US President Donald Trump’s imposition of a 50 percent tariff on India is unlikely to make India break, as it does not see itself as a junior partner in a Western-led order but rather as a civilizational power asserting its own sovereignty, according to journalist and geopolitical expert Dan Perry.
Perry, who tagged Trump’s recent move as a “sharp escalation” in “open trade war” highlighted how Trump’s 50 per cent tariff decision dispelled illusions that the US–India relationship was “a warm alliance of like-minded democracies.” He said, though India looked like “the perfect partner” on paper and Washington saw New Delhi as a counterweight to China, India “doesn’t see the relationship through sentimental eyes.”
Explaining India’s decades-long policy of non-alignment, Perry said that the instinct is rooted in deep historical memory, which includes colonization by Britain and being sidelined by US Cold War support for Pakistan. “Especially under the nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it sees itself not as a junior partner in a Western-led order but as a civilizational power asserting its own sovereignty,” Perry, a former Associated Press special international editor, wrote in The New York Post, said, adding that this explained “India’s refusal to isolate Russia over the Ukraine war.”
Also read
Perry believes that India is unlikely to cave, and the country with “a $4.2 trillion economy and decent economic growth”, India doesn’t take kindly to coercion. He added that India’s relations with the US were transactional and that Trump’s boasting of playing the peacemaker between India and Pakistan and putting Pakistan on equal footing with it reinforced the perception that Trump viewed “India not as a partner of principle, but as just another actor to be cajoled as the situation demands.”
The expert thinks that it was unsurprising that trade negotiations stalled. India maintains high barriers on agricultural imports, and what the US complains of as protectionism is imperialism for India. “India’s foreign policy is rational, pragmatic, occasionally aggressive, and ruthlessly self-interested. Trump’s tariffs may sting, but they won’t alter that fact,” Perry added.
