‘Diplomatic earthquake’: Researcher says India not among US' most important allies
The researcher said unlike popular belief, India does not feature in the top five partners of the US in the Indo-Pacific, which in itself is the third priority after Europe and the Middle East.
- Aug 6, 2025,
- Updated Aug 6, 2025 11:53 AM IST
Is India as important an ally for the US as it believes, questioned a research fellow, who said that New Delhi should have noted the signs of the deepening faultlines. The “flowery language” in joint statements has misled everyone, and there’s always more than what meets the eye.
Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Belfer Center, Kunal Singh, said, “We should reflect on why we got this so wrong. This has been a diplomatic earthquake. However, Indians and India-focused scholars ignored the signs indicating that we were living in a perilous seismic zone.”
Singh said unlike popular belief, India does not feature in the top five partners of the US in the Indo-Pacific, which in itself is the third priority after Europe and the Middle East. “As a result, we are misled by the flowery language in joint statements and begin to truly believe that the India-US partnership is the most important in the 21st century. For the US, India might be the partner number 23 or 37-- in other words, not important at all,” he said.
The assessment comes after Trump slapped a 25 per cent tariff on India, and threatened additional tariffs due to New Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian oil. Despite the US and the EU’s ongoing trade with Russia, they insist that it is India’s oil purchases from Russia that have enabled Moscow’s war on Ukraine. India has refused to abandon its trade ties with Russia. Meanwhile, the US seem to be getting closer to Pakistan as well as inking a trade deal with China soon.
The GDP size alone does not determine a country’s importance or Israel would not have been US’ strongest ally, said the researcher. India’s importance in the US policy is determined by what it needs in Europe and the Middle East. If pressurising Russia is what it wants, then the US targeting China and India makes sense. “Since the US relies much more on Chinese imports, targeting India is easier,” he said.
What makes sense is the US trying to balance China’s rise by partnering with India, and why the ties between US-India have improved since 1998 but what doesn’t make sense is why it has improved so minimally and gradually, the researcher said. “It does not explain why US dollars continue to flow to Europe over the Indo-Pacific,” he said.
NATO too should have been disbanded after the Cold War but it has only expanded.
Realism has been a poor predictor of events after the Cold War, he said.
Singh also said that biases of scholars studying India-US also creep into the analysis. “Their own positions are often correlated with the state of India-US ties. This makes them look for signs of success. They also have a previous body of work explaining the "success" of India-US ties and predicting its continued rise. In such cases, scholars tend to look for evidence that validates their stated positions and ignore those that do not,” he said.
If this were not true, one would have seen the weakening of the bilateral ties after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Is India as important an ally for the US as it believes, questioned a research fellow, who said that New Delhi should have noted the signs of the deepening faultlines. The “flowery language” in joint statements has misled everyone, and there’s always more than what meets the eye.
Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Belfer Center, Kunal Singh, said, “We should reflect on why we got this so wrong. This has been a diplomatic earthquake. However, Indians and India-focused scholars ignored the signs indicating that we were living in a perilous seismic zone.”
Singh said unlike popular belief, India does not feature in the top five partners of the US in the Indo-Pacific, which in itself is the third priority after Europe and the Middle East. “As a result, we are misled by the flowery language in joint statements and begin to truly believe that the India-US partnership is the most important in the 21st century. For the US, India might be the partner number 23 or 37-- in other words, not important at all,” he said.
The assessment comes after Trump slapped a 25 per cent tariff on India, and threatened additional tariffs due to New Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian oil. Despite the US and the EU’s ongoing trade with Russia, they insist that it is India’s oil purchases from Russia that have enabled Moscow’s war on Ukraine. India has refused to abandon its trade ties with Russia. Meanwhile, the US seem to be getting closer to Pakistan as well as inking a trade deal with China soon.
The GDP size alone does not determine a country’s importance or Israel would not have been US’ strongest ally, said the researcher. India’s importance in the US policy is determined by what it needs in Europe and the Middle East. If pressurising Russia is what it wants, then the US targeting China and India makes sense. “Since the US relies much more on Chinese imports, targeting India is easier,” he said.
What makes sense is the US trying to balance China’s rise by partnering with India, and why the ties between US-India have improved since 1998 but what doesn’t make sense is why it has improved so minimally and gradually, the researcher said. “It does not explain why US dollars continue to flow to Europe over the Indo-Pacific,” he said.
NATO too should have been disbanded after the Cold War but it has only expanded.
Realism has been a poor predictor of events after the Cold War, he said.
Singh also said that biases of scholars studying India-US also creep into the analysis. “Their own positions are often correlated with the state of India-US ties. This makes them look for signs of success. They also have a previous body of work explaining the "success" of India-US ties and predicting its continued rise. In such cases, scholars tend to look for evidence that validates their stated positions and ignore those that do not,” he said.
If this were not true, one would have seen the weakening of the bilateral ties after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.