Full Text | Ashley Tellis on Trump’s Tariffs and Whether India is Collateral Damage

The Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ashley Tellis, discusses with Karan Thapar the whys and hows of US president Donald Trump's tariff move on India. Does he care about the fallout? Or is India a useful pawn in US messaging to China and Russia? 

The full text of the discussion is below. It has been transcribed by Maryam Seraj, an editorial intern at The Wire.

Karan Thapar (KT): Hello and welcome to a special interview for The Wire. Forty eight hours after president Trump's 50% tariffs kicked in, is it India collateral damage that he doesn't care about? Is he using India as an instrument to send a message to Russia, but perhaps also to China? Meanwhile, what should we make of Trump's choice of Sergio Gore as America's new ambassador to India? Does it represent an attempt to dehyphenate India and Pakistan? And finally, how long will this bad patch last? Or could it last for a lot longer than most people realise? Those are the issues I shall raise with the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ashley Tellis. Professor Telus joins us live from Washington DC. Ashley tells us why President Trump has said that 25% secondary tariffs have been imposed on India for importing Russian oil as aggressive economic leverage on Russia to stop the Ukraine war. Doesn't that mean that India is collateral damage and President Trump doesn't care what happens to India? It's Russia he cares about, not India.

Ashley Tellis (AT):  Well, first thank you Karan for reinviting me to the show. I'm really delighted to be here. I think the question you asked points to a bigger issue and the bigger issue is what is India's status in Trump's worldview. I think all the issues pertaining to oil to trade are in many ways secondary. The central question is that India does not have the primacy that it did for the last 25 years in the US calculus with respect to Asia and the world. And that is because Trump does not think of geopolitics in the conventional sense. Now remember, ever since George W. Bush's presidency, India was really treasured by successive US administrations because we saw it as a pivotal partner in maintaining a global balance of power that favoured American interests. I don't think Trump cares about this. And so in that sense, India has become a political football to very narrow problems of the day and the approach that this administration has taken with respect to Russian oil is only emblematic of the fact that India does not enjoy that priority that it once did. And so when you ask me whether India's collateral damage, it is. But it's not collateral damage in a trivial sense because of a policy towards Russia or a policy towards oil. It's collateral damage because the fundamental framing of India's importance in US policy has disappeared because Trump has a very different view of the world.

KT: So you're suggesting or rather saying pretty clearly that the strategic importance that India had under Carter, under Bush, under Obama, even under Trump One and certainly under Biden has disappeared. Today, India is dispensable.

AT: I certainly don't know if I would say that it's dispensable, but it certainly does not enjoy the importance that it once did and it does not necessitate the United States making special efforts to understand India's constraints, its exigencies and its interests. And therefore what you've seen in the last several months is essentially a policy that is driven entirely by a certain conception of American interests which has very little room for allies, let alone partners, and India has become a hostage to essentially that turn of events. 

KT: I want very much to explore what you're saying. Let's start with the oil situation and then broaden from there. If the object is aggressive economic leverage on Russia, how come China, which imports more oil than India, has not had secondary tariffs imposed on it? In fact, in China's case, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said it's okay for China to keep importing Russian oil because that prevents inflation in global energy prices. Isn't that a double standard? One logic for China, quite the opposite logic for India?

AT: Of course, it's double standards. The fact of the matter is, this administration views China as very important to the United States because China has control over critical minerals. China is a huge trading partner and, therefore, China is treated differently. India does not have comparable leverage and therefore it is susceptible to different kinds of pressure of the kind that we've witnessed in the last few days. So the question of double standards is quite is quite patent but there is a bigger question right, the bigger question to my mind is what is it that we are trying to do with Russia? I understand the president's objective that he wants to bring peace between Russia and Ukraine. But if that is the strategic objective there are much better ways to get India to reduce its purchase of Russian oil than conducting broadsides, you know, in the public space which result essentially in a humiliation of the Indian leadership and actually constrain its choices in ways that could be helpful to the US.

KT: But you know, you put your finger on the very nub of it. These are broadsides against the Indian leadership, and they are designed to humiliate not just Modi and his government but the country as a whole. For example, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, has accused India of funding Russia's Ukraine war and publicly said in interviews that he wants Europe to also now impose secondary sanctions on India. Peter Navarro, Trump's trade adviser, says India is a laundromat threatening America's national security by buying Russian oil and freely admits that the intention is to hit India where it hurts. And Trump himself has said he doesn't care if India's "dead economy" sinks. To many in India, this feels vindictive and vengeful. Is there a sense in which Trump has got it in for India?

AT: I mean, there's an argument to be made to that effect for several reasons. I think one, he doesn't see India's interests in a broader geopolitical sense; he doesn't appreciate India's value to the United States in terms of the management of the Asian balance of power or the global balance of power. Second, I think he is also peeved by the fact that India did not give him the credit that he believes he deserves for ending the crisis with Pakistan. If anything, he has viewed India's remonstrations, its refutations, if you will, of his claims as being, you know, a personal affront. Now, between the strategy and between the personalism, we have ended up in a situation where our relationship has really taken big hits for ends that I'm not entirely clear about, and no one is.

KT: But actually, Ashley Tellis, it's not just limited to tariffs, oil and geopolitics. Now, people like Howard Lutnick and the Department of Homeland Security are starting to attack the fundamental bedrock of the relationship, people-to-people relations between India and America. Lutnick has said he's going to rethink the entire H-1B visa scheme and as you know 70% of its beneficiaries are Indians. This will clearly work against them. And the Department of Homeland Security says that student visas will be restricted to four years and the single biggest cohort of students in America from abroad are Indians. Both of these measures are going to hit the Indian people where it hurts them and that will sour the relationship way beyond politics.

AT: Well, I think you have to go back to first principles, right? If your approach to the world is strategic, then the costs of your policies are really viewed in very different ways. There's no one doing the math and saying what you just said, which is if we start hitting India in these ways the relationship will really take a toll and it will affect our ability to cooperate. I mean, those are the kinds of considerations that seem to be completely absent in the decision-making that is leading up to these choices. So I think the problem is far more fundamental and goes beyond the specifics. It's essentially an unwillingness to think strategically about US interests in the world. It's an unwillingness to think about how India fits into those interests and it's an unwillingness to appreciate what American presidents for 25 years have appreciated, which is that India is a very valued partner in order to advance US interests, let alone India's interests. If you don't have your eyes on the ball with respect to these three considerations then anything can happen and what you have described is probably just the first of many more problematic things to come. 

KT: In other words, things will get a lot worse before they start getting better or even stabilising. 

AT: I fear that's the case because there is no one in this administration at least at the very senior leadership levels, who gives the impression that they have a well-thought-out view of the world and they understand why we built this relationship with India in the ways that we did. I don't get that sense. Now I must make the point though that under the top layer of leadership, the core of the administration actually is quite sensitive to the importance of India. But because the leadership here drives policy in ways that are quite unprecedented in our recent experience, you know, even if mid-level and lower-level officials see India's importance, that's really of no value at the end of it because there's little they can do to limit the damage that is being done by the choices of the principals. 

KT: You know, your answer brings to mind what Peter Navarro wrote in the Financial Times just about a few days ago. He said, "If India wants to be treated as a strategic partner of the United States, it needs to start acting like one." Now, in your opinion, as someone who's closely observed Indo-US relations for a very long time, where is India falling short? 

AT: Well, it's a hard question to answer because we've always had complaints about India's trade policy. We've had complaints about India's inability to make hard decisions that, you know, sometimes go against the United States. But all this is trivial at the end of it, right? Because these differences that we have with India have always been susceptible to negotiation. Let me give you an example which I think people forget. When I was in Delhi from 2001 to 2003, the Bush administration then was getting ready, you know, to launch the invasion of Iraq, it was a decision that the government of the day, led by Prime Minister Vajpayee, was very deeply ambivalent about. And yet, because we were able to have a series of very quiet conversations with the prime minister, with the home minister, with the external affairs minister, we ended up in a position where India made the difficult choice of not criticising the US invasion of Iraq publicly. And that was actually an achievement. It was an achievement that President Bush really valued because he didn't want India complaining about the choices that he was about to make. And the way we managed to actually get that outcome was simply by telling our Indian interlocutors what US interests were and what we expected the partnership to yield with respect to the delivery of these interests. And so India can make hard decisions if it is given the opportunity to do so in a respectful way. Unfortunately, this time around I have seen absolutely no effort being made to work these things in ways that have been productive. The president, unfortunately, has set the tone by going public with his complaints and that limits the choices that India has, India's prime ministers have and this is where we've ended up. So we'll try and rescue the situation as best we can. But this is a predicament that should never have arisen to begin with. 

KT: But as we pointed out, the second President Bush made an enormous effort. He spent time convincing the Indian leadership because he valued India's response. Clearly, Trump is not prepared to spend that time and effort because he doesn't care about India's response.

AT: I fear you're right. Let me put it this way. If we wanted to get India to stop purchasing Russian oil, I understand that this is a really important priority for the president, for whatever reason. I think there was a way in which we could have done this, which was through quiet diplomacy. Let me give you a second example. In recent times, we had a comparable problem with India with respect to its purchase of Iranian oil. We had very quiet and sometimes very tough conversations with India about the need for India to reduce those purchases and India did and none of this was done by trading charges over the airwaves. It was done by quite old-fashioned diplomacy. And so we are capable of achieving outcomes that are difficult and sometimes where India has to swallow bitter pills. But you have to do it in a way that is conducive to India's national interests, that allows it to protect its face and allow it to make tough choices without imposing additional embarrassment. 

KT: But what's worse is this time round, Trump is in a way taunting and teasing India. He seems to have as I describe it fallen in love with Pakistan. He's only imposed 19% tariff on that country. His administration considers it a phenomenal partner against counterterrorism. He's invited Field Marshall Munir to lunch and he plans to help Pakistan prospect for oil whilst teasing India that one day, maybe India could buy Pakistani oil. And yet no one in India forgets that in his first presidency, he accused Pakistan of lies and deceit. Is his relationship with Pakistan another way of taunting India? Is that another way of getting to India?

AT: Well, I see it more as an example of how pandering pays off. I don't know whether he is making an explicit calculation about how favouring Pakistan somehow undermines India or taunts India. I think it is more bilateral. The Pakistanis have done a remarkable job since the end of Operation Sindoor with respect to playing up to Trump. Their nomination of Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize and so on and so forth. And I think Trump, who is essentially implementing a highly personalist foreign policy, is responding to that fawning behaviour on the part of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Now there are consequences for India, of course, which you point out, but I'm not sure he's doing this vis-a-vis Pakistan in order to get at India. I think the logic for the kind of favour he has shown Pakistan, the importance he has given Pakistan, is really driven by the fact that the Pakistanis have played up to his ego in a way that India has not. 

KT: Now, President Trump has appointed Sergio Gore as America's new ambassador toIndia. There's no doubt he's very close to Trump, and everyone says he has Trump's ear. But equally on the other hand, he has no diplomatic experience and no prior understanding of India. So what should we make of this new ambassador?

AT: Well, I think you treat him with the same regard that you treat every other representative of the president of the United States. And I think the fact that Mr. Gore is viewed as being very close to Trump is actually helpful. But the bigger challenge to my mind is that he is coming to Delhi at a very different time. There has been no ambassador who has come to India since Bob Blackwill who has not had the wind behind his back. The US-India relationship was on the up and up. India was seen as a valued strategic partner and the only challenge that US ambassadors had was how do we make this partnership even more fruitful. That was the challenge they had and each one of them, to that degree, had a relatively easy time. Now Mr. Gore is coming to Delhi, assuming the Senate confirms him, at a time when there is a very deep breach of trust and where New Delhi finds it very hard to understand this president, finds it very hard to understand his policies and is actually bruised by some of the policies that he has pursued in the last few months. Now, given that fact, I think the challenges that Mr. Gore is going to have are quite unprecedented. In fact you know the only analogy I can think of in my political career was the relationship that we had to manage in the aftermath of India's nuclear tests, but even there there was a fundamental goodwill that the United States had towards India. I remember the Clinton administration I remember Strobe Talbott and the discussions with Jaswant [Singh]. Even though there were fundamental differences of interest there was no there was no animosity towards India. This time, I get a sense that there is a brutalisation of the relationship that is imposing costs that are completely unnecessary. And if Mr. Gore can navigate this and turn things for the better, then, you know, we wish him all the best. We want him to succeed.

KT: But Gore will also be special envoy for South and Central Asia, a job that's been added onto his ambassadorship. And it's a very unusual step. No American ambassador has had this second string to his elbow. Is that an indication of the sort of hyphenation India resents? Is it perhaps the start of an attempt to mediate between India and Pakistan? 

AT: So let me say two things to that. One, nobody in Washington that I have spoken to knows what the task of the special envoy is. Nobody does, because this is quite unprecedented. And if the president had a certain conception of what Mr. Gore is supposed to do as a special envoy in opposition to what he's supposed to do as his ambassador to New Delhi, he has certainly not revealed that to anyone. So, we don't quite know what this actually means. Second, when it comes to the issues of hyphenation, I fear that there is hyphenation already. In President Trump's mind, India and Pakistan are simply two parts of the same equation. As recently as a few days ago at his cabinet meeting when he was describing his decision to impose these tariffs and his rejection of a trade negotiation with India he spent a lot of time talking about the India-Pakistan crisis which again you know, he emphasised, has gone back for hundreds of years and so on and so forth. So in the president's mind there's already hyphenation. Now whether Mr. Gore will be tasked to pursue a policy that in some way implicates this hyphenation in his job...if he does, I think he's going to have a very difficult time.

KT: So, let me at this point raise another aspect of the problem we're talking about. It's one that hasn't got very much attention up till now, but it is at the front of people's attention, after George Friedman, the former chairman of Stratfor in a podcast on Wednesday said that the 50% tariffs on India are not just intended as a message to Russia, but also intended by Trump as a message to China with whom he wants to do a deal. Friedman claims the message to China is that we are not siding with India against you. How do you view that interpretation?

AT: I find that hard to believe. I don't think Trump thinks of these bilateral relationships – the multiple bilateral relationships – that he is pursuing, particularly with respect to trade deals, in terms of their linkages. He's got what he claims is a very good relationship with President Xi. There is a very intense negotiation going on between the United States and China with respect to trade. And I think if Trump can get that deal, he will be extremely satisfied and he will think of China in radically new ways that will actually be quite unnerving to New Delhi. But he's certainly not doing this to India in order to send some signals to China or Russia. I just find that extremely hard to comprehend and he doesn't need to. The US-China relationship is so dense. It is so interdependent. And there are mutual leverages that each side has on the other that he doesn't need to be following the Chinese example of you know killing the chicken to scare the monkey. If that's what  Friedman is actually suggesting. I'm not persuaded by that argument at all. 

KT: Let me, for a moment, put to you how Indians view the possibility that Friedman might be right, because if Friedman is right, then once again India becomes collateral damage. It's been used to send a message to Russia. It's been used at the same time to send a very different message to China. Either way, India suffers and Trump simply doesn't care.

AT: Well, I think India's got collateral damage for sure, but it's not collateral damage in the form that uh you know Mr. Friedman is describing it. I think India's collateral damage is because Trump's worldview is very different from the worldview of his predecessors. His predecessors valued India because they saw India as an integral part of a larger global architecture which the US built, nurtured, protected and which serves our interests. Trump does not value that architecture and because he doesn't value that architecture, India's role in that architecture is inconsequential. So to that degree, India is collateral damage but it is collateral damage for much bigger reasons than I think Mr. Friedman's against. 

KT: If Trump doesn't value the architecture, which from an Indian point of view was almost central to the relationship then where does this leave Quad and where does it leave America's Indo-Pacific strategy?

AT: I don't believe there is an Indo-Pacific strategy – not in the second Trump term.

In fact it's ironic because successive presidents before Trump shied away from declaring the advent of great power competition. With a great deal of flair, Trump announced the arrival of great power competition in his first term. In the second term, great power competition has simply disappeared not only from the vocabulary but from our strategy. So you have a very peculiar reality that actually obtains right now. The president and his senior leadership are simply not operating on the assumption that we are involved in a competition with China and therefore, we need to protect the alliances that will enable us to successfully compete with China. The administration, though, continues to operate on just that assumption. And so you have a peculiar kind of schizophrenia in this Trump administration, where at the working level people understand that it's still a dangerous world out there. China is still a big challenge and a big threat to the United States and we have to nurture and protect our relationships with other countries precisely in order to deal with those challenges. But the leadership of this administration gives no evidence that they actually care about any of these issues. So the fact of the matter is if at the end of the day the leadership doesn't care, it matters little about what your subordinates think of the problem and what they propose to do. And I think that is the difficulty we're going to have to manage for the next three and a half years, unless of course, Trump has an epiphany and decides that he needs a fundamental change of course because the United States is actually at the end of the day in a great power competition after all.

KT: But tell me, is there any constituency in America that Trump would respect and listen to that's willing to stand up for India? That's prepared to say to him,"Mr. President, you're making a terrible mistake." 

AT: Well, the evidence speaks for itself. There's been no one on the Hill who has said a word or raised questions about Trump's tariff strategy, about Trump's application of punitive tariffs to India. There's no one in civil society, with the exception of a few folks in think tanks, who've raised questions about the wisdom of this policy. The famed Indian-American community which was given these mystifyingly important attributes in years past about its influence, has been completely silent. They've not had any impact in terms of shaping the White House's decisions. So the short answer to your question, Karan, is that there are no voices in Washington and I think even if there were voices, I don't think it would have a great impact. The only thing that will change the president's view is two elements in my judgment. The first is the policies that he's pursuing must incur very significant and conspicuous failure. If that happens, he will be compelled to rethink his current course of action. The second is that we need to have the prime minister and the president rebuild a personal relationship, which I suspect is not exactly at its best given the events of the last few months.

KT: Can we rebuild that relationship? Because it's actually very badly damaged and both of them are proud men who value their pride who feel that they've been humiliated by the other. Can they rebuild it?

AT: Well, I would never say never because at the end of the day, I trust prime minister Modi's desire to protect his country's interests and he's done difficult things in the past in order to protect those interests. And if that involves reaching out to the president, no matter how uncomfortable he may be about doing it psychologically, I suspect he'll do it. And so I would look to the next few opportunities for both the prime minister and the president to meet because it seems to me that unless you get a return to that kind of a personal relationship that they both enjoyed and was very clearly in evidence in the first term, I fear the scratchiness that we are currently experiencing will just persist.

KT: Tell me, how lonely, how silent or rather how quiet a voice is someone like Nikki Haley who used to be Trump's UN ambassador. In an article that she wrote for Newsweek, I believe it was last week, she criticised the Trump administration. She said to face China, the United States must have a friend in India. Scuttling 25 years of momentum with the only country that can serve as a counterpoint to Chinese dominance in Asia would be a strategic disaster. She added that it would serve America's interest to help India stand up to its increasingly aggressive northern neighbour, that's China, both economically and militarily. But how lonely a voice is that? Is it a voice in the wilderness that simply doesn't matter not just to Trump and the White House, but to the larger MAGA movement? 

AT: I fear that she is a voice in the wilderness. The expressions that Nikki Haley articulated in that Newsweek piece are essentially views that have dominated the traditional Republican establishment since George W. Bush. But it's not a view that has any currency in this administration. Now, there may be individuals in this administration who have that view but they are not going to challenge this president because it has become very clear that the price of survival in Trump 2.0 is absolute loyalty and no matter what your views on either the substance or on policies are or on personalities, you do not suggest any gaps between your position and the positions of the president. And so even if there are officials who share Nikki Haley's views, they are not going to be advocating those within the system and certainly not publicly at any rate. So as I said, unless there are conspicuous failures that accrue to Trump's current policy or unless he experiences a change of mind, because prime minister Modi and the president find new ways of getting along, I'm just afraid that views like this are going to be the staple of think tank discussions and debates, but with very marginal impact on policy.

KT: In which case, what does India do? How should it respond? Grit its teeth and wait for better times, or is there a tougher way of sending a message back to Washington? Perhaps imposing tariffs of its own. What does India do? Because it's a predicament that I'm not sure the Modi government knows how to resolve.  

AT: Well, you know, I can't advise the Modi government on what India should do, but I'll just make the following observations. Retaliation is a very costly and unproductive strategy because at the end of the day, India depends more on the United States than is the case in reverse. That is all the more true under Trump, who really would not give India the time of day ordinarily. So, a strategy of trying to retaliate against the United States, I think, is terribly counterproductive. It would only make things worse. The best thing that I think India should do is to make smart decisions about its own policies in its own interests, protect itself against the downsides of US policy and then simply hunker down and wait for the current crisis to pass. And they may not pass before the passing of Trump's toll. But you know India has been at the receiving end of tough US policies before. This is not new to India. The problem is that the last 25 years have been such wonderful years in terms of building the US-India relationship, we've forgotten that US-India relations after 1974 until 1998 was often extremely scratchy and very difficult and yet India survived it. You know India has balanced, India has mass, India can there will be pain but India can survive even the pain that the United States imposes through bad policies. So to the degree that you know this constitutes advice, I would just say grit your teeth, do the smart things that are in your own interest and then simply wait, you know, for this tempest to pass. It will pass. I mean, Trump at the end of the day has three-and-a-half years and that's it. He's not going to be around after that, short of some catastrophe in the United States. And I think there are enough people even in his own government today who understand India's importance. So we just have to wait for you know, saner minds to once again resurface. 

KT: But you're also saying quite clearly that it's very likely that this cold painful wind from Washington will continue to blow for another three and a half years until Trump's successor replaces him. 

AT: It could. Right. I mean the danger of trying to make any predictions of this kind is that you're dealing with a very mercurial and tempestuous president who in February, was pretending to be prime minister Modi's best friend and in May turns out to be anything but. So there is no guarantee that he cannot turn on a dime once again and move in a direction that is completely orthogonal to you know the current bearing as it were. So you have to be prepared for the worst and you have to act smartly on the assumption that the worst may persist for three-and-a-half years and that means this should be an opportunity for India to make the difficult choices that it has to make with reform. With respect to its foreign trade and so on and so forth. And just bide your time, nothing in politics is forever. 

KT: Well, to that one could say, amen. Ashley Tellis, thank you very much for the time you've given me. Thank you very much for your insight and analysis.

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