"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." ~ Henry Kissinger
To negotiate a long-term deal with the United States is to build a palace on shifting sands. Every four years, the tide changes—sometimes violently. Presidents are not just replaced; policies are repudiated, treaties torn, and entire geopolitical visions reversed without apology. What one administration solemnly agrees to, the next might discard with theatrical disdain.
Consider India's recent engagements with the Biden administration. Agreements were inked with all the ceremony due to a rising strategic partnership. But as Donald Trump—now a returning force in American politics—seeks to reclaim the Oval Office, he has made it clear: yesterday’s promises are today’s irrelevance. What he did not honour under Biden, he will not inherit from Biden. He demands not continuity, but rupture—new deals, new alignments, and a clean break with India's traditional ally, Russia.
To mistake American politics for a steady flame is to mistake a bonfire for a hearth.
This pattern of abandonment is not new; it is structural. It is not the exception; it is the rule. From Vietnam to Kabul, from the Kurds to the Shah of Iran, the United States has repeatedly walked away from those who trusted in the durability of its word. Its global conduct is governed less by covenant and more by convenience. There are few constants—only cycles.
In the case of the former Soviet Union, this betrayal assumed epochal dimensions. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, in an act of profound good faith, agreed to withdraw Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, trusting in the verbal assurances of Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush that NATO would not move "one inch eastward." What followed was not gratitude, but encroachment. Under Clinton, NATO expanded east. Under Bush, it expanded further. Today, NATO’s flirtation with Ukraine has ignited a powder keg. The broken promise echoes through the rubble of Donetsk and the ghost towns of Mariupol.
And what of the Middle East—a region disfigured by the oscillations of American foreign policy? One administration arms a faction; the next bombs it. From the ruins of Iraq to the fragmented sovereignties of Syria and Libya, the United States has demonstrated a tragic incapacity for stewardship. Each new doctrine overwrites the last with the urgency of erasure. Hope is installed one term, only to be deposed the next.
India, therefore, must ask itself: can a civilisation whose statecraft is measured in millennia afford to anchor its future to a polity whose attention span is electoral?
The caution is not anti-American. Rather, it is pro-reason. It is a call to strategic sobriety. India must engage with the United States—vigorously, and on equal terms—but without the illusion of permanence. We can trade, talk, and even temporarily align, but we must never tether our sovereignty to their signatures.
Long-term alliances demand long-term memory. And long-term memory is precisely what American politics lacks. In that sense, Kissinger's mordant quip contains a bitter truth for our times: America is a powerful friend, but a forgetful one—and to be forgotten by a superpower is to be exposed to history’s cruelties.
India must, therefore, be non-aligned not out of nostalgia, but necessity. Our foreign policy must resemble the banyan tree—rooted deeply in strategic autonomy, yet flexible in its embrace of the world. Let the winds of Washington blow as they will. We, on the other hand, must learn to build shelters that do not collapse with every change in weather.