“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak,” John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson two centuries ago. The second President of the US understood what Donald Trump, the 47th, refuses to learn. Power acquired at any price eventually bankrupts the buyer. Last week, Mumbai, emerging India’s corporate abode staged a vivid, almost vaudevillian demonstration of that bitter truth.
On Tuesday last, Secretary of State Marco Rubio with his wife and Ambassador Sergio Gor in tow landed in Mumbai. The ambience was awesome and the symbolism scandalous. Soon after their arrival, America’s 250th birthday was hosted and toasted at the Jio World Convention Centre in Bandra Kurla Complex, built by the very business tycoon Washington had come to court.
Next morning, the most powerful diplomat of the most powerful nation was keeping appointments like a salesman making a sales pitch. He along with Gor met both Gautam Adani and Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran before he began other official meetings. Neither side said a word about what was discussed.
The irony was impossible to ignore. Adani has spent two years battling an American lawsuit that almost dented his group’s global ambitions. The Tatas, whose flagship TCS developed business for American clients, watched Trump slap a punishing fee on H-1B visas that made sending Indian techies to manage those very clients prohibitively painful. The persons Trumpian establishment wounded were now being wooed by Washington. Few scripts are written with such sardonic symmetry.
And now comes the pilgrimage to Jamnagar. Gor, an envoy who strolls like a lord through Delhi’s corridors of power, had to accompany his boss across Gujarat to seek an audience with Mukesh Ambani and his son Anant. The mission was pure commerce. Both pleaded with Ambani to process Venezuelan crude, invest in America and finally facilitate the President’s refinery dreams in Texas come true.
The Ambanis, masters of message and image, orchestrated the optics with surgical skill. First came pictures of Rubio and Gor with the younger Ambanis, the patriarch pointedly absent, followed after an hour later by a frame of four before the family temple. Finally, a photograph of three of them—Rubio, Gor and Mukesh—lounging casually in a room wrapped in greenery. It was a cruel joke choreographed in pixels.
Three Indian business houses with a combined market value below a trillion dollars were setting the terms of trade for a nation with a GDP of over $30 trillion.
Equally symbolic was who stayed away from the highly-hyped event. Most of the titans who granted private audience were conspicuous by their absence at the anniversary celebration itself. The only diplomatically correct gesture came from the Indian government. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar attended with the Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and obliged his hosts with a bilateral meeting.
Yet Jaishankar delivered his discomfort with diplomatic deftness. He raised the champagne flute for the toast and placed it back on the table without a sip. Then he told Rubio, in good humour but with unmistakable sarcasm, “You won’t be counted as a friend of India until you really understand cricket,” before reminding both Indian and American guests that Saurabh Netravalkar, America’s leading cricketer, hails from Mumbai.
The message was elegant and exact. India plays both one-dayers and Test matches, Trump just plays T20.
But Rubio had nothing concrete to offer India. He repeated the familiar refrain that a trade deal with India was all but done. What India received is a temporary reprieve from punitive tariffs over Russian oil, a favour as fragile as the mood of the man who granted it. And that mood swings wildly. For years, Trump painted China as a predatory menace plundering American wealth. In September, he rolled out not one but two red carpets for Xi Jinping—greeted him on the tarmac at Andrews air base, gave him a guided tour of the National Archives and hosted a lavish State dinner. The Trump-Xi summit produced pageantry and pandas, but precious little policy.
On Russia, the reversal is even more ridiculous. The same Washington administration that punished India with a 25 percent penalty for buying Russian oil has now waived sanctions on Moscow and struck a deal for Russian diesel. When the US and Israel went to war with Iran in February, American diesel prices soared nearly 80 percent. Farmers fumed, truckers grumbled and a President facing voters suddenly discovered the virtues of Vladimir Putin’s oil fields. What was a crime for India became commerce for the US. Like an avaricious business leader, Trump betrayed even Ukraine by striking a deal with Russia.
Trump demanded that Kyiv stop striking Russian refineries. He advised Ukrainians to find a new leader through elections and nudged Zelenskyy towards surrendering land seized by Russian military. The defender of democracy demanded elections only from the democracy under attack.
Europe is the worst victim of Trumpian tantrums. Allies of eight decades are treated as foes by him, while he flirts with autocrats as friends. Israel, once the cornerstone of his Middle East policy, watched its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fly in for the UN General Assembly and leave within hours, denied a White House welcome.
Iran, bombed in February, is now an interlocutor to be invited for talks whenever oil markets tremble. India was labelled a tariff abuser in one season and serenaded as a strategic partner in the next. The thread tying together these twists is not strategy but survival. Americans vote on November 3. Losing the House would paralyse the administration for the remaining two years. For Trump’s transactional architecture, conviction is a matter of convenience and principle a bargaining chip.
For more than 18 months, the world order has been battered into being a bazaar where loyalty is rented and alliances auctioned. The world may have to suffer two more years of these hysterics. For eight decades, the world needed America. That compulsion gave Washington its unmatched leverage. Mumbai this week revealed a reversal of roles that should alarm every American patriot.
Today, America needs the world. It needs Russian diesel to calm its pumps, Chinese goodwill to steady its markets, Indian capital to build its refineries and Indian talent to run its industries. A nation that once dispensed favours now solicits them. History offers a sobering lesson—if Trump fails to correct course, the next chapter of American history will be written not in Washington, but in the capitals that would have learned to live without it.
Read all columns by Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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