Outlook Year-Ender 2025: The Year In Foreign Policy

2025 was a bad year for India’s foreign policy. The country’s usually intrepid diplomats, led by the suave and quick-witted Subramanyam Jaishankar often dubbed by his legions of admirers as the best foreign minister India has ever had fumbled.

Following the Pahalgan terror attack, India’s attempts to isolate Pakistan, did not succeed. While every government condemned terror, there was no finger pointing at Islamabad. What is worse, Pakistan’s dour Field Marshal Asim Munir, played a cleverer hand than Jaishakar and the Indian establishment. Pakistan, often treated as a pariah state by much of the world, came up trumps after Operation Sindoor, with Donald Trump entertaining Munir to lunch in the White House, signaling that Pakistan is back in the reckoning.

But the year seemingly began well. Donald Trump took oath once again on January 21, and unlike during his first term India was confident that New Delhi had a measure of the president. Besides, the personal rapport between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the US leader was well known.

During Trump’s first term the camaraderie was in full public display during the Howdy Modi event in Texas, when Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of accompanying the visiting leader to Houston for a tumultuous welcome from Indian American supporters. Modi paid back in kind during Donald Trump’s visit to Ahmedabad for the Namaste Trump event that saw a crowd of over 100,000 people turned- up to greet the US President and his family. Indian diplomats were confident and unfazed when Trump invited China’s President Xi Jinping for his inauguration. Xi skipped the event, sending in vice president Vice President Han Zheng to represent him. Foreign minister Jaishankar was in attendance, and his admirers noted that he occupied a prominent place in front, unlike many of Trump’s cabinet ministers.

India’s prime minister was one of the first few world leaders to visit Washington as early as February. However the visit took place in the background of Indian illegal migrants being sent back by the new administration on military planes with feet tied in chains to their seats, something that shocked the country. Despite public jabs by President Trump about India’s high tariffs and reference to India as the ``tariff king’’ the visit on the surface went relatively well with a long joint statement at the end of the visit celebrating the India-US friendship. Washington and New Delhi were all set to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement after the February visit. But the trade deal got stuck and meanwhile the US slapped a 25 percent tariff on Indian exports, and added another 25 over India’s lifting of discounted Russian oil, bringing the tariff figures for Indian goods to a whooping 50 percent. The tariffs remain while officials continue to negotiate a deal acceptable to both sides.

What New Delhi failed to assess was that Trump was an entirely different man during his second tenure. Much more confident, having also won the popular vote and now familiar with the Washington set-up. From the get go he was keen to fulfill every promise he had made during his campaign. Immigration and tariffs were high on his agenda. This time around, the cabinet was filled with people personally loyal to Trump and his MAGA base, there was no one to restrain Trump as it was with Mike Pompeo heading State Department or Jim Mattis as secretary of defence in his first term.

``It has certainly been a tough year for India’s diplomats, who overestimated Trump’s commitment to India and ability to end the Ukraine war, and underestimated the value of the bureaucratic “deep state” in holding the strategic partnership together,’’ says Ian Hall, professor in the school of government and international relations in Australia’s Griffith university. And the State Department and the Pentagon.

The way to Trump’s heart is through flattery and business. That is well known. World leaders from UK’s Starmer, to France’s Emmanuel Macron, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammud bin Salman who promised to invest over a trillion dollars in the US (whether that much will finally come through is another matter) have all played to this weakness. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif carried it to another level by nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for getting an India-Pakistan ceasefire in place.

As is now well known, Trump who fancies himself as a peace maker, had announced the India-Pakistan ceasefire hours before either New Delhi or Islamabad. He claimed that it was US diplomacy that led to a ceasefire. America had done this before during the Kargil war. Russia played a pivotal role in ending the 1965 India-Pakistan war. Again in 2019, an Indian pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, captured by Pakistan was handed back to India at the insistence of the US and several Gulf countries. India could have played along and thanked Trump instead of pushing back on his claims.

2025 marked a dramatic downturn in relations with the United States disrupting a partnership built over twenty-five years since Bill Clinton’s 2000 visit, even as shared concerns over China’s rise and assertiveness had long aligned the strategic interests of New Delhi and Washington.

Since its initial mistakes, New Delhi has attempted to send Trump a message that it has other options. Prime Modi went for the two-day Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit from August 31 to September 1 in Tianjin, a port city in northern China. Pictures of President Xi Jinping, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin in a smiling huddle, relaxed and chatting together flashed around the world. It won Modi much praise from anti-Trump sections of the US media that stressed on India’s strategic autonomy and refusal to take dictation from the White House.

India has stuck to that, inviting Putin on a state visit for an annual summit earlier in December and celebrating their traditional friendship. With China too, despite deep suspicion the relationship is gradually getting back to normal after the military confrontation in the summer of 2020 in Ladakh.

In India’s neighbourhood, New Delhi has again faltered. It failed to read the anti-Hasina sentiments in Bangladesh and the eventual fall of Sheikh Hasina, one of India’s closest allies in the region.

Then in September, after the Israeli attack on Hamas’s political leadership in Doha, Saudi Arabia signed a defence treaty with Pakistan, pledging mutual support in the event of third-party aggression and a possible nuclear umbrella. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf had been seen as one of Modi’s major foreign policy successes, with India believing it had weaned them away from their traditional support for Pakistan.

Sticking to the neighbourhood, there has been a turnaround of India’s policy with India reaching out to the Taliban government in Afghanistan. After decades of not dealing with the Taliban, the rift between Kabul and Islamabad has led to Delhi’s full-fledged engagement with the Taliban.

In short, 2025 exposed the limits of personality-centric diplomacy and the need for sharper institutional assessment in a volatile world. India’s long-term interests, its regional weight and its strategic options remain intact, but restoring momentum will require more than optics.