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Only two kinds of actors are bad: those who can’t be themselves and those who you wish wouldn’t be. All the rest are likely to shine in movies by good directors, and most actors whose reputations aren’t illustriously artistic have mainly been unfortunate in their collaborations. Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson has long been in my private pantheon of actors who are awaiting their showcase, ever since his performance in Michael Bay’s “Pain & Gain,” from 2013. Since then, Johnson has piled hit atop hit without stretching his artistry; now, in the title role of “The Smashing Machine,” Benny Safdie’s bio-pic about the former mixed-martial-arts star Mark Kerr, Johnson does the substantial work of bringing a noteworthy character to life, by infusing the role with his own expansive personality—perhaps unsurprisingly, given his background as a professional wrestler. It’s a performance of flair and precision and imparts emotion to a script that lacks it.

“The Smashing Machine,” which Safdie both wrote and directed, portrays Mark (the character, as distinguished from the real-life Kerr) from the time of his first bout in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, in 1997, to 2000. The period begins with victories and growing fame—though his achievements are shadowed and threatened by substance-abuse issues and conflict with his girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt)—and peters out with his climactic defeat in a big-money tournament that owes its high financial stakes to his earlier success. Safdie’s approach to the story is divided against itself: as a writer, he takes an analytical view, creating scenes that clearly exemplify the fighter’s powers and troubles and the personality traits that contribute to both; but he films the story with loose documentary-like sequences and large-scale spectacle, neither of which matches the script’s expressive precision.

That’s where Johnson’s acting comes in. Paradoxically, his performance draws strength from the narrow focus of Safdie’s writing, which enables him to flesh out the specific trait, feeling, or impulse that each scene exemplifies, slotting them together like tiles in a mosaic to form Mark’s character. The most fascinating of these traits is shown early on, when a journalist interviews Mark after his first triumph. As Mark describes his strategies, his reflections quickly outleap the specifics of the sport and take on a philosophical dimension. He starts with the simple part: his need to “really assert” himself on his opponent. Then he frames victory in psychological terms, saying, “I’m going to physically impose my will onto” the person in the ring who has the temerity to fight him: “You really feel when that happens, when the person just lets go and totally withers away in your arms.” He describes inflicting pain in gory detail, and, as if hearing the implications of his own thoughts, says that everything “felt very evolutionary,” a sublimely sidelong word for actions and emotions that he recognizes as atavistic and feral.

Safdie’s presentation of these comments foregrounds Mark’s understanding of what’s profound, and profoundly disturbing, about mixed martial arts, and perhaps all martial arts—the channelling and professionalizing of brutality. The scene sets the tone for the entire film, but it’s a height that Safdie can’t sustain. He delivers a rational movie on an irrational subject, an externalized film on a story of subjective depths. Safdie is obviously fascinated by the fighter’s psychology, but he doesn’t successfully dramatize the extremity of Mark’s experiences—except in negative form, by way of his difficulty fitting into the norms of a noncombatant life style.

Mark lives with Dawn in bland comfort in suburban Phoenix, but there’s nothing bland about the way he makes his living, and the conditions that this imposes on his daily routine place enormous stress on the couple’s relationship; Dawn thinks of Mark’s athletic career as a job, whereas, for him, it’s a comprehensive way of life. He declares, before another match, that, to succeed, he has to remain “one-hundred-per-cent concentrated” or else his “emotions will be running around everywhere,” and some of the movie’s most striking moments—and some of Johnson’s most impressive acting—involve Mark’s ironclad concentration when events are spinning out of control. His domestic life entails set regimens, including precise dietary requirements, and when Dawn gets the ingredients of his morning shake wrong (skim milk instead of whole, half a banana instead of one and a half bananas), he doesn’t rant or even criticize, but coolly dumps it out and makes himself another. His eerie calm seems to irritate Dawn even more than a candidly emotional confrontation would have done.

Dawn (a grievously underwritten character whom Blunt conjures with sheer actorly energy) is devoted and sympathetic but out of touch with the absolute, quasi-monastic nature of Mark’s athletic calling. (The script never makes clear whether their relationship had been different prior to his fighting début.) She joins him at the gym and helps him stretch, but her inability to pierce the solitude at the core of his pursuit drives her to a reckless decision that proves consequential. It leads to the movie’s best dramatic scene, one that plays to Safdie’s rational strengths. When Mark is in Japan to make his début on a mixed-martial-arts circuit called Pride, Dawn flies over and surprises him there, showing up in his locker room at exactly the wrong moment, just as he’s preparing to enter the ring for a bout. He barely acknowledges her presence, putting himself into a tightly controlled state of pressurized ferocity so intensely focussed and isolated, detached from all other concerns and thoughts, that she asks him if he’s high. (In pressing him for attention, she merely breaks his trance and, as the movie makes clear, is partly to blame for his bad results.) Johnson’s performance here is transcendent in its simplicity; doing as little as possible by means of will power, displaying an intense remoteness and an active impassivity, he strikingly evokes an athlete’s competitive self-sublimation.

Johnson exudes a preternatural sense of restraint throughout, endowing Mark with a calm that seems held together with inner bonds of steel that, should one of them slip even a bit, would unleash the hellish furies that he strives to reserve for the ring. Back home in Phoenix, when the couple’s relationship reaches a crisis point, Mark offers a brief but terrifying view of the violence he’s holding in when not fighting. But this is merely a piece in a puzzle; Mark’s traits get emblematized rather than developed. His self-control isn’t just a matter of mind games but also of medication. Along with the infliction of pain, the sport entails the endurance of pain; to cope, he becomes dependent on opioids, and, after an overdose, goes to rehab. Yet the movie shows no struggle, no introspection, but, rather, a nonchalantly reasonable ability to drop his stash into a garbage can and walk away.

The movie offers so little of the couple’s life, so little of their shared interests, of their ideas and their observations and their ordinary talk, that what is disclosed comes across as mere dramatic convenience. The relationships that Mark forms in the course of his career are similarly simplified—principally, his hearty bromance with Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), who is first his trainer and then, entering the circuit himself, a competitor. This change in role appears to have no consequences whatsoever in the two Marks’ friendship. In public, Mark Kerr speaks amiably about his trainer turned rival and even takes him along for a rowdy impromptu meet-and-greet, but the lack of friction comes off less as a sign of his unflappability than of Safdie’s indifference to probing a friendship beyond buddy-comedy depth. Mark’s bond with another trainer, Bas Rutten (played by the real-life former wrestler and broadcaster Bas Rutten), is similarly superficial.

As for the sport itself, Safdie illustrates it ably but impersonally. The fight scenes display mere curiosity about the sport but no enthusiasm for it or insight into its inner dimensions. They’re informative but not emotional, lacking a sense of awe or horror or any other extreme experience; they simply log the strategies, details, and outcomes, without even analytical fascination. “The Smashing Machine” doesn’t consider the specifics of mixed martial arts, such as its differences from Olympic-style wrestling (where Kerr got his start) or from the tightly formatted, quasi-balletic ways of boxing. One quick line, in which an elderly woman recognizes Mark’s sport as one that was threatened with a legal ban, suggests both its controversy and its singularity, but the subject is dropped as casually as it’s mentioned. Safdie takes a story of passion and fury, of rage and torment, and reduces it to the arm’s-length mode of the interesting. Only Johnson’s committed, precise, and vigorous performance suggests the power that inherently surges through the story and that the movie leaves nearly untapped. ♦

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Around twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I taught a class in a special observation room at my university’s teaching center. My students and I sat around a long oval table while cameras recorded us. I can’t remember which novel we discussed, but I do know what I learned when I watched the tape afterward, with a teaching coach. She pointed out that, when I was calling on students, I often looked to my right, missing the raised hands on my left. I didn’t let silences go on long enough, instead speaking just when a student had worked up the courage to talk. On the plus side, she noticed I’d been using a technique she liked, which I’d borrowed from a professor of mine: it was like cold-calling, except that, after you’d surprised a student with a challenging question, you told them that you’d circle back in a few minutes, to give them time to consider what they’d say. This, she told me, was “warm-calling.”

Teaching was my favorite part of graduate school, and I signed up for as much training as I could. While I was teaching, or otherwise focussed on students, my role in the project of higher education made sense to me: I was spending years learning about literature so that I could explain it to students who wanted to better themselves. Outside of class, though, the enterprise was murkier. I knew that what really mattered to my professional advancement was academic research. My teaching skills were basically irrelevant. In fact, I’d been warned that teaching was a distraction from the “real work” of writing articles for my peers.

It sometimes seemed as though coursework was a distraction for my students, too. Although earnest and diligent, they were often so immersed in extracurricular activities—charity efforts, musical groups, sports, startups—that they struggled to find time to study. I myself had been part of a startup as an undergrad, and was familiar with the underlying logic driving extracurricular overcommitment: grade inflation, which allowed mediocre students to do less work, also made it harder for excellent ones to distinguish themselves academically. All the incentives, for both teachers and students, encouraged doing less in the classroom and more outside of it.

These contradictions weren’t surprising; they reflected the complex nature of the modern university, in which undergraduate pedagogy is just one of several competing priorities. The implicit theory was, essentially, that students would learn what they could from the university’s top-tier researchers, some of whom were brilliant teachers and some of whom were not. Some classes would be difficult, others laughably easy; grades would be uniformly high; and, in any case, there would be plenty to do outside of class. It would be edifying to be around so many great minds. When learning didn’t happen through instruction, it would happen through osmosis.

Was this theory persuasive? Twenty years ago, it seemed so—but today the gears may no longer be meshing. Student debt has become a generational burden, with tens of millions of people taking on federal loans for degrees. At the same time, college seems to have become dramatically easier, in ways that suggest a diminishment of its core functions. In “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America,” the education scholar Jonathan Zimmerman observes that, in 2011, about forty-three per cent of college letter grades were As; in 1988, the figure was thirty-one, and, in 1960, it was fifteen. (In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch reports that, in 2024, the average G.P.A. of Harvard’s graduating class was 3.8.) Over roughly the same period, “the average amount of studying by people in college declined by almost 50 percent, from 25 to 13 hours per week.” Zimmerman cites a survey finding that, in one semester, half of the respondents from a wide range of institutions hadn’t taken a single course that required writing more than twenty pages, total.

It’s still the case that college graduates tend to be higher earners. And yet the newest data show that people with four-year degrees are now struggling to find jobs. Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, may soon reshape work in a variety of fields; many popular college majors, such as marketing, may prove less valuable than they used to. When A.I. is used by students, it also threatens to turn the classroom into a theatre, in which the act of learning is mimed rather than embraced. Students can have chatbots do their work for them, teachers can give that work inflated grades, and everyone can feel good while learning very little. “There’s a mutually agreed upon mediocrity between the students and the teachers and administrative faculty,” the folk singer Jesse Welles explains, in his song “College.” “You pretend to try, they’ll pretend you earned the grade.” If you want to be a doctor or an engineer, Welles sings, college might be worth it; otherwise, you might “skip the Adderall prescription,” and acquire “a YouTube subscription.”

Since the middle of the past century, the number of Americans in college has increased substantially—in raw numbers, by roughly a factor of five. This development has felt inevitable, driven by the rise of knowledge work and the opening of higher education to once-excluded groups. And yet, in the past decade, enrollment has begun to contract, and that contraction is expected to continue. Demography is a potential factor: a decline in the birth rate, which began around 2007, is predicted to result in fewer high-school seniors. But it also seems possible that more people are concluding that college has changed, and isn’t worth the cost. Universities go out of their way to seem eternal, but higher education is an industry like any other, with its share of ups and downs. If college is a bubble, could it be getting ready to burst?

“Academics used to be the main event at college, surrounded by a lot of sideshows,” Zimmerman told me, when I spoke with him recently. “Now, the sideshows may be the main event.” Even well-intentioned, well-resourced universities have struggled to stop this shift, and Zimmerman finds the roots of the problem in the history of American college teaching. He begins with Mark Hopkins, a professor of philosophy who was the president of Williams College from 1836 to 1872. If Socrates invented the seminar, Hopkins was his American emissary: at a time when education was often conducted through large lectures and by means of rote recitation, he led students in conversations about the meaning of life. “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other,” James A. Garfield, who was one of his students, later said. This idea became a lodestar for educators, Zimmerman writes, who came to understand college teaching as a “charismatic” activity, dependent mainly on the personal vivacity of professors.

There are good reasons for holding this view. A gifted teacher can change your life; a curriculum pre-written by a bureaucracy is unlikely to. As K-12 teachers know, administrative supervision of curricula is fraught with procedural and political perils. Colleges, Zimmerman shows, have navigated this territory by staying true to Garfield’s vision. Decade by decade, they grew larger and more institutionally complex, with flowcharts full of provosts—but, as “more and more of American higher education came under the bureaucratic umbrella, teaching mostly remained outside of it.” Today, administrators micromanage every aspect of college life, but the design and implementation of coursework remains mostly a private matter for individual professors to decide for themselves.

Although there have been many efforts to reform pedagogy in American higher education, they have been largely anti-bureaucratic, Zimmerman writes, with reformers aiming to make teaching “more personal,” by supporting decentralization and idiosyncrasy. In the years after the First World War, for instance, leading universities introduced discussion sections, or “preceptorials,” so that students could get more one-on-one time with teachers who might inspire them. In the nineteen-seventies, a progressive movement in higher ed took this idea further, encouraging professors to emphasize free-wheeling discussion over top-down instruction. Many students liked the hyper-conversational style. Others noticed that it was possible to have great classroom discussions without learning much. Zimmerman quotes one student complaining about “groovy” professors. Another notes that he doesn’t have to go to class for touchy-feely conversations; he can have them in his dorm.

There have been a few piecemeal attempts to exercise more direct control over what happens in the college classroom. The establishment of “centers for teaching and learning,” like the one I attended, aimed to educate professors about pedagogical best practices. (One obstacle, Zimmerman observes, is that specialists in education are often looked down upon by other professors, who see them as “the least scholarly members of the academic guild.”) In the nineteen-eighties, “portfolio assessment” policies required professors to submit their syllabi to committees of their peers; occasionally, state legislatures or other groups have asked universities to justify themselves by means of charters and metrics (and, sometimes, compelled them to pass political litmus tests). These initiatives, and others like them, have succeeded, failed, or backfired, to varying degrees. But none have changed the underlying reality that college teaching is in many ways “an amateur enterprise” for professors, who conduct it in their own ways while being primarily evaluated on their research.

The incredible thing, given all this, is that college teaching is as good as it is. This is a testament to the passion and seriousness with which so many professors approach their work as teachers (and, also, to the genuine curiosity and ambition of their students). To a great degree, Zimmerman argues, it’s precisely because professors take teaching seriously that they resist outside interference. “By the 1980s, across every kind of four-year institution, the amount of time faculty spent teaching was inversely related to their salaries,” Zimmerman finds. (This continues to be true, he says, even at many small colleges that seek to focus on students.) Yet throughout academia, he writes, “faculty members at every level threw themselves into teaching despite—or even because of—its lack of material reward.” He quotes Michael Sherry, a historian at Northwestern University: “What devalues teaching in professional terms might also be just what makes it valuable to us as individuals,” Sherry wrote. “It is ours, not the profession’s.” The purity of the classroom experience is one of the reasons people become professors in the first place. Hopkins wanted to sit on that log, too.

When I was an undergrad and a graduate student, it never occurred to me to question the near-total pedagogical independence of my teachers. I simply avoided the bad ones and sought out those who used their autonomy well. It was life-changing to learn from people who modelled independence of mind. Over all, Zimmerman argues, this autonomy has been a positive force. It’s allowed professors to be innovative, to connect with students on a personal level, to communicate nuanced points of view, to teach their research, and to harness and share their intellectual energy.

But it has also had negative consequences, some of which seem now to be building into a crisis. One of the most obvious is a growing and dysfunctional reliance on student evaluations of their professors. In the nineteen-sixties, Zimmerman writes, evaluations appeared mainly in student-run publications; by the eighties and nineties, they’d been widely adopted as “official administrative mechanisms” by deans who’d implicitly agreed not to judge scholars as teachers. Today, students are often the only people who actually observe professors teaching, and their evaluations are given weight, both in decisions about promotion and in any college’s sense of its own success. And yet it’s obvious that they are wildly imperfect measures of teaching skill. “Nobody would think of judging a faculty member’s research by polling students about it,” Zimmerman observes. Evidence suggests that students don’t actually learn more from the teachers they reward with good evaluations. In fact, it shows that “highly rated professors are more likely to be male, white, good-looking, and easy.”

Putting students in charge of teaching standards would probably be a bad idea in any circumstance. But it’s proved to be especially problematic at a time when the typical student body is growing academically weaker. The “ur-story” of the past few decades, Zimmerman told me, has been a decline in students’ attention spans, presumably driven by smartphones, social media, and other information technologies. In this environment, student evaluations have created a perverse incentive for classes to get even easier, and for grades to inflate. If evaluations and grades remain high—and if schools have no independent way of evaluating whether learning has happened—then who’s to say that anything’s different? Because, for good reason, there is little centralized control over pedagogy, there are few swift or coercive ways for a college to intervene.

The same dynamic can paper over the changes being brought about by artificial intelligence. And efforts to combat widespread chatbot-based cheating may themselves prove problematic. Recently, in the Times, the writer, professor, and technology analyst Clay Shirky catalogued some of the ways in which professors are responding to A.I. The basic idea, Shirky says, is to shift away from writing and embrace “a return to an older, more relational model of higher education.” This might entail replacing the composition of lengthy essays with shorter, in-class assignments, written by hand, perhaps in exam books; students might also be evaluated at required office hours and through oral exams that ask them “to demonstrate knowledge in real time.” Shirky argues that “our current practices around student writing are not part of some ancient tradition”; he notes that, “at times, writing was discouraged”—for example, at the University of Paris, in 1355. Freshman composition classes as we know them didn’t become popular until after the Second World War.

Does it make sense, at a time of declining literacy, for colleges to respond to A.I. by embracing traditions of oral education? That depends on how important you think literacy is. As someone who went to grad school to study English, I tend to believe that modern civilization was built on the written word, and to fear its eclipse. But, as a scholar of new media, Shirky appears open to the idea that, since “the production of ordinary writing now requires much less skill,” colleges ought to be less wedded to writing and reading. Perhaps literacy was a problem for a prior age, and today’s universities ought to be interested in different problems. “Contrary to much popular opinion, college is not in the information transfer business; we are in the identity formation business,” he writes.

On the other hand, a lot depends on how good “relational” education can be. When I was in grad school, I sat for two nerve-racking oral exams, each time studying for a year, under an adviser’s supervision, before facing a panel of three professors. This was possible because there were only about a dozen students in my cohort. Last summer, three Canadian professors explained how they’d administered oral exams to more than six hundred students simultaneously. In so-called ConVOEs—Concurrent Video-Based Oral Exams—students are asked questions by a computer, and then speak their answers into a camera. “We advised students that only the first 60 seconds of each of their responses would be graded, which encouraged concise and direct answers,” the professors wrote. The answers were graded by human beings, who followed a rubric, and used a piece of software that allowed them to view the clips at twice their original speed, “significantly increasing grading throughput.” So, yes, it’s an oral exam—but it’s not exactly Mark Hopkins on a log.

Of course—even if students read less, and do less of their own writing, and skip class more often, and are graded on elevator pitches given to computers—college could remain a stimulating and fun experience. You could still learn a lot; you could still grow as a person; you could still involve yourself in fascinating and rewarding projects. Perhaps you’d learn less, because you’d be on the receiving end of less “information transfer.” You might not care; after all, you wouldn’t know what you’d be missing.

Suppose that college continues to get easier. One might wonder whether it will remain indispensable for so many people. What will employers do if college becomes more widely seen as a kind of personal-development retreat for young people, rather than as a program of rigorous intellectual training? If I apply for a job as a fitness model, and list on my résumé that I was a “member of the gym” from 2021 to 2025, modelling agencies will presumably want to verify that I actually worked out; they’ll want to see my abs. (Perhaps I just waffled around on the elliptical while watching “Love Island” and enjoying the presence of fit people.) Many employers already subject potential hires to elaborate interview and testing regimes, sometimes requiring them to perform tasks or problem-solve while recruiters watch. We might expect such practices to become more widespread, appearing in fields where they’re currently absent and becoming more exacting in areas where they’re already used. (At The New Yorker and many other publications, for instance, editorial candidates are asked to take an “edit test.” Currently, they can take the test at home; maybe that will change.)

If employers grow more skeptical of college, and more frequently test graduates, then we could arrive at a new equilibrium, with the job market revealing, or claiming to reveal, which kinds of college educations actually make people cognitively fit, and which ones don’t. Does majoring in history really make you a better thinker, in ways that employers value? In the past, that’s been taken on faith. If that faith becomes troubled, and decision-makers outside of academia start weighing in more overtly, that will put new pressures on old fields.

Perhaps colleges themselves will diversify. Some may plow on in the current fashion, or experiment with new (or retro) pedagogical approaches, like the ones Shirky outlines, that are A.I.-aware. Others may seek to retrench. It’s possible to imagine that, at some schools, muscular administrators could seize the reins, forcing professors to unify around practices that defend the old norms of reading and writing. Maybe, at such schools, you’ll have to check your devices before entering the library, and prepare for the writing of essays by taking notes on paper, or purpose-built, A.I.-free devices. You’ll then spend your evenings doing homework in proctored computer labs where only printed books or authorized websites are allowed. Except in the computer-science department, A.I. will be forbidden, or tightly controlled. Colleges today emphasize “the great books”; these colleges could simply emphasize “books.” In the sci-fi epic “Dune,” a revolt known as the Butlerian Jihad results in the outlawing of “thinking machines.” Some young people will want to participate in such a revolt; perhaps degrees from universities that facilitate those students will be seen as more valuable, or at least as more indicative of a certain kind of meaningful human effort.

In all sorts of fields, A.I. is making us ask what exactly we do, and why, and whether we want to keep doing it for ourselves when a computer can do a version of it for us. Higher education is no different. Even before the arrival of artificial intelligence, the instant availability of information and distraction on the internet was leading students to wonder if the labor of learning was boring and potentially pointless. In Zimmerman’s account, the relaxification of college has stemmed, ultimately, from a centuries-old, studiously cultivated tradition of organizational disorganization; nevertheless, it might have appeared to be a collective professorial shrug, an admission that schoolwork wasn’t worth doing anyway. “We weren’t actually persuading the kids about the validity of what we do,” Zimmerman told me. Now, colleges may have no choice but to persuade. They’ll also need to demonstrate their value, in real time. ♦

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Photograph by Michael Robins

Bruce Smith joins Kevin Young to read “Open Letter to My Ancestors” by Mary Ruefle, and his own poem “The Game.” Smith, the author of eight poetry collections, including the forthcoming “Hungry Ghost,” has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Syracuse University.

Almost exactly six years ago, Donald Trump and Narendra Modi headlined an event in the Houston Texans’ football stadium called “Howdy, Modi.” Trump, then in his first term as President of the United States, and Modi, just beginning his second term as Prime Minister of India, held hands and waved to a crowd of around fifty thousand people. The two leaders had each risen to power by taking over their country’s dominant conservative parties—in Modi’s case, the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.)—and reorienting them around the demonization of ethnic or religious minorities and the promise of economic competence. During Trump’s Howdy, Modi speech, he said, “You have never had a better friend as President than President Donald Trump, that I can tell you.” There are more than five million people of Indian origin in the U.S., and in three Presidential elections Trump has steadily increased his vote share in that group, from under thirty per cent, in 2016, to nearly forty per cent last year, according to some estimates. (Modi is tremendously popular with the Indian diaspora.)

And yet, despite the fact that Trump is back in office, and Modi was elected to a third consecutive term, the relationship between the two countries is at its lowest point in many years. Earlier this summer, Trump put a twenty-five-per-cent tariff on India; then, in late August, he doubled it to fifty per cent, arguing that the rate was meant to punish India for buying Russian oil. Trump had already enraged some Indians by taking credit for brokering a ceasefire, in May, between India and Pakistan, after the countries had engaged in their worst military conflict in decades. (Pakistan’s government said that it would nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize; Modi, on a tense phone call with Trump, was reportedly unwilling to support such a proposal.) And now Modi, whose country was once seen by Washington as a bulwark against China in Asia, recently visited Tianjin as part of Xi Jinping’s push to create a new global diplomatic architecture without the United States.

To talk about the India-America relationship, I recently spoke by phone with Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump has really turned against India, whether Modi’s political standing in India is finally showing some signs of strain, and why Indian Americans have been so quiet about Trump’s India policies.

Why do you think the America-India relationship has gone off the rails in the past few months? And why do you think the Indian government thinks it’s gone off the rails?

First, I think it has to do with this White House’s view of the global order and geopolitics, and second, it has to do with the personality of the President himself. Let me start with the first. One thing that is really striking is that there really doesn’t seem to be a coherent China policy in this Administration. You seem to have different factions that are jostling for primacy, and they have very different views about the China relationship. That’s important because part of how India has been sold within the American government is that it is this bulwark against China in the Asia-Pacific region. There’s been a bipartisan consensus on that. Once you take that out of the equation, India’s importance is no longer self-evident.

Then I think there’s the personality story. It is clear that this President is annoyed about what happened in the wake of the ceasefire between India and Pakistan. He did not believe that he got sufficient credit from the Indian side. Pakistan lavished him with praise, and nominated him for the Nobel Prize. India didn’t acknowledge the role of the United States at all, and so I think what we’re seeing is a mix of geopolitics and personal pique. [In April, after twenty-five tourists and one local Kashmiri were murdered in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, India and Pakistan exchanged missile strikes. Pakistan has historically supported armed separatist groups in the region, which has been the site of numerous human-rights abuses by the Indian government.]

From an Indian standpoint, I think they’ve come to share both of those views I laid out. A former Indian diplomat who was visiting Washington said to me that they used to be able to have meetings at the Pentagon and the State Department and talk about how critical India was, in terms of the larger geopolitical competition with China. And nowadays they hear people of this Administration say, “Don’t tell me what you’re doing for us on China. Tell me what you’re doing for us as America.”

Yes, there is rhetorical anti-China energy from the Trump people, but, when you boil it down to specifics, it doesn’t seem like the President really cares. With the TikTok ban, for example, he seems to want to get the company’s American interests sold off to his allies. There is no broader strategic policy.

Take American policy toward South Asia writ large. One of the reasons this Administration has given for why it is hitting the reset button on Pakistan is that Pakistan is home to critical minerals and natural resources, and they don’t want to see Chinese control of those resources, which we value dearly. At the same time, they seem to be entering into a period of estrangement with India, which has always been seen as a much more important country in terms of countering China. So it seems to me that there’s a fundamental contradiction there, in terms of where the policy is going.

Do you believe what they are saying about Pakistan and natural resources? Jake Sullivan, who was President Joe Biden’s national-security adviser, recently said, “Because of Pakistan’s willingness to do business deals with the Trump family, Trump has thrown the India relationship over the side.” It’s true that Pakistan has got much more involved with cryptocurrency, though we don’t have evidence of direct Trump business deals. I also don’t want to fall into the trap of overanalyzing Trump’s actions or strategy.

No, I don’t think that natural resources are a critical driver here. I think that the Pakistanis have been very savvy in cultivating Trump and the Trump family. We know this President has a fascination with strongmen, and the way that Pakistan responded to the ceasefire was notable, right? They appealed directly to the President and lavished him with praise. India has long had this policy of wanting to deny a role for third-party mediation in what they see as a bilateral conflict.

This is the conflict over Kashmir that you’re talking about?

I’m talking about the recent conflict between India and Pakistan in May.

Right, but my understanding was that when it came to mediating Kashmir, which was the spark of the May conflict, India has also rarely wanted outside intervention, and the Pakistanis sometimes have.

That’s right. That’s been a long-standing objective of the Pakistanis. And in the aftermath of this brief conflict, the Trump Administration said that they would actually like to play a role in defusing the broader issue, which is about the status of Kashmir. Sergio Gor, who heads the office of White House Personnel, and who is the nominee for Ambassador to India, has now been given the title Special Envoy for South and Central Asian Affairs. I think many people in Delhi fear that he and other Trump officials will try to mediate what the Indians consider a bilateral dispute.

How has Modi tried to deal with Trump personally?

After the ceasefire, Modi was on the back foot. There were many people, particularly in the B.J.P. base, who had criticized him for stopping the conflict when he did. Pakistan [initially] had the upper hand and had shot down a still unknown number of Indian aircraft. We haven’t got a confirmation of how many; it could be two, it could be six. The government of India hasn’t told us. But, after that, most military analysts believe that the Indian military performed quite well and that Pakistani military installations were severely damaged. Then there was the ceasefire. And so Modi was already feeling defensive because people were saying he should have gone for the jugular. And the B.J.P. for many years has been fuelling this nationalism that says our job is not done until we take back the part of Kashmir that is occupied by Pakistan.

The idea that, in the wake of this, Modi was going to acknowledge that a third party essentially had a role in bringing this conflict to an end was just politically unpalatable. Now, in hindsight, I think there was probably a way for Modi to have done this by saying something as simple as, “We thank President Trump for putting an end to yet another bout of Pakistani military adventurism,” or something to that effect. But he didn’t do that. And, as time went on, it became harder and harder for him to do that, from a domestic political position. That brings us to this infamous phone call between Trump and Modi, in June. We don’t know what was said. Our understanding is that Modi tried to convey a message that there are certain things he could do privately, but not publicly. And that did not go over well. Now we are where we are—at fifty-per-cent tariffs.

The reason Trump has given for boosting the tariffs from twenty-five to fifty per cent is that India is buying Russian oil. My understanding is that India buying Russian oil was something that the Americans were essentially in favor of, because even though they wanted to sanction Russia, they didn’t want the global price of oil to skyrocket, which could have happened if a big oil seller like Russia was completely sanctioned. Is that your understanding, too?

That’s correct. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were relatively few international takers for imports of Russian crude. India was one of them. Of course, India has a long-standing partnership with Russia. Russian oil was being offered at a good price. The Modi government was very concerned about the effects of inflation on electoral outcomes, particularly for an incumbent who had been in power for almost ten years at that point. And so they imported Russian oil on the understanding that as long as the import price stayed below a cap that had been set by the G-7, this was not going to constitute a violation of international norms or the Western-led sanctions regime. Eric Garcetti, the former U.S. Ambassador to India, said as much publicly while he was still in office.

The Trump Administration is basically saying, “Well, that was a Biden deal. We think it was a bad deal.” But I think you’re absolutely right. I don’t think this starts with Russian oil. I think Russian oil is a bit of a pretext. India seems to be a target because it doesn’t have many levers with which it can retaliate.

To take a step back, Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, after, for several years, being banned from the United States for his role in ethnic violence in Gujarat. Pretty soon, he developed a fairly warm relationship with then President Barack Obama. That carried over to Trump’s first term and then to Biden, no?

I think there’s no question that we are at the lowest point in U.S.-India relations since the late nineteen-nineties, when the United States slapped sanctions on India in the wake of the 1998 nuclear test. [India and Pakistan each conducted nuclear tests that year, leading to international consternation and sanctions.] There have been other bumps in the road, but other than the odd trade dispute or some difference over intellectual property, this has been a relationship that has been moving on an upward trajectory. And I think the Indians felt very confident, frankly, about their position in a Trump 2.0 Administration. They felt that, despite all of the volatility, all of the uncertainty, all of the turmoil of Trump’s first term, India actually fared reasonably well. It was during Trump’s first term in 2020 that there were these border incursions by the Chinese military across the so-called Line of Actual Control that separates Indian-controlled and Chinese-controlled territory, and India felt that the U.S. came to its aid—not overtly, but behind the scenes in terms of providing both human and signals intelligence to help them track Chinese troop movements and the like. They were overly confident that Trump 2.0 would essentially be a repeat of Trump 1.0, and that’s where they went awry.

The Trump Administration says it is going to raise the fees for new H-1B visas, which are visas for high-skilled workers, to a hundred thousand dollars. How has that played in India?

If you read the Indian press right now, the case that many people are making is that this is part of a concerted effort to undermine India. The fact that you’ve had a number of pretty outright hostile statements coming from Administration officials, such as Howard Lutnick and Peter Navarro, and now you have this move on high-skilled immigration—more than seventy per cent of H-1B holders are Indian nationals. So this really looks like an attempt to pick on India. Some people in India are viewing this as an opportunity, perhaps, to reverse brain drain, to bring back or retain talent. But, obviously, these people are looking abroad for a reason, which is that they don’t believe there are enough jobs in India. They don’t believe that there are enough paths to upward mobility and they believe that the business environment in India is simply not attractive enough to stay. And so I think it presents them with a real conundrum. This is the sixth-biggest immigration corridor in the world, and India is now by far the No. 1 recipient of global remittances. This has become a macroeconomic issue, and not just an issue about national pride and foreign policy.

If the tariffs remain at this high level, how much of an economic problem is it for India, and how much of a political problem is it for Modi?

I think it’s a significant economic problem because the Indians, in their negotiations, had been given to understand that they would end up with a tariff rate somewhere between fifteen and twenty per cent, which would put them in the ballpark of many of their other Asian competitors. But with fifty per cent, there are just entire industries that are labor intensive whose exports are no longer viable. India has been very late to the game of getting involved in textiles and garments and leather and footwear. These are blue-collar jobs that employ a lot of low-skilled labor; they’ve made an incipient foothold in some of these areas, and that could evaporate. Some economists are projecting that this would shave up to one percentage point off G.D.P. I think actually the number could be much higher because of ripple effects and what it would signal about the investment climate more generally.

On the political side, I think it’s a twofold blow for Modi. Part of his appeal is that he’s a “teacher to the world,” who has really put India on the map when it comes to foreign policy, particularly in terms of relations with the great powers. So this would be seen as a big failing that he couldn’t adequately manage Trump when many others have managed to figure him out much better. The second point is that, to the extent that Modi has a real political liability, it’s on economics. It’s on jobs. It’s on improving people’s daily lives. And if you look back at his eleven years, we see a very mixed performance on the economy. He benefits from a relatively fragmented opposition, but I think there’s a feeling within the B.J.P. that Modi can defy the laws of political gravity only for so long.

When you say “within the B.J.P.,” do you mean that the threat to him is internal?

Well, the one issue where the opposition could actually make a lot of headway is on the economy. They’ve not succeeded in making corruption an issue. It’s been difficult for them to make foreign policy an issue. Modi has always said, Look, I presided over the fastest-growing state when I was chief minister of Gujarat, and I’m basically going to translate that vision to the national level if you elect me Prime Minister.

I think right now the B.J.P. internal threat is relatively muted, because, to the extent there were other power centers within the Party, with maybe one exception, they don’t really exist anymore. And that’s partially because Modi has remade the Party in his own image. That second rung of powerful B.J.P. state leaders does not really exist. Basically, every chief minister who exists in India today, who belongs to the B.J.P., has been handpicked. The one potential exception is Yogi Adityanath, who does have his own political standings.

This is the far-right chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who would be seen as being on Modi’s right?

That’s right. He would represent a threat to Modi coming from the political right, as someone who might be even more nationalist and even more hard-line than Modi.

Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician who has been critical of Modi, recently met with some Democratic congresspeople who were visiting India. And he said that they had not heard from any Indian American constituents complaining about the way India was being treated by the United States. I would say, in my own life, with more conservative Indian Americans whom I’ve talked to about this, there’s a lot of hand-waving or playing this down. Why do you think that is, and has the right-wing Indian media minimized this somewhat because Trump is the one doing it?

I’ve been struck by how quiet and mealymouthed Democrats have been on this issue, given that it is an obvious way they can go after Trump. But I’ve equally been struck by how quiet the diaspora has been. I think there could be a couple of reasons for this. One is that they’re fearful. They’re fearful that if they speak up, they will draw undue attention to themselves and there could be retribution from the state. We know that, in 2024, according to our data, there was a ten-percentage-point swing among Indian Americans toward Trump. And so I think there are people who are trying to grapple with their new political views.

I don’t think it’s because of the right-wing media in India. And the reason I say that is because, actually, the right-wing media in India has been very critical of Trump. The level of jingoism and rallying behind Modi has been very strong. In fact, there are a lot of voices within the B.J.P. ecosystem saying, “Every single major U.S. tech company has a campus in India. We could kick them all out tomorrow, and that’s our way to send a message.” Now, Modi has handled things very differently. He’s actually been very subdued in his messaging publicly. But I don’t think the right-wing ecosystem is actually feeding those messages of conciliation or underplaying the Trump threat. In fact, I would say that they’re playing it up quite a bit.

There had been this persistent feeling in India that India fares better under Republican Administrations than it does under Democratic ones. Privately, what I hear from officials in India is a bit of a lament that we actually didn’t know how good we had it under the Biden Administration. We had people like Jake Sullivan, who really believed and invested in this relationship. Now when we want to pick up the phone and call people in this Administration who might be our champions, we don’t actually know who to call.

Yes, I think there was a lot of concern from B.J.P. folks that, when Modi came into office, Democrats were going to lecture India about human rights and things like that, and I think mainly because of the centrality of China that fell by the wayside.

I would take it a step further. I would say that the Biden Administration really bent over backward not to make democracy or human rights a centerpiece of their India policy, when there was actually a lot of pressure from those on the left to do so. Even in the wake of an alleged targeted-assassination attempt of a U.S. citizen of Indian origin on U.S. soil. [In an indictment, the alleged architect of the plan was identified as a former Indian intelligence officer, and he is accused of plotting to kill a critic of the Indian government.] And so I think that, despite the rhetoric on democracy and human rights, there actually wasn’t a real difference in the policy between the first Trump Administration and the Biden Administration on the question of India’s own domestic transformation. ♦