With F-16 spares for Pakistan, US completes return to Cold War Eurasia strategy

Even as India and France have jointly moved the UN Security Council (UNSC) to designate two Pakistanis as ‘global terrorists’, the Biden administration in the US has rescinded a Trump-era ban and approved a $450 million F-16 ‘fleet sustainment programme’ to Islamabad, claiming the latter as an ‘important counter-terrorism partner’ and promising that it would not ‘altar the basic military balance in the region’ — an old American theme song viz New Delhi’s traditional and proven concerns.

It is anybody’s guess if New Delhi is satisfied with the US announcement that it was an F-16 spares’ ‘sales, and not assistance’ to Pakistan, particularly the timing. But then, New Delhi has since registered its strong protest to the US, not only on the latter’s decision and the timing, but also about the subterfuge. The Biden administration had silently/secretly notified Congress on the plans to supply spares and the like for Pakistan’s ageing F-16 fleet but did not mention it at the two-day 2+2 dialogue in early September.

While the US remains the sole superpower, France continues to have the highest number of island-territories in the Indian Ocean. The US has to fund and finance smaller regional nations across the world to set up shop, politically and/or militarily, and China too has been following suit. France alone owns them. In the re-emerging global architecture that has been redrawing itself time and again, especially in Eurasia, post-Cold War, the six months since the commencement of the Ukraine War has fast-tracked the pace and crowded the agenda.

Free and open Indo-Pacific

In the midst of it all, Washington has reiterated that the US and India ‘will work together to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific’ and also timed the ‘successful’ test of an unarmed inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM). For the first time, the US, in an unprecedented way, sent out a public alert about the ICBM test lest it should trigger avoidable yet instantaneous reactions from nations such as Russia and China.

Alongside, India and Japan have joined hands for a free Indo-Pacific, when they both are faced with an ‘expansionist China. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar together called on Japan’s Minister Fumio Kishida while in Tokyo for a 2+2 dialogue with the host nation. As may be recalled, along with Australia, India and Japan are members of the US-led Indo-Pacific architecture.

At the same time, India has joined the supply chain, decarbonisation, infrastructure, and anti-tax and corruption pillars of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) at the first in-person ministerial, even staying out of the first-pillar negotiations on the IPEF-embedded trade at this stage. As may be recalled, in 2020, India opted out of the China-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), after participating in the negotiations, as it found the terms unfavourable to the country.

Against this, the US author, as anticipated for long since the early talks of an Indo-Pacific began, was said to have begun urging regional nations to increase their defence budgets, to what would still remain subserving the US’ geo-strategic concerns in the Indian Ocean Region. Predecessor US President Donald Trump’s undelivered letter to South Korean ally made the point, though in a limited context without reference to the Indo-Pacific. Successor-incumbent Joe Biden seems to be following that point without saying it so loud and clear.

If implemented, it would be in a way, what the US did with its NATO allies or the Gulf-Arab partners in the past, in terms of ‘providing’ regional security during the Cold War in particular, at their financial cost. It sill ensures that it subserves the American vision and mission in the respective region, with the host-nations picking up a substantial portion of the price-tag.

All this, even as Germany, another powerful NATO ally of the US like France, has advanced its Indo-Pacific military presence and has also sent an air force contingent for a military exercise with Australia, which in turn is a partner in the tri-nation military pact involving America and the UK. In turn, this may indicate that a Europe-centric new global politico-security order has not been sacrificed at the altar of the ‘Ukraine War’ involving Cold War era rival Moscow, and against which the traditional West is still arraigned against, more in political and military-supplies term than through direct engagement or involvement. Prior to the Ukraine War, not just Germany and/or France, the European Union (EU) had drawn up and independent Indo-Pacific policy, where meeting points, if any, with the US-led formation, remained unclear and .

Ideological spectrum

On the other side of the ‘ideological spectrum’, if it could still be called so, a new group of ‘evil forces’ is getting together, or are being put together by western strategic analysts, if not their governments, as yet. There is already talk of a Russia-China-Iran triangle, to which Russia may have added a few more, albeit without acknowledgment. With Myanmar’s junta leader Min Aung Hlaing on his side, President Vladimir Putin told the annual Eastern Economic Forum at Vladivostok that the continuing war with Ukraine ‘will strengthen Russia’, especially in terms of sovereignty.

According to reports, a top lawmaker from China was present at the Forum meeting along with the prime ministers of Armenia and Mongolia, which nation India’s defence minister Rajnath Singh visited around the time, to be gifted with a local horse, a powerful battle-partner in the era before armoured carriers, tanks and fighter aircraft.  Leaders from India and Malaysia, along with counterparts from other nations, participated, online, in the Eastern Economic Forum.

At the third end of the strategic spectrum, Iran was reported to be working for an aircraft maintenance consortium with India, China and Russia, after the trial in June of the landmark International North-South Transport (INSTC) Corridor**,** connecting Russia and India via Iran after New Delhi came under western pressure for defying their sanctions and buying cheap Russian oil. Again in June, Iran had applied for membership of the BRICS global forum of emerging economies sans western influence, in which again, India is a founding member along with Brazil and later South Africa, when it signed in.

Then, there is a fourth dimension, possibly a ‘planted’ social media posts-campaign about Russia losing men and material six months down the Ukraine War and China supplying the same, possibly through North Korea. Whether any of it is true or war-time propaganda, North Korea has since passed an ‘irreversible’ law, for preventive, nuclear first-strike. This can add new tensions not only in the Korean Peninsula but also the larger East Asian landscape, particularly Japan, and even the US.

Then, there is the ever-present fifth dimension in the form of the Taiwan issue, to which Beijing added the South China-East China Sea disputes, almost without provocation. Now, in the midst of the Ukraine War, the US provoked the revival of avoidable tension by sending House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, heating up temperature and consequent military reaction by China.

New Arc that it isn’t

When Western analysts are talking about a Russia-Iran-China axis, in theoretical terms, a geo-strategic axis is still possible including these three nations, and adding Afghanistan and Pakistan, and going all the way up to Myanmar. This possibility should part-explain the US decision to help Pakistan maintain its F-16 fighters, and also in obtaining IMF assistance, at the height of the nation’s unprecedented economic crisis. As may be recalled, the US had refused to share with India, information of Pakistan’s deployment of F-16 at the height of IAF’s ‘surgical strikes’ into PoK in 2019.

Both are aimed at wooing Pakistan away from China’s vice-grip of the past several decades. Experience has shown that Pakistan has made a fine-art of running with the hound and hunting with the hare. Or, that is among the lines that the US can be expected to try and sell to India.

In parts, this should also explain why Myanmar’s junta is leaning even more on Russia and China, and why consequently, the West is going hammer and tongs at the latter, on democracy issues. In terms of the larger humanitarian issue centred on the ‘Rohingya refugee’ problem, the intervening democracy dispensation of Aung San Suu Kyi was equally unrelenting like the army rulers, before and after her, but the February 2021 coup has made her look good in the eyes of the West, though not to the same degree as when she was out-of-power, earlier.

Even otherwise, while wooing Iran and Afghanistan, the former for political and strategic reasons and the latter for strategic and economic causes, China, for instance, would be aware of the sentiments in the Gulf-Arab region, where Beijing wants to be on the right side of Saudi Arabia, among others. In global terms, the OPEC+ decision to cut down on oil production when the West, especially Saudis’ American friend wants them to increase it, cannot be missed out.

The US and the rest of the West wants higher Gulf oil production to cut down on greater dependence of nations like India, China on others on cheaper Russian oil in the aftermath of the Ukraine War, and also to help cut down oil prices, to this effect. Incidentally, India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar travelled to Saudi Arabia on a three-day visit, his first since joining the Modi Cabinet.

Strategic independence

Post-Ukraine War, the Eurasian landmass is on the boil all over than any time during the post-Cold War past. In the era ending with the Second World War, European colonials took their own war to their Asian colonies, particularly so in the 20th century. Fair enough, the colonial powers are not at war with one another. If anything, they do not want the Ukraine War to come to their homesteads.

Western Europe thought that by backing the US on provocatively backing Ukraine to join NATO, they were increasing the physical distance with Russia, in strategic and military terms. This has entailed that they joined the US-led sanctions war and oil price-caps against Russia even if Moscow’s shutting down the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline could endanger their heat and other energy needs in the upcoming summer.

But there is still the huge ‘missing link’ in such a construct. India continues to maintain its ‘strategic independence’ viz the historical friend, Russia, and the post-Cold War American author of the Indo-Pacific and Quad constructs. India’s concerns are here and now, viz China and Pakistan. India has maintained tactical silence on the latest US decision but past experience has been that the Islamabad-Rawalpindi combo had always used American aid (as much as the Chinese help) only to target India.

The latest on the China front for India is that the troops of both nations have ‘dis-engaged’ from a friction point in Ladakh, though there are other places where China has to pull back to pre-Galwan positions. The Chinese pull-out now from Patrolling Point-15 in the Gogra-Hot Springs area comes ahead of the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCC) meeting, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping are likely to meet. India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has since confirmed that the two nations would take up ‘remaining LAC issues’, a positive sign.

But none of them explains why the US is all over the place in Eurasia, as it used to be during the Cold War period. Sudden military disengagement from Afghanistan may have freed the US from avoidable political embarrassment of two decades, post-Cold War. Either way, the US would find ‘moral justification’ to expand its footprint militarily in the region, through NATO and Quad, the Indo-Pacific and AUKUS, the last one with the UK and Australia. In Taiwan and North Korea, the US has arraigned itself the right to intervene politically, strategically and militarily — and not without justification.

It is more so politically and not militarily, other than in the form of sending out navy vessels to the Taiwan Sea, to contest Chinese claims. Whether the Ukraine War ends in a way Russian President Vladimir Putin wants it or not, the US will find ways and means, reasons and justifications, to stay put in these parts. It is going to ventilate hyper-tensions, not only between the US and its traditional adversaries, say, Russia in Europe and China in Asia, not to leave out Iran and North Korea, where the Biden administration’s positions are not yet known clearly.

For India, it is going to be more problematic than solving any. New Delhi would be called upon to navigate through troubled waters as in the Cold War era, but taking sides seemingly, as it did on the side of the erstwhile Soviet Union during the Cold War era, is not an option after a point. EAM Jaishankar gave back to Europe, and even to the US, as India got it, in buying Russian oil, defying their unilateral sanctions.

India would need to consider if the US decision on F-16 spares for Pakistan was also a veiled message to India. After all, Russia too had begun befriending Islamabad, even if haltingly and without prejudice to India relations, after the latter had signed a path-breaking defence pact with the US in 2005. At that time, Moscow felt cheated as the US pact was done behind its back despite long years and decades of mutual association with and respect for India!

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and commentator. Views expressed are personal.

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