Trump’s attack dog Navarro made a string of bogus claims on social media; here’s why his accusations are nonsense

Have you watched or attended an MEA press conference? It is easier to watch paint dry. Certainly not for the faint-hearted. The Indian foreign policy establishment has mastered the art of deflection and revels in understatement and ambiguity.

For instance, prime minister Narendra Modi reached China on Saturday after a two-day visit to Japan where he attended the 15th annual summit with Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba. During his stay in Japan, Modi had also had the chance to meet former prime ministers Yoshihide Suga and Fumio Kishida. You can bet that Donald Trump’s targeting of India, and the global chaos unleashed by Trump’s tariffs must have come up for discussion.

The Indian foreign secretary confirmed it during his press briefing Friday, but you’ll have to read between the lines. “Former PMs Suga and Kishida called on the prime minister, and discussed issues of mutual interest relating to the bilateral relationship, and regional and global developments.”

The words “regional and global developments” doing heavy lifting here. And not without reason. Values such as structure, due process, order and consistency play foundational roles in India’s strategic culture and statecraft. Under the overarching framework of strategic autonomy, India’s diplomacy gives preference to private diplomatic exchanges over public posturing, quiet dialogue, consensus-building and peaceful conflict resolution. You won’t find a South Block bureaucrat blabbering before the media.

Shekhar Gupta isn’t far from the truth in his column for The Print, where referring to Pakistan’s lightning fast moves in pandering to Trump’s vanity and ego, he writes, “India’s rule-bound system would never be able to do so. Even a terrorist won’t be handed over so summarily without a pretence of due process.”

Policy decisions in India are distilled from extensive deliberation, hierarchical evaluation and aligned with national interest, ensuring that decisions are based in due process instead of impulsive moves. It does lead to slow decision-making. Honour and respect are of paramount importance, even when dealing with adversaries.

For instance, faced with an onslaught of public threats, mockeries and abuses from Trump and his troops, India’s stated responses have been sparse, measured, dignified and courteous, even when such courtesy is undeserved. The US president has repeatedly and recklessly lowered the dignity of his high office, his sidekicks even more so, but India has refused to deviate from the path of decency.

Trump has made crude and brash behaviour his signature. He uses his social media platform as the primary medium to take potshots at critics (that includes even TV anchors), communicate national security decisions or foreign policy positions, bypassing government protocol and established diplomatic channels.

On this unusual practice – given that India has frequently been at the receiving end – foreign minister S Jaishankar simply said, “We have not had a US President who has conducted foreign policy as publicly as the current one. That itself is a departure that’s not limited to India…”

Richie Benaud would’ve been proud at the understatement.

It is difficult, therefore, to reconcile India’s strategic culture with the persistent obnoxious behaviour from the Americans. Trump himself appears frustrated at not being able to bend India to his will, and his officials are trying their best to elicit some sort of response from New Delhi. But India isn’t helping. The prime minister has remained resolutely silent, and the ministry of external affairs has not commented beyond the initial reaction when it termed the 50% tariffs from the US “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable”. India’s disdainful silence is perhaps annoying the White House even more.

Among the stream of Trump’s aides who bark daily at India, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro tops the list. Navarro froths at the mouth, desperate for attention. Not content with writing a column for Financial Times where he accused India of “enabling Putin’s war machine”, Navarro has upped the ante. He has called the Russia-Ukraine conflict “Modi’s war” and New Delhi a “laundromat for Kremlin”.

On Friday, the White House trade advisor in a series of social media posts used AI imagery and a bunch of blatant fabrications to pretty much blame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine solely on India. Navarro’s allegations are so outlandish, farcical and absurd that a logical refutation is almost impossible. He epitomizes the roguish behavior of a Trump regime that is uniquely ahistorical, completely ignorant and utterly contemptuous of India’s strategic imperatives, political sensitivities, structural realities of the war or the global geoeconomic landscape.

Punch drunk on strong-arm diplomacy and unable to grasp the fact that unjustified economic coercion will not compel alignment or obedience from India that fiercely guards its strategic independence, Trump’s cronies resemble headless chickens – a set of arrogant fools and ‘America First’ douchebags who believe the sun revolves around their megalomaniac president.

I have in these columns pointed out the hypocrisy of America’s targeting of India’s energy trade with Russia many times in the past. Short point, if Trump’s secondary sanctions on India are really intended to degrade Vladimir Putin’s capability of continuing with the war, then the US president should have imposed these sanctions on all countries that purchase hydrocarbons from Russia.

That includes China, the largest buyer of Russian fuels, European Union, the largest buyer of Russian natural gas and Turkiye, a NATO member and the third-largest buyer of Russian fuel. In fact, EU is currently the top buyer of Russian LNG, purchasing about 51% of Russia’s LNG exports in 2025. China ranks second with 21%, with Japan third with 18%.

To top it all, the United States is a major importer of refined petroleum from India (sourced from Russian crude). It is the fourth-largest importer by monetary value from India’s private refiners, with imports worth about $1.4 billion in 2025 till date. It is beyond parody that the Trump regime, while imposing 25% additional levy on India for buying Russian crude, has made a specific carve-out to exclude both crude and refined petroleum products such as gasoline from Indian refiners. Ostensibly the fuel that Trump regime purchases from India is clean from any moral culpability.

To take Navarro’s twisted logic, energy purchased by India is adding to Russia’s coffers, but the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of energy purchased by EU since 2022 (according to estimates, the EU bought Russian energy worth almost 23 billion euros in 2024 alone), not to speak of largest buyer China, is not enabling Russia’s war. In 2024, when the Russian invasion had extended to its third year, the total value of EU’s purchase of Russian fuel surpassed the value of financial aid the Europeans sent to Ukraine.

India has complied with the G7 price cap that was imposed on Russian oil to keep Moscow’s crude flowing at lower than international prices – an endeavour supported by the Biden administration to ensure stability in global oil market. China, however, adheres to no such restrictions. It sources Russian crude via pipelines under long-term contract and gets significant discounts. Any coercive measure that targets India alone benefits China, and reeks of strategic malpractice and hostility.

As the White House trade advisor, Navarro is so incompetent that he is unaware of the fact that India does not use US dollar to trade in Russian oil but does it through currencies such as UAE’s dirham via traders based in third countries.

The Biden administration had taken a long view of India’s continued purchase of Russian oil not out of strategic altruism, but self-interest. Russia is the world’s second-largest crude producer with an output of around 9.5 million barrels per day (mbpd), which amounts to nearly 10% of global demand. It is also the second largest exporter, shipping about 4.5 mbpd of crude and 2.3 mbpd of refined products.

If the Russian supply is forced out of the market – and with the US imposing successive rounds of sanctions on Venezuelan and Iranian crude – global crude prices could touch $200 per barrel, pricing India out of the market and putting the energy security of 1.4 billion people in jeopardy. In March 2022, when Putin’s tanks first rolled into Ukraine, fears of Russian crude being banned drove Brent crude prices up to $137 per barrel.

Navarro accuses Indian refiners of buying “black market oil”. He is either a dullard or a malicious fabricator. Unlike Venezuelan or Iranian oil, Russian energy has not been sanctioned by the West or G7 but placed under a price cap mechanism to prevent “war profiteering” that India has been fully compliant of. India’s crude purchases from Russia are therefore legitimate, and in sync with international norms.

Before levelling such a serious allegation, that India is “fuelling Putin’s war chest”, the US has never communicated to India formally or informally that it should stop buying Russian energy. It had been encouraging India to pick it up instead.

Among Navarro’s string of bogus claims, one such is the allegation that India’s Russian oil surge isn’t driven by domestic demand but a profit motive. Navarro won’t be bothered to find out that when oil prices had become unstable in March 2022, at a time when Russian crude was under fear of sanctions, India mandated its oil PSUs to take a major hit to keep energy affordable for its people. The cumulative loss from April 2022-January 2023 of three oil PSUs in India was Rs 21,000 crores ($2.5 billion). The Modi government simultaneously levied an export tax on private refiners to discourage them from exporting their entire stock and to prevent enlarged profits.

New rules were promulgated, forcing private players to sell in the domestic market. While OPEC cut its production by 5.86 mbpd, India’s moves prevented oil market from being destabilized further.

To Navarro’s charge that India has become “the laundromat of Kremlin”, someone needs to point out to him that India’s annual petroleum products exports have remained relatively steady if we compare figures before the onset of the war and after it. India exported 98.8 MMT in 2022-23, 107 MMT in 2023-24, and 88.3 MMT so far in 2024-25. Where the metrics have changed is that Europe is picking up a lot more of Indian exports, and its share surged from 9,740 tonnes in 2018-19 to over 21 MMT in FY 2024-25.

India has even become Ukraine’s top supplier of diesel in July 2025, overtaking others to account for 15.5 per cent of Ukrainian imports, according to analytics firm NaftoRynok.

As Jaishankar said, “If you have a problem buying oil or refined products from India, don’t buy it. Nobody forces you to buy it. Europe buys, America buys, so you don’t like it, don’t buy it.”

Navarro also complains about India’s imports of Russian weaponry, a charge stunning in its deviousness and malevolence. The India-Russia defence relationship has deep historical roots. It is tied to the fact that the US in 1960s decided to arm Pakistan at India’s expense creating a security dilemma for New Delhi. The Americans have consistently weighed in favour of India’s arch-rivals Pakistan, and it is the erstwhile Soviet Union (now Russia) that has remained steadfast in its support as India’s defence partner, willing to offer cutting-edge weaponry and equipment such as nuclear-powered submarines.

Russia is also amenable to key Indian demands on technology import and licenced production, and has provided India with local manufacturing arrangements, enabling New Delhi to build domestic production capabilities for platforms such as ballistic missiles, Su-30 jets and T-90 tanks. That said, India has been diversifying its defence procurement, focusing strongly on developing indigenous capabilities while hiking up imports from the US, France and Israel.

Navarro’s accusation, that India is a “strategic freeloader”, is therefore ludicrous if we see how New Delhi is countering China in the Indo-Pacific, investing in US partnerships, buying fighter jet engines from GE, MQ-9 drones, and a host of US-made platforms such as the P-8I Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, C-17 Globemaster III and C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft, CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters, and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.

India has signed foundational agreements with the US and is investing in high-end military interoperability when it comes to American platforms. These play a vital role for India’s maritime security in the Indo-Pacific, air mobility and border management. What’s more, India’s order pipeline for US defence equipment is expected to keep growing.

Navarro’s wild accusations do not make sense until we perceive the larger picture. The sudden sanction on India has less to do with Russia-Ukraine war and more with Washington’s attempt to use India’s energy buys as a diplomatic wedge to get at New Delhi on trade where Trump’s efforts to ‘crack open’ India’s politically sensitive agriculture and dairy sectors have gone nowhere.

A recent New York Times report indicates what I have always maintained. The discord in India-US relationship is downstream of the bruised ego of Trump, who was incensed at India not validating his lie on India-Pakistan ceasefire, and wanted Modi to nominate him for the Nobel, a fanciful demand the Indian prime minister was unwilling to indulge in. The sudden shifting of goalposts on trade deal, and use of Russian oil as a leverage to pressure India on trade are force multipliers of (in Trump’s eyes) India’s original sin.

History may not have any more examples of bilateral ties getting savaged due to the petty personal pique of an egotistical narcissist.

The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.