India and the Power Quartet

THE WEST, IN THE PARLANCE OF international relations, stood for a cultivated cultural solidarity and a sense of freedom democracy alone ensures. If World War II settled the argument about man’s craziest attempt to strike a balance between race and destiny and brought evil back to the political conversation, the Cold War clarified the division of freedom; the countries that joined the campaign against communism shared a moral vision in which human dignity took precedence over the most ambitious ideology ever put in practice. The end of the Cold War saw the de-dramatisation of the world without blocs. It did last only till 9/11, when a new enemy made its entry and shattered the idyll. Ideology had been replaced by faith; the war on terror that followed brought fear as a unifying force to the West, which would ultimately win the argument against the alternative offered by radical Islam. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza may have prompted the West to reassess the values that shaped it as a cultural entity. The differences did not lead to the cohabitation of the irreconcilables. In retrospect, there was no one reason big enough to end a relationship that survived the exigencies of national interest for so long. Then happened Trump 2.0.

Today the West cannot afford a singular cultural attitude. How did Trump achieve this? Why does a president see himself as wiser than the traditions that kept America as the most influential—and admired—idea in the modern history of nations? It just vindicates for some the notion that history is taken to the extremes by the wildest sway of the human mind. Trump has not led the road to Armageddon, but he genuinely believes that a retreat from the brink, whether in Ukraine or in Gaza, is not possible without the world, certainly the West, taking its lead from him. An American president bowing to a Russian dictator and forcing a peace deal upon Ukraine is an inversion of the history of freedom in which America and Europe were partners. Europe, in the Trump universe, doesn’t matter. It’s not worthy of being an American ally any more. Europe’s influence, whether during the Balkan Wars or any conflict where the continent had its collective power at stake, was minimal. It was America that made the big difference. Europe’s actions were never matched by its posturing. It’s this posturing that a Trump loyalist calls “pathetic” in the defence department’s leaked group chat.

What we have is a power quartet: An inward-looking America busy restoring greatness, a Europe let down by America’s dilution of Americanism as a byword for freedom, a Russia pretty sure of keeping its historical enemy on its side, and a China looking for temporary allies in the face of Trump’s tariff terror. It is Europe’s efforts, led by England’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron, to assert itself as an alternative heart of the Western value system that irk America today. More than a cause of Trump’s annoyance, the new schism has broken the world’s oldest alliance of freedom. In the age of Ukraine and a neo-Stalinist Russia minus communism, such solidarity is what the world needs, especially when appreciation of autocracy is no longer a trait of the old Left alone.

The new European assertion is not here to stay for long because it is only as good as its leaders. Starmer, after the initial tentativeness, has suddenly become the voice of freedom, an idealist who aspires to be the next Tony Blair. A Labour leader as a globalist with a conscience is, by tradition, a friend of America, like the Blair-Clinton bromance. Starmer, whose mandate or aura does not match the vintage Blair’s, flanked by Macron, the apostle of a Eurocentric modernity, is an unlikely face of Western conscience pitted against American insensitivity. In the absence of a leader as commanding as a De Gaulle or a Mitterrand or a Thatcher or a Merkel, an anti-American European project will remain as fragile as its leaders’ mandate. Across the Atlantic, the leader who looms over America wields power like a maniac. The new international order defies a linear script; it follows the impulsiveness of Trumpism.

And that is why the fiercest argument about freedom between America and Europe has become an argument about democracy itself. In America power is personalised by a president who is more concerned about rebuilding the past rather than respecting traditions and conventions, which are very much European still. Trump only answers to his base, which remains loyal; his European antagonists have no such solid terrain beneath their feet. The two other parts of the quartet, Russia and China, the twin towers of unfreedom, are the true beneficiaries of the schism in the West.

Doesn’t it explain the earnestness with which India is being wooed by them all? Equidistance is not neutrality, and it gives India that rare privilege of wielding its freedom of diplomatic expression with the confidence only the size of its democratic mandate can provide.

Angela Merkelanti-AmericanChinese President Xi Jinpingcultural solidarityDe GaulleDonald TrumpEuropeanFrançois Mitterrandgeopoliticsinternational relationsMargaret ThatcherNarendra ModiRussia-China nexusVladimir Putin