US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s decision to skip Delhi in his visit to India is symptomatic of the state of India-US relations. No doubt immediate electoral concerns, such as the need to reduce diesel prices in the US, has prompted his visit to the Jamnagar refinery. In a perceptive article in the Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta suggests that this signifies a diminution of India’s place in the American mind. “India is not a partner in building a world order, or an actor whose political status has priority,” noted Mehta, “it is simply an amalgam of corporate interests.”This is a long way from the somewhat breathless declaration by a US State Department official in 2005 that the goal of US relations “is to help India to become a major world power in the 21st century” and that the US understood the military implications, of that statement. Through the Indo-US nuclear agreement that year, nuclear sanctions on India were lifted and arms sales opened up. The US sought to fit India into its global strategic equations.The fall from there has been abrupt, marked by incidents of name calling and threats and breath-taking hypocrisy. India has had to bear the whiplash of high tariffs and is named in the now suspended Graham Act as a country that could suffer 100% secondary tariffs on account of the Russian oil trade. On account of US secondary sanctions, India has been forced to abandon oil imports from Iran and the status of its handling of Chahbahar port remains uncertain.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.There is a school of thought that believes that India has to wait out the Trump administration and all will be fine thereafter. This is self-delusion. India is not being targeted by the administration out of any special hostility. Simply put, it is, as in the case of Russian oil trade, a collateral casualty of American domestic and international policy shifts.What made India attractive to the US in 2005 was a combination of things. While fighting its ‘Global War on Terror’, the US realised that India was a powerful model of stability and modernisation in Asia. Economically, India was doing well and US exports to India nearly doubled in the 2000-2005 period. The rapid expansion of the Information Technology sector in the US had created a huge demand for outsourcing as well as computer engineers. Highly skilled Indians entered through the H1B programme to fill this gap. IT outsourcing to India played a massive role in the growth, cost efficiency and global dominance of the US technology sector.The US technology sector is now increasingly shaped by AI, where China is simultaneously its principal strategic competitor and a formidable technological challenger. India’s AI industry does not yet have the relative heft that its IT sector once offered the US.Protectionist sentiment has gripped the USWhere the US once advocated free trade, it is now gripped by protectionist sentiment. And instead of being happy with its substantial trade with India, the US under Donald Trump resents the fact that India enjoys a trade surplus. Likewise, where once highly qualified immigrants were welcomed in the US, today they are reviled.The suspension of major Indian IT firms from the PERM programme has blocked new green-card sponsorship for affected employers, while Vice-President JD Vance has accused companies of abusing the system and described Indian employees as “foreign indentured servants”. The language is deeply offensive, as the MEA has said. Meanwhile, incidents targeting Indian-Americans, including a foiled mass-shooting targeting an Indian temple, and an official government advertisement caricaturing a “Mr Singh” as a dangerously incompetent driver, suggest that hostility to immigration is increasingly bleeding into prejudice against a community.In the past year, India has faced a succession of high duties on various accounts – Russian oil, allegations of importing products made of forced labour and so on. Seven months later, a final trade agreement still appears to be stalled, even as Indian and American officials claim it is just around the corner. Even these negotiated understandings offer limited reassurance when Washington retains the power to alter the terms. India should therefore judge such agreements by their substance, not by the political goodwill they are presumed to signify.Pakistan is another source of friction. Pakistan was formally allied to the US in the war against terror but its double-dealing was well understood by the US and made manifest by the episode relating to the presence of Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani sanctuary. But having pulled out of Afghanistan, the US has rediscovered the value of its links with the Pakistani military. There is cooperation in relation to the ISIS-Khorasan and keeping tabs on developments in Afghanistan.Impact of US-China relations on IndiaPerhaps, the most consequential change in Washington’s approach towards India flows from its relations with Beijing. The US outreach to India in 2005 was based on an assessment of the need to balance China in Asia. That logic intensified along with China’s economic and geopolitical rise. One consequence of this was the US “pivot” to Asia and its Indo-Pacific policy. This gave rise to the Quad with the US gathering two long-standing military allies – Japan and Australia – along with India to provide heft to its ‘Indo-Pacific’ policy. The military component of this was the annual Malabar naval exercises involving the four countries.The logic that made India a useful counterweight to China is under strain. In 2005, India with its IT prowess was a useful foil for Beijing. But in the 2020s, the US has realised that India has missed the China+1 and AI boats. Even in South Asia, it has failed to consolidate its primacy.Since 2005, China has consolidated itself as a manufacturing as well as a science and technology power. In his first administration, Trump shifted US policy from “engagement” to “competition” and also restricted US-China technology ties. The Biden administration enhanced the technology restriction regime and said China was the “most serious competitor” of the US.However, the US soon understood the limits of this policy and this was reflected in the US National Security Strategy of 2025 which spoke of the need to prioritise reciprocity to US-China policy by balancing trade and focusing “on non-sensitive factors.” It also called for a “robust” deterrence to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific.”Note that India got only a passing mention in the NSS, which emphasised the need “to improve commercial (and other) relations with India to encourage New Delhi to contribute to Indo-Pacific security including through continued quadrilateral cooperation with Australia, Japan, and the United States (“Quad”)”. And that was the only reference to the Quad itself, which has not met at summit level in 2025 or 2026, raising questions about its effectiveness.Ties between China and US also shifted in 2025, when, after a period in which the two sides slugged it out with tariffs, they moved to a ceasefire of sorts worked out at the Trump-Xi summit in Busan in October last year. Today, the two sides are seeking to consolidate their relationship under the rubric of a “constructive relationship of strategic stability”, raising questions about whether the two powers are moving towards an informal G-2 understanding.India’s responseDelhi’s response to Washington so far has been patience, or “strategic patience”, if one prefers. Modi has kept a low profile, and his most recent phone conversation with Trump was described as “productive”. Yet the language of “good friends” that once characterised the relationship has largely disappeared. External Affairs minister S Jaishankar has also effected mild criticism of the US as being an “insensitive partner” and as a country pursuing self-centred trade strategies.Now, there are expectations that there may be a shift in the climate. With an interim trade deal finalised, Modi will travel to the US for the December G-20 meeting and meet Trump face to face. The temptation will be to say that things are hunky dory again.But that will be a mistake. There is a structural shift occurring in US-India ties based more on the changes occurring in the US’s world view – things that New Delhi has limited leverage over. It is also based on a hard-headed assessment by the US of the importance of India in its scheme of things..India’s options are limited because the dependence runs largely one way. The US is a major export market and an important source of technology and capital. Open retaliation could therefore cost India more than Washington. The response must be calibrated but credible.India should stop assuming that concessions will automatically produce political goodwill. Recall that India has in the past two years been granting major unilateral concessions to gain US goodwill. It has cut duties on motorcycles, bourbon, some pharmaceuticals and ethernet switches. The proposed UPI fees are likely to benefit Visa and Mastercard. China, Canada, Brazil, EU and Vietnam have pushed back at the US where they can. India needs to do the same. Further, agricultural and dairy market access should be negotiated on their economic merits. Defence purchases, energy contracts and other commercial commitments must likewise be assessed against Indian needs and available alternatives, not treated as instruments for preserving an increasingly uncertain political relationship. The same should be true of the position of India as a defence co-production partner and a logistics hub.India can also reduce its strategic vulnerability by deepening ties with the European Union, Japan and Australia, expanding economic engagement with the Gulf, and diversifying defence sourcing towards France, Germany, Japan etc, where appropriate. Regulation of American technology companies should be based on competition, taxation, data protection and national security, rather than retaliation.Finally, India should preserve its freedom of choice on energy. Russian oil purchases should be determined by energy security, commercial considerations and applicable legal constraints, not by a desire either to appease or defy Washington.India cannot restore the relationship of 2005 simply by exercising strategic patience or making further concessions. Its task is to preserve cooperation where interests converge, resist pressure where they do not, and build alternatives that reduce its vulnerabilities. The United States remains important to India, but it can no longer be treated as a partner whose strategic interests will necessarily coincide with India’s own. That is not a case for abandoning the relationship. It is a case for approaching it without illusions.The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.