Keeping India-US ties out of the Pakistan trap

It is essential to approach the relationship with realism and recognise both its limits and opportunities, especially when the world is in flux

- Jawed Ashraf

There is understandable rage and dismay in India—and joy in Pakistan—at multiple aspects of President Donald Trump's repeated remarks, including during his visit to the Gulf, a sensitive region for us. We could attribute these to eagerness for instant personal successes, especially given others he set out to achieve still elude him; or, otherwise, to his aversion for war. Yet, it should not be a surprise, given his remarks after the Balakot strike in 2019 and his meetings with Pakistani leaders, the appreciation for Pakistan's counterterror cooperation in the State of the Union address in January, or the transactional, rather than geopolitical, approach to relations with India.

Indian disappointment comes from what appears as America's amoral and insensitive position on our Pahalgam response. It also arises from public perception of the relationship shaped by the hyperbolic American projection of India-US relations as the "defining partnership of the 21st century", the narrative of the global framework of relations, the warm optics of the bilateral and Quad summits, and, equally, the saturation media and think tank attention in India on this relationship to the exclusion of almost every other. President Trump's victory was, perhaps, more welcomed in India than elsewhere.