Greer says an India trade deal is in the short strokes and nothing is imminent

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Thursday that a trade deal with India is not imminent, even as he described the talks as close to done. Speaking to reporters after the G20 trade ministers' meeting in Milwaukee, he said the two sides had identified the universe of items that are sticking, that staff were meeting while India's team was in the country, and that President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi might speak again very soon to judge progress.

The meeting Greer was describing had happened the evening before, on the sidelines of the same G20 gathering. Commerce minister Piyush Goyal posted on X that he had held a productive discussion with Greer toward an early conclusion of a mutually beneficial interim agreement under the India-US bilateral trade talks. Greer's public line the next morning was more guarded. "We are continually trying to finish the trade deal with India. I would characterise it, as we say in the US, we're in the short strokes. So I think we're toward the end of it," he said. Short strokes is a golf figure for the last putts. It is not a date.

The gap between the two sentences is the story. Goyal's phrase was early conclusion. Greer's was nothing imminent, plus a list of sticking points already mapped. Both can describe the same room. An interim agreement has been the working target for months, a smaller text than a full bilateral deal, meant to cover a first basket of tariffs and market access while the rest waits. Greer did not name the basket. He did say the universe of difficult items is known, which is negotiator language for a text that has stopped growing and started shedding clauses.

The Milwaukee meeting followed a call between Modi and Trump on Wednesday. The two leaders reviewed trade, defence, energy and critical technologies. Energy remains the exposed flank because India has kept buying Russian crude. A trade text that does not touch that oil, or that tries to, will read differently in Washington and in New Delhi. Greer did not say oil was on the sticking-point list. He also did not say it was off it.

Food was the subject he did address in the G20 hall. In his opening remarks he said coercive trade actions on food, agricultural products and agricultural inputs carry serious consequences for economies and the people in them. Goyal, in the same discussion on the weaponisation of food, said the shared aim should be that food remains a source of security, stability and cooperation. Those lines are about export bans and input controls, not about the bilateral tariff schedule. They sit in the same week as the bilateral meeting because both ministers were in Milwaukee for the G20, and the bilateral was arranged around it.

What a reader can take from Thursday is a sequence. Wednesday, a leaders' call. Wednesday evening, ministers in Milwaukee, with Goyal calling it a step to an early interim deal. Thursday, Greer saying the end is visible, a further leaders' call may come soon, and nothing is imminent. Staff talks continue while the Indian team is still in the United States. The next public marker is that call, if it happens, or a text, if one appears. Neither was on the table when Greer stopped speaking.