Josherich's Blog

Trump’s India Tariff Tirade: A Gift to Beijing? With Evan Feigenbaum

Nearly home. Isn’t home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the pro’s number one most trusted app. If you’re hearing me, I’m going to assume you’re awake. And if you aren’t, because while you’re snoozing, someone else might be finding your dream home.

That’s where Realtor.com comes in. With over 500,000 new real listings straight from the pros every month, that’s a lot of chances to find the place you’ve been dreaming of. Whether you’re searching for:

• a two-story mid-century with a pool
• a little extra space with a spa-inspired bathroom

Realtor.com can help you find it today. So quit hitting that snooze button. Realtor.com isn’t sleeping on finding your dream home, and neither should you.

Download the Realtor.com app today, because you’re nearly home.
Make it real with Realtor.com.

Pro’s number one most trusted app based on August 2024 proprietary survey.
Over 500,000 new listings every month based on average new for sale and rental listings, February 2024 through January 2025.

Ever notice that everyone always wants more of a good thing? More rewards, more savings, more special offers? Well, when you become a new member of the Fuel Rewards Program at Shell, that’s exactly what you get. More.

Join today to save:

- 10 cents per gallon on your first fill  
- 20 cents on the second  
- 30 cents on the third  

Then enjoy everyday savings afterwards.

Want more? Then head to Shell where members get more.

Offer valid from 4-21-25 through 10-31-25 at participating Shell locations.
Offer must be redeemed within 60 days of registration.
Limit 20 gallons.
Restrictions apply.
Visit fuelrewards.com/join25 for more information.

Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.

Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo coming to you this week from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free as always, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support.

You can get me at [email protected].

I am in the market for new institutional support. Please help out.

Listeners, you can do your part by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. You will enjoy there, in addition to the podcast:

• the complete transcript of the show
• essays from me
• writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators
• and of course the knowledge that you were helping me to do what I honestly believe is very important work

So do check out the page, see all it’s on offer, consider helping me out.

It’s been a remarkable few weeks in South Asian diplomacy. On August 6th, President Trump signed an executive order slapping an additional 25% tariff on most Indian goods, tariffs that went into effect today. It’s August 27th, as we record, effectively doubling duties on many categories of goods.

This was ostensibly done to punish New Delhi for continued purchases of Russian oil.

Just a couple of weeks later, China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, was in New Delhi for meetings with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and with Prime Minister Narendra Modi before heading on to Islamabad for the China-Pakistan Foreign Minister Strategic Dialogue, and then to Afghanistan.

And now, of course, all eyes are on Tianjin, where probably by the time you hear this, India’s Prime Minister will have attended his first summit in China in seven years, a Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathering at which a meeting with Xi Jinping is widely expected.

So today on Sinica, I’m joined once again by one of my very, very favorite guests, Evan Feigenbaum.

Evan, as you know, is Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he leads their work on Asia. Before that, he had a long career in government, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and for Central Asia, and as an advisor on China at the State Department.

Evan has been coming on Sinica since our earliest days, and longtime listeners will remember how central he was to the bipartisan effort over the past 25 years to build trust and deepen ties between the United States and India.

These days, though, Evan has been watching in disbelief and horror as President Trump, in his second go-around, seems intent on dismantling much of that hard-won progress. He’s been especially sharp on social media about the ways tariffs, sanctioned talk, and inflammatory rhetoric are undoing the work that he and others labored so hard to achieve.

Frankly, the main purpose of today’s program may just be to let Evan vent his understandable frustration, and my questions are probably going to be a little superfluous. So with that, let me toss out a ball, then get out of the way.

Evan Feigenbaum, welcome back to Sinica.
Thanks, man.
Thanks for having me.

So the 25-year arc that I described—I mean, you’ve described this quarter century as a bipartisan project encompassing:

• civil nuclear cooperation
• defense
• trade
• tech
• higher education links
• regularized strategic dialogues

You were very much a part of that effort in your time in government. What, in your view, were maybe the two or three hinge points that built trust, and which institutions or habits of cooperation proved, you know, the most resilient when politics grew rough on either side, and maybe, you know, still will be ballast in the relationship as Rocky has gotten?

Well, first, isn’t the whole thing ironic? I mean, we went into the Trump administration with everyone saying that we were going to have a U.S.-China trade war as the dominant geoeconomic theme, and somehow we’ve ended up with a U.S.-India trade war instead of a U.S.-China trade war. So it’s ironic, but it’s interesting because it’s not the first time, obviously, that the United States and India have had a lot of turbulence in their relationship.

In fact, for the entire Cold War period, that was pretty much the norm. So we went into the decade of the 2000s, the end of the Clinton administration, and then especially into the George W. Bush administration with a few obstacles that had historically characterized the relationship. So one was the overhang of the Cold War, because during the Cold War, the United States had expected countries basically to line up on one or the other side.

Sure. And while India was non-aligned, after 1971, India largely had leaned toward the Soviet side. But in any case, it certainly wasn’t part of the American project in Asia more broadly.

Second, there was not a lot of economic content to the relationship.

And then third, after India tested a nuclear weapon in the 1970s, the United States imposed a whole variety of non-proliferation-related sanctions.

And so we went into the decade of the 2000s basically with two of those three cleared away.

• The Cold War was gone.
• India’s economic reform meant that we could build economic content into the relationship.

But then we had this non-proliferation sanctions problem. The Indian argument to the United States was:

“You can’t really have a strategic partnership with the country that’s the number one target of your non-proliferation sanctions.”

And that was the context in which the United States did a lot of lifting, both multilaterally and domestically, to create an exception to India, which is a non-signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to the requirement for full-scope safeguards and also for carve-outs from nuclear suppliers’ rules. We also had to amend the Atomic Energy Act.

So by the time the nuclear deal was done in 2008, we’d basically cleared away a lot of the obstacles that had created a lot of the turbulence. Certainly a major, major hinge point that I suggested built a lot of trust.

And after 2008, how would you describe the trajectory?

Yeah. So then the trajectory after 2008 was really toward a much more broad-based partnership. And the two sides had a lot of, as I said, the overhang of mistrust to get through. But there were certain habits of cooperation that were built. I think a lot of people took for granted that the United States and India had basically become enduring strategic partners in ways that had been unthinkable a few decades before.

When Trump came into the picture, and especially with not just the trade actions, but a series of other actions that he’s undertaken in the last two to three months, including, for instance, outreach to Pakistan’s military commander to the point of inviting him in the wake of a conflict between India and Pakistan that originated with a terrorist attack against civilians in India back in April, the relationship really began to change.

I would characterize three things as having changed the most. The first is what enabled a lot of the cooperation is that both sides were willing to take risks for the relationship politically in 2008, when we concluded the nuclear deal. Manmohan Singh, who was then the prime minister of India, actually put his entire government on the line. He subjected it to a no-confidence vote to try to get the nuclear deal through.

And on the U.S. side, same thing. I mean, George W. Bush was the president, but the Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress. And Bush provided a series of controversial fuel supply assurances and other assurances to India. Despite that, he was able to pass the India Civil Nuclear Bill with large congressional bipartisan majorities, nonetheless.

Second, the United States and India have always had a dim view of one another’s relationships with third parties. The United States, even if you put the Russia stuff to the side, didn’t particularly care for India’s relationship with Iran, for example, or with Myanmar. And for its part, India didn’t really like a lot of what the U.S. was doing with China and with Pakistan.

But they never let those objections to relations with third parties impinge on the bilateral relationship in a way that rode the whole thing off the rails. So this stuff that’s going on now about essentially sanctioning India for purchases of Russian oil, which Indians see as hypocritical in the first instance, in any case, is really an example of bleed back from those third-party relationships into the bilateral in ways that were really unthinkable even five years ago.

And then last, we’d really given this thing some lift beyond domestic politics. As I said, this was very bipartisan in the U.S. If you go back to 2008, you had a Republican president, you had Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. But the thing got passed by pretty large majorities.

On the Indian side, it had also been given some lift and had become depoliticized. Manmohan Singh was from the Congress Party. The current government under Narendra Modi is from the other side of Indian politics. And so what’s happened now with President Trump’s tariffs in particular is that this thing has become a political football again and all the efforts that have been made to depoliticize the relationship, take some risks, not let objections to relationships with third parties bleed back, have basically unraveled.

And what that means is that even if the two sides do a tariff deal, which I expect them to do, the trust is basically gone. And in India in particular, there are a lot of people basically saying that they “can’t trust the United States anymore.” That’s very debilitating, and it really unwinds everything that’s been worked for.

Evan, you’ve written that Washington appears to be veering from coalition building with India to coalition building against India. You know, you were talking about playing footsie with Pakistanis. What, I mean, I guess the big question is what’s changed in the U.S. policy process to produce this total inversion? I mean, is it just the idiosyncrasy of the man in the Oval Office? I mean, was he—I’ve seen theories—was he just deeply offended that India wasn’t grateful enough for his supposed brokering of a stand down after that big dust up between India and Pakistan in the spring? What was the deal? What’s driving this in your mind?

You know, I’m not sure it’s that useful to psychoanalyze President Trump. But do it anyway.

Yeah, it’s hard to know what drives them, man. And what I would say is that putting trade policy front and center, and in particular, putting trade deficits front and center, is not that productive because it moves you away from a more strategic approach to the relationship that led a lot of American policymakers on both sides, Republican and Democrat, including, by the way, in President Trump’s first term, to take a longer term and more strategic view of why the U.S. needed a productive relationship with India.

I think the thing about what’s going on now is that there’s no rhyme, reason, or logic to why India has been targeted in this way.

Let’s just take the tariffs for purchases of Russian oil as an example:

• The president had announced a base tariff on India of 25 percent, which, since you mentioned Pakistan, by the way, is six percentage points higher than the 19 percent that Pakistan got,
• but also higher than any countries in Southeast Asia got, which are basically 19 percent, with Vietnam at 20 percent.

So there’s what many Indians view as the intrinsic hypocrisy of imposing some of the highest tariff rates in Asia on India. But now you have this Russian oil purchase tariff of an additional 25 percent layered on top, so you now have a 50 percent tariff rate.

I think from the Indian perspective, it’s deeply hypocritical in the first instance.

For one thing,

• China buys more Russian oil than India does,
• yet it’s India that has the 25 percent Russian oil purchase tariff, and China has somehow been spared.

More importantly, if you have the goal of shutting down Russia’s commodity trade, then there’s no particular reason why you would look only at oil. And if you switch the commodity of reference up from oil to, let’s say, gas, then Europeans are still purchasing Russian gas. And if you switch it to chemicals and other products, the United States itself is still doing business with Russia. And so Indians look at that, particularly through the political prism in Delhi, and what they see is India being singled out in ways that are not being applied to other countries.

So at minimum, it’s viewed as hypocritical, but more, it’s increasingly viewed as targeting India.

As an American, I look at that and I say that it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It doesn’t make sense strategically to just have trade disputes unravel everything else that’s been achieved. But what’s more, it’s not a particularly principled approach either because of the way that it’s being applied.

You know, the president, if I can say that the president has:

• imposed tariffs on countries with which the United States has trade deficits, but also countries with which it has trade surpluses.
• imposed tariffs on countries with which the U.S. has free trade agreements, but also countries with which it does not have free trade agreements.
• imposed tariffs on countries with which he’s reached agreements previously, like, for example, South Korea in his first term, and countries with which he has not.

And now, as with these Russian oil purchase tariffs, or more precisely sanctions, he’s wielding tariffs as a weapon on things that have nothing to do with trade policy at all.

And he’s even threatening India and others with tariffs for membership in the BRICS group because he doesn’t like it.

And so it’s very difficult if you’re sitting in Narendra Modi’s shoes to negotiate with someone that, at minimum, has no particular consistency or logic to the way they’re wielding the instrument.

And as the Europeans and the Koreans and others have discovered, even when you reach a deal with President Trump, he’s liable to walk away from the deal and start negotiating again. And so that’s not a good recipe for success in New Delhi.

Just on the Russian oil purchases thing, when he’s been pushed on this, Scott Bessent has been talking about how it’s not so much the oil purchases themselves, but the fact that before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, India, and I checked this, India did buy very little oil from Russia.

And the accusation is that he’s just basically, you know, that India has taken advantage of Russia’s desperation, bought a lot of oil from Russia, and is basically flipping that oil now for a profit on global markets.

Is there any truth to that accusation?

Well, I think the Indians think that strains credulity at several levels. For one thing, the predecessor administration, the Biden administration, actually encouraged India to buy Russian oil because they thought it would induce some price stability into global markets by not taking too much oil off the market at one time in a way that would produce global shocks.

So the Indians would argue that actually they thought they were doing what the United States wanted them to do, and that Eric Garcetti, who was President Biden’s ambassador, and Janet Yellen, who was his treasury secretary, had actually encouraged them to do.

So yes, we’ve had a change of administration, but the policy and consistency can induce some whiplash.

I think it’s also troubling from the Indian standpoint because, after all, the United States has been reaching out to Russia itself. There was a report in the press this week that Exxon has been holding some meetings about restarting operations in Russia.

And if that’s true, it just fuels and feeds the notion of American hypocrisy in New Delhi.

And that notion of hypocrisy has basically become highly politicized, as I said, in ways that are unproductive.

I don’t think Mr. Bessent understands the political context in Delhi very well.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it’s really important to understand the domestic politics in India. So maybe you can break that out a little bit and explain how this has played out in, you know, the Indian democracy.

I mean, Americans are not particularly self-reflective in general, but we tend to ignore the fact that other countries have politics, too.

And when you filter this through the lens of Indian domestic politics, you can see why the Indian public, the Indian media, the Indian opposition, but also many people within Prime Minister Modi’s own party are encouraging the government not to knuckle under and show, quote unquote, weakness in the face of American pressure.

They think that they essentially are being coerced by a country that is targeting India in ways that single it out for things that other countries themselves are doing.

In the Russia case, penalizing them for a longstanding relationship that they’ve had for decades.

You can argue that the context of the Ukraine war should change the way everybody thinks about their relationship with Russia. But we need to recognize that setting the bar at India junking its relationship with what it views as a longstanding strategic partner was never going to happen. And if you set the bar at impossible, you’re not going to make a lot of progress. And so I think relations with the United States have always been especially politicized in India.

And something like penalties and sanctions, where the United States tries to mirror image its own foreign policy concerns and project them onto India, is something that induces a lot of longstanding neuralgia in New Delhi.

I’ll give you one example. This additional 25% is a tariff, but Caroline Leavitt, who’s the White House spokesperson, went to the podium in the White House the other day and referred to it as a sanction. So when we start conflating tariffs and sanctions, it induces a lot of historical memories in India that are very unpleasant.

Because as I said, after India’s nuclear test in 1974, the United States led the charge to impose a whole variety of sanctions on India, including related, for example, to the supply of nuclear reactor fuel, which is exactly why President Bush had to deliver fuel supply assurances to India to reassure them that the United States would remain a country that was not going to try to cut off India’s fuel supply again.

So in the context of India’s domestic politics, in the context of this history where the United States has been seen as a champion of sanctions on India, you can see why the government might be vulnerable on this. And so it’s produced a lot of neuralgia, unpleasant historical memories. And a lot, as I said, of the trust building that’s been done over the years to get beyond that has essentially come at risk of becoming completely unraveled.

I know that you’ve said that, you know, it’s sort of a black box, you don’t want to psychoanalyze Trump or anything like that. But I feel like US politics must have something to do with this.

I don’t know whether you saw, I floated a sort of a theory that this whole—so I mean, look, Trump may be many things. One thing that I do credit him with is kind of a low political cunning, right? He has a sense for the mood, especially in his base.

And there has been this surge in anti-Indian racism in the US. The far right has been ginning it up for some time now. You know, this was after what Vivek Ramaswamy said. It was, you know, this H-1B assault led by Marjorie Taylor Greene and others in Congress. There have been attacks on the right on J.D. Vance’s wife, who’s Indian. This is all, you know, sort of part of the culture war, and it further politicizes the relationship in this never-ending election-like environment that we have in the US.

But I sense that, like, Trump understood that this was a moment where he could round on India with sort of the support of racists, anti-Indian racists in his base. Do you think there’s anything to that?

I think it’s an incredibly important point that a lot of the domestic issues that most seem to engage the MAGA right are things that touch India either directly or indirectly. So if you just run down the list of issues:

• H-1B visas for tech workers
• Immigration policy
• Offshoring of manufacturing to not just China, but other countries in Asia

A lot of these issues actually touch India very directly. And so there’s this unique synergy right now between issues that really seem to engage the MAGA base and issues that have touched the US-India relationship in ways that have really politicized this on the American side.

So we’ve been talking about domestic politics in India, but the reality is this is becoming politicized in the United States, too, for precisely that reason.

And because President Trump is kind of like the Pied Piper, where there’s a segment of the Republican Party, but also of the American public that will follow him essentially anywhere he goes, I really think this is going to have some long-term implications and bleed into the US-India strategic partnership in ways that are extremely debilitating.

And that’s what I meant earlier when I said that this thing had been given some lift beyond domestic politics in ways that had really depoliticized it.

I mean, when I talked about the nuclear deal, for example, before, both Republicans and Democrats were real champions, not just of passing the Indian nuclear bill, but of the US-India strategic partnership and strategic relationship.

And by the way, if we’re being cynical about it, some of that had to do with the fact that China had become so politicized in US domestic politics. There’s a large segment of the American body politic, and this then bled into the American public, that essentially viewed India as kind of the un-China.

It was another large continental Asian-sized country that was not an authoritarian political system. And somehow people came around to the idea that building up India was somehow existentially in the United States’ interest because it would build a counterweight to China within Asia and more broadly. Now, whether that was true or not, or whether that was based on a series of assumptions and presumptions that might or might not have been heroic, that’s a different matter. My point is what it produced in American politics was a lot of bipartisan agreement and consensus around building the relationship with India at a time when there’s not a lot of consensus on anything.

So, you know, you had these two points of consensus:

• A lot of people just had a dim view of China
• A lot of people had a positive view of India, whether they were conservative Republicans or they were liberal and progressive Democrats

And somehow that’s come unraveled. And there’s interesting implications for China because this hypocrisy that we were talking about—a lot of what people in New Delhi think they see is the United States actually improving its relationships with both Russia and China at a time when the administration is tanking the relationship with India in ways that don’t seem to have moved the American body politic in quite the same way.

And so that gets to your question about President Trump because, I mean, I could easily see a place where just as a lot of people are rationalizing closer relations with Russia, people actually start to move the needle on relations with China in segments of the American political class that we would not have expected five or 10 years ago because they follow the president there.

It’s an amazing switcheroo, which is what I meant earlier when I said,

“How did we get from a U.S.-China trade war to a U.S.-India trade war?”

It’s crazy. And it’s certainly not what was expected from this president at the beginning.

Yeah. I’ve been talking quite a bit about how Trump is actually strangely moving, yeah, as you say, the sort of that once pretty solid bipartisan anti-China consensus now. It’s interesting to see how it’s happening. It’s both on the left and on the right that we’re seeing a change—part of it, you know, on the right, obviously, led by the idiosyncrasies of Trump himself.

But, you know, 25 years of trust building, there’s some residue. There’s some ballast still in place, right? I mean, most tangibly, I think, you know, in the bureaucratic channels there and the defense dialogues, in technology cooperation. I mean, there are going to be a lot of elements of trust that are hard to rebuild in the U.S.-India relationship.

But is there anything that could still be salvaged? Is there a foundation for, you know, a future administration to start rebuilding?

Yeah, sure. But I think there are three challenges.

The first is, it’s fine to say that bureaucracies continue to move the ball downfield. But remember that this administration is essentially decimating large segments of the American bureaucracy. And that includes parts of the government that have been most responsible for building U.S. relations with India.

The fastest growing areas of the U.S.-India relationship over the last decade are not just confined to defense and weapons sales. They also include a lot of areas of technology collaboration and technology sharing.

And in the face of a kind of new American techno-nationalism that wants to hold technology close and is somewhat skeptical of sharing it even with close allies, I think decimating that part of the bureaucracy makes it harder to just bank on bureaucratic initiative and inertia.

The second thing is, the good news is there’s a large ecosystem in the private sector of ties between American and Indian firms, funds, VCs, Silicon Valley and Bangalore and so on.

But as we’ve discovered in the U.S.-China relationship, that can be kind of a weak read in the face of political risk.

I mean, the reality is, as you know:

• The U.S. and China were vastly more intertwined than the U.S. and India were at the corporate level,
• At the level of investment flows,
• And even at the societal level.

There are a lot of Indian students in the United States, but there have been periods where there were far more Chinese students in the United States. And yet that came unraveled pretty quickly.

So political risk matters, and I don’t think it’s easy to just bank on societal connections as if the politics doesn’t matter.

And that brings me to the third point.

James Baker, who is a former Secretary of State who I really admire, wrote a memoir many years ago, and he titled it The Politics of Diplomacy. And part of why he titled it that way is that he argued in the book, as he always argued, that foreign policy ultimately had to be anchored in a pretty firm domestic political foundation.

And two of the lessons that I’ve learned in my career are that, generally speaking, in every country, domestic politics always trumps foreign policy at the end of the day.

And second, foreign policy initiatives never fly if they aren’t anchored domestically in a pretty strong firmament. And so everything we’ve been talking about, this politicization of U.S.-India relations, the fact that governments can be attacked by opponents domestically, what’s happening in India with allusions to the government not being, quote-unquote, weak, or here with the MAGA right turning anti-India, those things are very debilitating because they make the political foundation of foreign policy kind of like quicksand.

And once you end up there, it’s very hard to drive forward just in the foreign policy domain.

So when you add all those three things up, kind of bureaucratic decimation, the fact that societal and economic ties can come undone pretty quickly, and then this lack of a strong political foundation now, and the re-politicization of U.S.-India ties, I really worry about where we’re going to end up. We’re only eight months into this. I mean, give it another three and a half years, and where are we going to be in this?

I do think they’re going to reach a tariff deal, by the way, but the problem is even if they reach a tariff deal, the trust is gone. And what’s more, the President of the United States likes to renegotiate everything. So if everything’s a perpetual negotiation, you can make a deal, but you can end up right back in the mix again within months.

Right, right, right. Evan, what does this all look like insofar as you can tell from Beijing? You spend a lot of time in China. You spend a lot of time thinking about this. How is Beijing reacting to, you know, Trump rounding on India? Are they popping the corks? Are they being more or less quiet about it? Is there a lot of commentary?

They’re popping the corks, to be honest. And I think some of that is premature because the reality is that we’ve been talking about trust building. I mean, there’s really no trust between India and China. And that’s partly because of what’s happened on the border, but it’s also because of a whole variety of issues that have been very debilitating.

If you just look at economics, for example, the fact that India runs not just persistent, but widening trade deficits in goods with China is really a big political issue in India, just like it is in the United States and other countries. And not a lot has happened to change that.

So I think the Chinese see an opportunity in this flurry of diplomacy that you see happening, particularly the trip that Wang Yi just made to New Delhi, where there were a series of announcements that are interesting and important.

You mentioned that Narendra Modi is going to Tianjin. That’s pre-scheduled. It’s not about Trump. It’s for a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, but it is the first visit that Modi’s made to China in seven years. Seven years ago, he was in Sichuan and also in Qingdao. So it’s the first time in a long time.

And it creates opportunities if the Chinese are not overly clumsy to make some hay out of this.

I think the problem, as we saw with the Wang Yi visit, is that there’s a lot of ambition, but it’s still largely aspirational. And having watched this for a long time, there have been a lot of false starts after promising beginnings. So I don’t share the hyped-up enthusiasm that some people have about a broad strategic convergence now between the two sides.

But there are some things from the Wang Yi visit that stood out that we can talk about if you want.

Yeah, I mean, we’ll talk about that. But I mean, just more broadly, another reason I think that maybe we should not get ahead of ourselves here is that, you know, as you said, the Modi visit had long been planned. In conversations I’ve had with people who know, you know, Chinese diplomacy and the side and Indian relationship pretty well, I mean, there is a consensus more or less that it’s, you know, Trump’s anti-Indian turn was not a big factor in this so-called China-India rapprochement or detente, whatever you want to call it.

Things were already kind of trending in that direction, although very tepidly.

But you know, since last October, Modi and Xi met in Russia, there was agreement on troop reductions in the Galwan Valley area. This thaw has been in the works. There were already, as you said, plans for visits that were already there.

I’m wondering if you think that there are realistic deliverables that Modi and Xi could trade, you know, to maybe lower the Himalayan temperature without political backlash at home.

Do you think that out of Tianjin or out of this Wang Yi visit, that there might be anything more tangible?

Well, I think you’re right that this was underway. But I do think that the signaling aspect of it, since the Trump tariffs on India has been important, and that’s a new part of the equation.

When Wang Yi went, there were a few things that stood out to me, some of which are achievements and some of which are more aspirational, but create some opportunities. So one was that they’re going to… Resume direct flights between India and China, and also that they pledged to update an air services agreement that extends back, I think, to 2016 was the last update to it. So if you’re thinking about ramping up economic cooperation, having an environment where there are no direct flights is not due to that.

I mean, you think about air links between Taiwan and China, for example, at a completely different and unrelated context, but economic activity can be enabled by that. So that stood out. It very much was. Yeah, the whole period of Maingzhou and all the three connects were…

Yeah, I think the more important thing was that the Indian side actually nodded this time in an interesting way to China’s preference for how to manage the relationship. If you rewind to 2005, Wen Jiabao, who was then the premier of China, made a visit to India, and the two sides issued not separate but a joint statement in which they agreed that despite tensions on the border, they agreed that they would not allow it to impede or hinder the possibility of progress in other areas of the bilateral relationship.

So the border was there as a problem, but they kind of delinked it from the possibility of progress elsewhere. And in 2005, they did that jointly. Subsequently, the Indians really soured on that. And that became more of a Chinese formulation that after a series of incidents, you know, in Depsang, in Galwan, in the tri-junction, India really didn’t want to play ball with that.

But this time, the Indian side kind of nodded back to China’s preference to harken back to 2005. And then, they agreed to do an early harvest, that was the way they described it, suggesting the possibility of movement, for example, on less disputed or undisputed border segments, which would be areas, for example, like in Sikkim.

There’s also, as you were alluding to by Prime Minister Modi, a desire absolutely to ramp up economic activity. And that really is his instinct. Before he became prime minister, he was the chief minister in a Western state called Gujarat. And his reputation was always that he was quite business friendly.

By the way, he wasn’t China unfriendly in that incarnation at all. He famously admired some aspects of China’s economic development. He hosted business delegations from China. Gujarat was a very investment-friendly state. So this squares with his desire, albeit within the context of concerns about Chinese dumping into India, the trade deficit that is running both persistently and that’s been growing. I think it’s at $99 billion U.S. now.

Within that context, I think he personally and some people in the Indian business community would really like to ramp up economic activity. So that’s significant, except that Indian firms have faced a lot of competition in China domestically. And it hasn’t been easy in areas even where India excels. For instance, IT, because India runs into China’s government procurement and other rules, or even in pharma.

In fact, pharma is quite controversial, even though it’s an Indian comparative advantage, because India has a generics market that does export to China. But it relies heavily on active pharmaceutical ingredients that are imported from China. A few years ago, I think it was something like 70% of APIs being used in Indian generics actually originally came from China. So that creates some sensitivities in India, too.

But the potential is… Hey, at least there’s value-add. You know, they’re processing raw Chinese goods into…

Yeah, the potential is there.

I think the other problem is that India’s exports, if you look at the export picture, it’s mainly raw materials. You know, things like iron or shrimp, for example. But what India is importing from China is mainly machinery, machine tools. And that creates some of the concerns about over-dependence and also dumping that led India, for example, to withdraw from the regional comprehensive economic partnership agreement that was largely presented in India domestically as a sop to China, because it was characterized as an FTA with China that would lead to a lot of Chinese dumping.

You know, earlier, you brought up this idea of signaling versus maybe strategy in Indian diplomacy. Delhi’s moves, you know, the National Security Advisor Ajit Doval is going to Moscow, Modi, obviously going to Tianjin, as we’ve said. They, you know, I think they’re playing that up to signal anger at Washington.

What steps do you see as mostly sort of performative bargaining chips, and which could actually lock in durable realignment at all? I mean, are there things like:

• energy contracts or payments,
• plumbing through BRICS,
• development of deeper tech relationships

that Washington maybe really ought to worry about more?

Well, first, I think we need to separate Russia and China in India’s strategic thinking and foreign… Policy. They have a very longstanding, and for some people in India, actually quite emotionally resonant relationship with Russia that the Ukraine invasion has really not shaken at all.

So, Mr. Doval, the National Security Advisor, went to Moscow. Mr. Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister, has been to Moscow recently. The timing of that might or might not have been pre-planned, but in any case, the signaling to Washington, particularly of the fact that India’s invited President Putin to visit India this year is unmistakable, given the fact that the United States has layered additional penalties on India that are directly related to purchasing oil from Russia.

So that part is strategic signaling, but it’s within the context of a relationship that the Indians were never going to junk. It’s not just emotional for India with Russia. The Indians have had a broad geopolitical interest in trying to preserve the ability to poke some wedges between Russia and China, particularly as the Russia-China relationship has become closer and ever closer.

I think there is a view in Delhi that there’s the potential for Russia-China collusion, particularly in India’s immediate strategic geography. The most resonant example of that is Pakistan, because China has a very unique and special relationship of its own with Pakistan.

The Russians, who always lean heavily toward India, have been playing some footsie with Islamabad and even with Ralpindi, which is where the Pakistan military headquarters is located recently, that has unsettled a lot of people in India.

Because the Indians worry about Russia-China collusion and also are trying to keep an eye on a potential Russian role in Afghanistan that they think could cause them some trouble, they are nervous and don’t want to foreclose their options with Moscow. They don’t think the Americans, to be blown about it, appreciate that sufficiently.

If you rewind a few years ago, you’ll remember there was this Russia-China joint statement that famously had a line about a so-called no-limits partnership. A lot of that was nonsense because obviously every partnership has limits. And as we’ve seen with Russia and China, there are some limits to that.

We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, where, for example, the Chinese didn’t want to get crosswise with American sanctions on Russia. But in that same joint statement, there was a line that really stuck out in New Delhi, which was about coordination between the two of them, Moscow and Beijing, in neighboring, or I think they called it adjacent regions. From an Indian perspective, that could mean South Asia.

So there are some limits on the India-Russia relationship. India has been buying a lot of weapons from the United States to reduce its reliance on Russian weaponry. Russia can’t just swap in as an export market. It’s a small market for India compared to the United States. But that relationship includes both signaling and a lot of strategic substance.

The China relationship is different because none of the trust that was built up between India and Russia over many decades is there. In fact, it’s entirely absent. Rather than trying to diversify your partnerships away from a relationship of trust, in the Chinese case, what you have is a relationship of non-trust in which they’re looking for tactical opportunities that are entirely in their self-interest.

We’ve talked a little bit about Indian relations on its northern border, Pakistan. What about in the so-called Indo-Pacific role that it has? Will New Delhi ultimately hedge back toward Washington? Or do you think that there’s maybe structural shift underway there?

I mean, maybe Quad isn’t dead. It’s hard to see how Trump’s tariff salvo is exactly square with U.S. messaging on this so-called Quad.

But how is India reading this weird, self-inflicted American incoherence on that front?

Look, it’s in India’s strategic interest to have balances to China:

• First, for itself to be a balance to China, to make the Chinese think twice about potential force-on-force conflict on the border.
• It’s in India’s interest to see the United States create balances of power in the Indo-Pacific more broadly, and particularly in Asia’s maritime spaces.

There’s been plenty of Indian cheering for strong security partnerships between the United States, Japan, and others in the region.

I think the larger issue, though, is India’s own trajectory in the rest of the Indo-Pacific, particularly in the Pacific part of the Indo-Pacific. There, they’ve absolutely tried to diversify their own partnerships.

On this visit that Prime Minister Modi is going to make up to China, he’s also going to be visiting Japan, I think, on the same trip. In fact, the India-Japan relationship, the India-South Korea… The India-Vietnam relationship, including in the weapons sales space, and some of India’s relationships in Southeast Asia have come a long way. The problem is that the business of East Asia, at least, is business. And the backbone for supply chain relationships, integrated manufacturing relationships isn’t really there, except at the state level for some states in southern India, states like Tamil Nadu, that do a lot of manufacturing.

India’s really handicapped itself there, in my view, by being on the wrong side of a tariff wall with Southeast Asia, for example, by being outside the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that reduced tariffs at the border for countries, including China, that are in it. But India’s on the wrong side of it.

Second, because there are parts of the supply chain opportunity for India that have run into the realities of a lack of structural reform in India. As China’s moved up the value chain and multinationals and others have looked for alternatives, India wants to wear the crown but has a lot of competition:

• Vietnam
• Indonesia
• Thailand
• Even Bangladesh in some sectors.

That’s a game that I think India hasn’t played as well as it could have to ensure greater integration into East Asia.

You mentioned the Quad and these broad security partnerships. The problem with those, which is the same problem with the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), by the way, is that they’ve become largely form for form’s sake, and they’re chasing and groping for some meaningful function rather than function driving form.

I mean, they have quad summits and ministerials, and they issue a lot of communiques. But over the last five to ten years, everybody’s sitting around Washington and other capitals having conversations like,

“Gee, what should we do next on a quad? Maybe we should have a vaccine initiative. Maybe we should have an infrastructure finance initiative. Maybe we should do this. Maybe we should do that.”

Now, when you preface anything within a plurilateral group with maybe we should do X, question mark—that’s not a recipe for success.

If you think about how the quad began, it started at the end of 2004 after the Indian Ocean tsunami when those four countries—India, Japan, Australia, and the United States—provided nine days of rapid and effective humanitarian relief around the Indian Ocean littoral to countries that were affected by the tsunami.

So nine days. They didn’t have a lot of summits. They didn’t have fancy schmancy ministerials or issue a bunch of communiques. They did their job. And then, after they’d succeeded in the mission, they put themselves out of business.

So function drove form. And now we have form groping around for function. I think that’s why the quad hasn’t quite cohered along with the ambitions that some people have for it to become some kind of punitive Asian NATO.

I mean, that’s just fantasy land. Wasn’t the function supposed to be simply to contain China? Well, it’s not clear to me that the non-American members of the quad are down with that program. So that’s the problem.

It’s not clear what “contain China” really means in the context, for example, in Australia, of a pretty deep economic intertwining with China. That set of contradictions in Australia, for example, has become much sharper.

No country with the exception of Japan has really moved as far toward the heavily securitized American-style view of China over the last few years as Australia has. And yet, there was Anthony Albanese up in China for six days last month talking about strengthening economic links and so on.

So that set of contradictions is going to be there. And basically, if the quad wants to be relevant to the broader region, it needs to be what I’ve called a first mover in assembling coalitions to solve actual problems for the region.

The quad has made some attempts at that, for example, with the ideas for infrastructure finance or a vaccine initiative. But those four countries working by themselves can’t solve a single problem in the region. And that’s the problem.

If you flip to the other side of the equation, the U.S. has dodged a bullet on the BRICS and on the SCO, because those groups, too, are largely now form chasing function.

And that’s really the underlying question: When does it become more functional in ways that challenge U.S. interests?

To go back to the question you asked me earlier, what’s not performative that substantively could really challenge U.S. interests? It’s when those groups start to cohere around some set of functions, like, for example,

- Payment systems
- Financial alternatives to the U.S. dollar

that really weaken American financial hegemony in a substantive way. That’s the kind of thing that hasn’t happened yet. And I’m deeply skeptical, for example, … That India is going to make itself dependent on, PBOC policy or on the Russian central bank. I just don’t see it happening now. But over the long term, those are the kinds of questions that we need to be looking at.

Evan, let me wrap up by asking. I mean, earlier in this conversation, you talked about how despite the very, very deep economic integration between China and the United States, which we’re all very well aware of, things unraveled very quickly. What are some early warning indicators of a point of no return when it comes to U.S.-India ties?

I mean, how do we avoid that kind of a U.S.-China spiral, a downward spiral? What are some maybe highest leverage circuit breakers that either side could pull in the next, I don’t know, 90 days to prevent that from happening? You don’t think it’s going to be a tariff agreement?

Look, first of all, the U.S.-India relationship is apples and oranges to the U.S.-China relationship because the United States and India don’t have a trigger for war with each other where you can imagine a force-on-force conflict. And that’s not the case, obviously, in the U.S.-China relationship where the U.S. and China have all kinds of debilitating differences, lots of strategic competition. Some of that matters and some of that might not matter as much if the U.S. and China didn’t have a trigger for war, where you could imagine the two countries fighting each other force-on-force, as you can in the Taiwan Strait. So these two relationships are really apples and oranges.

I do think there’s going to be a tariff agreement because both sides want it.

Bessent was on TV this morning basically saying that he thinks they’ll get to an agreement, which is interesting because if Besant believes that, then that really raises a lot of questions about the strategy that the administration has been pursuing. A lot of this was entirely unnecessary.

I think what I worry about is the longer-term effects of the politicization we were talking about before. So I think the first thing that’s needed is a tariff deal because without a tariff deal, the free fall that we have right now is not arrestable. And you need at least, as we’ve discovered in other relationships—for instance, the U.S. and China—to put a floor under it when you’re in free fall. And that’s where the U.S. and India are now.

The second thing is that Modi and Trump need a functional relationship. They don’t need to have a great relationship, but they need to have a functional relationship. We used to think they had a great relationship, and now they have a completely dysfunctional relationship. The two top guys, which would then in turn filter down through the administration, need at least some ability to call a halt to this and develop a more functional tie again.

That, by the way, is what President Trump seems to have done with Xi Jinping. And why he can’t do that with Narendra Modi is absolutely beyond me, given their prior history.

Third, and most importantly, we need to find a way to get this out of politics. And I think that’s going to be tough on the Indian side. But ironically, it is going to be tougher on the American side if all of these domestic issues that touch India, like:

• H-1Bs,
• immigration,
• and President Trump going on television and dumping on Tim Cook for making things in India,
• threatening tariffs,

when, you know, you have this contradiction sharpening between America first on the one hand and Prime Minister Modi talking about making in India on the other. That suggests to me that it’s going to be hard to give this thing some lift out of politics. But we need to find a way to get there.

I think the reality is to get there, we’re probably going to need a new president on the American side. And there’s a lot of fatalism in India now about that, where they’re trying to ring-fence the worst outcomes. And that’s what a tariff deal would help to do.

But there’s a pretty widespread view now that this thing’s going to basically be largely on hold at the strategic level for the next three and a half years until there’s a change.

The best the United States can hope for, therefore, I think, is to try to make some progress within India in other areas. The bureaucracies have done that a little bit in the defense area, but there are some limits to it now.

But then also to hope that the India-China relationship doesn’t improve too much from the American standpoint. And the good news on that, as I said before, is the mistrust. But also that since the Galwan clash, India’s put a lot of restraints in place that actually put de facto limits on the economic relationship.

For example, China has gotten dinged by an expanded foreign direct investment screening mechanism in 2020, which is now pretty extensive. Investment from China is much more heavily regulated by the security regulator in India. You’ve had an app ban on Chinese apps in the digital space that gets into gaming, dating—something like 300 apps, including gaming, dating, photo, video sharing, all the things that are popular with young people. This actually led to an unwinding of Chinese VC investments in Indian startups.

All of that, even things like engineering procurement construction (EPC) contracts that Chinese firms used to do in India, there’s been a lot of unwinding of those EPC contracts.

So, the good news if you’re sitting in Washington and you’re a strategic type, working for Pete Hegseth, is that there are probably some limits on that. But we need to watch that space because I think when you combine the performative piece with the fact that the bar is not that high, if the Chinese wanted to be a little cagier about this and smarter with India politically, I wouldn’t say the sky’s the limit, but there’s a lot of room for improvement with China that would unsettle Americans looking at India’s strategic trajectory.

Evan, as always, just absolutely brilliant. It’s like drinking out of a fire hose, talking to you. It’s such an amazing wealth of information that you bring. Thanks so much for spending so much time talking to me about this.

Let’s move on now to the segment called “Paying It Forward.” I’d love you to name check a young colleague of yours, somebody whose work we should be paying more attention to you before we get to our normal recommendation segment. Who do you have for us?

So there’s a lot of people interested in China who are also interested in Japan. I think, particularly among Americans, when they think about Japan, it’s like this backward-looking, closed economy that really is progressively less globalized than it used to be.

A lot of that view is because the Washington strategic class looks at Japan entirely through the kind of security prism that we were just talking about when we were talking about the Quad.

But at Carnegie, a few years ago, I pivoted our Japan program from looking at security the way a lot of DC think tanks do, to looking at technology and innovation. And I hired an amazing guy named Kenji Kushida, who really looks at Japan through the prism of innovation and the startup sector.

His work is amazing because, if you think about the big questions about Japan—how open or closed is Japan?—traditionally, we think of Japan as very closed, but in the innovation and startup space, it’s actually much more open than you think.

If you think about whether Japan has models that can be exported and scaled around the world, in the tech space, even with old tech, there’s a lot of interesting and disruptive stuff happening in Japan.

Kenji’s got this interesting stuff that he’s writing about technology, innovation, and startups through two projects:

• Startup Japan
• Innovative Japan, Global Japan

It really flips the script on a lot of the ways that we think about Japan, particularly as China specialists who think about China as global and multinational and Japan as the opposite.

Marc Thiessen: Hmm. Fascinating. So if we just go to the Carnegie site and look up Kenji Kushida, we’ll be able to find his projects and…

Marc Thiessen: Yeah, absolutely. Or if you go to the Asia part of the Carnegie webpage, there’s a whole build-out on the Japan stuff, the title of which is Innovative Japan, Global Japan, which in itself flies in the face of the idea of a non-innovative, hidebound, backward-looking, and very closed Japan.

Marc Thiessen: Provincial, yeah.

Marc Thiessen: Yes, it’s meant to be.

Marc Thiessen: Perfect. That’s a great, I mean, an exemplary paying it forward. And we will absolutely put a link to Kenji’s work. Thanks so much, Evan. What about recommendations? What do you have for us in that way?

Marc Thiessen: So since we talked about China in the region and because the audience is focused on China, that’s usually what we talk about when I come on the podcast, I want to recommend some work by two of my Carnegie colleagues, Sheena Greitens and Isaac Kardon.

There’s this view that countries like Vietnam that are deeply skeptical of China or have had a lot of conflicts with China—as we were just talking about with India, for example—somehow that historic mistrust makes the improvement in relations impossible. But actually, they’ve done some work on Vietnam lately that showcases two things that really fly in the face of conventional wisdom:

1. While the US is the external partner of choice for Vietnam on security,
2. The internal partner for Vietnam is actually China, because Vietnam, like China, is ruled by a communist party that now is run largely by cops and guys with a security background. Background who love to crack down on dissent and love surveillance equipment and love a lot of the stuff that China is pushing. And so Vietnam and China actually are a lot more copacetic on internal security and at party-to-party level than I think that conventional debate presumes.

The other thing is, there’s this notion that the US does security and China does economics in Asia. And if you think about things like internal security and policing, that Vietnam case and a lot of other cases show that that’s clearly not the case. There’s a lot happening between China and Asian countries on security. It’s just not on military security. It’s on internal security.

And so their work, some of which is based on a gigantic and really fresh new data set, is pretty interesting on both scores. And it makes you rethink a lot of the conventional assumptions that we have.

“Yeah, that came out about a month ago, if I remember. I mean, Sheena and Isaac’s report on the export of security, of domestic security.”

Yeah, they’ve been writing on it for a while. There’s a big Carnegie paper. There was an article in International Security.

• Right.
• There’s been some smaller pieces. But it really stands a lot of conventional wisdom on its head.
• And that’s what we’re trying to do at Carnegie these days.

Fantastic. Great recommendation. I’ve got one also in China related. It’s a translation in Wang Xi’s Pekingnology Substack of an essay. It was written, you know what, 2008. So that’s like 17 years ago by Tang Shiping and Xie Daofeng. It’s called:

“How Sinocentrism and U.S. Centrism Warped or Warped Beijing’s Foreign Policy Thinking.”

It’s really great. I mean, Sinocentrism, obviously, you know, this sort of the Chinese brand of exceptionalism that I’ve talked about quite a bit. And U.S. centrism, that kind of Chicago, New York problem.

Chicago, you know, I mean, I hear it’s terrible there. We need to send our, you know, federal troops over there, Evan, to your hometown.

Oh yeah, it’s a dystopian hellscape. I was on the lake the other day and it didn’t look too dystopian.

Anyway, but, you know, the Chicago, New York thing, I mean, that’s how people describe it, where the Chicagoans read the New Yorker, New Yorkers read the Chicagoan. Is there, what is the Chicago magazine called? We don’t even know. But, you know, there’s this U.S. centrist thinking in China to the neglect of much else, where behind every other bilateral issue, there sort of stands the shadow of the United States in so much Chinese thinking.

But it’s critical of this and it really stands the test of time. It’s still, I think these are still two, two big problems in Chinese foreign policy.

And it’s a great piece. So I highly recommend it. An excellent translation too.

But the Chinese should love Chicago now, because what was it that the Defense Department called China the pacing threat? And now that Chicago has replaced China as the pacing threat for the defense department, the Chinese should be popping the champagne.

Yeah. Well, I’ll tell Damien he can write a piece about that.

Hey, Evan, thanks so much, man. That was a lot of fun. Thanks.

Thanks for having me. It’s always great to have you on.

You’ve been listening to the Sinica Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo.

Support the show through Substack at www.sinicapodcast.com, where there is a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio.

Email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show or just to say hi.

Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year.

Huge thanks to my guest and good friend, Evan Feigenbaum.

Thank you for listening. We will see you next week. Take care.