India, Aug. 12 -- The Donald Trump administration has allowed chip manufacturers such as Nvidia and AMD to export their products to China, provided they share 15% of their export revenues with the US government. Such an arrangement is weird - there is no other way to put it - by present-day norms. It can only be compared with imperial charters allowing the likes of East India Company to trade with other countries a couple of centuries ago, in return for tributes to the ruling monarch. However, it would be naive to leave it at that. There is a larger game here. Chip companies do not seem to be complaining about Trump's move and expectedly so. The only option they had other than sharing 15% revenues with the US government, was having no revenues at all. China is too important a market for advanced chips to not be selling. The move allows the Trump administration to protect its rare earth supplies from China - shutting off chip exports risked this - while pocketing some extra revenue that the US desperately needs in the aftermath of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. China will be pretty pleased with itself, having forced Trump and the chip companies to continue the supply of critical hardware, while it faces much lower overall tariffs than what Trump initially had in mind. Other countries, India included, will be watching this. What if Trump demands similar tributes from service sector firms doing business in India? The more Trumponomics plays out, the more it seems like the US is trying to cut deals with China rather than act as a strategic bulwark against it. What clearly seems a bygone is the US that was once a vanguard, champion, and enforcer of a rules-based global economic order....