Shadow Warrior | Mr Modi goes to Washington, déjà vu all over again

Considering that India and the US are my two favourite countries, it is odd that I get nervous whenever there is a summit between the two. I am reminded inevitably of the Frank Capra film Mr Smith goes to Washington, where James Stewart, a naive idealist, goes to the corrupt company town Washington DC and is bullied and humiliated. In the end (this being fiction) Mr Smith wins a famous victory for the ideas of democracy and the power of the people.

In real life, things are different. Mr Modi is not naive, and he is a pragmatist (though there is a wee bit of an idealist in him), and he is quite aware of the Deep State and its regime-change agendas (e.g. they just did one in Brazil, defenestrating Bolsonaro). Besides, I am sure that the PM remembers the same Democrats giving him the dubious honour of being the only person ever denied a visa on the grounds of “severe violation of religious freedom”, purportedly for the Gujarat riots in 2002. Yes, along the same lines as the absurd USCIRF.

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When Democrats are in power, things simply don’t seem to go well for India-US relations. There are many reasons: one is that Democrats on average seem to prefer autocrats and uniformed caudillos because hey, they get things done; another is that many are Atlanticists, and quite a few are of Eastern European origin (eg Brzezinski, Albright, Nuland, Blinken) with scant regard for Indo-Pacific issues; a third is that they tend to be woke.

The Clinton Administration and especially the Obama Administration were unpleasant to India, in keeping with the above tendencies Democrats exhibit. Manmohan Singh was, with much hoopla, given the “first state dinner” by Obama, which so far as I can tell meant nothing whatsoever. It was an empty gesture.

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In fact, I have been underwhelmed by various US shows of bonhomie. I panned the Obama state visit in 2010. To be honest, I have not been an admirer of Obama from day one, and the current Biden Administration seems to be, for all practical purposes, Obama 3.0: same ruinous economic and foreign policies, mostly the same tired faces, the same wokeness.

Even though I am Republican-leaning, I was not all that impressed by Narendra Modi’s interaction with Trump in 2017 either. Certainly, Trump was a lot better than the Democrats, but then I expected Trump to look out, correctly, for US interests, rather than do anything for India, even though Republicans understand the China threat better.

Earlier, I thought the entire full-court-press and hard-sell on the 2008 ‘nuclear deal’ simply indicated that it was a good deal for the US, and  not so good for India. In the event, India’s nuclear power production capacity did not go up dramatically, India became a much bigger buyer of US military hardware, and there were surely (non-public) limitations placed on India’s nuclear weapons programmes.

I guess I suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations. I think this is a selling job on the part of the Americans, and that ill-prepared Indians will be taken in by flattery. Therefore, I continue to be sceptical about the real value of the current tour by Modi to meet Biden, and have a ‘state dinner’ with him.

Prospects are actually worse for Indo-American rapport today than they have been for years, although it should be the opposite, given rampaging China. The principal reason is Democrat antipathy: for instance, Biden’s staff explicitly hurt India in the past with the so-called Biden Amendment that  set back India’s space programme by 19 years by pressing the Russians to cancel the transfer of cryogenic engines, as seen in the brilliant Rocketry: the Nambi Effect.

On top of this, the US has hurt itself in the last few years through disastrous policies, allowing others to gain power in relative terms. So when PM Modi goes to Washington, it would be appropriate to revisit the old story about the emperor, the vassal king and his court bard, who wrote a new poem extolling the emperor as “the full moon”, and the king as “the new moon”.

Upon being berated by the king for diminishing him, the bard explained: “The full moon is waning, and the new moon is waxing.” This mollified the king, presumably saving the bard from having his head separated from his body.

India is on a trajectory to achieve economic (and military) power, but then it may or may not be in the US’ interests to accommodate India. The on-again, off-again US approach to the Quad (eg the AUKUS diversion) signals that the US is not serious about India’s concerns regarding China’s hegemonic ambitions. Not only US politicians, but the steady stream of Wall Street and business honchos making a beeline for China suggests that even for the money folks, despite calls for ‘de-coupling’ or ‘de-risking’, China is very much a factor in their future plans.

The US has made several strategic, even existential, blunders in the recent past, and again I think the Democrats are mostly to blame:

1. The US actively collaborated in the rise of China by allowing it to be a principal manufacturing partner. People such as Henry Kissinger and several POTUSes wittingly or unwittingly helped in a process where China effectively de-industrialised the US. As the realist foreign policy analyst John Mearsheimer suggests, this may be the worst example ever of a major power paving the way for its own eclipse.
2. The unnecessary Ukraine war, with the singular goal of humiliating and possibly balkanising Russia, has already had disastrous consequences for Western Europe. Russia is a demographically declining power, and it will eventually fade away on its own; wasting enormous amounts of money and effort on ‘punishing’ it is a folly, as was the peremptory, headlong abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban. By pushing Russia into China’s embrace_,_ the Ukraine war is counterproductive strategically.
3. The emerging facts about the Covid pandemic suggest that Antony Fauci and others were working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on ‘gain-of-function’, in direct contravention of US law. In addition, the poorly handled fiscal and monetary policies in relation to the pandemic have imposed pain, including high inflation, on the US.
4. The awful culture wars and the focus on gender issues, diversity, equity, climate change and other divisive issues have been tearing the US apart since Obama’s time. Objectively speaking, some of these are manufactured issues. In addition, there is clear deterioration in the system, where now we have the unedifying spectacle of an ex-President indicted on mishandling classified documents, and the sitting President is accused of the same, as well as of relatives doing influence peddling.

None of this is a good look. The US is in trouble. Which it pains me to say, because I think the ideals of the ‘City on a hill’ that animate the spirit of the US Constitution still resonate after all these years. It is hard to think that the US is being overtaken by an authoritarian China.

Anyway, I think the general idea from the Biden Administration’s point of view is to get India into its orbit as a vassal, just like most of Western Europe, Japan, Australia, etc. The nastiness at the time India stoutly refused to toe the US/NATO line on Ukraine is a signal about this. People like the Portuguese Bruno Macaes and Duleep Singh, the architect of the Russia sanctions, chided India severely; the official US stance was that India somehow betrayed their trust. They couldn’t accept that India has no dog in this very European/Western fight.

I suspect a big part of the backroom negotiations on the PM’s trip will be to get India to toe the line on Ukraine. There will be various sticks and carrots dangled, such as technology transfers (which is actually an oxymoron, as nobody in their right mind transfers technology; the only way it happens is if you steal it, like China does). Then there is the GE fighter aircraft engine under discussion, and vague talk about quantum computing and other exotic stuff.

There will be more efforts to wean India away from Russian arms imports, and to sell lots of US hardware. There are expensive drones being discussed. An expert told me that if these are Reaper-class Sea Guardians, they may be a good buy, as they can be paired with the submarine hunter-killer surveillance craft, the P8i Poseidon, to help patrol the Indian Ocean.

All in all, the prospects for a mutually beneficial outcome seem bleak. Let us just hope that the Indians don’t come back with a whole lot of lemons, having been bamboozled. Again.

The writer has been a conservative columnist for over 25 years. His academic interest is innovation. Views expressed are personal.

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