\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hen Donald Trump won his second term, India\u2019s ruling elite must have been quietly pleased. Prime minister Narendra Modi\u2019s performative courting of King Donald, both in and out of office, suggested a special chemistry between these two titans of the hard right.<\/p>\n As Trump set about remaking global trade and geopolitics by weaponising tariffs, India got into trade negotiations with the US early. New Delhi accepted that negotiations would be difficult, given its red lines on agricultural and dairy products. Yet it was optimistic about getting a deal commensurate with India\u2019s economic heft \u2013 and strategic value to the US as a counterweight to China.<\/p>\n Instead, Trump first slapped India, in April, with a 25% tariff that in itself exceeded the rate levied on most US allies. This has now doubled to 50%, as punishment for India for buying, refining and exporting Russian oil during that country\u2019s war on Ukraine. This tariff rate will make all nonexempt Indian exports to the US uncompetitive.<\/p>\n Modi\u2019s much-touted special relationship with Trump now looks risible. And <\/strong>it wasn\u2019t just the tariffs. India\u2019s short war with Pakistan after the Pahalgam terrorist atrocity in April saw Trump, and his vice-president JD Vance, treat India and Pakistan as squabbling south Asian neighbours that had to be brought to order by US intervention. Trump\u2019s insistence that his telephoned threats had forced India and Pakistan to stop fighting seemed to bracket India and Pakistan as unruly nuisances, a humiliating equivalence that India felt duty-bound to repudiate. It has since been suggested<\/a> that the real trigger for the 50% tariff was India denying Trump, desperate for a Nobel peace prize, credit for peacemaking.<\/p>\n Trump made it clear that this was a punishment beating. He dismissed India as a \u201cdead economy\u201d while his chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, accused India of war profiteering by buying discounted Russian oil. He even described the Ukrainian conflict as \u201cModi\u2019s war\u201d.<\/p>\n This mortifying breakdown of relations has discredited Modi\u2019s decade-long effort to play the well-connected world statesman. The energetic hugging and over-the-top bonhomie that characterised his photo ops with world leaders seem gauche in retrospect. But it would be a mistake to think of this turn in Indo-US relations purely in terms of a powerful individuals.<\/p>\n Large countries such as India have geopolitical moorings that aren\u2019t easily loosened. Non-alignment \u2013 India\u2019s cold-war-era positioning as neither capitalist nor communist \u2013 isn\u2019t a fashionable term in Modi\u2019s India because of its Nehruvian antecedents, but his foreign policy has tried to maintain India\u2019s freedom of action in a multipolar world. Non-alignment might now fly under the flag of \u201cstrategic autonomy\u201d but its aim is not dissimilar. India\u2019s ability to buy Russian oil, refine it and re-export it to Europe with the tacit blessing of the Biden administration was, until recently, seen as an example of this bloc-straddling suppleness.<\/p>\n What changed was that over the past quarter of a century, India\u2019s political class began to see the US as the country\u2019s natural partner. It was the main destination of India\u2019s exports and also the aspirational destination for the children of its ruling elite. Since the time of Modi\u2019s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, who signed the Indo-US nuclear deal, India has tilted towards Washington. The Quad, a grouping of four countries \u2013 Japan, Australia, the US and India \u2013 designed to foil China\u2019s designs in the Indo-Pacific, was widely read as a sign of this westward tilt.<\/p>\n This tilt has led to a curious unbalancing of India\u2019s foreign policy. Its feet firmly planted in strategic autonomy, India has leaned towards the US to get close and personal, via alliances that aren\u2019t quite alliances, and vibes that aren\u2019t matched by substance. India\u2019s policymakers under Modi assumed that India\u2019s aggregate economic heft and its growth rate had elevated it to the world\u2019s top table.<\/p>\n The fact is, India isn\u2019t rich enough or white enough or English-speaking enough to be a charter member of either the west or the anglophone world. Modi\u2019s mandarins forgot that \u2013 outside the charmed circle of the west \u2013 the US doesn\u2019t have allies, it has clients. Trump\u2019s decision to further raise tariffs on India out of resentment <\/strong>was a reminder that US presidents have often seen India as either a supplicant or a nuisance or both.<\/p>\n Pundits argue that Trump is a maverick, that the Indo-US relationship is too important both economically and geopolitically for this froideur to last. It\u2019s much more likely that Trump is ahead of the curve, that he is saying out loud what other western leaders are still too constrained by liberal convention to utter.<\/p>\n Western benevolence has always been predicated on western hegemony. Once the climate crisis and China\u2019s rise made it clear that the west\u2019s supremacy wasn\u2019t future-proofed; once the promise of steady economic growth, the modern measure of secular progress, became unredeemable, western centrists began to secede from the world order they had created in their pomp. Gaza is the sum of this secession. The WTO, overseas aid, due process for asylum seekers, international humanitarian law, the UN system \u2013 the whole postwar order built by the west and led by the US \u2013 is being cast aside as rich countries circle their wagons against a needy, unruly world.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n This has led to the near-simultaneous rise of agenda-setting far-right parties in western countries. Trump-like and Trump-lite demagogues has become inevitable. Nigel Farage, Jordan Bardella, Alice Weidel, Viktor Orb\u00e1n are living proof that Trump\u2019s mix of nativism and protectionism is the reality that India and non-western countries more generally will have to contend with for the foreseeable future. (One of the revelations of Trump\u2019s second term has been the willingness of European leaders to abase themselves to propitiate the US.)<\/p>\n For all the liberal hand-wringing about Trump\u2019s crudities, where he leads, the European political class will follow. Trump\u2019s tariffs aren\u2019t whims, they are portents. They are bricks in the wall that the west is building to fortify its compound.<\/p>\n Modi, like Indian prime ministers before him, is learning that geography can\u2019t be transcended, that non-alignment isn\u2019t a choice \u2013 it is a necessity. India\u2019s place in the world will often present it with grim, constrained choices. It can\u2019t square up to the US, as China does, as an equal. Nor can it kowtow to Trump as the EU has, like a client looking for protection. India will continue to walk a tightrope, teetering this way then that, as it negotiates a hostile world under the watchful eyes of its vulnerable people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Donald Trump won his second term, India\u2019s ruling elite must have been quietly pleased. Prime minister Narendra Modi\u2019s performative courting of King Donald, both in and out of office, suggested a special chemistry between these two titans of the hard right. As Trump set about remaking global trade and geopolitics by weaponising tariffs, India […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10666],"tags":[3986,964,3184,18463,491,965,11739,18462,761,2662,473,919],"class_list":["post-28184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reparations","tag-blindsided","tag-hard","tag-indias","tag-kesavan","tag-learning","tag-lessons","tag-modi","tag-mukul","tag-order","tag-place","tag-trump","tag-world"],"rttpg_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",0,0,false],"landscape":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",0,0,false],"portraits":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",0,0,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",150,150,false],"medium":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",300,300,false],"large":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",1024,1024,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",1536,1536,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",2048,2048,false],"post-thumbnail":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",370,265,false],"kava-thumb-s":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0_1998_1598\/master\/1998.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&precrop=40:21,offset-x50,offset-y0&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=2e83469b238096e868717f49e7a1366a",150,85,false],"kava-thumb-s-2":["https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/65b379fe23095c0a0ad5bbc2bff49956175d265c\/215_0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NEWS<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"When Donald Trump won his second term, India\u2019s ruling elite must have been quietly pleased. Prime minister Narendra Modi\u2019s performative courting of King Donald, both in and out of office, suggested a special chemistry between these two titans of the hard right. As Trump set about remaking global trade and geopolitics by weaponising tariffs, India…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28186,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28184\/revisions\/28186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}