INDIA & US: STATE OF THE UNION
MILAN VAISHNAV South Asia expert at Carnegie
As a real estate maven, Trump is inherently transactional. It is always about the deal and when this deal is over, it’s about the next one. America’s bet on India, articulated by successive administrations, has been strategic and long-term. If Trump doubles down on his short-term approach, I fear that the current minor irritants in the ties will metastasise.
ALYSSA AYRES
Council on Foreign Relations and former head of India desk at the US state department
Two recent events have shifted my thinking to the ‘worried’ category. The President’s tantrum at the G7 meeting showed that no measure of strategic partnership (indeed, no strength of alliance) nor longevity of ties stand in the way of a Trump trade tirade. The US-India relationship has a long laundry list of economic frictions as it is, and now the administration is creating new problems on top of those—the steel and aluminium tariffs, the fixation on the trade deficit, the arbitrary focus on Harleys. Now we see secretary Pompeo postponed the 2+2 meeting so he can go visit the dictator of North Korea. President Obama (or Presidents Bush or Clinton) would never have done this. So count me concerned.
MICHAEL KUGELMAN
South Asia expert at Wilson Center
Until recently, the US-India relationship under Trump had represented a rare example of policy continuity from the Obama administration—a warm partnership with particularly strong momentum on the defence side. But what we’ve seen in recent months are tensions on the economic side, long the Achilles heel of US-India relations, threatening to spill over into the defence side, which has long formed the glue of the partnership. Despite the tensions of recent days, the relationship will be fine; there’s plenty of goodwill and trust to see it through the bumps in the road. But we’re also getting a reminder that in the Trump era, even the most sound and stable relationships are prone to shocks.
SHAILESH KUMAR
Former head of India desk at US treasury and now with Eurasia Group
The relationship under Trump has been on a positive trajectory overall, despite the recent hiccup with tariffs. At the onset, it seemed that Trump would be more favourable towards India than past presidents given his overall posture and comments regarding India relative to statements he made about other nations. Similarly, the US stance on Pakistan has been in near unison with India’s, and the closest any US administration has come to declaring Pakistan a state sponsor of terror. Accordingly, the US sees South Asia much through the prism of India which in macro terms shows close alignment between both governments. However, in a few months, the warmth has cooled a bit with limited high profile interactions between the two – we would have expected a Trump visit to India at this point of time. There’s also the issue of tariffs, but we should not consider that as an example of a deterioration of US-India ties. For example, Trump’s comments on India are the lightest and softest he has given of any country that has a trade surplus with the US. Thus, on a relative basis, his comments regarding India should not be seen in a negative light. Instead, we should look towards, again, the US attitude towards Pakistan and the fact that it is almost entirely aligned with India’s.