The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Did Trump Just Wreck US-India Relations? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

With tensions rising in India and Pakistan, it was only a matter of time before Trump had to step in and put his foot in his mouth. Basically, what happened is the Trump administration announced a ceasefire and peace talks between India and Pakistan...seemingly without consulting either side.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/did-trump-just-wreck-us-india-relations

Hey all, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Canyonlands National Park, and today we're going to talk about India and Pakistan and how it intersects with what the Trump administration has recently done. Specifically, Indian Pakistan recently had a near-war exchange. Some Pakistani militants who may or may not have been loosely affiliated with the very weak Pakistani government launched an attack inside Indian territory in Kashmir and killed a lot of people and took the time about it. It showcased the general security and competence of the Indian government,

government. So the Indian government felt that it had to respond and it hit some targets in Pakistan, some of which were military, and then we got tit for tat back and forth attacks that were just gradually escalating, hitting more and more sensitive issues until such time as we got peace talks brokered by the Trump administration. Now, Trump being Trump, he made the peace talks all about him, and he announced that there was now a ceasefire without really consulting either the Pakistanis or the Indians made it very clear in the situation to come that all three parties would be involved in the talks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nothing that sounds too incendiary unless you know anything about India.

The Indians have had the firm position for over a half a century now that any negotiations between Pakistan and India should be that. Negotiations between Pakistan and India with no third party involved at all. And so the very involvement of the Americans was something that New Delhi saw as an insult. And the reason is pretty straightforward. India has a population that's roughly nine. times the size of Pakistan, an economy that's closer to 12 times the size of Pakistan, and that's probably being overly favorable to the Pakistanis. So in any real negotiations on anything,

the Indians feel that they should hold all the cards because they do hold almost all of the cards. And if you bring in a third party, they're going to tilt towards some degree of equality between Indian Pakistan, which India rejects on principle. And that's exactly what has gone down. And so we now have, arguably, the the worst relationship between India and the United States that we have seen in the last 30 years. Now, that might seem grossly over-exaggerated, but think back to what we've been doing for the last 30 years. In the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks, the United States found itself needing to be involved in a ground war, in a landlocked country, and the United States is a naval

power. So we found ourselves doing things that we don't like to do in places we don't like to do them and we had to rely on countries for transit and Pakistan was the most important of those. During the Cold War, it was okay to side with Pakistan against India because India was relatively pro-Soviet. But in the post-Cold War environment, we found ourselves dealing with the jihadist government that was fighting a jihadist insurgency in order to transport gear through jihadist territory to get to other jihadist's territory to fight different jihadists. It was a pain in the ass and we had to do it for 20 years. And at every step of the way, we found ourselves at odds with the government in Islamabad, as Pakistani militants were attacking every aspect of the American operation, oftentimes in league,

or at least informed by the Pakistani government. We hated every single second of it. And so as the United States has gradually removed itself from Afghanistan over the last 15 years now, we've been bit by bit by bit edging towards a better relationship with the country that we would rather have the relationship with. Not Islamist Pakistan, not weak Pakistan, not militant Pakistan, but a democracy in India that has a lot more shoreline and is a much more logical partner for us long term in holding off China and protecting sea routes and making a partner with the country of the future that has a much bigger market. Or that's how it was until this week. Basically all of that work has now been unwound because we took the one thing that the Indians cared about and basically took a big

steaming dump on it. So this is something that the Trump administration would have known if they had talked to people in the CIA or the NSC or the State Department, but all of those people have been fired. And so we basically now have a new foreign policy that has partnered with the wrong side and the partner that we have been trying to get away from since 2002. Blah.