Oshrit Birvadker, senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) and a leading expert on India’s foreign and national security policy, spoke to a February 2 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes her comments:
It wasn’t until the 2000s that the U.S. perceived India as “the ultimate counterweight for a rising China, and also as a massive market for American tech.”
The India of 1949 was “postcolonial, post-British, post-partition, post-traumatic,” and most of all proud of “its non-aligned foreign policy that rejects the idea of alliances.” During the Cold War, India attempted neutrality in the bipolar geopolitical system of which the U.S. and the Soviet Union were competing global powers. Based on its post-World War II experience, India’s suspicion of America’s capitalist system as a new iteration of Western imperialism led to its friendship treaty with Soviet Russia until the USSR collapsed.
It wasn’t until the 2000s that the U.S. perceived India as “the ultimate counterweight for a rising China, and also as a massive market for American tech.” The economic benefits smoothed the way for U.S. President George W. Bush and India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to sign a civil nuclear deal. India’s current government under Narendra Modi strengthened relations between the two countries. However, due to America’s relations with Pakistan, India’s enemy, the U.S.-India relationship is presently undergoing a “rough patch,” notwithstanding the “formal military agreements” and stronger economic ties between Washington and New Delhi.
Under U.S. President Trump’s second term, India had high hopes that its relations with the U.S. would enter a period of “strategic intimacy.” Unfortunately, after Trump took credit in May 2025 for ending the brief conflict between India and Pakistan, India rejected his call for mediation as a matter of “national principle, national pride, [and] national strategy.” By treating India and Pakistan the same, the “asymmetry in this equation” undermined a 25-year effort by New Delhi to convince Washington that while India fights against terrorism, Islamabad is its state sponsor.
The high mark occurred in 2017 when Modi visited Israel and upgraded the relationship to a “strategic partnership.”
In Trump’s “lack of cultural tact” in international relations, Pakistan’s chief of staff was invited to the White House only weeks “after the terror attack in Pahalgam in Kashmir.” Following his calling India “a dead economy,” Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff, with half of it “a penalty fee for [India] buying Russian oil.” Modi’s response was “a very tactical cold shoulder” in that he sent Washington the message that “India can walk away” and into the arms of its Russian and Chinese counterparts.
As the world’s third-largest economy, India’s mindset is that it is self-sustaining. In response to the “Trump factor,” New Delhi signed “the mother of all [trade] deals” with the EU at the end of last month. The deal will promote infrastructure projects such as IMEC, the India-Middle Eastern-European Economic Corridor—a project that is also in America’s national interest. Trump and Modi were subsequently able to resolve recent trade tensions by reaching an agreement.
In contrast, India’s relationship with Israel, formed only in 1992, is one of “shared destiny.” The high mark occurred in 2017 when Modi visited Israel and upgraded the relationship to a “strategic partnership.” The glue that binds the two in a “pragmatic relationship” is a shared “threat perception.” Both India and Israel were British outposts “born out of the chaos of the post-World War II period.” Moreover, each endured a “bloody partition” exacerbated by a refugee crisis, and their populations have lived “in constant fear and the shadow of war.”
Moreover, each endured a “bloody partition” exacerbated by a refugee crisis, and their populations have lived “in constant fear and the shadow of war.”
Modi characterized the relations between New Delhi and Jerusalem as a “convergence of similarities.” Thus, India’s “complex geography” vis a vis Pakistan is comparable to that of Israel vis a vis its Arab neighbors. The two countries are each on the “front line fighting jihadi terrorism since the day of their establishment.” Prior to October 7, the relationship between the two was more that of “a buyer and seller,” with Israel selling close to a billion dollars in defense equipment to India annually.
During the Gaza war, the old saying that “a true friend walks in when everybody else walks out” was true when it came to India. Germany imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel, but India’s facility that produced drones for Israel’s Elbit were flying over Gaza to provide vital intelligence. Israel’s change in its foreign and defense policies reflects the meaning of “strategic autonomy”—the price for overreliance on one country, the U.S., was exposed. This is one of the key decisions accounting for Israel’s drive “to move on … to interdependency with India.”
Given Israel’s “unique technological edge,” India can counter China’s and Turkey’s provision of tech, ammunition, and drones to Pakistan as Israel diversifies its line with technology and military assistance to an India aiming to become the “next democratic superpower.” In return, India can provide Israel with “strategic depth and reliability” while the Jewish state is embroiled in the aftermath of the Gaza war. The New Delhi-Jerusalem partnership is “what I call a long-term architectural pillar of this new international order.”
