Opinion | Message For Delhi: A Pact With Trump’s America Is A Faustian Bargain
If it hasn't already, India must very quickly internalise that a strategic embrace with America under Trump is no guarantee against Beijing hellbent on cartographic aggression
Ukraine hasn’t lost the war. Its backers, including successive administrations in the United States of America (preceding Trump’s), have demonstrated great tactical awareness in frustrating the strategic aims of Putin’s extra-territorial liaisons. What Moscow thought would be a two-day war has dragged on for three years that have humbled Russia into accepting an unstable stalemate.
But you would have never imagined that Ukraine’s embattled President Zelenskyy held a few cards of his own when his nose was being unceremoniously rubbed into the carpet of the Oval Office by US President Donald Trump and his MAGA cohorts. At the risk of repeating a cliché, that day, diplomacy became a reality TV show.
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Trump’s pro-Russia tilt wasn’t even the shocking part of the televised circus. It was his total disregard for Ukraine’s sovereignty. What it told the world was that America under Trump has lost the moral courage to stand up for the rules-based order that it itself created.
The wanton abandonment of the victim, a US proxy no less, is a mighty warning for the foreign policy mandarins in Delhi. It reveals that the greatest power on Earth is now happy to stand and watch from the sidelines as some of its competitors simply roll into an ally country with a view to grabbing it. There may be several well-considered differing opinions about who or what is to blame for the war in Ukraine but after the Oval Office bust-up, there is near unanimity that (if Trump plays deal broker) hostilities will end in an unjust peace.
Ukraine will make concessions as if it were the aggressor. This is an unprecedented pivot towards the law of the jungle – an acknowledgement that at the end of the day, might is right.
Russia and its “brother-for-all-seasons" China will welcome this new reticence in America. Beijing, more so, will see DC’s backpedalling as a sign of waning American influence and agency and test waters. And ‘waters’ is an apt metaphor because, for a while now, China has been itching to set sail for Taiwan and plant its flag atop that island country’s sovereign parliament. Once it has tasted blood, China will flex on land too. It shares a disputed border with India and will feel emboldened to change the status quo in its favour.
If it hasn’t already, India must very quickly internalise that a strategic embrace with America under Trump is no guarantee against Beijing hellbent on cartographic aggression.
If Trump can abandon NATO, he’d have even fewer qualms about upholding a commitment to the much more recently forged QUAD. Little wonder that Australia, a member of the QUAD, has already displayed a sense of strategic autonomy by breaking from Trump’s line on Ukraine. Canberra, like Delhi, is now all for itself in the Indo-Pacific.
Like Australia, India’s strategic autonomy will count for nothing if it doesn’t build economic and defence capacity of its own. The road to “Atmanirbhar Bharat" has never looked clearer. Trumpianism could yet be a blessing for India.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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