On Trump's Offer to Mediate Between India and China

The Print’s daily roundtable TalkPoint posed a question connected to the US President Donald Trump's offer to mediate between India and China over the “raging border dispute": Does Trump help or harm India’s interests when he offers to mediate with China, Pakistan?My response:

US President Donald Trump’s offer to mediate is a needless distraction in the grand scheme of things.Assessing what the US foreign policy would be like based on Trump’s offer to mediate on Twitter is a risky exercise. Often, there is a considerable gap between the two, like in the case of Afghanistan.Officially, the White House released a report on 20 May that said in no uncertain terms that Beijing “flouts its commitments to its neighbours by engaging in provocative and coercive military and paramilitary activities in the Yellow Sea, the East and South China Seas, the Taiwan Strait, and Sino-Indian border areas.” We can only guess whether Trump’s latest offer to mediate follows as a result of this understanding.Nevertheless, India’s position on such offers has been consistent — it intends to solve such disputes bilaterally and not through third party mediation. China is not likely to accept any such offers of mediation either. Hence, it would help the Indian and American interests both, a lot more if the US and India work together to build capacity to resist Beijing’s coercive and arrogant approach to border disputes.The case with Pakistan is also similar. The border dispute there is just one issue in a consistently strained India-Pakistan relationship. In fact, the US support to the Pakistani military-jihadi complex over the years has made this problem even more difficult. Here again, it would help the Indian and the US interests a lot more if the US adopts an overall strategic stance that sees Pakistan as a part of the problem.

You can read the full conversation on ThePrint. here. 

Trump’s India visit tightens defense ties

Donald Trump concluded his 36-hour India tour on Tuesday evening. This was his first visit to India since being elected the 45th president of the United States in November 2016. His tour to India was much anticipated by both the countries, which have a common strategic objective of balancing China’s rise.This objective was reflected immediately in Trump’s first speech after landing in India, where he took a jab at China’s undemocratic rise. India’s rise “is all the more inspiring because you have done it as a democratic country, you have done it as a peaceful country, you have done it as a tolerant country, and you have done it as a great free country,” he said in his speech at Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.The article was originally published in Asia Times.

On the Howdy Modi event

The Print’s daily roundtable TalkPoint posed a question connected to the Indian PM’s Howdy Modi event in Houston: Is it smart diplomacy for PM Modi to align himself with Donald Trump’s campaign in Houston?Whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s endorsement of US President Donald Trump at the ‘Howdy, Modi’ event should be termed smart diplomacy depends on its real impact on the future of India-US relations. The event by itself carries immense symbolic value, and the world will take note of how far India-US relations have come. This is a positive outcome. However, an Indian Prime Minister taking an overt partisan position on US domestic politics will have negative consequences.First, this sets a precedent for any foreign leader to take sides in Indian elections or its politics. This could ultimately make it tough for India to manage its relations with other countries. Second, the Indian-American community faces the risk of being seen as more Indian and less American. Opponents of Donald Trump might even play up this line of thinking to reap political dividends in the 2020 US presidential elections. So, the costs involved are real.The backlash against China’s attempts to influence Australia’s domestic politics showed that once nationalist political sentiments take precedence in the host country, immigrant communities face the risk of being isolated and targeted.Read the entire discussion on ThePrint.in website here. 

Howdy Modi and Trump showcase Indian lobby in US. But double loyalties can’t go far

Trump’s presence at Howdy Modi certainly highlights the strength and the comfort of the India-US relationship. The event’s organisers claim that it is the largest-ever turnout for a foreign elected leader on US soil. Apparently, only the Pope attracted a bigger crowd. In the amoral world of international relations, it is par for the course for states to influence the politics and policies of other countries.  A lot depends on how the prevalent nationalist “America First” political sentiment in the United States perceives the Howdy Modi rally.Read more

On Trump's Kashmir comment

ThePrint's daily roundtable Talkpoint posed a question related to PM Modi's conversation with US President Trump on the latter's offer to mediate on the Kashmir issue. The question was: Is PM Modi allowing Trump to play policeman in India-Pakistan tensions over Kashmir?My response:Policeman is an incorrect metaphor to use. The act of policing involves ensuring compliance with an underlying rule of law. No such enforceable force of law exists in the domain of international relations. Instead, power is the currency in international relations. It is precisely for this reason that Trump’s stance and actions on India-Pakistan tensions are important following the Narendra Modi government’s move to abrogate Article 370.The real issue then is how the Modi government can deal with a powerful stakeholder like Trump now. While India needs the US in order to increase its own economic and military power, the US-China structural rivalry makes India a very important player in the US strategic calculation. Pakistan doesn’t feature in any of these forces driving the India-US equation.For its part, Pakistan will try to use the Kashmir issue to drive a wedge between the US and India. From Pakistan’s standpoint, returning to the India-Pakistan hyphenation era in the eyes of the US is desirable. And given Pakistan’s role in the ongoing talks between the US and the Taliban, Pakistan’s case is likely to carry more weight than it otherwise would. India’s challenge will be to continue isolating the US-India relationship from the ongoing India-Pakistan dynamic. This task will become more challenging if the security situation in Kashmir worsens.Read other views on ThePrint here. 

Delhi must wake up and smell the opportunity

Deepening competition between the US and China over trade and technology is bringing forth a new set of economic and strategic challenges for India. Navigating these successfully requires New Delhi to mitigate and manage the threats, while leveraging the opportunities that arise. Doing so, however, requires the Indian government to undertake key reforms and adopt a strategic outlook with regard to certain domestic policies.A protracted Sino-US tech war could limit India’s room to maneuver, with the possibility that the global cyberspace and technology and innovation ecosystems could splinter into spheres of influence. This necessitates the adoption of a strategic outlook towards domestic policies.Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/specials/sunday-spotlight/delhi-must-wake-up-and-smell-the-opportunity-739059.html 

We need more trade, not a trade war

The decision by the Trump administration to withdraw preferential treatment to Indian goods should serve as a strong warning to the New Delhi that prioritising narrow domestic politics over good economic policy can have dangerous consequences.Trump’s decision to levy import duties on erstwhile exempted goods did not, as commonly understood, come out of the blue, nor was it the first strike in an emerging trade dispute. The US Trade Representative has appealed to New Delhi multiple times in the past to remove the trade barriers that it has imposed on US goods and investments. This move by the US is largely due to three distortions introduced by the government that hurts not only US business interests but also Indian consumers. These are the price caps on cardiac stents and knee caps, the new FDI in e-commerce industry rules that prohibit foreign e-commerce firms to run inventory based retail, and the ban on American dairy products.It is not in India’s national interest to get into a trade war with the US. We have more to lose than them by doing so. India should drop the threat of escalating the trade war. Relative size of an economy and dependence on trade with the other partner are crucial in determining whether trade barriers can achieve the necessary outcomes. The US is a lot more important trading partner for India than India is to the US.Geopolitical realism instructs us that India cannot afford to indulge in such a trade war and that the damage we can inflict upon the US is not big enough to force it to change its trade regime. If India escalates the matter, it could very well lead to a full-blown trade war that could potentially witness bigger retaliation from the US in the form of higher tariffs on pharmaceutical products or non-trade barriers on Indian software products, which can truly hurt the Indian economy. We could also suffer due to decreased investment by US firms in India and, at a time of decreasing domestic investment, this can be damaging.Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/panorama/we-need-more-trade-not-a-trade-war-with-us-722934.html