‘Trump-Modi friendship is over’: Ex-NSA John Bolton says US-India ties set back by decades

Ex-NSA John Bolton says India-US ties pushed back decades

Former US National Security Adviser John Bolton has said that President Donald Trump’s once-strong personal relationship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi “is gone now,” warning that close ties with the American leader “won’t protect” world leaders from the “worst.”

Bolton argued that Trump’s approach had set back US-India relations by decades, adding that the previously close rapport between the two leaders had effectively evaporated. His remarks come against the backdrop of ongoing trade tensions fueled by Trump’s tariff policies on India.

“Trump had a very good relationship personally with Modi. I think that's gone now, and it's a lesson to everybody,” Bolton said in a recent interview with a British media portal, LBC.

He was asked if the global order is shifting, pointing to Prime Minister Modi’s presence alongside Russian and Chinese leaders at the SCO summit.

Replying to which, he said, “I think about 100 percent of this goes to Donald Trump and the way he’s treated India on a number of fronts over the past several months, setting back decades of effort to pull India away from its Cold War relationship with Russia… That progress has been reversed.”

Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, has been outspoken in his criticism of the former president and his handling of international affairs.

“I think Trump sees international relations through the prism of his personal relations with leaders. So if he has a good relationship with Vladimir Putin, the US has a good relationship with Russia, that's obviously not the case,” he said.

New Delhi has been hit hard by US tariffs, with a 25 percent duty on Indian goods and an additional 25 percent on imports of Russian crude, effectively raising the overall tariff burden on Indian products to 50 percent.