Can India really trust America to stay the course on China?

The India-China rivalry is adversarial, structural, and increasingly resentful. Bilateral ties have reached such a nadir that going against its strategic culture, New Delhi is gradually peeling off its preferred strategic ambiguity to reveal an openly confrontationist posture. As India aligns slowly but surely with the American security orbit and the United States seeks to intensify its partnership with India as a democratic counterbalance to China, one question also needs to be simultaneously explored: can Washington stay the course on Beijing? This is not an academic question. For India, which still has 50,000 soldiers facing off against Chinese troops in…