Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’re currently in a little rough patch with India.
Narendra Modi, who’s been the prime minister for 11 years—a very powerful figure within India and a player on the national scene—he’s a center-right politician, if not, you know, unabashedly right-wing. So, he would be a natural partner for the United States under President Donald Trump. And they did have very close relations in the first term.
And Trump sees India as a large, English-speaking counterweight to China. It’s got 1.4 billion people. China’s a little bit bigger, but China has a falling—drastically falling—birth rate. India’s pretty steady.
So, India seems like it’s going to be more ascendant in the future, even more than China. And they’ve had a lot of border disputes along the Himalayan area, as they have with Islamic Pakistan. It’s also the largest democracy in the world.
So, you add up all of these ingredients and it seems like a natural ally of the United States in general and Donald Trump in particular: conservative governance, suspicious of China, democratic, English-speaking, closer to the United States than Islamic Pakistan, which has given us, you know, that was the sojourn or a base for Osama bin Laden.
And then, more importantly, Indian Americans are now numbering 5 million or 6 million people. We’ve opened the borders wide open to people immigrating from India. And they immigrate often with a lot. They have English facility—gets them a leg up on other immigrants. And more importantly, they come with capital and skills. And they’re a very influential minority, very successful minority in the United States. And we welcome them with open arms.
So, you would think that the Modi-Trump, Indian-American relationship would be great, but it’s not. And why isn’t it? Well, one reason is that India traditionally ran large surpluses with us, given their tariffs and our lack of tariffs for India. But recently, that has closed.
And now Indian economists and American economists and politicians disagree whether India has a big surplus with the United States in trade or a small—depending on how you count material goods, services, remittances, etc.
By the way, there’s about $35 billion to $40 billion in remittances that go to India. It’s right behind Mexico and Central America.
So, it should be a very profitable relationship, especially for India to have all of its citizens free to come to the United States. And millions apparently do, and they get billions of dollars in remittances. They run a trade surplus with us. And we have a lot of commonalities as English-speaking democracies. But we’re not.
And so, why aren’t we? One of the greatest problems is Donald Trump slapped a tariff. And he said, “India’s tariffs are too high.” And they replied, “Well, if you look at services and the other intangibles that I mentioned, maybe it’s not that bad. And we’re working on it.” But Trump really did put high tariffs on India.
The second thing is, India buys a huge amount of Russian oil, along with China. We’re talking about secondary boycotts in the Trump administration and the United States. And what I mean by that is Trump will put high tariffs, if not sanctions, on countries that buy oil—buy Russian oil. Not just Russia itself that sells its oil.
This is very controversial because in the Indian mind, we’re not going to, necessarily, sanction Germany or some Europeans that buy Russian energy, natural gas and oil. Nor have we taken on the Chinese juggernaut that buys Russian oil.
So, India is saying, “Why are you picking on us, a rival of China, and so much commonality?”
And Trump would reply: “Because you’ve been buying Russian oil for over three and a half years and fueling the Russian war machine that invaded Ukraine. And we’re now at delicate, critical periods in the Ukraine-Russian war. And if you were just to back off, voluntarily, the purchases of Russian oil, and maybe we could then pressure China and maybe I could consider tariffs.”
And Prime Minister Modi said, “No.” And he not only said no, but he wasn’t going to be bullied around. And one of the results is now he is triangulating with China and Russia. So, he’s developing better relations with his traditional rival and enemy, China, and he’s cementing his relations with Russia.
Remember, during the Cold War, Russia was very close to India. India was a veritable proxy of Russia. We backed Islamic Pakistan. So, in those wars between Pakistan and India, there was a Russian-American dimension. We were on the wrong side of it, in my opinion, because India was an English-speaking democracy. Pakistan was an Islamic autocracy, de facto.
But my point is that it has strong ties, historically, with Russia and it’s developing ties with China, and it’s pulling away from us, despite the fact that we allow them trade concessions, asymmetrical tariffs, generous remittances to be sent back. And it’s the second-largest immigrant group in the United States.
How’s it all going to end? We’ll see. A lot depends on the fate of the Ukraine war. If the Ukraine war were to end, we would restore friendly relations very quickly. If it doesn’t, things are gonna get worse.
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