Russian President Putin and US President Trump
For India, the reprieve is reason enough for a quiet celebration. It was not exactly a Taco Tuesday, but it was certainly a Samosa Saturday in New Delhi: the country Trump threatened to crush for buying cheap Russian oil has been let off the hook by a president who has now discovered the virtues of affordable energy. The oil hasn’t changed, nor has the argument. Only Washington’s position has.
Among them: 500% tariffs on Russian goods; 100% tariffs on the five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas (which would include India); and 100% tariffs on the top facilitators of Russian sanctions evasion. India survived; Graham did not, passing away on July 11 at 71. In theory, the president retains leverage; in practice though, a threat that is announced, legislated, signed and then shelved risks becoming less an instrument of coercion than a negotiating prop.
TOI correspondent from Washington: For months, MAGA supremo Donald Trump and his minions threatened to “crush” India’s economy for New Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil. “If you keep buying cheap Russian oil… we will tariff the hell out of you and we’re going to crush your economy,” raged the late Senator Lindsay Graham, who piloted the legislation, warning of tariffs up to 500 per cent. The economics has now caught up with the rhetoric. Faced with soaring fuel prices at home and a widely forecast rout in the mid-term elections, the US President has reversed course and put most of the Russia sanctions on ice, effectively leaving India off the hook for now. The waiver follows Trump’s surprise announcement of a deal with Vladimir Putin to buy Russian diesel fuel, even as his administration has turned on Ukraine to end a war that began with Russia’s invasion. This does not mean sanctions threat has disappeared. The executive order leaves the administration room to reverse course if Trump or designated officials later decide that further action is appropriate. it is considerably less forthcoming about the political embarrassment and diplomatic debacle — arising mainly from the vituperative hectoring the bill’s authors subjected India to While the presidential order is admirably concise about the legal manoeuvre. Forgotten amid the hand-wringing: The Biden administration tacitly encouraged–and explicitly permitted — India to purchase Russian oil to stabilize global energy supply so long as those purchases adhered to the price cap mechanism. Now, with Graham gone but his legislation very much alive, Trump has discovered that appeasement may not be a strategy either — but neither is making American motorists pay a premium for geopolitical virtue.
The presidential U-turn, announced in an executive order issued on Friday evening (when governments typically drop bad/embarrassing news), invokes the president’s authority to waive provisions of the Graham Act passed last month “in the national interests of the United States. The deadline to implement the sanctions was to expire on Sunday, one month from the day the bill was passed.