NYT: Trump Wrecked 30 Years of US-India Relations in One Summer

For three decades, successive US presidents have made enormous diplomatic efforts to establish friendship with India. The New York Times addressed this topic against the backdrop of current US-India relations. Bill Clinton, who laid the foundation for the modern American-Indian partnership, called these two democracies "natural allies." George W. Bush described the US and India as "brothers in the cause of human freedom." Barack Obama and Joe Biden considered relations with India one of the most important global alliances of the current century.

For Washington, India represented a huge emerging market, a potential partner to counterbalance China, a key partner in ensuring security in the Indo-Pacific region, and a rising power whose democratic identity would strengthen the rules-based international order.

In turn, India, filled with mistrust of the West after nearly a century of British colonial rule, gradually overcame its Cold War-era suspicions of Washington, which for decades had armed and financed its sworn enemy, Pakistan, and slowly moved closer to the United States.

It took Donald Trump one summer to destroy those achievements. In May, he took credit for ending a brief military conflict between India and Pakistan. This angered India, which considers its disputes with Pakistan to be exclusively bilateral, and humiliated Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had boasted of his closeness to "my friend Donald Trump."

These days, against the backdrop of a noticeable strain in relations with Washington, which was in fact and openly initiated by Trump, India is taking steps to improve relations with China and has already made some progress on this path.