Two conjoined developments last week in the US Congress need to be understood for their far-reaching consequences for the world order that will inevitably appear on Indian shores sooner rather than later. The first is about the House of Representatives passing the bill last Saturday for a whopping $61.8-billion aid to Ukraine, and the second devolves upon a bill on the House floor titled the 21st Century Peace Through Strength Act, tabled by the House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, in these troubled times when the “world is on fire”.
McCaul’s bill sets a new threshold in the US’s sanctions policy towards adversaries, which allows the transfer of frozen Russian sovereign assets in the US to meet Ukraine’s needs. It is rather Kafkaesque that the US proposes to fund its proxy war against Russia with Russian reserves. To be sure, the European Union will follow suit. McCaul is a hugely influential Republican politician from Texas and he figured lately as a key interlocutor in the complex manoeuvring that resulted in Donald Trump signing off on the Ukraine aid bill on Friday in a thrilling restoration of “bipartisan consensus” in foreign policy, belying the polarisation in American politics when it comes to the core issues of the preservation of the US’s global hegemony.
Russia and China have been apprehending such a historic escalation of the weaponisation of the dollar by the US, empowering itself to confiscate the reserves of adversaries and utilising them as funds to rearm itself. The subtext here is that Washington is retracting from its solemn commitment of the early 1970s to make the dollar freely available to all countries for transactions in return for acceptance of its status as reserve currency of the international community—enabling the US, in turn, to live a profligate lifestyle by printing its currency wantonly and risking massive debt burden (touching $34 trillion in April and adding $1 trillion worth of debt to the total balance every 100 days). The US Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell warned in February that the nation is on an “unsustainable” path, as apparent also from the diminishing credibility of US bonds and recent surges in gold and bitcoin prices.
Instead of addressing the debt crisis, the US is adopting an ingenious way of “income generation” by seizing the sovereign reserves of other countries. Today, Russia and China are in the crosshairs. Such an arbitrary, unilateral rewriting of the rules of international financial order is fraught with cataclysmic chain reactions. In geopolitical terms, what is no longer possible to obfuscate is that the US’s unspoken agenda in the Ukraine war all along had been to weaken Russia and stifle its potential to be an independent voice and effective presence on the global stage—put differently, to reduce Moscow to a subaltern role in world politics—that also sets a precedent for the incoming showdown between the West and China. The US-Russia-China triangle is returning with a vengeance, reminiscent of Henry Kissinger’s doctrine that was conceived in a similar period of American political weakness following the Vietnam war.
In the emerging scenario, it is anybody’s guess whether India’s episodic diplomacy is pivoted on the above ‘big picture’. For India, the Ukraine war has largely been about the access it gained to Russian oil at discounted prices—which the US condoned, given Delhi’s compliance with Washington’s core agenda of atrophying the India-Russia defence partnership consciously, deliberately over time.
As regards China, India of course has frozen cooperation with its neighbour in any direction, instead of attempting to leverage cooperation to mutual benefit and to moderate differences over time, which is largely the pattern of international diplomacy in modern history, except for a clutch of eternal enmities as on the Korean peninsula or Turkey-versus-Armenia.
To be sure, a moment of truth lies ahead for India as to whether it is sustainable for it to be a lotus eater in sunny climes living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness and idleness like the people represented in the world of Homer in classical age. The point is, there is a naive belief pervasive in the Indian mindset that with philistinism being the motivating force of American political culture, so long as India can pander to American business interests, especially the military-industrial complex, all is well with the world.
On the other hand, in reality, China’s experience shows otherwise, as the recent six-day visit by the US Treasury Secretary to Beijing amply testified. Simply put, as much as the Biden Administration is seeking stability, predictability and communication channels in the US-China discourse, the competition is intensifying and the pressures on trade and technology remain relentless.
Then there is the incredible sales pitch by the government that their enthusiasm for India’s past is not necessarily a rupture or divergence with the interests and values of the US or Europe; on the contrary, it may forge a deeper historical foundation for strategic alignment between our country and the West. Such sophistry won’t fly. We shouldn’t be kidding ourselves. The US has a history of clipping the wings of even its closest Western allies if they become too big for their boots. It dealt with Japan in the 1970s when its foreign trade bloomed. Again, Germany, which was regarded as a potential superpower hardly 2-3 years ago, is today threatened with ‘de-industrialisation’ after being forced by the Biden administration to abandon the Nord Stream gas pipelines built by Russians.
The time has come to start thinking in a more reasonable way. Climbing up the greasy pole of international politics is no picnic. And make no mistake that the West is determined to preserve its four-century old dominance. When it comes to India, in particular, they will never allow “another China” to emerge in Asia. Herein lies India’s predicament. Today’s happenings were foreseen by the great visionary Russian strategic thinker Yevvgeny Primakov in the 1990s, when he proposed a Russia-India-China alliance.
(Views are personal)
M K Bhadrakumar | Former diplomat