In most Indian households, when the power goes out, the first reaction isn’t to check the fuse or fire up the backup inverter. No, it’s to peer out the window and squint at the neighbours’ houses. If their lights are out too, there’s a collective sigh of relief—at least we’re all in the dark together. But if the neighbours’ fans are whirring and TVs blaring, that’s when the panic begins.

It looks as if we have brought this same misplaced instinct to trade policy. The moment tariffs were slapped on Indian goods, the first reaction in many circles wasn’t indignation or recalibration; it was to point out, with almost comic consolation, that the tariffs on other countries are much higher. As if getting a lighter slap somehow makes the slap itself strategic praise. This societal reflex needs rewiring. Global trade isn’t a shared power outage. It’s a race where the last thing you want is to be comforted by how much worse your neighbour is limping.

In global diplomacy, timing is never coincidental. The United States’ decision to impose a 26 per cent tariff on select Indian imports, announced with an air of nationalistic triumph on its own as its ‘Liberation Day’, underscores a new doctrine. The age of predictable partnership is yielding to a more jagged, transactional world. For India, the question is not merely how to respond tactically to this tariff imposition. The deeper concern is how to strategically reorient its foreign policy, trade architecture, and industrial capacity in anticipation of a world shaped by asymmetry and opportunism.

The context is inescapable. India and the US have been moving towards a comprehensive bilateral trade arrangement. Prime Minister Modi’s Washington visit earlier this year signalled the intent. March’s working-level meetings in Delhi between the USTR and the Ministry of Commerce hinted at a collaborative path ahead. But before pen could reach parchment, the United States delivered its preface in the form of tariffs. That move, in an ideal rules-based world, should mean that the very balance of trust and timing in international negotiation is broken.

But let us not read this as a rupture. It is better understood as an........

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