Return of the Brotherhood

THE NEXT US ADMINISTRATION led by Donald Trump will have to navigate an uncertain world, a fragile economy and hardened polarisation at home at a time when a new age of international relations is dawning. The crises, conflicts and wars that are currently raging highlight just how profoundly the global geopolitical landscape has changed in recent years, with America’s own power and influence coming under increasing challenge. Great-power rivalries have again become central to international relations, with the US now pitted against a prospective Sino-Russian alliance.

Thanks to outgoing President Joe Biden, the US is deeply involved in the wars in Ukraine and the Mid­dle East that have exacerbated global divisions. The risk is growing that, unlike its indirect entanglement in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the US could be directly involved in a war over Taiwan if China launches aggression against that island democracy.

For Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has called Taiwan’s incorporation into China a “historic mission”, the longer the wars continue in Ukraine and the Middle East, the better. An end to the Ukraine war would leave the US free to focus on the Indo-Pacific, a critical region that will shape the next global order.

China’s expansionism is centred in the Indo-Pacific, from the East and South China Seas and the Taiwan Strait to the Himalayas. Xi must be pleased that US transfers of critical munitions, smart bombs, missiles and other weaponry to Ukraine and Israel are depleting American stockpiles and exposing America’s inadequate industrial capacity to restock weapons and ammunition.

The US has played a critical role in bankrolling the Ukrainian fight against the invading Russian forces, with Congress approving almost $175 billion in military and non-defence assistance. But American assistance has been unable to turn the tide in the war, with Russia still making slow but steady territorial gains in eastern Ukraine. Almost one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory is currently in Russian control.

One key reason for Russian advances is that, more than weapons and funds, Ukraine needs new recruits to replenish the ranks of its exhausted and depleted forces. But even draconian conscription practices have not been able to offset Ukraine’s mounting troop shortfall. Many Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines today are in their 40s and 50s.

Meanwhile, the US dollar—which, according to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) paper, was facing “stealth erosion” before the Ukraine war—now confronts a more open but nascent challenge to its global dominance in response to the West’s weaponisa­tion of finance and seizure of Russia’s earnings on its central-bank assets that have been frozen by Western governments. As countries explore alternatives to the dollar, the greenback is beginning to lose some of its global influence, especially in oil markets.

Meanwhile, as a hedging strategy, central banks in many countries—especially China, Turkey, India, Kazakhstan, and in Eastern Europe—have increasingly been buying gold. Such hoarding, coupled with greater geopolitical uncertainty, has helped drive gold.

The US-led Western decisions to weap­onise finance and seize interest earned on fro­zen Russian central-bank assets have caused deepening disquiet in the non-Western world, helping to build support in BRICS to explore alternative arrangements, including new cross-border payment mechanisms invulnerable to political pressures or inter­ventions. Some countries are also reassessing their heavy reliance on the US dollar in inter­national transactions and reserve holdings.

The fact that more than 30 countries have applied to join BRICS shows that countries from the Global South are eager to lessen their vulnerabilities to Western pressures by enlarging their geopolitical options. They view membership in BRICS, the world’s first major non-US international initiative, as use­ful both as a hedging strategy and to navigate increasing global geopolitical turbulence and uncertainty.

The US cannot be pleased that BRICS is becoming a magnet to pluralise the world order. Reshaping the present US-led global order may not be easy but what unites the BRICS countries is the goal of achieving a multipolar international system. This is driven by the shared belief that only multipolarity can put checks on hegemonic power, which, if left unchecked, could undermine international peace, stability and economic growth.

More fundamentally, the Trump administration cannot ignore the fact that China poses a far greater threat than Russia to Western interests and the US-led order. Whereas Russia’s designs are largely confined to its own neighbourhood, China is seeking to supplant the US as the world’s foremost power. It also has the means: China’s economy, like its population, is about 10 times larger than Russia’s, and China spends four times as much as Russia on its military.

China is currently engaged in the largest peacetime military buildup in history. It has more than doubled its nuclear-weap­ons arsenal since 2020, and is expanding its conventional forces faster than any other country since World War II.

Yet, by focusing on the wrong enemy (with Biden only strengthening American policy fixation on Russia), the US has crimped its ability to counter the greater challenge that China poses. For example, with its military resources already stretched thin by its involvement in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the US is dedicating insufficient attention and resources to countering Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific.

Indeed, China has been the main beneficiary of Biden’s forceful response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unprec­edented US-led sanctions, including the weaponisation of international finance, have been a boon for Beijing, turning it into Russia’s banker and expanding international use of the yuan. Russia now generates much of its in­ternational export earnings in the Chinese currency and keeps these proceeds mostly in Chinese banks, in effect giving Beijing a share of the returns.

At a time when a majority of Americans believe that the nation’s power is declining on the world stage, the Trump adminis­tration needs a more realistic balancing of America’s key geopolitical objectives. Without such rebalancing, the US may well fail to deter China from attacking Taiwan or cementing its strategic axis with Russia, just as Biden failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine.

If objectively seen, a protracted Ukraine war is not in America’s interest. But bring­ing an end to the war demands dialogue and diplomacy, which Biden has shunned with Moscow.

India is one of the few countries that can play a mediating role in the Ukraine war, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been ready to broker a ceasefire. After the presidential inauguration ceremony on January 20, will American policy begin to shift in favour of a ceasefire in Ukraine? Given that a negotiated deal is the only way to halt the war, it is better to seek it sooner rather than after months or years of more bloodshed and devastation.

BIDEN’S LEGACY

The Trump administration will need to repair the damage the Indo-American relationship has suffered during Biden’s presi­dency. Before Biden, every American president since the 1990s left the relationship with India in stronger shape than what he inherited. But with US-India relations now strained, Biden is bequeathing the troubled ties to his successor to mend.

An ageing Biden seemed unable to grasp that the blossom­ing US-India partnership is too important to lose.

While needling India, he prioritised outreach to China, resumed coddling of Pakistan, and stayed mum on China’s en­croachments on Indian lands, including the resulting military standoff. Biden’s $450-million modernisation of Pakistan’s F-16 fleet evoked bitter memories of the US arming Pakistan against India and supporting the initial development of the Pakistani nuclear bomb during the Cold War.

Biden’s cognitive decline, which ultimately led the Demo­cratic Party elites to force him to end his re-election campaign, may have been a factor in the US-India relationship cooling, especially as others in his inner circle gradually gained an increasing say in decision-making. The new tensions between Washington and New Delhi can only please Beijing, Moscow and Islamabad.

Biden’s national-security team largely comprised “liberal interventionists”, or hawks on the left, who, among other things, tactlessly exerted pressure on New Delhi to drop its neutrality on the Ukraine war and even sought to leverage the Khalistan card against India. On the eve of Modi’s US visit for the Quad summit in September, Khalistan radicals were hosted by the White House, where they were briefed by senior admin­istration and intelligence officials.

Biden’s top economic adviser, Brian Deese, touched a raw nerve in India when he threatened in 2022 that “the costs and consequences” for it would be “significant and long-term” if it stayed neutral on the war. After New Delhi rebuffed the US pressure to pick a side in the Ukraine war or face consequences, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking to the media in April 2022 in the presence of the visiting Indian defence and foreign ministers, took a swipe at India, alleging “a rise in hu­man rights abuses”.

With every diplomatic spat with New Delhi, Blinken resur­rected the human rights card against India.

The jarring fact is that, while maintaining close cooperation with a wide array of undemocratic governments and staying mum on their human rights abuses, the Biden administration has used human rights promotion as a geopolitical tool to bring pressure on countries to toe its line, including through US gov­ernment-funded organisations like Freedom House. As Blinken repeatedly showed, human rights concerns are raised as leverage even against a friendly democracy like India. This geopolitics-driven approach only undermines American credibility.

It is also striking that as Biden’s cognitive decline became more apparent, the scourge of rising Khalistan militancy in the US and Canada started casting a lengthening shadow over Washington’s relations with New Delhi. The US and Cana­dian allegations of alleged Indian assassination plots against terrorism-glorifying Khalistan extremists in North America have sought to obscure the role of American and Canadian security agencies in shielding such elements as potential assets against India. It is telling that at the centre of the Canadian- US diplomatic row with India have been two Sikh militants designated by India as terrorists—Hardeep Singh Nijjar and Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

Khalistan militancy may be practically dead in India, but many Indians are asking whether some Anglosphere agencies are seeking to revive it in Punjab by using extremists in the Sikh diaspora.

Biden’s cognitive decline, of course, had a wider apparent impact on the conduct of foreign rela­tions. For example, Biden’s memory issues, including doing things that he had earlier pledged not to do, may well explain why his risk appetite grew in the Ukraine war, especially as he became more and more beholden to the Ameri­can “deep state”.

With the flow of sophisticated Western weapons to Ukraine failing to stem Russian advances or force Russia to retreat from the areas it has occupied, Biden progressively escalated American involvement in the war by embracing ideas that he had earlier said were taboo. For instance, he permitted Ukraine to use American-provided weapons to strike inside Russia despite having declared earlier that any Ukrainian attack on Russian territory with US-supplied missiles would go against his mandate to “avoid World War III”.

Biden’s overriding focus on punishing Russia not only pushed Moscow closer to Beijing but also threatened to exac­erbate India’s security challenges. A Sino-Russian military and strategic alliance would directly impinge on Indian interests.

It was in the twilight of Biden’s presidency that the US-backed regime change in Bangladesh occurred and that Wash­ington, in concert with Ottawa, escalated the row with India over North America-based Khalistan militants.

In the run-up to the 2024 General Election in India, the Biden administration began targeting the Modi government on issues ranging from human rights to the implementation of a new Indian law that grants citizenship to non-Muslim refugees who fled religious persecution in neighbouring Islamic countries.

Biden has long alleged Russian interference in US elections. He even imposed sanctions against Russia in 2021 over its alleged meddling in American elections. But Team Biden had no qualms about interfering in other countries’ elections, as it did in the world’s largest democratic exercise in India. It used some of the talking points of Indian Opposition politicians to criticise the Modi government. It even sought to cast aspersions on India’s legal processes, although the Biden administration has faced heat at home for weaponising the justice system against political opponents.

New Delhi found it troubling that the Biden administration set Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau against India by sharing sketchy intelligence with Ottawa. Trudeau admitted before a federal inquiry recently that he relied on raw “intel­ligence and not hard evidentiary proof” when he triggered the downward spiral in Canada-India relations in September 2023 by alleging India’s “potential link” with Nijjar’s killing.

But unlike Trudeau, who made the allegation against India from the floor of the Canadian parliament, the US allegation of a failed Indian plot to kill Pannun did not come from Biden or any of his cabinet members but from lower-level officials who briefed the media about the unsealing of an indictment. The US indictment alleged a murder-for-hire scheme that was remarkably amateurish: an Indian operative, at an Indian intelligence officer’s purported direction, tried to arrange the killing of Pannun on US soil, but the hitman he hired long-distance from India turned out to be an undercover law enforce­ment officer.

Biden has not spoken a single word against India while Trudeau has continued to personally lead the charge against New Delhi.

The US and India, as partners in the Quad, may agree on larger issues in the Indo-Pacific, including a stable balance of power, maritime security, and settlement of inter-country disputes without coercion and on the basis of international law. But in India’s own neighbourhood, the divergence in US and Indian interests has been laid bare by the Biden administration.

Instead of working with New Delhi in India’s neighbour­hood, the Biden administration pursued policies in South Asia that it knew were injurious to core Indian interests. It is telling that Washington has been coddling military-backed govern­ments in Pakistan and Bangladesh while seeking to overthrow Myanmar’s military junta, including through stringent sanctions and “non-lethal” military aid to rebels, despite the spillover effects on Indian border states like Manipur.

The US-supported regime change in Bangladesh, followed by Washington’s silence on ongoing human-rights abuses there, including atrocities against minorities, represented just the latest wake-up call for New Delhi. What many saw as a “colour revo­lution” in Bangladesh came after Biden’s disastrous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan effectively surrendered that country to a Pakistan-reared terrorist mi­litia, including leaving behind billions of dollars of weapons for it.

Bangladesh is now pretty much under military-mullah rule, with Muhammad Yunus just the nominal head of the army-installed “interim” regime. The upsurge of Islamist violence, and the regime’s politi­cal vendettas and release of terrorists from jail indicate that Bangladesh will struggle to restore economic momentum or regain investor confidence.

Wherever the US has directly or indirectly intervened over the years to bring about regime change, chaos has usually fol­lowed in that country, with Islamist or other extremist forces gaining ascendancy. The murder and mayhem in Bangladesh il­lustrate how that country faces destabilisation, with far-reaching consequences extending beyond its borders, especially for India.

As one of its parting shots at India, the Biden administration has slapped sanctions against 19 Indian firms for their alleged export of “dual-use” items to Russia. The term “dual-use” is de­fined by Washington so broadly that sanctions can be justified against whichever target it selects. The 19 Indian firms, which figure in a larger list of companies from multiple countries slapped with sanctions, have been accused of exporting just a paltry $2 million worth of items to Russia. Compare that with the flow of more than $200 billion in Western military and other aid to Ukraine.

RESTORING TRUST

These are challenging times for US-India relations. Undermining what should be America’s most important strategic partnership in Asia makes little strategic sense, especially if the US wishes to genuinely pivot to the Indo-Pacific. But without mutual respect, the US-India strategic partnership can scarcely advance.

A country as large and proud as India cannot become just another Japan or Britain to the US. A friend does not mean a fol­lower. Nor is a Cold War-style “us versus them” approach relevant today. A less rigid, more adaptive approach will serve American diplomacy better.

Washington must remember that India has hewed to an independent approach to international affairs under successive governments. This approach is unlikely to change given that New Delhi believes in friendship without dependence.

Furthermore, the US and India are both bitterly polarised democracies, and each government should consciously avoid saying anything that could give a handle to the other’s domestic critics. Important figures within the Democratic Party during the Biden presidency, however, barely concealed their hostility to Modi and what they saw as his brand of Hindu nationalism.

Rebuilding mutual trust with India ought to be a priority for the Trump administration. Strategic partnership between the world’s most powerful and most populous democ­racies is pivotal to equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific, including hindering China’s westward naval march from its new citadel, the South China Sea. As Admiral Mike Gilday, chief of US naval operations, said in 2022, India’s centrality to a stable Asian power bal­ance makes it an essential US partner.

India, a founder and leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, now makes little mention of nonalignment. Instead, it is multi-aligned and building close partnerships with democratic powers from Asia to Europe.

India now holds more annual military exercises with Amer­ica than any other country. The US has become a key supplier of weapons systems to India, as underscored by the recent deal, valued at nearly $4 billion, to sell 31 armed MQ-9B High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) drones.

India has signed the four “foundational” agreements that the US maintains with all its close defence partners. These accords range from providing reciprocal access to each other’s military facilities and securing military communications to sharing geospatial data from airborne and satellite sensors.

Booming US exports to India—perhaps the world’s fastest-growing market today—reinforce bipartisan support in Washington for a closer partnership with New Delhi. In addition to weapons, the US has rapidly become an important source of crude oil and petroleum products for India, which is the world’s third-largest oil consumer after America and China.

India’s importance as the world’s ultimate swing state is likely to grow, especially as Russia and China deepen their entente. In­stead of driving a wedge between these two natural competitors, US policy has helped turn China and Russia into close strategic partners. Biden compounded his blunder in helping to build a Sino-Russian axis by impelling India to seek a thaw with China as a hedge against American unpredictability.

If the US is not to accelerate its relative decline through strategic overreach, it needs India more than ever. But without mutual respect and trust, the US-India strategic partnership could wither away.

Donald TrumpIndia-ChinaIndia-US relationsKamala HarrisNarendra ModiUS Elections 2024