The Task Ahead in US-India Relations

Ties between the United States and India have been on a positive trendline for more than a decade now. Following India's breakout as a nuclear weapon state in the late 1990s, Washington briefly sanctioned New Delhi, but matters slowly improved. First came a visit by U.S. President Bill Clinton and then, more significantly, the 2005 civil nuclear cooperation agreement, forged by the Bush administration, granted India the United States' imprimatur as a responsible nuclear state. 2005 thus marked the moment India and the United States recognized a degree of mutual strategic compatibility; official rhetoric from both states highlighted their common status as democracies – one the world's oldest and the other the world's largest.

This history is well known to observers of the relationship, but even as ties continued their upward ascent during the Obama administration, there was little reflection on the broader narrative about India, and U.S. ties with India, that had grown in the United States. India, despite its status as a nonaligned state through much of the Cold War and as a new nuclear weapon state outside of the ambit of the global nonproliferation regime long supported by the United States, nonetheless enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington. While concerns about China's "peaceful rise" ran hot, optimism about the "India story" also blossomed. U.S. presidents Bush and Obama between them saw a strong and prosperous India in Asia as ultimately in the interest of the United States and the regional security architecture.

When Trump was elected, anxieties grew in New Delhi that this new U.S. president – an unknown quantity as a foreign policy thinker and perceived as a transactional capitalist mercenary – had little interest in the old myths about India. Trump, unlike Obama and Bush, was expected in blunt terms to ask the question of policymakers in New Delhi: "What can India do for me?" Making matters worse, Trump demonstrated in his first few months in office that allies, partners, and adversaries alike would be spared no grief over any trade deficits they may maintain with the United States. In 2016, the U.S. goods and services trade deficit with India was $30.8 billion.

For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the overriding task in the first six months of the Trump presidency was to make sure that the broad trajectory of U.S.-India ties remained unaltered. Modi, perhaps wisely, did not rush to Washington in February or March 2017, allowing the administration to demonstrate its foreign policy bona fides with other heads of state and government first. In the meantime, high-level U.S.-India engagement continued and the institutionalized bureaucratic foreign policy machines of both countries maintained momentum. For instance, talks continued on several Obama administration-era initiatives, from defense technology cooperation to economic coordination to Afghanistan.

Modi's visit to Washington in June 2017 ultimately proved to be more than just a moderate success. Not only did Modi succeed in avoiding any serious public perception of discomfort in the relationship, but, over the course of just one day of meetings with Trump, gave off the appearance that the two leaders had hit it off on a personal level. Still, Modi, who has long championed his “Make in India” initiative, didn't have quite a fully formed answer for how U.S.-India ties could find compatibility between his project to turn India into a manufacturing powerhouse and Trump's "America First" economic nationalist agenda. For India, like so many net exporters across Asia, the United States is a structurally important source of demand and inbound foreign investment.

The first visit between the two leaders had important outcomes demonstrating that the momentum that was initiated in 2005 and boosted in 2016, with India's designation as a "major defense partner" of the United States, would persist. The joint statement released by Trump and Modi managed to be comprehensive and touch on nearly all aspects of the U.S.-India strategic relationship. While the statement was notable for excluding climate change – not a surprise given the public divergence between Modi and Trump on the 2015 Paris climate agreement – it included extensive new language on the economic and cultural relationship between the two countries.

On defense and strategic cooperation, the statement ran the gamut on the bilateral, the regional, and the global issues that concern the United States and India. Modi and Trump included a less-than-subtle veiled rebuke of Chinese activities in Asia without naming Beijing. They reiterated support for freedom of navigation, the rules-based order in Asia, and India even won the United States' acquiescence to a sharp paragraph noting that Modi and Trump “support bolstering regional economic connectivity through the transparent development of infrastructure and the use of responsible debt financing practices, while ensuring respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, the rule of law, and the environment.” The latter point was a rebuke of China's Belt and Road Initiative, less than one month after Beijing convened the Belt and Road Forum, its banner foreign policy event for the year. India, pointedly, did not attend the forum.

Additionally, the two leaders hit on everything from terrorism to defense industrial cooperation, maritime security to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The granularity of the statement and its breadth, which kept with recent statements between Modi and Obama, demonstrated that staff supporting the inaugural Modi-Trump meeting were adequately prepared on both sides to treat this encounter with a degree of seriousness.

Modi took the opportunity of his meeting with Trump to also offer a forward-looking vision of U.S.-India ties. He noted, in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, that the two sides had successfully overcome the "hesitations of history." He continued that the “logic of our strategic relationship is incontrovertible,” words that were especially powerful given that the Indian and U.S. navies would commence the Malabar 2017 exercise just weeks later, joined by the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. For Modi, underlining that the destinies of India and the United States were intertwined was a paramount task.

The hard work, however, will still lie ahead. While the first meeting between the two leaders was positive, much now depends on whether a slimmed-down foreign policy bureaucracy in Washington will be able to devote sustained attention to the relationship with India, and U.S. strategy in South Asia more broadly. Similarly, India will have to contend with treating the question of what it can do for Trump's America seriously. The U.S. president may have been impressed with his first impressions of Modi, but Trump's "America First" agenda isn't transient. In the coming weeks and months, much work will lie ahead for the United States and India.