Transcript | Trump's India Tariff Tirade: A Gift to Beijing? With Evan Feigenbaum

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, as always, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com. I am in the market for new institutional support. Please help out. Listeners, you can do your part by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. You will enjoy there, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, essays for me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators — And of course, the knowledge that you are helping me to do what I honestly believe is very important work. So, do check out the page and see all it’s on offer. Consider helping me out.

It’s been a remarkable few weeks in South Asian diplomacy. On August 6th, President Trump signed an executive order slapping an additional 25% tariff on most Indian goods. Tariffs that went into effect today. It’s August 27th as we record. Effectively doubling duties on many categories of goods. This was ostensibly done to punish New Delhi for continued purchases of Russian oil. Just a couple of weeks later, China’s top diplomat Wang Yi was in New Delhi for meetings with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, before heading on to Islamabad for the China-Pakistan Foreign Ministers’ Strategic Dialogue, and then to Afghanistan. And now, of course, all eyes are on Tianjin, where, probably by the time you hear this, India’s prime minister will have attended his first summit in China in seven years. A Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathering at which a meeting with Xi Jinping is widely expected. So, today on Sinica, I’m joined once again by one of my very, very favorite guests, Evan Feigenbaum. Evan, as you know, is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he leads their work on Asia. Before that, he had a long career in government, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and for Central Asia, and as an advisor on China at the State Department. Evan has been coming on Sinica since our earliest days, and long-time listeners will remember how central he was to the bipartisan effort over the past 25 years to build trust and deepen ties between the United States and India. These days, though, Evan has been watching in disbelief and horror as President Trump, in his second go-around, seems intent on dismantling much of that hard-won progress. He’s been especially sharp on social media about the way his tariffs, sanctioned talk, and inflammatory rhetoric are undoing the work that he and others labored so hard to achieve. Frankly, the main purpose of today’s program may just be to let Evan vent his understandable frustration. And my questions are probably going to be a little superfluous. So, with that, let me toss out a ball, then get out of the way. Evan Feigenbaum, welcome back to Sinica.

Evan Feigenbaum: Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.

Kaiser: So, the 25-year arc that I described, I mean, you’ve described this, this quarter century, as a bipartisan project encompassing civil nuclear cooperation, defense, trade, tech, higher education links, regularized strategic dialogues. You were very much a part of that effort in your time in government. What, in your view, were maybe the two or three hinge points that built trust. And which institutions or habits of cooperation proved the most resilient when politics grew rough on either side, and maybe still will be ballast in the relationship, as rocky as it’s gotten?

Evan: Well, first, isn’t the whole thing ironic? I mean, we went into the Trump administration with everyone saying that we were going to have a U.S.-China trade war as the dominant geoeconomic theme, and somehow we’ve ended up with the U.S.-India trade war instead of the U.S.-China trade war. So, it’s ironic, but it’s interesting because it’s not the first time, obviously, that the United States and India have had a lot of turbulence in their relationship. In fact, for the entire Cold War period, that was pretty much the norm. So, we went into the decade of the 2000s, the end of the Clinton administration, and then especially into the George W. Bush administration, with a few obstacles that had historically characterized the relationship. So, one was the overhang of the Cold War, because during the Cold War, the United States had expected countries basically to line up on one or the other side. And while India was nonaligned, after 1971, India largely had leaned toward the Soviet side. But, in any case, it certainly wasn’t part of the American project in Asia more broadly. Second, there was not a lot of economic content to the relationship. And then, third, after India had tested a nuclear weapon in the 1970s, the United States imposed a whole variety of nonproliferation-related sanctions. And so we went into the decade of the 2000s, basically, with two of those three cleared away — That Cold War was gone. India’s economic reform meant that we could build economic content into the relationship, but then we had this nonproliferation sanctions problem, and the Indian argument to the United States was you can’t really have a strategic partnership with a country that’s the number one target of your nonproliferation sanctions. And that was the context in which the United States did a lot of lifting, both multilaterally and domestically, to create an exception to India, which is a non-signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to the requirement for full scope safeguards, and also for carve-outs from nuclear suppliers rules. And we also had to amend the Atomic Energy Act. So, by the time the nuclear deal was done in 2008, we’d basically cleared away a lot of the obstacles that had created a lot of the turbulence.

Kaiser: Certainly, a major, major hinge point that I suggested built a lot of trust. And after 2008, how would you describe the trajectory?