Tariffs are back, industrial policy is fashionable again and over the past year the United States, the country that helped build and maintain the open trading system, has spent its energy tearing holes in it, taxing allies and rivals alike. The popular verdict in India is grim: a global trade war is on, the rules-based order is finished and we are caught in the crossfire. But is that really what's happening?

In this episode of the Turbulence podcast, Devashish Mitra, Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs, provides a bracing answer on two counts. Tariffs, he argues, can't do what they promise: trade balances are governed by macroeconomics, not trade policy, and the cost of a tariff falls largely on the country that imposes it.

And for India, the more uncomfortable truth is that the binding constraint was never Washington, but it's India's own protectionism. The conversation runs from Trump's tariffs to the wider drift toward industrial policy and “friend-shoring,” to what the future of trade might look like and what India should actually do about it.