As Modi meets Trump, can he get India tariff waivers, Iran respite?
New Delhi, India – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Washington late on Wednesday night and is scheduled to meet United States President Donald Trump on Thursday at the White House.
While the two leaders have often described each other as friends in the past, and have even held joint political rallies together, Modi’s visit comes at a time when the relationship is being tested by Trump’s tariff threats and deportation realities.
“I look forward to meeting my friend, President Trump,” Modi said in a departing message, adding that he has a “very warm recollection of working together in [Trump’s] first term”.
Trump had announced Modi’s visit to the US after their telephone conversation on January 27, a week after he was sworn into office for his second term. After their call, Trump also said that he believed Modi would do “what is right” on undocumented Indian migrants in the US.
But pleasing both Trump and the Indian public won’t be easy for Modi.
Here’s what’s at stake for India, and what Modi might bring with him to the meeting with Trump to try to placate the US president.
What’s at stake for India?
The US is India’s largest export destination and ranks among its top two trade partners in several sectors, including technology, trade, defence and energy. The two-way trade between the US and India touched an all-time high of $118bn in 2023-24.
Bilateral ties have also strengthened in the last three decades as the US has increasingly focused on countering the rise of a shared rival – China.
But despite that convergence, Trump has made clear – as he had with several US allies – that he has deep differences too with India.
During his campaign for the 2024 election, Trump labelled India a “very big abuser” of trade and threatened tariffs. Since being elected, he pushed New Delhi to buy more US-made security equipment as a way to reduce the imbalance in their trade. In 2024, the trade surplus stood at $45.6bn, in favour of India, according to US government data.
Trump’s re-election campaign also highlighted undocumented immigration and illegal settlement in the US. As of 2022, India ranked third, after Mexico and El Salvador, among countries with the largest number of undocumented immigrants – 725,000 – living in the country.
And on Wednesday last week, a US military plane touched down in Amritsar, a city in northern India, carrying 104 Indian deportees, their hands and legs cuffed. In the farthest such journey undertaken by a US military aircraft, the “mistreatment” of deportees prompted a major outrage, including protests by the opposition, in India.
“India has always celebrated the success of Indians in the US, which means Indian Americans have been a very visible community in India’s consciousness,” said Swaran Singh, professor at the centre of international politics at Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University. Indian foreign policy too, under Modi, has especially celebrated nonresident Indians, he said. “These dynamics make the mistreatment of Indian deportees a volatile and inflammable issue in bilateral ties,” Singh said.
Jon Danilowicz, a retired diplomat who served at the US Department of State, said that Modi’s meeting with Trump “is mainly an opportunity for the Indian PM to present his side of the story to make New Delhi’s case”.
But what could Modi offer to manage the Trump threat on tariffs and deportation?
What’s Modi’s likely game plan on deportation?
Singh noted the Indian government’s muted official reaction to the outrage over images of citizens returning from the US in cuffs.
That, he suggested, was a deliberate decision.
“Trump has some method in his madness. He uses whimsical statements to create maximum pressure,” said Singh. “It is not a good sense to then publicly confront him [on contentious issues].”
Instead, after an uproar in the parliament, India’s foreign minister, S Jaishankar, said that the use of restraints was part of the US’s deportation policy, adding that “it is the obligation of all countries to take back their nationals if they are found to be living illegally abroad”.
“Our focus should be on a strong crackdown on the illegal migration industry while taking steps to ease visas for legitimate travellers,” said Jaishankar.
How might Modi counter Trump on tariffs?
Trump has promised to announce further tariffs later this week, and though he hasn’t specified which countries or sectors might be targeted, India is expected to be affected.
On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said that she expected these reciprocal tariffs – against countries that Trump believes impose unfair restrictions on US imports – to be announced before the US president meets Modi.
Trump has already imposed a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese imports on top of existing tariffs and has introduced a 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminium imports.
But when Modi meets Trump, the Indian PM could point to recent unilateral steps that India has taken to lower the barriers to entry for US goods, say analysts.
Traditionally, India, an emerging economy, has had high tariffs in place for several imported products that it feared could hurt its domestic industry and farm sector. However, in its latest budget, announced on February 1, the Modi government slashed tariffs and avoided any protectionist announcements.
Such steps might “preempt some action of the US administration”, said Danilowicz.
India, after all, is familiar with the risks of a tariff war with the US. In 2018, Trump had imposed tariffs of 25 percent on $761m of steel and 10 percent on $382m of aluminium imported from India, which retaliated by adding customs duties to at least 28 US products. After years of trade tensions, in 2023, a resolution was announced during a Modi visit to Washington.
Modi will want to avoid a repeat.
“India has so far escaped the direct tariff heat by the new Trump administration and that is a positive sign,” said Biswajit Dhar, a distinguished professor at the Council for Social Development in New Delhi.
Dhar, an international trade expert, told Al Jazeera that Modi needs to use this meeting “to convince Trump that India plays a fair game vis-a-vis trade and, therefore, India should be treated differently.”
“If China is slapped with these kinds of tariffs, then the same thing should not happen to India,” Dhar said, adding that the “personalised background” to the duo’s relationship should allow space to accommodate these discussions. “At the least, India would not like itself to be clubbed along with China.”
After all, China – or rather the shared suspicion of Beijing’s plans for the Asia Pacific region – is the biggest glue that holds the India-US relationship together.
‘Commitment to QUAD’
Modi is only the fourth world leader to meet Trump since his re-election, after conflict-engaged Israel, Jordan and Japan, its ally in the Asia Pacific. Foreign policy experts told Al Jazeera that being invited this early in Trump’s term shows how important the US president considers ties with India.
China is a big part of that.
A day after Trump was sworn in as the 47th US president, his newly appointed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, held a meeting with fellow foreign ministers of India, Australia and Japan. The four nations – with a collective population of nearly two billion people and representing more than a third of global gross domestic produce (GDP) – form the Quad, a strategic forum focused on the Asia Pacific region.
The Modi-Trump phone call on January 27 also “emphasized their commitment to advance the US-India strategic partnership and the Indo-Pacific Quad partnership”, a US government statement after their conversation said.
“The Trump administration has clearly signalled that the Indo-Pacific region is a priority. And that’s clearly driven by the competition with China,” said Danilowicz, the former US diplomat.
But there’s another country that Trump and the US want to target – and there, New Delhi and Washington differ.
The Iran equation
A major storm is brewing between India and the US over Iran, said Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, a Washington, DC-based think tank.
At the centre of tensions is the port of Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman, where India has made a multimillion-dollar investment in the hopes of developing a strategically located maritime facility. The port allows India to send food, aid and other commodities to landlocked Afghanistan and Central Asia via Iran, bypassing Pakistan, New Delhi’s archrival.
India had secured a sanctions waiver from the US during the first Trump administration for work related to Chabahar.
But in a national security presidential memorandum that Trump signed on February 4, he asked US Secretary of State Rubio to “modify or rescind sanctions waivers, particularly those that provide Iran any degree of economic or financial relief, including those related to Iran’s Chabahar port project”.
“Trump’s Iran policy could well become a flashpoint in the US-India relationship and can have a deleterious impact,” Kugelman told Al Jazeera, adding that Trump’s “maximalist position towards Iran” presents a delicate diplomatic situation for India.
‘Bonhomie’ and friction
Other niggles in ties – like allegations by US prosecutors that India’s spy agency attempted to assassinate an American citizen, Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun; or the US indictment of billionaire Gautam Adani over bribery charges – will continue to shadow bilateral ties, noted Kugelman.
“These issues will not necessarily come up in the immediate future, or at this meeting, but they are not going away anytime soon,” said Kugelman. “Given Trump’s maximalist position on tariffs, he’s going to try to do everything to incentivise countries to bring down and reduce tariffs.”
Indian diplomats and international foreign policy experts have said Modi’s celebrated ‘bromance’ equation with Trump provides India an edge on the table with other countries.
However, it does not necessarily translate into “a better deal”, said Danilowicz, the former US diplomat.
“A good equation can get India a quicker meeting or face time with Trump, not a deal,” he said, adding that New Delhi needs to prepare to deal with frictions. “It would be a mistake for India, or any country, to put too much emphasis on a personal relationship with Trump and neglect that there are many other inputs into the US foreign policy-making process, including the Congress.”
Source: Apps Support
As Trump imposes ‘no exceptions’ tariffs, Asian allies hope for a reprieve
When United States President Donald Trump announced his latest tariffs on steel and aluminium this week, he insisted there would be “no exemptions, no exceptions”.
Washington’s closest allies in the Asia-Pacific are hoping that they will be able to change the mercurial US president’s mind.
Japan, South Korea and Australia, US treaty allies with export-reliant economies, have all confirmed that they are seeking exemptions from Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminium.
Trump has pledged to follow up on the measures against imported steel and aluminium with broader reciprocal tariffs, which could potentially cover a far wider range of goods, on countries that impose levies on US exports as soon as Thursday.
“We will take necessary measures, including lobbying the United States for an exemption, while closely monitoring any possible impact on the Japanese economy,” Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who met Trump in Washington last week, told parliament on Wednesday.
Tokyo’s efforts to sway Trump are likely to include commitments to increase US imports.
The US trade deficit with Japan stood at about $70bn last year, mostly as a result of exports by Japanese automakers such as Toyota, Honda and Nissan.
Tokyo is also likely to highlight its importance as an ally in confronting China in the region and “its technical advantage, which is desperately needed by the US to take a lead in new strategic industries”, said Shigeto Nagai, the Asia head of Oxford Economics.
“Japan enjoys a large trade surplus with the US for machineries, which gives incentive to the US to impose tariffs,” Nagai told Al Jazeera.
“At the same time, the technological advantage of Japanese machineries such as semiconductor equipment and materials will make it difficult to quickly find substitutes.”
After their talks at the White House on Friday, Trump and Ishiba released a joint statement acknowledging the Republican’s agenda of boosting domestic industry, including a pledge to strengthen energy security by “unleashing the United States’ affordable and reliable energy and natural resources”.
At the same time, Ishiba impressed upon Trump that Japan has been the largest foreign investor in the US for the past five years running and announced plans for $1 trillion in further investments, including in artificial intelligence.
“My sense is that this [tariff exemptions] remains negotiable,” Ryota Abe, an economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC), told Al Jazeera.
“The adverse impacts on the US economy would not be small should the relationship between the two seriously be damaged. And this would not be the best choice even for the US.”
Although the contours of his second administration’s policy priorities are still unfolding, Trump has taken his reputation for being fond of a deal with him from his first term.
Despite insisting that his tariffs would apply to all countries, Trump almost immediately left the door open to an exception for Australia, saying he would give “great consideration” to an exemption.
“We have a surplus with Australia, one of the few,” Trump said.
Trump’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, poured cold water on those hopes the following day, claiming that Australia was “killing” the US aluminium market.
Australia’s aluminium exports surged after Trump first entered office in 2016, peaking at about 269,000 tonnes in 2019.
Exports have fluctuated considerably since then, coming in at 83,000 tonnes in 2024, down from 210,000 the previous year.
“Overall, the second Trump administration is acting both more ruthlessly and chaotically than the first, so allies like Japan – and Australia, and NATO/EU [European Union] allies – will continue to confront a highly volatile and difficult diplomatic situation, which will require extremely dextrous leadership,” Craig Mark, an adjunct lecturer in economics at Hosei University in Tokyo, told Al Jazeera.
During his first term, Trump did not adopt a uniform approach to granting reprieves to friendly countries and allies.
In 2018, his administration exempted Australia from steel and aluminium tariffs and granted South Korea a duty-free steel quota of up to 2.63 million tonnes.
But his administration did not extend such relief to Japan.
The administration of former US President Joe Biden eased the tariffs on Japanese steel in 2022, agreeing to allow 1.25 million metric tonnes of steel to enter the US each year duty-free while keeping tariffs on aluminium in place.
“The experience of the first Trump administration shows how Japan could find itself the target of US tariffs yet again, despite all its diplomatic efforts,” said Mark, the Hosei University professor, pointing out that former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went to “great lengths to build a close personal relationship with Trump”.
While Trump has a “much more expansive view of his remit”, compared with his first term, and views tariffs as a “genuinely valuable tool that can be used to solve a myriad of problems”, the overriding feature of his administration is uncertainty, said Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore.
Elms said she was not certain Trump himself would be able to provide answers about his policy direction or goals, “or if he did so, that his answers now would be the same as what he might say in another hour or day or week”.
“As he’s the one driving trade policy – for the moment, at least – this lack of clarity matters,” Elms told Al Jazeera.
Source: Apps Support