Trump and Modi are both swaggering right-wing populists with limited tolerance for opposition. They should have no trouble getting along, right?
The problem is that Modi wants to be the unquestioned boss of India, but Trump sees himself as the boss of the entire world. The two aspirations are incompatible. Friction was the inevitable result.
Two observations are pertinent here. First, as I’ve noted many times before, the notion of an enduring international coalition of nationalists is logically ridiculous, because no nationalist leader is going to agree to subordinate his country’s interests to someone else. Second, history provides evidence for the point; the high-water mark for extreme nationalism was the 1930s, and you know how that turned out.