
Monkey see, monkey do. The change of government forthcoming in the US next month could exert an influence the world over, first by emulation. In France, the cabinet of Prime Minister Michel Barnier has fallen to the only successful no-confidence motion since the era of Charles de Gaulle, because Marine Le Pen’s far right party made common cause with the left. With France at a low ebb, it is feared the far right could get another shot at power soon.
Size matters, and the US is huge on several axes––military force, financial and diplomatic clout, academic leadership, the size of markets. President-elect Donald Trump proposes to wield tariffs like a broadsword to bring other countries to heel, to rightsize trade imbalances and right historical wrongs in areas like security. He has threatened tariffs against Canada and Mexico to push them to police the border with the US. He will brandish tariffs at China to press it to address the illicit trade in fentanyl, an opioid that has devastated lives in the US.
The economies of France and Germany are dispirited and the new political change in Paris will also have budgetary implications. It looks like a good time to lean on Europe and NATO, which had aggravated Trump during his first presidency, using tariffs to show who’s boss.
However, billionaire investor Scott Bessent, whom Trump has nominated for treasury secretary, has been at pains to explain that tariffs are meant to be rattled like sabres at the negotiating table, not actually used in trade wars. This is credible, because rising prices would be inconvenient for Trump’s government, which was elected on the promise that it would straighten out the inequation between quality of life and cost of living. Exporters usually pass on tariffs to the consumer so indeed, tariffs could be used only as a threat.
BRICS should be prepared to face such a threat, because Trump dislikes attempts to dedollarise international trade. And India has reason to anticipate real tariffs, not mere threats, because Trump bears a grudge.
It began with the small matter of motorcycles. In his first term, he was outraged to discover India imposed a 100 percent tariff on motorcycle imports, and for years, he railed that it was being used to keep Harley-Davidson bikes––icons of Americana among his core supporters––out of India. This was not true, because the duty applied only to completely built bikes, while Harley mostly used assembly kits to bypass the tariff. Also, Harley failed in India because its price points are pain points when translated into rupees.
But that did not deter Trump from demanding to know, continuously over at least two years, if the Indian government did not understand that Harley was the original all-American brand and that he took the tariff against it as a personal affront. If India were to impose tariffs on hilsa imports from Bangladesh, West Bengal could secede. Trump’s reaction was on that scale, and he could pick up the thread again.
So, the next government in Washington will exert its influence the world over, but monkey business isn’t a one-way trade. Politics, whether left or right, tends to follow the same playbook everywhere, so which monkey saw which other monkey doing monkey business is a moot point.
There are, for instance, intriguing precedents of witch-hunts in America from India. If India has ‘urban Naxals’, America has ‘coastal elites’. If there’s a ‘Khan Market gang’ in Delhi, there are ‘government gangsters’ in Washington. That’s actually the title of a book by Kash Patel, a lawyer of Indian descent who rose fast in the security establishment in Trump’s first term, and is now tipped to head the FBI. Kash is also known as ‘K$h’, but never as Ke$ha. His book featured a list of ‘government gangsters’ who stood independent of the Trump ecosystem and he now threatens to go after them.
The subtitle of Patel’s book is ‘The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy’. The echoes of that phrase, ‘deep state’, may reverberate frequently in the coming months. It’s a nebulous term reeking of conspiracy and chicanery that suggests a cabal of unelected cogs is running the US, having stolen it from Americans.
But in Patel’s reality, the deep state is defined very simply: it’s a list of people in government who are insufficiently loyal to Trump. Their names had appeared in his book, but it was not read widely outside Trump’s charmed circle, so some of these people did not even know they were in the crosshairs, until now––when Patel threatens to bring the might of the state upon them.
We Indians need not be half as alarmed as the people on that list. We have been in the trenches. The steel frame of the administration soars above us while the autochthonous deep state plumbs unfathomable depths. Its long arm now threatens to reach under every mosque in the land to discover artefacts of Hindu civilisation that were literally suppressed.
Monkey see, monkey do. But in a wilderness of mirrors, we can never know which monkey is which.
(Views are personal) (Tweets @pratik_k)
Pratik Kanjilal | For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public