Trump's tariff strike on India plays into China's hands
It will also send an unmistakable signal of the growing détente between Asia's two heavyweight nuclear powers after a period of escalating tensions and border conflict.
If US President Donald Trump makes good on Wednesday's vow to double tariffs on Indian exports into America, Modi would arrive in China for the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation on August 31 with his relationship with Beijing's chief rival under newfound strain.
At 50 per cent, the tariff would be among the highest the Trump administration has imposed on its trading partners. Half of that figure is in retaliation for India's purchases of Russian oil. Notably, China, the world's largest buyer of Russia's fossil fuels, has so far escaped a similarly punitive measure.
Tightening the screws on Russia by strangling its wartime economy has been a key tool of the United States and its allies to try to force Vladimir Putin to abandon his ambitions to annex Ukraine. But Trump's surprise decision to single out India for punishment – and his confrontational approach to trade negotiations, including disparaging India's economy as 'dead' – is a high-risk gamble that undermines years of US-led efforts to build trust with India.
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On the world stage, India plays a careful hand, wary of being pulled too closely into either China's or America's orbit. It is a member of both the Chinese-dominated BRICS forum, which was set up as an alternative to US-led institutions, and the Quad security dialogue with the United States, Australia, and Japan.
For more than two decades, the US has courted India as a strategic ally, efforts that have escalated in recent years as America and its allies have increasingly seen India as a counterweight to China's growing assertiveness in the region.
'China would be pleased to see this going on,' says Dr Lavina Lee, director of foreign policy and defence at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney.
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Ukraine and the European Union have pushed back on proposals that they view as ceding too much to Putin, whose troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, citing what Moscow called threats to Russia's security from a Ukrainian pivot towards the West. Kyiv and its Western allies say the invasion is an imperial-style land grab. After the talks in Britain, Axios reported a US official as saying: "Today's hours-long meetings produced significant progress toward President Trump's goal of bringing an end to the war in Ukraine". It was not clear what, if anything, had been agreed. Moscow has previously claimed four Ukrainian regions – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – as well as the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which was annexed in 2014. Russian forces do not fully control all the territory in the four regions. Russia is demanding that Ukraine pull out its troops from the parts of all four of them that it still controls. Ukraine says its troops still have a small foothold in Russia's Kursk region, a year after its troops crossed the border to try to gain leverage in any negotiations. Russia said it had expelled Ukrainian troops from Kursk in April.
