Context

• The trajectory of India–United States relations over the past two decades reflects a fundamental shift in American strategic thinking.
• In 2005, the relationship was anchored in confidence, optimism, and a belief that the rise of responsible powers strengthened the global order.
• By contrast, the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) reveals a more inward-looking America, focused on minimising burdens and reassuring itself of relevance.
• This transformation carries significant implications for India’s strategic choices and expectations.

The Spirit of 2005: Confidence and Strategic Generosity

• The strategic moment of 2005 was defined by American self-assurance and strategic generosity.
• Washington’s declaration that it wished to help India become a major world power reflected a worldview in which the ascent of others was not seen as a threat but as a stabilising force.
• This belief underpinned the civil nuclear agreement and a broader partnership that treated India’s rise as an end in itself.
• Mutual confidence lay at the core of this engagement. India’s strategic autonomy was accommodated because it was embedded in a shared sense of possibility.
• Global leadership was viewed as a responsibility to be exercised, not a liability to be avoided. The partnership was expansive, aspirational, and future-oriented.

The 2025 NSS: Retrenchment and National Reassurance

• The 2025 NSS marks a sharp departure from this earlier outlook. Its tone is assertive yet defensive, saturated with claims of unprecedented achievement.
• Rather than offering a roadmap for shaping the international system, the strategy functions as an exercise in national reassurance, projecting certainty in a world that increasingly resists American control.
• Where the language of 2005 emphasised partnership, the language of 2025 emphasises burdens.
• The declaration that the U.S. will no longer prop up the entire world order like Atlas signals a retreat from confident global leadership.
• Engagement is framed as a cost to be reduced rather than an investment to be sustained, and leadership becomes conditional and transactional.

India Reframed: From Strategic End to Tactical Means

• This intellectual shift is most visible in the treatment of India. Cooperation remains important, but it is explicitly instrumental.
• India is framed less as a civilisational power with intrinsic value and more as a component of America’s China-balancing strategy, particularly within the Indo-Pacific and the Quad framework.
• In 2005, India’s rise was a strategic objective; in 2025, it is a strategic function. This narrowing reflects a broader retreat from internationalist confidence.
• The assertion of unilateral autonomy and hemispheric exclusivity highlights an irony: strategic autonomy once questioned when articulated by India is now embraced by the U.S. and labelled realism.

Strategy as Performance and the Limits of Engagement

• The NSS’s tone reinforces this inward turn. Its enumeration of diplomatic successes across diverse regions reads less as strategic assessment and more as performance aimed at domestic audiences.
• Strategy becomes a narrative of achievement rather than a framework for managing global complexity.
• For India, the implications are stark. The U.S. that once sought to expand India’s strategic space is now preoccupied with its own vulnerabilities and burden management.
• It demands more from partners while offering fewer assurances in return. Shared interests persist, but shared responsibilities are receding, and burden-sharing increasingly resembles burden-shifting.

Recalibrating India’s Strategic Outlook

• This shift does not negate the value of India–U.S. cooperation; it redefines its basis.
• India can no longer assume that Washington will invest in India’s rise as a matter of strategic design.
• The partnership must rest on converging interests rather than expansive expectations.
• As the NSS itself underscores, partners are expected to assume primary responsibility for their regions, signalling that U.S. support will be selective and conditional.
• The lesson of 2005 remains instructive. Transformative partnerships require confidence on both sides and a belief that another’s rise reinforces one’s own strength.
• The 2025 strategy lacks this confidence, shaped instead by grievance over past overreach, scepticism of institutions, and a desire to restore an earlier conception of American primacy.

Conclusion

• The era of widening horizons that enabled the civil nuclear breakthrough has given way to contracting American ambition and expanding Indian responsibility.
• India’s emergence as a major world power will depend not on external sponsorship but on its own strategic confidence and material capacity in a fragmented global order.
• Paradoxically, the narrowing of American commitments creates greater strategic space for others.
• India’s challenge is not to fill a vacuum but to craft a role aligned with its scale, interests, and civilisational temperament.
• While the assumptions of 2005 may not return, the aspiration that animated them remains India’s to realise.