New Delhi must respond with open-eyed diplomacy, not open-hearted sentiment.

US President Donald Trump’s visit to China may not be remembered by posterity as much as Richard Nixon’s famous trip in 1972. But it has forced Indians to confront the parallels with what was hitherto considered the darkest chapter of the India-US relationship.

Nixon, like Trump, believed that resetting relations with China was in paramount American interest. Nixon, like Trump, led a White House and establishment that was instinctively unsympathetic to Indian concerns. And Nixon, like Trump, viewed the Pakistani military leadership through rose-tinted glasses. Nobody, not even ordinary Pakistanis, has ever celebrated a Pakistani military dictator more than Nixon or Trump.

But here is what matters: The relationship between India and the United States survived Nixon. It grew and flourished. The partnership is stronger than any one person, even an enormously consequential president. It is greater than any administration, any party, any geopolitical moment. It is beneficial for both and yet it is not definitional for either. We can live without it.

In the past, India navigated a hostile White House, a hostile establishment, and an indifferent American public. Today’s position is better, even if the Trump White House returns to overt hostility from its current passive-aggressive demeanor. Large sections of the Washington establishment continue to value the bilateral partnership. People-to-people connections have deepened. And the business-to-business ties of investment, innovation and trade have already demonstrated their capacity to ignore and outlast shifts in capital markets or political fashion.

This is not to minimise divergences that are neither superficial nor personality-driven. A structural faultline has emerged in Indo-US relations. It cannot be papered over. There are, in fact, three faultlines, not one.

India’s energy security, its abiding concern in global affairs, is imperiled by American unilateralism and breathtaking double standards on sourcing fuel from Russia. Washington’s search for detente with China removes the relationship’s strategic ballast. And India has reforged its sense of self: It will, and it must, continue to refuse to play the compliant partner to a whimsical Washington. These are serious, structural disagreements. They deserve to be named as such.

But we must also recognise the institutional convergences that persist. Bilateral military-to-military cooperation. Strands of collaboration under the Quad’s umbrella that Trump dislikes and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ambassador Sergio Gor seek to cleverly sustain. The INDUS-X defence ecosystem. The TRUST initiative for emergent technology and critical minerals and multiple supply chain partnerships. All of these receive undiminished official energy, and will continue to do so. And hard words and the 50 per cent tariffs notwithstanding, a trade deal was eventually arrived at. The glue holds. Barely, but it holds.

We should think of this moment as an opportunity. The US-India relationship has always been sold as an inevitable strategic convergence. But until recently, it was something else: Two very different civilisational world-views cohabiting uneasily. What Trump’s arrival did was strip away the diplomatic veneer.

New Delhi must respond with open-eyed diplomacy, not open-hearted sentiment. It must engage all strands of thought in the United States, a democracy almost as diverse and complex as ours. Trumpism may outlast Trump — both sides of the aisle asking, if in more polished terms, the same uncomfortable questions the current administration has posed.

The truth is that this president has done us a favour. We can now rework this relationship on more honest, durable terms.

This cohabitation was in many ways an arranged marriage. The two countries were joined together by a panchayat of wise elders: P V Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Bill Clinton, Manmohan Singh, George Bush, and their generations. The arranged-marriage mantra is: Ceremony first, compatibility later. For our two nations, the strategic relationship came first. Strategic convergence was supposed to follow.

It didn’t. Our worldviews did not converge the way matchmakers anticipated. A philosophical gap, one rooted in our respective democratic cultures, has persisted: India does not understand alliances; America does not understand autonomy.

In any marriage, both partners change, compromise and build a partnership of equals. A relationship between two civilisation-states is no different. The White House cannot write the rules of marriage without co-opting India’s distinctiveness. Until Washington accepts that India is an ancient nation with its own immutable timeline and unalterable threat calculus, and not a junior supplicant seeking admission to some charmed circle, this relationship will oscillate between promise and frustration. The fact is, America does not understand “equal”.

New Delhi is not holding its breath. As the old order dissipates, India is neither dismantling nor defending it. Foreign policy and strategic autonomy have visibly been very hard work and yet an imperative. To be fair, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team are rearranging the pieces rather well. India has discovered a new and appropriate proximity and distance to the US, deeper strategic intimacy with the EU, recalibration with Beijing — while engaging Moscow in a dynamic world.

The India-US partnership will endure. It survived Nixon; it will survive Trump. But whether it matures is a different question entirely. The answer depends on one thing alone: America deciding it can accept India on mutually agreeable terms. The Trump White House doesn’t understand the question. Perhaps its successor will need to find the answer.

Originally Appeared in Indian Express. Read it here