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Srinath Raghavan is one of the great historians of contemporary India (and South Asia). His new book on Indira Gandhi is a must-read. But I also found a lot of value-added beyond the book in this great interview of him by Rohan Venkat on Rohan’s excellent India Inside Out Substack. Go forth and read the interview.

In the last blog post, I highlighted recent Pew data on Indian views of the United States and China. Today Pew continues its streak of important data about India and public opinion with views of India in a couple dozen other countries. One thing we want to be careful about is attributing too much to year-on-year shifts (surveys can be noisy, response rates can vary, etc) but it’s still interesting and worth keeping an eye on.

First, the overall favorables. I was struck by how evenly divided opinion in the US is (more below), and the lack of high favorables in Australia and South Korea compared to Japan and Indonesia. Not clear how much of this is signal versus noise, but interesting to note.

Second, change since last year (again, take with grains of salt):

Third, after going through some gender and age splits, Pew notes that there isn’t a consistent ideological cleavage in views of India:

This speaks to questions about whether India is perceived more favorably by the Republicans in the US; consistent with my poking into the question way back in 2019, there is some evidence that the American left is more pro-India on aggregate than the right. Given the heightened anti-Indian sentiment (around H1Bs, for instance) in the Trump coalition, this should be little surprise, and certainly doesn’t suggest a strong pro-India mass constituency on the right.

Donald Trump’s approach to India over tariffs will be bad for US foreign policy. New Delhi will surely figure out a way to do business with the US in the coming weeks and years, but it seems pretty obvious that it will not be able to trust the US as a reliable strategic partner (at least, I sure wouldn’t). A wildly mercurial, punitive America is not going to reach its potential as a hub in an effective series of bi- and multi-lateral relationships in Asia. India has limited options since Russia is not a full substitute and China is at the end of the day a strategic rival, so I don’t expect it to break entirely from the US or anything. But New Delhi will likely see a lower ceiling on future cooperation with the US than in a counterfactual world in which this was all handled differently. And I say this as someone who has often been more skeptical than the conventional wisdom on US-India ties, so not a booster or someone whose professional status depends on an ever-improving relationship.

The particularly perverse aspect here is that Trump’s policies come at a time when the Indian public is (was?) notably pro-US compared to many other middle-income states. Pew just had a fascinating piece on views of the US and China in several such countries, and as of spring 2025, India was much less concerned about the US than its contemporaries:

This is consistent with decades of survey work on Indian attitudes – often skeptical of particular US foreign policies, but quite positive at a broad level about the United States. It’s possible that this will continue, but the nature of Trump’s highly public, unambiguous denunciations of India – alongside his renewed ties with Pakistan – may trigger a serious drop in this sentiment. And all for no clear reason: it’s a gratuitously insulting, counterproductive way to run a country’s foreign policy, especially toward states like India that are not locked into being US protectorates like Europe or parts of NE Asia, and that have at least some room to maneuver in response.

My Carnegie Endowment colleague Ashley Tellis wrote a critical piece on “India’s Great Power Delusions” back in June in Foreign Affairs. Today, we see responses from Nirupama Rao, Dhruva Jaishankar, and Lisa Curtis, plus a reaction by Tellis. Go forth and read the exchange for both defenses and critiques of India’s current foreign policy.

Japan Camera Hunter is a well-known expert/seller of high-quality Japanese (and some German) camera gear, mostly vintage but some modern. Below is a nice video he made on the Canon rangefinder series of the 1950s/1960s – they used the Leica thread mount (what Leica used before introducing the M mount). I have a Canon Serenar 50/1.8 from the early 1950s in LTM and it is a shockingly good lens for the age. Canon transitioned to its FL/FD mount in the early 1970s, which is when it really began to take off as a top-tier camera maker (the electronic/autofocus EF mount came in the late 1980s and marked another step forward). As boring as I used to find Canon back in the day (I started with Olympus and then Fuji), all of my stuff now is Canon – an A-1 (from my grandfather-in-law) with a couple FD lenses and Canonet QL17 G-III (starting to break down so need repaired but worked great for me for a decade despite being from the 1970s) for film, an R8 and a number of RF lenses, plus the Serenar and an EF lens that I adapt to the R8. They just work, and the ergonomics are lovely and functional, even if the modern cameras have all the design flashiness and vintage flair of a 2017 Honda Accord.

JCH on Canon’s rangefinder series:

I’ve taught Arendt several times, and really enjoyed this PBS documentary on her life and political thought. Streaming at least for awhile more on the website here.

I’ve been working on a book project for several years about how major power competitions affect the internal politics – and often the foreign policy alignments – of “swing” states, focusing on South and Southeast Asia. Some early thought can be found in this 2024 Foreign Affairs article, while the scholarly book version is now under advance contract at Princeton University Press.

Part of the work was being done for a United States Institute of Peace contract that would explore this question in South Asia in a policy-focused way; I like being able to do analytical work that is aimed at a broader audience. The report was mostly finished when Elon Musk’s DOGE bizarrely decided to kill USIP, including my contract.

I took the project to my colleagues in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who were interested in it. USIP then revived itself, and we decided to jointly publish the paper. USIP has now been shut down again literally days ago, but hopefully it will be resuscitated for a second time.

In any case, the report is now out from Carnegie (a link to the full PDF is there too). It offers a new typology of how major power rivalries can manifest themselves in the politics of third-party states (which I hope can be applied beyond South Asia), while also adding thoughts on mechanisms that can pull local and global politics together or push them apart. The piece concludes with some policy implications for American foreign policy. Here are some excerpts:

“there are important differences in whether and how domestic players in third-party states mobilize external major power rivalry in their own internal politics, ranging from making it central to their political strategies to ignoring major power competition in favor of a purely internal focus. To improve our understanding of how geopolitical rivalries intersect with swing states’ politics, this paper outlines a new framework of trajectories that helps us measure and compare the overlap between the contours of a major power international competition and the key lines of division within the domestic politics of third-party states. It then identifies three mechanisms that can increase or undermine this overlap, both across countries and over time within them. . . . .

Table 1 provides a new way to identify how major power competition can align with domestic political competition. These outcomes can be thought of as changeable trajectories because political systems can move along the spectrum over time. For instance, Cambodia in the mid-1950s was much less polarized than it would become by 1970, when the spillover of the Vietnam conflict and the collapse of Norodom Sihanouk’s balancing act into a direct communist-anticommunist showdown turned Cambodia into an open war zone. Major power competitions can also play out differently within the same state or region. For example, in the Sahel, China-India competition is far less relevant than U.S.-Russia competition, but far more important in Nepal. This lets us compare different countries to each other and study changes in one country over time. . . .

The United States should thus cultivate a role as a friendly outsider, being flexible and open to working with a variety of local players. It can carve out a narrow but valuable niche in the region’s smaller states as a provider of expertise, technology, and capital that helps these countries develop economically and achieve political stability. This approach will be most effective when explicitly not framed as simply reactive to China: consistent engagement can limit Chinese influence as a consequence, but it should not be the explicit driving force behind American strategy in the region. Indeed, there may be times when it makes sense to adopt a similar approach to China in order to advance American interests in a particular third-party state.

Such a nuanced, case-by-case approach that invests in deep knowledge of local political coalitions and public opinion can help the United States navigate a new era of rivalry in the region. Yet this goal has been undermined by sweeping cuts to American aid and development initiatives, as well as planned reductions in the U.S. State Department.⁵⁵ Eliminating soft power instruments and regional expertise is a curious way to pursue major power competition. Such tools are obviously not always effective in building political influence for the United States—but it is very difficult to beat something with nothing. China has devoted substantial resources, both diplomatic and financial, in South Asia, while U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration appears to have decided to simply not compete in these countries. For instance, for months it appeared that the United States had cancelled the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) agreement with Nepal, while the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development has removed one of the main tools of American engagement in the region.⁵⁶

As Carnegie’s Evan Feigenbaum has warned, the United States risks being seen as the “Hessians of Asia,” primarily useful in the military realm but absent, or even adversarial, in other domains.⁵⁷ The Trump administration has further accelerated this drift in American policy—it is extremely unclear what a positive, forward-looking American policy message in the region could be. Emphasizing military aid and cooperation makes sense with countries locked in rivalries or deep territorial disputes with China, but that does not apply with much force to South Asia’s swing states. They do not want to be dominated by China, but also are not looking for American weapons or military backing. Development, domestic political survival, and governance are vastly more pressing domestic priorities. Without reinvesting in the tools and strategies that can help address these countries’ actual goals, the United States risks sitting on the sidelines.”

Leica offers an annual Oskar Barnack award for a photography series, with photos “of a documentary or conceptual-artistic nature, and deal with the relationship of humanity to the environment.”

This year’s shortlist is up (you can also see past finalists and winners), heavily featuring conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, and the DRC, as well as series on migration and climate change, among others. Incredible work; check it out.