Trump’s Art of the Deal Collides with Modi’s ‘India First’ Policy

Trump’s Art of the Deal Collides with Modi’s ‘India First’ Policy
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute

For the purposes of containing China’s influence and aggressive behaviour across the Indo-Pacific theatre, there is no more important partner for the US than India. And vice versa. Unfortunately, that strategic partnership is under threat from an explosive combination of American arrogance and unilateralism and Indian hubris and prickliness. 

There is no future in attempts to ground the relationship by relegating India to a US vassal state instead of a respected partner. Matters have not been helped by the propensity of the two countries’ leaders to braggadocio and narcissism. While President Donald Trump might be better known for the latter trait, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi outmatched him when he hosted President Barack Obama in May 2015 in a suit with his name stitched into the fabric in an endless loop to form the pinstripes.

On 30 July, Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on India. The next day, he posted on Truth Social that he didn’t care if India and Russia ‘take their dead economies down together.’ On 6 August, he announced an additional 25 percent tariff as penalty for India’s purchase of Russian oil. The hefty tariffs, among the highest in the world, came despite many signals from both sides that they were close to finalising a deal. 

The consummation never came. India exports around 20 percent of its goods to the US and Indian experts estimate Trump’s tariffs will hit exports worth around 2 percent of GDP. The threat of an additional 10 percent against members of the non-Western BRICS grouping, of which India is a founding member, remains.

At various times, Modi has embraced Trump as a ‘true friend,’ ‘dear friend,’ and ‘great friend of mine.’ But tariff king Trump has no permanent personal attachments, only shifting transactional interactions in search of the next good deal for America. Every country engages in foreign policy trade-offs between moralism and self-interest and also between competing interests. 

Not all refrain from castigating others who elevate national interests above international principles. India gives priority to the energy needs of its poor over the selective moralism of EU and NATO countries. India’s negotiating culture of long, drawn-out haggles over every item in minute detail clashed with Trump’s big picture on the spot deal-making. 

Their strategic cultures also collide. With such a stiff impost on India, Trump is reversing 25 years of bipartisan efforts on both sides to expand and deepen bilateral ties and build a strategic partnership that can act as a counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific. If not resolved, the trade tiff could damage both India’s economic and US strategic ambitions.

India has an unmatched capacity to look an opportunity firmly in the eye, turn around, and walk off resolutely in the opposite direction. The US has shot itself in its strategic foot by imposing a 50 percent tariff wall on Indian imports. The sudden chill in a bilateral relationship that had promised so much at the start of the year reflects missteps and missed signals on both sides that are rooted in part in Trump’s narcissism and Modi’s hubris. Modi came to believe his own hype of India as the fastest-growing major economy and seduced the people with India’s great power delusions. The hype will turn into reality if and when more Indians start returning to the country than leave for greener pastures abroad. Meanwhile, the call centres and spam artists have caused immense reputational damage.

India did not make it into Forbes’ list of the ten most powerful countries in 2025, beaten into 12^th place behind the likes of Germany, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, and just ahead of Canada. The ranking methodology used five factors with equal weight: leadership, economic influence, political influence, strong international alliances, and military strength. India outside the top ten is not the only suspect score. Another anomaly on first look is Japan ranking below South Korea.

India’s Hubris

Around 30 percent of India’s total oil imports are from Russia. The discounted price is a huge boon for millions of energy-poor Indians, but the oil trade has fuelled anger in the West that India has been bankrolling Russia’s war on Ukraine. Me, I tend to be a data-driven analyst. According to the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, from December 2022 until the end of July 2025, China bought 44 percent and 47 percent of Russia’s exports of coal and crude oil, respectively, compared to India 20 and 38. The EU was the largest buyer of LNG (51) and pipeline gas (36), followed by China (21, 30). Turkey, a NATO member, was the biggest purchaser of Russian oil products (26), with China second (12). In July 2025, Russia’s most lucrative export markets for all fossil fuels combined were China (€6.2 billion), India (€3.5bn), Turkey (€3.1bn), and the EU (€1.3bn). Trump’s punitive tariffs that single out India for punishment for the oil trade with a Russia under Western sanctions are indeed ‘unfair, unjustified and unreasonable,’ as India’s official spokesman said.

This is so for four reasons. First, previously the US had encouraged India to keep buying Russian oil in order to stabilise the global energy market. Second and as noted, EU and NATO countries were also still buying Russian energy. Owen Matthews wrote in the Telegraph recently that the EU ‘pays more money into Putin’s coffers’ than India. Third, the US itself was importing Russian uranium hexafluoride, palladium, fertilisers, and chemicals. When asked about US imports from Russia, Trump said, ‘I don’t know anything about it. We will have to check.’ Fourth, China buys more Russian oil, but unlike India, it hasn’t attracted the same high tariffs through secondary sanctions. Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, wrote in Foreign Affairs recently that Chinese leaders have concluded that they are ‘in a very strong position on trade with the United States’ because its ‘ability to tolerate a trade shock is weaker than China’s.’

Modi is in his third five-year term as prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy. He won a solid majority for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its own right in 2014, the first time in 30 years that India had a single party majority in parliament. He increased the margin of victory in 2019. In both cases, there is no doubt that the main reason for the party’s triumph was faith in Modi’s competence, integrity, and ability to get things moving and done. But after ten years, the trust in his ability to fulfil his 2014 promise of ‘less government, more governance,’ with results to show, had fallen. He is back in power, but with fewer MPs and dependent on a motley coalition of minor parties to form a majority government. The third victory shows he has done a lot right not to have been turfed out. The loss of majority for the BJP on its own shows that the achievements have fallen short of the grandiose boasts.

In eleven years as PM, Modi has frittered away the priceless political capital of two powerful electoral mandates on pet projects of cultural-religious nationalism that have rent asunder India’s vaunted social cohesion while neglecting long overdue economic and governance reforms. Instead of the required annual growth rate of 8-10 percent, the economy has grown at a more modest 6-6.5 percent, insufficient to absorb the millions of new entrants into the labour force or to anchor significant military modernisation. Modi has been engaged in a relentless campaign to ‘liberate’ all of India from Congress Party rule (he uses the phrase Congress-mukt, meaning Congress-free), weaken the other opposition parties, and politicise and bend the country’s institutions to his will.

If only Modi had devoted more attention, time, and effort to policy and governance reforms and less to the pursuit of pet Hindutva projects and campaigning extensively in state elections for his party, India could have been far better positioned today, like China, both to disincentivise US tariffs and to weather the shocks of sudden tariffs. Many Chinese believe that Trump’s relatively favourable treatment confirms Xi Jinping’s diagnosis of the US as a declining power against their own continued rise. By contrast, India continues to drift rudderless on the tide of history instead of bending its arc to the destination of choice.

Import barriers have worked to keep many Indian products internationally uncompetitive. The demonetisation decision of 2016 and the loss of nerve at one minute to midnight on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in November 2019 were acts of wilful self-harm. India shot itself in the economic foot in pulling out of the principal regional trading bloc, an act that dented the credibility of its entire Indo–Pacific strategy. A visionary, bold, and decisive PM would have signed RCEP and used it as a lever with which to discipline Indian manufacturing, agriculture, and dairy for long-overdue structural reforms, productivity gains, and improved international competitiveness.

By abandoning the RCEP, Modi effectively mortgaged India’s economic future and its rise as a comprehensive national power. Long-term gains notwithstanding, he took fright at the short-term economic pain and adjustment costs of integrating with the world’s most dynamic and fastest-growing region. India effectively conceded that its companies and products cannot compete even in their home market against firms based in RCEP countries, despite market size, economies of scale, and cheap labour. Looking at the advantages offered by investment opportunities inside the RCEP compared to the myriad problems besetting India, why would internationally mobile investment capital flow to the latter and not the former?

Conditioned into a statist mindset, Indians bear regular witness to Modi exhorting foreign investors to ‘Make in India.’ But investment decisions are not made on the basis of political speeches. India is a tough market to crack because of serious infrastructure deficiencies, low worker productivity after decades of neglect of human capital formation, layers of byzantine regulations at all levels of government, severe labour market rigidity on hiring and firing, an extortionate bureaucratic mentality that inflicts tax terrorism regardless of whether an enterprise is profitable or flailing, an opaque and corruptible legal system plagued with delays, and an unattractive quality of life for expatriates.

Decades of protectionism, whereby wealth is accumulated more through political connections than created by risk-taking entrepreneurial initiative, have left Indian industry uncompetitive. The price is paid by the Indian consumer through restricted choice, higher cost, and shoddy quality. On 19 April 2020, Modi exhorted India to become ‘the global nerve centre of…multinational supply chains in the post Covid-19 world.’ Modi boasts that ‘a process of comprehensive reforms has been initiated in almost all areas.’ The problem with this is that he has a long record of overpromising but underdelivering. In 1991, the exogenous shocks of the end of the Cold War, the discrediting of the command economy model, and a balance of payments crisis forced India into desperately needed market-friendly economic reforms. In 2025, can Trump’s tariffs shock play a similar role in completing India’s journey to a genuine free market economy?

US Arrogance

Modi’s timidness in implementing critical economic reforms does not excuse US high-handed behaviour that risks long-term damage to a potentially key partnership in the Indo-Pacific. Trump, exploiting US geopolitical heft and market power, has ushered in ‘a new world order of tariffs.’ Maybe the early successes in forcing many traditional allies in Europe, Japan, and South Korea into making concessions to his disruptive, hard-power style fed his self-belief in his own genius for deal-making. India had offered concessions of no tariffs on industrial goods and phased drawdown of tariffs on cars and alcohol.

However, given India’s economic realities and political sensitivities on rural livelihoods and food security, agriculture and dairy sectors are red lines for any Indian government. India’s quest for affordable and stable fuel is also non-negotiable. To abandon the supply of Russian oil under economic and diplomatic pressure from Washington would be a betrayal of core domestic interests, morally indefensible, and politically suicidal.

The downward spiral in bilateral relations has resurrected the Ugly American trope. Trump is seen to be acting like a global gauleiter, less a deal-maker and more a mob boss with the classic shakedown threat of sign here, or else. Fears of US untrustworthiness have been reawakened and fuelled anger at US bullying. Trump’s anger may reflect Western frustrations that their sanctions have failed to tame Russia, and his real object might well have been President Vladimir Putin in preparation for their Anchorage meeting on the 15^th to talk peace in Ukraine. Nevertheless, what for Trump might be a negotiating tactic is widely seen in India, by governing and opposition parties, by officials, commentators and the people, as threats and national insults.

Other irritants had also built up. India is not in the habit of asking ‘How high’ when told to jump. Trump repeatedly claimed he had brokered an India-Pakistan ceasefire after their 4-day skirmishes in May. While Pakistan stoked Trump’s ego in thanking him and nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize for averting a nuclear war, India, ever sensitive to hyphenation with Pakistan and its frequent Chicken Little warnings of Kashmir as a nuclear flashpoint as a tactic to internationalise the issue, insisted the war ended when Pakistan’s generals sued for peace from Indian counterparts. The trouble is, for Trump, this was not just a challenge to one single boast but an affront to his entire narrative of being the world’s peacemaker-in-chief.

India has a longer list of legacy complaints against America than the other way round. American-made and -supplied arms have been used in war against India and killed Indian soldiers. The reverse has never happened. If India, since its independence, had armed and given other material and diplomatic assistance to America’s direct enemies since the Second World War, as the US has done with Pakistan and also with China during the Bangladesh independence war in 1971, how many American bombs would have fallen on India by now? Having just come out of British colonial oppression, should India have agreed to be a mere tribute-paying vassal of America? Modi, despite being the elected head of a state government, was denied a US visa until he became PM in 2014.

Consider this. On 22 April, terrorists killed 26 domestic Indian tourists in Pahalgam, Kashmir. They identified Muslims, spared them, and killed all the Hindu males. One woman whose husband was killed in front of her and her child asked to be killed as well. Rejecting her request, the killer said: ‘I won’t kill you. Go and tell Modi.’ India blamed Pakistan.

Less than two months later, on 18 June, Asim Munir had lunch with Trump, the first ever serving Pakistani army chief who isn’t also the president to be hosted at the White House by a US president. Former Pakistan ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani downplayed the White House meeting, explaining it as a tactical move by Trump to annoy India into improving its offer in the tough tariff talks then underway. Trump succeeded in irritating not just the Indian government but also most opposition parties, people, and media. How would the American president, people, and media have reacted if India’s prime minister had hosted Osama bin Laden for lunch in November 2001?

Seven years ago, India and Russia signed a $5 billion agreement for Russia’s S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missiles defence system. The deal was especially significant because India ignored repeated warnings about triggering the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (2017), which mandated US sanctions on entities engaged in ‘significant’ defence transactions with Russia. After the May 2025 India-Pakistan clashes, India’s air chief made a point of emphasising the Indian military’s satisfaction at the effectiveness of the S-400 Triumf air-defence system under battle conditions.

Yet, despite the legacy of arms imports from Russia, India has been redirecting purchases towards Western suppliers, most notably France, Israel, and the US. According to the authoritative mapping of the global arms trade by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in the five years 2020–24, the largest share of India’s imports came from Russia (36 percent), followed by France at 33 percent. However, this is exactly half the share of Russian imports in 2010–14 (72 percent). By any measure, this is a dramatic turnaround within one decade from the long history of Russian military imports by India since the 1950s. The continuing shift is also visible in India’s new and planned orders for major arms, most of which will come from Western suppliers.

Despite the history and the volatility of the administration, India has been steadily building, broadening, and deepening links with the US. Over the last few years, Chinese hostility has pushed India towards the US. A modern-day Henry Kissinger would have cultivated India and Russia into a loose coalition with the US-led West against China as the one peer rival and principal future adversary. Instead, Trump’s preferred approach seems to be to engage in simultaneous confrontations with all three and drive them closer together into a new strategic troika. His unilateralism could push India away again. If the administration believes this serves US interests, India will regret, suffer, but adjust its foreign policy settings to the new normal.

BRICS

Jorge Heine, a former Chilean ambassador in chronological order to South Africa, India, and China, wrote in the China Daily last November that ‘the most significant geopolitical shift that has taken place in 2022–24 has been the emergence of what was once known as the Third World; that is, the developing nations, now labeled as the Global South, to the forefront of international politics.’

The BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the UAE) represents their ‘geopolitical and geohistorical’ voice in world affairs at a time of multipolar multilateralism. With a focus on South-South cooperation, a comment for the London-based Chatham House argued, ‘BRICS is less anti-Western than Russia would like.’ While some analysts argue it is ‘sliding towards irrelevance,’ others hold that the Rio Declaration at the 17^th summit in Brazil last month ‘underlined the basic cohesion and consensus within BRICS members on a range of issues.’

In November, President-elect Trump called BRICS ‘anti-American’ and warned it against any moves towards de-dollarisation on pain of 100 percent tariffs. On 6 July, the president repeated the threat that any country aligning with BRICS in that effort would face 10 percent US tariffs. He has been deaf to explanations from all members that the group was pursuing the use of national currencies and barter arrangements internally, with no interest in replacing ‘the mighty US dollar’ (Trump’s words) as the global standard. Later in July, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned China, India, and Brazil: ‘we’re going to tear the hell out of you and we’re going to crush your economy, because what you’re doing is blood money.’

The bellicose rhetoric from Washington targeting BRICS merely reconfirms the wisdom and necessity of its members’ pursuit of strategic autonomy that is subordinate neither to Beijing nor to Washington. As one report in the influential Indian Express noted, ‘New Delhi has ostensibly begun a pivot towards China, Russia and Brazil in the face of US economic coercion.’ On 7 August, one day after Trump’s shock penalty tariffs for India’s oil trade with Russia, Modi spoke to Brazil’s President Lula da Silva on 7 August about global issues, including Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on both countries.

A day later, Modi had ‘a good and detailed conversation’ with President Vladimir Putin on the phone. The two leaders reaffirmed their commitment to further deepen the special and privileged strategic partnership between India and Russia. On 20 August, India restarted negotiations for a trade deal with the Eurasian Economic Union comprised of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, and Russia. The talks were suspended in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On 8 August, the same day as the Modi-Putin talks, China announced that Modi had confirmed attendance at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin at the end of August. He will hold discussions with President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the summit. His last visit to China was in June 2018. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited India on 18–19 August and held meetings with his counterpart S. Jaishankar and Modi. The visit was very productive, with China and India reaching agreements on resumption of direct flights, trade and investment initiatives, and three new mechanisms to manage border-related issues.

After five years of border tensions, they are making progress in rebuilding bilateral ties. In other words, Trump’s anger-fuelled attempts to coerce India and Brazil into abandoning BRICS could instead cement the group’s cohesion as the vehicle for democratising the architecture of international financial governance and accelerate the very geopolitical realignment that irritates Trump.

Conclusion

On 14 August, India’s foreign ministry spokesman reaffirmed that India and the US ‘share a comprehensive global strategic partnership anchored in shared interests, democratic values, and robust people-to-people ties.’ Trump and Modi have been careful not to criticise each other directly, suggesting both are interested in rescuing the relationship. US global sway is beyond dispute. 

Having successfully concluded 16 free trade agreements over the last five years, India is currently negotiating with another six countries, including the US. Modi must infuse these with greater urgency because a more balanced suite of trade relationships will anchor foreign policy strategic autonomy. For the sake of national dignity and long-term viability as a sovereign nation, India has to accept the short-term pain of Trump’s unilateralism. For its own economic self-interest, India needs to reform its agriculture and diversify export markets. In response to a question on India’s policy on Ukraine at the Globsec forum in Slovakia in June 2022, Jaishankar said: ‘Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.’ The comment resonated across the Global South.

A report from the Center for a New American Security on 26 June identified Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa as four of six multi-aligned ‘global swing states’ that, along with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, possess ‘geopolitical weight’ such that together, they ‘will exert disproportionate influence over the future of international order.’ For its own self-interest, the US must address Indian complaints about demanding fealty to American sensitivity while ignoring key Indian concerns. Economically, India offers the greatest promise for alternative supply chains to cut dependence on China. 

Strategically, India is the best placed to help the US ring-fence China’s expanding geopolitical influence. Politically, India offers such a combined economic-geopolitical partnership from within the democratic camp. By slowing India’s growth trajectory and hampering its military potential, US tariffs will also import tension into the Quad grouping and damage India’s potential contribution to it, thereby harming the strategic interests of Australia and Japan as well as the US itself. More widely still, China will be the prime beneficiary of Trump’s disruptive and bully-boy tariff wars on countries of the Global South. An editorial in the Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, commented that India can be an American friend, but only on the condition that it stays obedient.’

Trump’s Art of the Deal Collides with Modi’s ‘India First’ Policy
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society