India didn't get a tariff ‘deal' from Trump last week. That signals a real one may be near.

Politico

15-07-2025

Even as Trump has set Aug. 1 as his new deadline to impose steep new tariffs on dozens of countries, with the goal of fixing trade imbalances, he's also threatening new and unrelated tariffs that could further complicate trade talks.
Trump has been particularly frustrated with a group of emerging market nations, known as BRICS, which includes India. The president is threatening a 50 percent tariff on Brazil in part because of recent efforts from the bloc to move away from the dollar as the international standard, along with a 10 percent levy on all BRICS member nations. He's also threatening a 100 percent tariff on nations that purchase oil and gas from Russia amid the ongoing war in Ukraine; India is the second-largest purchaser of fossil fuels from Russia.
Whatever agreement is announced between India and the U.S., it is expected to be only the first phase of a trade deal, with a more robust and comprehensive agreement to come in the fall. And in Trump's Washington, no deal is done until the president says it is, as his last-minute intervention in a recent 'deal' reached with Vietnam made clear.
'This is Trump,' said Lisa Curtis, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for South and Central Asia on the National Security Council during the first Trump administration. 'Until everything is signed, sealed, and delivered, there's going to be a certain amount of nervousness.'
A White House official, granted anonymity to share the administration's plans, confirmed that no more tariff letters to countries were in the works as of Tuesday, though they added that it's a 'fluid situation.'
India was one of the first countries to begin trade negotiations with the U.S., launching talks in February as Trump began to unveil his ambitious agenda to remake global trade. Trump has teased a deal with the country since late June, though his repeated talk about brokering peace between India and Pakistan this spring has complicated U.S.-India relations and may make it harder for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to sell the deal domestically.
Trump has come close before. During his first term, the U.S. worked to secure a bilateral trade deal with India — similar to agreements the administration negotiated with Japan and South Korea — but the deal fell apart amid disagreements over how to handle agricultural disputes and other tension points.