Trump to swear in Sergio Gor as ambassador to India amid wrecked ties with New Delhi

The TOI correspondent from Washington: US president Donald Trump will be swearing in ambassador-designate to New Delhi Sergio Gor in the Oval Office on Monday amid growing disquiet among foreign policy boffins about his erratic policies they say have damaged ties with a range of allies including India.

The White House schedule lists Gor’s swearing in for 3 pm EST (1.30 am IST) after Trump hosts Syrian president Ahmed al‑Sharaa, a former al Qaeda leader formally listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist till recently, signaling a major US policy shift in the region.


Removed from the terrorism watchlist, Sharaa arrived in Washington DC over the weekend and was spotted playing basketball with security personnel even as other US allies are jumping through hoops to appease the US president’s fixation with tariffs and trade imbalances, among other piques.

Presidential involvement in ambassador swear-ins is rare and exceptional, not the norm. The standard practice is for the vice president to administer the oath of office to newly confirmed ambassadors, typically at the vice president's ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building or occasionally at the State Department.

But Trump administering oath of office to Gor is seen as more as a reflection of the envoy’s closeness to the president than the importance he attaches to India, a country he has repeatedly twitted and taunted in recent times with both his policies, notably on tariffs, and his enthusiastic outreach to Pakistan and China, and his abrasive remarks.

Gor has already visited New Delhi on a recce as ambassador-designate and will head back to try and steady, if not salvage what many experts say is a trainwreck caused by Trump’s haphazard policies that often talks up his personal ties with Prime Minister Modi while inflicting serious damage to ties with India with punitive measures. Trade and foreign policy analysts like Raymond Vickery and David Price have excoriated the president for a transactional approach they say has eroded trust, harming ties that took more than half a century to rebuild after the 1970s fiasco.

“Pakistan has a tariff of 19% and India has a 50% tariff. Where is the friendship between Modi and Trump that was extolled? It is a slap in the face for Modi because the Indian opposition is asking him where’s the friendship,” former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan said at a Chicago thinktank event last week. While the two countries could arrive at a trade agreement soon, Rajan warned that the US risked losing India’s trust because “these things stay long in people’s mind," despite all the talk of military alignment between the two countries. The partnership was most recently reiterated in talks between the defence establishments of the two countries and the signing of a ten-year defense framework agreement by defence minister Rajnath Singh and US defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

However, Trump’s repeated reference to a G-2 formulation with regards to China, a country US analysts say he has virtually surrendered to on the trade issue, and his disdain for the G-20, whose annual meeting in South Africa later this month he is avoiding, has alarmed foreign policy experts who say his moves make no sense. The US president also appears to have put the Quad, a grouping of US, India, Japan, and Australia, on the backburner, abandoning a leadership summit India was to have hosted in November.

In a commentary headlined Trump’s incoherent foreign policy defies explanation, Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relation, said the US president’s pronouncements are so often unexpected and disconnected from reality that they leave foreign policy scholars, and foreign leaders, bewildered. He pointed to Trump’s recent outbursts against South Africa, Venezuela, and Nigeria among other countries to maintain that his decisions are based on a whim, often driven by disinformation, and the purpose could simply be “to keep the world off balance and to keep the spotlight on him.”