View: What is at stake for India in the US elections?

A lot of the discussion on how the American people’s choice for their next president would matter for India has tended to focus on Trump’s presumed special relationship with Modi, the Democrats’ prickliness over human rights violations in Kashmir and Biden’s readiness to match Trump’s toughness vis-à-vis China, if not the Indianness of Kamala Harris. This is tosh. And not just because Trump revealed how deep his special feeling for friend Modi’s land plumbs when he called India filthy and dirty to score a point in a public debate.
US withdrawal into Trump’s America-First shell has meant vacating swathes of geopolitical power for China to move into. Unbridled Chinese power is not good for India or the rest of the world. Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the rules-based world order, to cheer the hearts of the mighty and to the dismay of the rest. Climate change, pandemics and terror are other bits of the global policy commons that could be damaged or nurtured, depending on whom American voters choose to lead them. Finally, Trump’s ability to amplify the flaws of American democracy has strengthened anti-democratic tendencies around the world.

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India is not just an emerging market. It is an emerging power. It is the only power in Asia that can hope to countervail China. Its space programme gives it indigenous capability to develop different kinds of missiles with varied payload and range capabilities. It has an indigenous nuclear programme. It can project power in the Indian Ocean with its aircraft carrier and a capable Navy. India has good relations with most nations of the world and prizes its autonomy. Its economy is large and has the potential to grow fast, given the size of its young, work-ready demographic.

India wants more room for itself in the world. Today, the US forces India to import liquefied natural gas from itself, rather than from Iran, whose ports are closer to the Indian shore than Delhi is to Mumbai. China vetoes any move to pin Pakistan down in the UN for its support to terror. India’s quota and voting power in the IMF are sadly out of proportion with its status as the fifth largest economy in the world. More room for manoeuvre means loosening today’s rules to allow greater leeway for a country like India.

India wants different global rules, not a world without rules, where might is right. Donald Trump’s America First approach to foreign policy is wrecking the rules-based global order and replacing it with the law of the jungle, enforced solely by the ferocity of tooth and claw that can be brought to bear on any dispute. Trump’s brand of Make America Great Again corrodes the rules-based global order, instead of strengthening it with new rules that replace the old ones that constrain emerging markets like India — when America refuses to allow any appointment to the appellate body of the World Trade Organisation’s dispute settlement mechanism and renders it dysfunctional, walks out of the Paris climate accord, torpedoes the Iran nuclear deal, buys up Covid vaccines in the making for its own citizens and walks out of the World Health Organisation, instead of strengthening its programme for equitable global access to vaccines, prosecutes a trade war that derails global growth, tries to bully the chairman of the US central bank to slash policy rates and add to the flood of liquidity gushing through the world’s cross-border pipelines, pushing up the prices of financial assets to levels totally out of sync with the performance of the real economy.

Trump has been attacking China much as BJP politicians attack Pakistan: to create an external bogeyman that would deflect attention from internal failures. However, his actual contribution to restraining China’s advance in the geopolitical power stakes is in inverse proportion to the decibel levels of his China Virus cries. The more the US retreats on the world stage, the more the room for China to advance.

Neither Japan nor South Korea is today sure that they can count on the US to stand by its treaty obligation to come to their defence in the face of an attack. This gives China additional heft in its dealings with these neighbours. The US abruptly withdrew its troops from the Kurdish area of Syria, after the Islamic State was routed in the Syrian civil war and many of its fighters were taken captive by the Kurds. This allowed Turkey to attack the Kurds, who considered themselves America’s comrades-in-arms in their fight against the Islamic State. The Kurds were forced to retreat, and allowed the Islamic State captives to escape. America-First Trump cannot make a reliable ally, as the Kurds discovered.

Climate change denial and promotion of fossil fuels on President Trump’s part have eroded the world’s ability to hold down global warming. Many countries will suffer as sea levels rise, extreme weather events such as cloudbursts, hurricanes, forest fires and droughts become more frequent. Biden, in contrast, has promised a major programme to fight climate change, if he becomes President.

Trump has been negotiating a speedy American exit from Afghanistan, leaving the Taliban to run amok and Pakistan to wield control over Afghanistan through its proxies, the Taliban.

Yes, there is a whole lot at stake for India in the US presidential election far removed from direct bilateral relations between India and the US, which will proceed on a trajectory of convergent interests, regardless of who occupies the White House.