New Delhi: The most damaging consequence of the Trump administration’s approach to India is not the tariffs or trade dispute but the return of politics and third parties within the bilateral relationship, former State Department official Evan Feigenbaum said Tuesday.
“If I rewind to a year ago, quite apart from the tariffs, what I saw happening was, on both sides, the US-India relationship becoming politicised again in ways that really have been unthinkable for the previous 15 years or so,” Feigenbaum, currently vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said at a media briefing at the Carnegie India Centre in New Delhi.
The problem, according to him, is that once the relationship becomes a domestic political issue, strategic arguments become harder to sustain. Feigenbaum described the resulting danger as “a slow-motion catastrophe”. The irony, he argues, is that the relationship was deliberately constructed to survive precisely these kind of disagreements.
“This administration essentially wants to assert its primacy in every region of the world, but the way this group defines primacy is not that you provide public goods. Instead, it’s that everybody basically does what they’re told, and if they don’t do what they’re told, the US will assert itself,” he added.
Feigenbaum had, during his tenure as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, helped shape US-India policy during the George W. Bush administration. He said the strategic relationship was built in the 2000s around a simple but difficult principle: Disagreements between Washington and New Delhi over third countries should not be allowed to poison the bilateral relationship.
That principle, he believes, is now being abandoned.
“The two single achievements that came out of the decade of the 2000s were, number one, that the US-India relationship was given some lift outside of domestic politics,” he said.
“The second achievement was equally important. Washington and New Delhi had learned to live with disagreements over each other’s relationships with other countries. The United States objected to India’s ties with Iran and Russia. India objected to Washington’s relations with Pakistan and remained wary of American policy toward China,” he said.
“But it was never allowed to bleed back into the bilateral,” Feigenbaum added.
The third-country trap
Feigenbaum then made the case for how third parties became a key contention in India-US relations.
“The US, in my view, made a huge mistake. Because once they linked in the Russia thing, it was the first time in a long time where a third-party relationship was linked back to the bilateral movement that Bill (Clinton) had taken away. And it was made worse when Karoline Leavitt (former White House press secretary) referred to it as a sanction rather than as a tariff,” he said.
The recent American effort to pressure India over Russian oil, he argued, reverses that logic. “You can make a trade deal,” he said. “You can do a lot of the stuff that is supposed to happen in a functional relationship.” But those things, he argued, are the baseline.
“What’s been lost from that baseline is the trust,” he said. “And I think that is much harder to build.”
The discussion turned to the Trump administration’s evolving approach to the Indo-Pacific, including the decision to rename the US military command from Indo-Pacific Command back to Pacific Command and the significance of Defence Undersecretary Elbridge Colby’s maiden visit to the Philippines.
Colby’s speech, which repeatedly invoked the Indo-Pacific but made no mention of China, prompted questions about whether the administration was signaling a broader shift in its regional strategy.
Feigenbaum was skeptical that such signals necessarily reflected a coherent strategic shift. “They’re not the most coordinated administration,” he told ThePrint.
“The starting point for me is that there’s only one person in this administration,” he said. “He makes the policy and he has neither a strategic nor a principled view of this part of the world.”
If President Trump had a coherent strategic conception of Asia, Feigenbaum argued, his policies would look very different.
“If he had a strategic view of this part of the world, he would not be tariffing every ally out the wazoo,” he said. “Coercing the very partners the United States needs to balance China. Picking fights with countries like India. And morphing a US-China trade war into a US-India trade war.”
“If he had a principled view of the region, he would have a set of core principles like open markets, or progressive liberalisation of economies. That’s not his view either.”
Instead, Feigenbaum described Trump as fundamentally transactional.
“He’s the most transactional guy on the planet. So to sit here and try to impute strategy or principle to the administration’s approach, when the only person that matters is the President of the United States, just seems to me to be a false scenario,” he said.
Feigenbaum has a name for the tendency to construct a strategic explanation after the fact: “Trump’s strategic retrofitting.”
“The President flattens something,” he said, “and then literally hundreds of people start to rationalise it. They twist themselves into pretzels saying, you know, it’s like 63-D chess he’s playing.” Against that backdrop, Feigenbaum said he was reluctant to read too much into Colby’s speech or other statements by senior officials.
He said the same pattern had become visible in the administration’s approach to India. “You experienced it in India. I mean, Navarro was popping off one thing, Bessent, the Treasury secretary, is popping off about something else, then somebody else said something else.”
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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