DC Edit | Give Conciliation With Trump A Shot First

Making sense of US President Donald Trump’s mixed messages may appear as daunting a task as taking a rollercoaster ride without letting rushes of blood affect clear thinking. And yet India must move delicately at a time that the trade deal is not just a temporary wrinkle that needs to be ironed out when tariffs are threatening to derail the very foundations on which US-India ties had been rebuilt over the last three decades.

Given the background of threats from his attack dogs like Peter Navarro and Howard Lutnick who are even threatening to place tariffs on software imports and remote workers — which would rip the very heart out of the trade relationship with India’s largest foreign buyer of goods and services — India may hardly be inclined to try to sit down across the table and sort things out with the United States.

Hobnobbing with China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Tianjin may have provided great optics as a way of dealing with a transactional US President. So too a show of force in an intention to rearrange some of India’s trade and ties with the eastern hemisphere. But, before taking the big leap, there is one thing that India must attempt to do and that is to test how sincere Trump is in affirming eternal friendship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi while he reiterates a special India-US relationship.

Before tearing up the chapters of the history book in which are detailed the calibrated resetting of ties by the US, begun by Bill Clinton in the late 1990s and continued through George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump himself, it may be wise on the part of India’s Prime Minister to seek an immediate meeting with the US President. If there is one fact staring Indian in the face in this ugly Trumpian tariff contretemps it is that no one else can take the call to redress trade and ties than Trump himself.

There is still an opening for the PM to take, which is the address to the UN General Assembly in New York this month while also seeking to meet Trump and seeing if the personal bonhomie of the ‘Howdy Modi’ and ‘Namaste Trump’ days still exists. Maybe, Trump is just playing the good cop and bad cop routine with the likes of Navarro and others as the pantomime villains now. The best way to find out would be to not assail or confront him but to meet Trump and suss out the chances of a rapprochement.

The similarities in the temperament of two populist leaders with authoritarian tendencies might not be too conducive to harmony when differences crop up as seen from Trump’s canvassing for the Nobel Peace Prize with claims of mediating and “solving” the military conflict with Pakistan in May. But it is important for India to make this one decisive attempt at reconciliation because, unlike China, India has no major cards to play as in a grip on exporting of rare earth minerals and such other materials so necessary to keep modern devices going.

Trying to break Trump’s tariff wall by making him see reason on an arbitrary sanction on purchase of Russian oil India would not be at the cost of sacrificing its strategic autonomy that is vital in today’s multipolar world. India has no alternative to protecting its grain and dairy farmers. But there could be alternatives to selling goods to an increasingly unreliable trading partner like the US, even if that represents a tough path to take as the pain of withstanding US tariffs is high. The idea is to give conciliation a shot before taking the long road.