This article is part of the essay series: From Response to Reorientation: One Year of Operation Sindoor
Operation Sindoor (Op Sindoor) was not a routine military engagement. It was a balance-shifting exchange between India and Pakistan that altered the strategic calculus of both countries. It also caused a stir in Washington, a country that has historically taken an interest in their rivalry. Op Sindoor demonstrated India’s political will to strike with precision across the Line of Control, reversing the assumption that nuclear deterrence between the two neighbours automatically forecloses conventional military escalation. For India, there are as many learnings from the incident as there are actual changes, both on and off the battlefield, that are likely to shape the next round of military exchange. Drone warfare, electronic countermeasures, and the role of external actors introduced variables that New Delhi had anticipated in theory but confronted in practice. Yet, Op Sindoor’s most enduring consequences may not be military, but diplomatic and nowhere is this more acutely felt than in India’s relationship with the United States (US).
The Trump administration used the opportunity and the crisis between India and Pakistan to put America in an advantageous position in the region.
One of the fundamental shifts that has taken place is the turn in Washington’s relations with Pakistan and India. The Trump administration used the opportunity and the crisis between India and Pakistan to put America in an advantageous position in the region. These were for two primary reasons. It seems that the thinking in Washington about a potential conflict with Iran was brewing in the context that Iran was the ‘head of the snake’ of an expansive network of proxies in the region. Trump’s thinking on bettering relations with Pakistan may have aligned with at least two end goals, first, to use Pakistan as a strategic proxy both for operations, intelligence, and surveillance if a war between Iran and the US broke out; and second, to use Pakistan to advance its own economic interests in the region. Pakistan’s proximity to the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf and its historically deep ties with Gulf partners made Islamabad a convenient node in any emergent American military and logistical architecture aimed at Iran. Trump’s transactional and unsentimental instincts appear to have reassessed that utility at precisely the moment when India’s assertive posture in the subcontinent created an opening.
For India, these calculations carried significant political implications. They not only generated unease in New Delhi, but also narrowed India’s diplomatic manoeuvring space — particularly amid Trump’s repeated assertions that he had played a decisive role in halting the India–Pakistan conflict. The claim itself, which has been largely unsubstantiated and contested by Indian officials, reflected Washington’s broader desire to cast itself as the indispensable mediator, irrespective of whether India welcomed such framing. For a country that has invested decades in distancing itself from the hyphenated India-Pakistan narrative, Trump’s positioning was a diplomatic setback.
Trump’s relations with Pakistan since Operation Sindoor also came in handy in serving Washington’s immediate purpose in assisting the US posture in the Iran crisis, and later by providing diplomatic space and a via media to facilitate talks between the US and Iran. Islamabad served as a back-channel facilitator at a moment when direct American diplomatic reach into Tehran was constrained. The Trump administration certainly used this conflictbetween India and Pakistan by seeking more cooperation with Islamabad, ranging from investments in crypto ventures, a potential investment in Pakistan’s mineral reserves in Baluchistan, to energy supply arrangements, which may have given Trump ample rationale to advance relations with Islamabad, sometimes at the cost of its relations with India. For Trump, whose economic instincts are mercantilist and extractive, this was not ideology but opportunity.
The claim itself, which has been largely unsubstantiated and contested by Indian officials, reflected Washington’s broader desire to cast itself as the indispensable mediator, irrespective of whether India welcomed such framing.
For New Delhi, it has paid more political cost than any other stakeholder in this reconfiguration, given that Trump’s attempt to hyphenate India and Pakistan and mediate between them was not received well in India. India’s diplomacy has banked on a long-term assessment of its relationship with the US rather than the man in the White House. But this strategic patience, however prudent, has limits. Trump’s imposition of tariffs on India, including an additional 25 percent surcharge for purchasing Russian oil, further problematised the bilateral relationship and added layers to the post-Operation Sindoor impediments in India-US relations. It placed New Delhi in an uncomfortable position of managing economic pressure from Washington while simultaneously navigating a volatile western front. The tariff question also touched the structural nerve of India’s relations with Russia as a sovereign economic decision. Its penalisation signalled that the Trump administration was unwilling to distinguish between strategic partnership and transactional compliance.
Yet, the bilateral relationship itself between India and the US never derailed, and the conviction that the bilateral relationship is an important strand in the emerging geopolitics of the world has been sustained. India has realised that the Trump administration’s approach to bilateral relations flows from a very solipsistic attitude of ‘America First’ that may not align with New Delhi’s goals, but there is an imperative to keep the relationship positive. The institutional depth of the relationship spanning defence procurement, technology transfer, intelligence sharing through frameworks like iCET, and the Quad architecture has proven sufficiently robust to absorb political turbulence at the top. Christopher Landau, Trump’s Assistant Secretary of State, during his Delhi visit, reminded India that America is not going to repeat the mistakes that it made with China, essentially telling India that the past course of the bilateral relationship may be over. That assessment may carry both opportunities and risks for India. On one hand, it reinforces the need for India to diversify and drive its great power relations more independently. On the other hand, it raises concerns about whether the United States will remain committed to sustaining the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. Landau’s message, read carefully, was a form of conditional partnership that demands strategic alignment with American preferences rather than simply celebrating convergence where it exists. It is a departure from the relatively permissive framework that characterised Obama and Biden-era engagement with India.
Trump’s imposition of tariffs on India, including an additional 25 percent surcharge for purchasing Russian oil, further problematised the bilateral relationship and added layers to the post-Operation Sindoor impediments in India-US relations.
Perhaps one of the most important learnings in the post-Operation Sindoor period has been the fact that the Indo-Pacific priority that past US administrations have held vis-à-vis the region may not be resonating similarly with the Trump administration. Where Biden invested in institutionalising the Quad and framing the Indo-Pacific as a rules-based order challenge against Chinese revisionism, Trump’s instincts appear more bilateral, more transactional, and more indifferent to the multilateral scaffolding that India had factored into its long-range strategic planning. This is consequential. India’s bet on American engagement in the Indo-Pacific was not merely about containing China but also about ensuring that the region’s security architecture would have a counterweight that India or the US alone could not provide. If Washington’s attention drifts, or if its regional engagement is recalibrated away from alliance-building toward deal-making, New Delhi’s strategic environment becomes considerably more demanding.
The post-Sindoor moment, then, presents India with a paradox: the crisis has revealed both the resilience of the India-U.S. relationship and its structural fragility under a particular kind of American leadership. India’s diplomatic challenge is not only to manage the immediate consequences of the crisis, but to shape the terms of its partnership with Washington for a period in which American reliability is no longer a settled assumption.
Vivek Mishra is Deputy Director with the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation.
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