We have issues… but focus is on potential in India-US ties: Jared Kushner

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US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner sought to play down trade tensions with India on Thursday even as a senior official separately acknowledged the Trump administration was so frustrated over the differences that it was prepared to deploy a punitive trade tool first used against China.

“When we look at India we see a country with such amazing potential and we see the relationship between America and India as one with boundless potential,” Kushner said at a discussion hosted by the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, an advocacy group promoting ties between the two countries.

“We still have some issues we have to work through,” he added in an obvious reference to the trade tensions that his father-in-law and boss, US President Donald Trump, has agitated frequently in remarks and tweets which have been echoed by trade hawks in the administration.

“But we are all focussed on the tremendous potential” of the relationship, Kushner added, downplaying the dispute in his first appearance at an India event after moving into the White House as one of its most influential officials. Kushner has been entrusted with so many tasks by the president that he has been called the “secretary of everything”.

But Kushner disputed, lightly, that the Thursday event was his first India event. “This is not my first India-US strategic dialogue,” he said, playing on the tag line that had headlined official level talks for years. His roommate in college was from India and he spent some time in India growing up and has many friends from Mumbai and New Delhi.

Kushner went on to speak more broadly and extensively about US President Trump’s vision for the country and the world, but his remarks about trade differences that are being portrayed as having pushed ties to an ‘inflection point”, or a “pivotal” and a “critical” juncture were found reassuring.

On stage before Kushner, Jeffrey Gerrish, a known trade hawk who is the No 2 trade negotiator for the US as deputy US Trade Representative, had said, in the first official acknowledgement of a widely speculate next in escalating trade tensions, “We believe that we should use the full range of trade tools including Section 301 where warranted.”.

Gerrish was referring to a US trade instrument that was invoked by US President Trump in 2017 to order an investigation into China’s trade practices that led eventually to the US announcing the first round of tariffs, which, in turn, set off a trade war between the world’s largest economies.

He went to qualify his remarks saying it was too early at this stage of engagement with the new government in New Delhi — same leader, but different interlocutors — to talk of next-steps but he doubled down on the rhetorics to insist this time there will be no “open-ended discussions, and time is of the essence”.

Though known to be a tough trade negotiator, as acknowledged grudgingly even by his Indian counterparts, Gerrish shocked both sides with the timing of his remarks: He has a team of USTR officials on the ground in New Delhi for the first official-level meeting after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump decided in Osaka, on the sidelines of the G-20, to address the relationship’s biggest irritant.

In a new opening for de-escalation, Gerrish said, prompted by the moderator, that India could post a sign of good intent and a confidence building measure by conceding the market access demands at the heart of the discussions related to a special trade status that the US took away from India June.

“If there was a resolution of those issues, they would be a confidence building measure,” said Gerrish, who argued that market access issues generally — and to dairy and medical devices sectors specifically, in the context of the special trade status under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), were those that could be resolved quickly.

The Thursday event turned out to be, however, about Kushner, who it is being hoped would emerge as a champion for ties with India, taking it under his wings as he has other tasks, initiatives and priorities of the Trump administration such as West Asia, US-Mexico-Canada trade deal and immigration.