America First, India Last: Modi's Fatal Strategic Blunder

2025-12-11 08:07:20

(MENAFN- Asia Times) When Narendra Modi swept to power in 2014, his budding alliance with America was hailed as a masterstroke. Yet the United States' freshly unveiled National Security Strategy (NSS November 2025), published on December 4, lays bare the folly of that embrace.

What Modi pitched as a ladder to a great-power status has instead ensnared India in a lopsided bargain, one that serves only the parochial whims of Donald Trump's“America First” doctrine. This alliance risks entrenching India in dependency, limiting strategic autonomy and undermining long-term national interests.

Allies, it turns out, are expected to shoulder more burdens, align strategies and pour resources into Washington's coffers – while receiving little in return: no market openings, no preferential market access, none of the tech windfalls that were lavished on China in the 1990s.

Modi hawked this pact as transformative, a shortcut to global heft. In truth, it smacks of a snare, designed to bleed India's assets in pursuit of the prime minister's vaulting“guru to the world” ego. This should bother anyone concerned about India's future independent foreign policy.

This author sounded the alarm as early as 2020, in an Asia Times dispatch warning that America was goading India into squandering scarce funds on a ruinous arms race with Beijing. A pro-Western lurch, the piece contended, would only deepen the trap.

Modi brushed aside such counsel, plunging India into a pact in which its outlays dwarf any illusory gains. This stems from his blinkered approach to China, which has left India economically exposed amid festering border rows – a peril dissected in another critique.

Modi's suicidal fundamental agreements with the US

India inked three of the four foundational pacts with America under Modi, cementing its role as a full-fledged strategic sidekick.

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