White House is ‘close’ on Japan, India tariff agreements — but expect them to be light on specifics

It “may take months to hammer out the final deals,” said one of the people, conceding, “these things are complicated.”

It’s the clearest sign yet of how President Donald Trump and his top economic officials plan to tackle the gargantuan task they have bitten off: negotiating individual agreements with more than 60 trading partners to head off the steep tariffs the president has threatened to impose in early July. And it shows an awareness within the White House that they need to do more to reassure businesses and financial markets that they have an endgame in sight for the trade wars that have rocked the global economy — and could inflict even more pain in the coming months.

Vice President JD Vance hinted at such an approach in a speech in Jaipur, India Tuesday, saying Washington and New Delhi are “hard at work on a trade agreement,” and noting that he and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “made very good progress” in a meeting on Monday. The vice president’s office issued a statement Monday saying the U.S. and India had finalized the “terms of reference” for the talks but declined to elaborate on what that involved.

It’s unclear to what extent announcing frameworks for future deals will calm markets and stave off political backlash to the continued economic turmoil.

“I wouldn’t even call them deals,” another person close to the White House said of the frameworks the administration is looking to announce. “Basically, [it’s] an agreement that we would like to talk about doing a deal.”

“They’re going to start rolling out a bunch of stuff that just says, you know, we’re signing something that says we’re going to start talks,” they added.

A spokesperson for the White House referred questions about a trade agreement with India to the vice president’s Tuesday remarks and did not respond to further requests for comment on negotiations with Japan.

A representative for the Indian embassy referred POLITICO to the country’s statement from Monday that hailed “significant progress” in negotiations, but did not provide details.

A spokesperson for the Japanese embassy declined to comment. But the Japanese government has been adamant in recent weeks that it won’t rush into a trade deal with the U.S., even after Trump met personally with one of the country’s top trade advisers last week.

“We do not intend to make one compromise after another to conclude negotiations swiftly,” Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told his parliament last week, according to regional media. More meetings are planned this month.

Trump announced “reciprocal tariffs” as high as 50 percent on more than 50 countries and the 27-member European Union on April 2 — which the White House had promoted as “Liberation Day” — in the most significant U.S. protectionist trade action since the 1930s. The president has argued the tariffs are necessary to reset decades of trade imbalances and rebuild the U.S. manufacturing sector, but the announcement shocked political leaders in the U.S. and abroad and caused a sharp downturn in financial markets.

As warnings of economic calamity grew louder, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the higher tariffs on most countries on April 9, just a day after they went into effect, while ratcheting up the tariffs on Chinese goods to a total of 145 percent. The pause stopped the immediate panic, but the economic uncertainty has lingered. Some economists have indicated that the U.S. may still be headed toward a recession and consumer sentiment about the economy has plummeted over the past three months.

The White House is under pressure to show meaningful progress on trade deals, as markets remain anxious amid continued uncertainty about tariffs, as well as Trump’s threats to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped nearly 1,000 points on Monday — and appears headed for its worst April since 1932.

“There’s a range of economic indicators putting pressure on the market, and business leaders and investors are looking for signs of progress,” said Kevin Madden, a senior partner at Penta Group, a business consultancy. “Congressional allies want to be able to point to some broad frameworks being agreed to. At the very least it helps provide some momentum, as well as some political breathing room, for the current policy approach.”

But speed can mean negotiations aren’t as thorough and don’t have lasting effects, according to Wendy Cutler, a former negotiator in the U.S. Trade Representative’s office who is the vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“If the president thinks we have a lot of leverage with these tariffs, why not take the time and really think through our asks to these countries so we can conclude meaningful agreements that will be durable and continue to govern the trade and investment relationship for the years ahead, versus maybe one-off agreements that may be more transactional in nature?” Cutler said.

The people briefed on the talks with India and Japan said that the agreements are expected to be structured to imply that the United States is the countries’ major trading partner, not China — though one cautioned the language will contain significant and purposeful ambiguity.

Any agreement that pressures China’s Asian neighbors to restrict trade with its regional allies is likely to face major blowback. Both India and Japan have deep economic ties with China, and are under intensifying pressure from Beijing not to make major concessions to Washington.

In a statement issued Monday, the Chinese Commerce Ministry warned, “China is firmly opposed to any party striking a deal at the expense of the Chinese side,” and suggested negotiating with the U.S. was akin to bargaining with a tiger for its skin, “which is ultimately counterproductive and detrimental to others as well as to oneself.”

Felicia Schwartz contributed to this report.