By any conventional measure of power, the U.S. remains formidable. Its military power is unmatched, and it still possesses the world’s largest national economy. Yet power in the 21st century has never rested on material capabilities alone.
For decades, America’s true strategic advantage lay in something less tangible but more potent: its capacity to attract. Its ideals, openness and professed commitment to universal values conferred a moral authority that made alliances easier, its influence deeper and its leadership more legitimate. That advantage is now being squandered.
The current focus on the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran should not obscure a larger reality: The damage the second Trump presidency is inflicting on U.S. soft power — on the very credibility that made American leadership possible — is profound and likely to outlast the administration itself.
The concept of soft power, a term coined by the late Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, rests on three pillars: an appealing culture, political values that a country actually upholds, and a foreign policy imbued with moral authority. Today, each of those pillars is being eroded.
The most visible fracture is domestic. President Trump’s rhetoric has normalized a form of racialized politics that previous generations of American leaders, from both parties, publicly rejected. His disparaging comments about Somali immigrants, like his circulation of dehumanizing imagery of the Obamas, revives some of the ugliest tropes in the long history of racial oppression. These are not isolated excesses — they signal to the world that the U.S. is retreating from the very values it once claimed as its moral core.
For audiences across Africa, Asia and Latin America — regions whose histories are deeply scarred by European colonialism and extractive rule — such rhetoric is not just offensive. It is revealing. It suggests that the language of equality and human dignity, long invoked by Washington in international forums, may have been less a principled commitment than a convenient instrument of power.
That perception is reinforced by what Trump and his team now say about the world beyond America’s borders.
In his Jan. 21 address in Davos, Trump spoke with disarming candor about territorial acquisition and imperial expansion. Voicing nostalgia for colonialism, he said European empires had simply acquired “great vast wealth, great vast lands all over the world,” adding that “there’s nothing wrong with it.” This was a statement of worldview.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Feb. 14 address at the Munich Security Conference only sharpened the point. He praised Western colonialists for settling “new continents” and building “vast empires extending out across the globe,” lamenting what he called the “terminal decline” of those empires after World War II. The signal was unmistakable: The age of empire was not a moral tragedy but a civilizational achievement.
Different tones, same message: The past they praise rests on racial domination.
No mainstream Western leader has voiced such unvarnished neo-imperial yearning in decades. For European allies who have spent 80 years publicly renouncing colonialism, and for countries across the Global South that fought to escape it, the implications are jarring. When American leaders speak this way, they do more than offend; they delegitimize the very international order the U.S. claims to uphold.
Words are only part of the story. Under Trump, they are increasingly matched by actions that suggest a return to 19th-century imperial precedents. From renewed pressure for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal to open-ended military intervention in Venezuela and talk of redrawing borders or relocating populations, the administration has revived a logic more familiar to the age of empires than to the post-1945 international system.
The old Monroe Doctrine has been globalized into a claim that American power itself is legal authority. The capture of Venezuela’s president, the tightening of a blockade that has deepened Cuba’s humanitarian crisis, and the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader represent a pattern that erodes major principles of international law.
This worldview may strike its proponents as a restoration of strength. In reality, it is a confession of insecurity. Great powers confident in their legitimacy do not need to glorify conquest or invoke racial hierarchy; they rely instead on the willingness of others to follow their lead. That willingness is precisely what is now eroding.
The consequences are already visible. Allies hedge. Partners question U.S. commitments. Countries across the Global South, long lectured by Washington on democracy and human rights, now hear such rhetoric with growing skepticism. Rivals, from Beijing to Moscow, find it easier to portray the U.S. as hypocritical and self-serving.
None of this means that American decline is inevitable or irreversible. The U.S. has reinvented itself before. Its greatest strength has always been its capacity for self-correction. But renewal begins with recognition.
The tragedy is not merely that America’s image is being tarnished by signals of a retreat into racialized nationalism and nostalgia for empire. It is that the very qualities that once made U.S. leadership attractive are being dismantled by American hands themselves.
Credibility, once lost, is hard to regain. Trust, once broken, is not easily restored.
If the U.S. continues down this path, the Trump presidency will not merely mark a contentious chapter in domestic politics. It will be remembered as the moment when America forfeited the moral authority that sustained its global influence, thereby accelerating a relative decline that no amount of military or economic power can easily arrest.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive.
As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically.
Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach is turning it into its own worst enemy. Nowhere is this clearer than in its relationship with Japan, which it has pushed from wary partner to strategic counterweight over the past two decades.
More recently, China’s full-spectrum pressure campaign against Japan — intended to weaken Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi — has instead helped deliver her a landslide victory in the Feb. 8 election. Japanese voters appear to have grown weary of Beijing’s coercion. The resulting supermajority in the Diet gives Takaichi not only political authority, but also strategic latitude to harden Japan’s statecraft against China.
Japan’s election has thus delivered something Taiwan has not heard in a long time: genuinely good news.
For Taipei, Takaichi’s victory is not just another electoral outcome in a neighboring democracy. It marks a strategic inflection point for Taiwan’s security environment. For the first time in decades, Japan is moving decisively from strategic ambiguity toward strategic clarity — and that shift matters enormously for Taiwan’s future.
The first and most consequential change is political. Takaichi has been more explicit than any previous Japanese leader in stating that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan itself. Under Japan’s 2015 security legislation, that language is not rhetorical; it provides the legal basis for the Self-Defense Forces to exercise collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s survival.
In practical terms, this signals that Japan is politically and legally prepared to stand alongside the US if Taiwan is attacked.
For Taiwan, this reduces the most dangerous form of uncertainty — not whether China might act, but whether others would respond.
It may also explain Beijing’s sharp reaction. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (王毅) denounced Takaichi’s Taiwan position as a “challenge to China’s sovereignty.”
The second shift is military. Japan’s southwestern island chain, stretching from Kyushu to Yonaguni just 110 kilometers from Taiwan, is rapidly becoming a fortified defensive arc. Japanese missile batteries, air defense systems, electronic warfare units and surveillance networks are being deployed along this chain, transforming it from a symbolic “tripwire” into a credible counterstrike barrier. This significantly complicates any Chinese attempt to blockade Taiwan or project force across the Taiwan Strait.
Geography has always made Japan central to Taiwan’s security. Taiwan, in turn, underpins Japan’s own security as a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago. Under Takaichi, that geographic reality is finally being translated into operational strategy.
Third, Takaichi’s supermajority opens the door to constitutional reform. For decades, Article 9 has constrained Japan’s ability to act as a normal security provider.
With a two-thirds majority in the Lower House, Takaichi now has the leverage to formalize the status of the Self-Defense Forces and expand their operational latitude, even as she accelerates defense spending toward 2 percent of GDP.
A stronger Japan means a more secure Taiwan. Indeed, a Japan that is legally unshackled becomes a far more credible deterrent against Chinese expansionism — one that Beijing must factor into any calculus over Taiwan.
Japan now appears poised to move from reacting to Chinese military pressure to imposing tangible costs. Nowhere is this clearer than along the southwestern island chain, where Tokyo is building the capacity to deny access, complicate Chinese planning, and ensure that no coercive maritime gambit or fait accompli seizure of territory goes unanswered.
Fourth, and just as important, Tokyo has demonstrated that it will not be intimidated by China’s economic coercion, despite the costs.
Beijing attempted to influence Japan’s election by restricting seafood imports and Chinese tourism, tightening export controls on critical materials, and intensifying military pressure around Japan’s southwestern islands. The effort backfired. Japanese voters interpreted the pressure as bullying and responded by strengthening Takaichi’s mandate.
That outcome carries a powerful message for Taiwan: China’s economic leverage is not irresistible, and democratic societies can push back when they choose to do so.
Taken together, these developments amount to something Taiwan has long needed but rarely enjoyed: strategic clarity from its most important neighbor.
The benefits for Taipei are concrete. A Taiwan contingency is now explicitly linked to Japan’s own security. Intelligence-sharing is likely to deepen as Tokyo centralizes its intelligence apparatus. Economic ties may expand through a potential Taiwan-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, embedding Taiwan more firmly in trusted supply chains. And Japan’s easing of defense-export restrictions opens the door to quiet but meaningful industrial cooperation.
None of this means Taiwan’s challenges are over. Beijing will continue to apply pressure — diplomatic, economic and military. Japan’s constitutional reforms will likely face hurdles in the Upper House and in a national referendum. Ultimately, Taiwan’s own resilience remains the decisive factor in its future.
But geopolitics is rarely about perfect security; it is about relative advantage. Compared with a year ago, Taiwan’s strategic position is stronger. It now has a Japan that is more willing, more capable and more politically authorized to contribute to its defense. And the US has approved a record US$11.1 billion arms package to strengthen Taiwan’s deterrence against Chinese coercion.
In a region where bad news has become routine, that alone marks a meaningful shift.
For Taiwan, Japan’s election result is a reminder that the balance of power in Asia is not static and that democratic solidarity, when backed by political will, can still reshape the strategic landscape.
Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
Trump has already etched his name into the history books—not as a strategic innovator, but as a leader who turned American foreign policy into a vehicle for spectacle and coercion, mistaking shock for strategy. Rather than ‘Make America Great Again’, he is steadily diminishing his country’s power, leaving the US less trusted and less credible than at any point since the end of the Second World War.
Donald Trump’s second presidency marks a decisive shift in US statecraft: foreign policy as personal theatre, multilateralism displaced by a doctrine of calculated disruption, and the institutional order recast through a narrowly transactional ‘America First’ realism.
Moving beyond the improvisation of his first term, Trump’s second term is deliberately revisionist. His administration has upended foundational norms, including withdrawing the US from scores of international organisations and the Paris Climate Agreement. Nowhere is this “disruption as doctrine” approach clearer than in his treatment of sovereignty and territoriality—evident in recurring annexation threats towards Greenland and Canada, and in the articulation of a personalised “Donroe Doctrine”, an idiosyncratic evolution of the Monroe Doctrine.
On the economic front, Trump has weaponised trade as a tool of primary national power, with his tariffs spurring significant international volatility. Even after the US Supreme Court struck down many of those tariffs as illegal, Trump immediately responded by imposing a 15 per cent global import duty under a different national law.
His policies and actions in the security realm have triggered increasing international volatility and instability, including widening divisions within the Western bloc.
By mistaking disruption for strategy and bullying for leadership, Trump has made America appear more erratic and less dependable than at any time since 1945. The US can still project overwhelming force, but its ability to shape stable outcomes, build coalitions and lead by example is steadily eroding.
The Myth
Trump’s self-proclamation as a global peacemaker sits uneasily—indeed irreconcilably—with his record in office. Such is his reliance on militarised statecraft that he ordered more military strikes on countries in just the first year of his second presidency than the entire four-year term of his predecessor, Joe Biden.
In speeches, social-media posts and ceremonial initiatives, Trump has cast himself as the man who ended eight “unendable wars”, deserved the Nobel Peace Prize and restored American strength while avoiding costly “forever wars”. Yet the empirical record of his second presidency reveals something quite different: a sustained dependence on high-intensity military force across multiple theatres, a dramatic expansion of nuclear-weapons capabilities, and a foreign policy increasingly personalised, transactional and erratic.
This disjunction reflects a deeper doctrinal shift: Trump’s redefinition of peace itself. In his formulation, peace is not the product of diplomacy, compromise or durable political settlements; it is the abrupt cessation of violence through overwhelming, unilateral force—what his advisers describe as “peace through shock”.
The result is a foreign policy that claims the mantle of non-interventionism while normalising frequent, destructive military action. The long-term effect is to weaken American strategic credibility, erode international norms, and leave America less secure in a world already defined by sharpening great-power rivalry.
There is a growing gap between Trump’s words and actions. Take his National Security Strategy (NSS) that he released a little over three months ago.
At first glance, the NSS promises a restrained and pragmatic approach to US foreign policy. It criticises previous administrations for defining American interests so broadly that “almost no issue or endeavour is considered outside its scope,” and instead pledges a more focused conception of national interest. The document outlines four core principles: a narrowed definition of national interest, “Peace through Strength,” a “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism”, and “Flexible Realism”.
The language of non-interventionism is especially striking. Rooted rhetorically in the Declaration of Independence, the NSS asserts that all nations possess a “separate and equal station”, implying respect for sovereignty of other states and a high threshold for military action. It disavows ideological crusades and promises “peaceful commercial relations” without imposing social or political systems on others.
This is how that section reads in full: “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism—In the Declaration of Independence, America’s founders laid down a clear preference for non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations and made clear the basis: just as all human beings possess God-given equal natural rights, all nations are entitled by ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God’ to a ‘separate and equal station’ with respect to one another. For a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible. Yet this predisposition should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention.”
On paper, this suggests a break with the interventionist US habits of the post-Cold War era. In practice, however, the NSS embeds a paradox.
While professing a predisposition against intervention, it simultaneously calls for maintaining the world’s most powerful military, accelerating technological dominance and undertaking a sweeping nuclear modernisation programme. The document thus creates conceptual space for a foreign policy that claims restraint while preserving—and expanding—the capacity for aggressive action.
The operational reality of Trump’s second presidency exposes how hollow the claimed predisposition to non-interventionism has become. Rather than reducing the use of force, the administration has shifted towards a “shock and awe” model—favouring short, high-intensity operations instead of long-term operations that usually result in a military quagmire.
In Yemen, Trump’s Operation Rough Rider (March-May 2025) involved hundreds of strikes over a 53-day period, the most intense US bombing campaign in that country’s history.
In Iran, Operation Midnight Hammer deployed more than 100 aircraft and massive bunker-buster bombs against nuclear facilities, with the White House declaring the Iranian nuclear programme “obliterated”. On June 25, 2025, the White House posted on its website: “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been obliterated—and suggestions otherwise are fake news.” Yet, just months later, Trump is threatening to launch war on Iran if it does not abandon its nuclear programme.
In Venezuela, the US conducted a regime-change military operation early this year, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and gaining control of the world’s largest proven oil reserves. This operation, however, was framed not as war, but as a law-enforcement operation.
These headline operations were accompanied by intensified drone and air campaigns in Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, and the Caribbean, alongside the militarisation of the US southern border under a memorandum treating migration as an “invasion”. Data from conflict-monitoring organisations indicate that the US under Trump carried out more than 600 airstrikes in 2025 alone.
In ordering the Christmas Day strikes in Nigeria, Trump portrayed the bombings as necessary to protect Christians from ISIS attacks. Yet Sokoto state, where the US conducted the airstrikes, is largely Muslim, and the local Catholic bishop explicitly denied that Christians there were being systematically targeted. Nor is there any clear evidence that the insurgents operating in Sokoto are linked to ISIS.
The key innovation under Trump is not restraint but reconfiguration. Trump has replaced prolonged US occupations with repeated, high-tempo kinetic actions justified as counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics or protection of religious freedom.
Just the form of intervention has changed. The frequency, geographic reach and normalisation of intervention have only increased.
Manufacturing a Persona
Against the backdrop of expanded military activity, Trump has constructed an elaborate narrative of peace-making. At the United Nations (UN) in September 2025, he claimed to have ended seven “unendable wars”, later revising the number to eight. He practically crowned himself a global peacemaker at the UN, claiming “everyone” says he should win the Nobel Peace Prize. The boast was vintage Trump: detached from reality and delivered with a straight face.
He has created a personalised ‘Board of Peace’, launched at Davos earlier this year, over which he exercises unilateral control. The board is effectively a one-man show—Trump alone can veto decisions, set the agenda, invite or expel members and even anoint his own successor. Trump has even renamed the US Institute of Peace building after himself.
The cases he cites as evidence of his peace-making often collapse under scrutiny. Some of the alleged wars—such as tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia or Kosovo and Serbia—were not wars at all. Others, such as the Cambodia-Thailand dispute or the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, were addressed primarily through regional diplomacy or remain unresolved despite ceremonial agreements.
In still others—most notably Israel and Iran—Trump did not end a conflict but actively escalated it, joining hostilities through direct US military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The pattern is consistent: inflate the scale of a conflict, insert the US—and Trump personally—as the indispensable mediator, deploy coercive force and then declare victory regardless of the underlying political reality. Peace, in this narrative, becomes a branding exercise rather than a substantive outcome.
The human consequences of this doctrine are visible in Yemen and Gaza.
In Yemen, “Operation Rough Rider” achieved its immediate objective of halting Houthi attacks on shipping lanes but at significant humanitarian cost. Independent monitors estimate hundreds of civilian deaths in just 53 days, including strikes on critical infrastructure such as the Ras Isa port, a lifeline for humanitarian aid, and a migrant detention centre in Sa’ada that killed dozens of African migrants.
The Trump administration’s response has been to dismiss or deflect such reports, blaming “human shielding” by adversaries and measuring success solely by restored maritime security. The NSS’ supposed “high bar” for intervention thus becomes, in practice, a high tolerance for civilian harm.
In Gaza, Trump’s approach has been equally stark. His early proposal to “take over” and redevelop the enclave into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, initially tied to the displacement of millions of Palestinians, has evolved into a heavily securitised but still vague reconstruction plan overseen by his Board of Peace. Plans for a permanent US military presence in Gaza underscore the extent to which “peace” is conceived as managed pacification backed by force, rather than a political settlement grounded in rights and sovereignty.
The Nuclear Paradox
Perhaps the clearest illustration of the gap between rhetoric and reality lies in Trump’s nuclear policy. While presenting Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat justifying military strikes and coercive diplomacy, the US under Trump has allowed the last remaining US-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, New START, to lapse. At the same time, the US is expanding and modernising its own nuclear arsenal.
The Trump administration boldly frames this not as contradiction but as doctrine: “Peace through strength” in its purest form.
American nuclear weapons are portrayed as stabilising instruments wielded by a responsible democracy, while the same weapons in the hands of adversaries are deemed inherently illegitimate. The result is a shift away from the Cold War logic of mutual restraint towards a model of unilateral primacy.
This is reflected in America’s 2026 “nuclear modernization” budget, a cornerstone of the Trump administration’s “peace through strength” doctrine. The budget, which represents a historic financial commitment to the already-formidable US nuclear triad, totals approximately up to $90 billion in authorised spending—a 26 per cent increase over the Biden administration’s final request.
The consequences are predictable. By abandoning treaty constraints and investing tens of billions of dollars in new delivery systems, warhead and missile defences, the US encourages rival powers to expand their own arsenals.
Iran, meanwhile, has responded to last summer’s US strikes on its nuclear facilities by seeking to rebuild its programme in more hardened and secretive configurations, illustrating how tactical victories can generate long-term strategic instability.
Strategic Consequences
Beyond military actions and nuclear policy, Trump’s approach has reshaped the very process of American foreign policy. Diplomacy has become an extension of his personal brand, marked by spectacle, unpredictability and a preference for dramatic gestures over sustained engagement.
Major decisions—from bombing Iranian nuclear sites to proposing regime change—are often announced impulsively, with allies and even cabinet officials learning of them through social media.
Professional diplomats and intelligence officials are sidelined, eroding institutional expertise and continuity. Where foreign governments once relied on their intelligence services to understand American policy, they now simply monitor presidential social-media posts.
Trump’s excessive personalisation of policy breeds confusion and mistrust. Allies cannot be certain whether statements reflect official policy or personal impulse, while adversaries struggle to interpret whether threats are credible or performative.
The blurring of public policy and private gain, including the influence of Trump’s booming business ventures, further undermines the credibility of US decision-making. Trump’s personal wealth has risen on the back of cryptocurrency ventures and other deals, with mounting evidence that his family’s business empire is influencing decision‑making on sanctions, financial regulations, travel restrictions, and even choices of partner states.
The cumulative effect of these patterns is deeply corrosive for US foreign policy and long-term American strategic interests.
First, Trump’s redefinition of peace as “shock and awe without occupation” normalises frequent, highly destructive uses of force while devaluing diplomacy. This weakens international norms governing the use of force and exposes as hollow US claims to uphold international law and civilian protection.
Second, his militarised statecraft accelerates arms races, great-power rivalries and regional instability. The lapse of the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty, combined with expansive US nuclear modernisation and missile defence initiatives, incentivises rivals to expand their own weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities. The cycle of action and reaction increases the risk of miscalculation and escalation.
Third, Trump’s transactional and personalised diplomacy weakens alliances and partnerships as well as the US-led international order, which has traditionally helped amplify American power. Allies and strategic partners confronted with America’s unilateral actions and unpredictable policy shifts are more likely to hedge, pursue strategic autonomy or seek alternative partnerships. This is exactly what India is doing.
Fourth, the fusion of foreign policy with domestic political theatrics erodes the credibility of US commitments. When actions appear driven by personal branding or electoral considerations, both friends and adversaries are likely to discount American assurances and threats.
Finally, by mistaking disruption for strategy and coercion for leadership, Trump has made the US appear less reliable and less trustworthy.
Trump’s peacemaker narrative is not merely a matter of personal exaggeration. It reflects a deeper transformation in how American power is conceived and exercised. By redefining peace as the product of overwhelming force, he has blurred the line between war and diplomacy and normalised the routine use of violence.
The costs are already visible: destabilised regions, renewed arms races, strained alliances, and a global perception of the US as erratic and self-interested. In the long run, these trends threaten to leave America weaker, lonelier and less capable of shaping the new global order in ways that serve its interests.
Trump has already etched his name into the history books—not as a strategic innovator, but as a leader who turned American foreign policy into a vehicle for spectacle and coercion, mistaking shock for strategy. Rather than ‘Make America Great Again’, he is steadily diminishing his country’s power, leaving the US less trusted and less credible than at any point since the end of World War II.
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, right, shakes hands with Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, during a news conference at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, on March 2, 2026. Photo: Bloomberg
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to India is intended to close one of the most acrimonious diplomatic chapters between two major democracies in recent memory and inaugurate a more pragmatic, interest-driven partnership for an age of geopolitical uncertainty.
Rarely have Canada and India found themselves so publicly at odds as they did in 2023-24, when the relationship sank to its lowest point ever. Then-prime minister Justin Trudeau’s allegation of a potential link between the Indian government and the killing of a Sikh-Canadian on Canadian soil triggered a spiral of recriminations, expulsions, visa suspensions and nationalist outrage.
The dispute also exposed a deeper structural fault line: Canada’s permissive approach toward Sikh separatist activism versus India’s zero-tolerance view of Khalistan militancy. For New Delhi, the issue has not been merely diaspora politics but national security, shaped by the memory of the deadly 1985 Air India bombing by Canada-based Sikh terrorists. For Ottawa, the challenge has been to balance civil liberties with public safety in a diverse democracy.
Mr. Carney’s visit signals that both governments have decided the costs of continued estrangement are too high.
The visit’s strategic logic is rooted in a shared reassessment of the global order. Both Canada and India are hedging against the volatility of great-power rivalry. Mr. Carney’s emerging “middle-power” doctrine emphasizes building networks of trusted relationships beyond Washington’s orbit. India, for its part, has long sought diversified partnerships to avoid overdependence on any single pole.
In this sense, the visit is not just a bilateral reset but part of a broader pattern: a quiet consolidation among middle powers seeking resilience in a fragmenting world. Both Canada and India, though, are walking a tightrope. They want to diversify away from an unpredictable U.S. without triggering further retaliation from Washington.
At the heart of the visit lies a concrete economic agenda. The most eye-catching initiative is a 10-year, US$2.8-billion uranium supply agreement, which could be signed during Mr. Carney’s visit. For India, Canadian fuel offers a pathway to reduce reliance on both Russian imports and coal. For Canada, it secures a long-term market at a moment when Western demand is uncertain.
Canada, which sees more than 90per cent of its energy exports go to the U.S., is seeking to become a major oil and liquefied natural gas supplier to India, the world’s fastest-growing major energy consumer, with demand expected to double by 2045. India is already the world’s third-largestenergy consumer.
Alongside energy, the two sides are accelerating negotiations on a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), with a target of doubling bilateral trade to $70-billion in four years. The scope extends well beyond tariffs: services trade, digital commerce, labour mobility, agriculture and critical minerals are all on the table. A CEPA would anchor a supply-chain corridor linking Canada’s resource base with India’s manufacturing and technological capacity.
This economic agenda reflects a shared desire to “derisk” from China-centric supply chains without embracing full decoupling, and to hedge against shifting currents of U.S. policy.
Yet the economic reset cannot stand without a parallel security understanding. Both governments recognize that another crisis over extremism or sovereignty could derail the entire project.
In Canada, Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, would, if passed, criminalize the public display of terrorist symbols. It could signal to New Delhi that Canada is taking more seriously the issue of Sikh militancy.
At the same time, both countries are expected to revive and upgrade their Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, shifting toward real-time intelligence sharing and more streamlined extradition processes. India, for its part, is reaffirming respect for Canadian sovereignty after the controversies of 2023-24.
The aim is to create institutional “guardrails”: mechanisms that allow co-operation to continue even when sensitive issues arise.
Mr. Carney’s challenge, however, is as much domestic as diplomatic. Bill C-9 faces strong resistance from civil-liberties advocates, and parliamentary delays have already stalled its progress. Mr. Carney thus faces a delicate balancing act – demonstrating to India that Ottawa will act against extremist activity, while convincing Canadians he will not dilute constitutional freedoms or bow to external pressure.
More fundamentally, Mr. Carney’s India visit marks a transition from an emotionally charged relationship to a transactional one. The bitterness of the Trudeau era is being set aside in favour of a sober recognition of mutual interests.
If the uranium and hydrocarbon deals advance and CEPA negotiations stay on track, February, 2026, may be remembered as the moment Canada-India ties matured into a modern strategic partnership. For two pluralistic democracies navigating an uncertain century, this may prove to be the most sustainable foundation of all.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
The election marks the arrival of a Japan that will be more assertive, more strategically self-confident and less inclined to subordinate its interests to shifting currents of U.S. policy.
Japan’s Feb. 8 election was not merely an electoral landslide. It was a geopolitical turning point.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party secured a two-thirds supermajority — an outcome that finally gives Tokyo something it has lacked for decades: a political mandate to redefine its postwar identity and act as a proactive security power.
For Washington, this is both a gift and a challenge. The U.S. can now deepen collaboration with its most important and capable ally in Asia. Japan hosts the largest concentration of U.S. forces anywhere in the world. Its geographic position is uniquely strategic, and its naval and air capabilities are the most sophisticated among U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, with interoperability unmatched by any regional partner.
But the election also signals Japan’s strategic reawakening. It marks the arrival of a Japan that will be more assertive, more strategically self-confident and less inclined to subordinate its interests to shifting currents of U.S. policy. Tokyo is no longer content to be a U.S.-protected power. It intends to be a shaping power.
For almost eight decades, Japan operated within self-imposed limits — constitutional pacifism, restrained defense budgets and a preference for economic statecraft over hard power. Takaichi’s mandate alters that trajectory. With a supermajority, she can pursue constitutional revision, formalize the status of the Self-Defense Forces and accelerate defense spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product.
Japan is set to shift from merely reacting to Chinese military pressure to imposing costs for it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the southwestern island chain stretching toward Taiwan. Tokyo is building the capacity to deny access, complicate Chinese planning and ensure that no “fait accompli” seizure of territory or coercive maritime gambit goes unanswered.
For American strategists concerned about U.S. overreach, this is a structural upgrade to the regional balance. A Japan capable of defending its southwestern approaches will reduce the burden on U.S. forces while disrupting Chinese war-planning.
Beijing’s pressure campaign was meant to deter Japan’s rightward drift. Instead, it helped bring about Takaichi’s landslide. Chinese economic restrictions, maritime incursions and thinly veiled threats did not fracture Japanese politics; they consolidated it. Voters concluded that dependence invites coercion and that resilience requires strength.
Japan’s push to rewire supply chains toward India, Southeast Asia and trusted partners is not just industrial policy — it is counter-coercion doctrine.
Takaichi has described a Taiwan contingency as an “existential threat” to Japan. That language would once have been politically radioactive. Now it carries electoral legitimacy and, if sustained, will alter the military geometry of the Taiwan Strait. In a crisis, Japanese bases, surveillance networks and maritime forces would become integral to a U.S. response.
For the U.S., this reinforces a broader trend: Chinese pressure is accelerating, not halting, the formation of balancing coalitions. A stronger Japan becomes the anchor of that process in East Asia.
Takaichi’s strategy also involves alliance diversification. She is building stronger economic and defense links with Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and especially India, alongside the U.S. treaty alliance — insurance against volatility in American politics.
Japanese policymakers have drawn a sober conclusion: that resilience requires options. Fluctuating U.S. trade policy, tariff threats, periodic talk of retrenchment and transactional approaches to alliances have convinced many in Tokyo that Japan must insure itself against strategic volatility in Washington.
For the U.S., this is not a loss of influence but a redistribution of responsibility. A Japan that leads within the Quad, shapes regional trade architecture and invests in defense industrial cooperation strengthens a stable Indo-Pacific order — provided Washington treats Tokyo as a strategic partner rather than a junior ally.
Takaichi’s economic program — “Sanaenomics” — fuses industrial policy with national defense. Supply-chain resilience, semiconductor co-development, critical-mineral stockpiles and shipyard revitalization are designed to reduce Japan’s vulnerability to “weaponized interdependence.”
This aligns with Washington’s emphasis on economic security but also introduces potential friction. A more nationalist “Japan First” posture could collide with U.S. tariff policies or technology controls if not coordinated. The opportunity lies in building a shared defense-industrial ecosystem.
For years, American policymakers urged Japan to do more for its own defense. Takaichi’s victory answers that call.
But greater capability brings greater autonomy. Tokyo will expect a more important voice in alliance strategy — from Taiwan contingencies to regional trade architecture — and will not accept policies that expose it to coercion without consultation.
Alliances endure not because one side dominates, but because both sides see them as vehicles for advancing national strategy. A stronger Japan will strengthen the alliance if Washington treats Tokyo as a co-architect rather than a subordinate.
The most consequential implication of Japan’s election is regional. Across the Indo-Pacific, middle powers increasingly see a stronger Japan as a stabilizing “strategic ballast” amid uncertainty about both China’s trajectory and America’s staying power. Japan is reentering history as a security actor, not merely an economic one.
Washington should recognize what just happened. Japan did not simply elect a new government. It chose strategic normalization — deterrence over hesitation — and signaled that the era of passive alliance management is over.
For Washington, the message is clear: The most important geopolitical shift in Asia is not China’s rise alone, but Japan’s return. The alliance must evolve accordingly.
Trump might have done India a favor. By exposing the raw transactionalism at the core of his foreign policy, he has left no doubt that, under his leadership, the US is not a reliable strategic partner.
For over two decades, the United States has regarded India as a “natural partner” – a rising power whose geography, military capabilities, and democratic credentials made it indispensable to America’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific. Five successive US administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, invested heavily in strengthening that partnership, treating India not just as a market, but as a long-term strategic bet.
But the goodwill that the US built up with India over that period has been rapidly eroded since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency last year. Trump’s second presidency has brought repeated public insults and a bruising trade war, with the US using tariffs as tools of geopolitical coercion. The interim trade deal announced on February 2 may have halted the economic confrontation, but trust – the essential currency of any strategic partnership – is unlikely to be restored any time soon.
By reducing the effective US tariff burden on Indian goods from 50% to 18%, the newly announced deal will deliver short-term relief for India. But it comes with plenty of strings attached, including the requirement that India move toward near-zero tariffs on US industrial products and a wide range of agricultural goods. India’s decision to open its sensitive agricultural sector – the country’s largest employer – to a flood of imports from the US is already sparking a domestic backlash.
But that is not all. India has also agreed to purchase a whopping $500 billion worth of American goods over the next five years, and to replace discounted Russian oil with US energy at market prices, which also implies additional transport costs. Meanwhile, the US offered no binding commitments to India. This lopsided bargain looks nothing like a stable, reciprocal, rules-based trade partnership, and underscores how far US trade policy has drifted from World Trade Organization norms. It is probably best understood as a tactical de-escalation, not a strategic reconciliation.
The way the deal was announced reinforces this interpretation. Typically, bilateral agreements or joint statements are announced simultaneously in both capitals to signal equal partnership. The free-trade agreement India recently concluded with the European Union, which created a trade corridor encompassing roughly 25% of global GDP and one-third of world trade, was touted by both sides as the “mother of all deals.”
The US-India agreement, by contrast, was announced first by Trump, who portrayed it on his social-media platform as a favor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose “request” for an agreement Trump had granted “out of friendship and respect.” Days later, the White House released a “joint statement” outlining the terms of the agreement at 5:00 a.m. Indian Standard Time.
The Trump administration then added injury to insult, announcing a presidential executive order authorizing reimposition of punitive tariffs if the US deems India to have violated its commitment to halt all direct and indirect imports of Russian oil. By framing Indian energy imports as a US national-security issue, the administration has turned economic engagement into a compliance test. The message to India is unmistakable: autonomy will be tolerated only within US-approved limits.
India’s leaders have framed the agreement as a win, noting that India now faces lower tariffs than China or Vietnam. But this is a low bar for a relationship that successive US administrations described as “defining.” And they are probably well aware that Trump could still pull the rug out from under them. The arrangement’s details have not yet been finalized, and Trump has a long history of changing his mind, scrapping deals, and layering on new demands.
Whatever happens next, India will not quickly forget Trump’s past betrayals. Nor will it overlook his slights, such as branding India, whose GDP growth outpaces all other major economies, as a “dead economy” last July.
In a sense, Trump might have done India a favor. By exposing the raw transactionalism at the core of his foreign policy, he has left no doubt that, under his leadership, the US is not a reliable strategic partner. As a result, India’s government is committed to diversifying India’s economic relationships away from the US, as underscored by its FTAs with the EU and the United Kingdom – an effort that will likely continue, regardless of the new trade agreement with the US.
Markets, too, are unlikely to put too much faith in the US. News of the trade deal did trigger a stock-market rally in India, but the gains are likely to be short-lived.
Strategic partnerships are sustained not by tariffs and threats, but by predictability, mutual respect, and restraint – qualities that have been conspicuously absent from Trump’s presidency. The US should beware. Whatever short-term concessions Trump secures through bullying and coercion will be dwarfed by the long-term costs of destabilizing a partnership that, as previous administrations recognized, is vital to American interests in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
The “rules-based international order” was never a set of neutral rules. It was a story the U.S. told — about itself, its power and its right to bend norms when convenient.
In January, that story finally collapsed when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called that order what many governments have long known it to be: a useful “fiction,” sustained less by universal law than by American power and selective enforcement.
For decades, when U.S. officials invoked a “rules-based international order,” they were not describing universal principles, but defending a flexible set of rules largely devised in Washington and adjusted whenever American interests required it. Now, as President Trump openly revives territorial expansion and economic coercion as tools of U.S. statecraft, that phrase no longer commands belief, even among America’s closest allies.
Carney, speaking in Davos, did what no major Western leader had previously dared to do: He called the bluff. The “rules-based order,” Carney said, was a convenient illusion — one the West itself knew was only partially true, tolerated for as long as U.S. hegemony delivered enough public goods to make the hypocrisy worthwhile. That bargain, he concluded, no longer works.
Carney’s candor marks a watershed. By naming the fiction out loud, he validated a critique long voiced by the Global South and quietly acknowledged across Western capitals. More importantly, he signaled that the era of polite silence surrounding American exceptionalism has ended.
Any international order must, by definition, rest on rules. Modern global life — trade, finance, aviation, maritime navigation — cannot function without shared norms and procedures. The real question has never been whether rules matter, but which rules matter most, and to whom they apply.
For many Western governments, the core norm underpinning the international order is the prohibition on territorial conquest. That is why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was framed as a civilizational rupture. As then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, the war challenged the principle that borders cannot be changed by force.
International law is indeed clear on this point: the U.N. Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of states, and the Geneva Conventions forbid the demographic transformation of occupied territories.
Yet the selective invocation of this norm has gradually eroded its credibility. The U.S. has repeatedly violated the territorial integrity of other states — not by annexing land, but by overthrowing governments and installing new ones that remain formally sovereign while substantively dependent on Washington. This maneuver allows Washington to deny conquest while achieving many of its effects.
Nor is Ukraine’s defense best understood as a pure defense of the norm against conquest. Great powers rarely act primarily to uphold norms. They intervene to prevent adverse shifts in the balance of power. The rallying of NATO behind Ukraine may have aligned with international law, but it was driven at least as much by strategic calculation as by legal fidelity.
The fiction of moral clarity was further strained by the rhetoric that cast the conflict as a battle between democracy and autocracy. Under Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine has lurched toward authoritarianism. As in past U.S. interventions, “fighting for freedom” has remained a narrative convenience rather than a consistent standard.
If the Biden administration strained the fiction, Trump has shattered it. Trump has openly re-embraced territorial expansion as a legitimate tool of statecraft. His second term has featured military intervention in Venezuela, renewed demands for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal, and an unapologetic revival of “Manifest Destiny.” Unlike his predecessors, Trump does not bother cloaking ambition in the language of universalism. He says the quiet part out loud.
Trump is not unique in expanding American power; because of his predecessors’ global expansion, there are about 750 U.S. military bases today in at least 80 countries. What is new is the abandonment of euphemism. By openly praising 19th-century imperial precedents and refusing to rule out coercion even against allies, Trump has made it impossible to pretend that the U.S. is merely the custodian of a rules-based order.
Norms survive not on consistency alone but on credibility. When enforcement is asymmetric, rules become tools rather than constraints. The same applies to the norm of non-interference, which has never prevented cyber operations, sanctions, covert actions or targeted killings. No major power — whether the U.S., Russia or China — fully abides by it. What differs is how honestly that reality is acknowledged.
Carney’s comments matter precisely because they strip away the last vestiges of moral theater. By admitting that Western allies knowingly participated in a ritualized fiction, he reframed the present moment not as a transition, but as a “rupture.” The old bargain — accept U.S. primacy in exchange for stability and public goods — is unraveling. What replaces it will be messier and more transactional.
The “rules-based order” endured not because it was universally respected, but because it was useful — and because American power made it impolite to ask questions. With that politeness gone, what remains is not the collapse of order, but the collapse of pretense. This may allow for a more honest reckoning with power, interest and responsibility.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House, many foreign governments assumed his second term would simply mirror the first—more noise, more tariffs, more brash moves, but no fundamental break. They misjudged him. In its first year itself, Trump’s second presidency has redefined the norms, institutions and expectations that have governed international politics since the end of the Cold War.
What once looked like impulsive theatre has hardened into a governing philosophy. Unpredictability is no longer a quirk of Trump’s personality; it is a strategic tool he deploys openly. Norm violations are no longer tactical deviations; they have become a defining feature of American policy.
The result is a more transactional, coercive and personalized global order. In this order, power is asserted directly, institutions are circumvented or stripped of authority, and stability is offered only in exchange for submission.
More fundamentally, Trump is not simply eroding the international order. He is attempting to construct an alternative in its place.
From disruption to doctrine
During Trump’s first term, allies and adversaries alike learned to discount much of what he said. Tweets contradicted policy. Threats were issued and withdrawn. In his second term, however, the pattern has changed. Disruption itself has become US doctrine. His administration now treats uncertainty not as a risk to be managed, but as leverage to be exploited.
This shift is visible across domains. Trade policy is no longer governed primarily by economic logic but wielded as an instrument of political coercion. Diplomacy is no longer mediated through institutions but centralized in the president himself—his whims and fancies, and his efforts to expand an already-sprawling personal business empire. Military power is no longer restrained by concerns of legitimacy but openly deployed to assert control over other states’ resources and territory. Soft power—the quiet, accumulative influence of norms, culture and credibility—has been dismissed as weakness.
The pattern is unmistakable. Trump no longer seeks to lead the international system; he seeks to dominate it, transaction by transaction, deal by deal.
Nowhere is this shift clearer than in trade. By weaponizing tariffs, Trump has ushered in an era of what Western executives now call “tariff roulette.”
Tariffs have been moved from the margins of economic policy to the centre of American statecraft. On April 2, 2025—branded by the White House as “Liberation Day”—he invoked America’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose a universal 10% tariff on all imports. This was not a negotiating tactic aimed at reforming rules; it was a unilateral assertion of power.
Targeted tariffs have gone even further. These measures are not calibrated responses to unfair trade practices but punitive tools meant to force capitulation. Worse still, they are unpredictable. Announcements are frequently made with little warning, often through social media, leaving governments and firms scrambling to respond.
Months after concluding a trade agreement with South Korea, Trump abruptly raised US tariffs on South Korean goods from 15% to 25%. His tariffs on India now exceed even those imposed on China, America’s principal strategic rival. Agreements offer no insulation; strategic partnerships provide no security.
The economic effects are already evident in the US. Business confidence has been shaken by the inability to plan investment or supply chains amid sudden policy reversals. Inflationary pressures have intensified, with US personal consumption expenditures projected to rise by more than three per cent. Confronted with policy-driven volatility, the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates on hold to avoid amplifying uncertainty.
The deeper damage, however, is systemic. The global trading system depends less on low tariffs than on credible commitments. Trump has shattered the expectation that the US will adhere to predictable, norms-based processes. In its place, he has delivered a stark message: stability is available only through direct, bilateral concessions to Washington. Multilateral rules no longer protect; they merely delay punishment.
Rules give way to raw power
If weaponized trade represents the economic pillar of Trump’s new order, the creation of the “Board for Peace” is its institutional centrepiece. Launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the Board is presented as a bold alternative to what Trump calls the United Nations’ “permanent failure” to resolve modern conflicts.
The contrast could not be sharper. The UN, for all its flaws, derives legitimacy from process: universal membership, formal rules and a (sometimes paralyzing) commitment to sovereignty and law. The Board for Peace rejects this model entirely. Membership is selective, reportedly contingent on substantial financial contributions. Decision-making authority is centralized. Trump himself holds absolute veto power over its agenda, decisions and membership—and even the designation of his successor. In other words, the Board is effectively a one-man show.
What is being set up is privatized global governance. Conflict resolution becomes a pay-to-play enterprise, overseen by personal authority. Trump has said the Board will “work with” the UN. Yet he has also openly suggested that it could replace it. In practice, the Board is already a mechanism to bypass international law rather than enforce it.
Actions speak louder than words.When Trump arbitrarily rescinded Canada’s invitation to join the Board soon after its launch, he revealed its true nature: not a forum governed by rules, but a court governed by favour. The message to the world is that peace is no longer a collective good. It is a commodity, dispensed at the discretion of Washington.
Another dramatic shift in Trump’s second term has occurred in the Western Hemisphere. Long portrayed as an isolationist, Trump has in fact embraced a form of aggressive expansionism. The US is no longer merely asserting influence in the Americas; it is asserting ownership.
On January 3, American forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by carrying out the first bombing of a South American capital in modern history. Trump subsequently declared that the US would “run the country and take its oil.” The statement was not a gaffe. It was a declaration of intent that is now being implemented. Proceeds from selling stolen oil are being deposited in a US bank account in Qatar, to be spent without US congressional approval. Venezuelan oil worth $500 million has already been sold, according to the White House.
The military action against Venezuela followed America’s large-scale naval deployments in the Caribbean, its unilateral renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” and renewed discussions about annexing Greenland and reasserting direct control over the Panama Canal. These moves reflect a coherent worldview of the Trump administration: North and South Americas constitute a privileged zone of US control.
Trump has revived the Monroe Doctrine not as a warning to external powers, but as a license for military intervention or political interference in other nations’ domestic affairs. Sovereignty, in this framework, belongs not to states but to those strong enough to enforce it. The language of partnership has been replaced by the language of possession.
As hard power has been elevated, US soft power has been systematically dismantled. Funding for USAID has been slashed. Voice of America has been effectively shuttered. Cultural diplomacy has withered.
Soft power does not coerce, but it shapes preferences. It reduces the cost of leadership by making influence appear legitimate. The Trump administration, however, does not regard soft power as an asset.
The US withdrawal from the World Health Organization in January is emblematic. For decades, global health was one domain in which US leadership was uncontested. That leadership is now gone, surrendered not after debate, but by presidential decree.
America’s relations with Europe have also deteriorated sharply. The 2025 US National Security Strategy describes Europe as a victim of “civilizational erasure” and calls for alignment with “patriotic” movements there rather than mainstream governments. Such ideological interference signals that, even in the Western bloc, shared values no longer bind. What matters is ideological affinity and transactional utility.
A world remade
Taken together, these shifts amount to more than a change in tone. They represent a transformation in how power is exercised and justified. Trump’s second term has accelerated the erosion of an international system built on norms, institutions and predictability. In fact, he has stepped up efforts to replace it with one organized around coercion, personal authority and short-term gain.
In effect, Trump has not merely taken the world by storm; he is reshaping the environment in which global politics operates. And unlike the social-media posts that signal these changes, the consequences of his reshaping of international relations will endure.
It is against this backdrop that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney became the star at this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos with his remarkable candour in exposing longstanding Western hypocrisy and describing what a Trump-reshaped world meant.
Delivering a prepared speech, Carney declared, “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
The plain fact is that the new, Trump-driven order is not stable. It invites emulation by other strongmen. It encourages pre-emptive defiance by smaller states. It fragments global cooperation into spheres of influence governed by fear rather than trust. Yet it is coherent. And that coherence is precisely what makes it dangerous.
The most consequential legacy of Trump’s second term may not be the policies he enacts, but the precedents he sets. Even if a future US administration seeks to restore the old order, it will confront a world that has already adapted to its absence. Once credibility is lost, it cannot simply be reclaimed by presidential proclamation.
India as the pivotal swing state
No country is more exposed to—or more consequential for—the world Trump is remaking than India. As the world’s largest democracy, its fastest-growing major economy, and a central node in Indo-Pacific strategy, India now finds itself cast not as a partner in a US-led order, but as a swing state in a coercive, transactional system.
Trump’s second term presents India with a paradox. On one hand, Washington sees New Delhi as indispensable to balancing China. On the other, it treats India less as a strategic partner than as a negotiable asset—subject to tariffs, pressures and episodic favours. The result is a relationship marked by simultaneous courtship and coercion.
Trade policy illustrates the dilemma starkly. India has sought deeper economic integration with the US but instead it has faced some of the steepest tariffs imposed by the Trump administration—higher even than those levied on China. Market access is dangled not through long-term accords, but through ad hoc bargaining. Stability in the bilateral relationship is conditional.
Strategically, India is being pulled into a vision of order that sits uneasily with its own traditions. Trump’s disdain for multilateral institutions and his open embrace of unilateral force clash with India’s longstanding emphasis on strategic autonomy and international law. The creation of new international bodies such as the “Board for Peace,” governed by personal veto rather than collective legitimacy, places India in an awkward position: participation may offer influence, but at the cost of endorsing a precedent that weakens the very norms India has relied upon as a post-colonial power.
There is also a deeper reputational risk. As Trump reframes global politics as a contest among civilizational strongmen, democracies are valued less for their institutions than for their utility. India is courted not as a democracy, but as a counterweight. This instrumentalization erodes the moral capital that once distinguished democratic alignment from mere alliance.
Trump’s second term is also reshaping the triangular dynamic among China, India and the US—a strategic triangle that is central to Indian interests. Washington now frames its India policy almost exclusively through the prism of countering Beijing, while simultaneously undermining the norms and institutions that once sought to constrain Chinese power. The contradiction is stark: the US asks India to assist American strategy in Asia even as it legitimizes unilateral pressures on New Delhi to compel shifts in trade, energy and strategic policies.
For China, Trump’s unilateralism is an opportunity to step up its own coercive and expansionist policies, especially against its neighbours, including India. It is also an opportunity for China to quietly expand its influence in institutions the US has vacated.
For India, the triangle is more perilous. It faces sustained pressures from China along the Himalayas and via surrogate Pakistan, yet it is being asked by Washington to align with an American strategy that normalizes spheres of influence and transactional dominance. In such a world, today’s partner can become tomorrow’s pressure point.
The erosion of a norms-based order challenges all middle powers like India that rely on predictability to balance asymmetry. As China’s immediate neighbour, India’s challenge is also to navigate this triangle without becoming locked into a logic where raw power becomes the only currency that matters.
India is not without agency. Precisely because Trump’s world is transactional, India’s choices carry outsized weight. Accommodation would signal that even the world’s largest democracy and most-populous country sees no alternative to coercive bilateralism. Resistance—through diversification of partnerships, renewed investment in multilateral forums, and strategic patience—would suggest that the erosion of the old order is not yet complete.
More broadly, Trump has made one reality unmistakably clear: the post-World War II international order is no longer being quietly eroded; it is being openly displaced. Norms are giving way to deals. Institutions are yielding to personalities. Predictability is being replaced by leverage. This is a structural shift, which could gain permanence.
In this emerging order, the world’s future direction will not be determined solely by Washington or Beijing. It will also be shaped by the choices of key states that still retain strategic autonomy. Among them, none matters more than India.
India’s response to Trump’s world will signal whether the country that is home to 18% of the global population believes that power without restraint is inevitable—or whether it still sees value in preserving norms that protect the weak from the strong. Alignment driven purely by fear or expediency would accelerate the very transformation that leaves all democracies more vulnerable. Strategic patience, diversification and selective resistance are likely to slow it.
Whether the 21st century tilts decisively toward coercion or retains space for constraint and norms may well depend on middle powers like India. India is no longer merely rising. It is deciding—by its economic and strategic partnerships and policy choices alike—what kind of world will rise with it.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books.
For all Donald Trump’s talk about security, he proves far more interested in lining his own pockets. No country that hosts a major Trump-branded property or strikes a high-profile business deal with a member of Trump’s inner circle – including some with well-documented ties to global terrorism – faces US travel restrictions.
Last month, US President Donald Trump banned or severely restricted nationals of 20 additional countries from entering the United States, expanding the entry restrictions he put in place in June, supposedly to mitigate “national security and public safety threats.” But a cursory glance at the list of targeted countries makes clear that this is just another case of ethnonationalist politics dressed up as an anti-terrorism measure.
Many of the countries Trump targeted in 2025 – including Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Haiti, Laos, Malawi, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – have virtually no history of exporting transnational terrorism. But a large share of them – 16 out of the 20 announced last month and 26 of the 39targeted in 2025 – are in Africa. The obvious conclusion, especially in light of Trump’s wider agenda and rhetoric, is that racial bias is informing US policy, much as religious bias guided his first administration’s 2017 restrictions on travel and resettlement from seven Muslim-majority countries.
To be sure, US officials say their decisions reflect “demonstrated, persistent, and severe deficiencies in screening, vetting, and information-sharing,” as well as criteria like visa-overstay rates and even refusal to accept US deportation flights. But these justifications are more improvised than airtight. For example, as the American Immigration Council observes, the Trump administration is using non-immigrant overstay rates to justify bans on immigrant visas.
Moreover, much like Trump’s tariffs, the criteria are being selectively applied, with some countries, such as Egypt and Kuwait, facing no new restrictions, despite high overstay rates, documented information-sharing, and vetting deficiencies. Even countries with longstanding links to global jihadism, such as Pakistan and Qatar, are being spared, despite Trump’s claim to be motivated by national-security considerations. Saudi Arabia belongs to both groups, yet it has never been targeted by Trump.
Some of these privileged countries are almost certainly dangerous. What they have in common is not that they are safe, but that they are useful. Countries like Egypt and Iraq are considered strategically indispensable. Saudi Arabia is not only a key US defense partner; it is, like Qatar, a major investor in the US – and in the investment firm of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Pakistan signed a major investment deal with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm majority-owned by the Trump family, as part of its aggressive courtship of the US administration. It’s a strategy that never fails to pay off: No country that hosts a major Trump-branded property or has struck a high-profile business deal with a member of Trump’s inner circle faces US travel restrictions.
A telling example of this pattern is that while the Trump administration tightened restrictions on many countries, it lifted its pre-existing ban on non-immigrant visas for Turkmenistan, which has supposedly made “significant progress in improving its identity-management and information-sharing procedures.” Conspicuously, the decision came just a few weeks after the reclusive, gas-rich country agreed to cooperate with the US on energy and critical minerals, and to consider granting preferential treatment to US firms.
This lesson is clear: countries that have strong personal ties to the Trump administration or lucrative business relationships with his family and cronies receive favorable treatment. The boundary between US public office and private gain has never been so porous, with Trump’s business empire expanding rapidly since his return to the presidency.
The result is absurd. A citizen of Burkina Faso, a country with no history of threatening US security, is barred from entering the country, but a national of Bangladesh, which is beset by Islamist violence and anti-American extremism, is not. This incongruity undermines the credibility of US diplomacy and counterterrorism efforts, as it sends a dangerous message to states that sponsor or tolerate extremism: accountability is negotiable.
If Trump actually wanted to protect the US from terrorism, he would pursue a strategy based on credible intelligence and consistent standards. He would recognize that international terrorism is not confined to weak or isolated states; on the contrary, some of its most prolific enablers are regional powers. And he would demonstrate a willingness to confront US partners and adversaries alike.
Unfortunately, for all of Trump’s talk about security, he has proven far more interested in lining his own pockets. His latest travel restrictions are a case study in how the language of national security can be repurposed for coercive diplomacy and private gain.
In a sense, this was the natural evolution of the “America First” ethos. The concept was always intended to justify a transactional approach to international engagement. But during Trump’s second presidency, it has ascended to a higher level of cynicism. Now, those who fail to produce adequate offerings for Trump are punished, while those who prove themselves useful to him can act virtually with impunity – US national security be damned.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
India has long prided itself on charting an independent course in world affairs — cultivating friendships without dependence and partnerships without formal alliances. For years, that posture seemed not only principled but effective.
A nonaligned India enjoyed unusually warm ties across rival power centers. Some American strategists even described India as the ultimate “swing state” in an emerging multipolar order, capable of tilting the global balance through its choices.
Yet 2025 will be remembered as the year that exposed the fragility of these assumptions. A succession of external shocks revealed structural weaknesses in Indian foreign policy and forced New Delhi into increasingly uncomfortable strategic corners. The cumulative effect was not a single diplomatic failure but a broader loss of strategic room for maneuver.
The most jarring shock came from Washington. Under President Donald Trump’s second-term administration, U.S. policy toward a rising India turned overtly punitive. The imposition of 50% tariffs on Indian exports was more than a trade dispute; it was a political signal that the world’s largest democracy was now viewed less as a strategic partner and more as an economic rival to be squeezed.
This shift was underscored by the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy, which — unlike its 2017 predecessor — barely mentions India or the Quad and frames the relationship in narrowly transactional terms of “improving commercial relations.”
More galling for New Delhi was the document’s claim that Washington had “mediated” the May 2025 India-Pakistan ceasefire — an assertion India has vehemently rejected. For a country that has invested years in projecting itself as a net security provider and responsible regional power, the implication that it required American mediation was diplomatically humiliating.
The chill in ties was also visible at the personal level. Prime Minister Narendra Modi skipped the United Nations General Assembly and ASEAN summits, reportedly to avoid an awkward encounter with Trump, symbolizing how thoroughly the bonhomie between the two had evaporated. While the Trump administration has shown similar brusqueness toward America’s traditional allies, from Germany to Japan, the sting was sharper for India, which had grown accustomed to steadily deepening strategic ties with Washington.
If relations with the U.S. froze, India’s immediate neighborhood grew markedly colder.
For decades, New Delhi assumed that its surrounding region, though perpetually turbulent, could be managed through sustained engagement and economic outreach. In 2025, that assumption collapsed.
The most dramatic blow came with the announcement of a Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defense Pact declaring that “aggression against one is aggression against both.” For over a decade, Modi had invested heavily in cultivating Saudi Arabia as a strategic partner. The pact revealed the limits of that courtship and underscored Riyadh’s enduring security affinity with Islamabad.
At the same time, India’s own retaliatory military response to the Pahalgam terror attack ended in a ceasefire after merely three days, just as Indian forces appeared to have gained the upper hand. The abrupt halt highlighted how India’s escalation dominance is now constrained by shifting great-power calculations, narrowing its options in a crisis.
The sense of encirclement was compounded by its lingering border tensions with China, political turbulence in Nepal and Bangladesh’s slide into Islamist chaos. Rather than projecting confidence as a regional stabilizer, India in 2025 often appeared reactive, struggling to keep pace with fast-moving developments in its own backyard.
Adding to these pressures was the reemergence of a familiar and uncomfortable pattern: the U.S.-Pakistan security relationship. After two decades of Indian diplomatic efforts to isolate Pakistan internationally over its nexus with terrorist groups, New Delhi watched as Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief and revived a transactional partnership with Islamabad — highlighted by the Trump family’s lucrative cryptocurrency deal.
Perhaps most troubling was not any single diplomatic setback, but the muted domestic response to this cascade of reverses. A year marked by serious foreign-policy shocks generated surprisingly little introspection within India’s strategic community or political class.
Part of the explanation lay in New Delhi’s tendency to reframe setbacks as strategy. India’s renewed outreach to Russia and tentative engagement with its principal rival, China, were presented as evidence of successful “multi-alignment.” In reality, the effort to mend fences with China was less a strategic choice than a compelled response to Western pressure. The rhetoric of strategic autonomy thus obscured a year in which India exercised less agency, not more.
A measure of hubris compounded the problem. Growing instability in India’s neighborhood exposed an inflated sense of New Delhi’s ability to shape political outcomes beyond its borders. Influence was assumed to be enduring when, in fact, it proved fragile.
If 2025 was the year of shocks, 2026 will be the year of hard decisions. India can no longer afford reactive diplomacy cloaked in reassuring slogans.
The relationship with the U.S., despite its deterioration, remains vital to India’s interests. A limited trade deal is likely, even as Indian officials insist they will not negotiate “with a gun to our head.” In reality, New Delhi already finds itself doing precisely that.
The danger is that U.S. economic coercion will extract significant concessions from India without delivering genuine strategic reassurance in return. India has now opened up its commercial nuclear power sector to private companies, including from abroad, and raised foreign direct investment in the insurance sector to 100% from 74%.
The era of lofty talk about U.S.-Indian strategic convergence has given way to cold commercial bargaining, a reality India must confront with clear-eyed pragmatism rather than wounded indignation.
India’s assumption of the BRICS presidency in 2026 will further test its diplomatic agility. Leading a grouping increasingly viewed by the Trump team as hostile will require high-wire diplomacy. New Delhi will seek to champion the Global South without endorsing the overtly anti-Western rhetoric of fellow-members China and Russia — a balance that will be difficult to sustain amid intensifying great-power rivalry.
The strategic landscape facing India has shifted decisively. The world has changed faster than India’s foreign-policy machinery has adapted.
The 2025 shocks serve as a warning to India that, in 2026, it should abandon complacency, question its own assumptions, and return to the principles that once underpinned its diplomatic success: realism over rhetoric, flexibility over dogma, and strategy grounded in hard choices rather than comforting narratives.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
Indian President Droupadi Murmu walks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi on Dec. 5. © Reuters
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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