Trump, Russia and West
As Trump rearranges US foreign policy, provokes outrage, India must prepare to cope with the consequences
The growing tensions between America and its European allies on the one hand and Russia in recent years, have steadily pushed Moscow closer to Beijing which has emerged as the real challenger to American primacy.
Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State and guru of modern realpolitik, says that America must have better relations with all other major powers than they have between themselves. That would let America prevent the emergence of a countervailing coalition and retain its primacy in perpetuity. If that is a sensible principle for hegemonic power, Trump might be doing the right thing by America in trying to improve relations with Russia. The growing tensions between America and its European allies on the one hand and Russia in recent years, have steadily pushed Moscow closer to Beijing which has emerged as the real challenger to American primacy.
It is not often that the former intelligence chiefs denounce the sitting president of the US as a traitor. That kind of a thing is supposed to happen only in banana republics, not in the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy. A closer look suggests that the problem may not be with Russia, but America’s domestic politics. For the Democratic Party, the liberal elite and the permanent foreign policy establishment, Trump is an interloper in the White House. They believe that it was Russian meddling in the 2016 election that teased out a technical Trump victory. For them, the FBI investigation into the Russian role and Moscow’s connection to the Trump campaign is an instrument to delegitimise the Trump presidency.
This domestic argument over Russia has been reinforced by Trump’s questioning of many traditional tenets of American foreign policy — that economic globalisation is good and America must pay any price for leadership of the West and stewardship of the global order. Trump has been persistent in his argument that American workers have lost their jobs thanks to deindustrialisation engineered by free trade. He insists that American tax payers should not be paying for the defence of European allies. Trump’s articulation of these arguments reached a crescendo during his European tour. If his denunciation of allies was shocking enough, his seeming reluctance to confront Putin on election meddling has triggered enormous outrage in America. India has no reason to take sides in America’s internal contestation about Russia and burden-sharing within Western alliances. But Delhi must strain every nerve to cope with the consequences of this debate that has the potential to rearrange the international system constructed after the Second World War.
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