The New York Times on India-US Relations: Reading Between the Lines

The New York Times on India-US Relations: Edward Wong, The New York Times’s global affairs correspondent and author of a book on China, filed from Delhi this week on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s four-day visit to India. Wong was already travelling across Asia to cover Trump’s Beijing summit, which gives his piece a useful dual vantage point: he watched Trump lavish praise on Xi Jinping in Beijing, then followed the diplomatic ripples as they reached Delhi.

The result is one of the more substantive pieces of India coverage the Times has published in recent months — attentive to the texture of the relationship, and alert to how much has changed in a short time.

The article, published on May 23 and updated May 24, carries the headline “Trump’s Pursuit of a Partnership With China Raises Concerns in India.” It is, at its core, a story about anxiety — Indian anxiety about where Washington’s priorities now lie, and whether the strategic logic that drew the two countries together over two decades still holds.

The Cleanup Man Arrives

The piece’s central argument is established early: Rubio has come to Delhi to do the hard work of reassurance.

Trump flew home from Beijing without stopping anywhere else in Asia, made no public remarks about US allies or partners in the region, and said he would revisit arms sales to Taiwan — a comment that sent tremors across the continent. Indian leaders, rather than getting a face-to-face meeting with the president himself, are receiving his secretary of state.

Rubio delivered a White House invitation to Modi and spoke of deepening trade and defence cooperation. Wong does not dress this up as more than it is — the preliminary labour of diplomacy, not its substance — but he also takes seriously what the visit represents: an attempt to signal that the relationship still matters to Washington, at a moment when India has genuine reason to wonder.

A Grudge With Geopolitical Consequences

The article traces the relationship’s visible fracture to a specific moment.

In a call last June, Modi told Trump plainly that India and Pakistan had resolved their 2025 crisis without American help — a direct rebuttal of Trump’s claim to have personally brokered the ceasefire after the four-day war. Trump, the piece reports, “seethed.” He subsequently imposed 50 percent tariffs on Indian imports.

Wong renders this as something close to personal — a president “obsessed with getting the Nobel Peace Prize” who felt publicly denied credit he believed he deserved. An interim trade agreement followed in February, on terms the piece describes as onerous for India, before the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s broad tariff regime.

Now there is a fresh complication: Trump has praised Pakistani leaders effusively for mediating the US-Israel war against Iran. Pakistan’s standing in Washington has risen sharply, precisely as India’s has come under strain. From New Delhi’s perspective, the regional hierarchy has been rearranged without its consent.

The G2 Problem

Indian officials, Wong reports, paid close attention to Trump’s use of the term “G2” during a Fox News interview in Beijing — referring to the United States and China as “the two great countries.”

If this reflects genuine strategic doctrine rather than casual rhetoric, it places considerable pressure on the entire framework of the Indo-Pacific partnership that India has invested in over two decades.

“There is deep concern on the current direction of India-U.S. relations and how ties have deteriorated,” Ananth Krishnan, a Beijing-based author on India-China relations, tells Wong. “While I believe there is resilience to the deep linkages both sides have forged when you look at defence and technology, it’s still striking how the narrative has shifted from the framing of India as a key partner in the region.”

Japan and Australia are asking similar questions. Their top diplomats are flying to Delhi for a Quad conclave on Tuesday, and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution notes they will all “particularly seek to understand the significance of Washington agreeing to a ‘constructive relationship of strategic stability’ with Beijing.”

India Turns — Reluctantly — Toward China

One of the piece’s more significant observations, tucked into its latter half, is that Trump’s posture is producing an effect he likely does not intend: nudging India toward China.

Relations between the two countries had collapsed after their militaries clashed along the Himalayan border in 2020, and the wound ran deep. But Wong reports that India has recently eased travel restrictions with China and is exploring the possibility of allowing Chinese investment into certain non-sensitive sectors of its economy.

“While I don’t think India-China ties will go back to where they were, because what we saw in 2020 was a deep rupture,” Krishnan says, “it’s clear that both are looking to restore some ballast to the relationship.”

If progress is made on the border issue, he adds, “that could potentially raise the ceiling that currently limits the relationship.”

Wong frames this shift as a consequence of American policy rather than Indian preference — a reasonable correction to a sudden loss of US support, rather than a strategic pivot. Whether or not that is the complete picture, it is a framing that will be noted in Delhi.

The Landau Moment

The sharpest passage in the piece concerns Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, who said something at the Raisina Dialogue in February that “shocked some Indian officials.”

The United States, he warned, was “not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago” — implying that India’s economic rise might someday be viewed as a threat to American commercial interests rather than a complement to them.

That a serving US official delivered this message at an Indian forum, in India, is striking. Wong includes it without softening, and it sits in the article as perhaps the clearest illustration of how the bilateral mood has shifted.

There was also Trump’s reposting last month of a podcast transcript in which the host called China and India “hellhole” places and questioned whether recent immigrants from those countries had “integrated” as “European Americans” had. The Indian government took the rare step of rebuking the White House on social media, calling the remarks “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste.”

Whose Voices Are Missing

The piece’s one notable limitation is structural: almost no Indian voices appear in it.

The analysts quoted — Donald Lu, Tanvi Madan, Meenakshi Narula Ahamed, and Ananth Krishnan — are either former American officials, Washington-based fellows, or authors resident in Beijing. Jaishankar appears once, via a speech from Munich in February. Modi does not speak at all.

It is a piece about India’s anxieties filtered largely through the American foreign policy establishment — valuable in its own right, since that is precisely the audience that shapes policy in Washington. But Indian readers will notice the absence of domestic Indian voices, and the absence of context about India’s own active diplomacy this month: the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting it hosted on May 14, Modi’s five-nation tour, or the political turbulence of the Cockroach Janta Party movement at home.

India, in this piece, exists primarily in relation to American decisions. That is a limitation. But it is also, in a way, the story the piece is trying to tell.

Why It Matters

None of that diminishes the article’s importance.

The New York Times remains the publication that sets the agenda in Washington foreign policy circles, on Capitol Hill, and in the think tanks whose alumni staff administrations of both parties. A piece that frankly describes the deterioration of the India-US relationship — and frames India-China warming as its direct consequence — is a message to the American establishment about what the current approach is costing.

For Indian policymakers, that is genuinely useful. They do not need to say publicly that the relationship is under strain; the paper of record is saying it for them. They do not need to signal openness toward China explicitly; a respected correspondent frames it as a rational response to American neglect.

Whether Rubio’s visit changes the underlying dynamic remains to be seen. As one former Biden-era diplomat quoted in the piece puts it, the secretary’s task is to “lay the foundation for Trump to repair this relationship.”

That foundation, if it is to be durable, will ultimately require more than a four-day visit and a White House invitation. It will require a US administration that has decided, with some consistency, what it actually wants from India — and is prepared to say so clearly, in Delhi, not just in Beijing.

Karvaan India Foreign Media Watch tracks how the international press covers India. Analysis reflects editorial judgment, not institutional position.