Decades of United States efforts to nurture strategic relations with China and India, while isolating Russia, have gone up in smoke under President Donald Trump’s tariff blitzkrieg. That nurturing produced a complicated diplomatic mosaic, which has now been considerably simplified and attenuated by Mr Trump to the detriment of the US. India and China were until the past few weeks ill at ease with each other, having fought a bitter and bloody border war in 1962; Russia and China were not the best of neighbours, with the former annexing a part of Chinese Manchuria (1858-1860), and after the Sino-Russia split in 1961, became bitter leadership rivals for the control of global communism, nearly coming to nuclear blows during the Zhenbao Island incident of 1969; while Russia and India relations had warm relations that peaked in 1971 (Friendship Treaty) but cooled and even stagnated after the collapse of Soviet Union until the 2000 Strategic Partnership, and again cooled as India veered West and fostered a rapprochement with China.
Such diplomatic complexities, with all their intricate and delicate nuances, proved too cumbersome for President Trump to grasp. His insular view of diplomatic relations makes sense to him only if it is mediated by purely whimsical, boyish and punishing tariff impositions. On August 27, after India failed to heed US directive to desist from buying discounted Russian crude oil that saved the South Asian country $17bn, Mr Trump imposed 25% tariffs on some key Indian goods, and a further 25% punitive tariffs on those same goods, bringing the total tariffs to a whopping 50%, almost at par with the tariffs imposed on Brazilian exports to the US. Before the imposition of extraordinary tariffs on India, the South Asian country had enjoyed a trade surplus against US to the tune of over $4bn. The result of the tariffs is that India, which regards Mr Trump’s ultimatum as hostile and duplicitous, has begun to look elsewhere, defying America’s bullying tactics, and working to restore and rebuild relations with China. Much worse for the US, decades of American efforts to decouple India, the world’s biggest democracy and fifth largest economy, from China, the world’s second largest economy at $19.23 trillion to the US $30.50trn, has not only been reversed, the mistake is now probably beyond remedy. Having nurtured its relations with the West, and particularly the US, for decades, India is shocked by Mr Trump’s insensitivity and utter lack of strategic insight into global power politics as he unites the worlds’ second, third and fourth top military powers against America.
The damage to US foreign policy and image consequent upon Mr Trump’s shallow and whimsical approach to global power politics is immense and probably irreparable. The world’s other economic and military powers will not only distrust the US, or probably hold it in contempt, they are almost certain to unite against it, a point the US president himself made in oblique reference to China’s President Xi Jinping hosting India, Russia and eighteen other countries at a two-day regional security and economic summit (The Shangai Cooperation Organisation) in Tianjin between August 31 and September 1. The purpose of the summit essentially was to intensify the effort to promote a powerful counterweight to the Western Alliance and produce a new global order. The Russo-Ukrainian war may have brought Russia down a peg or two, almost in the same way World War II paradoxically diminished the influence and power of Great Britain in contrast to the US, the Shangai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) will proceed in the years ahead to entrench itself as a countervailing force to the Western Alliance. To a President Xi hungry for global power and influence, Mr Trump’s bumbling and pedantic diplomacy is godsend.
No country, not even in the Western Alliance, trusts the US anymore, not to talk of Mr Trump in particular. The US president has not only alienated Asia and completely damaged and repudiated the Indo-Pacific alliance carefully curated by his predecessors to produce the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), both of which aimed to whittle down the growing geopolitical assertiveness of China as well as sustain the paramountcy of liberal international order, he has also managed in the same breath to antagonise the rest of the world, including Africa and Latin America. He has promoted American exceptionalism with a nationalistic and deeply offensive fervour, twisted visa policies without regard to America’s global leadership, ridiculed and discarded his country’s value system from which most of the world previously took their compass, turned his back on science, research and intellectuals, enthroned a truly vexatious sense of triumphalism and entitlement, promoted mercenary foreign policy, and returned the country to the unprofitable isolationism and racist tendency of the early 20th century that contradict and undermine America’s global ambition and position. No president anywhere has so profoundly undermined his country’s ennobling objectives.
Mr Trump, though a darling of American evangelicals enamoured of the prophetic, may inadvertently be fulfilling Bible prophecy. Under him, there is an almost undecipherable and dystopian future about the US. How could such a richly endowed, powerful and dominant country elect someone so unendowed, so self-centred, so averse to logic, so pedestrian? But it happened, not just once, but twice. After his reelection, he has embraced the most retrogressive and pugnacious domestic and foreign policies ever, and projected his personal insecurity upon his country. The ordinary task of analysing and explicating the future and ambition of his country eludes him in a way that made ancient Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar far his superior. Shorn of any capacity for reflection or circumspection, and unlike King Nebuchadnezzar who wondered what fate awaited Babylon after his death, Mr Trump has spared no thought for his country after his presidency, beyond of course his insufferable comparisons, nor wondered why the bible seems silent on the US while giving copious mention to the alliance between Russia and China vis-à-vis the solution to the Palestinian conundrum.
China may not have been tested in war since Deng Xiaoping inspired its economic renaissance, but it has in the past one decade or a little more deployed its newfound economic power to forge a technological base and military machine that may have exceeded Russia’s capability. One day, inevitably, this machine will be put to use, perhaps at a time America seems truly and irrevocably isolated. If the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union is any example, it will be futile to imagine or calculate that fateful date to be far in the future. Under Mr Trump, America has antagonised nearly every country and embarked on scorched-earth foreign policy as well as racist and divisive domestic policies. His successors, even if they are not cut from the same cloth, may find the damage hard to amend.
