I remember the pomp and ceremony that greeted Donald J. Trump as 45th President of the United States when he visited India.
Now, all the pomp and ceremony associated with India involves Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to China, where he shook hands — and made deals — with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
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One could argue that tariffs drove Modi into the arms of his country’s bitter enemy, China. Trump recently placed a 50 percent tariff on Indian goods coming into the U.S. because India was buying gasoline from Russia. It wasn’t long before the recent China-Russia-India Summit took place.
The two-day summit also overshadowed Trump’s Washington D.C. summit. Xi had 20 countries joined him, Trump just 8.
CNBC, however, put a “Whoa Nellie” on any hasty conclusions of the Indian-Chinese partnership.
Accoding to the network, the former Indian ambassador to China, Gautam Bambawale, summed up things this way:
“The dragon and the elephant are not dancing as yet. They are just looking at each other from opposite sides of a room and trying to assess what are the implications of the relationship between the two? It’s going to take time to bring the relationship back on track.”
Trump posted on Truth Social that trade with India “has been a totally one sided disaster!” He added that India offered to lower its tariffs to zero. but: “They should have done so years ago.”
The event was billed as the Shanghai Cooperative Oragnaization (SCO) Summit.