Geopolitics is just professional wrestling with higher stakes and worse outfits.

Donald Trump is back in the headlines, huffing about global trade like a landlord who just realized you’ve been running a crypto rig in the basement. This time, he’s looking at India’s receipts for Russian oil. And Asaduddin Owaisi, the veteran firebrand of Indian politics, didn't just push back. He threw the digital equivalent of a brick through a window.

"Who is this gori chamdi wala (white-skinned man) to tell us what to do?" Owaisi asked a crowd, leaning into the kind of raw, identity-driven rhetoric that performs spectacularly well on X and even better in the alleyways of Hyderabad.

It’s a classic collision of two populist styles. You have Trump, the architect of "America First," who views global trade as a zero-sum game played on a spreadsheet he’s the only one allowed to edit. Then you have Owaisi, a man who has built a career on the specific friction of being the ultimate outsider in his own country, now turning that energy toward the ultimate outsider of the West.

The math here isn't complicated, though both sides try to make it look like a moral crusade. Since the invasion of Ukraine, India has been vacuuming up Russian Urals like it's a clearance sale at a closing department store. While the U.S. and its allies slapped a $60-per-barrel price cap on Russian crude, New Delhi looked at its growing energy needs and its 1.4 billion citizens and decided that "strategic autonomy" sounded a lot better than "expensive gas."

India saved roughly $7 billion in the first year of the war by ignoring the West’s finger-wagging. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the difference between a functional economy and a nationwide riot.

Trump’s grievance—and the grievance of the American establishment he occasionally represents when it suits him—is that India is effectively subsidizing the Kremlin’s war machine. But Owaisi’s retort cuts to the bone of a deeper, older resentment. The term "gori chamdi" isn’t just a descriptor; it’s a rejection of the colonial-era dynamic where a guy in a suit in Washington or New York decides what a family in Bihar pays for electricity.

It’s easy to dismiss this as mere theater. Maybe it is. But theater is how policy gets made in the 2020s. We live in an era where the hardware of global trade—tankers, pipelines, insurance waivers—is increasingly at the mercy of the software of outrage.

The friction is specific and jagged. The U.S. wants to leverage the dollar’s dominance to choke off Moscow. India, meanwhile, is busy figuring out how to settle trades in Rupees or Dirhams to bypass the SWIFT system. Every time a U.S. politician threatens sanctions, it just accelerates the development of an alternative financial stack that doesn't report back to the Federal Reserve.

Trump loves a bully pulpit, but Owaisi is reminding him that the pulpit only works if the congregation is still listening. For a large swath of the Global South, the sermon on "democracy vs. autocracy" sounds increasingly like a lecture from a landlord who hasn't fixed the pipes in thirty years.

There’s a certain irony in Trump being the target of this particular brand of populism. He’s the guy who supposedly broke the "globalist" mold, yet here he is, being cast as the face of the very Western hegemony he claims to despise. Owaisi isn't just attacking Trump; he's attacking the idea that the West gets to set the thermostat for the rest of the planet.

This isn't about human rights or the sanctity of borders. It's about a barrel of oil, a discount code from Moscow, and the reality that "America First" has a funny way of teaching everyone else to put themselves first, too.

The tankers will keep moving. The oil will keep flowing through the "shadow fleet" of vessels with obscured ownership and dubious insurance. And politicians will keep finding new ways to turn the price of a gallon of fuel into a referendum on the ghost of colonialism.

If the West wants India to stop buying Russian oil, they’re going to need more than a price cap and a stern look. They’re going to need a better deal. Until then, the rhetoric will only get louder, the insults will get more personal, and the spreadsheets will keep bleeding red.

Which makes you wonder: at what point does "strategic autonomy" just become the new name for a world where no one is actually in charge?