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For nearly a quarter of a century, Washington and New Delhi were proud to count themselves among the most reliable allies of the post–Cold War era. That now looks to be one of the darker days of a strategic partnership of the sort each superpower covets. So grave is the problem of trust in the bilateral relationship, analysts say, that tariffs and oil are but some of the ingredients in a collision course.

“There’s a core that’s been hit, and that is that the Indian leadership simply is furious and not ready to take this kind of slapping around,” Evan Feigenbaum, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who studies South Asia, said. “We’re in a situation in the U.S.-India relationship where the premises and assumptions of the last 25 years — that everybody worked very hard to build, including the president in his first term — have just come completely unraveled.”

Trust between the two capitals hit a low when Trump last month announced that the United States would place a tariff on India that would rise to 25 percent on June 16 and double to 50 percent on August 27 unless New Delhi agreed to stop buying Russian oil. The tariff was in response to New Delhi’s reluctance to put an embargo on Russian crude despite the war in Ukraine. Rather than bending to American demands, India’s state-run oil refiners have welcomed the discounts Moscow has offered in recent weeks, and the shift in strategy has paid dividends.

Last week alone, India’s national security adviser visited Moscow, followed by Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. Meanwhile, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, was in New Delhi, the first in a series of visits that will lead up to Modi’s trip to China, the first in more than seven years, later this year. Putin is also expected in Moscow sometime this year. It’s more than posturing, experts say.

Feigenbaum told Foreign Policy that Indian public opinion has soured over what is being perceived in Delhi as Washington’s attempts to pressure India to adopt its foreign policy choices. “They’re signaling very clearly that they view that as interference in India’s foreign policy, and they are not going to put up with it,” he said.

Refiners, after some pause at the beginning of the war, had already restarted Russian oil imports after Moscow offered discounts on its oil exports by about six to seven percent. Russia now accounts for 35 percent of India’s crude oil imports, from the 0.2 percent seen before the war in Ukraine. Moreover, Russia has given a significant boost to its offer. “We will continue to supply India with crude, oil products, thermal and coking coal,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov said in an interview. “We also see potential for the export of Russian LNG.”

Slow Moving Entente, Domestic Calculations

Economic sanctions on Russia have been described in India as “transactional,” while Putin’s relationship with Modi has been resilient. Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Washington-based Wilson Center, said Trump’s tariff was but one reason India is trying to repair ties with Beijing and Moscow.

“We’ve seen indications for almost a year of India wanting to ease tensions with China and strengthen relations, mainly for economic reasons. But the Trump administration’s policies have made India want to move even more quickly,” Kugelman said.

Feigenbaum told FP that while some of New Delhi’s actions are theater, some of them are for real. “India is going to double down on some aspects of its economic and defense relationship with Russia — and those parts are not performative,” he said.

India had, in the past, weaned itself off Russian hardware, choosing instead to spend on French Rafale jets, U.S. Apache and Predator drones, and Israeli spy planes. But as relations with Moscow soured in the West, New Delhi saw its energy trade with Russia surge.

In an interview with the Indian outlet The Hindu, Kugelman described India’s turn toward Russia as a “validation of their long-standing belief that the U.S. can’t be trusted, whereas Russia can — because Russia is always going to be there for India no matter what.” Modi has also found an opportunity to appeal to nationalistic fervor in India to “protect the livelihoods of farmers, small businesses, young workers” and flex in front of Washington on its strategic decisions, Kugelman said.

India has already made some significant compromises to the United States, from keeping the “talukdaar” farmers out of the renegotiated trade pact to bringing back workers and a reduction in trade tariffs. “Because of those concessions, India needs to be careful about signaling further willingness to bend. This is one reason there was no trade deal — Modi put his foot down,” Kugelman said.

Reaction in Washington to India’s newfound embrace of Russia has been quite frosty. Navarro, who was a White House trade adviser, called New Delhi’s purchases “opportunistic” in an opinion piece for the Financial Times.

Tariffs, he wrote, were “the only effective way to hit India where it hurts — its access to U.S. markets — even as it seeks to cut off the financial lifeline it has extended to Russia’s war effort.”

The breaking of trust also upends earlier defining moments in the U.S.-India strategic partnership, such as the U.S.-India civil nuclear deal in 2008, in which the United States opened its nuclear fuel and technology markets to India despite the latter being outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty. While India did import its first nuclear reactor from the United States that year, New Delhi and Washington managed to compartmentalize their issues from that point. The U.S.-India nuclear deal was a symbol of how those differences could not affect the bilateral strategic partnership.