As US-India Ties Fade, China Acts
Beijing is seizing its moment, but there’s only so much India-China ties can improve.
By: Kamran Bokhari
Washington’s efforts to forge a new strategy for managing global affairs have hurt its ties with India.
This has forced New Delhi to try to normalize relations with its rival in China, which has seized the opportunity to try to contain Indian influence in the Asia-Pacific.
But there are limits to how much India can truly mend ties.
A flurry of diplomatic pleasantries between India and China attests to their desire to set aside grievances.
After a recent meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) hailing the progress made between their countries since last October, when he met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Russia.
The post came amid Wang’s trip to South Asia, where he also spoke with Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval.
Only a few weeks ago, Jaishankar traveled to Beijing, and Doval attended a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Modi is due to meet Xi in early September in Tianjin – his first trip to China in seven years.
Visits like these are unusual and noteworthy.
Relations between the two countries have been strained since their troops clashed in June 2020 in Kashmir, near the western end of their 2,167-mile-long (3,500-kilometer-long) border.
But over the past few years, two larger overarching factors have fueled their adversarial relationship.
First, China is a long-time ally of India’s South Asian rival, Pakistan.
Second and more important, the United States has seen India as a special ally over the past decade in its strategy to counter the challenge from China.
U.S.-India ties were an obstacle standing in the way of improved China-India ties.
Though China and India have managed to avoid escalation, Beijing has kept the pressure on India from the western to the eastern portions of the Line of Actual Control through long-term, heavy military deployments.
The Chinese military would strategically poke India on the Himalayan frontier so that New Delhi would spend time, attention and resources on the northern frontier instead of on its maritime capabilities, which Washington wanted to cultivate to pressure China.
As a result, the periodic talks to ease tensions were fruitless – that is, until the Trump administration began to change the way the U.S. manages the international system.
As far as New Delhi is concerned, the United States pursued two parallel developments that affected Indian interests.
The first relates to the overall tariff strategy that soured relations between the two sides.
On July 31, the White House announced a 25 percent “reciprocal” tariff on Indian imports, slated to take effect on Aug. 7.
Less than three weeks later, Trump imposed an additional 25 percent tariff on imports from India for its continued purchases of Russian oil.
This move came in the wake of the failure of multiple rounds of negotiations to reach a deal that India had hoped to sign in the fall. Indian negotiators resisted American demands that India – the world’s largest market by population – lower its barriers to trade for U.S. goods.
They assumed they had more room to maneuver given the unique position their country had in the U.S. strategy on China.
But they underestimated the lengths the Trump administration would go to to manage China.
While its trade talks with India were underway, Washington had been engaged in its more important trade negotiations with Beijing.
The U.S.-China dealings had an indirect but far more significant impact on U.S.-India relations.
China has the world’s second-largest economy, so the U.S. simply has to reach some kind of accommodation with it.
This is why, after months of escalating tensions and reciprocal tariffs, the U.S. and China agreed to a preliminary understanding.
Washington suspended previously scheduled tariff increases, maintaining a 30 percent tariff on Chinese imports.
For its part, China suspended its planned tariff increases, keeping duties on U.S. goods at 10 percent.
On Aug. 19, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the trade arrangement as "working pretty well," noting productive discussions with Chinese officials, and said more meetings would take place in the coming months between his team and China’s.
Washington wants a stable trade relationship with Beijing but doesn’t want China to challenge the U.S. militarily, especially with regard to Taiwan.
Beijing, too, has an interest in avoiding a confrontation with Washington.
Therefore, the arrangement that likely emerged is that China would refrain from provocation over Taiwan if the U.S. did likewise with India.
From the point of view of the Trump administration, if an understanding can be reached with China, New Delhi is far less useful a tool to contain Beijing.
India had demonstrated little utility either economically or militarily in U.S. strategic plans.
Hence the pressure it applied on India over its oil purchases from Russia.
In an op-ed in the Financial Times on Aug. 18, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro warned India to halt oil purchases from Russia.
The following day, in an interview with CNBC, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused India of profiteering from its purchases of Russian crude, which he described as unacceptable.
Though these remarks relate to India-Russia ties, they underscore the extent to which the American view of India has changed.
Having miscalculated, New Delhi is now trying to manage this foreign policy crisis.
It will have to eventually reach a compromise with the U.S., but it is playing with a weak hand, so it’ll take some time.
This approach is part of India's efforts at damage control, which have led to an uptick in diplomacy with China.
This move is informed not just by the shift in India’s position in the U.S.-China competition but also by the situation in its immediate geopolitical vicinity.
China is a very close ally of Pakistan, and India cannot afford to fight two adversaries at the same time – certainly not when it can no longer assume that the U.S. will support it against China.
Washington is, moreover, developing closer ties to Islamabad, which was able to shoot down five Indian aircraft with the help of Chinese military hardware in a brief conflict last May.
India is therefore trying to reduce tensions with China so it can better manage the regional security environment as it determines how to deal with a U.S. that no longer sees it as an indispensable ally.
New Delhi understands there are simply too many factors that limit how it can improve ties with China.
For now, the priority is to adjust to a global environment marked by rapidly evolving geopolitical alignments.
For China, this is an opportunity to contain India largely within the South Asian region.
In this way, it hopes to prevent India from becoming a tool the U.S. can use against it.
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