At the G7 summit in Evian last week, President Donald Trump reached across to clasp Narendra Modi’s hand and called him a tough negotiator, even a “killer”, before pronouncing the India-US trade deal “very close”. It was a warm theatre, and New Delhi will take the warmth. Yet it came only weeks after a US strike linked to the war with Iran killed three Indian sailors. The substance in the same news cycle pointed the other way too: Washington had dropped “Indo” from the name of its Indo-Pacific Command, and its trade office proposed fresh duties of up to 12.5 per cent on 60 economies, India among them. The bonhomie is real; so is the baseline. The gap between the two is the actual story of this deal.
In early June, India’s commerce minister put the first tranche at about 99 per cent done; a fortnight later, the US ambassador offered the same figure. The missing 1 per cent, agriculture and dairy, is not the hard part. What has quietly changed is what the full 100 now refers to.
Rewind to February. After months of tariffs rising to 50 per cent, Washington cut India’s rate to 18 per cent, with India pledging to buy a reported $500 billion in American goods. Then the prize lost its floor. On February 20, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the statute behind the reciprocal tariffs did not authorise tariffs at all; that power, it said, belongs to Congress. The decision voided roughly 70 per cent of the US tariff structure, including the mechanism by which India’s 18 per cent had been set. Within days, the duties were terminated. The number India had negotiated for did not fall so much as dissolve.
What replaced it is where the economics turn interesting. Stripped of its emergency tool, the administration fell back on a time-limited baseline near 10 per cent on almost everyone, plus new unfair-trade investigations that could yield fresh, uncapped levies later. On paper, India now faces a lower baseline than the 18 per cent it celebrated. But a duty applied to all comers is not the asset that a bilaterally negotiated, India-specific rate was. The first moves with the next executive order or investigation finding; the second was meant to be something India had bargained for and could bank on. The deal is still “99 per cent” complete, yet what it completes has been re-priced, and that re-pricing transmits into behaviour. The $500 billion pledge, too, now rests on a shakier exchange, since India is being asked to lock in long-dated import intent against a tariff promise the other side cannot presently guarantee.
I am in Washington this month, speaking to people across think tanks, congressional offices, government bureaus, and the private sector, testing how India’s choices read from this side. Coming to it from the Indian policy community, what strikes me is how consistent the through-line is: The tariff number is the least durable part of the relationship. Beneath every headline rupture, working-level cooperation has largely continued. The trajectory is described here less as linear convergence than as an upward-sloping sine curve, full of dips that rarely prove structural.
The deeper point is about China, and it cuts both ways. India’s strategic value to Washington is, at bottom, downstream of America’s competition with China. The tariff relief, the courtship, the talk of India as a manufacturing alternative, all of it flows from a bet that India can help reduce American dependence on Chinese supply chains in critical minerals, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and defence inputs. India tends to command sustained American attention precisely when China becomes a problem; that is the real ballast under this deal, far steadier than any tariff line.
The sharpest version of the China problem is not mining but processing: Beijing’s dominance lies at the refining and component nodes of these chains, where a single export restriction can ripple through factories worldwide. That is exactly where India’s cooperation is valuable, and where a shared vulnerability shows: American resilience is only as strong as its partners’ freedom from Chinese inputs.
Yet the premise is more contingent than the courtship suggests. Since the Modi-Xi thaw of 2024, India has been cautiously recalibrating its own economic relationship with China, easing some investment restrictions and leaning on Chinese components and capital goods that remain cheaper and faster to source, driven by domestic growth pressures rather than any strategic reconciliation. The same New Delhi that Washington courts as a hedge against China is quietly managing its own dependence on China, sector by sector. Washington, in turn, sends mixed signals: Dropping “Indo” from a combatant command is a small administrative act, but to South Asian readers it hints that the very China-balancing frame which gives India its leverage may itself be softening.
None of this makes the agriculture impasse trivial. Washington wants entry for dairy, apples, tree nuts, and genetically modified crops; New Delhi has never opened dairy in any trade pact and treats GM corn, soybean, rice, and wheat as closed. It is a genuine distributional fight touching millions of smallholders. But it is a problem with known instruments, exclusion lists, tariff-rate quotas, minimum import prices, and calibrated safeguards, rather than a conceptual deadlock. The real risk is that it is rushed to manufacture a “100 per cent” headline that proves politically brittle, when the harder, quieter questions of standards and digital rules are where durable value actually settles.
So when the India-US deal is signed this summer, and it likely will be — India is considering adding a sunset clause to retain policy flexibility amid the unpredictability — it will be announced as complete, the last per cent triumphantly closed. The more useful question is not whether it reaches a 100, but what that 100 rests on. A tariff number undone by a court or a fresh investigation is not the same as a strategic logic that compounds over a decade.
And there is a further test, one that predates Trump: Whether Washington can treat India as an equal rather than a convenient hedge, since partnerships of this kind mature on mutually agreeable terms, not on warmth alone. Trump can call Modi a killer negotiator and mean it as praise; the toughness India should bank on is structural, anchored in shared exposure to China rather than in a headline rate that has already shown it can vanish overnight. Ninety-nine per cent complete and 99 per cent durable are not the same, and only one of them is worth negotiating for.
The writer is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation
And there is a further test, one that predates Trump: Whether Washington can treat India as an equal rather than a convenient hedge, since partnerships of this kind mature on mutually agreeable terms, not on warmth alone. 
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