How India faces a strategic squeeze amid Trumpian disruption and China’s silent advance

For decades, protocol, politeness, and process defined US diplomacy. Indians and others might have disagreed with American positions, but they understood the debates and could predict policy. Media emphasises divergence, but the differences between Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton and George Bush were more about style and tactics rather than substance and goals. US President Donald Trump upended the continuity. Rather than draw inspiration from the French prelate and statesman Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), who created the first formal foreign ministry, or the French diplomatic theorist François de Callières (1645–1717), who wrote about the art of negotiation,…