What Might Define Indo-American Relations Under Trump’s Second Term

A cold wave pushed the weather to such freezing temperatures in Washington, DC, that Donald Trump’s inauguration had to be moved indoors to the Capitol building, from the traditional lawns outside. 

That chill was a perfect metaphor for the frostiness that had characterised relations between America and India for four years under President Joe Biden.

But a pleasant thaw was signalled the day before the inauguration when the American ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, was sacked without warning.

For Indians on social media, Garcetti’s departure came as a great relief because of the awful extent to which they had been subjected to by Garcetti’s frequent, truly cringe-inducing videos. Even third-degree torture might have been preferable to clips of him dancing to Bollywood hits.

But from a diplomatic perspective, Garcetti’s removal was a firm message that the new Trump administration intends to repair ties with India — to the extent that it can without compromising on American interests.

So, how might bilateral ties unfold over the next four years, and what are some of the associated motivations and constraints?

First, energy: Trump made it clear in his inaugural address, by using an old, evocative phrase — “Drill, baby, drill” — that he would get the American economy revving again by using the upstream petroleum industry as a prime mover.

This is what he did quite successfully in his first term, and what Biden tried to build on but failed at in his ‘Great Gamble’ to replace Russia as the principal supplier of energy to Europe.

As Swarajya predicted as far back as late 2021, before the war between Ukraine and Russia erupted, Biden would fail in his gamble simply because his intention to increase domestic production of oil and gas from tight geological formations, called shales, would clash violently and counterproductively with his political need to keep the green lobby with him (an electorally crucial constituency for his Democratic Party).

The irony of Biden’s failure is that America had the industrial capacity to ramp up production and would have been able to meet the bulk of Europe’s fossil fuel needs, if only he had maintained a consistent line on energy policy and not painted oilmen as villains who pollute the planet. 

It is always bad politics when you try to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds at the same time. In Biden’s case, the principal beneficiary of his policy myopia was India, which resolutely ignored America’s calls for sanctions on Russia and instead went on to swiftly become Europe’s biggest supplier of refined petroleum products using Russian crude oil.

But Trump will not make that mistake. Instead, he will promote oil and gas production in America and supply larger volumes to not just Europe but the two largest energy markets as well — India and China.

This is an imperative for Trump because it is the easiest and most profitable manner in which he can trim yawning trade deficits with all three regions.

The extent to which India offtakes hydrocarbons from America will be a pure diplomatic function of the extent to which America cooperates in other sectors, namely, security, armaments, and commerce. These are all big-ticket items that will in turn influence Trump’s position on relatively minor issues, like the H-1B visa.

It will not be easy for Trump to achieve the desired export levels of oil and gas because of an allied aspect: the end of a war between Russia and Ukraine, which was provoked extremely injudiciously and conducted in proxy with unconscionable persistence by the Biden administration and the West.

To explain: the day that war ends, Europe (western Europe in particular) will no longer retain a valid reason to continue treating Russia as a pariah.

As a result, Trump would have to cut good deals with India and China to force them to cover up for the limited volumes he might be able to sell to Europe.

Can he do that? Yes, possibly, but India would drive a hard bargain because of one reason that came up in the second half of Biden’s tenure and continues to fester.

That is the second point regarding Indo-American relations: security.

Specifically, the supply of jet engines manufactured in America for our Tejas fighter aircraft.

Sadly, for the past year, the Tejas assembly line has been pretty much dead in the water since the Biden administration reneged on its official agreement and has not supplied these engines as scheduled.

What possessed Biden to act so irrationally towards a friendly nation is a question for the ages, as everyone knows how central the Tejas programme is to India’s security. It is the kernel around which a great transformation is being slowly engineered in India, as we shrug off decades of institutional sloth and exit an era of import dependency, and as we evolve from being “Import Bahadurs” to ‘Aatmanirbhar’ in the manufacturing of key indigenous weapons platforms.

In their defence, the Americans have claimed that the delay is due to supply-chain issues originating in South Korea.

At the official level, New Delhi has been astutely silent on this betrayal, but the fact that foreign minister Dr S Jaishankar has been camped in Washington, DC, for some days now means that the resumption of these engines’ supply by America at the very soonest is going to be central in defining how bilateral ties improve.

For India, Biden’s decision underscored one tenet of our psyche — that Americans cannot be trusted. But Trump won’t mind resuming supply; indeed, he would probably try to go beyond jet engines and force India to purchase additional weapons as well. We will not like it, and our social media warriors will yelp at ‘vanity purchases’ like armoured vehicles, helicopters, or drones, but this is the real world we live in, and at times, we will just have to bite the bullet and accept the burden of these geopolitical acquisitions until we develop equivalent domestic alternatives. 

In return, India would ask for more American pressure on Pakistan and China. Trump will be constrained in how much pressure he can bring to bear on China because it is vitally important for him to reduce the bilateral trade deficit. And for that, he has to get China to buy more oil from America.

But on Pakistan, he would be more amenable to agreeing with the Indians’ wishes, not least because Biden pulled America out of Afghanistan (thereby reducing Pakistan’s strategic relevance to America), and, more importantly, because he needs India more than any other country for his Indo-Pacific security framework to work. Without India, that plan would be a non-starter.

Consequently, the onus of somehow getting the two giants of Asia to cooperate bilaterally, by at least a smidgen more for starters than that trainwreck which Sino-Indian relations is today, will rest with Russia.

And already we see some movement in that direction. The press has started reporting that Trump and Narendra Modi may meet in India this year for a meeting of the QUAD (a thus-far nebulous, quasi-strategic grouping of America, India, Japan, and Australia).

This news follows an official BRICS declaration that Indonesia has been formally accepted as a full-fledged member, and that Nigeria has been given partner-nation status in BRICS.

Thus, to conclude, while we may expect an improvement of ties between America and India under a second Trump administration, its precise contours will be defined by a host of multilateral poles, many of which function beyond the control of either country.