US, Oct. 6 -- In the space of a single weekend, the world offered a fairly complete inventory of its disorder. Washington warned Tehran that its next move would come the easy way or the hard way. Energy markets, shaken by the West Asia conflict, refused to settle. And a new American statute sat on the books empowering the President to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on countries that keep buying Russian oil. Against that backdrop, what stood out about India's two senior voices at the Munich Leaders Meeting in New Delhi was how unhurried they sounded.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the gathering that the India-US trade negotiations had reached a plateau, beyond which further give and take "might be very, very difficult." I...