Has the United States Really Lost India?

Sameer Lalwani

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In a post to Truth Social, President Donald Trump lamented that the United States had “lost India” to China. The September 5 post featured a photo of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping—as if a new troika had emerged from their Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. A few days earlier, Xi and Modi had held a bilateral meeting—during the latter’s first trip to China after a seven-year drought—and expressed their intentions to work as “partners, not rivals”. Some analysis suggests that this rapprochement, paired with a downturn in US-India relations, might presage a major shift in global affairs. That analysis is overstated.

The China-India rivalry will likely persist due to fundamental disagreements and distrust over economic coercion, border aggression, Pakistan relations, and technology stacks. Meanwhile, the US-India relationship is likely to stabilize and rebound due to a much deeper and more substantive defense partnership.

There remains an iron ceiling to the India-China relationship, which is shaped by behavioral and structural factors. Prime Minister Modi’s mending of fences with Xi at the SCO summit must not be interpreted as more than risk mitigation and opportunistic posturing. Although the two countries seek to restore normal relations on their border and build economic ties, the outcomes of India-China bilateral engagements appear more tactical and rhetorical than strategic. The two leaders agreed on so little that, after the meeting, they issued separate statements that often sidestepped or conflicted with each other. The few deliverables were paltry in nature: nothing more than potential action on people flows through direct flights, visa facilitation, border trade, and access for pilgrims.

The readouts of the leaders’ meeting revealed deep fault lines on strategic and defense issues. These included divides on whether border peace serves as the foundation of the relationship, whether China can countenance a multipolar Asia, whether terrorism and its state promoters are a challenge for the relationship, and whether there is a meaningful mechanism for addressing the stark trade deficit between the countries.