IMAGE: EVAN VUCCI/REUTERS
IMAGINE A prime minister who treats foreign investment as a personal negotiation. Who picks up the phone to a neighbouring finance minister and asks, directly, for a transmission line to be approved by Tuesday. Who invites a foreign infrastructure fund to lunch and makes the sale himself. The image feels un-Nepalese, almost undiplomatic. But it describes Donald Trump’s method, and it contains a truth that Kathmandu cannot afford to ignore.
Mr Trump has turned Air Force One into a flying sales desk. In the past year Boeing has secured hundreds of billions of dollars in prospective jet orders, from Qatar, South Korea, Turkey and most recently China: each deal announced alongside a foreign leader’s visit. Some of those commitments are non-binding. Some recycle old backlog. The $3.6trn investment figure Mr Trump once touted from a Middle East tour melted under scrutiny.
Yet the process works. When a head of government tells a chief executive, “I want your factory here”, the state moves faster than any inter-agency working group ever could.
Balenendra Shah, Nepal’s youngest prime minister, took office on March 27th with something his predecessors have lacked for a generation: a single-party majority. The Rastriya Swatantra Party holds 182 of 275 parliamentary seats. That is democratic gold. But the Asian Development Bank expects Nepal to grow at just 2.7% in 2026, dragged down by political unrest and the spillovers from Middle East’s conflicts. The gap between mandate and inheritance is brutal.
Mr Shah’s manifesto promises to turn Nepal from a buffer state into a bridge between its two giant, nuclear-armed neighbours, using balanced diplomacy to chase development. His foreign minister has told ambassadors that economic diplomacy is the priority. Nearly two months in, however, there have been no bilateral meetings with world leaders; no high-profile visits. The government has looked inward, towards anti-corruption drives. Admirable instincts. But they alone do not attract capital.
Here is the Trump lesson stripped of its bluster. Investment follows personal conviction, and conviction follows personal relationship. When a prime minister sits across from a CEO and says, “I want your business here”, the conversation sheds its bureaucracy. Boeing’s own chief executive admitted as much: Mr Trump’s focus on international campaigns, he told investors, had been strikingly successful. Nepal does not need a travelling sales office on a presidential jet. It needs a prime minister who understands that diplomatic niceties are no substitute for a direct ask.
Yes, Nepal’s structural problems run deep. Foreign direct investment stood at under 0.5% of GDP in 2025. Hydropower projects stall on land-acquisition delays. Tourism was recovering until the Gulf conflict rattled travel from the Middle East. Cutting approval timelines, reforming land laws, making the one-stop investment window actually function: these boring fixes are unavoidable.
But the structural and the personal are false opposites. A leader who personally presses India’s finance minister for a cross-border power line, who hosts a Japanese infrastructure fund in Kathmandu and sits through the meeting, who treats Nepal’s hydropower surplus as a commodity to be sold at the highest levels: that is not radical. In other words, that is what effective economic diplomacy has always looked like. Mr Trump simply made how things work easier to see.
But the drawbacks are just as easy to see. America brings market access, security guarantees and advanced technology to the table. Nepal, not so much. Mr Shah cannot threaten tariffs or withdraw a military umbrella. What he can offer is a stable, well-governed corridor between two of the world’s three largest economies. That proposition has been rhetorically appealing for years without ever being operationally credible. His majority is the first real chance to make it credible. Credibility accrues slowly and squanders fast.
Nepal graduates from least-developed-country status in November. That transition will strip away trade preferences and force the country to compete on its own terms. The graduation clock and the investment urgency tick together. Mr Shah has roughly 18 months of political capital at its most abundant, before governance’s inevitable attrition sets in and novelty calcifies into routine. Mr Trump, for all his many flaws, has never mistaken governing for waiting. That is one lesson Kathmandu can afford to borrow. The other is what happens when the salesmanship outruns the substance. ■
