How Trump has taken India-US-Pakistan dynamics back to Cold War era

US President Donald Trump has been escalating the way to America’s India-Pakistan strategic re-set, back to the Cold War era. When everyone, starting with the Government of India, has conveniently addressed only his tariff talk viz India, no one, including the eternally pro-active sections of the Indian strategic community, has addressed the real and real-time issue which should be of greater concern to India and all Indians.

Trump talked about tariff hikes and penalties, yes, but what he said even more about was the US’ revived ties with Pakistan and his dumping India and Russia as ‘dead economies going down together’. It is sad and sorry that both the Government of India and most commentators in the country have chosen to look the other way. When private commentators began taking note, it came a lil’ too late on their instant tweets and mega FB posts.

Trump’s references in this regard all at once imply that his America has begun re-hyphenating India-Pakistan relations. It was something the White House under his post-Cold War predecessors assiduously avoided and began treating India relations as a stand-alone affair, more worthy of advancing in the larger regional and global interests – be it in terms of geopolitics, geo-economics and geostrategy, not necessarily in that order.

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Today, Trump has told us Indians that it’s all in the past. Better, New Delhi took note. Worse still, by clubbing India and Russia together but refraining from making political and geostrategic linkages, he has made sure that we miss out on the main, if not the real, aim of his combined statement. After all, tariffs and politics do not travel on the same page, and if he has had reservations, he could well have taken it up with the Indian leadership at a different level. If not, he could have tweeted separately on the matter, earlier or later.

It does not stop there. Through Operation Sindoor, India also brought out well and deep how Pakistan was aligned to China in military matters. The fighters and missiles that Pakistan used to target India all bore the Made-in-China mark. Now, not only Pakistan and China, but even the US and its Nato allies could not close their eyes to reality.

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It’s like India’s Pokhran-II nuclear tests ‘forcing’ Pakistan, too, to test, thus denying the age-old deniability available to their US ally ever since A Q Khan’s name began doing the rounds over two decades or so. It is not as if the Americans did not know but could get away by asking their Indian interlocutors to show ‘more proof’.

Best of both worlds

Be it as it may, from an Indian security perspective, the Trump announcement on the neo-normal US-Pakistan relations has pushed the region, too, into the Cold War era conundrum. Maybe, in the name of wooing Pakistan away from China, as the US wanted India and the rest of the world to believe — and possibly did not actually believe in it — Islamabad now has both nations on its side, or the best of both worlds, all over again.

It will remain so unless Trump recasts his sights one more time. That is, if it makes sense for Team Trump to read the message emanating out of Balochistan that there are no oil reserves for the US to explore, export and exploit jointly, as Gen Munir seems to have convinced the Trump establishment. Pakistan is troubled by Balochistan in the post-Afghan era, and the generals are trying to talk Trump and the US into doing their bidding on the security front. The unspoken word is about Pakistan’s unproven allegation that India is behind the Balochis’ nationalist fervour. The Trump generation in the US does not know about its origins in the pre-Partition era, when the Balochis wanted to merge with India, despite their religious identity with the newly formed Pakistan, but contiguity rules did not permit it.

Indian street opinion

Linked to all this is the Indian street opinion that continues to influence even the hardest of American allies in New Delhi’s policy-making establishment — political, diplomatic or otherwise bureaucratic. Since before the Bangladesh War in 1971 and more definitely after the Nixon-Kissinger era’s aborted despatch of the US Seventh Fleet to these parts before 92,000 Pakistani soldiers surrendered, the Indian public has always been sceptical about America and American support for India.

In the self-belief that has not held for long, whether for South Asia or for other regions of the world, American policymakers have taken the rest of the world as less smart than themselves. They continue to do so in the case of India and South Asia all over again. Their lack of understanding of civilisational states, their cultural mores and what it does to their policy resilience are all to blame. Add to that the inevitability of American policy and military leadership not thinking about the day after, over which they actually do not have any control, which has shamed them no end, and repeatedly so.

Over the decades after the Second World War, this embarrassing lack of knowledge, compounded by their revolving-door entry-exit rule for policymakers, has all caused a massive loss of American face in Vietnam, Shah’s Iran and, more recently, Afghanistan. Yet, their persistence with self-belief and consequent self-defeat continues.

India is a functioning democracy, where, barring an occasional erratic shift or course correction, the nation’s security and foreign policies have dovetailed. They have also withstood the test of time and remained predictable and self-correcting under changing regimes and new-generation leaders. In democratic terms, Pakistan is still much younger compared to India, a the political stability and continuity are provided by the generals sitting in Rawalpindi and not by the political leadership operating out of the capital, Islamabad.

Peanuts and worse

The Pakistan generals have seen more American presidents than you can count. They have remained steadfast in their own version of the ‘Pakistan first’ policy, which is self-destructive in many ways. They don’t care. But as Gen Zia-ur Rehman said of President Jimmy Carter’s aid offer as ‘peanuts’, every Pakistani general knows how to play around with Carter’s successors. As an institution, they are playing for the long term and are adept at making small shifts and changes to suit the personal fancies of every American administration. In the end, they have thumbed the nose at Establishment America, and repeatedly so.

Now the generals are ready for the next round, post-Afghanistan, and they have a willing American president walking into a trap that he himself has set for his successors, too. Now, in turn, is the time for India to re-evaluate the nation’s America policy, and not just the Pakistan or China policy. For, both Washington and Islamabad/Rawalpindi have forgotten that Pakistan is already Afghanistan in waiting and Afghanistan is Pakistan in the making—and in more ways than one.

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.