Busting Myths About The Odds For An Even Deal

Some are projecting Trump's tariffs as an opportunity. Experience shows it won't be easy to sign a trade deal with the US by autumn. And it's not clear how it will help India

- K P NAYAR

Donald Trump has blinked on tariffs, but the influential American lobby in India has not. It is still in an overdrive in wholesale support of the U.S. Targeting worried corporate boardrooms, it is pointing to the light at the end of the dark tunnel of a conceivable bilateral trade deal by autumn. At another level, to generate optimism, it is hugely exaggerating a persuasive fantasy for the aam aadmi that the global trade war unleashed by the 47th U.S. president represents an opportunity for India.

My experience of being professionally involved in U.S.-India trade negotiations while working in Washington for 15 years belies hopes that a trade deal, trumpeted much—mind you, only on the Indian side—will be easy.

More than two decades ago, Frank G Wisner II, who was U.S. ambassador to India—and later a lobbyist for New Delhi in Washington—tried to convince me that India and the U.S. would soon conclude a free trade agreement (FTA). I did not buy his story. He then approached my chief editor, who promptly consulted me. Wisner was a consummate and clever diplomat who inherited many qualities of his father, one of the founders of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. This was disinformation, which Wisner needed to spread at the time to promote himself. My newspaper did not pursue the story. The FTA, of course, is yet to fructify.