In the US-China trade war: India has enough weight to avoid being forced to make the choice… Should avoid making (an) outright choice, says Martin Wolf

According to Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, London, China is likely to come out better than America in their escalating trade war. And it might be advisable for countries such as India to walk the middle path, like it has done in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, he said in an interview with Anil Sasi.When Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, the general impression was that he might pander to the MAGA base for a while and then get back to business. There was a feeling that all this tariff talk could just be transitory. Now it does not seem like that. How do you read the situation?

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| think what's changed between his first term as president and the second term is that the last time he didn’t know what to do. He was almost a classic example of the famous story of the dog that catches the car and then doesn’t know what to do after that. He became president the first time around, and | don’t think he really expected to become president. He didn’t know who to appoint... The area where he was probably most radical was trade policy even then, but he had a US trade representative Robert Lighthizer, who was very professional. He was very conservative, and | disagree with him on most things, but he was a professional trade negotiator.So (now) MAGA moved from being a slogan to being a cult, and there were a lot of people, many of them associated with the Heritage Foundation, who developed a detailed plan for what they would do when they were in government. A lot of that is happening so it's a very different administration with a man at the head who feels both vindicated and vengeful.

| think that’s sort of the description of what we've got and there are very few people in this administration, | think Scott Bessant is probably one of them, Marco Rubio is another, who would be plausible candidates to be in the administration of a Republican president before Trump himself. Nobody else in this administration, as far as | can see, would have been appointed, even by Trump 1.0, let alone George W. Bush or George Herbert Walker Bush.So this is anew administration. Now, tariff is the one thing he really feels (strongly) about, thinks about, and he feels that all this should be rectified by having bilateral balances.China move to issue a fairly open threat that countries that are negotiating for a deal of some sort with the US will be slapped with some sort of retaliatory tariffs of their own. Now this is an escalation of the kind that was probably not expected earlier. Are we in some way now reaching a point of no return?