Boute by Trump, Modi learns difficult lessons in the place of India in the new world order | Mukul Kesavan

WHen Donald Trump won his second term, the leading elite of India had to be quietly satisfied. The performance court by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of King Donald, both in and out of his duties, suggested a special chemistry between these two Titans of the hard right.

While Trump began to rebuild world trade and geopolitics by arming prices, India had trade negotiations with the United States early. New Delhi admitted that negotiations would be difficult, given its red lines on agricultural and dairy products. However, it was optimistic to obtain an agreement proportionate to India’s economic spread – and to the strategic value for the United States as a counterweight to China.

Instead, Trump slapped India for the first time, in April, with a 25% price which in itself exceeded the rate deducted from most American allies. This has now doubled at 50%, as a punishment for India for having purchased, refining and exporting Russian oil during the war of this country against Ukraine. This rate rate will make all Indian exports not exempt to the United States non-competitive.

Modi’s special relationship with Trump now seems laughable. And It was not only the prices. The short war of India with Pakistan after the terrorist atrocity of Pahalgam in April saw Trump, and his vice-president JD Vance, treat India and Pakistan as South Asian neighbors who had to be put in order by American intervention. Trump’s insistence that his telephoned threats had forced India and Pakistan to stop fighting seemed to put India and Pakistan as unruly nuisances, a humiliating equivalence that India felt forced to repudiate. It has since been suggested that the real 50% price trigger was India denying Trump, desperately for a Nobel Peace Prize, Credit for the restoration of peace.

Trump clearly said it was a beating punishment. He rejected India as a “dead economy” while his chief sales advisor Peter Navarro accused India of war procedure by buying Russian oil at a reduced price. He even described the Ukrainian conflict as a “Modi war”.

This mortifying distribution of relationships has discredited Modi’s effort for a decade to play well connected world statesman. The energetic bonhomie of the embraces and the bonhomie that characterized its photo sessions with the leaders of the world seem left retrospectively. But it would be a mistake to think of this turn in Indo-American relationships only in terms of powerful individuals.

Large countries and India have geopolitical moorings that are not easily loose. The non -alignment – The positioning of India in the era of the Cold War as neither capitalist nor communist – is not a term in fashion in Modi India because of its Nehruvian history, but its foreign policy has tried to maintain the freedom of action of India in a multipolar world. The non-alignment could now fly under the flag of “strategic autonomy”, but its objective is not different. India’s ability to buy Russian oil, refine it and re -export it to Europe with the tacit blessing of the Biden administration was, until recently, considered as an example of this flexibility of blocking.

What has changed is that during the last quarter of a century, the political class of India began to see the United States as the natural partner of the country. It was the main destination for India exports and also the ambitious destination for the children of its ruling elite. Since the time of the Modi predecessor, Manmohan Singh, which has signed the Indo-American nuclear agreement, India has tilted to Washington. The Quad, a group of four countries – Japan, Australia, the United States and India – designed to thwart China conceptions in Indo -Pacific, has been widely read as a sign of this inclination to the west.

This inclination led to a curious imbalance in India’s foreign policy. Its feet firmly planted in strategic autonomy, India has leaned towards the United States to get closer and personal, via alliances which are not entirely alliances and vibrations which are not appeared by the substance. Political decision -makers of India under Modi assumed that the overall economic weight of India and its growth rate had raised it to the main table in the world.

The fact is that India is not rich enough or white enough or English enough to be a founding member of the West or the English -speaking world. Modi mandarins have forgotten that – apart from the western charmed circle – the United States has no allies, it has customers. Trump’s decision to raise more prices on India out of resentment recalled that the American presidents often considered India as a supplicant or a nuisance or both.

Experts argue that Trump is a freezer, that the Indo-US relationship is too important both economically and geopolitically so that this coldness lasts. It is much more likely that Trump will be ahead of the curve, that he says out loud what other Western leaders are still too forced by the liberal convention to pronounce.

Western benevolence has always been based on Western hegemony. Once the climate crisis and the rise of China clearly indicated that the supremacy of the West was not the test of the future; Once the promise of regular economic growth, the modern measure of secular progress, has become unprecedented, Western centrists began to separate from the world order they had created in their pump. Gaza is the sum of this secession. The WTO, aid abroad, the regular procedure for asylum seekers, international humanitarian law, the United Nations system – the whole of the post -war period built by the West and led by the United States – is put aside while the wealthy countries surround their wagons against a needy and unruly world.

This led to the almost simultaneous rise in the far -right parties of the agenda in Western countries. Trump and Trump-Lite demagogues have become inevitable. Nigel Farage, Jordan Bardella, Alice Weidel, Viktor Orbán are living proof that Trump’s nativism and protectionism mixture is the reality that India and non -Western countries will more generally have to face a predictable future. (One of the revelations of Trump’s second term was the will of European leaders to be absent to propel the United States.)

Despite all the liberal mists on the raw vegetables of Trump, where he leads, the European political class will follow. Trump’s prices are not whims, they are omens. These are bricks in the wall that the West built to strengthen its compound.

Modi, like the Indian Prime Ministers before him, learns that geography cannot be transcended, that non -alignment is not a choice – it is a necessity. The place of India in the world will often present it with dark and constrained choices. He cannot adapt to the United States, as does China, as an equal. Nor can he go to Trump as the EU, as a customer looking for protection. India will continue to walk on a stiff rope, passing this way, while it negotiates a hostile world under the vigilant eyes of its vulnerable people.