"India, the United States and the Future of the International Trade Order" - by CWP alum Manjari Chatterjee Miller

Regardless of the party in power, successive U.S. administrations have agreed that China poses a threat to the United States-led order. Consequently, the United States has looked not just to its formal allies, but also to partners to shore up its global power. The United States’ partnership with India has been a significant part of this strategy. While U. S. overtures to India are long-standing—dating back to the George W. Bush administration—India, on the other hand, responded sporadically. It was really under the first Trump administration that the relationship took off, with India, often slow to commit, signing three defense agreements with the United States in just four years. The Biden administration continued to make this partnership even more central to its Indo-Pacific strategy, and its “friendshoring” agenda, reaching out to key partners and allies to divert important supply chains away from China. Given how complex and layered the U.S.-India partnership has become and the bipartisan support for continuing to develop it, President Trump is unlikely to deviate from the U.S. outreach to India. However, the United States still has a very tenuous grasp on India’s interests, particularly on where India stands with respect to the different norms underpinning the U.S.-created liberal international order. Without this understanding, it is futile to expect India to pose a true counterbalance to China. This is particularly the case with respect to the international trade order.

Article by Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Author - February 10, 2025 12:36 pm (EST)

Manjari Chatterjee Miller is a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and professor of international relations at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto where she also holds the inaugural Munk Chair in Global India. She is also an associate at the Asia Center, Harvard University. An expert on India, China, and rising powers, she is the author of Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power (2021, shortlisted for the 2022 Hedley Bull Prize in International Relations), Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China (2013), and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations (2020). 

Photo Credit: https://www.cfr.org/article/india-united-states-and-future-international-trade-order