Explained : The US Will Not Give India the Ride It Gave China and Its Impact

For those who successfully made the trip to Delhi, the Raisina Dialogue earlier this month presented an opportunity to discuss the Iran conflict, its impact on India, and across the wider region.

On the first day of the Dialogue that opportunity was not taken up quite as meaningfully as it could have been, given one of the key opening speakers was US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who spent much of his allotted time highlighting the apparent holes in US foreign policy thinking over the decades since the Cold War ended around 1990.  

“We just kind of, let it all happen by default, there was never a moment of reckoning to say – what is the point of US foreign policy? ” he told the Raisina audience. “In the last 35 years” he said, “we have not really had any kind of vision about what we’re doing in the world”.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr Landau seemed far more comfortable with the current “America First” form of foreign policy as expressed by Donald Trump.

“He has taken on a key leadership role in foreign policy so it’s not an anonymous desk in the State Department that is making the decisions, instead it is coming out of the  President and the White House, and reflects the President’s political agenda, rather than a deep state agenda.”

On India, Mr Landau described the nation as one with “almost unlimited potential.”

He went on outline the desire of the US to become a more integrated partner with India across the coming decades.

“I’m not here to do social work”, he reminded the audience, “I’m here because I believe it’s in the interest of our country, and in the interests of India, to deepen our partnership”.

He was referencing the US-India Free Trade Agreement, which followed hard on the heels of an India-EU deal, amid a number of other trade deals including on with New Zealand, which Indian media suggest is due to come into force in September this year.

But Mr Landau drew the sharpest reaction when discussing the WTO era and what the US views as a historic error. He warned India that the US would not replicate the errors it made with China roughly two decades ago, when China was permitted to develop markets and subsequently surpassed the US in sectors like manufacturing and technology. “India should understand that we’re not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago,” he said.

By the standards of diplomatic language, it was a remarkably candid thing to say on Indian soil and cut to the heart of what Washington really wants from its partnership with India — and what it is absolutely not prepared to offer.

“We are not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago in terms of saying, ‘You will be able to develop all these markets.’ Then the next thing we know, you are beating us in many commercial things. We are going to make sure that whatever we do is fair to our people,” Landau told the audience.

The “mistake” Landau referred to has a specific history. From 1980 to 2000, China’s Most Favored Nation status was reviewed annually by the US Congress, often linked to political conditions. In 2000, Congress granted China permanent normal trade relations under President Clinton, ending annual reviews. A year later, China entered the WTO. In Washington’s current view, this sequence of decisions gave Beijing an economic roadmap it then used to become a formidable commercial — and strategic — rival.

The lesson the Trump administration has apparently drawn is that open-ended market access, granted without sufficient conditions or reciprocity, can and will turn a partner into a competitor.

The message to India is: that will not happen again.

And yet the speech was far from hostile. Landau was simultaneously enthusiastic about what the US-India relationship could become. “We are very excited about the trade deal that is almost at the finish line now and think that could be the basis for unlocking almost limitlesse potential,” he said.

He spoke of India’s rise as “undeniable” and described the country as one whose economic and human resources would help “decide the future of this century.” He urged India to move away from what he called the “Cold War model where India kept the US at arm’s length,” arguing that in the next few years, both countries could “set the stage for very close India-US cooperation” in areas including counterterrorism and freedom of navigation.

Landau put his remarks within President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy strategy, asserting that US diplomacy should primarily serve American national interests. But he was careful to draw a distinction between that doctrine and isolationism. “America First does not mean America alone,” he said, adding that just as Trump wants to make America great again, he would expect the Prime Minister of India and other world leaders to want to make their own countries great again.

“It has to be obviously based on reciprocity and mutual respect,” he said of any future trade and economic partnership.

The speech landed in a context already crowded with diplomatic activity. India and the US announced an interim trade agreement framework earlier this year, apparently as a precursor to a broader Bilateral Trade Agreement.  The US has already made some concessions, reducing the base reciprocal tariff on Indian goods from 25 per cent to 18 per cent, scrapping an additional 25 per cent penalty that had been linked to New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil, and issuing a  30-day, temporary waiver, allowing India to purchase Russian oil currently stranded at sea. This move eased sanctions aimed at stabilising global energy markets rather than lifting the ban entirely, and follows significant disruptions caused by the US-Iran War and other tensions in the Middle East.

The reaction to Landau’s remarks was swift and mixed. In India, opposition politicians seized on the comments as evidence of a lopsided relationship. Congress leader Supriya Shrinate posted a video of the remarks online, implying that the Modi government had conceded too much in trade negotiations. Former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, attending the Dialogue, said he was “shocked,” interpreting Landau’s words to mean “the US is suggesting that it won’t allow India to prosper and lift so many millions of people out of poverty.”

India’s own Foreign Minister, S. Jaishankar, appeared to respond — without naming Landau — on the final day of the conference. He commented that the rise of a country is ultimately determined by that country itself, emphasising that India’s rise would depend on its own strength rather than on the mistakes of others. He went on to describe India’s trajectory as, in many ways, “unstoppable.”

The earlier comments from Secretary Landau captured, in a short form, the central tension running through US-India relations in the Trump era. Washington wants a partner in the Indo-Pacific to counterbalance China, and it is prepared to invest diplomatically and commercially in that partnership. But it doesn’t want a repeat of what it now considers a major strategic error in the post-Cold War period: the belief that deep economic integration would turn a rival into a friend.

Bonnie Glick, an adjunct senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies who also spoke at the Raisina Dialogue. She compared the US approach to India and China as a matter of “apples and oranges.” , describing the decision to grant China WTO entry as an experiment that “has, I think, widely been viewed as a miscalculation in the United States.”

For India, the message from Washington is warm but conditional. The partnership is real, the potential described as limitless — but the terms will be America’s to set. Whether New Delhi accepts those terms or uses its growing strategic weight to negotiate something more balanced, may be the defining question of the relationship for the years ahead.

Asia Media Centre