As Washington and New Delhi start talking again, both sides must quickly inject new energy into the bilateral relationship.
After weeks of steadily deteriorating ties, US and Indian leaders seem to have a new determination to pull the US-India partnership back from the brink. Despite the needed vibe shift, the bilateral relationship will not easily return to the same degree of warmth and candor it once possessed. The past few months have done serious damage to US credibility in India, and even the staunchest advocates of the relationship acknowledge that bilateral trust is at an all-time low.
The irony of the current moment is bitter: just six months ago, the relationship had reached an apparent zenith, and the two nations had committed to a TRUST initiative designed to deepen cooperation in emerging technologies further. That effort, which provides a needed means of sustaining technological superiority over China’s state-directed innovation machine, has withered as rapidly as the bilateral partnership.
As Washington and Delhi uneasily eye each other in the wake of the recent bilateral crisis, rebuilding trust can serve as a pathway to repair the damage done to the overall partnership. Here are five proposals to begin that task.
T: Transforming Engagement Channels
One of the biggest challenges of rebuilding TRUST is the lack of key officials to re-energize bilateral technology cooperation. Both the State Department and the National Security Council have eliminated the technology offices responsible for overseeing global technology partnerships; the State Department lacks a confirmed assistant secretary to oversee South and Central Asian affairs; and the head of the Defense Innovation Unit—the Department of Defense’s lead for US-India technology cooperation—recently departed his role.
Two steps could help re-establish needed channels of communication. First, the Trump administration could consider shifting the lead for TRUST to the Commerce Department. This would not only help align new technology initiatives within broader government efforts to build bilateral commercial partnerships. It would also better integrate export control and technology release discussions—currently managed through the Commerce-led Strategic Trade Dialogue—into the TRUST dialogue.
Beyond realigning government engagement channels, the United States and India would also benefit from a more robust framework for non-official dialogue. One of the more striking elements of the recent bilateral breakdown was the absence of strong external mechanisms—such as Track 1.5 dialogues, cultural or business forums—to provide the needed reinforcement to official channels.
Where other countries have strong unofficial linkages, the United States and India have few such mechanisms to help offset downturns in official ties. To rectify this problem, both sides should look to leverage the strong ties that exist between the Indian and Indian-American communities across the business and cultural fields. This could include converting the existing US-India CEO Forum into a more organic platform, which could meet consistently without the need for cabinet officials to drive the agenda. Similarly, the United States and India could consider establishing new parliamentary channels at both the federal and state levels to create a broader platform for dialogue on technology and business affairs that do not need to be solely managed by the executive branch.
R: Revitalizing Export Control Alignment
Rebuilding TRUST requires both nations to confront uncomfortable realities about technology transfer policies that have created friction in their partnership. For too long, American export control regimes have treated India—a strategic partner and fellow democracy—with the same restrictions applied to potential adversaries. Meanwhile, India’s technology ecosystem has struggled with regulatory frameworks that inadvertently favor Chinese technology platforms over democratic alternatives.
The path forward requires coordinated export control reform that serves both nations’ strategic interests in countering China’s technological expansion. The United States should work with India to harmonize export control regimes, particularly for the five critical technology areas under TRUST: semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, and space technology. This means creating a unified “trusted technology sharing” framework that allows accelerated collaboration between US and Indian entities while maintaining robust guardrails against Chinese access to sensitive innovations.
For India, this requires difficult choices about Chinese technology integration—particularly in telecommunications, connected vehicles, and cloud infrastructure. But strategic autonomy cannot mean strategic vulnerability to Beijing’s technological penetration. India’s emerging “trusted technology” standards for 5G networks and data localization requirements offer a foundation for broader technology security alignment with the United States.
Both sides should establish joint technology security assessments for TRUST initiatives, ensuring that breakthrough innovations remain within democratic technology ecosystems rather than leaking to authoritarian competitors.
U: Unleashing Research and Development Partnerships
The future of TRUST won’t be built in cabinet rooms. It will be built in the laboratories where breakthrough technologies are born, the classrooms where future innovators learn to collaborate across borders, and the startup incubators where democratic technological leadership takes shape. The numbers tell the story. Over 330,000 Indian students—more than any other country—study in American universities, contributing $25 billion annually to the US economy.
Many of these students continue to work in the United States after graduation, helping to power America’s innovation economy. However, immigration uncertainty and lengthy visa processing times—as well as the addition of administrative fees reaching six figures annually—threaten to weaken this pillar of the bilateral technology partnership.
The stakes could not be higher. In 2022, China graduated twice as many STEM bachelor’s degree recipients as the United States and produced nearly 20,000 more STEM PhDs. America cannot win this technological race through domestic talent alone—it needs to build a “rest of the world” team of democratic partners. India, with its massive pool of English-speaking engineers and scientists, represents the largest and most natural component of that team. Maintaining robust pathways for sustained collaboration becomes essential for preserving democratic technological competitiveness.
The United States could send a clear signal that it continues to value the contributions Indian researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs are making to the American economy by initiating a new US-India RISE—Research, Innovation, STEM Exchanges—initiative under the TRUST rubric. This program could serve as a one-stop shop to centralize discussions on bilateral academic exchanges, expedite student visa timelines, fund joint research in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced energetics, and other emerging fields, and pool investment vehicles to generate capital for young entrepreneurs.
When young Indians and Americans collaborate on solving problems in Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, and research labs, they build trust that outlasts political cycles and creates innovation networks that China cannot match, despite its massive state investments.
S: Securing Strategic Technology Supply Chains
Even as trade tensions persist, the underlying technological cooperation that drives TRUST has continued to advance, offering a model for compartmentalized engagement that prioritizes innovation over ideology.
Both countries should identify near-term technology wins that could generate renewed momentum and morale in US-India relations. There will be a temptation to hold any significant announcements until a potential leader’s visit later in the year. Still, this only risks allowing additional months of “dead air time” to sour public opinion on the relationship.
Near-term wins could include jointly announcing new technology investments US and Indian companies are making in each other’s economies; concluding drawn-out negotiations for joint defense production initiatives; or announcing long-anticipated plans for additional cooperation on human spaceflight. Identifying a bucket of near-term wins would not only send a much-needed boost of energy into the bilateral partnership but also send a clear signal to Beijing about the priority both Washington and Delhi continue to place on their partnership.
T: Time-Bound Technology Cooperation Commitments
Trust requires concrete actions, not just fine words. Both sides should implement near-term confidence-building measures with clear timelines focused specifically on technology cooperation under the TRUST framework.
America should:
1) Build on the September 2024 ITSI partnership with India’s Semiconductor Mission by designating India as a priority partner for ITSI and identifying additional sources of funding to diversify legacy semiconductor supply chains away from China. While India became the eighth country to join the ITSI program alongside Costa Rica, Mexico, and Vietnam, the relationship’s strategic importance warrants dedicated funding streams for joint research in quantum computing and AI that go beyond the initial assembly, testing, and packaging focus.
2) Establish joint technology incubation centers in both countries, focusing on the five TRUST technology areas, with dedicated funding streams and streamlined regulatory approval processes.
India should:
1) Commit to excluding Chinese technology companies from critical infrastructure projects, following US Commerce Department guidelines on connected vehicles and cloud services.
2) Announce major deals with US space launch services and satellite technology for India’s expanding constellation programs.
3) Establish “TRUST technology corridors” in Indian innovation hubs that provide preferential treatment for US-India joint ventures in semiconductors, biotechnology, and clean energy technologies.
Both sides should:
1) Launch joint technology demonstrations in each TRUST sector within 18 months, creating visible proof-of-concept projects that showcase democratic technological superiority.
2) Establish shared intellectual property frameworks that protect innovations while enabling rapid commercialization across both markets.
Rebuilding What Matters
Seven months ago, US-India relations had reached an all-time high, and both nations committed to the TRUST initiative as a symbol of their technological partnership. Today, as bilateral trust sits at perhaps historic lows and the relationship seeks to recover from recent crises, the same TRUST framework offers the most viable pathway back from the brink.
The irony that launched this analysis remains: the very initiative designed to cement technological cooperation between the world’s two largest democracies has withered precisely when it’s most needed. However, the five proposals outlined here—transforming engagement channels, realigning export controls, unleashing research partnerships, sustaining sectoral cooperation, and implementing technology-centered confidence-building measures—demonstrate that TRUST need not remain a casualty of broader bilateral tensions.
The alternative to rebuilding through TRUST is continued drift while China accelerates its dominance in semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, and space technology. Every month of US-India stagnation hands Beijing additional advantages in the technologies that will define global power for decades to come.
The recent bilateral crisis has caused significant damage, but it has not destroyed the fundamental calculation that brought TRUST into being: both countries need each other to maintain democratic technological leadership against authoritarian competition.
What’s needed now is the political will to choose rebuilding over recrimination. Trust, once broken, is hard to rebuild. But the TRUST initiative provides both the framework and the opportunity to begin that work where it matters most—in the laboratories and classrooms where democratic technological leadership takes shape.
The phones between Washington and New Delhi are now ringing again. It’s time both sides started listening.
About the Authors: Lindsey Ford and Divyansh Kaushik
Lindsey Ford is a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation America and formerly served as the Senior Director for South Asia on the National Security Council.
Divyansh Kaushik is a non-resident Senior Fellow at American Policy Ventures.
Image: Madhuram Paliwal / Shutterstock.com.
