The US-India Relationship Has Its Challenges — But Must Endure

The U.S.-India strategic relationship is at something of a crossroads heading into the G-20 summit in New Delhi this weekend. 

On one side, it is clear that both the United States and India are focused on the importance of the strategic relationship to both nations’ economic and national security and expanding the relationship to address some of the challenges in this domain, particularly as China continues to make moves that undermines confidence in regional stability in the Indo-Pacific and joins hands more closely with Russia, North Korea and Iran.  

On the other hand, the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as it has for many years, continues to expand the BRICS economic bloc to include countries like Iran, and is moving forward domestic policies and legislation that could limit the ability of the American public and private sector to effectively collaborate with India’s private sector.

To be fair, the United States itself is not immune to make making moves that, in India’s view, challenge the relationship as well, with the Biden administration having publicly pressured India to hold off its acquisition of S-400 missile systems bought years earlier from Russia and having publicly expressed concern about India’s recent human rights record, particularly on religious freedom. Nonetheless, with the leaders of both Russia and China blowing off the G-20 summit, there is a unique opportunity for India and the United States to build on their burgeoning relationship now.

The importance of the U.S.-India economic relationship is hard to overstate. As the world’s largest democracy by far — the U.S. is second — India’s more than 1.4 billion people make up the world’s fastest growing worker base, and India is projected to contribute a staggering 23% of total global growth in the working-age population by 2025. India already is the world’s third-largest economy in purchasing power terms, and bilateral trade between the U.S. and India amounts to a record $191 billion, up nearly double in less than a decade.  

Over 4 million Indian Americans live in the United States, the second largest immigrant population in the U.S. after those from Mexico, and nearly 200,000 Indian students currently study in the U.S. Americans make up over 28% of travelers to India, more than double the pre-pandemic percentage. Both India and the U.S. view our trade relationship as centrally important; the United States is India’s single largest trading partner and India is the United States’s ninth largest trading partner, with bilateral trade of over $191 billion in 2022. 

Our national security relationship continues to deepen as well, building on the strategic shift engineered by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and continuing under three U.S. presidents since and Prime Minister Modi in India, as well as the designation of India as a “major defense partner” by Congress in 2016. We have increased defense trade with India from zero in 2008 to over $20 billion by 2020, including sales of Seahawk and Apache helicopters and Sea Guardian drones (a U.S. Reaper drone variant that will be assembled in India), as well as the new effort to manufacture GE jet engines in India for a domestically produced light combat aircraft.

There also are India’s new role as a hub for U.S. naval assets, major joint U.S.-India military engagements, including the Tiger TRIUMPH, RIMPAC and Malabar exercises with other regional allies, and a significant deepening of Quad strategic dialogue between the U.S., India, Japan and Australia. These efforts are paralleled by public-private partnerships on technology, with the adoption of a defense industrial cooperation roadmap, the launch of the India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem (INDUS-X) for advanced technology collaboration, major efforts in civilian space cooperation, including delivery of a joint synthetic aperture radar satellite, increased collaboration on critical minerals, and the start of additional efforts on space and artificial intelligence that will build on recent efforts to expand cybersecurity cooperation.

These are all good signs, to be sure, and yet there remain significant challenges as well.  Concerns about human rights — and specifically the way that India treats major religious minorities, including Christians and Muslims, particularly in Modi’s home state of Gujarat — have been raised by American officials, but likewise create frustration among Indian officials who see these issues as purely internal matters in which Washington ought not be meddling.  

And India’s appalling failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as its expanding purchases of Russian oil, have caused the White House significant heartburn as it doubles down on U.S. support to Ukraine. These matters, as well as India’s longstanding commitment to non-alignment — or perhaps more accurately, “multialignment” — continue to cause stress on national security cooperation. 

Likewise, on the economic front, Indian trade barriers have limited even more expansion of the bilateral trade relationship and U.S. responses have merited frustration from the Indian side. Increasingly, the White House and American private industry have become concerned about a slew of domestic legislative and regulatory efforts in India that, while framed as being neutral (as in Europe), appear to be targeting American companies, particularly in the high-growth technology sector, which the U.S. accurately views as being central to its economic and national security in the coming decades.

But all of these stresses and challenges — significant and knotty though they may be — actually have the potential to be solved, and this weekend’s meetings present yet another opportunity to take concrete steps forward to that end. 

On the trade front, having resolved six major World Trade Organization matters this summer, the United States and India ought to build on this positive momentum and begin a serious dialogue about a broader trade deal, including whether India ought be designated a Trade Agreements Act country, and a potential roadmap to a long-term free trade agreement — which many are skeptical of, but which remains quite important.  

On the technology side, India ought to agree to focus its internal regulatory and legislative efforts on ensuring that both nations can leverage their massive workforce and training relationship to create more innovation, not regulating in a manner that hampers innovation and limits technology uptake; likewise, the United States should agree to create more permanent pathways to allow Indians who want to study and live in the United States on a long-term basis  — and build companies here — to do so without having to wait for the vagaries of the immigration lottery system. 

And finally, on the national security side, both countries must come to the joint recognition that the real long-term threat lies not in economic or political disputes with one another, but in a China that is growing increasingly restive and more aggressively flexing its muscles, not just on its border with India, but across the region as well, and continuing to expand its military forces, including in the nuclear domain.  

This very real and present danger ought to drive the United States and India to more formally cement our joint defense relationship and make clear that an Indo-Pacific region free from aggression and unwarranted economic pressure is one that we will stop at nothing to achieve and protect.

Jamil N. Jaffer is the former chief counsel and senior adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is currently founder and executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and an adviser at Beacon Global Strategies, among other things. He is the author of a book chapter entitled “U.S.-India Relations on Cybersecurity: An Important Moment for Strategic Action on Collective Cyber Defense in Enhancing U.S.-India Strategic Cooperation” (Manchester Univ. Press 2020).