Subscriber Exclusive: Is America Making a Bad Bet on India?

As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads to the White House this week for a state dinner, politicians and TV anchors will recall familiar platitudes about how India and the United States are the world’s two biggest democracies and uniquely share values and interests in an otherwise turbulent and rocky world order.

The rhetoric may have felt promising a decade ago. Today, it feels dated. After all, democracy has faced challenges in both the United States and India; and New Delhi has pointedly diverged from Washington’s foreign-policy objectives by not only refusing to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine but also increasing its imports of Russian crude in the last year by orders of magnitude. As the United States has sought to build a coalition to punish Russia, isolate China, and, more broadly, align democracies against autocracies, India hasn’t quite followed the script. Instead, it has expressed a more individualistic approach, picking and choosing the best deals and partnerships for itself depending on its circumstance and specific perceived need.

Ashley J. Tellis, a former U.S. policymaker and longtime watcher of U.S.-India relations, made a splash recently with a Foreign Affairs article titled “America’s Bad Bet on India.” (He has since told FP the headline itself was “melodramatic” and overstated his argument.) But his larger point was that Washington may be hoping for too much of its friendship with New Delhi—that if it expects India to get involved in a potential future conflict with China, it will end up being disappointed. In other words, India will do India.

Is Washington expecting too much of New Delhi? Is India somehow taking advantage of a moment when the United States is preoccupied with competition with China? Ahead of Modi’s visit to the United States, FP’s Ravi Agrawal interviewed Tellis on FP Live. Tellis is the Tata chair for strategic affairs and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.