no deal”.²⁰²¹

The hugs are still there. So are the tariff notices.

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So where are we, really?

If you zoom out from the daily noise, the India–US story can be read in three large movements.

First, the moral and ideological phase. Non-alignment, nuclear lectures, food aid, sanctions, righteous speeches from both sides.

Second, the economic and technological phase. Liberalisation, IT services, diaspora, the nuclear deal, defense cooperation, the Indo-Pacific, the Quad.

Third, the current messy phase. High strategic convergence, thick economic interdependence, and a running gunfight over tariffs, data, digital rules, visas, and domestic politics in both countries. ²⁸¹⁰

The centre of gravity has moved from ideology to interest.

India no longer wants to be told whom to buy oil from or what its nuclear doctrine should be. It wants market access, technology transfer, and room to play Russia and the West off each other on its own terms.

The US no longer looks at India primarily through the lens of poverty, non-alignment, or Pakistan. It looks at India as a hedge against China, a market, a talent pool, and a sometimes-difficult partner that still matters a lot more inside Washington than it did thirty years ago. ²⁸¹⁰

Tariffs in this picture are not an aberration. They are a tax on that new intimacy.

When you barely trade and barely cooperate, sanctions and tariffs are symbolic. When you are each other’s top partners in multiple domains, they are friction in the plumbing. They hurt very real businesses and very real workers on both sides, even as the broader relationship keeps moving forward.

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My bias, laid bare

I grew up with stories of a distant superpower that alternated between lecturing India and sanctioning it.

I now live in a world where the US is inside Indian lives in a way that would have been hard to imagine in 1974. Phones, apps, films, VCs, H-1Bs, climate finance, chip supply chains, drones, joint statements, Netflix specials. India, in turn, is inside America through its people, its IT systems, its doctors and engineers, and increasingly through its market and its politics.

So when I look at the current tariff regime and whatever its next avatar will be, I see it as part of a longer story, not a breaking-news headline.

The story is simple.

Two large, loud democracies spent decades talking past each other.
Then they discovered they had overlapping interests and compatible fears.
Now they are trying to work together without becoming each other’s client state.

That is not a romance. It is a negotiation.

Tariffs will come and go. Leaders will hug and glare in cycles. There will be real disagreements on Russia, on digital rules, on climate, on human rights.

Underneath all that, the India–US relationship will keep doing what it has been doing for the last thirty years.

Getting denser.
Getting messier.
And, slowly, becoming too important to be left to just diplomats and tariff lawyers.

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