Trump's Policies Ringing Alarm Bells in Delhi

"We are in Zelenskyy’s shoes now", read a recent headline in a major Indian newspaper. There are similar concerns being raised in other world capitals in Asia and Europe after President Donald Trump's decisions to cut military supplies and stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine following a White House summit with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine who is facing the military might of Russia on the battlefield in Europe.    

From L to R: Putin, Trump, Xi and Modi

“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” said Friedrich Merz, Germany's chancellor-elect. Singapore Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen said the  US has “changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent”.

The events of last week have revived the memory of a quote attributed to former US Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger who is reported to have said: "The word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

New Delhi has been counting on Washington's help to fend off hostile China which sits on its doorsteps. There are some Indians who believe Russia would come to India's help in the event of war with China.  But former US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan threw cold water on this idea when he said: "In fact, it (Russia) is becoming the junior partner to China.  And in that way, they would side with China over India any day of the week". 

Trump has fundamentally changed the geopolitics of Asia and Europe. Old alliances no longer matter. Now it's all about each transaction which Trump wants to ensure favors the United States. 

During the last Trump Administration in 2019, India's friends in Washington argued for a US policy of "strategic altruism" with India. The new Trump administration seems to be rejecting such talk. Prior to his recent meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House, President Donald Trump described India as the "worst abuser of tariffs" and announced "reciprocal tariffs" on Indian imports to the United States.  At the same time, Mr. Trump cracked down on both legal and illegal immigration from India. His administration is deporting thousands of illegal Indian immigrants in handcuffs and shackles on US military aircraft. Meanwhile, stringent new regulations on temporary work visas could significantly delay visa processing times and reduce the number of Indian workers employed in the United States on H1B visas. 

Tariffs Comparison. Source: BBC

In a 2019 piece titled "The India Dividend: New Delhi Remains Washington’s Best Hope in Asia" published in Foreign Affairs journal, authors Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis argued that the Trump Administration should continue the US policy of "strategic altruism" with India that began with US-India nuclear agreement. They asked President Trump to ignore the fact that the US companies and economy have only marginally benefited, if at all, from this policy. They see India as a "superpower in waiting" and urge Washington to focus on the goal of having India as an ally to check China's rise. They see Chinese support for India's arch-rival Pakistan and China’s growing weight in South Asia and beyond as a threat to India. 

India Tops Source Countries For H1B Visa Holders. Source: USCIS

Trump's trade and immigration policies are going to hurt India at a time when its economic growth is declining and job growth is stagnant.  The latest Indian annual budget has offered middle class tax relief to spur growth.  But economists warn it may not be enough for the vast majority of Indians, whose income still falls below taxable limits and who may still be reeling from the impact of the COVID pandemic, which devastated their earnings, according to a report in Aljazeera. “There is a vast base [of people] where recovery has not come back after the pandemic,” says Kaushik Basu, professor of economics at Cornell University. “We see this in data that the agricultural labour base has increased. And agriculture may well be just a parking spot.”

Illegal immigration from India to the US has dramatically increased on Prime Minister Modi's watch. A Pew Research Center report said that as of 2022, India ranked third, after Mexico and El Salvador, on the list of countries with the largest number of undocumented immigrants — 725,000 — living in the U.S.

India has a serious unemployment problem, particularly for the young people entering the job market by the millions each year. This problem is concealed by headline  economic growth figures highlighted by the Modi government. At the same time, India is losing its best and brightest in a massive brain drain. 

President Trump has clearly not taken the advice of India's friends in Washington. He is in no mood for "strategic altruism". Instead, the Trump Administration has signaled that it will treat ties with India as just another transactional relationship. 

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  • Riaz Haq

    Trump Truth Social Posts On X
    @TrumpTruthOnX
    I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care. We have done very little business with India, their Tariffs are too high, among the highest in the World. Likewise, Russia and the USA do almost no business together. Let’s keep it that way, and tell Medvedev, the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he’s still President, to watch his words. He’s entering very dangerous territory!

    https://x.com/TrumpTruthOnX/status/1950776077204513135
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    Jayant Bhandari
    @JayantBhandari5
    Who would have thought that in comparison to India, Pakistan would be better friends with the US and Russia and be a deep friend of China? Modi and Chouhan's grotesquely corrupt and braindead regime made that possible.

    https://x.com/JayantBhandari5/status/1950735268014944354

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    Amir Husain
    @amirhusain_tx
    President Trump has announced an energy partnership with Pakistan. CPEC has made immense progress. Gwadar port and airport are done and ramping up. Thousands of megawatts of energy have come online. Large dams are being built. Pakistan has one of the fastest growing solar economies in the world. A new cutting edge, 1.2GW Nuclear reactor based on third gen tech is presently being built with China. Pakistan will drive 600% growth in shipping capacity over just the next three years. Road networks have been added at great speed. Pakistan Railways has hit record revenue. Just last year, hundreds of kilometers of highways were built. This year over 1,000km have been approved. Oil lies off Pakistan’s coast, in Sindh and Balochistan. At least ten new discoveries have been made since just 2024. An estimated fifty trillion dollars’ worth of rare earths and minerals lies beneath the surface. A partnership is emerging with China in this area. The Pakistan Minerals Investment Forum was a huge eye opener. There were hundreds of international delegates there to do deals. At the last IDEAS conference in Karachi, $30B in defense MoUs were executed, a few billion of which have already converted to orders, including with Azerbaijan. The PSX stock index is near all-time highs while Pakistani equities remain one of the most affordable in the region based on P/E multiples. There is massive interest in Pakistan’s economy right now.

    https://x.com/amirhusain_tx/status/1950711516950638846

  • Riaz Haq

    Why Trump’s Tariffs on India Are Part of a Wider Geopolitical Game: George Friedman – The Singju Post

    https://singjupost.com/transcript-why-trumps-tariffs-on-india-are-p...

    https://youtu.be/dgPROuLq2gA

    India’s Strategic Value to the US
    GEORGE FRIEDMAN: Well, the relationship between US and India has been moderately good. But India is not an essential country from the American standpoint. We have fundamental allies that we need badly, and then allies which we give, lose or win doesn’t much matter. India goes into that category.

    When the Chinese cut were unable to continue to sell to the United States, everybody looked at India as an alternative. It’s not. It’s far from the level of the Chinese economy. And therefore, while we had good relations, this was an opportunity at the cost to India, which we didn’t much mind to both signal things to the Chinese and Russians, which we do mind. So different signals to both sides. But on the other hand, India is not a critical element in our strategy.

    ————

    GEORGE FRIEDMAN: Well, trust is not a major term in international relations. Interest is we did not do these things with India before. We’ve had a non confrontational strategy toward China. We’ve not done anything particularly aggressive against China. China has on a number of occasions done some things aggressive against our allies. We’ve been defensive but passive in that.

    So when you ask the question, what’s more important in the United States, a changed relationship with China, a changed attitude on the part of Russia or a relationship with India? If you have to ask the question, which is the most dangerous things in there? It’s Russia and China, which is least in that configuration? It’s India.

    So if you can signal and then turn around and drop tariffs too, if it works, if you can just signal to the Russians that we will raise tariffs on anyone who trades with you and we’ll start with one of your biggest customers and the strongest, that’s helpful. Same with the Chinese side. If we signal that we are not going to go to war with you, that’s a good signal.

    Strategic Unpredictability as Foreign Policy
    In other words, when you are engaged in diplomacy or buying a house, there are two things you do. You act like you don’t want it and then you manipulate it until you can get your best price. Diplomacy is not necessarily best a consistent policy. Doing the unexpected. Sometimes when you’re carefully moderated, and this was carefully moderated, doing the unexpected and feeling the pressure is a possible way to reach an accommodation.

    India was in this sense a victim, a minor, relatively minor cost to the Indians, certainly nothing to break relations over. On the other hand, it did signal to the Chinese that we’re not going to be going to war with them, which they worried about India and to the Russians that we really are going to impose tariffs. The most useless thing to do is say we’re going to really hurt you and never hurt them. The other thing not to say is, we’re going to attack you and then attack them. So in both cases, diplomacy consists both of having some advantages presented and some disadvantages, and this did both.

  • Riaz Haq

    While Trump Rattles the World, China Basks in the Limelight - The Wall Street Journal.

    https://www.wsj.com/world/while-trump-rattles-the-world-china-basks...

    BEIJING—The leaders of three of the world’s four most powerful nations will meet in China this weekend to discuss how to react to the upending of the international order wrought by the fourth: the U.S. under President Trump.

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping is set to welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is currently being wooed by Washington, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose country—long cultivated by the U.S. as a centerpiece of its aspirations to contain Beijing—has just been slapped by punitive American tariffs.

    They will be joined by several other national leaders, including those from Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan, at a summit in the Chinese city of Tianjin that starts Sunday and aims to showcase Beijing’s global economic and political clout.

    Putin and some of these guests will then stand alongside Xi, North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un, and the presidents from countries as far afield as Cuba and Zimbabwe, to watch the Sept. 3 military parade in Beijing. The event will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Japan in World War II—or, as China calls it, the Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance.

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    To some in the Trump administration, the outreach to Putin at the expense of Ukraine and European security makes sense as part of a “reverse Kissinger” approach. The grand idea is to drive a wedge between Russia, which is seen as a power that could be accommodated, and China, which is considered a challenge to America’s global pre-eminence.

    In a Fox News interview after the summit in Alaska, Trump openly mused about how Russia and China are “basically natural enemies” and blamed former President Joe Biden for bringing them together. “Russia has tremendous amounts of land. China has tremendous amounts of people, and China needs Russian land,” he said.

    The entire population of Russia’s Far East region, which accounts for 40% of its territory, is fewer than eight million people, or smaller than the number of inhabitants in a medium-size Chinese city like Shenyang or Foshan.

    During the first Trump administration, Chinese officials were genuinely alarmed by the prospect of a U.S. rapprochement with Russia at Beijing’s expense, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Center in Berlin and an expert on Sino-Russian relations. But today, he said, they no longer consider it a serious concern because of just how dependent Russia has become on China as a result of the invasion of Ukraine.

    “The Chinese understand that Russia is in their pocket to a much greater extent than before the war, and they also understand that because of Putin’s obsession with Ukraine, a normalization of Russian relations with the West as a whole remains impossible,” Gabuev said. “Xi and Putin also know just how mercurial Trump is—and that the Russians can’t trust any American promises and inducements.”