Comment by alephnerd

> India has not been antagonistic or ambivalent in its recent past...

Yep, but stuff can change rapidly.

From 1972-1992 it was China that used to be the pillar of the America's Asia strategy as a bulwark against the USSR, with US soldiers posted in Xinjiang monitoring the USSR [0], US government sponsored tech transfers and scientific collaboration [1], American support for Chinese military modernization [2][3], and expanded economic cooperation [4].

Yet by the late 2000s, that relation degraded into a competitive relationship that has become the cold war that it is today because by the 1990s US and Chinese ambitions became misaligned - especially following US sanctions due to the Tienanmen Massacre [5], Clinton's pivot to newly democratic Taiwan [6], and Chinese attempts at industrial espionage [7].

The US and India are not fully aligned because neither American nor Indian policymakers have significant exposure to either and remain extremely insular (eg. Stanford and Penn are the only American universities with a competitive program on Contemporary Indian politics and foreign policy, and there are only at most 20 American scholars on contemporary Indian policy - it was the same during my time in the early 2010s with regards to China, except instead of Penn it was Harvard), and that's why the US-India relationship has been in a tailspin for the past couple years. The US-India relationship are now in the equivalent position as that of the US and China in the late 1990s to early 2000s era, and are largely predicated on mutual competition against China.

Snafus like the RAW-backed Nijjar assassination as well as the US's support for Asim Munir highlights how the relationship is starting to fray. If alignment is not found within the next few years, the relationship will become competitive and potentially antagonistic in nature because India will start feeling that the US is encircling India just like China, and the US will start viewing India as "rocking the boat".

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/18/world/us-and-peking-join-...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93China_Agreement_o...

[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/17/world/us-decides-to-sell-...

[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/04/archives/study-urges-us-a...

[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/26/business/us-china-investm...

[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/05/world/the-west-condemns-t...

[6] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/10/world/clinton-is-expected...

[7] - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/as...