Howard Lutnick’s comments are frivolous. India’s restraint stands out as other nations wilt under US power

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s comments, delivered against the backdrop of ongoing India-US trade negotiations, suggested that a bilateral trade deal failed to materialise because India’s Prime Minister did not personally call Trump (File photo)

January 10, 2026 12:57 PM IST First published on: Jan 10, 2026 at 12:57 PM IST

As the world order seems to be at a crossroads, diplomacy and interstate relations appear to be unravelling at a breakneck speed. The traditional toolkit for understanding international relations and diplomacy in a predictable way seems to have fallen by the wayside. When the world’s largest economic and military power embraces a policy of upending established modes of foreign policy conduct, this distorted practice overshadows traditional policy behaviour across the international system.

The United States today appears to be at the helm of a fundamental shift in foreign policy, one that is marked not merely by a disregard for existing norms and institutions but by a naked and fiercely transactional guarding of its perceived national interests at home and abroad. Often, however, this strategy sits in direct conflict with the very set of rules, regulations, and institutions the United States itself put in place nearly 80 years ago in the aftermath of World War II. What the current administration appears to be doing suggests at best and increasingly clearly that Washington has turned the page on the tenets of the last world order without offering a coherent alternative framework.

US President Donald Trump’s conduct of foreign policy is significantly different from that of past presidencies in several important ways. First, decision-making is so heavily centralised in the President that the role of advisers has often become a smokescreen rather than a substantive institutional check. Second, many of these advisers lack political training in diplomacy and instead emerge from hardcore business interests, a background that has deeply shaped the administration’s foreign policy outlook. Third, the political will for the use of force has shifted to a new, lower, and more calculated threshold, blurring the line between coercive diplomacy and outright intimidation. Finally, the Trump administration has been unusually blunt in outlining its economic interests in any region, neighbourhood, or issue, and then unleashing a team of fierce defenders to rationalise these demands through passive-aggressive language that underlines coercion rather than cooperation.

It is in this broader context that the recent remarks by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick must be situated. Lutnick’s comments, delivered against the backdrop of ongoing India-US trade negotiations, suggested that a bilateral trade deal failed to materialise because India’s Prime Minister did not personally call Trump. This assertion is both shallow and frivolous. While the Indian government has dismissed the remarks as “not accurate”, they also represent a mischaracterisation of the negotiation process, both factually and in principle. On the first count, New Delhi has clarified that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Trump spoke at least eight times over the past year, undercutting the claim. On the question of principle, Lutnick’s framing appears to be a classic case of negotiations conducted in bad faith. If anything, Lutnick’s remarks have produced a double jeopardy. On the one hand, they suggest that the train may have already left the station on an India-US trade deal; on the other, they attempt to assign the blame for this outcome squarely to India. Such rhetoric risks undermining the strategic trust that has been carefully built over the past two decades across defence, technology, and people-to-people ties.

Lutnick’s detailing of the negotiation process appears to be a calculated, passive-aggressive attempt to coerce India into a deal that remains asymmetrically favourable to the US. Simultaneously, it may also reflect an effort to reposition himself as a vigilant guard dog of US economic interests at a time when other Trump lieutenants such as Marco Rubio, J D Vance, Pam Bondi, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner have increasingly occupied the foreground of the administration’s strategic and political decision-making.

India’s refusal to negotiate with the US with a metaphorical gun to its head, and perhaps more frustratingly for Washington, New Delhi’s unwillingness to descend into a retaliatory tariff spiral, have proven to be silent strengths. This restraint stands out at a moment when sovereign nation-states are increasingly being forced to wilt under new distortions of American power. Clearly, there are limits to the purchase that multilateralism can secure with the current Trump administration, but with a retributive Washington, it becomes all the more important for Delhi to balance its willingness for a trade deal with political firmness.

As the possibility of a new 500 per cent tariff bill targeting Russia and countries that continue to deal with Russia looms large, with tacit approval from Trump, India must carefully assess the economic and strategic fallout of such moves. The India-US relationship today is too consequential to be reduced to transactional ultimatums or personalised slights. Whether Washington recognises this reality may well determine not just the fate of a trade deal, but the broader trajectory of bilateral ties in an increasingly fractured global order.