DC Edit | Amid Global Churn, India & Malaysia Strike A Good Deal

The great churn that was taking place in the wake of the trade wars Donald Trump ordered and then retracted in fits and starts is hardly over before another great concern seems to have swept in like the Winter Storm Fern which slammed into the USA in January. This is to do with the great nuclear arms race which could be in the offing with the gravest possible consequences for global security.

Democracies as well as authoritarian regimes seem equally determined to build on arsenals with a vengeance as the last standing nuclear arms control treaty between the USA and Russia — the New START — has expired and negotiations on a new one are not even on the launching pad, leave alone being ready to start. As one of nine nuclear-armed states, India is, mercifully, not in this race, preoccupied as it was in the time of the trade roiling to go around signing up trade deals with countries, ranging globally from New Zealand to the EU.

Concerns over how effective the just announced framework of a trade deal with the USA are being aired nationally, especially over how much of a hit long-protected sectors like agriculture and dairy farming may have to take, even as India is scrambling to finalise the details in the devilish small print of documents that are to be signed in a month or so. And then there lies the general unpredictability of the Trump temperament.

Having used the interim period — between August 2025 when punitive Trumpian tariffs came into force and now when 50 percent tariffs could go down to 18 percent the moment a deal is signed — effectively to enter into trade agreements that are equitable, India resumed its wider diplomacy to follow its “Look East” doctrine with a range of pacts with Malaysia, one of its friends across the sea and well outside the troubled inner circle of nearest neighbours sharing land borders such as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In an ideally agreeable atmosphere made possible by the deep friendship between the Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Anwar Ibrahim, India and Malaysia signed several agreements that have become de rigueur in modern diplomacy, and which are to do with enhancement of strategic ties by way of defence and maritime cooperation, digital economy, agriculture, public health, etc.

Two India-Malaysia pacts stand out from the many signed and they are to do with cooperation in the field of semiconductors, an area in which Malaysia seems to have gained greater experience and the usage of local currencies for bilateral trade settlements, which is of significance at a time of a great currency churning in which the US dollar is falling, and so too the Indian Rupee but not because of the dollar’s dip.

India has also sought the help of Malaysia to get the Asean-India trade agreement reviewed as the nation feels there is scope for a revision as the 2010 pact seems to disproportionately favour the 10-member Southeast Asian bloc, as reflected in the imbalance of India’s imports being almost double what it exports, with the last estimated surplus being $33 billion in favour of Asean countries.