MAGA and MIGA meet to make MEGA: Modi
PM Modi and Trump launched the US-India COMPACT for a "mega partnership," aiming to enhance ties in defense, trade, and technology during Modi's DC visit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that US President Donald Trump’s vision of Make America Great Again (MAGA) and his own idea of Make India Great Again (MIGA) can translate into a “mega partnership”, with the two leaders unveiling an ambitious new plan — the US-India COMPACT for the 21st century in Washington DC on Thursday evening eastern time (Friday morning IST).
COMPACT, the abbreviation for Catalysing Opportunities for Military Partnership, Accelerated Commerce & Technology, will serve as the basis of India’s ties with the second Donald Trump administration, and is a clear and interconnected blueprint that ties together a relationship based on deeper defence, energy, trade, investment, technology, innovation, people-to-people ties. It also envisages stronger regional partnerships in India’s neighbourhood across the Indo-Pacific, West Asia and Western Indian Ocean. It has clear timelines and lays out clear outcome-oriented expectations from both partners.
Modi became only the fourth foreign leader to visit the White House after Trump’s inauguration, and the first Indian PM to be invited to see an American President within the first month of his term -- a sign of the deepening strategic partnership as well as the past personal bonhomie between the two leaders. As Modi walked into the West Wing, he and Trump shared a warm hug, with Modi telling Trump that it was great to see him and Trump telling Modi, “We have missed you. We missed you a lot.”
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The warmth, partially a result of the shared experiences from “Howdy Houston” and “Namaste Ahmedabad”, two large public events that the two leaders addressed in both countries during Trump’s first term, was visible through the four hours that Modi and Trump spent together — in the Oval Office during a restricted bilateral dialogue, during more extended delegation-level talks, at a press conference and at dinner. They repeatedly referred to each other as dear and old friends and expressed admiration for each other’s leadership traits. And they delivered on the substantive outcomes that a summit of this nature would warrant, and arguably did more than what was expected from a quick visit largely meant to establish early communication.
Speaking at the press conference in the East Room, Modi said, “We agreed that the partnership and cooperation between India and the US can shape a better world... The people of America are aware of President Trump’s motto, Make America Great Again, or MAGA. The people of India too are focusing on both heritage and development as they move forward at a fast pace and with a firm resolve to ensure a developed India by 2047. Our vision for Viksit Bharat is to make India great again, or MIGA. When America and India work together, that is when it’s MAGA plus MIGA, it becomes MEGA, a MEGA partnership for prosperity.”
Trump recalled the time they had spent together in the first term, and spoke of the special bond between the world’s oldest and largest democracy. “Today, the Prime Minister and I are announcing a framework to strengthen those ties even further economically, and the US-India COMPACT for the 21st century is a historic initiative that will deepen every aspect of our partnership and our friendship.”
The comments, par for the course during high-level visits, seemed partially justified, for Modi came to DC in a challenging backdrop.
Hours earlier on Thursday, Trump had announced a decision to impose reciprocal tariffs on countries which charged US products higher tariffs, a category that includes India. The optics around the deportation of illegal immigrants had created a backlash against the government at home. The Trump administration had made clear its expectations from India on buying more defence systems and energy products. And in the global context, a day earlier, Trump had begun a process of negotiation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the Ukraine war in a manner that made Europe unhappy. The manner in which illegal immigrants were sent back to India earlier this month -- with restraints in a military plane -- had also become a big talking back home. It was in this backdrop that Modi and Trump built on the work that their diplomatic teams had done to create a new framework for ties that noted from both the first Trump administration, and less conspicuously, from the previous Democratic administration.
On trade, Trump, through the evening, continued to criticise India for its high tariffs. But substantively, in the statement, the two countries launched Mission 500, setting an ambitious goal of $500 billion for trade by 2030, but a more realistic and immediate goal of a first tranche of a bilateral trade agreement by the fall of this year when Trump is expected to travel to India for the Quad summit. A key element of this effort to reduce India’s trade surplus — and make the trade “fair” — was energy imports, with Trump saying, “We can make up the difference very easily with the deficit — with the sale of oil and gas, LNG, of which we have more than anybody in the world. The Prime Minister and I also reached an important agreement on energy that will restore the US as a leading supplier of oil and gas to India. It will be hopefully their number one supplier.” In an important breakthrough, they also built on India’s decision to amend its nuclear liability legislation to move on nuclear commerce.
On defence, India also highlighted the presence of American defence systems and indicated a willingness to acquire more, with Modi acknowledging American role in Indian defence preparedness. On his part, Trump showed a willingness to re-examine export control and arms transfer regulations, including “paving the way to ultimately provide India with F-35 stealth fighters”. While the joint statement was more circumspect in its language, and India said it had not begun the process, putting an American fifth generation fighter on the table for India was a new marker in the relationship.
Technology continued to be the core focus of the partnership with the initiative on critical and emerging technologies giving way to Transforming Relations Utilising Strategic Technologies (TRUST), a mechanism that would focus on a partnership on Artificial intelligence infrastructure, critical minerals, supply chain diversification, semiconductors and more. A similar spirit guided wider regional partnerships with India and the US agreeing to continue working on Quad, the Indian Middle East Europe Economic Corridor, create an Indian Ocean Strategic Venture, and create new plurilateral groups in Western Indian Ocean, Indo-Pacific and West Asia and enhance military coordination.
Modi and Trump also discussed people-to-people ties, backed more legal migration pathways for students and professionals, and agreed to crack down on wider networks and ecosystems that promoted illegal immigration. They also built on their past convergence on battling terror, calling on Pakistan to bring to justice the accused in 26/11 and Pathankot terror attack, and introduced language in the joint statement that could be interpreted as a harsh signal to Khalistani separatists in the US attacking Indian diplomatic property and threatening diplomatic personnel.
Operationalising the terms of the statement in the given timelines or timelines that Trump may expect - from defence acquisitions and trade liberalisation — will be a challenge for the Indian bureaucratic system, as will be managing Trump’s various interventions on global issues that impinge on Indian interests.
But while that is a medium-term challenge India is conscious of, for now, Thursday marked a day that showed the power of personal diplomacy between Modi and Trump and structural factors that have only pushed the India and US to come closer in the last 25 years across different administrations in DC and governments in Delhi. As Modi said in the Oval Office, one plus one in the case of India and US was not two but eleven. Translating this vision of leaders into reality is the next task for both systems.