Trump and Modi: America First, India First

Donald Trump’s return to the White House will have major implications for the entire Indo-Pacific region, as the choice could upset both the strategic and economic balance of a region that is home to some of the major engines of the global economy, but is also a hotbed of crises. Crises that have so far been kept at bay only by the converging views of chanceries, observers, and markets on the many wars that are tearing the world apart, intertwining and reinforcing each other, from the war in Ukraine to the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reopening of the Syrian powder keg. All regional conflicts with global implications. In India, the originating Trump administration has been greeted with barely concealed satisfaction. Not that Trump was the first in Washington to turn his attention to India, both because of its growing specific weight and to consolidate its role in countering Chinese ambitions by defining a privileged relationship of geostrategic and economic weight, similar to those the United States maintains with Japan and South Korea. The path had already been opened by Hillary Clinton with her Pivot to Asia and expanded by Obama, the only American president to visit India twice, elevating the bilateral relationship to the rank of a strategic partnership. His speech before Parliament in the Extraordinary Session in 2010 was memorable and ended with the words “Jay India” – “Long Live India” that are still remembered today. Moreover, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made several crowd-pleasing visits to the United States during his tenure, most recently in 2023 and 2024. Modi is betting big on Trump. Relations with the Biden administration were unstable: good but not excellent, despite the relations with New Delhi being based on multilateralism and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) formula. There was no shortage of friction over Bangladesh, for example, when Washington backed a coup that overthrew Sheikh Hasina, a Modi ally who, unsurprisingly, fled to India, which essentially increased Beijing’s influence in Dhaka. Mutual expectations are aligned. Modi hopes for even stronger support for his policy of driving a wedge into the boundless China-Russian friendship, so he continues to maintain the best possible relations with Moscow. He focuses on the fact that if there is one theme in the USA that unites the many souls into which this great country splinters – Congress, the media, the think tank community, public opinion – it is the theme of strategic competition with China. The iconic line from the movie Highlander comes to mind: “There will be only one left.”

On the other hand, one can foresee that the second Trump administration will combine, if not completely replace – as in the style of the “new” president – a stronger bilateral dimension compared to Biden’s multi-bilateral dimension. For Prime Minister Modi, who is comfortable with transactional relationships, this would be a good thing; he talks in Moscow with Putin and in Kiev with Zelensky, chairs the G20, weaves a web with Washington, but sits among the founding partners of BRICS, an organism that is still diverse but whose clear intention is to define a new global order alternative to the liberal one. Modi, like Trump, is convinced that the ultimate struggle for supremacy will take place in his backyard, and he intends to capitalize on it. Meanwhile, he smiles as the central bank governor and finance minister present him with the national accounts, and even more so when looking out the window at China in economic stagnation, weighed down by a real estate bubble and Xi Jinping’s revamped administrative-command system of bureaucratic state-led economic management. Trump and Modi are taking the same approach to many important transnational dossiers at the moment. Not least on climate change: an eyesore for the former, only empty words for the latter, a self-proclaimed leader of the Global South, but intent for the long term on focusing on importing coal and oil at minimal prices from Russia to keep pushing India up the ladder. Trump and Modi share more than one characteristic besides natural personal empathy, ranging from a consonance of views on “noisy” minorities to an aversion to the typical antics of representative democracies. They are also united by the myth of the strong man with a direct connection to the masses: “India First” for one and “America First” for the other. So, they feel comfortable in a region (if you only look at Asia) that is full of strong leaders, led by China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Finally, and importantly, both feel endowed with a supernatural dimension. Trump declares: “God protected me during the attack because he wanted me to save America,” followed closely by Modi: “I thought I was a biological person, but it turns out I’m not.”

The consonance of views will be helped by the fact that Trump gets along well with Indians: after defeating Kamala Harris, who is half-Indian, he appointed as head of the FBI Kash Patel, who grew up in Queens but is the son of Indian immigrants, and he is the one who has shown intention to “shut down FBI headquarters and turn it into a wax museum.” In addition, Trump has a vice president, J.D. Vance, who is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants and who has renewed his relationship with Nimrata Randhawa, known as Nikki, married to Haley, the daughter of Ajit Singh and Raj Kaur Randhawa, the Nikki who challenged him for the nomination in the primary. In addition, there is a legion of Indian managers at the helm of some of the top companies in the USA, from Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichar, to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, to Adobe Systems CEO Gantanl Narayen, to IBM President and CEO Arvind Krishna, to mention only those in the technology sector. A sector that the US economy is counting on to slow the Chinese approach and which employs thousands of technicians trained at prestigious Indian polytechnics that rival, and often surpass, MIT and Harvard.

It is too early to judge how the match between China and the USA will unfold in the long run and at what inflection point India will find itself: we will have to prepare for surprises because the balance of power in the world is becoming more slippery than ever. Suffice it to say that the expected overtaking of the Chinese economy has receded over time, if it ever happens. Having archived, at least for an extended period, the remnants of multilateralism (as Trump prepares to leave or jam major international forums), we are back to great power politics, dear to autocrats old and new and favored by American right-wing conservatives. But without a new Congress of Vienna to stabilize the views…

If we broaden the view, the decisive game for global supremacy will not be played out on European soil. Not with Russia, which, as Obama said, remains a regional power for the American establishment, certainly dangerous, but which will eventually have to settle for revising the security architecture of the Old Continent, an architecture that Washington believes is destined to become increasingly peripheral. The decisive match – technical-strategic, economic-financial, and, to a certain extent, “cultural” – will be between two giants, the only superpowers in a world teeming with ambition but poor in vision and, even more so, in leadership. And it will happen in the Indo-Pacific, in a kaleidoscope of risks and opportunities, challenges that are still ill-calculated, at the center of all the trend lines of the coming decades: economic growth, social experiments, technological revolutions, demographic growth and decline, the laboratory of modernity, the epicenter of environmental degradation, the black hole of human rights. A region that is home to 60 percent of the world’s population and is estimated by the OECD to produce 53 percent of the world’s GDP in 2030, with 90 percent of the future middle class settling there. We said the challenges were poorly calculated: who could have imagined the return – even for a few hours – of martial law in democratic and strategic South Korea, imposed by a president in a quandary? Democracy is a fragile plant that, in the words of Master George Kennan, needs careful care. But this is not only true for Asia.

The pawns seem to be arranged on a chessboard (but there are no rules of the game) for a struggle for planetary hegemony between Washington and Beijing centered in the Indo-Pacific region. A glance at the geographical map confirms this: there is continuity, even territorial continuity, between the various crises, which intertwine into a vast arc of crises (other than the one once envisioned with an anti-Soviet function by Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor during Jimmy Carter’s presidency), which unfolds from the Sarmatian Plains (the Russian-Ukrainian conflict) through the Black Sea and the Caucasus (the Georgian crisis), through the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula (Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria), through the monsoon region (Yemen, Afghanistan), all the way to Taiwan (what will happen to Trump, obsessed with the balance of payments, but to a much lesser extent with China’s now not-so-distant technological superiority?), through the Himalayas and to the Indo-Chinese contrast atop the Himalayas. It’s not just a risk, it’s a reprise of The Big Game, this time on a global scale. But the first ones saw experienced players at the table, with only muskets, cavalry, and telegraph, as well as the privilege of having time to think; while the current ones, less astute and with the need to react in real time, with intercontinental thermonuclear missiles, artificial intelligence and drones. Perhaps Mao, the Great Helmsman, was right when he declared that “there is great confusion under the sky, and the situation is excellent…”