99% work done on trade deal, tariffs and visa curbs not targeted at India: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Signalling an outreach towards India and seeking to assuage concerns, visiting US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday said the tariffs are not meant to “punish India” and the visa restrictions are “not targeted” at the country.

In an exclusive interview with The Indian Express, Rubio said the India-US trade deal is “incredibly close”. The two countries have been holding negotiations for more than a year-and-a-half now.

“I think we’re incredibly close. The way I would say it is, we are weeks, not months, away from, I think, finalising it. I think 99% of the work is done. The remaining factor, you have to have 100% done. But I feel very positive of the trajectory that it’s on,” he said.

“I don’t want to get into the details of the sticking points. I can simply tell you that it’s there. I won’t call them technicalities, but it’s language related. It’s basically down to what certain words mean and what certain phrases mean,” he said.

On the US’s earlier decision to target countries importing Russian oil and gas with up to 100% tariffs — President Donald Trump announced a waiver last week — and whether it co­uld affect economic ties, Rubio said: “I mean, it can. There’s no doubt about it, and that’s why it has to be managed. It has to be managed very carefully, and that’s why the relationship we have is so critical. We certainly don’t want to do things. None of these tariffs are done to punish or to harm India.”

Speaking on the US administration’s visa restrictions, he said, “We are trying to fix 20 years of neglect of an immigration system that was simply not being enforced, and that’s not targeted at India.”

Looking back at his almost two years as US Secretary of State, Rubio said India-US ties have been “positive” and the Quad was an example of “very strong cooperation” with India, which is beginning to “actually turn ideas into action”.

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When asked about the Trump administration being soft on China, he rejected the perception. “Soft is not the right terminology…the attitude of this administration has been to try to find a level of strategic stability in our relationship with them,” he said. He added that a US-China trade war would be “devastating to the global economy” and would “impact India”.

Allaying Indian concerns on the Trump administration’s relations with Pakistan’s generals, Rubio said: “What everyone should be assured of in India is that our relationship, not just with Pakistan but with any country in the world, will never come at the expense of our relationship. We don’t view it that way in our relationship with India.”

© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd

Shubhajit Roy, Diplomatic Editor at The Indian Express, has been a journalist for more than 27 years now. Roy joined The Indian Express in October 2003 and has been reporting and writing explainers and analysis on foreign affairs for about 19 years now. Based in Delhi, he has also led the National government and political bureau at The Indian Express in Delhi — a team of reporters who cover the national government and politics for the newspaper. He has got the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award for Excellence in Journalism ‘2016. He got this award for his coverage of the Holey Bakery attack in Dhaka and its aftermath. He won the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award, 2023, for the second time for his reporting of the Oct 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza. He also got the IIMCAA Award for the Journalist of the Year, 2022, (Jury’s special mention) for his coverage of the fall of Kabul in August 2021 — he was one of the few Indian journalists in Kabul and the only mainstream newspaper to have covered the Taliban’s capture of power in mid-August, 2021. ... Read More