Newsweek: Waiting Out the Storm: What India Can Teach the World About Trump | Opinion

DAVOS — No one would mistake Copenhagen for New Delhi. One is a compact Nordic capital of bicycles and canals where winter darkness arrives by mid-afternoon. The other is a sprawling metropolis of 30 million, where December brings thick haze and temperatures that still reach the mid-70s. Denmark has been a NATO ally since the alliance’s founding, sending soldiers to fight alongside Americans from Normandy to Helmand Province. India sent troops to fight alongside allies under the British flag under colonialism and, once independent, spent the Cold War in the Soviet sphere, only gradually drifting toward Washington after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Yet the same exasperated refrain emerges from both capitals: “Wait three years.”

While visiting India last month, I heard variations of this phrase repeatedly during conversations with officials, think tank analysts and journalists. When I tried to pitch an official at India’s Foreign Ministry for an interview on India’s view of its relationship with the United States, he demurred, pointing instead to the “power of silence” and strategic patience.

Then it came up again this week, this time when The New York Times surveyed Danes’ reactions to U.S. President Donald Trump’s increasing insistence on acquiring Greenland as a U.S. territory. One Danish political commentator said he is banking on Republican losses in November’s midterms to quell the Arctic landgrab.

“If that doesn’t happen, then we’re just waiting for the three years to pass,” he said. “It’s a long time, but we don’t have anything else.”

During Trump’s first term, his relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was often described as a “bromance.” But the year since Trump’s second inauguration has shredded whatever goodwill existed between Washington and New Delhi.

Last April, Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on India, citing trade imbalances, then added another 25 percent in August as punishment for purchasing Russian oil—never mind that Trump subsequently gave Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a waiver for the very same thing—bringing the total tariff on India to 50 percent, among the highest levied on any trading partner.

When fighting broke out between India and Pakistan in May following a terrorist attack in Kashmir, Trump claimed he brokered the ceasefire. Modi publicly rejected the claim, saying “no world leader” had asked India to stop its strikes. Trump’s immigration crackdown tightened H-1B visa rules, hitting Indian professionals especially hard. Trade negotiations, which began optimistically in February with Modi’s visit to Washington, foundered on agricultural policies that are politically explosive for India’s farmers, and remain unresolved.

Managing the Unmanageable

“This year has undermined U.S. reliability as a partner,” said Ajay Bisaria, former Indian ambassador to Canada and Pakistan and now a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, at a briefing I attended last month. “So, we don’t trust the U.S. as much as we did last year, but we will deal with the U.S. because it is a critical partner still.”

Before this past year, Bisaria said India had been pursuing a strategy of “manage China, engage America, reassure Russia.” Now the framework has shifted. China is still India’s central strategic adversary—”that will remain true for the next 30 years,” he said—but the United States has moved into the same category as Russia: a critical relationship that must be managed rather than relied upon.

While the Danes speak of betrayal by a longtime ally, the Indians I spoke to characterized the current frictions with the U.S. as a fundamental erosion of trust, evaporating any sense of a budding alliance. Several people seemed genuinely sad about this. One Indian journalist told me wistfully that twelve years of her career spent building relationships with Americans had gone up in smoke.

India is managing disappointment. Denmark is processing heartbreak. Casper O. Jensen, a Danish pollster quoted by The Times, captured it: “I thought we had a really good thing going on. Apparently not.”

Storm and Accelerator

Danes and other Europeans might benefit from the framework Bisaria offered to understand what’s happening beyond individual relationships. He called it the “Trump storm”—the torpedoing of partnerships and alliances. But he identified something more significant: the “Trump accelerator.”

Because the United States has become less reliable, countries are diversifying their relationships.

“If the United States pushes India and other countries beyond the point, we will find—or try to look for ways to bypass the United States,” Bisaria said.

The evidence is already visible. In 2024, India and Canada expelled each other’s diplomats after a major dispute sparked by the killings of Sikh activists in Winnipeg. Since Trump’s inauguration, the prime ministers of the two countries have met twice. They announced a comprehensive economic partnership agreement and are talking about critical minerals deals.

The Trump accelerator, Bisaria said, also made the Modi trilateral handshake in Tianjin possible. In August 2025, Modi visited China for the first time in seven years to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The image of the three leaders holding hands in what became known as the “troika” photo was widely disseminated by Chinese state media as a signal that if the United States pushes too far, alternatives exist.

Canada, too, is now looking to get closer to China, largely because Canada recognizes it needs to expand its relationships beyond an unreliable United States. Just last week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited Beijing and secured agreements lowering Chinese tariffs on Canadian canola from 84 percent to 15 percent while Canada reduced tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

The two countries established new cooperation frameworks on energy, finance, agriculture and cultural exchanges. When asked if China was a more predictable partner than the United States, Carney said the relationship with China “is more predictable, and you see results coming from that.” 

India’s multi-alignment doctrine, once seen as uniquely suited to India’s position between great powers, is becoming a global roadmap as old bonds and alliances shake under Trump 2.0. 

“We are in an odd situation where both our strategic partner and our strategic rival have weaponized trade this year,” Bisaria said. The American approach to allies now resembles its approach to adversaries. The result is that allies start behaving like non-aligned nations. 

Trump is dismantling American centrality while trying to assert it. His threats, tariffs, and demands are producing exactly what he claims to oppose: a world where American power matters less because American reliability can’t be assumed. 

India developed strategic autonomy as a doctrine because its history required it. Denmark is being forced to learn it as a survival skill. The question isn’t whether this diffusion can be reversed. The question is whether waiting three years merely delays recognizing a permanent shift—from American reliability as the organizing principle of allied foreign policy to something closer to the Indian model, where every relationship must be managed because none can be fully trusted.

The “Trump storm” will eventually pass. What Bisaria calls the “Trump accelerator” may prove more durable than the man who triggered it.

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This Article is an opinion piece written by Gabriel Snyder for Newsweek.