Many words were spoken at this month’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, China, but one picture packed the proverbial power of 1,000 words, a photograph the Associated Press dubbed the “huddle.”
The photo showed Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and erstwhile U.S. ally Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, smiling, laughing, hands clasped, and engaged in a warm embrace.
It was a stunning rebuke to President Donald Trump, whom Modi frequently referred to not that long ago as “my friend” and whom the Indian premier endorsed for a second term in 2020.
Until recently, the two leaders of the biggest (India) and second biggest (the United States) democracies in the world had a clear affinity for each other, and in India, there was every expectation that Trump’s return to office would herald a new era of even closer cooperation.
For more than two decades, the U.S. has been courting India to move it closer to the West, where its size and economic strength would serve as a counterweight to China’s rising threat.
“When Mr. Trump was elected in November, pro-Modi Indian media personalities exploded with a mawkish mixture of triumphalism and schadenfreude,” Kapil Komireddi, author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. “They declared that with Mr. Modi’s friend back in the White House, India’s adversaries were on notice, and rhapsodized about the chemistry between the two men.”
Trump enthused in June, “I think Modi is a fantastic man. We’re going to make a trade deal with Modi of India.”
Then everything went south.
Modi, like Trump, is a proud man who rules thanks to a considerable cult of personality, based on his carefully crafted image as a world leader who commands respect.
India’s electorate, like the U.S.’s, is deeply divided over how the country is being run. But by offending Modi, Trump has awakened a surge of national pride among Indian voters.
“For the first time in decades, the United States is the common foe of almost every political faction in India,” Komireddi wrote.
He noted that many Indians believed Trump would be a breath of fresh air after former President Joe Biden, who occasionally was known to “raise concerns about the deterioration of democracy under Mr. Modi.”
Several sources of friction have led to a falling out between Modi and Trump, not the least of which have been the punitive tariffs Trump has levied on India — 25%, plus an extra 25% for buying oil from Russia and reselling in the world market at a profit.
If not lifted, those tariffs threaten to impact an estimated $48.2 billion in exports, triggering job losses and slower economic growth.
“India, in particular, feels deeply aggrieved by Trump,” former Trump national security adviser John Bolton wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Examiner. “It is the only victim of his threat to impose tariffs and sanctions, either directly on Russia or secondarily on countries purchasing Russian oil and gas.”
“The longer India hangs out to dry, the worse the New Delhi-Washington relationship gets,” Bolton argued, as have many other foreign policy experts.
Peter Navarro, White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said in a recent appearance on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, “India is nothing but a laundromat for the Kremlin. Putin gives Modi a discount on the crude. They refine it and they ship it to Europe, Africa, and Asia at a big premium, and they make a ton of money. Now, what’s wrong with that picture? Well, it fuels the Russian war machine.”
But long before the tariffs took effect on Aug. 27, Modi felt disrespected by Trump.
In June, Trump hosted a White House luncheon for Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir ostensibly for his agreement at Trump’s behest to step back from a brief but intense military confrontation with India in May.
And particularly galling to Modi was the reason for the honor.
“President Trump will host Field Marshal Munir after he called for the president to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for preventing a nuclear war between India and Pakistan,” White House Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly was quoted as saying at the time.
India has been adamant that U.S. mediation played no role in the subsequent ceasefire and that Trump’s claim that he brought the two longtime adversaries back from the brink of nuclear war was total fiction.
But Pakistan, India’s arch nemesis, was using a tried-and-true playbook to reset relations with Trump, who once accused Pakistan of “nothing but lies and deceit.”
Bolton said, “What Trump has done is make it clear that he wants the Nobel Peace Prize more than anything else, and the way to his heart, as Pakistani chief of staff Munir found, Bibi Netanyahu found, is to offer to nominate him.”
But Munir had another chit to cash in.
Through what U.S. Central Commander Gen. Erik Kurilla called “a phenomenal partnership with Pakistan,” Munir’s forces found and extradited Mohammad Sharifullah, an ISIS-K operative who played a role in the August 2021 suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate in Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. military servicemembers and more than 160 civilians.
“The first person he called, Chief of the Army Staff Munir, was me,” Kurilla testified before a House committee in June. “He said, ‘I’ve caught him, I’m willing to extradite him back to the United States. Please tell the Secretary of Defense and the president.”
It gave Trump a win he could crow about.
“I want to thank especially the government of Pakistan for helping arrest this monster,” Trump said in an address to a joint session of Congress on March 4.
But while Pakistan was ingratiating itself with Trump, Modi was fuming about Trump’s weaponization of trade to bend India to its will.
And then came the phone call, reported by the New York Times and so far undisputed by the White House.
Citing interviews with more than a dozen unnamed people in Washington, D.C., and New Delhi, the outlet reported that in a June 17 phone call, Trump infuriated Modi by repeating the claim that he personally “solved” the India-Pakistan war and said how proud he was that Pakistan was going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize — the implication being Modi should do the same.
“The Indian leader bristled,” the outlet reported. “He told Mr. Trump that U.S. involvement had nothing to do with the recent ceasefire. It had been settled directly between India and Pakistan.”
“The disagreement — and Mr. Modi’s refusal to engage on the Nobel,” the outlet reported, “has played an outsize role in the souring relationship between the two leaders.”
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told CNN, “Why did Trump put this 50% tariff on India? As near as we can tell, it’s because Modi refused to give Trump credit for ending the India-Pakistan conflict from a few months ago. Because Trump was personally affronted, we’re alienating a crucial partner and a crucial ally? That’s just idiotic foreign policy. It’s a huge problem for our country.”
Trump has insisted that his trade war with India, as with many other countries, is about fairness.
“You have to understand, for many years it was a one-sided relationship,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “India was charging us tremendous tariffs. About the highest in the world.”
Now, Trump has said India has offered “no tariffs anymore.” The president told The Scott Jennings Radio Show that the concession resulted from his hard-nosed negotiating skills.
“I understood tariffs better than any human beings in the world … If I didn’t have tariffs, they would never make that offer,” Trump said.
But according to the United Kingdom’s Telegraph, Modi has been giving Trump the silent treatment.
“[Trump] has reportedly phoned the Indian prime minister on four occasions to seek a compromise. Each time, the Indian leader refused to pick up,” the outlet said.
Smith said, “We have alienated India, a crucial economic partner. Also, a crucial partner in battling against Russia and China. And we have taken them and shoved them into Russia and China’s arms.
On the U.K.’s Sky News, Bolton said, “The West has spent decades trying to wean India away from its Cold War attachment to the Soviet Union, Russia, and cautioning India on the threat posed by China. Donald Trump has shredded decades of efforts with his disastrous tariff policy.”
Taking into account Trump’s mercurial and confrontational negotiating style, it’s certainly possible that a deal will eventually be struck and U.S.-India relations will recover, but some of the damage may be long-lasting.
“On a bipartisan basis, going back decades, the United States has worked to build its relationship with India, the world’s largest democracy, a country that we should be aligned with us on technology, talent, and economics,” Jake Sullivan, former Biden national security adviser, said on a recent podcast.
WHAT IS ’CAUSE’? AND WHY CAN’T THE PRESIDENT FIRE LISA COOK?
“Trump has thrown the India relationship over the side, and that is a huge strategic harm in its own right,” Sullivan said. “But imagine every other country in the world — you’re Germany, or Japan. You’re Canada. You look at that and you say, ‘that could be us tomorrow,’ and that only reinforces the view that you’ve got to hedge against the United States.”
And hedging against the U.S. seems to be exactly what Modi was doing, gladhanding and gushing over dictators Putin and Xi at the SCO summit in China.
