‘Trump administration has squandered fair amount of goodwill with India’

NEW young new delhi: The onus for winning plunk for goodwill with New Delhi amid a downswing in India-US relations is on Washington, while the loss of trust between India and the US is a win for Europe, two leading geopolitical experts said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Saturday.Trade is the “core lens” through which the US administration sees its diplomatic relations, and President Donald Trump has always expressed concerns about Indian tariffs, said Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council. “If we look at how the US-India relationship reached a point of crisis, we have to start at the fact that the Trump administration has singled out India as a core offender when it comes to countries that have economic policies that can undercut America’s own economic interests,” he said.While noting that engagements in defence and strategic areas, such as military exercises and the conclusion of a 10-year defence framework agreement, continued amid the strained relationship between India and the US, Kugelman said the Trump administration had squandered a “fair amount of trust and goodwill” through its policies and rhetoric. “I think the onus, quite frankly, might be on the US to try to do what needs to be done to win back some of that goodwill,” he said.Kate Sullivan de Estrada, associate professor in the international relations of South Asia at Oxford University, argued that the loss of trust between India and the US is a “sort of a win for Europe”.The European Union (EU), which is negotiating a free trade agreement with India, can do a lot in the bilateral sphere, including cooperation in biotech, renewable energy and quantum computing, she said.However, she cautioned that India and the EU were hedging at a time when both have their own unique issues with China and “facing an increasingly unreliable partner in the US”. She added, “The problem with Europe and India is that the EU tends to approach [trade] agreements with partners in a way that goes beyond trade policy [and] pure trade. There are these sort of expectations of agreements…that reach into things like climate protection, social protections, and these feel in a way protectionist from an Indian point of view,” she said.Kugelman also referred to the unbridled power of the military and the army chief in Pakistan and warned of the likelihood of a conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan.“I think that South Asia’s next war might be between Afghanistan and Pakistan. What that could entail is not a conventional war – the Taliban cannot fight the Pakistani military – but rather Pakistan carrying out strikes in Afghanistan to target terrorists and then the Taliban sponsoring militant attacks across Pakistan,” he said.