The US-Indian negotiations at the highest level held on February 13-14, 2025, in Washington notably deepened the strategic partnership of the two countries and raised relations to a new and more advanced level.

It is notable that Modi was also among the first to have a telephone conversation with the US president-elect after his inauguration and confirmed his coming visit. On the eve of his arrival in the United States, on the side-lines of an artificial intelligence summit in Paris, he met with Vice President J. D. Vance. Having arrived in Washington, he first spoke with Tulsi Gabbard, the director of US national intelligence, Michael Waltz, the president’s national security adviser, billionaire Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a major entrepreneur of Indian origin. 

Agenda of the negotiations

As expected, the agenda of the summit itself turned out to be extensive and covered a diverse range of topics, from tariff, trade, economic and migration issues to military-technical, atomic, nuclear, scientific-technological and strategic foreign policy cooperation.

When discussing mutual trade, Trump expressed concern about the significant imbalance in favour of India, which amounts to more than $30 billion, with the total trade turnover amounting to about $120 billion. Washington is dissatisfied with the clearly excessive Indian tariffs on numerous US goods, reaching 70% or more, which negatively affects US export. Trump welcomed the reduction of these tariffs and said that the US would take into account these steps of the Indian government in its tariff policy. In general, the parties agreed to reduce duties and tariffs on Indian and US goods and to ease policy in this area overall. The mutual flexibility shown essentially made it possible to avoid a tariff war and the corresponding pressure from the United States.

Following discussions, a very ambitious, but quite realistic, goal was set, namely to increase the volume of bilateral trade and bring it to $500 billion by 2030. Along with the expansion of the range of US goods supplied to India, Washington expressed its........

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