From Darling to Discarded: Trump’s Second-Term Shift on India

The idea that Washington spent two decades practising “strategic altruism” (战略利他主义) towards India is relatively common among Chinese scholars—what’s more striking is Mao Keji’s (毛克疾) suggestion that “strategic altruism” may have given way to an era of US–India rivalry.

Mao is an up-and-coming India specialist at China’s influential National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) who spoke to us in a fascinating interview this March. Alongside his views on Trump, China’s rise and global politics more broadly, Mao ended that interview with a prediction that US–India relations would cool. To his credit, he made these remarks well before Trump’s punitive August tariffs, and before the warm Modi-Xi-Putin meet at the SCO summit in September.

In past work, Mao has pushed back against more blindly chauvinistic dismissals of India, arguing instead for a measured, evidence-based assessment. He cautions that China should not underestimate India, but ultimately comes down on the bearish side, judging that India is unlikely to seriously challenge China’s position in global manufacturing.

In the essay below, Mao writes about the possibility of a future “battle for second place” (亚军之争) between the US and India. The piece echoes the supreme confidence running through much Chinese commentary on the trajectory of US–China relations—American decline and China’s continued rise.

That decline is, for Mao, the main driver of Trump’s India policy, and of India’s transition from being Washington’s “darling” (宠儿) to a “discarded” actor (弃子). Preoccupied with its own relative decline, Mao argues, the US is increasingly reluctant to pay the costs of geopolitical competition—and instead prefers to bleed its allies dry.

— Jacob Mardell

1. Since the late 1990s, the United States has adopted a position of “strategic altruism” towards India, assuming that a rising democratic India would balance China.

2. Washington paid real diplomatic costs to back New Delhi—most notably, carving out a special exception to global non-proliferation norms.

3. Trump’s second term breaks sharply with that logic: steep tariffs, visa-fee hikes, tighter limits on Indian outsourcing, and consistently disparaging rhetoric towards New Delhi.

4. Many Western observers treat this as a temporary “Trump anomaly”, blame India’s weak capability, or point to a shift in how Trump conceives competition with China (less geopolitics, more economics).

5. These takes miss the structural pattern—both across Trump’s ally policy and in why India is being targeted. The root driver is US anxiety over its declining strength, which now outweighs concern about external geopolitical threats.

6. This

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