This Way For The Trump Card

Modi meets POTUS this week. An Afghan strategy and an offer of mediation can make it noteworthy.

- Pranay Sharma

US President Donald Trump’s penchant for midnight tweets and their ability to wreck Washington’s ties with some of its close allies like Germany and Austra­lia might not be giving sleepless nights to Indian policy planners, but is certainly an issue that has begun to bother them.

South Block’s keenness that the first-ever meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and POTUS gets off to a flying start on June 26 could well come to naught by one such devastating tweet—his favourite medium of communication. Trump’s short barbs against Chancellor Angela Merkel and Australian PM Mal­colm Turnbull had embarrassed the two governments in recent months, after he decided to make public their differences.

But many more in South Block are worried about Trump’s disruptive, disjointed politics, prompted largely out of domestic compulsion that has led him to overturn most of the policy initiatives of Barack Obama. Be it the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) or Iran or Cuba, Trump is mowing through every single foreign policy move of Obama’s.

Since strengthening Indo-US relations further and dealing with the challenges from an assertive China was also a foreign policy priority of the Obama administration, will that too be reversed by Trump? And if so, which aspects of that policy will be overturned?

Trump’s comments on the Paris Climate Change Agreement while pulling the US out of it and blaming India, describing it as a freeloader has already strained relations between to some extent. Even as New Delhi has decided not to make an issue out of it—except a terse refutation by foreign minister Sushma Swaraj—to clear the decks for a positive start to the Modi-Trump interaction, the uncertainty of dealing with an unpredictable leader like Trump remains.