"Take Him Seriously, But Not Literally": Expert On Trump's India Approach

It's a question that's going to be asked repeatedly this year, especially in the context of what's been happening between India and US President Donald Trump over the last few days and the last few weeks. Mr Trump, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, all of it throwing up a big question - can India trust Mr Trump? The India-US relationship is a very strong one, and has always enjoyed a great deal of continuity.

But now there are questions over whether India needs to recalibrate and prepare for the next steps in the world of Mr Trump.

Dr Ashley J Tellis, the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is a voice that anyone who's important listens to in the world of international security, defence, and Asian strategic issues, a voice that is heard above all others by lawmakers, the leadership on issues of US-India relations, and zooming in to the whole Trump-PM Modi dynamic.

Mr Trump hosting Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir for lunch had become a huge talking point.

"I think it was the President's personal decision to host the lunch. I'm not quite sure there was a universal consensus within his own administration on the wisdom of doing this. But President Trump is, as we know, an eclectic personality. He fancies himself a peacemaker. He genuinely believes that during the most recent India-Pakistan crisis, his administration and he himself personally had a very important role to play in the making of the ceasefire. And so I think he saw the lunch with Field Marshal Munir as an opportunity to sort of build on what he believes he achieved," Dr Tellis told NDTV.

"And the reason why I think he invited the Prime Minister [Narendra Modi] was this hope, this fanciful hope that they could all three be at a table together. They could hash out all the outstanding issues and that he would come out at the end of it, burnishing his reputation as a peacemaker," he added.

Before the lunch, in a 35-minute phone call between Mr Trump and PM Modi, the Prime Minister is said to have very clearly stated that the ceasefire after Operation Sindoor was something that India had achieved by virtue of its military actions and it had nothing to do with trade deals or mediation and that India didn't need any mediation.

However, a short while thereafter, Mr Trump asserted again that the ceasefire was all because of him. On this matter, Dr Tellis told NDTV, "I think this is in many ways vintage President Trump. I think the Prime Minister made a very compelling argument and I think the diplomatic record will bear that out that a substantial element of the success of the ceasefire were the backchannel conversations between the Indian government through its military officials and the Pakistani government through Pakistani military officials. The US did play a role. Certainly, I think Secretary Rubio was a very, very useful interlocutor to both sides. But for us to claim credit that this was somehow magically our contribution, I think exaggerates our role."

"But you can't keep a good man down and you can't keep President Trump from his very strongly held beliefs about his own role in the matter. So I think even though the Prime Minister really attempted to walk him through the sequence of events, I'm not sure it is going to have a lasting impact," said Dr Tellis, who while on assignment to the US State Department was intimately involved in negotiating the civil nuclear agreement with India.

On how India should interpret Mr Trump's signalling, Dr Tellis said the US-India relationship is generally in a very good place and both should "avoid doing anything that makes the current scratchiness into a permanent feature of the relationship. I think that is not helpful either to India or the United States."

"Two, we have to recognise the eccentricities of President Trump's personality and his worldview. Take him seriously as they say, but not literally. Recognise that he does want to play the role of a peacemaker, even though the United States as a country at this moment is singularly not suited for playing that role," Dr Tellis said.

"And so I think it is useful for India to continue to emphasise that a third-party mediation is not required. That the two countries, India and Pakistan, are entirely capable of handling these matters on their own. And continue to engage the administration more widely beyond the President on a range of issues that currently are very important to both sides.

And I would focus on economics and in particular the trade negotiations, which have been going actually reasonably well. I would focus on putting together the building blocks for enhanced defence cooperation. And I would focus on how the two countries can work together in other parts of the world. Those are things that are of common interest, that's really the way forward, especially in these tumultuous times, when you cannot really rely on political personalities in a sense to deliver what is necessary for both sides," Dr Tellis told NDTV.