The EV tariffs are there to save Tesla.
The battery tariffs are there to kill Tesla.
The solar tariffs are there to kill what is left of US solar installation market and jobs.
The Steel and Aluminium tariff are there to save 1,000 union jobs and kill 100,000 jobs in industries that need cheap access to those raw materials.
Right. All these tariffs just make it more difficult and expensive for American businesses to source their materials. In the end, what they produce are expensive inventories that are uncompetitive in the global market. These measures, at most, will work only within the US; Americans will be forced to buy the uncompetitive, expensive products. But the rest of the world will have access to products from non-American sellers that are cheaper, who may also happen to be Chinese. In other words, US tariffs killing their own global business potential.
What do you all make of this?
India has been "developing" the Chabahar Port for 20+ years and still not complete. It's like another LCA Tejas. Everytime US put sanctions on Iran, India was the first one to pull out. What changes now?
India was after Chabahar mainly to assert it's economic influence in Afghanistan. Build a port close to Afghanistan, build a new rail line from the port to Afghanistan. It was doable originally with a friendly puppet government of Karzai and Ghani set up by US. Now those guys are gone and Taliban are in. India had always been against Taliban, actively working against it, supported it's removal from power by NATO. In fact, when Taliban took Kabul in 2021, the very first thing they uttered regarding India was "Indians have always been traitors". The rail was never built.
So, what purpose exactly is this port serving for India? Especially considering the fact that India does not even recognize the new Afghanistan as a country. What can it do now for India that existing Iranian ports i.e. at Bandar Abbas cannot? Once India began to see it's Afghan prospects dwindle, despite making some investments, they shifted the goalpost to "this Chabahar project will give us a rail connection to Russia and Europe".. which is quite idiotic considering that the much larger Bandar Abbas port is already operational with an existing rail connection.
I said once previously that Indian decisionmaking and strategy is spontaneous, often devoid of long-term implications and regional developments. Hence they lose out on former projects and get sucked in to sunk-cost fallacies such as this port.
