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Former US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has warned that Washington is "making a big mistake with India," criticising US President Donald Trump's increasingly isolationist trade approach.
Speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics alongside former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Raimondo said the US risks alienating key partners and weakening its global influence.
"On my list of top 20 things that I would be critical of this administration
for is pissing off all of our allies," she said. "America first is one thing.
America alone is a disastrous policy. An America that's not a good friend or
partner or ally to Europe, to Japan, is a weak America. I don't think we can
be effective without strong relationships with Europe or much of Southeast
Asia. And I wish that we would have much stronger commercial relationships
with Europe. I think we're making a big mistake with India."
Her remarks come as India–US trade tensions have grown in recent months, following Washington's decision to impose 50% tariffs on Indian goods, including a 25% penalty for buying Russian oil.
Raimondo, who served as Commerce Secretary under former President Joe Biden, said the US had displayed "hubris" in its dealings with allies and warned that other nations would not wait for Washington to re-engage.
"What we're doing right now is giving the Heisman to the rest of the world," she said. "And if we think they're going to sit around and wait for us to come back, I worry they won't. That's another thing China does well. China is right there every day in Europe, in Africa, in Latin America, in Southeast Asia. And it's such hubris by America to say we're the only ones."
Raimondo also criticised the US industrial and trade policy, saying she had disagreed with both the Biden and Trump administrations over their emphasis on domestic manufacturing.
"I don't agree with the idea that we should make everything in America," she said. "We don't have enough labour, it's not a good at which we have an advantage, and it's not critical to our national security."
She recounted that Biden had pushed to "make everything in America," but that she had cautioned him such a move would raise consumer prices.
"If we try to make everything in America and we don't have the capacity or the labour, inflation will go through the roof," she said.
Raimondo added that both the Biden and Trump administrations had maintained tariffs for political reasons despite their economic costs.
"President Biden kept a number of the tariffs out of that instinct, ‘I want to be on the side of the American worker,'" she said. "If you're a politician, it's tough to take a tariff off once it's on — you're going to be the one that says, ‘I'm not sticking up for the American worker, go ahead, flood the market with cheap imports.' That's a tough political decision."
Turning to China, Raimondo said the US needed a more "nuanced" and strategic approach to avoid escalation.
"What I see this administration doing is just making moves with China that are escalatory without even thinking about the next move that China might make," she said. "We have almost $700 billion of trade with China, 99% of which is in commodity goods. We have to manage this relationship and have a long-term view, operate from a position of strength, and get better at nuance."
