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America’s new India doctrine: Never repeat the China mistake
Washington’s strategy toward New Delhi takes a guarded turn
U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi take part in a joint news conference at the White House in February 2025. | REUTERS
By Brahma Chellaney
Jul 13, 2026
For nearly a quarter century, a rare bipartisan consensus guided American policy toward India. Washington believed that helping the world’s largest democracy become stronger — economically, technologically and militarily — served U.S. interests by creating a durable counterweight to an increasingly assertive China.
Washington’s India consensus is now quietly unraveling.
The clearest indication came not from a leaked strategy paper but from U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau speaking in New Delhi. Declaring that Washington “will not repeat its China mistake,” Landau said the U.S. would not allow India to “develop all these markets” only to outcompete America commercially.
Those remarks deserve far more attention than they received. They amount to a remarkably candid acknowledgment that Washington no longer views India’s rise as an unqualified strategic asset. Instead, it increasingly sees India through the same prism that now shapes its approach toward China: as an emerging economic giant whose technological ascent must be carefully managed.
It marks a structural shift in American strategy.
The shift is also visible in American strategic vocabulary. The Pentagon’s recent decision to drop the “Indo” from “Indo-Pacific” is far more than bureaucratic rebranding. Names in strategy reveal priorities.
For nearly a decade, the Indo-Pacific concept placed India at the heart of America’s vision for balancing China’s rise across two oceans. It reflected the belief that India’s emergence as a major power was indispensable to ensuring a stable balance in Asia.
Removing “Indo” sends a different signal. It suggests that Washington is narrowing its strategic horizon, placing greater emphasis on managing relations directly with Beijing while downgrading India’s role in its larger regional calculus. The change also aligns with U.S. President Donald Trump’s more conciliatory approach to Beijing since mid-2025 and his repeated references to a U.S.-China “Group of Two,” a framework in which the world’s two largest powers bargain directly over global affairs rather than relying on broad coalitions of partners.
Successive U.S. administrations in this century promoted India’s emergence through expanding defense cooperation, a civil nuclear deal, growing technology partnerships and repeated invocations of shared democratic values. They believed India’s rise would strengthen, not challenge, American leadership. Today that assumption is giving way to a different strategic calculation.
The lesson many policymakers in Washington drew from China’s ascent is not simply that Beijing became militarily formidable. It is that the U.S. aided the rise of an industrial and technological rival capable of dominating global manufacturing, critical supply chains and advanced technologies and challenging American primacy.
America’s new objective is to avoid repeating that experience with India. Landau merely articulated publicly what American policy has begun to reflect.
Trump’s 50% punitive tariffs on Indian exports were more than trade measures. They conveyed that “America First” applies as much to strategic partners as to competitors. His administration increasingly treats India less as a geopolitical pillar than as a market for American goods and investment. Indeed, Trump’s National Security Strategy frames the relationship in transactional commercial terms rather than as a long-term geopolitical investment.
Even more revealing are the growing obstacles surrounding the transfer of advanced jet-engine technology.
The agreement between General Electric and India’s Hindustan Aeronautics was celebrated as a watershed because it promised unprecedented technology transfer for engines to power India’s three separate indigenous fighter programs: Tejas Mk1A, Tejas Mk2 and Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft. The multibillion-dollar deal was never simply about supplying engines. It represented a potential breakthrough for India’s ambition to become an independent aerospace power.
Instead, implementation has become bogged down in unexpected roadblocks. Engine deliveries have stalled, delaying fighter production and leaving completed Indian-built aircraft stranded without propulsion systems.
That, in turn, has placed the Indian Air Force under severe operational strain, with its active strength plummeting to approximately 29 operational squadrons, as against the required 42.5 combat squadrons to effectively counter a dual-front threat from nuclear-armed allies China and Pakistan.
Whatever the official explanations, the broader strategic message is difficult to miss. Washington appears increasingly reluctant to facilitate technologies that could enable India eventually to compete at the highest end of advanced industrial manufacturing.
The U.S. shift extends to India’s own strategic backyard. If India is no longer viewed as the indispensable anchor of America’s Asian strategy, it becomes easier for Washington to pursue regional policies that diverge from New Delhi’s interests.
For much of the past decade, New Delhi assumed that growing strategic ties with Washington would naturally translate into greater American sensitivity toward India’s concerns in its immediate neighborhood. That assumption no longer holds.
In Bangladesh, Washington supported the violent overthrow of the India-friendly government of Sheikh Hasina in August 2024. Bangladesh’s consequent descent into violent Islamism threatens the security of India, which is already home to millions of illegally settled Bangladeshis.
Myanmar presents another example of how policies conceived in Washington carry direct security consequences for India. Washington’s stringent sanctions against Myanmar’s military government and “nonlethal” military aid for anti-junta forces may reflect broader American objectives, but they have contributed to instability along India’s sensitive northeastern frontier, where insurgent movements have long exploited cross-border sanctuaries.
While seeking to topple Myanmar’s junta, Washington has embraced Pakistan’s military-backed regime, feting the country’s de facto ruler, Field Marshal Asim Munir.
The U.S. modernization of Pakistan’s F-16 fleet, expanding military contacts and repeated statements by senior American officials that U.S. policy seeks to prevent any single power from dominating the Indian subcontinent have revived uncomfortable memories in New Delhi of Cold War-era balancing. Many in India see that objective as closely mirroring China’s own interest in keeping India boxed in.
America’s changing attitude toward India suggests that it is now being guided by a different strategic logic. Washington is no longer asking whether its regional policies strengthen India’s position. Instead, it appears increasingly comfortable limiting India’s geopolitical room for maneuver while simultaneously restricting the technologies that would underpin its long-term industrial ascent.
The irony is striking. For two decades, Washington encouraged India’s rise because it believed a powerful democratic India would reinforce American strategy in Asia. Today, many U.S. policymakers appear to fear that helping India become too successful economically could recreate the very mistake they believe Washington made with China.
That does not mean America seeks to contain India as it seeks to contain China. Rather, it suggests something subtler but no less consequential. Washington wants India strong enough to complicate Chinese strategy, wealthy enough to remain an attractive market for American exports and influential enough to contribute to Indian Ocean security — but not so technologically advanced or economically competitive that it eventually becomes another global economic challenger.
That is a far narrower conception of partnership than the one that guided U.S. policy for much of this century. India should recognize that this is not a passing disagreement over tariffs, energy purchases or defense contracts. It reflects a deeper reordering of American strategic priorities.
The relationship with India is consequently becoming more transactional, with Washington primarily interested in securing a larger share of the world’s fastest-growing major market.
The U.S. now views India’s rise no longer as an inherently benign development, but as a phenomenon to be carefully managed, moderated and, where necessary, constrained.
The quiet demotion of India in America’s grand strategy represents the most significant shift in U.S. policy since Washington embraced New Delhi as a strategic partner at the turn of the century.
