Who is Peter Navarro? Why is he angry with India, and rest of the world?

Though not shocked, many Indians were surprised when US President Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro trained his guns on India. A known baiter of China, he has apparently gone soft on Beijing, turning hawkish on India instead.

On August 18, he wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Times, saying India’s purchases of Russian oil were funding Moscow’s war on Ukraine, which had to stop. He wrote: “India acts as a global clearinghouse for Russian oil, converting embargoed crude into high-value exports while giving Moscow the dollars it needs.”

'Laundromat for Kremlin'

Four days later, talking to reporters in Washington, he not only ruled out any relief from the additional 25 per cent US tariff applicable from August 27, but also called India “a laundromat for the Kremlin” for importing Russian oil it didn’t need but for running a “profit-sharing scheme”.

He characterised India’s trade policies as “Maharaja tariffs and high non-tariff barriers”, and disapproved of India “cosying up to (Chinese President) Xi Jinping”.

Also read: Peter Navarro slams India over Russian oil purchase, trade tariffs

This is a bad sign for India. In May 2025, CNN explained when and why Trump deploys Navarro (selectively). It wrote: “Trump has long viewed Navarro’s public appearances through a strategic lens — one designed to drive a hardline or unrelenting message…deployed to push back sharply against any perception of weakness.”

Softer on China

Navarro isn’t attacking China the same way, having conceded implicitly earlier that the US couldn’t act against China because the latter had leverage on it. China is the largest buyer of Russian oil; India is next. The US’s softness towards China was, however, explained by Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary, last Tuesday (August 19).

He said China merely “diversified” its oil import — from buying 13 per cent of Russian oil before the Ukraine war to 16 per cent now — while India was “profiteering” by buying cheap Russian oil and reselling it as products — its import of Russian oil rising from less than 1 per cent before the war to 42 per cent later. He also added: “They’ve made $16 billion in excess profits — some of the richest families in India.”

Navarro may have surprised India by attacking it for buying Russian oil but his advocacy for reciprocal tariff is well known and rooted in his firm belief that the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage is long dead and the world needs to “reimagine and reengineer its models of trade so that they conform far better to the realities of the international trading arena”.

In fact, he had loftily declared, in a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School in April 2019: “Ricardo is indeed dead. Under President Trump, long live free, fair, and balanced trade.”

Before explaining why Navarro thinks as he does, here is a brief backgrounder on him.

How did Navarro land in Trump’s orbit?

Navarro is a 76-year-old economist, holding the position of Director in the White House’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy (OTMP). The White House describes his duties as advising Trump “on policies to increase economic growth, decrease the trade deficit, and strengthen Americas’ manufacturing and defense industrial bases… reform the conventional arms transfer and unmanned aerial systems policies of the United States, and to expand foreign military sales to our Nation’s partners and allies”.

Son of a musician, Navarro grew up in the East Coast and had a tough childhood, as his parents were divorced when he was barely 10. Raised by his mother, he did odd jobs, including at gas stations, and went on to earn a PhD from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation wasn’t on trade but on corporations’ charity motives. He has had a long academic career teaching economics and public policy at the University of California (where he continues as professor emeritus). Until about a decade ago, he had remained “a little-known academic nearing retirement”, a commentator wrote recently.

Also read: Trump nominates close aide Sergio Gor as next US ambassador to India

Political runs

Navarro entered politics as a liberal Democrat, championing the cause of the environment. He ran for political offices several times in the 1990s, all ending unsuccessfully, before turning into a conservative Republican political adviser.

The change happened in the early 2000s.

It is said that he noticed his former students facing difficulty in landing and holding on to good jobs — which he would later ascribe to China flooding the US with cheap products, “thereby beginning to put Americans like my MBA students out of work”.

He has authored several books but a particular one stands out (and relevant here).

‘Death by China’

Titled Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action, it was published in 2011 with fellow academic at the UC and a space policy expert Greg Autry.

In the book, they detailed how China’s “perverse brand” of “state capitalism” had “totally shredded the principles of both free markets and free trade” by deploying “a potent mix of mercantilist and protectionist weapons to pick off America’s industries job by job and one by one”.

They listed China’s “weapons of job destruction” to include “massive illegal export subsidies, the rampant counterfeiting of US intellectual property, pitifully lax environmental protections and the pervasive use of slave labour”.

They wrote: “The centerpiece of Chinese mercantilism is, however, a shamelessly manipulated currency that heavily taxes US manufacturers, extravagantly stimulates Chinese exports, and has led to a ticking time bomb US-China trade deficit close to a billion dollars a day.”

Navarro, and Ron Vara

Reports say, Navarro had quoted an expert in this book, named Ron Vara, and later admitted that this was made up and an anagram of “Navarro.”

Also read: Jaishankar to US on Russian oil: Don’t like it? Don’t buy it

Accounts vary about how Navarro came to Trump’s orbit.

One account says, in 2016, Trump reportedly asked his son-in-law Jared Kushner to research on China, which led to the latter’s discovery of Navarro-Autry’s book (Death by China) on Amazon, and Navarro ended up advising Trump’s campaign. Another says, Trump’s relationship dated back to 2011, five years before Kushner discovered Navarro and invited him to join the campaign.

‘Ricardo is indeed dead’

At the April 2019 Harvard Kennedy School speech mentioned earlier, he dismissed British political economist David Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory of 1817, which argued in favour of global free trade on the premise that so long as countries specialise in what they make most efficiently, free trade benefits all.

The Ricardian theory of trade continues to hold sway for all these years and is supported by most mainstream economists in the US and India.

But Navarro argued that it no longer worked well in today’s real world.

He explained, in his speech, that this theory “no longer (has) any relevance in global markets dominated by industrial espionage, rampant cheating, intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, state capitalism, and currency misalignments”.

Tirade against China

He said it wasn’t based on “the possibility that one or both trading partners will lie, spy, cheat, or steal” and went on to list China’s alleged malpractices to illustrate — hacking to learn trade secrets, grabbing market share with cheap goods to put American companies out of business, manipulating its currency, apart from flooding counterfeit goods and contraband like fentanyl into the US. Trump’s policy goal, he explained, was to eliminate contraband and counterfeits to save American lives and create American jobs.

He also explained why he advocates reciprocal tariffs.

Analysing the WTO’s most-favoured-nations (MFN) rule, he said it essentially required non-discrimination but “nothing in the MFN rule requires a WTO member to provide equal — that is reciprocal or mirror — tariff rates to trading partners”, “members are free to charge systematically higher tariffs to other countries, so long as they do that to everybody else”.

Also read: What India can learn from Brazil, others facing Trump’s tariff tantrums

'America, the piggy bank'

In this system, he asserted, the countries that get hurt most are those that have the lowest average tariffs like the US. Talking about trade deficits, he said, “America, the piggy bank, will continue to be plundered by a trade deficit that transfers more than half a trillion dollars of American wealth a year into foreign hands”. He also dismissed “conventional, fossilized wisdom propagated right here in academia” — that is, “trade deficits don’t matter”.

Surely, mainstream economists don’t take him seriously. Trump and Navarro tried to launch a trade war with China in 2018 and also threatened India but none of it went far. Some ascribe that to more mainstream economic advisers prevailing in the Trump administration.

He dismissed Musk as carmaker

Navarro has earned many sobriquets in the past few years.

Steve Bannon, media executive who served as chief strategist in Trump’s first administration for a few months, had described Navarro as “honey badger” for his relentless and unapologetic push for policies that appeal to Trump’s base voters in a forward of Navarro’s another book.

Navarro’s other colleagues have described him variously, in their books, as “eccentric”, “dogged and prescient”, “intemperate”, a “trade warrior”, with a reputation for “rudeness, ignorance and dishonesty”, etc.

He has faced stiff opposition from many insiders but has survived. Trump is known to defend Navarro by saying: “He went to jail for me.”

Navarro reportedly promoted the theory that the 2021 election, which Trump lost, was rigged. He even rebuffed the congressional committee hearing on the attack on the US Capitol, found him guilty of contempt, following which he spent four months in prison.

Public spat

More recently, he had a public spat with Elon Musk.

Also read: Amid Trump's tariff war, Modi’s Tokyo visit to cement India-Japan strategic ties

In April, Navarro dismissed Musk in an interview as “not a car manufacturer” but “a car assembler, in many cases”.

Musk hit back, calling him a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in his posts on X.

Navarro kept his counsel, saying “I’ve been called worse”. Today, he continues to enjoy Trump’s trust and pushes for reciprocal tariffs on the rest of the world to bridge the US trade deficit, while Musk is out of Trump’s charmed circle.