The choice of Kamala Harris as the running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has increased Indian interest in the American presidential election. Typical of Tamil Nadu, which readily identifies as much with the ‘global Tamil’ as with the ‘global Indian’, flex boards have come up for Kamala, some with the late J Jayalalithaa blessing her from above.
The Indian angle misses the point that the nation had ‘endorsed’ US President Donald Trump when Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared with him at a ‘Howdy Modi’ campaign rally at Texas in September last, followed by a ‘Namaste Trump’ return show in Ahmedabad this February. The Trump campaign is using ‘Howdy Modi’ clippings in its poll promos.
How will New Delhi explain away the Texas show to a Biden presidency if it came to that? Like Pakistan and Article 370, some in Biden’s White House could project it as ‘interference’ in ‘internal affairs’. On the home front, Trump was waiting to happen. After decades of weariness with war veterans in politics, the US gave billionaire-independent Ross Perot a fifth of all votes polled in 1992. Politicians and poll analysts then declared that America ‘will not allow this to happen again’—letting an independent walk away with a large chunk of votes. Perot signified that Americans were willing to vote for change—and mainline criticism meant that the change should come from the status quo polity, not from someone who may not be a team player.
From Perot’s time, the father-son Bush duo took America back to the era of security threats and wars overseas. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein helped in the 90s with the Kuwaiti invasion, and the non-existent WMD (weapons of mass destruction) played that part a decade later. In their time, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama became ‘transitional presidencies’ for America and Americans to look inward. In between, during the Bush Jr era, Osama bin Laden brought the fear of God to the American homeland, long after Pearl Harbour.
Then came Trump, cornering Clinton-Obama’s ‘Ross Perot’ kind of ‘vote-for-change’ votes. Appealing to those that the ‘all-American’ electoral behaviour had not attracted, Trump won his first term on promises that created a core constituency of American manufacturing labour who had lost jobs and incomes to China in particular over the previous decades. Abrasiveness and arrogance: In his maiden presidential run, Trump made ‘American jobs lost’ (to India) one of his main planks, and won. This meant he had to deliver on H1B visa restrictions before facing his core constituency in America’s ‘Rust Belt’, who had lost manufacturing jobs to China. So China has to be his main campaign plank this time.
Unwittingly or otherwise, Trump’s current poll plank too may have become America’s foreign and security policy for the coming decades. A future American President, now or later, is going to find it difficult to reset the clock on China, as allies including India and Japan, Southeast Asian nations and the EU will apply reverse pressure on the US not to change course at will and dump them, that too in favour of China—whom it has taught them to hate more than earlier.
Trump has got enough ‘campaign support’ from China’s Xi Jinping in his electoral endeavour. Xi has added aggression to Trump’s trademark abrasiveness through provocative actions in the South China Sea, East China Sea and along the Indian border. With return help from Trump’s America, China is now where it wanted to be. It has emerged as the counterpoise to the US in the post-Cold War geo-strategic affairs, after successfully positioning itself as such in geo-political and geo-economic arenas. For China, the next step is to replace the US as the sole superpower.
Filling the vacuum: The territorial adventurism of China, coupled with military muscle flexing, economic might (until it ends up otherwise), political presence in P-5 and an enlarging list of ‘client states’ have all served one purpose that the Trump campaign may not have thought about. Xi’s China has come to fill the inevitable vacuum originally created by the sudden exit of the Soviet Union, with near-similar characteristics.
After the Soviet collapse, the geo-strategic vacuum was filled by small-time fundamentalist elements like Al-Qaeda first and ISIS later—both uninvited, yet acquiring global proportions and getting acknowledged as such. With the exit of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’, too, has failed. If their place is not taken by a relatively ‘predictable and responsible’ (?) state actor in China, more irresponsible and equally faceless non-state players of the Al-Qaeda kind may end up filling the ‘Soviet vacuum’ all over again.
It may be the beginning of the ‘new Cold War’. Trump’s America may have already heralded the ‘remaking of the world order’. How ‘cold’ or ‘hot’ will it be for India vis-a-vis China—with at least Pakistan in the shared neighbourhood as its eternal gun-for-hire—will then be decided not only by New Delhi but also by Washington. It may be unlike the Soviet times, when New Delhi decided for itself and Moscow stood by unquestioning.
N Sathiya Moorthy
Distinguished Fellow and Head-Chennai Initiative, Observer Research Foundation (sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)