The Trump turbulence: US can be a leader only if it behaves like one

Indian External Affairs Minister Jaishankar was on the money when, shortly after the re-election of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the US, he said that “a lot of countries are nervous about the US…we [India] are not one of them”. The absence of trepidation in India about dealing with Trump 2.0 doesn’t mean that India is living under some grand illusion of how benign and beneficent the incoming US administration will be towards India. But there is a sense of quiet confidence that India will not just manage but also strengthen the bilateral relationship.

This is notwithstanding the expected kerfuffle over trade, tariffs, visas, immigration, and of course Trump’s proclivity for provocative remarks. If indeed these are the priority issues for the Trump administration, then dealing with the US will be a bit of a breeze. All we will need is some thick skin and some common sense in policy making.

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Some of Trump’s asks might actually be good for India, provided we can flip his demands to our benefit by nurturing and retaining Indian talent and making India’s economy more efficient and competitive through much-needed reform and deregulation. The problem for India isn’t so much that Trump is transactional—all international relations are inherently transactional; the problem really is Trump’s mercantilist or protectionist approach, which can translate into an isolationist approach where MAGA isn’t Make America Great Again but Making America Go Alone. If so, then the US cannot expect to lead the world, nor can it expect other countries not to look for alternatives to hedge their bets and protect their interests.

Unlike some US allies that have been mooching for decades, India has been pretty self-sufficient and not dependent on US economic or military assistance. Despite running a surplus, India’s trade with the US is not as imbalanced as US trade with China. But Trump’s insistence on balancing every bilateral trade relationship is a silly and even impractical demand.

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Even so, India can easily accommodate some of the tariff demands and address some of the trade barrier issues without unnecessarily escalating the issue. If Trump wants to “drill baby drill”, India can always source more oil and gas from the US, and that too at lower prices because of the increase in oil supply in the international market. All the talk of a 100 per cent tariff on BRICS countries is so much hot air. There is no replacing the US Dollar for the foreseeable future. India especially has no incentive to see the USD replaced by the Chinese Yuan.

On immigration, India doesn’t hold any brief for illegal immigrants and has made it clear it will take back any Indian citizen, albeit after due verification of their antecedents. In fact, this might actually be good for India because it means diminishing incentives for illegal migrants who allege persecution to claim asylum, tarnishing India’s image. The H1B visa is again something which India can take in her stride. Trump and some of his close aides have been open to reform on H1B visas but aren’t inclined to altogether scrap this visa category. While these are issues that have been agitated in the media discourse, these are unlikely to cause any rupture in India’s relationship with the US. Some friction, yes, but certainly nothing beyond.

On the strategic and political front, there are some positives to look forward to. The Trump administration will be less intervening, hectoring, and sermonising than its predecessor. India also is on a reasonably good wicket not just with Trump but also with many of the top officials in the incoming administration who consider India a crucial partner. The pressure on India over Russia could ease, more so if the US itself looks for some kind of détente. But there could be greater pressure on India over Iran. The carve-outs for India on Chabahar and connectivity to Afghanistan and Central Asia through Iran could be reversed.

While trade between Iran and India is under $2 billion, even this could end if the US tightens the secondary sanctions regime. There is also a real danger of hostilities breaking out over Iran’s nuclear programme which could prove seriously disruptive in the Middle East and impact India adversely. Any serious regime change operation in Iran could end up severely destabilising the region, making India’s strategic environment fraught. On Afghanistan, the new administration has people who loathe the Taliban regime and could take steps that might jeopardise India’s carefully calibrated moves to engage with the Islamic Emirate.

China is of course the mother of all strategic challenges, not just for the US but also for India. The trouble is Trump’s China policy remains inchoate. He and his team want to counter China but haven’t quite thrashed out how exactly they propose to go about it—will it be limited to trade ties with tariffs and market access being the sum and substance of the China policy? Will it be about forming alliances and partnerships to shift manufacturing and supply chains out of China? How will that fit into Trump’s plans to shift manufacturing back Stateside and weaponise trade, tariffs, and finance to Make America Great Again?

Will it mean drawing smaller countries out of China’s vice-like embrace (debt-trap diplomacy, etc.) and incentivising them by giving them an economic and security stake in their relationship with the US? How will that happen if the US is constantly harping on reciprocity even with countries whose economies are a tiny fraction of that of the US? Will it involve building military and economic sinews of countries around China so they can stand up to Chinese bullying, individually and collectively? Or is the entire focus going to be US-centric—if America gets to cut a good deal with China, it will throw everyone else under the bus? These are issues that all countries, including India, will be watching very closely.

For India, the fact that many in the new US administration see her as an important, even critical, partner in the Indo-Pacific strategy is a bit of a mixed bag. At one level it opens many doors for India and creates space to forge a closer partnership with the US and its allies to build capacity, capability, and economic strength. But at the same time, there will be an expectation from India to shed some of her strategic ambivalence, or if you will, strategic autonomy.

India would of course like to keep China at bay, but India isn’t quite ready to become a ‘Ukraine’. Conflict with China doesn’t suit India; contestation and, to the extent possible, containment do. But there is no clarity on what exactly the Trumpian game plan is, how much of it India will be willing to sign on to, where India will balk and beg off, and how that will play in the US.

In other words, does the US have a grand strategic plan, or is it merely a grand consensus on countering China and making a plan as things move along? Against the erstwhile Soviet Union, the US had clarity on how to confront without provoking a conflict. That grand strategy had ideological, political, diplomatic, military, and economic dimensions. None of that is visible today, even less so given Trump’s knack for publicly rubbing existing and potential allies the wrong way and losing goodwill in the pursuit of demands that, in the grand scheme of things, appear rather petty.

The thing is that if the US wants to remain the paramount power and lead the world, then it needs to behave like a leader. The US can either seek exceptionalism or it can demand equality or complete reciprocity. But it cannot expect both at the same time.

The writer is Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.