Trump brings the Age of Humiliation for friends. Modi needs stoicism abroad, humility at home

Trump has ushered in the age of humiliation. His method is to push around America’s friends rudely and publicly. He knows none of them can afford to fight back.

Illustration: Shurti Naithani

The outrage over US Navy’s sinking of Iranian frigate IRIS Dena can be understood with one headline: Donald Trump has ushered in the age of humiliation, exclusively upon his allies, partners and friends. For us in India, the answer to this is another ‘H’ word which we will come to, in a bit.

There’s also a simpler way to understand this, using the Indian truckers’ logic. Among the delightful lines you will read on the back of the highway trucks is: aisa koi saga nahin, jisko humnein thaga nahin. In English it loses flavour, yet, on best effort: There’s no relative (or someone really close), whom I haven’t swindled.

Substitute relative with ally/partner/friend and swindled with humiliated, and you get the picture. Trump’s method is to push around America’s friends rudely and publicly. He knows none of them can afford to fight back given traditional dependencies, as with Europe. Or relatively recent trust and linkages for India.

He’s often humiliated these countries’ leaders. He did earlier this week with Keir Starmer what he had done with leaders of Spain, Denmark, Norway, Canada, Ukraine, South Africa, France, neutral Switzerland, and counting. On Spain denying the use of its bases for the war on Iran he said the US simply won’t ask. With Denmark and Norway, respectively, there is Greenland and his Nobel. On South Africa he bought into the Elon Musk mythology of a ‘white’ genocide and his ‘love’ of Zelenskyy we well know. That hasn’t stopped him, however, from seeking Ukraine’s help against Iran’s drone swarms now.

You can see two things, therefore. One, that Trump can be pragmatic. He doesn’t take his insults for his friends to his own heart. That he also expects them not to can be problematic. Europe is too dependent on him to complain. If you can’t defend yourselves, you bear humiliation stoically by one you’ve outsourced your security to. 

It can’t work the same way for other democracies with popular leaders and ability to defend themselves. India is the most significant of these. For Narendra Modi, Trump said in one of his shooting-the-breeze moments on camera that “I don’t want to destroy his political career”. 

This, however, was used in a muddled context open to interpretation from trade and Russian oil to homophobia. Trump’s claim of stopping the fighting by threatening to halt trade passed the dozen-mark some time back and we’ve stopped counting; as with the number of planes he claims were downed during Operation Sindoor. Of course he doesn’t say whose. Trump isn’t a man of subtlety. His obsession is making the headline. On the odd day he might feel a headline missing, he’d fire a Cabinet member. Watch his dismissal of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the incredible post he wrote subsequently waxing boorish like a feudal lord on what her future might hold on the “large farm we have made for her”.

The second thing follows. That he feels so comforted and confident in only attacking those reliant on him: America’s sovereign friends, or his own team members. He is nice to Xi Jinping, indulges Vladimir Putin and earlier, even Kim Jong Un. Noem is only the second key figure he’s removed in this term after Michael Waltz—the NSA and Mr Fast Fingers on Signal. But, if the past is any guide, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

In his first term he fired seven Cabinet-rank officers and forced about as many out. He is at war even now with some. Think former NSA John Bolton and Adviser Steve Bannon.

At various points Trump has said for his people what would be seen as insulting in our cultures. 

Point proven: Trump’s special ‘affections’ are exclusive to his friends and comrades. That’s why the time to get really worried is when he refers to you as ‘my very good friend’. That’s when he’s really sharpened the knife for you. He’s the school bully who must keep reminding those he sees as in his gang that he’s the boss, and stay out of the way of rival bullies.

How do India and Modi respond to this? This isn’t Europe and Modi isn’t Starmer, Merz or even Macron. So far, he has handled Trump wisely by not taking the bait. India remained silent despite being singled out for ‘punitive’ tariffs.

I don’t believe a BJP in opposition would’ve given a Congress government that space. 

The Congress when in opposition is mostly content with writing tweets. They are too lazy to even collect 10,000 people to protest this ‘national humiliation’. But as pressure adds up, how long can the Modi government/BJP keep this calm? It is wise to observe maun vrat on Trump, forgetting when it called Manmohan Singh ‘mauni baba’ (mute faqir) for not speaking up on the most minor foreign provocation, like that sham of an “insult” to Devyani Khobragade. Anti-Americanism is Indian public opinion’s default option and works for both sides.

The other area they’ve been wise on is the search for other friends. The effusively warm response to Mark Carney is a good example. After all, Canada has been the US’s closest ally and therefore the recipient of the worst—‘51st state’—insults. Trump is creating more openings for his victims. Middle powers are searching for solace in the bosom of one another.

Nobody has still told India why Modi made this visit to Israel when it wasn’t even his turn but Netanyahu’s. And this despite knowing that a war on Iran was lurking.

The only educated guess I can make is that Op Sindoor was a rude wake-up call on military gaps and the urgent need to fill them. The two successive PSLV launch failures, loss of invaluable military-capable satellites, inadequacy of own ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) resources, as well as the need for stand-off weapons, drones, sensors and air defence should another round begin.

It’s also evident that in the Middle East, India has picked a side. And it’s the Israel-UAE combine. It also puts that sudden and mysterious visit by UAE ruler Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed (MBZ) in perspective. The third wise thing is to yield space to China on trade. How many ‘pangas’ can India take, in this age of global insecurity, with its limited leverage and own vulnerabilities.

The fourth wise thing the Modi government could do, but likely won’t, is to repair its relationship with the Opposition (read Congress). India had a healthy tradition of the government taking the Opposition in confidence in the national interest. How do you do it when you treat the Opposition as vermin and its leader as a clown?

I understand that today’s politics is rude and unforgiving, but Trump’s insults aren’t about to end. This week he sank a ship leaving your own ceremonial fleet review, tomorrow it will be worse. As the pressure from the Opposition grows, it will only shrink your room for manoeuvre. One window to strategic autonomy also lies in domestic politics. Shutting it narrows your options.

In short, we got ahead of ourselves in presuming global stature for ourselves. We drank too much of our own Kool-Aid (the Americanism is used deliberately) of being a rising and indispensable global power and got high on it. Trump has hosed us down with chilled Potomac water.

It’s time to take a deep breath, suspend self-congratulation, and get down to building up our economy, defence, keep the social cohesion, recalibrate domestic politics and rebuild bipartisan national unity. Tough? But to navigate the remaining three Trump years you need that other ‘H’ word we deep-froze over these heady eleven years. Some humility at home is where you begin dealing with Trump’s global age of humiliation.