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. 

Flashpoints on the Periphery: Understanding China’s Neighborhood Opportunism

How is China taking advantage of the pandemic to pursue its foreign policy goals?

Tensions in China’s periphery have increased dramatically over the past few months as Beijing stepped up the use of military and diplomatic tools within its neighborhood. The frequency of the events involving Chinese actors, especially in the second half of March, increased as normalcy started returning to the mainland after the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak.This raises a few questions. First, is this evidence of China’s opportunism at a time when the United States is struggling to maintain its presence in the East and Southeast Asian regions? Second, has Beijing adopted a more aggressive approach for the post-pandemic period? Third, would the recent spike in activities impact the regional order?Read more

This article was originally published in The Diplomat.

US-तालिबान समझौते से शांति की कितनी उम्मीद और भारत की चिंताएं?

अमेरिका और तालिबान के बीच शनिवार, 29 फरवरी, को कतर में शांति समझौते पर हस्ताक्षर हुए। इसके मुताबिक, अमेरिका 14 महीने में अफगानिस्तान से अपने सैनिक हटाएगा। इससे हो सकता है कि अमेरिका का सबसे लम्बा युद्ध शायद ख़त्म हो जाए. इस वक़्त अफ़ग़निस्तान में अमेरिका, जर्मनी और ब्रिटेन समेत 38 देशों की सेनाएं हैं. अब इन में से अमेरिका की 8000 से ज़्यादा सैनिक है जिन्हे इस पैक्ट के मुताबिक़ अब अपना बोरिया बिस्तर उठा कर वापस अपने घर जाना होगा.

इस पैक्ट की दूसरी ख़ास बात है 'तालिबान कमिटमेंट' - ये कमिटमेंट कहता है कि 'तालिबान अपने किसी भी सदस्य, या किसी दूसरे व्यक्ति या संगठन को, जिनमें अल-क़ायदा भी है, को अमेरिका और उसके सहयोगियों की सुरक्षा के लिए खतरा नहीं बनने देगा, और इस के लिए अफ़ग़निस्तान की ज़मीन का इस्तेमाल नहीं करने देगा.

लेकिन क्या वाकई इस समझौते से शांति की उम्मीद की जा सकती है? और इस समझौते का भारत के लिए क्या मतलब है?

Listen in to this episode of The Big Story Hindi Podcast by The Quint featuring Pranay Kotasthane.

https://audioboom.com/posts/7519553

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.

Technology is set to be the main front in the US-China trade war

Despite the fanfare, the phase 1 agreement that the US and China signed last week does not represent a truce in the ongoing trade “war". It is not even a temporary ceasefire, as tariffs mostly remain in place and there is no indication how or when they will be lifted. The deal is at best a waypoint in the increasingly adversarial relationship between the world’s only superpower and its prospective challenger.

China promised to buy an additional $200 billion of US agricultural and energy products in two years, but it is hard to see how the Chinese economy can re-direct trade patterns of such magnitude in such a short period. As one US think tank expert told me, it’s not even clear if the US has “that much farm and energy stuff to sell" in the first place. China also solemnly promised not to steal intellectual property from high-technology companies, but how this will be enforced remains an open question. Moreover, Beijing astutely refused to make any commitment to hacking and cyber aggression, taking refuge in the argument that this is not a trade issue. In return, the US agreed to hold back from further increases in tariffs on Chinese goods.Read more

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. 

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 

The Fallout of US Tariffs

However, if the current trend of protectionism in the US extends to other goods such as pharmaceuticals, or to services such as software, the US faces the prospect of losing this support base. Further, if the US were to lose the support from the south, the India-US relationship will again be seen largely from the prism of the Pakistan factor and the economic partnership will have to take a backseat.

The India—US defence partnership will also be weakened if trade barriers hinder the relationship between the two countries. Purchasing defence equipment is a strategic decision, not a transactional one for India. The risk of being overly dependent on foreign powers can be mitigated if we procure military equipment from countries with which we have extensive economic ties. However, if general trade between the US and India suffers due to increasing tariffs, defense procurement from the US would no longer serve a strategic purpose and India will lose the strategic leverage that comes from being able to favour a country that can give us something more than just military equipment.

Finally, tariffs will also affect business and investment decisions. Given the particular state of global finance, with increasing inflation in the US (partially caused by increased import costs) and higher interest rates as a result, the flow of portfolio and direct investment from the US to India will reduce. With India’s banking sector facing a severe crunch due to the high amount of non-performing assets, the need for private sources of funding for Indian companies will be acute. Simultaneously, China is continuously looking for opportunities to invest abroad, as witnessed by its aggressive buying of assets in other countries. The void that will be left by the US will be readily filled by China, and that is an outcome that neither the US nor India will be too keen to witness.

Read more here>