Cowboys and Indians

WHEN ENGLISH COLONISTS turned up on the coast of North America in the late 1500s, they encountered locals who had been living there for millennia. The Anglo-Saxon English, fleeing persecu­tion at home, called them Red Indians. Red because their skin appeared bronze. Indian because Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, who had got there earlier, called the inhabitants of the New World “Indians”. Columbus had sailed west (instead of east) to find the land of fabled riches known as India. The name stuck.

Five hundred years later, most Red Indians (now correctly called Native Americans) had been exterminated or pushed into impoverished reservations. But for the newly wealthy Anglo-Saxon Americans, there was the real India on the other side of the globe that needed geopolitical attention in an unsettled world order.

The US has struggled hard to get to where it is. It first attacked those bronzed Red Indians and occupied their land. Then came shiploads of African slaves on English galleons. Such was the booming traffic in the transatlantic slave trade that by 1750 there was one black slave in colonial America for every four white colonists.

Independence from the British Crown followed but America’s strug­gles continued. The newly independent United States was small, confined large­ly to the 13 New England colonies on the East Coast.

Texas was a separate country. California belonged to Mexico. Louisiana belonged to France. Alaska belonged to Russia. The US bought Louisiana from France in 1803 for $15 million ($50 billion in today’s money). Russia held on longer, till 1867, selling Alaska to the US for just $7.2 million. Texas was annexed in 1845 and became the 28th state of the US.

Meanwhile, the US army invaded Mexico. By 1848, it had acquired, by treaty or war, vast Mexican territories in the south and west, from Arizona and New Mexico to Nevada and California.

Fast forward to the present. Since 1945, the US has set the rules of the world order. The Soviet Union challenged the world order briefly but after its collapse in 1991, the US has been the world’s unitary superpower.

Since Indian independence in 1947, a powerful lobby has operated in Washington. It was meant to keep India, then in the Soviet orbit though perfunctorily non-aligned, in check. It wasn’t till 1998 when India conducted the Pokhran-II nuclear tests that Washington began to exam­ine India’s potential seriously.

The 2005-08 India-US nuclear civil deal was structured to keep India’s nuclear ambitions under US surveillance. Washington tightened its Indian embrace with the Quad and other allianc­es to counter the emerging threat to US hegemony: China.

The US is a predatory power. It has a history of violent wars, African slave-owning and brutal treatment of Native Americans. It brooks no challenge to its supremacy. The Soviet Union was dismantled. Russia has been weakened. China is under sanctions.

It matters little who is US president. The techno-bureau­crats in the Pentagon and State Department run US foreign policy. They are mistakenly referred to as America’s “deep state”. They in fact simply represent a century-old Anglo- Saxon supremacist agenda that ordains Western global dominance.

China is now the principal threat. It is being targeted relentlessly. And India? Till recently, Washington’s modern-day cowboys regarded India as a useful front­line state against China. After the India- China rapprochement following the BRICS summit in Russia, however, the Russia-India-China axis looms as a future challenge to the US-led West’s military and financial hegemony.

The “BRICS Bridge” currency project discussed at the Kazan summit worries the US. It could weaken the dollar’s status as the world’s safe-haven currency which allows Washington to impose crippling sanctions on any country that doesn’t toe its line.

As The Economist, a devoted media flagbearer of the West, warned in a recent editorial: “The BRICS Bridge [currency] scheme may have momentum. There is a broad consensus that current crossborder [SWIFT] payments are too slow and expensive.”

If China, India, Russia and others in the Global South succeed in de-dollarising the global financial system, US power to sanction countries will erode. For Washington, the compliant India of old has transformed into an uncomfortably assertive India.

Unlike America’s first tryst with Native Americans it once called Red Indians, India poses an entirely different challenge. Washington’s recent legal actions against Indian ‘agents’ in coordination with colonial cousin Canada is a tactic the US often uses to send a message. The problem for Washington is India may no longer be listening.

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