India should never allow Donald Trump the illusion that he is in the driver’s seat
On February 2, 2026, US President Donald Trump suddenly announced that, after nearly a year of conflict with India, he had struck a deal with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Our amazing relationship with India will be even stronger going forward. Prime Minister Modi and I are two people that GET THINGS DONE,” he wrote.
Trump announced that he would lower tariffs on India from 25 to 18 per cent and bragged that not only did Modi reduce tariffs and other barriers against US products to zero, but India would also purchase much more from the United States.
Modi should not trust Trump. Just as Trump claimed credit more than 50 times for bringing peace following the Pahalgam attack and Operation Sindoor and said he hoped to resolve India and Pakistan’s “fight for 1,000 years” over Kashmir, so too did Trump belittle Modi in his TruthSocial post, declaring the deal came at Modi’s request. Whether Trump’s goal was to humiliate Modi by making him appear a supplicant or to simply promote himself is irrelevant. For Trump, India will never be a partner; it will always be a punching bag.
The real danger would be to trust Trump. Not long ago, he labelled India the “tariff king” and a “big abuser.” In a February 13, 2025, news conference, Trump stated, “Starting this year, we’ll be increasing military sales to India by many billions of dollars.” “We’re also paving the way to ultimately provide India with the F-35 stealth fighters.”
But just three months later, Trump claimed to leverage trade to ‘force’ India to end Operation Sindoor. “Let’s stop it. Let’s stop it. If you stop it, we’ll do a trade. If you don’t stop it, we’re not gonna do any trade. People have never really used trade the way I used it, that I can tell you, and all of a sudden, they said, ‘I think we’re gonna stop,’” Trump said that he said.
Because of his long-time friendship with a lawyer who lobbied for Pakistan, he then sided unequivocally with Pakistan, the aggressor that had sponsored the terrorists who infiltrated into India and killed Hindu men in front of their families. The lesson for India should be clear: Trump can change in a heartbeat or turn on a dime (or, perhaps, because of a dime).
The message should be clear. To trust the United States would be foolish, if transactionalism trumps guiding principles in setting policies. Trump will exit the White House in three years. His floating of an unconstitutional third term is less a literal ambition than a tactic to delay lame duck status. But it remains unclear if Trumpism will remain, under a President JD Vance or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
India and the US should have free trade because both could prosper and grow wealthy together. Trump may look at tariffs as a policy tool, but tariffs are like alcohol: In the short term, a drink or two might give a buzz, but in the longer term, too much will kill. By embracing tariffs and protectionism, Trump is not hurting India; he is destroying the vitality of the American economy. Put another way: free market reforms over the past three decades brought unprecedented affluence to billions of people in East Asia and Africa; for Trump to instead pivot to failed protectionist and socialist models sacrifices more than a century of progress and American industrial might and accelerates US decline, his rhetoric about “Making America Great Again” notwithstanding.
De-escalation is good. So too is unwinding India’s relations with Russia. There can be no moral equivalency between Russia and Ukraine. India prides itself on upholding international law. Russia accepted the 1991 Almaty Declaration recognising existing borders, and so to claim neutrality now is to upend New Delhi’s traditional support for international law. More pragmatically, Russia is an even more unreliable partner than Trump, as its cancelled deals demonstrate. Purchasing Venezuelan oil offers a good alternative that meets India’s interests.
But, beyond that, the United States arguably needs India more than the reverse. Rather than accept Trump’s triumphalism, New Delhi should not only demand zero tariffs reciprocally, but it should also demand reparations for the damage Trump did. These need not be financial but could rather be necessary corrections: Diplomatic support for returning Pakistan and placing Turkey on the Foreign Action Task Force (FATF) grey list. Ending Pakistan’s “Major Non-Nato Ally” status. Listing Khalistani groups as designated terrorist entities.
India should never allow Trump the illusion he is in the driver’s seat. Some behaviour should never be forgiven.
(Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Views expressed are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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