In May 2025, as a U.S.-brokered ceasefire put a momentary stop to deadly fighting between India and Pakistan, claims circulated (archived) that U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns said, "Treating India and Pakistan the same would be a mistake. Our ties with India are growing stronger — but we don't trust Pakistan.'"
(X user @MeghUpdates)
One X user, whose May 12 post had more than 760,000 views at the time of this writing, wrote: "BREAKING: U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns drops a bombshell: 'Treating India and Pakistan the same would be a mistake. Our ties with India are growing stronger — but we don't trust Pakistan.'"
The claim appeared mainly on (archived) Facebook (archived) and X (archived).
However, we found (archived) no (archived) credible (archived) reports that Burns, a career civil servant who served as the U.S. ambassador to China from 2021 to 2025, said the alleged quote about not trusting Pakistan in May 2025 as the "Breaking" part of some social media posts suggested. The video shared alongside the alleged quote showed an event on Oct. 7, 2016, that did not include the alleged statement. Therefore, we rate this claim an incorrect attribution.
The 2016 video accompanying the claim showed a panel discussion about India's foreign policy at the Brookings Institution featuring Burns — then a Harvard University professor and member of then-Secretary of State John Kerry's Foreign Policy Advisory Board — and Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, a diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service who served as high commissioner to Pakistan.
The clip shows Burns' reply to a question about whether the U.S. should "re-hyphenate" relations to India and Pakistan — meaning treat foreign relations with the two countries equally. Burns said (at 45:45, emphasis ours):
I think it would be a great mistake if we attempted to frame our relations with these two countries in some kind of you know, we have to have equal treatment, and equal levels of interest because we have an entirely different relationship with India, much more positive, much more engaged, much more integrated than we do with Pakistan.
Burns added (at 46:08, emphasis ours):
You've seen this big swing in America's confidence and trust in Delhi and a decline in our confidence and trust in Islamabad so I don't think President Obama can position himself, nor do I think that Delhi especially would want him to, as some kind of evenhanded mediator and I do think that Condi Rice was absolutely right in March 2005, when she first went to India as Secretary of State and she said it does not make strategic sense to the United States to have some kind of equal strategic interests in these two countries when clearly our relationship with India is rising and I would never want to see us to go back.
While Burns did share the sentiment that the U.S. was losing confidence in its relationship with Pakistan compared with its confidence in India in 2016, Burns didn't say the U.S. didn't trust Pakistan, and he certainly didn't say it in 2025.