Stand up to the US, but be careful about standing with China
Trump has burnt painstakingly built bridges, but China can’t be counted on to not quietly burn bridges India builds with it
While I have had a fair idea of the US disconnect with Indian sentiment over President Donald Trump’s bizarre tariff war, the ever-widening gap between Americans of a certain ideological persuasion and the Indian response became evident to me on a recent show hosted by UK TV presenter Piers Morgan.
Brigadier general Mark Kimmitt, who retired from the US army, was among Morgan’s guests. A former assistant secretary of State in the George W Bush administration and a military veteran with 30 years in service, Kimmitt astonished me when he used the word “arrogance” to describe India’s unbending position before Trump’s bullying. Then, he argued that the recent bonding between the US and Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir should “give India pause.”
The context for the show was China’s display of military might, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by the side of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Morgan wanted to know if China was the new sheriff of the global neighbourhood.
The image of the Modi-Putin-Xi power huddle from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit a day before the Chinese military parade was on everyone’s minds. Kimmitt and a couple of others wanted to know what India was doing in the corner of “authoritarians”.
If the meltdown in America over the pictures from China is over “democratic values”, then the new love fest between Donald Trump and Pakistan’s army chief makes the opposite argument, doesn’t it? After all, from no other country did the military chief accompany the supposedly elected prime minister to the SCO summit.
Of course, India has to stand up to Trump’s arm twisting and bullying. I have always argued that the “penalty” for India’s purchase of Russian oil is a bogey, and Trump’s pique is personal and full of staggering hypocrisy. That said, I remain a serious China-sceptic. After Galwan and, most recently, China’s active support to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, I would see the images out of China as strictly tactical as of now. Trump necessitated a global reset, one which India should be embarking on with eyes wide open.
But the responses on the Morgan show and the kind of voluminous, near-panic stricken coverage in the western media that the SCO summit drove is instructive. Before Modi locked arms with Putin or took a limo ride with him, and before Xi rolled out the red carpet for Modi and others, coverage in the western media of Trump’s tariff war was, for most part, marginal.
I was speaking to an American analyst the other day, trying to gauge popular sentiment on the trade wars Trump had unleashed. He said people usually didn’t have an opinion on technical subjects such as trade policy. This wasn’t about trade policy, I argued back. It was about geopolitics, security, international security, and so on.
Truth is, till the SCO summit took place in China and the images from there went viral, you would never have heard CNN primetime devoted to why India had fallen out with Washington. Commentators like Van Jones commented on how the West had boxed itself in, isolated against a new world order.
So, in the short term, I am all for the shake-up the SCO summit has triggered in western understanding of what’s going down between New Delhi and Washington. Given that the entire fight with Trump is over sovereignty and the right of India, as a free nation, to autonomously take decisions, it’s good to send a message loud and clear. The age of America as school captain — the age of ‘sit down, stand up, do push-ups, there’s a good girl’ — is over.
But if India is speaking of multi-polarity and strategic autonomy, then that’s what the coming months and years have to be steered by.
Let’s not be so quick to forget what the deputy chief of the Indian Army said about China’s role in Operation Sindoor. Lt Gen Rahul Singh spoke of the battle being on one border, but with two adversaries. He pointed out that Beijing had used the battleground like a “live lab”. And he used the metaphor of a “borrowed knife” to elaborate on how China had used Pakistan against India. The “Borrowed Knife” concept is purportedly part of 36 strategic dictums followed by China.
So, while it makes absolute sense to borrow from Trump’s own book of deal-making and transactionalism, we cannot overlook the fact that our troops, in the thousands, are eyeball-to-eyeball with the Chinese in the high Himalayas of Eastern Ladakh.
Or that, by all accounts, we are not yet completely back to a pre-Galwan status quo ante at the Line of Actual Control. And that it is China that has historically blocked India’s resolutions against Pakistan-based terror groups at the United Nations.
India’s hard-wired to stand up to neo-imperialists. And that is something to be proud of. But the path ahead is challenging because, while Trump has burnt painstakingly-built bridges, China can’t be counted on to not bomb the bridge you build with it — metaphorically speaking.
India, while engaging with everyone, must aspire to greater power and economic heft. That is the only language of the new world order.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal
