Jerry Seib served as The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor and wrote the weekly “Capital Journal” column for 29 years. He is the author of ‘We Should Have Seen It Coming” a book about the transformation of the Republican Party and American politics. He is currently working on a biography of former Sen. Robert Dole and is a Visiting Fellow at the Dole Institute of Politics. Happily for us, he is also a contributor to News Items and Political News Items. This piece addresses the “rapid deterioration” of U.S. relations with India.
In the Time of Trump, when disruptions to the established order arrive daily, if not hourly, it’s possible to lose sight of the truly consequential ones—the ones with broad and long-lasting implications.
So it is with the rapid deterioration of relations with India.
Of all the jarring developments so far in the second Trump term, none has greater potential long-term strategic significance for the U.S. and the world order than the rupture with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There is no need to wonder how serious this rift could become; Modi and President Trump have confirmed it for us this month.
Modi showed up, smiling and seeming comfortable, at a three-way meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in China on Sept. 1, a gathering at which the Chinese leader declared India and China were “development partners.” The entire picture seemed designed to tell Washington that the ground had shifted. Trump in turn seemed to acknowledge as much when he posted on social media: "Looks like we've lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China.”
In the last couple of days, Trump has softened his rhetoric a bit, calling Modi “a great prime minister,” albeit one who oversees an unacceptable regime of tariffs on American exports to his country.
All this represents a remarkable injection of uncertainty into a relationship that had, until this year, emerged as one of the bright spots of America’s strategic picture. India had become “a cornerstone of our pressure on China,” said Richard Haass, a former top State Department and White House official and past president of the Council on Foreign Relations. On the “Alternate Shots” podcast with News Items publisher John Ellis, Haass declared: “Strategically, this is, I think, a major gain for China as well as for Russia.”
Indeed, for the last two decades, successive American administrations, Republican as well as Democratic, have been engaged in a protracted effort to woo India away from its traditional Cold-War stance of remaining independent and equidistant from the world’s superpowers. The U.S. and India had resolved some trade disputes and agreed to cooperate in developing advanced technologies. They linked arms as members of The Quad, strategic partnership with Japan and Australia aimed at offsetting Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. declared India to be a “Major Defense Partner,” a designation that gave India access to American military technology.
The advantages of this effort were obvious: India is the world’s most populous nation, has the globe’s fifth largest economy (likely on its way to the third-largest), and is a nuclear power in a region of growing strategic importance. It is perhaps the most obvious potential offset to rising Chinese power.
Now, in a matter of weeks, all these carefully constructed building blocks of a new relationship have been put in peril.
What happened? Actually, it’s hard to say, because the decline is the result of not one thing, but rather a surprisingly rapid accumulation of problems. India, like other nations, found itself the target of President Trump’s tariff offensive. Unlike other nations, it hasn’t cut a deal or agreed to lower its own considerable tariff barriers, causing the White House just this week to accuse it of being the “Marahajah of tariffs.” The tension was exacerbated by India’s refusal to heed Trump administration calls to stop buying Russian oil, a step that the White House envisioned as the centerpiece of its plan to exert economic pressure on Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
As a result, India has been hit with a giant 50% tariff rate, outstripping what even China is paying.
President Trump also has appeared annoyed that India hasn’t given him more credit for helping broker a ceasefire with India’s arch-enemy, Pakistan, earlier this year. The president is hoping to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts at ending conflicts around the world, and has suggested that the India-Pakistan cessation of hostilities helps make the case. Pakistan, in an obvious bid to win favor with the White House, said it was nominating Trump for the prize. Modi appears to disagree, arguing that India and Pakistan found a truce mostly on their own.
On top of that, the Trump family crypto currency venture has developed ties to Pakistan, including a deal with the country to accelerate adoption of crypto currencies there. It’s impossible to know how much those business ties with India’s main enemy might influence administration policy, but they certainly are in the picture.
The question now is whether the slide downward in relations with India is destined to continue, or can be turned around. Richard Rossow, who heads India studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, thinks it is significant, and encouraging, that India has been relatively calm as the U.S. ratchets up pressure. “So far this really has just been one side that's been initiating the fight,” he says. “They’re keeping the powder dry in India.”
Rossow, a former business executive with experience in India, hopes that Indian posture leaves a path forward to a de-escalation in economic tensions. “The way out is to have a mutually acceptable trade agreement,” he says. “That's the path out of this.” The states are huge, Rossow says: “I think to an American audience sometimes it still is stunning when you say that in the future, there's only going to be three mega, consequential economies in the world. Today it's already the United States and China, but India is going to be in those ranks steadily.”
Haass isn’t so sure it’s possible to fully repair the damage already done. “I don't mean to absolve the Indians of all responsibility here, but I don't think we can quite go back to where we were,” he says. “My guess is that the historical consequence of what's happened is (India) will re-embrace its idea of independence and equal distance that for so long was the compass for Indian national security.”
The Weekend Edition of News Items will be posted tomorrow (Sunday).
What is absent from this essay is a discussion of the importance to any political leader (and Modi in particular) of energy wealth. Demanding Modi not purchase cheap Russian oil is asking him to increase the price of energy that is, decrease India’s energy wealth which outcome his constituents will see and feel, in exchange for what is to most villagers an obscure and invisible goal.