Evan A. Feigenbaum
First, as former assistant commerce secretary Ray Vickery has put it, the president blusters before making deals, so at some point a Trumpian “trade deal” is likely to reduce India’s 25 percent baseline tariff rate. Second, as my Carnegie colleague Rudra Chaudhuri has rightly written, the ecosystem of commercial, technology, and societal ties between Americans and Indians is deeper than Trump, with billions in two-way investment, numerous tech firms working together, and tens of thousands of Indian and American engineers and venture capitalists intensively engaged with one another.
Third, as leading strategic affairs analyst C. Raja Mohan notes, India needs structural reforms, so Trump’s hardnose tactics could even provide the impetus for India to reset. Fourth, as the Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead suggests, there are persistent, enduring, and perhaps even permanent “pain points” that have caused rancor and throw up obstacles to cooperation even in the best of times.
Finally, in the real world, geopolitical threats still matter, so the shared concerns Secretary of State Marco Rubio has identified about the rise of Chinese power will invariably yield some strategic convergence. But these caveats ignore the two most fundamental facts: domestic politics nearly always trumps foreign policy, and foreign policy arguments almost never prevail unless they are anchored by a strong domestic political foundation.
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