US will regret throwing India under the bus

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP just threw India under the bus. After months of affronts and barbs, Washington now treats New Delhi more as foe than friend, undermining a relationship that several American administrations—including Trump's first—tried to strengthen, not least to contain China in the Indo-Pacific.

- ANDREAS KLUTH Bloomberg

Instead, India will now distance itself from the US and draw closer to Russia and even China.

By diplomatic standards, the deterioration has been abrupt. In February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Trump in the White House, and the pair looked like two populist peas in a pod. Gushing about his MAGA host, Modi pledged to Make India Great Again and promised that "MAGA plus MIGA becomes a mega partnership".

Fast forward to recent days, as Trump first slapped a draconian tariff of 25% on India, then doubled that to 50% (to take effect later this month) as punishment for India's ongoing imports of Russian oil. Trump's ire against India is "mystifying" and "shortsighted", Lisa Curtis at the Center for a New American Security told me. She's worked for almost three decades to deepen ties between the US and India, most recently on the National Security Council in Trump's first term. Like his Democratic predecessor and successor, Trump at that time also wanted to enlist the most populous democracy as an ally to help resist the looming autocratic axis of China and Russia.

During the Cold War India remained proudly "non-aligned" but bought its weapons mainly from Moscow, whereas its arch-rival, Pakistan, mostly used American arms. In recent decades, though, these relationships inverted.