India, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has spent the last decade telling the world a story about itself: that it is the Indo-Pacific’s decisive power, a civilisational state rising to challenge China and a natural partner of the United States in leading the “free world”.
Modi has invested enormous political capital into choreographed diasporic spectacles, G20 extravagance and the belief that a new US-India alignment is both historic and inevitable. Yet Washington’s National Security Strategy, released in November, gives India barely a passing mention. In a blueprint that reorders American foreign policy priorities, India appears only as a supporting actor, sometimes even as a problem for the US president to fix.
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