US President Donald Trump’s penchant for midnight tweets and their ability to wreck Washington’s ties with some of its close allies like Germany and Australia might not be giving sleepless nights to Indian policy planners, but is certainly an issue that has begun to bother them.
South Block’s keenness that the first-ever meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and POTUS gets off to a flying start on June 26 could well come to naught by one such devastating tweet—his favourite medium of communication. Trump’s short barbs against Chancellor Angela Merkel and Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull had embarrassed the two governments in recent months, after he decided to make public their differences.
But many more in South Block are worried about Trump’s disruptive, disjointed politics, prompted largely out of domestic compulsion that has led him to overturn most of the policy initiatives of Barack Obama. Be it the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) or Iran or Cuba, Trump is mowing through every single foreign policy move of...
