India’s confidence in gaining from Trump’s trade distortions is misplaced

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India’s policymakers should be drawing up strategies to deal with the new age of trade barriers. Instead, they seem to be looking forward to it with a certain confidence, even optimism.

There is none of the concern or outrage visible in other countries that US President Donald Trump has targeted. Indeed, if anybody nourished a vague hope that Trump would fail to impose tariffs on Indian exports, the man himself dashed them last week. Duties would be imposed on goods coming into the US from 2 April, the US President said in an interview to Breitbart News, adding for good measure that India was “one of the highest tariffing nations in the world." Perhaps the Indian government takes comfort from the promise Trump made during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Washington that a new trade deal between the two countries would be signed by autumn.

It is, of course, possible that the White House wants to use new US levies from April as a spur for India’s famously refractory negotiators. Trump said himself that he believes that New Delhi will be lowering tariffs “substantially" as a consequence of his actions. It is not as if Indians don’t recognize that duties imposed by the United States might hurt their exporters.

Certainly, some in business—particularly those that have scaled up shipments to American markets in recent years—are far from happy. But, particularly in recent weeks, as the level of Trump’s determination to remake global trade has sunk in, leaders have begun to think that its exporters might have a fighting chance in this new era. But what most outsiders identify as optimism is actually the opposite: A deep pessimism that Indian manufacturing will never be productive