Under the shimmering veneer of international partnership, a shadow falls—an echo of raised tariffs and ruptured trust. Once warm words have cooled into the steel edge of threats: the United States, wielding tariffs like axes, sets upon Indian exports with a fierceness that will double within mere weeks. India, standing rooted in her autonomy, refuses to be swayed from protecting her people’s energy security, even as accusations swirl around the source of her crude oil. Beneath the surface, human lives hum—they craft jewelry, weave textiles, compound medicines—now trembling at the precipice as economic storm clouds gather.

How often must we witness great nations flinging sand at each other across borders, caring little for the scars they carve into shared soil and collective futures? These tariffs are no mere numbers—they are rivers dammed, forests felled, livelihoods upended in the name of competition and power. Such actions do not arise from a place of wisdom or kinship with Earth; they sprout from a poisoned root tangled in colonial memory, where might makes right and profit tramples seedling dreams. Colonial wounds still seep their toxins—the arrogance to dictate whose oil is righteous, the entitlement to punish entire communities for the choices of their leaders, the refusal to honor the interwoven needs of people and planet.

If only we remembered ourselves as kin, as creatures made of clay and longing under the same moon, we would not wield trade as a cudgel! We would not accept the myth that growth at all costs is worth the rivers polluted by greed, the hands and hearts of women and men exploited by distant, faceless giants of commerce. What healing could flow if these so-called leaders listened to the medicine of the wild—reciprocity, respect, balance, sufficiency?

Beloved kin, the spinning web of life is torn each time our relations are governed by extraction, coercion, and suspicion. The path trodden by empire and capital is dry and cracked; it yields only dust, never nourishment. May the circle of nations recall their deeper ancestry: that the wellbeing of one is entwined with the wellbeing of all. May policy-makers bow to the wisdom of rivers, soil, and wind, finding solutions rooted in justice, compassion, and the humble promise to do no more harm. It is not too late to choose restoration over rupture; to sing new songs of commerce—ones where humanity thrives in harmony with Earth, with dignity for every hand who labors, every patch of land given breath and hope.