Dr. Tanvi Madan

“I used to read a lot. We used to do those things in those days, like read newspapers and magazines. There was this one show, there was state-run TV in India, so just the one channel. But every week, there was to be the show called on Friday, called The World This Week, and it was my favorite TV show.”

“Advice partly for folks who both kind of on the government side, on the university side, but also on the corporate side, which is both ironic and sad that we are seeing this decline in area studies at the very time the importance of it is so evident. You can't be a business and not think about geopolitics and understand how other countries are reacting today or having to understand what is going on within countries.”

“The people who really propelled the US-India, what we call next steps in strategic partnership, were not the India Wallace, with the exception of our friend Ashley Telles. Almost all of the people working on it were veterans of traditional alliances. Nick Burns with NATO, Torekla Patterson and me with Japan, Bob Blackwell with NATO, Steve Hadley with NATO. Most of the people I mentioned were maritime allies, focused on and not continentalists thinking about stabilization with China or Russia as the core goal, but thinking more about building a balance of power that favors freedom, as Coddy Rice put it.”

“I always joke that one of the things that happened when India liberalized is, suddenly you got cable TV and a lot of that cable TV was American soap operas was playing in prime time. So things like there were these shows called Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara, and people had saw America in a very different way, not just how they had heard about the US and obviously, how the US treated India was very different over time as well.”

“If you go back to the early 1980s, you had Indira Gandhi complaining about US military activities in Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. And she said it was a bigger threat to regional stability than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Just a few months ago, you had the US and India with their P8s, these maritime reconnaissance aircraft, doing a joint patrol, doing joint exercises, going essentially sub-hunting, hunting submarines, which, guess who they're worried about in working together.”

“The new element was President Trump's personal peak at India, at least seeming personal peak at India, for not, in his view, acknowledging the role he said he played in bringing India and Pakistan to a ceasefire. And I think particularly Pakistanis nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. I think the missing element was China. What you didn't see, haven't seen in this Trump term is that idea in the Trump administration, particularly the president's part, that there is a single-minded view of this desire to compete with, balance China.”

“There's a lot of nostalgia about that first Trump term, but I drew up a list of all the things that were quite difficult for India, US relations, even in the first Trump term. And that list is not short. There was an India-Pakistan crisis then. President Trump also went and announced a ceasefire before anybody else did then. He welcomed Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to the White House. He had a moment during the Mar-a-Lago summit of doing a deal with China. He put additional tariffs on India. He insulted Prime Minister Modi then.”

“I think this is going to be, and I suspect even if we have the US and India working out of some of the other differences, whether on trade, whether moving forward on other, we're seeing the kind of anti-Indian hate online, but also of seeing Indian immigrants as a problem in parts. And as you said, in consequential and influential parts of the administration, not to mention the MAGA movement, that will leave a legacy. And I worry that this is going to move from the online space to the streets at some point.”

“I think if you do see a trade agreement announced, which at the base level we know would bring down India's tariff rate from 50 percent to 18 percent, which not just would be good for India, because it's down from 50 percent, but it's also competitive. I think the lack or rather this 50 percent tariff rate, especially that 25 percent sanction, so to speak. If you think about a pipe and water flowing through this and that being the relationship, this was like something like just gumming up the works.”

“No minilateral should be a self-licking ice cream cone that should just exist for the sake of existing. It should exist if there is buy-in, if the countries think it's worthwhile. I think it's already facilitated coordination and cooperative mechanisms that will continue in some form. Now, I hope that we will see a persistence of the Quad because I think there's actual cooperation and coordination that's useful, but also it's a good signal to China. Nothing worries China more in terms of India and the US than the Quad.”