Trump's Policies Ringing Alarm Bells in Delhi
"We are in Zelenskyy’s shoes now", read a recent headline in a major Indian newspaper. There are similar concerns being raised in other world capitals in Asia and Europe after President Donald Trump's decisions to cut military supplies and stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine following a White House summit with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine who is facing the military might of Russia on the battlefield in Europe.
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| From L to R: Putin, Trump, Xi and Modi |
“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” said Friedrich Merz, Germany's chancellor-elect. Singapore Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen said the US has “changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent”.
The events of last week have revived the memory of a quote attributed to former US Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger who is reported to have said: "The word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
New Delhi has been counting on Washington's help to fend off hostile China which sits on its doorsteps. There are some Indians who believe Russia would come to India's help in the event of war with China. But former US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan threw cold water on this idea when he said: "In fact, it (Russia) is becoming the junior partner to China. And in that way, they would side with China over India any day of the week".
Trump has fundamentally changed the geopolitics of Asia and Europe. Old alliances no longer matter. Now it's all about each transaction which Trump wants to ensure favors the United States.
During the last Trump Administration in 2019, India's friends in Washington argued for a US policy of "strategic altruism" with India. The new Trump administration seems to be rejecting such talk. Prior to his recent meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House, President Donald Trump described India as the "worst abuser of tariffs" and announced "reciprocal tariffs" on Indian imports to the United States. At the same time, Mr. Trump cracked down on both legal and illegal immigration from India. His administration is deporting thousands of illegal Indian immigrants in handcuffs and shackles on US military aircraft. Meanwhile, stringent new regulations on temporary work visas could significantly delay visa processing times and reduce the number of Indian workers employed in the United States on H1B visas.
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| Tariffs Comparison. Source: BBC |
In a 2019 piece titled "The India Dividend: New Delhi Remains Washington’s Best Hope in Asia" published in Foreign Affairs journal, authors Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis argued that the Trump Administration should continue the US policy of "strategic altruism" with India that began with US-India nuclear agreement. They asked President Trump to ignore the fact that the US companies and economy have only marginally benefited, if at all, from this policy. They see India as a "superpower in waiting" and urge Washington to focus on the goal of having India as an ally to check China's rise. They see Chinese support for India's arch-rival Pakistan and China’s growing weight in South Asia and beyond as a threat to India.
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| India Tops Source Countries For H1B Visa Holders. Source: USCIS |
Trump's trade and immigration policies are going to hurt India at a time when its economic growth is declining and job growth is stagnant. The latest Indian annual budget has offered middle class tax relief to spur growth. But economists warn it may not be enough for the vast majority of Indians, whose income still falls below taxable limits and who may still be reeling from the impact of the COVID pandemic, which devastated their earnings, according to a report in Aljazeera. “There is a vast base [of people] where recovery has not come back after the pandemic,” says Kaushik Basu, professor of economics at Cornell University. “We see this in data that the agricultural labour base has increased. And agriculture may well be just a parking spot.”
Illegal immigration from India to the US has dramatically increased on Prime Minister Modi's watch. A Pew Research Center report said that as of 2022, India ranked third, after Mexico and El Salvador, on the list of countries with the largest number of undocumented immigrants — 725,000 — living in the U.S.
India has a serious unemployment problem, particularly for the young people entering the job market by the millions each year. This problem is concealed by headline economic growth figures highlighted by the Modi government. At the same time, India is losing its best and brightest in a massive brain drain.
President Trump has clearly not taken the advice of India's friends in Washington. He is in no mood for "strategic altruism". Instead, the Trump Administration has signaled that it will treat ties with India as just another transactional relationship.
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Riaz Haq
From competing to beating US in numbers and tonnage, here’s how China built its shipping empire
PLA Navy now fields more warships than US Navy and is on track to deploy 425-ship fleet by 2030, sustained by industrial base capable of replacing, repairing vessels way faster than US yards.
SNEHESH ALEX PHILIP
https://theprint.in/defence/from-competing-to-beating-us-in-numbers...
New Delhi: The Indian Navy had plans to become a 200-ship strong force by 2027. But in 2019, it revised its target downwards to 170, citing an acute financial crunch. Contrast this to the Chinese. Over the past two decades, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has grown from a modest coastal force into a regional juggernaut with frigates, destroyers, submarines and aircraft carriers being constructed and commissioned at record speed.
As of 2022, the PLAN was operating a battle force fleet of 351 ships, surpassing the US Navy’s 294.
According to the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), China has already overtaken the US Navy in terms of hull count, and is rapidly closing the gap in fleet tonnage and key technologies like Vertical Launch System (VLS) missile cells. By 2024, China’s surface combatants deployed half the VLS cells of their US counterparts, up from just a quarter in 2019.
This stark growth is compounded by the fact that China’s naval forces are primarily concentrated in the Indo-Pacific, whereas US forces are globally dispersed.
Since 2010, China has dramatically reduced the tonnage gap with the US from roughly 4 million tons to under 1.6 million tons.
China’s emergence as a global shipbuilding powerhouse began with key policy changes that were initiated in the early 2000s. Recognizing that the rapid growth of containerized maritime trade would be a boon for global shipbuilders, Beijing began developing ambitious plans to position Chinese firms at the forefront of the industry. In 2002, Zhu Rongji, China’s premier and chief economic architect at the time, visited the headquarters of CSSC, where he declared that China would seek “to become the largest shipbuilding country by 2015”.
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China’s shipbuilding dominance a national security risk for US: Report
https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2025/03/11/chinas-s...
In only two decades, China has grown to be the dominant player in shipbuilding, claiming more than half of the world’s commercial shipbuilding market, while the U.S. share has fallen to just 0.1%, posing serious economic and national security challenges for the U.S. and its allies, according to a report released Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In 2024 alone, one Chinese shipbuilder constructed more commercial vessels by tonnage than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II. China already has the world’s largest naval fleet, the Washington-based bipartisan think tank said in its 75-page report.
“The erosion of U.S. and allied shipbuilding capabilities poses an urgent threat to military readiness, reduces economic opportunities, and contributes to China’s global power-projection ambitions,” the report said.
Concerns about the poor state of U.S. shipbuilding have been growing in recent years, as the country faces rising challenges from China, which has the world’s second-largest economy and has ambitions to reshape the world order. At a congressional hearing in December, senior officials and lawmakers urged action.
Last week, President Donald Trump told Congress that his Republican administration would “resurrect” the American shipbuilding industry, for commercial and military vessels, and he would create “a new office of shipbuilding in the White House.”
“We used to make so many ships,” Trump said. “We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon. It will have a huge impact.”
Mar 16
Riaz Haq
India (8.3%) is the second largest importer of arms over the last 5 years (2019-2024). Ukraine (8.8%) is first. Pakistan (4.6%) 4th, according to SIPRI.
India's arms imports mainly from Russia, France and Israel.
Ukraine's from US, Germany and Poland.
Pakistan's from China, Netherlands and Turkey
https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/ukraine-worlds-bigge...
https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/top-10-listing/top-10-la...
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Chinese arms made up 81 per cent of Pakistan’s weapons imports in the past five years, as Islamabad buys more advanced systems from its long-standing Asian defence partner, according to data from Swedish think tank SIPRI.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3302515/china-supp...
That was up 7 percentage points from the previous five-year period to 2019, when 74 per cent of Pakistan’s arms imports came from China, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database shows.
The boost comes amid a huge push in China to improve self-reliance in its defence industry – from aircraft carriers to sixth-generation fighter jets – which has also seen it expand the range of weapons it can offer to its strategic partners.
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“The apparent willingness of China to supply or at least talk about supplying some of its more advanced weapons to Pakistan shows China’s trust in Pakistan,” said Siemon Wezeman, a senior arms transfers researcher at SIPRI.
China has been Pakistan’s primary arms supplier since the 1990s. But Pakistan’s tensions with India – especially since a series of border skirmishes broke out in 2016 – have prompted Islamabad to increase defence spending, and that has drawn it closer to Beijing.
Beijing avoids formal alliances but Wezeman said it could be seen as “Pakistan’s only real ‘ally’, the only one to depend on when dealing with India”.
At the same time, Pakistan plays a similar role for Beijing and is “the only one that at this moment could give China a secure access to a base on the Indian Ocean and near the Middle East”.
In April last year, China launched the first of eight Hangor II submarines to be delivered to Pakistan in a deal worth around US$5 billion – one of the most valuable military contracts China has signed.
According to the SIPRI database, some of Pakistan’s key orders in the past five years include the country’s first spy ship, the Rizwan, more than 600 VT-4 battle tanks, and 36 J-10CE 4.5-generation fighters.
The first delivery of multirole J-10CE fighter jets arrived in Pakistan in 2022, adding to its JF-17 fighters – a backbone model that makes up the bulk of Pakistan’s fleet.
The fourth-generation JF-17 was jointly developed by Pakistan Aeronautical Complex and China’s Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group in a programme that dates back to 1999.
The Block III version of JF-17 – featuring an active electronically scanned array radar – was inducted by the Pakistan Air Force in 2023.
Song Zhongping, a military commentator and former PLA instructor, said China might also export its fifth-generation fighter jet, the J-35, “if Pakistan requests it”.
He said that since India was considering adding the American F-35 or Russian Su-57 fifth-generation fighter jets to its fleet, Pakistan was likely to be considering its options too.
China also delivered a range of surface-to-air missiles and defence systems to Pakistan between 2020 and 2024, according to SIPRI. They included a long-range HQ-9 system with around 70 missiles, some 200 medium-range LY-80s, and about 890 low-altitude portable FN-6 missiles.
Mar 16
Riaz Haq
Riaz Haq
@haqsmusings
#Trump #Tariffs: #Vietnam (46%), #Thailand (36%), #Bangladesh (37%), #India 26%, #Pakistan (29%), and #SriLanka (44%) hit with steep new duties under sweeping trade order | Business Upturn
https://x.com/haqsmusings/status/1907541298971898015
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Trump's list of countries facing reciprocal tariffs, including Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-countries-...
Vietnam (46%), Thailand (36%), Bangladesh (37%), Pakistan (29%), and Sri Lanka (44%) hit with steep new duties under sweeping trade order
Vietnam: 46%
Thailand: 36%
Bangladesh: 37%
Pakistan: 29%
Sri Lanka: 44%
South Africa: 30%
Trump said, “We will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us — this includes all forms of tariffs, non-monetary barriers, and other trade manipulations.”
The full list also includes:
China: 34%
European Union: 20%
Japan: 24%
India: 26%
South Korea: 25%
Taiwan: 32%
Malaysia: 24%
Indonesia: 32%
Switzerland: 31%
Israel: 17%
Philippines: 17%
United Kingdom: 10%
Brazil: 10%
Singapore: 10%
Chile: 10%
Trump emphasized this was not a full one-to-one tariff match but rather a proportional measure intended to rebalance trade relations. “This is going to be our Golden Age,” he declared.
The tariffs are expected to take effect immediately, with the auto and parts sectors seeing 25% duties starting Thursday, and additional product categories expected to follow.
Apr 2