Seasoned US commentators and geostrategic experts of several decades of experience, who have worked with world leaders, whether they are pro-Trump or anti-Trump, have been nearly unanimous in declaring the latest US tariff policy against India an unmitigated disaster.

It appears, at least from the outside, that a one-man think tank consisting of John Navarro, president of the US Security Division at Mobile Communications America, has convinced POTUS that a tariff war against India will bring big benefits to the US.

In actions that have lasted just weeks, Trump, in calling the Ukraine war “Modi’s war", has derailed three decades of carefully constructed diplomacy by both the US and India that had brought bilateral relations to a stable, even slightly friendly condition.

It is clear that the US, in its excessive concern with China, the Asian dragon, has ignored the Asian elephant. One never talks about the dragon in the room. It’s always the elephant in the room about which one is uneasy. India has paid heed to Deng Xiaoping’s sage advice about biding one’s time while one builds up one’s strength.

Quietly, almost unobtrusively, we have been trying to build our economic and military strengths, the twin pillars of global heft, so that we are becoming a voice that others listen to seriously.

In the new world order that is unfolding literally in front of our eyes, it is more important to be the ambassador of the world instead of being the policeman of the world. The old school of thought in the US still thinks that the world exists as it did in the post-World War II era of the 1950s and 1960s; how wrong they are.

The US action against........

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