Downturn in India- US ties

New Delhi has received the news of the appointment of Sergio Gor (né Sergey Gorokhovsky) as the American ambassador to India with restraint. The 38-year-old Gor has simultaneously been appointed as Special Envoy for South/Central Asia; the implications of this stunning development remain to be seen. Suffice to say that never since 1947 has India shared an envoy with responsibility for such a vast region.

A close associate of President Donald Trump, Gor is currently the head of Presidential Personnel Appointments Office (PPO). Here, he clashed with Elon Musk, who described him as a “snake.” Gor had previously helped create a publishing venture that paid millions of dollars to Trump to produce his books when he was out of office; he ran a super PAC supporting Trump in 2024.

Though not a career diplomat, Gor can be expected to clear the US Senate confirmation process. Some have hailed his appointment as offering India “a rare back channel” to Trump, but Gor’s mandate, as former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal observed, appears to overlap with the jurisdiction of the State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs.

He will have a huge responsibility managing US relations and interests in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (South Asia) as well as in the formerly Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. He may be tempted to manage the inter-relationships between these countries to promote US interests in the region. This could create tensions between and within the countries of that vast and heterogenous area, and with Russia, China, and India, that have vital interests in the region. There are fears that the new envoy could exploit India’s internal political fault lines.

Previously, in January 2009,  then-President Barack Obama had appointed Richard Holbrooke as special envoy to Pakistan and India. However, when the news was leaked by the New York Times, New Delhi lobbied extensively, and Holbrooke’s mandate was eventually confined to Afghanistan and Pakistan. New Delhi adamantly refused to be hyphenated with Pakistan.

Coming close on the heels of Operation Sindoor (May 7-10, 2025) wherein India decisively destroyed the terrorist training camps in Pakistan and consistently denied President Trump’s claims of having mediated a ceasefire between the two countries, the appointment suggests Trump’s conscious hyphenation of India with Pakistan. The reaction of the nations of South and Central Asia to this decision remains to be seen.

The core issues behind the tensions in Indo-US ties include India’s purchase of Russian oil and Washington’s punitive tariffs on India. Former US envoy to the United Nations, Nikki Haley urged India to “take Trump’s point over Russian oil seriously, and work with the White House to find a solution.” She added that, “Navigating issues like trade disagreements and Russian oil imports demands hard dialogue. But we should not lose sight of what matters most: our shared goals. To face China, the United States must have a friend in India.”

The advice expectedly raised hackles in India. Observers point out that President Trump has chosen friendship with terror-sponsoring Pakistan, an action reminiscent of Washington’s embrace of Islamabad in the early years of the Cold War, when Pakistan joined the Baghdad Pact in 1955. As the Cold War 2.0 deepens, Trump seems to favour some of the alignments of the post-World War II era; however, he disapproves of the European Union and is undermining the consolidated NATO-centric Western bloc of Cold War days.  

New Delhi has previously defined its redlines. First, on trade, there will be no compromise on farmers’ and small producers’ interests. Second, India will continue to buy Russian crude as it is a stabilising factor for global markets. Third, there will be no third-party mediation in bilateral ties with Pakistan.

Obliquely hinting at the problematic nature of Gor’s appointment, Dr. Nishchalnath Pandey, Director, Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS), recalled the tenure of Carol Laise, the first woman US envoy to Nepal, who got married on active duty to the influential Ellsworth Bunker, the US envoy to South Vietnam during the war. “Amb. Bunker used to come regularly to Kathmandu on a military plane!,” he tweeted.

Kanwal Sibal also pointed out that the Special Envoy mandate blurs the focus on the Indo-Pacific dimension of US-India ties. As New Delhi deepens its relationship with Moscow and Beijing and the BRICS community of which all three are founding members, it has little interest in serving as a US proxy against China. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), comprising the US, India, Japan, and Australia, has been downgraded by the churn in international strategic, diplomatic, technological, and commercial alignments triggered by President Trump.

According to the Times of Malta and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) International Center for Journalists, The little-known Gor was, born Sergio Gorokhovsky, on November 30, 1986, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of the Soviet Union. Records indicate that he spent at least five years of his childhood in Malta where his mother created a Maltese company in 1994, listing her nationality as Israeli.

Between 1996 and 1999, he studied at a Catholic school for boys, De La Salle College, in Vittoriosa, a town near Cospicua in Malta. The family emigrated to the U.S., where he became a citizen. He got a job with Republican Senator Rand Paul, which he quit in 2020 to work as chief of staff on the Trump Victory Finance Committee for the failed re-election campaign.