By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

The U.S. has carried out scores of covert and overt regime-change operations since the last century. Scholarly consensus is clear: such interventions rarely advance U.S. interests and usually produce unintended consequences that recoil on America itself.

Yet President Trump’s administration is engaged in a barely disguised effort to topple President Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela.

The dissonance between Trump’s rhetoric and policy could not be starker. He has repeatedly denounced decades of U.S. intervention abroad, especially military-backed attempts at regime change and “nation-building.” After his 2016 victory, he declared: “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.”

But in contrast to this “America First” non-interventionist pose, Trump’s approach to Venezuela has been one of the most sustained U.S. campaigns for regime overthrow in recent memory. His strategy has included crippling sanctions, narcoterrorism indictments against Maduro and his associates, and naval deployments under the fig leaf of an anti-narcotics operation.

In recent weeks, after ordering strikes on Venezuelan boats that killed at least 21 people, Trump dispatched warships, surveillance planes and even an attack submarine — a show of force calculated to weaken and ultimately topple Maduro.

Such adventurism clashes with Trump’s latest bid to crown himself a global peacemaker. At the United Nations, he claimed he had “ended seven un-endable wars” and boasted “everyone” wanted him to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The problem is that some of the seven “wars” never existed, others remain unresolved, and in one case (the Israel-Iran conflict) Trump joined the fight by ordering U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. In his telling, this was peace by another name.

In 2023, Trump thundered, “Either the Deep State destroys America or we destroy the Deep State.” Yet since returning to the White House, he has often acted as executor of the very Deep State agenda he rails against. His distinction seems to be that the Deep State should confine itself to foreign entanglements while steering clear of domestic politics.

Trump’s Venezuela gambit ignores the long trail of regime-change debacles, from Guatemala and Chile to Afghanistan and Libya. Libya, since the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi, remains a a failed state. The roots of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution can be traced to the 1953 CIA-led Operation Ajax, which ousted a democratically elected prime minister and installed the Shah’s dictatorship.

Similarly, U.S. involvement in the 1973 Chilean coup achieved the goal of removing a socialist president but at the cost of propping up Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. The coup stained America’s reputation and left scars that still shape Chilean politics.

Even failed regime-change efforts have produced blowback. Violent jihadism in Syria was fueled by a multiyear CIA program — the second largest in its history after the 1980s Afghan campaign — to topple Bashar al-Assad. Launched in 2012 under Barack Obama, the $1 billion project trained and armed anti-Assad rebels, inadvertently boosting jihadist forces and helping spawn the Islamic State. Trump himself shut it down in 2017, acknowledging that U.S.-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda, which had emerged from CIA-trained Afghan “mujahideen.” 

The destabilization of Libya, Syria and Iraq fueled a refugee influx into Europe — 1.1 million into Germany alone in 2015. That wave, in turn, stoked radical Islamism across Europe, with terror attacks in Munich, Nice, Brussels and Paris.

Most recently, following Assad’s downfall last December, Trump embraced Syria’s new president — a former jihadist warlord with al-Qaeda roots whose regime has intensified sectarian violence against non-Sunni minorities. When terrorists become American assets, America’s moral authority is collateral damage.

The history of U.S. regime-change operations reveals three recurring outcomes. First, regime replacement usually yields civil war, prolonged insurgency or outright state collapse. Second, interventions more often install authoritarian rule than foster democracy. Third, interference breeds resentment, undermines U.S. credibility as a defender of democracy and galvanizes extremist movements.

Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, which helps explain Trump’s zeal for regime change there. U.S. oil sanctions are designed to choke off Maduro’s main source of revenue and force his ouster. But they have created a severe humanitarian crisis, fueling Latin America’s largest refugee exodus in history and straining Venezuela’s neighbors, especially Colombia and Peru.

Trump has brushed aside both the human suffering and the sobering lessons of past adventures. Oil, not democracy, is the real prize he seeks in Venezuela.

By personalizing foreign policy to the point where major decisions hinge on impulse rather than consultation with national security professionals, Trump has heightened the risk of miscalculation. His Venezuela gambit may yet produce the same blowback that has defined so many regime-change campaigns — leaving the U.S. weaker, not stronger, in Latin America and beyond.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

It takes a special kind of genius to end wars that never started. Trump has achieved what no military general in history ever managed: ending wars that never began. No shots fired, no armies on the march — yet Trump claims three historic triumphs

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

GENEVA – “Everyone says that I should get a Nobel Peace Prize,” US President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly this week, because “I ended seven un-endable wars in seven months.” The boast was classic Trump: extravagantly formulated, unironically delivered, and patently false.

A recent poll indicates that only 22% of US adults believe that Trump deserves the Nobel Prize – a far cry from “everyone” – with 76% of respondents stating that he does not deserve it. Perhaps this reflects the fact that Trump has not ended seven wars. Arguably, he has not even ended one.

Some of Trump’s claims were pure fiction. For example, he took credit for ending a war between Egypt and Ethiopia. But, although bilateral tensions over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam have simmered for years, they have never boiled over into war. Likewise, Trump claimed to have ended a nonexistent war between Kosovo and Serbia. Despite considerable hostility – and a history of violent clashes – the two countries have not been at war since the 1990s. No war is easier to end than one that has never started.

Perhaps Trump’s most risible invention was the war – “a bad one” – between Armenia and Cambodia, countries located over 4,000 miles (6,500 kilometers) apart that have never had any conflict whatsoever. Armenia did clash with neighboring Azerbaijan this year, and Trump convinced both countries’ leaders to sign a joint declaration aimed at ending their decades-long conflict. But progress on implementing that agreement has stalled, and the accord is in danger of unraveling. That Trump would consider this conflict “ended” reveals the depth of his ignorance about peacemaking.

The same goes for the war between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Trump does have a set piece to point to: a “wonderful” US-mediated deal. But while the war may have ended on paper, deadly clashes continue.

As for Cambodia, it engaged in skirmishes with its neighbor Thailand in July over their contested border. But Trump’s attempts at economic coercion did little to defuse the crisis. What brought the fighting to an end was the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ diplomacy, with this year’s ASEAN chair, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, hosting the Cambodian and Thai leaders for face-to-face talks in Kuala Lumpur. While the underlying border dispute, centered largely on ownership and control of ancient Hindu temples, remains unresolved, the “immediate and unconditional” ceasefire that Anwar brokered halted the violence.

This is not the only example of Trump taking credit for others’ foreign-policy acumen. After Pakistan-backed terrorists massacred Indian tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir in April, India took decisive and carefully calibrated retaliatory action, launching military strikes on Pakistani terror camps. It was this show of force that made Pakistan back down, but Trump would have the world believe that he single-handedly mediated an end to the conflict using his favorite tool: trade threats. So absurd and relentless were his boasts that Indian officials publicly refuted him.

Trump’s most audacious claim, however, was that he ended the war between Israel and Iran. In reality, Trump gave Israel the green light to strike Iranian positions; deployed American military assets to help Israel shoot down Iran’s missiles and drones; and ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites – severely undermining the global nonproliferation regime in the process. If this is Trump’s idea of peacemaking, one dreads to think what his version of warmongering would look like.

Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize campaign has followed a familiar pattern: invent or inflate a problem, claim to have solved it, and then demand a reward. From his photo ops with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to his Middle East “peace deals” (which merely formalized existing relations between the Gulf states and Israel), Trump engages in theater, not diplomacy – performances staged for headlines and applause. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, one suspects, will not be fooled. The same cannot be said for Trump’s base.

Trump’s absurd claims not only undermine US credibility abroad but also carry real risks. For starters, they trivialize genuine peacemaking. Ending wars is among the most difficult tasks in international politics. It demands quiet diplomacy, painstaking negotiations that address the root causes of conflict, and a commitment to following through on any agreement. Trump has shown little interest in such work. All he cares about is fanfare.

Moreover, false declarations of peace can mask unresolved conflicts and undermine the vigilance needed to prevent new flare-ups, which could ignite with even greater ferocity. Such proclamations can also erode accountability for diplomatic failures – and even for reckless military actions like those Trump sanctioned against Iran.

Trump’s claim to have ended seven “un-endable” wars is best understood as a case study in self-delusion. Branding is not leadership. Real peace depends on leaders who know the difference. But in Trump’s world, peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of applause.

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.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

The tectonic plates of global power are shifting. The American-led postwar order is eroding without a clear successor. In this uncertain interregnum, there is a growing risk of the world fracturing into rival geopolitical and economic blocs, threatening both prosperity and peace.

Two recent events in China encapsulate this transformation. On Aug. 31 to Sept. 1, leaders gathered in Tianjin for the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a 10-nation grouping that began as a regional security forum but has steadily expanded its scope and ambition. With China in the driver’s seat, the group is made up mostly of autocracies.

Soon after, on Sept. 3, China staged a massive military parade in Beijing to commemorate the end of the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. Yet far from celebrating peace, the event showcased Chinese military might, with a guest list that read like a who’s who of the world’s strongmen. They included Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Myanmar junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, and the presidents of Iran, Cuba, Belarus and Vietnam. They make up the so-called “Axis of Upheaval” — a loose coalition of states determined to reshape the Western-led global order.

The juxtaposition was telling. The summit highlighted how Beijing and Moscow are institutionalizing their strategic alignment, while the military parade underlined the solidarity of a growing authoritarian camp. For China and Russia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization serves as both a symbol and an instrument of their deepening cooperation — from joint military exercises to efforts at shaping the economic and security architecture of Eurasia.

For Washington and its allies, these gatherings sent a clear signal: An alternative power bloc is taking shape.

President Trump is accelerating the reordering of the international system, though not in the way he believes. Trump may think he is bending nations to his will, but history could record something else: the corrosion of America’s alliances and partnerships, the erosion of its credibility and the acceleration toward a truly multipolar world. By elevating disruption into his governing creed, Trump is unwittingly providing the very shock therapy the international system needs to break free from U.S. dominance.

This geopolitical realignment is mirrored in the economic sphere. Globalization, once seen as irreversible, has stalled and may even be going into reverse. Protectionist policies are proliferating.

Washington has turned to tariffs, subsidies and secondary sanctions to advance its geopolitical ends. Beijing is promoting yuan-based settlement mechanisms and alternative supply chains, while procuring gold at a voracious pace to insulate itself from Western financial pressure, including potential sanctions.

What is emerging is not a single global marketplace but a patchwork of rival trading and financial blocs.

The consequences are already visible. The U.S. push to “de-risk” supply chains has triggered costly reshoring and diversification strategies. Technology is splitting into parallel ecosystems. Energy markets, too, are fragmenting, with Russian oil and gas exports largely shifting from Europe to Asia. In finance, competing payment systems are gaining traction, threatening to erode the central role of the U.S. dollar.

At the same time, the spread of armed conflicts shows how economic and geopolitical fractures feed on each other. In recent years, the number of wars and crises has risen, each with ripple effects on energy prices, supply chains and refugee flows.

The turbulence reflects a world in transition: the slow decline of the U.S.-led order without the emergence of a stable successor. It is the dawn of a new era — fractured, fiercely contested and dangerously unpredictable.

This moment echoes the 1930s — not in its specifics, but in its warning. Then, a world system changing between orders witnessed the emergence of competing economic blocs, fueling nationalist rivalries that eventually erupted into global war. The challenge today is not merely to manage competition, but to prevent economic, technological and ideological fragmentation from spiraling into chaos. That requires leadership, restraint and imagination — qualities in short supply.

In this environment, much will depend on how “swing states” position themselves. A recent report by the Center for a New American Security identified six such states as pivotal to the emerging global order: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey. Each is multi-aligned, seeking to balance ties with the U.S., China and Russia rather than choosing sides. Collectively, they wield the ability to influence whether the world fragments into hostile blocs or maintains a degree of pluralism and connectivity.

India is perhaps the most critical of these nations. As the only long-established democracy in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, it is trying to prevent the grouping from acquiring an overtly anti-Western orientation, even as it participates in Western-led forums such as the Quad and, as a special invitee, the Group of 7.

Brazil, like India, is charting an independent course on trade and climate, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey are expanding ties eastward without severing links to the West. These countries demonstrate that the binary framing of “democracies versus autocracies” does not reflect the real complexity of international politics.

The danger, however, is that intensifying U.S.-China rivalry could reduce the room for maneuver for such states. If Washington sharpens its protectionist edge while Beijing doubles down on its authoritarian partnerships, the middle ground will narrow. Economic and security fragmentation could harden into a bipolar structure — two camps with little trust, minimal cooperation and heightened risk of confrontation.

That outcome is not inevitable. But preventing it will require conscious effort. Multilateral frameworks must be strengthened, not abandoned. Global cooperation — on climate change, pandemic preparedness, food security and technology standards — must be preserved despite geopolitical tensions. Above all, great powers must recognize that fragmentation carries grave risks not just for growth but for stability.

The world has been here before. The lesson of the 20th century is that when trade and politics fracture into competing blocs, confrontation follows. Unless today’s drift is reversed, the coming decade may bring not just the end of globalization, but the return of bloc-driven conflict.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Appeasement has never tamed revisionist powers, and it has often emboldened them. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi learned this the hard way during his first years in power, when China took advantage of his goodwill to alter the Himalayan status quo in its favor, but now he is at risk of falling into the same trap.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

In 2020, China’s stealth encroachments into India’s Himalayan borderlands triggered deadly clashes and a prolonged military standoff that nearly erupted into war. Five years on, the border crisis remains largely unresolved, yet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is headed to China in an apparent effort to ease friction – just when India is facing punishing tariffs imposed by Donald Trump. But recent history offers a stark warning: trusting China is a dangerous path.

One can certainly understand Modi’s motivations for seeking a diplomatic thaw with China. The US-India relationship, once touted as a bedrock of America’s strategy for ensuring a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” has plunged to its lowest point this century. The decline began during the final years of Joe Biden’s presidency, but accelerated rapidly under Trump, who has now raised tariffs on US imports from India to 50%.

Trump’s actions are as ironic as they are absurd. The US long courted India as a vital counterweight to China across the vast Indo-Pacific region, yet it is India that is now being subjected to sky-high tariffs, while China is enjoying a reprieve. Moreover, Trump claims he is punishing India for buying Russian oil, but India purchases less energy from Russia than China or Europe. Trump’s real objective, it seems, is to strong-arm India into a lopsided trade deal.

Meanwhile, Trump is attempting to woo Russian President Vladimir Putin – to whom he has shown far more respect than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – so that Putin not only ends the Ukraine war, but also takes a step back from China. But while Trump recognizes that punishing and isolating Russia drove the country closer to China, creating considerable risks for the US, he is repeating this mistake with India.

Modi, however, should beware of letting Trump push him into China’s arms. In journeying to China at this moment, given the pressure he is under, India’s prime minister will come across less like a confident leader shaping events than a wounded statesman courting his country’s chief security threat. Past experience indicates that China is far more likely to exploit any hint of Indian weaknesses than act as a reliable partner.

Ever since China annexed Tibet in 1951, turning what had previously served as a buffer with India into a Chinese military stronghold, Sino-Indian relations have been marked by rivalry and mistrust. When Modi became prime minister in 2014, he made it his mission to change that. His initial hope of improving the relationship may not have been misguided; but his refusal to change course, even when China relentlessly exploited his goodwill to make quiet territorial advances on the ground, certainly was.

China took few pains to hide its intentions: its troops encroached on an Indian borderland as Modi welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to India for the first time. While that initial 2014 summit was portrayed as a success, Chinese forces remained on Indian territory until India dismantled its defensive fortifications there.

The following year, Modi delisted China as a “country of concern,” in order to attract Chinese investment. What India got instead was a flood of cheap Chinese imports. China’s trade surplus with India has grown so large that it now exceeds India’s entire defense budget – the world’s fifth largest. In effect, India is helping to finance China’s military buildup and thus its territorial revisionism.

In 2015-2019 – as China steadily tightened its strategic axis with Pakistan, erected militarized “border villages” along India’s frontier, and expanded its high-altitude military infrastructure – Modi met with Xi 18 times. So committed was Modi to rapprochement that he continued to engage in “appeasement diplomacy,” even after China’s 2017 seizure of the strategic Himalayan plateau of Doklam. It was only after Chinese soldiers quietly surged across multiple frontier points in April 2020 – inexplicably catching India off guard – that Modi suspended his overtures to China.

Five years later, Modi is at risk of falling into the same trap. Modi is traveling to China mainly to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin. But the SCO is largely a Chinese initiative, and India – the only established democracy among its ranks – has not treated it as a priority. Last year, Modi skipped its summit in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital; and in 2023, when India held the rotating chair, he downgraded the summit to a virtual format. Modi’s decision to show up this year was probably more about signaling conciliation toward China than about the SCO.

China has given India no reason to think this time will be different. On the contrary, when India conducted targeted strikes on Pakistani terrorist camps in May – a response to a brutal attack on tourists in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir – China lent Pakistan critical support, including real-time radar and satellite data. Furthermore, China recently confirmed plans to build the world’s largest dam adjacent to India’s border – an undertaking that will have grave ecological and national-security implications for India.

Appeasement has never tamed revisionist powers; more often, it has emboldened them. By allowing China to profit from Indian markets even as it chips away at India’s sovereignty and security, Modi has conveyed that India, despite its tremendous economic and strategic clout, is willing to be treated as a doormat. Only with a hardnosed strategy that meets Chinese coercion with Indian resolve can Modi safeguard India’s interests and territorial integrity.

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.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

The Alaska summit between President Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, was more than a high-stakes encounter over the Ukraine war. It signaled America’s recognition that its own missteps have helped drive Russia closer to China, fueling a de facto alliance that poses the gravest threat to U.S. global preeminence since the Cold War.

Washington’s miscalculations helped build the China-Russia partnership it now fears most.

In a world where the U.S., China and Russia are the three leading powers, the Alaska summit underscored Trump’s bid to redraw the great-power triangle before it hardens against America.

The president’s Alaska reset seeks to undo a policy that turned two natural rivals into close strategic collaborators, by prioritizing improved U.S.-Russia ties.

Trump’s signaling was unmistakable. In a Fox News interview immediately after the summit, he blasted his predecessor. “He [Biden] did something that was unthinkable,” Trump said. “He drove China and Russia together. That’s not good. If you are just a minor student of history, it’s the one thing you didn’t want to do.”

The remark captured the essence of America’s dilemma. Two powers that are historic rivals — one vast in land and resources, the other populous and expansionist — have been pushed into each other’s arms by Washington’s own punitive strategies.

For decades, the bedrock of U.S. grand strategy was to keep Moscow and Beijing apart. President Richard Nixon’s 1972 opening to Beijing was not about cozying up to Mao Zedong’s brutal regime, but about exploiting the Sino-Soviet split by coopting China in an informal alliance geared toward containing and rolling back Soviet influence and power.

That strategy helped the West win the Cold War, not militarily but geopolitically.

Since 2022, however, Washington has inverted that logic. In response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. unleashed unprecedented sanctions designed to cripple Russia economically. Instead, the sanctions drove the Kremlin toward Beijing while tightening Putin’s grip on power. What had been an uneasy partnership has become strategic collaboration against a common adversary — the U.S.

Rather than playing one against the other, America finds itself confronting a two-against-one dynamic, with China as the primary gainer. Western sanctions have effectively handed resource-rich Russia to resource-hungry China. Beijing has also chipped away at Russian influence in Central Asia, bringing former Soviet republics into its orbit.

Meanwhile, despite the grinding war in Ukraine, Russia remains a formidable power. Its global reach, military capacity and resilience under sanctions have belied Western hopes that it could be isolated into irrelevance.

On the battlefield, Russia holds the strategic initiative, strengthening Putin’s bargaining hand and reducing his incentive to accept any ceasefire not largely on his own terms. The uncomfortable truth for Washington is that it risks losing a proxy war into which it has poured vast resources.

The legacy-conscious Trump recognizes this. His push for a negotiated end to the war is not a retreat but an attempt to cut losses and refocus U.S. strategy on the larger contest with China that will shape the emerging new global order.

Among the great powers, only China has both the ambition and material base to supplant the U.S. Its economy, military spending and technological capabilities dwarf that of Russia. Yet Beijing remains the main beneficiary of America’s hard line against Moscow.

In fact, sanctions and Western weaponization of international finance have turned China into Russia’s financial lifeline. Russia’s export earnings are now largely parked in Chinese banks, in effect giving Beijing a share of the returns. China has also locked in discounted, long-term energy supplies from Russia. These secure overland flows, which cannot be interdicted by hostile forces, bolster China’s energy security in ways maritime trade never could — a crucial hedge as it eyes Taiwan. Far from weakening Beijing, U.S. policy has made it stronger.

A formal China-Russia alliance would unite Eurasia’s vast resources and power — America’s ultimate nightmare, as it would accelerate its relative decline. The Ukraine war has drained U.S. focus even as China expands influence in the Indo-Pacific, the true theater of 21st-century geopolitics.

This is why the Alaska summit mattered. Trump and Putin seemed to recognize that improved ties could reshape the global balance of power. For Trump, the goal is clear: Reverse America’s blunder, separate Moscow from Beijing and refocus power on the systemic challenge posed by China.

Critics call this appeasement, but it echoes Nixon’s outreach to Mao: exploiting geopolitical rivalries to keep the U.S. globally preeminent.

Washington needs similar clarity today, not doubling down on a failing proxy war, but easing tensions with Russia while strengthening deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, where the stakes are truly global.

Trump’s tariff-first approach, evident in his punitive approach toward India, has already hurt important partnerships. Yet his instinct on the U.S.-China-Russia triangle could be transformative. If he can begin to pry Moscow away from Beijing — or even sow just enough mistrust to prevent a durable Sino-Russian alliance — he will have altered the trajectory of world politics.

America need not befriend Russia — it need only prevent Russia from becoming China’s junior partner in an anti-U.S. coalition. That requires ending the Ukraine war and creating space for a geopolitical reset.

The Alaska summit was only a first step. But it acknowledged what U.S. policymakers resist admitting: continuing the current course will further strengthen China and entrench America’s disadvantages. A shift in strategy is not weakness. It is the essence of grand strategy — recognizing when old approaches have outlived their usefulness.

If Trump can reengineer the strategic geometry of the great-power triangle, he will have preserved America’s place at the apex of the global order.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

President Trump’s decision to slap secondary sanctions on India over its imports of Russian oil, while also unleashing a tariff barrage on Indian exports, is more than a trade dispute. It is a self-inflicted wound to America’s most vital strategic partnership in Asia at a time when China is flexing its military muscle throughout the region.

Washington has long courted India as a bulwark against an expansionist China and as a critical pillar of its “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy. Yet Trump’s punitive steps against India are eroding the very trust on which strategic alignment rests — to Beijing’s delight.

The mutual trust painstakingly built over years underpins bilateral cooperation. Once lost, it will be hard to rebuild. Even if the administration eventually reaches a trade deal with India, it may not be able to repair the damage.

Targeting India over Russian oil purchases smacks of selective enforcement. The European Union’s large imports of Russian energy products, especially liquefied natural gas, have been left untouched. Such European imports not only contribute more to Russia’s coffers than India’s purchases, but Europe spends more on Russian energy than on assisting Ukraine.

Trump has also spared the world’s largest buyer of Russian oil and gas: China. But India, the very country Washington has spent years courting as an Asian counterweight, has become the first victim of his secondary sanctions. This suggests Trump’s tactics are less about punishing Moscow than about pressuring New Delhi.

Russian oil is a pretext to strong-arm India into accepting a Trump-dictated trade agreement, much as he foisted a largely one-sided deal on the European Union. That his tariffs on India have little to do with Russian oil is evident from one telling fact: Indian exports to the U.S. of refined fuels such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel — increasingly made from Russian crude — remain exempt from his tariffs.

Such is the Trumpian logic. He has hit Indian non-energy exports with steep tariffs, but spared booming exports of refined fuels made largely from Russian crude. Trump seems to have no problem with Russian oil — as long as it is refined in India and then pumped into American planes, trucks and cars.

Furthermore, given continued U.S. imports of Russian enriched uranium, fertilizers and chemicals, Trump does not seem troubled that his own administration is helping fund Russia’s war in Ukraine while still locked in a proxy war with Moscow.

In truth, Trump is using New Delhi’s Russian oil purchases as a crude bargaining tactic to secure a bilateral trade deal on his terms. India illustrates how the Trump administration has weaponized tariffs not merely to extract trade concessions but also to bind other countries more closely to American strategic and security interests. In seeking to bend India to its will, it has targeted that country’s traditionally independent approach to global affairs, including neutrality on conflicts.

Indian exports to the U.S. now face a steep 50 percent tariff, signaling the end of Trump’s bromance with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His moves against strategic-partner India are harsher than against China. This marks a dramatic U-turn from his first term, when bilateral relations thrived to the extent that Trump declared at a huge February 2020 rally in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, “America loves India, America respects India, and America will always be faithful and loyal friends to the Indian people.”

In Trump’s second term, Modi was among the first world leaders to visit the White House, agreeing to fast-track trade negotiations. In July, the Indians believed they had reached an interim deal, awaiting only Trump’s approval. But in characteristic fashion, Trump abruptly rejected the accord and embarked on punishing India.

New Delhi has publicly criticized the Trump administration’s double standards. But it is more concerned about a deeper question: If Washington can so easily turn its coercive tools on a supposed ally, what is to stop it from doing so again?

U.S.-India relations have probably plunged to their lowest point in the 21st century, thanks to Trump’s economic war and his singling out of India for secondary sanctions.

The fallout will extend beyond lost trade. India could respond by doubling down on strategic autonomy — hedging between the U.S., Russia and others — and diversifying its economic and security partnerships. Trump’s gamble may wring out trade concessions in the short term, but it risks undermining the security architecture in the Indo-Pacific, where unity among key democracies is the only real check on China’s expansionism. America is effectively handing China an opening to court a disillusioned India.

New Delhi is already signaling that it has other geopolitical options. Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit India in the coming weeks. In less than three weeks, Modi is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, which Putin will also attend. Moscow is pushing for a revived Russia-India-China grouping.

A stable Indo-Pacific order demands more than joint military exercises and communiqués; it requires political will to accommodate each other’s core interests. Punishing India in ways that ignore its legitimate security and energy needs sends the opposite message.

Ironically, Trump’s sanctions-and-tariffs blitz may have done India a favor by exposing the strategic reality of America’s unreliability. By presenting the U.S. as a fickle, transactional power, Trump has signaled that Washington cannot be counted on to separate short-term commercial considerations from long-term strategic imperatives.

Trump’s economic coercion risks alienating a vast, still-growing market that U.S. firms see as central to their future growth. India remains the world’s fastest-growing major economy, and as many other economies stagnate and populations shrink, it stands out as a rising giant.

Sacrificing a linchpin of Indo-Pacific stability for a fleeting win in a tariff war is not tough bargaining. It is strategic recklessness — and a gift to China.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”