India is the kind of associate power that Donald Trump will look for: Walter Mead

Walter Mead said Donald Trump’s protectionist instincts are geared more towards manufactured goods such as steel and cars than digital issues

NEW DELHI: US President-elect Donald Trump is expected to be supportive of both the bilateral relationship with India and the Quad amid continuing contestation with China, leading American columnist and academic Walter Russell Mead said on Saturday.

Walter Mead said India was among the countries that had done the best with Donald Trump during his last term by coming up with a “list of things that they have on offer” (HT Photo/Raj K Raj)

While trade relations could be an issue in the next Trump presidency, his protectionist instincts are geared more towards manufactured goods such as steel and cars than digital issues and technology that have a greater importance in the India-US economic relationship, Mead said during a conversation at the 22nd Hindustan Times Leadership Summit.

Mead, who is the James Clarke Chace professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, said the area in US foreign policy with the greatest degree of bipartisan consensus was the Indo-Pacific policy.

“That would mean both India and China. I think Trump will be supportive of the Quad, I think he’ll be very supportive of the relationship with India. India is not asking the US for military guarantees, India pays for its own defence budget. So in all those respects, India is much more the kind of associate power that Trump would be looking for,” he said.

India's trade with the US, Mead said, is more weighted “towards cyber and IT than it is to manufactured goods” and Trump “doesn't seem to have the same sort of protectionist instincts about tech that he does about steel and cars”. The greatest opportunity for India will be the creation of a “free world technosphere”, he added.

“Whether we like it or not, we can see the Chinese are building one tech system and other countries, who don't want to be part of that, are looking at alternatives,” Mead said, adding that India, Israel, the US and European nations could come together as a Bloc.

There should be “an Indian voice at the table” for making rules that would go along with establishing such a technology alliance, and the system should evolve in a way that “India is an integral part of it”.

India was among the countries that had done the best with Trump during his last term by coming up with a “list of things that they have on offer” for the US, Mead said. “I think Trump and [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi managed to work out a good relationship... I think India has a shrewder idea of how to approach these kinds of negotiations,” he added.

The issue of H1B visas is different from illegal immigration through the southern border of the US, and there are people such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who know the value of this visa programme from their own experience. “I think the thing to do is to look at industries that have Trump's ear, whose interests are very much engaged with this, and I don't see any existential reason why this could not be managed effectively,” he said.

While Trump may not close the door on a “grand bargain with China”, working out the details for such a deal may not be easy. “I would be surprised to see that happening, though I think, given the state of the Chinese economy, there's probably more disposition in Beijing to explore that road, than maybe there would have been a couple of years ago, when Trump was last in office,” Mead said.

Given the US's wide-ranging trade interests around the world, it is going to remain global in its thinking and there won’t be regions that Washington will ignore, Mead added.

“[With] the rise of countries like India, we’re seeing a world that's going to be more multipolar than in the past, but there's a difference between adversarial multipolarity, say China’s contest with the US, and competitive multipolarity, where you have a group of countries who broadly accept the framework of the international system and try to maximise their own interest… that's probably where the Americans would like to see it go. My guess is this is also what India would like,” he said.