BRAVE NEW DEAL

WILL MODI'S HIGH-RISK GAMBIT WITH TRUMP PAY OFF?

- RAJ CHENGAPPA

Nothing focuses the minds of world leaders quite as much as the prospect of being struck down by a sledgehammer-wielding president of the world's sole superpower. It has been barely a month since Donald J. Trump formally assumed office, but he has already gone about his global demolition spree with astonishing and, for many, alarming speed. Not only is Trump rapidly dismantling massive parts of his own federal bureaucracy and the idea of what constituted America but he has also walked, nay, sprinted his talk of throwing out illegal immigrants and expressed his pet peeve of getting nations trading with America to lower their tariffs significantly.

So, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi set out to meet Trump along with Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and National Security Advisor A.K. Doval on February 13 at the Oval Office, they didn't want to walk into an ambush and possibly return red-faced and empty-handed. Jaishankar's visits to the US soon after Trump was re-elected and at the swearing-in ceremony on January 20 ensured that he had tested the waters and got a good grasp of what Trump 2.0 was going to be all about.

The Indian assessment was that Trump was more bold, confident and assertive than he was in his first term. The conservative Republican party had become his supplicants, turning it into, well, Trump's own party. It was also through his own set of friends, filters and priorities that Trump viewed his relations with countries and he would deal with them in a manner that was anything but conventional. The Indian delegation was aware that Trump remained capricious and could swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other, forcing them to be nimble-footed in their dealings with him.