Description: US President Donald Trump has stated that recent rounds of trade negotiations with India have rapidly progressed while also claiming that India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has personally guaranteed that his country would gradually decouple from importing Russian crude oil. The trade tensions began earlier this year, with the US imposing up to 50% tariffs on imports from India due to the latter’s energy ties with Russia. President Trump accused India of indirectly sponsoring the Russian war efforts in Ukraine by filling Russia’s war chest while also making a healthy profit for itself by selling refined Russian oil on the global market. Modi’s office has declined the speculations that India offered guarantees regarding its abandonment of oil imports from Russia, however, it stated that trade negotiations have seen some progress in recent months. Russia has criticized the US initiative to condition and threaten India claiming it violated the global market principles of fair trade.
Impact: US – India relations have experienced drastic overtures in recent months, primarily focused on the trade talks which have prompted India to strategically pivot towards China and the US to start devising closer strategic ties with India’s regional rival Pakistan. India as the fourth largest global economy has imported crude oil from major suppliers such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Nigeria and the US and currently serves as the global balancing power on the oil market. The US push for India to abandon its Russian oil imports is disguised as part of a larger strategy to prevent the Russian economy keeping itself afloat in wartime conditions while objectively being a conditioned foreign policy which aims at polarizing India towards the US and forcing the country to abandon its strategic ambiguousness with China and Russia. The US can’t risk losing India as a regional partner in the Global South by outlining unrealistic demands, while India would eventually have to make serious concessions in order to appease the US in the form of gradually reducing oil imports from Russia and establishing closer energy ties with the US, effectively aiming to reach a bilateral trade agreement.