The United States will impose a 25 percent tariff on India beginning Aug. 1, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday. Despite five rounds of negotiations, India has so far been unable to secure a better deal. And with the new rate being a mere 1 percentage point less than the original amount threatened in April, Washington is demonstrating that it seeks an aggressive strategy to help curb the United States’ trade deficit with India.
“Remember, while India is our friend, we have, over the years, done relatively little business with them because their Tariffs are far too high, among the highest in the World, and they have the most strenuous and obnoxious non-monetary Trade Barriers of any Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday. In 2024, India was the United States’ 10th largest trading partner, and the U.S. trade deficit with the country was $45.7 billion.
Alongside a 25 percent tariff, Trump threatened on Wednesday to impose an additional “penalty” for India’s continued purchasing of Russian oil, energy, and military equipment. It is unclear what that penalty might be, but experts believe that it may consist of the 100 percent secondary tariff that the White House has threatened to place on some of Russia’s biggest trading partners, including China, India, and Brazil.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Moscow has become India’s largest oil supplier. And between January and June of this year, Russia accounted for about 35 percent of India’s total oil supplies, according to Reuters data. As Trump’s efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine have failed and the U.S. president has begun to lose patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intransigence, there has been a growing appetite in Washington to cut off that vital source of revenue to pressure the Kremlin to get serious about peace.
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