AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: U.S. tariffs on more than 90 countries took effect today, raising import taxes to the highest levels since the Great Depression. They range from 15% on imports from countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Iceland and Nigeria, to up to 50% on India and Brazil. President Trump slapped India with one of the highest tariff rates, which are set to go into effect on August 27th, to pressure India to stop buying Russian oil. Separately, President Trump tied Brazil’s tariffs of 50% to punish Brazil for putting former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro on trial for his 2022 coup attempt. Trump has called Bolsonaro’s prosecution a “witch hunt.” Bolsonaro was placed under house arrest earlier this week.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to New Delhi, India. We’re joined by Jayati Ghosh, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, previously an economics professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where she taught for 35 years.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! So, you have President Trump imposing 25% tariff on India, to go up to 50% because they’re buying Russian oil. China is also buying Russian oil. They’re not doing the same with China. Talk about what this means for India and why you see Lula in Brazil’s response to Trump as a good example of what India should do — defying him.

JAYATI GHOSH: Well, as you said, there is — there’s so many double standards in this particular recent announcement of Trump, because it’s not just that other countries, like China, are buying Russian oil. The European Union is buying Russian oil. The U.S. is buying various Russian exports, including minerals of different kinds, uranium and so on. So, you know, basically, Trump has picked on this particular one to raise at this point. It could be anything tomorrow, just as he’s announced he doesn’t like BRICS, and any country that’s going to join BRICS is going to suffer for it. So, even if we say, “OK, we’ll stop buying Russian oil,” he could well say, “Well, you’re still in BRICS, so until you leave BRICS, I’m going to actually slap more tariffs on you,” or he could say, “I don’t like anything you’re doing internally in terms of your own justice system or your political system, so I will slap more tariffs on you.” This can go on forever. And it’s becoming not just ridiculous, but a bit bizarre, I would say.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you’ve said, Professor Ghosh, that India has not responded the way it might have, and has made too many concessions to the U.S. If you could talk about what those concessions were, when Prime Minister Modi and Foreign Minister Jaishankar were here in the U.S. earlier this year?

JAYATI GHOSH: Well, you know, we don’t have good information on this, because this is all hearsay. It depends on, you know, basically, what we get to know, because none of this is made available to the Indian public.

But, obviously, what happened was that immediately after the threats, the great Liberation Day threats of early April, the prime minister and the external affairs minister, Mr. Jaishankar, they actually presented India as willing to make many concessions. And this has been something that President Trump himself actually pointed out, saying that “There are all these countries coming and kissing my ass and saying, ’We’ll do anything, sir. We’ll do anything.’” They agreed to a rushed trade deal. I’m very, very very glad that that hasn’t happened, because it would have been very much against India’s interests. They agreed to a range of concessions, which we are unaware of at the moment.

We do know there are some red lines that even they have not dared to cross, particularly Indian agriculture. The U.S. has lost a lot of agricultural exports because of the bans on China and that China itself has imposed in retaliation to the U.S. And soybean farmers in the U.S. are hurting. Various farmers are hurting. And they want to push those highly subsidized agricultural products onto India, where agriculture is still livelihood for around half of our population, very, very poor, small farmers, and basically would get wiped out by extremely subsidized multinational agribusinesses shoving a lot of their products into the Indian market. So, that’s an absolute red line for India. There should be many more red lines.

I’m hoping that this latest very ridiculous demand will actually put some steel in the spine of the Indian government. It already seems to have reacted, I think, sensibly. We know that the Lula government, the South African government — I mean, everybody is actually, shall we say, rethinking any kind of deal they may strike with the U.S. at the moment, because it’s also evident that even if you strike a deal, it’s not safe. You never know what the president of the U.S. is going to decide tomorrow, and whether then he will say, you know, “That’s off. I’m now going to impose some other punishment on you, because you’ve done this.”

AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t it President Biden that encouraged India to buy Russian oil?

JAYATI GHOSH: Yes. You know, the Russian oil example is so, so typical of the double standards of the U.S. When Biden imposed those sanctions, they encouraged India to buy oil from Russia, so long as it remained under the $60 cap, precisely because they wanted to keep the global oil price down. So, they wanted to harm Russia without destabilizing global oil prices, because it’s such a sensitive thing within the U.S. economy. And so they actively encouraged India to import from Russia, and they knew full well that a lot of those imports were then being, effectively, processed and reexported back to the European Union. So, now for the Trump administration to claim that this is horrifying and shocking and so on, it’s really — shall we say, it’s not very convincing.

And let’s face it: We also don’t know three months from now whether Russia will still be an enemy or will become a friend again. Mr. Trump loved Mr. Putin a few months ago and thought that Russia was the victim in that particular conflict. The whole thing may change in a few months, and he may decide that China is now the bigger enemy, and Russia is our friend again. So, you know, in this kind of context, for any country to hope that a trade deal, on often really adverse terms, with the U.S. is something that is going to stick and that is something that will actually benefit them in the medium term is ridiculous.

AMY GOODMAN: Jayati Ghosh, we want to thank you for being with us, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, speaking to us from New Delhi, India.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Up next. Israel may soon expand its assault on Gaza to a full military takeover of the area. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “King Tide and the Sunny Day Flood” by Billy Bragg in our Democracy Now! studio.