Trade & tariffs: Trump hopes for “potential deals” with India, S. Korea, and Japan
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: After waging a fierce trade war against multiple countries, including China, US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he has “potential trade deals” with India, South Korea, and Japan—all viewed as anti-Beijing—the media reported on Thursday.
In remarks at an ‘Investing in America’ event in Washington, D.C., he said he wants to convert his tariff policy into trade agreements.
At a town hall on the NewsNation television network, Trump was asked when he would be announcing agreements with those three countries. “We have potential deals” with them, he said.
However, he said, he was in no rush to conclude the deals because the United States is reaping the benefits of the tariffs he has imposed.
“I’m in less of a hurry than you are. We are sitting on the catbird seat. They want us. We don’t need them,” he said.
US media and policy circles, the media reported, have been agog with talks of a US-India trade deal as the first to be announced in the rush for agreements to beat President Donald Trump’s 90-day pause in the implementation of his sweeping levies on nearly all of America’s trading partner countries.
“I wouldn’t say finish line (but) close,” Jamieson Greer, the US Trade Representative, told Fox News, when asked if a deal with India was close to the finish line.
“I have a standing call with India’s Trade Minister. I sent my team to India for a week. They were here last week and I met with their chief negotiator,” he added.
Asked about US Vice-President J.D. Vance’s visit to India, Greer, an old hand at the office of the US Trade Representative, referred to the announcement by the two sides of a framework for trade negotiations between them.
He served as Chief of Staff to Robert Lighthizer, the US Trade Representative in President Donald Trump’s first term, when the US and India came very close to the finish line on a trade deal.
A deal was to be announced and signed during President Trump’s visit to India in February 2020, but it fell through despite protracted and tough negotiations.
Top Indian trade negotiators blamed the US for it, alleging they “kept changing the goalpost.”
Greer seemed far more bullish about a trade deal with South Korea in the present flush of negotiations, saying they have been most forward looking and the US strategy has been to go with the most ambitious proposals on the table.
