Western voices back India against Trump's tariff war

The TOI correspondent from Washington: It is not often that India finds favour - or is the flavour - in the global commentariat. But amid growing signs pointing to US President Donald Trump bringing about a generational - and adversarial - shift in American policy towards India, New Delhi is finding broad support from the Western intelligentsia in its struggle to resist the US bullying.

Indications that the Trump dispensation is hell-bent on punishing India aggressively came when US treasury secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday urged Europe to align with Washington and crank up tariffs on India. "We could use a more fulsome assist from our European partners... I don't see them threatening tariffs on the Indians," Bessent complained in a Fox News interview, cranking up pressure on the EU, with which New Delhi is trying to finalise a free trade agreement.


Although Bessent said India and US would "eventually come together" because of their common democratic and market orientation, indications that ties have gone off the rails for now came when he said Trump will not budge on the tariff issue if India does not. Trump himself has remained quiet as his minions continue to vilify India, taking a cue from their boss' recent hostility towards New Delhi. Separately, the MAGA dispensation also broadened its crackdown on travel, business, and student visas - which affects Indians disproportionately because of the volume of traffic between the two countries - alleging that India was the biggest source of misuse of visas.

Trump's torching of US-India ties is not going down well with regional experts who have seen bipartisan support across administrations over past 25 years for strengthening the relationship.

"The conflict in Ukraine is Putin's war, not 'Modi's war', and anyone who thinks this patently ridiculous formulation is going to provide leverage with New Delhi is beyond delusional. At this point, this is sabotage, pure and simple," Evan Feigenbaum, a former state department official now with Carnegie Endowment, said on Wednesday, referring to Navarro's characterisation that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is "Modi's war".

"It is hard to escape the conclusion that some people on the US side are arsonists who are deliberately torching 25 years of work to build US-India relations," Feigenbaum, among a slate of officials who had piloted the US-India nuclear deal, added.

Qualified support for India also came from the Economist, which called Trump's wrecking of ties with India and his embrace of Pakistan "a giant own-goal for America's interests that compounds its neglect of Nato in Europe". Calling out American duplicity, the publication said New Delhi buying Kremlin crude is "grubby", but given that India does so through a price-cap scheme run by the West, that it sells refined petroleum products to Europe, and that much of the world, including China, also buys Russian oil, the surcharge makes it look as if India has been singled out for special punishment. "For America to alienate India is a grave mistake. For India it is a moment of opportunity: a defining test of its claim to be a superpower-in-waiting," the Economist said, supporting New Delhi's China outreach and its quest for new markets, while encouraging reforms at home.

Several American analysts also unloaded on the Trump approach saying the US is simply shooting itself in the foot with its belligerence towards India. "India will sell its exports no longer to the US but to rest of the Brics. What you are doing is, in a hothouse fashion, developing Brics into an ever-larger, more integrated and successful economic alternative to the West," Richard Wolfe, a leftist economist and trenchant critic of MAGA policies, warned in a podcast.

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