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America First

Slogan of a Retreat in Slow Motion

‘I didn’t come along and divide this country. This country was seriously divided before I got here.’¹

––President Donald Trump, White House press conference, 16 February 2017

‘We can make America great again [ . . . ] The historic events in the Soviet Union have taught us a very important lesson. National security begins at home, for the Soviet empire did not ever lose to us on the field of battle, it rotted from the inside out [ . . . ] It rotted from economic and political and ultimately from spiritual failure [ . . . ] But make no mistake about it, the end of the Cold War is not the end of threats to America.’²

—Bill Clinton, lamenting the challenges faced by the American middle class while announcing his candidacy for US presidency, 31 October 1991

‘Russia is our friend.’³

—White nationalist slogan in Charlottesville, Virginia, 13 May 2017

‘Since 2010 we have seen the return of Great Power competition. To varying degrees, Russia and China have made clear they seek to substantially revise the post-Cold War international order and norms of behavior.’⁴

—US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) report, 2018

‘Why can’t we take out these bastards [the Islamic State]?’⁵

—CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta to President Barack Obama during a press conference in Turkey, November 2015

Jim Acosta was expressing a frustration that a lot of Americans shared as the Obama presidency was drawing to an end. Prefacing his question, he said, ‘They [the American people] see that the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS.’⁶ It was a few days after the Paris terrorist attack on 13 November 2015. Obama had taken a view that the Islamic State (IS) was contained; it did not pose an ‘existential threat’ to the US. In his view, the biggest existential threat to America—and humanity—was climate change. Obama was visibly irritated at Acosta’s question, but responded politely. ‘Jim, I just spent the last three questions answering that very question, so I don’t know what more you want me to add. I think I’ve described very specifically what our strategy is, and I’ve described very specifically why we do not pursue some of the other strategies that have been suggested.’⁷

Towards the end of his administration, Obama was accused of downplaying American power, not only by his Republican opponents, but also his Democratic fellow travellers including Hillary Clinton. Trump’s campaign latched on to this sentiment and inflamed it.

America is the world’s foremost military superpower by miles. It has 6800 nuclear warheads, 430 ships and submarines roaming the oceans across the globe and eleven aircraft carriers––the newest one, USS Gerald R. Ford, commissioned by Trump in 2017, is said to be science fiction turning into a floating reality. The US spends more than $600 billion on its military every year, and the next seven biggest spenders––China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan––combined spend less than that. America has 800 military bases in more than seventy countries. In contrast, the only place outside of the former Soviet Republics that Russia has a military base in is Syria. Russia, Britain and France together don’t exceed thirty military bases abroad. So America has the military strength to wipe out any other country from the face of the earth.

Traditionally, the US has sought to deal with the rest of the world, including India, with the self-assurance that such military brings. The former US ambassador to India, Harry Barnes, had ‘threatened Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi saying, “We will make a horrible example of you,” when he heard that there might be another nuclear test in the early 1980s.’⁸ ‘We are going to come down on these guys like a ton of bricks,’ President Bill Clinton said as he opened a meeting at the White House to plan the American response to Pokhran-II in 1998.⁹

The US’s ability to sway world events according to its interests is restricted by multiple factors. This is frustrating for America’s ruling elite, expressed in Acosta’s question about the IS—‘Why can’t we take out these bastards?’ Why can’t the sole superpower in the world take out a few thousand jihadis who are driving Soviet-era pickup trucks in deserts and beheading people with medieval weapons?

The rot from within that Clinton warned about in 1991 is showing up in America in multiple ways. For a country that started the post-Cold War era with a decisive world leadership role and was able to meet its military and strategic objective in forty-two days in early 1991 to expel Saddam Hussein’s invading Iraqi army from Kuwait, this is a large shift. When George H.W. Bush decided to use military force against Hussein, the United Nations Security Council voted overwhelmingly for it, and the American Congress supported it with a significant bipartisan majority.

The years that followed have seriously damaged the US’s global leadership position. This is best captured in the wide variance between two slogans, three decades apart—the first heralding globalization and the second, calling for drawing a curtain on it. ‘Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’¹⁰ President Ronald Reagan said, speaking in what was then West Berlin on 12 June 1987, in front of the Berlin Wall that had symbolized the division of the world into Communist and Capitalist blocs. Three decades later, ‘Build that wall’¹¹ became the war cry of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, echoing his promise to build a wall along America’s southern border with Mexico, if elected. The wall came to represent an American yearning to separate and secure itself from the rest of the world.

‘America First’ is a political argument that has crystallized over three decades of globalization. It is not a coincidence that politics in many parts of the world is discussed in a temporal framework of the ‘last 30 years’. In India too, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly pointed to the fact that he is the first leader in the last thirty years to win an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha.

Throughout this book we refer to strategic culture as a framework to define the self, the enemy and the allies by respective countries. The ongoing American crisis arises from the confusion over these questions—who we are, who are our enemies, and who are our allies. America First, Trump’s ultranationalist slogan, is an expression of that confusion, in theory and practice. It marks the end of strategy, as the country’s grand designs over the last three decades lie in ruins.

The current crisis in the US began from an obsessive conviction that its political and economic model was ideal for the rest of the world—an idea that it unabashedly promoted following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The political model was that of representative democracy, and the economic model was unbridled market capitalism driven by global trade. The overdrive of the market and its success created social fissures that played out rather starkly in an open society. The promotion of market economy as a world system also opened up opportunities for other countries, particularly China, to grow to threaten the global primacy of the US. The aggressive promotion of its own models unleashed violent forces in many other parts of the world, particularly the Middle East. In other words, the current American crisis is actually a result of the successes of neo-liberalism—wherein the capacity of the state is curtailed, that of the private sector expanded and the notion of national sovereignty weakened. America, its homeland, is what neo-liberalism threatens the most.

A Challenged Supremacy

Challenges to American supremacy began almost immediately after what many Americans still consider the country’s greatest success—the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism. Exactly at that moment of victory, it was faced with a new challenge. America, collaborating with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had propped up jihadis in Afghanistan to counter communism. Soon after the withdrawal of the Soviets, America left Afghanistan, but the jihadis did not go back to celebrate the success of free market and liberal democracy. Three decades later, the US is staring at a black hole in Afghanistan that is sucking its spirit, resources and will. The old adage that Afghanistan is the nemesis of empires has come to haunt them. The US-led forces will sooner or later reclaim the territories lost to the Islamic State, but global jihadism, as an ideology, shows no signs of waning. And the war in Afghanistan, for America, is turning out to be what it was for the Soviets—an impossible place to stay on or exit, with significant costs in terms of money and prestige. The country is today fighting the monsters it created to fight the Soviets. On the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria and on Homeland Security, from 2001 to 2016, America has spent $3.6 trillion, according to a study by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.¹² It is a war America cannot win; it is a war in which it cannot define what victory is. And it has to decide whether to stay, or run, and at what cost.

Afghanistan starkly demonstrates the dilemma of American power. It represents a debate America cannot easily conclude—what is it fighting for in Afghanistan? Or more broadly, who or what is its enemy and who are its friends? This question has been tailing the country since the end of the Cold War, but the overwhelming military and economic power that it commanded throughout this period helped it to avoid confronting these questions. America acted as a Noah’s Ark in world politics, where all kinds of seemingly incompatible species could cohabit. Israel and Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Japan, India and Pakistan, the UAE and Qatar, Germany and Turkey—all these nations that have varying degrees of mutual animosity jostled for space under an American umbrella, complaining to it about each other. America’s perceived neutrality and its ability to control the actions of their adversaries held these countries close to it for the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

President Obama sought to expand the ark even further, reaching out to Iran and Cuba for instance. Presidents starting with George W. Bush tried to bring about an understanding with Russia, with varying degrees of success. Whether or not America offered justice to all, it led the world order that followed in the wake of the end of the Soviet era.

In the first decade after the end of the Cold War, America used post-Second World War institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reinforce the primacy of its world view. Bush Senior and Bill Clinton worked hard to keep international and domestic opinion on their side through global institutions and domestic social alliances. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, the world appeared to stand solidly behind the US, but that unravelled soon enough. When George W. Bush made what now bears out as one of the most catastrophic of American moves since then—the invasion of Iraq in 2003—it was a unilateral move without complete endorsement from the UN.

Following Bush, and inheriting the worst economic collapse in American history, which was structurally different from the cyclical capitalist dips, Obama had little option but to accept the relative decline of American power. His very presence at the White House awakened the craftily hidden racist bones in many Americans. His attempts to reboot America’s terms of engagement with the world, by a calibrated accommodation of rising powers and seeking to turn over a new leaf in relations with countries considered ‘enemies’, angered those with entrenched notions of American foreign policy and its military. Most notable among these was his outreach to Iran and Cuba. His appreciation of the limits of American power and the need for building broader and newer coalitions caused some degree of backlash domestically and internationally.

Harsher views on this are represented most effectively by Trump himself, but even officials working for Obama found his reticence ‘degrading’. For instance, Andrew Exum, who was the US deputy assistant secretary of defence for Middle East policy and one of the negotiators with Russia between 2015 and 2016 on the crisis in Syria, wrote in an Atlantic article in 2017:

We initially offered up carrots—such as increased military and intelligence cooperation with the Russians against Islamist extremists—if they would help us remove Bashar al-Assad from power, but by the end, we were practically begging the Russians to just let humanitarian aid shipments into East Aleppo. As one of the U.S. negotiators, I found the whole experience degrading.¹³

Exum welcomed Trump’s decision to bomb Syria in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—a measure that won Trump bipartisan applause in the early days of his presidency in April 2017.

The notion of an irreconcilable enemy figure, in a binary world of good and evil, has been the hallmark of American foreign policy for most of the last century. First, it was Nazism and then, communism, which gave moral clarity to American self-perception. Its end made such a distinction difficult to sustain, and American thinkers began to reflect on this question. ‘Since the 1940s, the central purpose of the foreign policy of the U.S. has been the global containment of communism. If the Cold War is ending, or even changing its character in radical ways, the question arises: What should America’s purpose be in the conditions likely to prevail during the rest of this century?’ National Interest, an American conservative magazine said as introduction to a debate on the issue in 1989, when the Soviet Union was still around.¹⁴

The fundamental question that faced America was whether it should retreat into a cocoon of blissful isolation or whether there was anything else that it needed to be present for and continue to fight for. ‘What purpose have we in such a world?’ asked American political commentator Charles Krauthammer.¹⁵ He argued that the US had won the battle against communism and Nazism and made the world safe for democracy. But the expansion of democracy required continued American engagement, for which he proposed the model of ‘Universal Dominion’, in which America would work ‘for a super-sovereign West, economically, culturally and politically hegemonic in the world’.

‘This would require the conscious depreciation not only of American sovereignty but the notion of sovereignty in general,’ which would need to be replaced with ‘super-sovereignty, mechanisms such as G-7 and G-5 which are beginning to act as a finance committee for the West’. How will the new order function internationally? The America-led West would remain at the centre of the world, and around it ‘will radiate in concentric circles, first the Second World, the decommunising states, dependent on the West for technology and finance [ . . . ] As they liberalized economically and politically, they would become individually eligible for status as associate members of the unipolar center.’

Krauthammer is a conservative thinker, but it is safe to argue that there has been a general consensus among the US policy elite that the path he outlines is the one to pursue. But world events and America’s own evolution would not let that vision progress in the manner envisaged by Krauthammer. For one, it is noteworthy that his essay made no mention of the jihadis in Afghanistan, who also thought they had brought communism down and now wanted to bring capitalism and its culture down. Secondly, it did not mention China even once! China attached itself to the outer circle first, and quickly moved inwards. As Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision, unveiled at the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017, outlined, it now wants to be the centre of the world’s political and economic system.

In 1989, American calculations about maintaining presence in Asia revolved around concerns about Japan. ‘In the absence of Pax Americana there would be enough nervousness about ultimate Japanese intentions and capabilities to spark a local arms race and create instability and tension,’ he argued. The rise of China has not overshadowed American concerns about Japanese militarism until recently. ‘How can I stop Japan starting a war with China?’ John Kerry asked a group he met soon after taking over as secretary of state in 2013.¹⁶

What can be called an age of innocence ended for America on 11 September 2001. The US lost its patience to lead the world order where countries would join it in concentric circles. ‘You’re either with us or against us,’¹⁷ President Bush declared in 2001, resuscitating a dead Cold War logic in the new context of terrorism that would soon invalidate most existing strategic theories and reimpose a fresh moral clarity and certitude to America’s raison d’être.

This would not last long, as Islamism and the jihad it inspired were no longer the sole threats to America or the world. As global complexities grew, friends and enemies mutated and fused to form a galaxy of ‘frenemies’. Islamism, its rise aided by Bush’s policies, was not territorially confined as the earlier enemy ideologies, Nazism and communism, had been. For a country used to partners swaying at its will and being able to force enemies to fall in line, it had suddenly become an unfamiliar world.

The notion of ‘enemy’ is often defined by the notion of self and vice versa. Both are fraught questions in today’s America. The internal debate on these issues has become so polarized that the country is unable to arrive at answers to these questions. America’s strength—its democracy that it used to proudly present to the world—seems to be smothering it in the absence of a common set of values and objectives that its increasingly diverse citizenry can share and cherish. Various interest groups, communities, corporations and other countries, using lobbyists and election financing, are pulling the country in different directions.

Trump believes that American policies in the last thirty years have been a failure. And that because of faulty policies and ‘stupid leaders’, America is less safe, less powerful and less prosperous today. His America First politics is based on this argument. The country’s strategic culture has not made it any safer, prosperous or powerful. At the same time, the state power has been eroded also because of the growth of corporations that began to influence policy, domestic and strategic, to their own advantage. Whether Trump’s own policies would offer relief to middle-class Americans or reinstate America’s unchallenged power over the world remains an open question, but he propagates all his foreign policy initiatives as efforts in this direction.

Just when the era of neo-liberalism was being inaugurated, Trump was a sceptic, though it took three decades before his arguments could find widespread support in America. Three months after Reagan made his Berlin speech, on 2 September 1987, Donald Trump—then a forty-one-year-old real-estate tycoon—made his first move that could be called political. He took out an advertisement in the New York papers on the ‘stupidity’ of American politicians and spoke to CNN’s Larry King in an interview. What he said proves that what has not changed since then are his world view, words and style.

Looking at our own stupidity, other countries are laughing at us. [ . . . ] This is a great country. But we have stupid leaders [ . . . ] The country is losing $200 billion a year [in trade deficit] [ . . . ] Japan, Saudi Arabia [ . . . ] these are countries that would be wiped off the face of the earth if it were not for the USA. This country will go bust in a couple of years. Japan and all these countries must pay for protection.¹⁸

He was asked whether America should protect its trade through protectionist policies or by making its businesses more competitive. ‘There is no free trade in the world, it is virtually impossible for an American company to go and do business in Japan or Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, Japan is coming to this country and buying up all of Manhattan,’ he said. ‘Our farmers are dying, the homeless are all over the streets of our cities [ . . . ] We give so much money to the wealthiest countries of the world, but we can’t take care of our own people—the poor, the sick, homeless, the farmers, those people we are not helping.’

Trump’s America First policy is often interpreted assuming that the country’s policies amounted to something other than this all this while. ‘Every country takes advantage of us, almost, I may be able to find a couple that don’t. But for the most part, that would be a very tough job for me to do,’¹⁹ Trump said, explaining the policy in February 2017. His opponents, the traditional US foreign policy pundits, often insist that American interventions, wars, military sales and trade pacts are done in the interest of humanity. This is a contested claim, but is part of the country’s perception of its own goodness. For instance, see how a former attorney of the US army and defence department W. Hays Parks responds to a Washington Post article that held US forces responsible for civilian deaths in many parts of the world.

The United States invested billions of dollars to develop precision-guided munitions to improve the targeting of military objectives and reduce risk to civilians. In contrast, from the Korean War through the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Storm and post-9/11 military operations against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, opposing governments or groups used civilians as human shields and civilian property to shield their forces from attack—in violation of the law of war.²⁰

This exaggerated American sense of its own goodness apart, it is true that many countries allied with the US and linked to its market have benefited from the world order that America has promoted based on the twin principles of market economy and liberal democracy. Access to its market was the big incentive the US offered to its partners. American leadership, or dominance if seen from a different perspective, came from a compact of international institutions and alliances controlled by the US, all of which accepted market economy, though not necessarily democratic politics, as their fundamental creed. The rest of the world might think that the world order has been designed to America’s advantage, but Trump has been categorical that he is committed to dismantling it. He is convinced that global institutions, pacts and trade deals are all working to America’s disadvantage, and his politics is about undoing them.

Trump is particularly hostile to his immediate predecessor, Obama. America, as a country, and its thought leaders are obsessed with primacy.²¹ As we discuss throughout this chapter, America’s primacy has relatively declined due to what Fareed Zakaria calls the ‘rise of the rest’ and not due to any absolute decline of the country per se.²² Obama was, arguably, the first American president to appreciate the rise of the rest, though he made it a point to dismiss fears of an American decline. He sought to charter a new course in the new world, configuring his country’s position in a web of criss-crossing global linkages, and in the face of emerging new challenges such as climate change. The National Security Strategy (NSS) of the Trump administration, released on 18 December 2017, does not mention climate change even once. Trump’s rhetoric outlines the world in stark, inescapable binary choices. He does not account for long-standing American policies while announcing his own positions.

It could be argued that this reordering of American priorities under Trump could work in India’s favour. There is a view among pro-India strategic thinkers that due to Obama’s considerations of the complexities of global power equations and the resultant strategic restraint, he took a more accommodating stand towards China and Pakistan. Trump, with his black-and-white world view, may be more willing to confront the two countries. Though it is Reagan that Trump claims to emulate and admire, his demeanour and approach is closer to George W. Bush, who without UN approval issued an ultimatum on 17 March 2003, demanding that Saddam Hussein step down from power and leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. This was in stark contrast to his own father who had put together a global coalition under the UN banner before declaring war on Hussein in 1991, as well as Obama, who refused to militarily intervene in Syria in the absence of specific congressional authorization.

An influential section in India believes—or at least hopes—that Trump’s rigid views on jihadi danger and Chinese assertion will work to India’s advantage. Far from worrying over the disturbances that his actions may cause to the world order, Trump would be happy to be the disrupter. India, being a rising power, can draw some benefit from the resulting shake-up in the status quo.

The American Decline

While Obama contested theories of American declinism—numerous books have been written on the subject—Trump accepts them and attributes them to trade deals and military interventions around the world in the last three decades. The alternation between notions of greatness and lamentations of decline is an essential character of hyper-nationalism. He blames his predecessors for the ‘rise of the rest’ in the last three decades just as Modi continuously blames all his predecessors for the alleged decline of India. Trump does not offer, and most likely does not have, any detailed or informed arguments in support of his theory. As George F. Will, American philosopher and journalist, said, Trump can say all that he knows about a particular topic in 140 characters.²³

Trump’s world view, unappreciative of the change in world politics due to the rise of other powers, and the changing nature of capitalism that has led to an undermining of state power by American corporations, in many ways epitomises a prevalent American strategic propensity to decontextualize and a-historicize problems and solutions. Trump’s erstwhile key adviser, nationalist Steve Bannon—who no longer works in an official capacity but retains influence over the President’s support base—offers a more rigorous theoretical explanation for the weakness of America and puts the blame on the stranglehold of American corporations over its policy and the deviation of its capitalism from Judeo-Christian roots.

Today, Islamism, China and Russia certainly challenge American power, but it is undermined also by Apple, Google and Facebook—companies that have business models that thrive on negating the notion of rigid national boundaries and sovereign powers. The idea of depreciating the sovereignty of America—Krauthammer’s idea for the new century—has been effectively adapted by multinational companies. As noted earlier, Obama offered an informed, nuanced understanding of this changed world and its order and his country’s position in it. He sought to tinker with American capitalism and build a new social compact, his most valiant and partially successful effort being the overhaul of the country’s health care. His attempts to address the country’s economic and social stresses, however, remained superfluous.

A major part of Obama’s attempt to maintain America’s pre-eminence in the world was to sharply bring the focus to a challenge that humanity faces together—climate change. He single-mindedly focused on it as a potential existential threat, closely followed by nuclear terrorism. These threats were not only America’s to handle but the responsibility of other rising powers as well. His idea of responding to the new world was to maintain America’s place at the centre and at the top, while at the same time allowing other countries and rising powers to feel important and play their role. By advocating a ‘first among equals’ place for the US, he acknowledged publicly that he did not see his country as a hyper-power any more. In fact, he went so far as to talk about past American arrogance and its impact on the world order.

Succeeding Bush, who set out to change the world according to his vision, Obama started in 2009 with an appreciation of the way the world is and the need ‘for the tempering qualities of humility and restraint’ in America’s conduct of its foreign policy. While he said he considered the senior Bush and his team great practitioners of reasonable strategic policy, he considered the junior Bush’s decision to invade Iraq stupid. ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’²⁴ became a motto of the Obama White House, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of Atlantic, wrote in his path-breaking work ‘The Obama Doctrine’. Obama told Goldberg, ‘I want a President who has the sense that you can’t fix everything.’

This approach came in for sharp attacks from Republicans and a section of Democrats led by Hillary Clinton. Clinton opposed Obama’s foreign policy and forced him to topple the Libyan government while she was secretary of state; and after she left that office, she held him responsible for the mess in Syria. ‘Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle,’ she said in an assessment published in the Atlantic.²⁵

Among Republicans, before Trump vanquished them all in 2016, sixteen other candidates breathed fire at Obama for his foreign policy. Ted Cruz accused him of going on an apology tour for America’s success around the world.²⁶ Marco Rubio and Trump insinuated repeatedly that he was deliberately setting the country up for failure. The insinuation, in both Trump’s and Rubio’s repeated statements about Obama’s ‘deliberate’ attempts to undermine America, was that he was a closet Muslim. A large segment of Republicans, Trump the leader of them, had repeatedly made such statements.

Obama classified the thinking that guided American foreign policy over decades into four streams—isolationism, realism, liberal interventionism and internationalism. He considered himself a hybrid of realism and internationalism. ‘You could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, receive all the world’s misery,’²⁷ Obama had told Goldberg. He said he was also an internationalist as he sought to empower global institutions and enter into multilateral agreements for solutions for the problems faced by the world.

Trump not only holds Obama responsible for the decline in the country’s exercise of power but also says that America will intervene in decisive ways. ‘The world is in trouble, but we are going to straighten it out,’²⁸ he said at the National Prayer Breakfast on 2 February 2017. So Trump’s America First is not about non-interventionism, but about unilateral interventions, as he does not consider post-war institutions or alliances as having any role in maintaining America’s leadership of the world. This approach is writ large on all decisions he has taken till date. The America before Trump had been mindful of defining its role in the world as hegemony rather than domination. Trump is intellectually incapable and temperamentally disabled to make that distinction, while he would be only too willing to use American military strength to enforce its will. His America First is a combination of neoconservatism and mercantilism.

In Trump’s understanding of the world, all the countries are taking advantage of America. The Paris Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are instruments through which other countries dupe America and take advantage of its goodness or stupidity; they are certainly not the means of American hegemony over the world as Krauthammer imagined in the Universal Dominion principle. Trump says almost everything significant that George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama did in the last thirty years has gone against the interests of the American people, though his revulsion is focused on Obama.

At a weekly address on 7 July 2017, he said:

Foreign nations got rich at America’s expense—and many special interests profited from this great global theft of American wealth. Since taking the oath of office, our government has adopted a new philosophy: AMERICA FIRST—and believe me, it’s about time. The era of economic surrender is over—and a new national pride is sweeping across our land [ . . . ] We have also sent a clear message to the world that we will not allow other nations to take advantage of us any longer. That’s why I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord—and believe me, it was one-sided. Not a good deal for our country. And the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership, and that’s why we are pursuing a total renegotiation of NAFTA and if we don’t get it, we will terminate—that is end NAFTA forever [ . . . ] Every other nation on earth protects its own interests. America is finally going to do the same.²⁹

It is not that Trump is offering any coherent alternative strategy; in fact, several of his actions contradict his own stated positions on many fronts. He believes that championing a new era of military build-up is essential for making the country great again, though he has called American interventions in recent decades ‘stupid’. The US now has a President who believes that what the country has been pursuing all this while has not been in its national interest. And he represents a dominant view among the American public, though the establishmentarian elite of the country tries to ignore this as uneducated opinion.

Critics of globalization, particularly those of a leftist persuasion, largely looked upon the World Bank and IMF as instruments of American pursuit of global hegemony after the fall of communism. Commentaries on Indian reforms in the 1990s never failed to discuss the Washington Consensus, a version of market doctrine that the two organizations have promoted with an alleged hidden agenda to facilitate American primacy. But former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Trump himself, see these organizations as wasteful distractions for American money and power, rather than instruments of authority. The US is the biggest owner of these institutions. Trump’s first budget draft proposed to cut US support for multilateral development banks over the next three years by $650 million. The American ability and willingness to support development funding around the world has diminished in recent years. The US development assistance through the World Bank had already shrunk to its lowest before Trump took over. In September 2016, of the $75 billion that the bank raised for development assistance for the next three years, the US committed only $7.5 billion, i.e. 10 per cent. The UK is the top donor, and after Brexit, the country has only increased its global commitment through the bank.

The UN, the World Bank and the IMF have been viewed as instruments of American hegemony for decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union was validation for the US of the power of market economy and liberal democracy. The globalizing world required a gradual depreciation of the concept of national sovereignty, including the US’s own, its liberals and conservatives agreed, though not from entirely overlapping perspectives. Promotion of market economy and democracy, defence of human rights and environment, and so on were assumed to be part of the American global hegemony. Bankrolled by the US and its followers, institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, through aggressive advancement of neo-liberal economics, and the UN, through non-proliferation, climate protection and Responsibility to Protect doctrines, helped chip away at the concept of national sovereignty. Moreover, it was assumed that the US’s own example of prosperity—‘the shining city upon a hill,’ according to Ronald Reagan—would lead the rest of the world to accept its model of democracy and market economy.³⁰

Trump and his America First doctrine calculate the price of everything and perhaps understand the value of nothing. ‘The United States is one out of 193 countries in the United Nations, and yet we pay 22% of the entire budget and more. In fact, we pay far more than anybody realizes,’ he told the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in 2017, in his first address to the world body. It is national sovereignty—he mentioned ten times—that will safeguard the world and not globalism, upending the US gospel that guided the order. ‘For too long, the American people were told that mammoth multinational trade deals, unaccountable international tribunals, and powerful global bureaucracies were the best way to promote their success [ . . . ] Now we are calling for a great reawakening of nations.’³¹

Indeed, the promise of market expansion around the world as envisioned by the World Bank and the IMF has not gone according to plan. In response, the former is changing its orientation and emphasis. The Trump administration believes that the World Bank-promoted free trade has worked to America’s disadvantage. Gary Cohn, former White House economic council director, told a World Bank annual spring meeting in early 2017 that there was no free trade in the world. ‘If you want to insist on having a tariff on a product—which we prefer you not—the President believes that we should treat you in a reciprocal fashion and that we should tax your product coming into the United States. That is free, that is open, and that is fair.’³² Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross articulated the same argument more elaborately in an article in the Wall Street Journal on 1 August 2017.

On the one hand, the World Bank and the IMF continue to promote trade, contradicting Trump’s position on the issue; on the other hand, these institutions have completely rolled back their trickle-down economic doctrine, which the Trump administration backs domestically. While the Trump administration is hostile in its policy towards multilateral institutions, the World Bank has firmed up its collaboration with the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), signing a memorandum of understanding instituting an overall framework for cooperation between the two bodies for development financing and staff exchanges. In early 2018, partly as an attempt to push back against the Chinese influence in global developmental financing, the Trump administration agreed to support a significant capital enhancement of the World Bank. The move has surprised many observers as it went against the rhetoric of Trump.³³

In the first year in office, the Trump administration cut down its aid to the UN. On 13 October 2017, he destabilized an international agreement that the US, four other UN Security Council members and Germany had reached with Iran on its nuclear programme; on 12 October 2017 the US decided to quit the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which it had stopped funding due to a congressional mandate. In the first year of the Trump administration, other international commitments that the US unilaterally reneged on include the Paris Agreement and the TPP. NAFTA is gasping for breath; and treaty allies South Korea, Japan and Germany have been threatened for trade surplus with America. Trump seems to be acting on a belief that post-war institutions are not good for America, neither are the institutions that were built subsequently, such as the TPP.

American Self, America’s Enemy

By the time the Trump campaign began to take shape in 2016, the questions that had faced America since the 1990s became more immediate and urgent. Simultaneously, the flux in America’s notions of the self and the enemy became increasingly chaotic due to domestic and international circumstances. Trump sensed a great opportunity in this social and existential turmoil. In July 2016, on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, that formalized Trump’s nomination as the party’s presidential candidate, one of his advisers explained the significance of this election for America to some of us foreign journalists.

Joseph Schmitz was speaking on Trump’s foreign policy, but it also involved the question of American identity. He drew what he called the ‘Sun Tzu maxim’ from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which said that in order to win wars, you have to know yourself and your enemy. ‘Which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump has been focusing not only on those principles that define who we as Americans are, but also on who our enemies are,’ he added.³⁴

Schmitz named democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law as the basis of America’s alliance with European partners after the Second World War. ‘President [Ronald] Reagan restated, and kind of updated, those three foundational principles in a famous speech he gave in June 1982 in the British House of Commons. He referred to individual liberty, representative government and the rule of law under God [emphasis added].’³⁵

America’s notion of self-identity is complex and ever evolving. George H.W. Bush, who followed Reagan, opened the American borders to greater immigration, even as the digital economy was taking shape, which also marked the origins of the H-1B visa programme, which brought young Indian technology experts to the US in large numbers in the years that followed. Through the three decades of neo-liberal globalization, a broad consensus emerged among the political and economic elite of the US that immigration is fundamental to the greatness of America. ‘Immigrants aren’t somehow changing the American character; immigrants are the American character,’³⁶ President Obama said during the 2016 campaign when Trump began assailing the country’s immigration policy.

That immigrants are the American character is not just a romantic notion; it also made economic sense as the economy expanded in a regulated manner, absorbing cheaper and brighter talent from other countries over decades. What held them together was the ‘American dream’, the promise of prosperity. Those who spoke different languages, looked different and even carried their cultural baggage to their new land were united in their pursuit of wealth in a way that was only possible in America. Over several decades, the notion of a closet alien community threatening the nation continued, though it kept changing according to the circumstances. Italians, Japanese and suspected or actual communists were targeted during different periods. But the argument that immigrants contributed to the prosperity and the forward march of the US was widely accepted in the initial decades of globalization.

The promise of globalization was interrupted by two events at the turn of the century—the meltdown on Wall Street and the 9/11 terror attacks. Just as the country was recovering from them, in 2008, two disruptive forces struck again—a second economic crisis and the election of the first African-American President.

‘An African-American whose last name was one consonant removed from the world’s most infamous terrorist becoming President,’³⁷ as Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN, put it, marked a new era in US democracy and diversity. But Obama’s election also created grounds for a white backlash. The number of white supremacist ‘patriot’ groups in the US jumped soon after he became President—from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009, 824 in 2010, 1274 in 2011 and 1360 in 2012. It dipped a bit after his second election but in 2017, the number shot up again to 998.

Obama has himself pointed out that the Republican obstructionism that brought his administration to a standstill, through a congressional logjam in his second term, was driven by a racial element. During the 2008 primary contest, Hillary Clinton staffers circulated pictures of him in African garb. Forty-three per cent of Republican voters and 15 per cent of Democratic voters believed he was a Muslim. The White House website did not use his middle name ‘Hussein’ at all—coincidentally also the surname of the slain Muslim leader of Iraq.

Obama symbolized change and promised change. How much of the change that he promised has been realized remains open to interpretation, but it is clear that America’s global supremacy declined under his watch. And an average American is more stressed, financially and socially, today than he or she was in 2008. It might be due to a crisis in the economic model, but it is Obama who gets the blame. Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan—used first by Bill Clinton as early as 1991—had a new resonance in this context.

As Edward Said famously theorized, the best way, and often the only way, to define yourself is to define your other. Trump framed these questions during his campaign—‘who are we?’ and ‘who is our enemy?’ ‘Imagine what we can achieve if we start working as one people, under one God, saluting the American flag,’³⁸ he declared during the campaign and used it regularly throughout 2016. As President of the United States, he expanded on the same thesis of American identity and its enemies in a civilizational context much like Indian greatness is articulated in terms of Hindu civilizational ethos by the Hindutva doctrine. The idea of one nation under one God and one flag became the cornerstone of Trump politics.

Expanding on it at an international platform, like Narendra Modi did at Madison Square and in Sydney and at Wembley over the last few years, Trump told a public rally in Warsaw, Poland, in July 2017:

We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers. We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.³⁹

He was talking about Western, rather Christian, civilization. In the writings and speeches of Bannon, Trump’s key ideologue, the phrase often used is ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization.

Using the slogan of nation ‘under one God’, Trump also sought to make a crucial change to the racial politics of America, somewhat like what Modi has done to caste politics in India. Those who oppose Trump can easily locate white supremacist and anti-Semitic undertones in his politics. It might be safe to assume that xenophobes, racists, misogynists and homophobes support him, but it will be erroneous to assume that only they are the ones who do so. A nation ‘under one God’ that has an enemy in ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ conveys a totally different and unprecedented meaning to a lot of Americans. The whistle of Christian nationalism might subsume white nationalism but is not restricted to it.

Trump is clear about the vision of a global civilizational alliance against Islamism, like Modi. Convenient Muslim partners are welcome in that alliance. But a sharp delineation of allies and foes may not be easy to achieve, partly because Trump wants to open trade wars with many of these civilizational allies in the West! The loosening of America’s traditional interpretation of enemies and friends during the Obama regime was evident, as he began challenging actions of some ‘friends’ such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, and began to look at new openings with ‘foes’ such as Iran and Cuba. The pushback was stormy, as the Saudis and Israelis began to play with US domestic divisions to undermine Obama’s presidency. The far-right prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, expanded Jewish settlements in occupied lands, closing the door on a two-state solution that America has been pushing for decades. He addressed the American Congress on Republican invitation in 2015, and questioned Obama’s foreign policy and his negotiations with Iran. Obama’s pent-up frustration with the Israeli leader found expression in a dramatic refusal to veto a UN resolution that rebuked Israel over settlement, weeks before he left office in December 2016. He challenged Saudi domination of West Asia and believed that the Saudis and other American allies needed to learn to live in ‘cold peace’ with Iran. The traditional Sunni allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which wield tremendous influence in Washington, would not accept this.

Obama was ‘willing to question why America’s enemies are its enemies or why some of its friends are its friends’.⁴⁰ His list included Pakistan and Saudi Arabia whom he suspected of gaming the US system. Trump has been trying to shuffle the pack of friends and foes as per his own understanding. America’s closest friends have been his immediate targets; Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea and even Canada have not escaped Trump’s wrath. What makes foes of some of his cultural allies is the second component of America First—economic nationalism. Trump reserved particular hostility for Germany. ‘We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military,’ the US President tweeted on 30 May 2017.⁴¹ ‘Very bad for US. This will change,’ he said after returning from his first trip to Europe in 2017. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after Trump’s first visit that the ‘days when Europe could completely count on others are over to a certain extent’.⁴²

‘The Germans are bad, very bad,’ Trump had told European Union leaders according to reports in the German press on 26 May 2017.⁴³ ‘See the millions of cars they sell in the U.S., terrible. We will stop this.’ Germany’s trade surplus with the US is growing.⁴⁴ It rose to 252.9 billion euros in 2016 from 244.3 billion euros in 2015. Germany has the third largest trade surplus with the US, after China and Japan. Trump was not the first President who told his European partners that they were not spending enough to keep the alliance in shape. Obama had complained that they were ‘free-riding’ for defence, and even threatened that for the US and UK to continue their special relationship, London needed to spend 2 per cent of its GDP on defence.

Trump has raised the rhetoric to a different level altogether. In 2006, NATO members pledged to spend at least 2 per cent of the GDP on defence, and reiterated the pledge in 2014 after Obama pushed for it. Only five members of the alliance met that threshold in 2016. The US is particularly peeved at Germany which spends only 1.2 per cent of its GDP on defence despite being a robust economy, while the US spends 3.6 per cent. In other words, friends of the US in Europe had become either unwilling or unable to spend as much as they used to in order to maintain the hegemony of the Western system much before Trump’s America First doctrine. It is not a coincidence that many of them, including Germany and the UK, are finding common ground with China on multiple fronts.

The US’s struggle with a post-Cold War world is singularly pronounced in its wobbly relations with Russia. John Kerry, US secretary of state under Obama, and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, met fourteen times and spoke on the phone numerous times in 2016 as both countries sought to work together on some intractable global issues, even as America was witnessing the rise of Trump and a new model of nationalism. The relationship between Russia and America, now at its lowest ebb in the last three decades, has been an extraordinary one, producing a range of outcomes.

Russian Roulette

During Obama’s presidency, at one end of the spectrum of the US–Russia engagement was the Iranian nuclear deal that both agreed had capped the Shia regime’s nuclear capabilities. At the other end was the descent into the abyss of Syria, a bloody and grim reminder of the limits to their cooperation. And by the beginning of 2018, there was a complete breakdown of even elementary diplomatic interactions between the two countries. Trump defied America’s security establishment and conventional politicians from both parties to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in July 2018, in Helsinki. But far from improving the ties between the two nuclear powers, the summit only showed how internally divided America was over the question of Russia. The Russia pitch had been queered for Trump even before he took over the presidency.

The election year of 2016 came to a close with a turn for the worse in US–Russia relations. On 31 December, a Saturday, a special Russian plane carrying thirty-five of its diplomats took off from Washington. Obama had asked them to leave within seventy-two hours, accusing Russia of having meddled in the US presidential election through cyber intrusions.

The charge that Russia not just tried to intervene in an election on American soil but that the President of the US owed his victory to Russia not only vitiated bilateral ties but also undermined the authority of Trump himself when he took over the reins in January 2017.

It all started in July 2016, as US newspaper reports citing anonymous intelligence sources accused Russia of trying to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. The reports said hackers working for the Russian government obtained the emails of the Democratic Party functionaries which were published by WikiLeaks. Subsequently, emails of John Podesta, chief of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, were hacked and appeared in the public domain. These revealed details about the internal functioning of the party, and exposed some facts—for instance, a few paragraphs from one of the several paid speeches that Clinton made to Wall Street firms—that her campaign had tried to conceal. The Obama administration’s response to the alleged hacking grew progressively strident. The anonymous allegation was made official. From initially terming it an attempt to discredit the US electoral process, the administration concluded that the attempt was to engineer Republican candidate Donald Trump’s victory. Russian President Putin was personally held responsible.⁴⁵ All this culminated in a raft of retaliatory measures. The expulsion of Russian diplomats, with a seventy-two-hour notice, was a decisive escalation.

The Russian view of American action towards it in recent years was summarized in a document titled ‘Foreign Policy Concept’ released by the Russian foreign ministry on 27 December 2016. It noted, ‘The entire world has to pay a high price for the attempts of a limited number of countries to retain their global “leadership” at all costs,’ in a clear reference to the US and its NATO partners. ‘The terrorist threat in the belt of instability ranging from North Africa to South Asia’s borders has taken on a systemic dimension [ . . . ] the international community clearly saw the [ . . . ] nature of a unipolar hegemony and [ . . . ] unilateral approaches,’ the document said, calling for a ‘polycentric world order’.

It said Russia’s relationship with the United States ‘was complicated by an aggressive US policy of systemic containment of Russia, which included the build-up of sanctions pressure, the deployment of Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) components and provocative military activities on Russia’s western borders and in the Black Sea’.⁴⁶ Also, that the ‘well-orchestrated campaign to accuse Russia of interference in the presidential election in the United States was designed to whip up anti-Russia sentiments’.

In subsequent explanations, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, held Obama personally responsible for the degeneration in bilateral ties and singled Kerry out for praise. Terming the President’s advisers ‘a group of foreign policy losers, bitter and narrow-minded’,⁴⁷ she wrote on Facebook, ‘Out of this group of spoilers, I pity only Kerry. He was not an ally. But he tried to be a professional and maintain his human dignity.’

Zakharova was alluding to the collapse of a ceasefire that Russia and America sought to enforce in Syria, once in February and then in September 2016. Its collapse was yet another case study of America’s internal conflicts projected on to the world stage. In the September 2016 ceasefire plan was included a Joint Implementation Centre of Russia and America that would coordinate a military campaign against identified jihadi groups. The February ceasefire lasted for a few days; the September one could not even get off the ground. Russia and the US accused each other of being responsible for its collapse. A fact, however, is that the Pentagon was less than enthusiastic about joint operations with Russia, a line Kerry had been publicizing since late 2015.

At the core of the Pentagon’s discomfort with Russia was the fact that the NATO alliance is based on Cold War logic—or a pre-Islamism logic, if you will—according to which the US military–industrial complex developed. Technologies and weapons more suitable for combating non-state actors are now developing at a fast pace but not at the cost of more advanced fighters and missile systems.

In July 2016, the last NATO summit during the Obama regime in Warsaw resolved that the alliance had to deal with two distinct threats—on the east from Russia, and on the south and south-east from Islamist groups. On Russia, there is a remarkable convergence between the Republican and Democratic security establishments. By the end of his tenure, Obama had more or less come around to his 2012 opponent Mitt Romney’s view—which he had earlier contested—that Russia is the US’s ‘number one geopolitical foe’.⁴⁸

While Obama was sending Russian diplomats packing from Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Trump a year-end greeting card hoping to ‘take their interaction in the international arena to a whole new level’ in ‘a constructive and pragmatic manner’.⁴⁹ This ‘pragmatic’ deal could span a vast range of regions and issues. Putin sent roughly the same message on the new year of 2018, even as the rivalry between the two countries reached the level of a new Cold War during the first year of Trump’s presidency. On Syria, however, Trump made a significant reversal in the American position that predated him by no longer insisting on the exit of the Assad regime. But he has not been able to make any breakthrough in ties with Russia as the national security establishment gagged him, and national hysteria over Moscow’s interference in the US elections gripped the country.

Putin had not immediately responded to Obama’s action with a retaliatory expulsion of American diplomats but he did finally do it in the last week of July 2017, after fresh legislation made it impossible for Trump to revisit and amend existing American sanctions against Russia. Even before that, Trump had seen what was coming: ‘I think Putin probably assumes that he can’t make a deal with me anymore because politically it would be unpopular for a politician to make a deal.’⁵⁰ This, even as the US Congress passed a resolution with near total unanimity to impose more sanctions against Russia—the only topic on which there has been a bipartisan consensus in the Congress in a long time.

Addressing the UN in September 2015, Putin had called for a ‘genuinely broad alliance against terrorism, just like the one against Hitler’.⁵¹ Trump is in complete agreement with this position, but his hands are now tied by the US Congress. On 2 August 2017, he signed the legislation voted for by almost all Republican and Democratic lawmakers, imposing stricter sanctions against Russia. The latter retaliated with the expulsion of nearly 800 American officials. In response, the US expelled more Russian diplomats and ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in San Francisco in August. On 16 March 2018, the US imposed sanctions against nineteen Russian individuals and five entities for interfering in the 2016 election and for other cyber intrusions. Earlier, the special counsel investigating the Russian interference in the election had indicted thirteen Russian individuals and entities. On 26 March 2018, America expelled sixty Russian officials and ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, as bilateral ties continued to deteriorate. A senior administration official said the move was in response to the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in England earlier in March, and other acts of aggression by Russia. Trump’s summit with Putin in July 2018 was preceded by leaks by American security agencies and further indictment of alleged Russian operatives by the special counsel.

An anti-Russian hysteria, driven by the mainstream media, has gripped the traditional strategic community of America since Trump’s rise. The bias in the Russia coverage of the media was best captured by The Economist in the following lines in an article in November 2017.

BuzzFeed recently broke an explosive story about Russia’s meddling in America’s elections. On August 3rd 2016, it reported, just as the presidential race was entering its final phase, the Russian foreign ministry wired nearly $30,000 [ . . . ] to its embassy in Washington [ . . . ] with a description attached: “To finance election campaign of 2016”. Worse still, this was only one of 60 transfers that were being scrutinised by the FBI [ . . . ] The story created a buzz, but not of the kind its authors hoped for. “Idiots. The Russian election of 2016, not the US one, you exceptionalist morons,” tweeted a prominent Russian journalist.

By pointing out that Russia had also held parliamentary elections in 2016, the Russian journalist suggested that the money was most probably sent to Russian embassies in several countries to organize polling for expatriates. The Russian foreign ministry later confirmed this was indeed the case. ‘BuzzFeed updated its story but did not take it down,’⁵² The Economist reported.

This has roughly been the fate of numerous mainstream media stories on Russian meddling in US politics.

An unstated but equally important reason that led Trump to seek a partnership with Russia was China. Obama’s presidency witnessed an increasing closeness between Russia and China. Trump had declared that ‘China is our enemy’ numerous times in the past.⁵³ His overtures to China in the initial months of his administration gave conflicting signals on his approach towards it as he sought Beijing’s help to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Seeking support for improving ties with Russia has been a component of populist revolts across Europe.⁵⁴ Giuseppe Conte, the newly elected Prime Minister of Italy, said his government was pushing for better ties between Russia and Europe. Calling for a ‘review of the sanctions system’ against the Kremlin, the leader of a coalition of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and right-leaning League has made improving ties with Russia a priority of his government.⁵⁵ Challenging the orthodoxy of American strategic thought, Trump called for reinstating Russia in the group of major economies at the G7 Summit in Canada in June 2018. The G7 was G8 until 2014, when Russia was expelled. ‘Why are we having a meeting without Russia being in the meeting?’ he wondered.⁵⁶ America and its allies are confused about the attitude towards Russia among them and within their societies.

The domestic diatribe in America over Russia has affected India’s relations with the United States too. America’s anti-Russia politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, in their enthusiasm to tie Trump’s hands on relations with Russia have also introduced a sweeping law called Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). The sanctions target any country trading with Russia’s defence and intelligence sectors. India is potentially a target of US sanctions under this law. By July 2018, under pressure from American arms manufacturers worried over roadblocks to sales in India, the US Congress passed a law that allowed for exemptions for countries such as India.

America in the Trump era is a contest of two conspiracy theories. Trump and his supporters believe that there is a conspiracy of the American Deep State, that is its intelligence and security apparatus, to undermine and dethrone him using Russia as a smokescreen. Democrats and other Trump opponents appear to be convinced that Trump won the election in 2016 only because of a Russian conspiracy that helped him.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is leading an investigation into allegations of Russian meddling in US politics. The outcome of this investigation, regardless of the merits of its findings, will deepen the divisions in American society. But this debate has brought to the forefront another crucial challenge to American power—the conflict between the interests of American global corporations and the interests of the US political establishment. The tussle between American technology giants—icons of the globalized world such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter—and the American state over security questions have surfaced periodically, but the Russian investigation takes the debate on the obligations of these companies to America to an unprecedented level.

Terrorism investigations had already been battlegrounds for state agencies and tech companies where they argued that their primary obligations were to the consumer and not to the state or society at large. In a widely noticed case of public and security interest, the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked Apple to create a tool to break the encryption of an iPhone used by Islamist Syed Rizwan Farook—who was killed by the police with his wife after he shot fourteen of his co-workers dead in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015. ‘The F.B.I. may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a back door. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control,’ Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement, explaining the company’s refusal.⁵⁷

Apple, Facebook and Google were first off the block to publicly denounce Trump’s move to restrict immigration and impose a temporary travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries—making the argument about global markets and universal talent pools. But the Russian investigation, in which the role of Facebook and Twitter came into sharp focus, put these companies in an awkward position, and raised new questions about how American a global company must be. American lawmakers and law enforcement agencies accuse social media platforms of falling prey to a Russian conspiracy to spread information to aggravate social divisions in the country. On the one hand, Facebook and Twitter epitomize the success of an unregulated and global economy, while on the other they represent the risks that America as a society and country face. These companies that operate on a global scale cannot make themselves tools of American state without surrendering their claims to be global citizens. What could be a sound logic in support of barring a Russian user—or an Indian for that matter—of Facebook or Twitter from commenting on a political issue in America?

While these companies claim to be global, the rise of American corporate giants that dominate the world today was underwritten by American public funds, which have been shrinking for a while now. The stifling of public funding for basic science and its negative impact on American power and global leadership started before Trump, and has accelerated since the 2008 recession. Even so, Trump’s first budget proposals in 2017 proposed further and deeper cuts. This is a less noticed and rarely discussed subject in strategic commentaries.

The long-term and irreversible effect of shrinking public funding for basic science has been elaborated by the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), L. Rafael Reif, in an article in Foreign Policy months after Trump came into power.⁵⁸ He points out that it is from the US government’s attempts to ‘expand human knowledge that powerful new businesses grew, with technology titans such as Apple and Google building world-class companies on the backs of technologies emerging from federal investments in research’. The US government has been the world’s biggest supporter of basic science, which makes America the holder of the highest share of knowledge in the world. Some of the most commercially profitable and life-changing technologies today—such as the GPS, MRI scanner and the Internet—were created on the basis of knowledge produced by federally funded research decades before these became marketable products and services. Between 2008 and 2014, US R&D grew just over 1 per cent annually, but more troubling for America’s global superiority in technology is the sharp decline in federal funding by nearly 20 per cent between 2009 and 2015.

What are the reasons from this?

Sluggish economic growth since the end of the last economic downturn has made it difficult to justify funding projected with no projected returns for decades to come. There is also a sense that other countries will reap the profits of US investment in basic research without helping cover the cost. And there is a concern that, in combination with globalisation, innovation is contributing to the erosion of jobs.⁵⁹

While the US is shrinking its funding for R&D, between 2008 and 2013, China and South Korea increased it by 17 per cent and 9 per cent, respectively. In 2013, Beijing’s Tsinghua University leapt ahead of Stanford, for the first time in history, in the number of patents filed for in a year. The US government’s ability to own and control frontiers of technology is key to the country’s global supremacy.

With federal funding on the decline, and with China ramping up its investments in R&D, new restrictions are being added to American capacity. The new tax policy unveiled by Trump and Republican lawmakers in 2017 further tightens the screws on science and technology. ‘There is no better indication of the U.S. government’s myopia than the decline in funding for research [ . . . ] for the first time since World War II, private funding for basic research now exceeds federal funding,’ says Fareed Zakaria,⁶⁰ noting that the new tax plan would further squeeze funding for research.

President vs Washington

Trump is dismantling Obama’s foreign policy legacy, but that does not mean that he is restoring pre-Obama notions of American foreign policy. Unlikely as it may sound, there is one thing common between Obama and Trump—both question the foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington. The former was extremely dismissive of the foreign policy orthodoxy that he inherited and did not hide his scepticism about it. Trump and Obama may have questioned different sets of assumptions, but both did question them.

Trump has, however, turned out to be opportunistic in his questioning of these assumptions. Public repudiation of the American defence and foreign policy establishment is essential to his politics, whereas Obama was more tactical about confronting it. This could lead to serious conflict within the administration and the President’s ability to push his agenda in the sphere of international relations. Of his struggles with the Washington establishment, Obama said that there was a playbook that Presidents were expected to follow unquestioningly:

It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.⁶¹

American mainstream media assumes that the President has to automatically follow the instructions of the playbook. See one report on the controversy over Trump ‘congratulating’ Putin. ‘Trump was instructed in briefing materials “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” before his call with the recently re-elected Putin, but congratulated him anyway, according to the Washington Post’s report. He also ignored a recommendation to condemn the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom, which the Kremlin has been accused of orchestrating.’⁶²

Obama has been a tactful politician who breached the playbook selectively. Trump’s entire politics is built on his chest-thumping confrontation with what he describes as the ‘Washington establishment’, the custodians of the playbook. Early on in his campaign, he named and challenged two key players in the equation—intelligence agencies and the media.

The American media’s courage in taking on the political executive is often remarkable—like we see in the CNN reporter’s question to Obama in the opening of this chapter, or the relentless reporting on Trump’s transgressions. But it can be unquestioning in its propagation of the security apparatus’s world view, as we have seen in the reporting on Russia.

Trump continuously questions the security and foreign policy establishment’s wisdom and ability. He has said that everything that the US did in the last three decades has been disastrous, that American policies built up China into a challenge, and that Russia is not an enemy but a potential friend, horrifying the military establishment.

He seems to have touched a raw nerve while repeatedly saying that American policies have been foolish, recalling, for instance, that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on fake intelligence produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He has refused to back down, which many think is tactless egotism, though some see it is an essential component of his politics. Trump has even said publicly that American agencies also carry out assassinations, when it was pointed out to him that the Putin regime in Russia does so.

The American establishment has hit back strong and hard. Trump’s first choice as national security adviser (NSA), Michael Flynn, was felled by intelligence agencies who recorded and leaked his conversation with the Russian ambassador to the US. Flynn, as NSA designate, had discussed American sanctions against Russia with the ambassador, and he failed to disclose the full nature of his discussions to Vice President Mike Pence. His downfall starkly demonstrated one thing—the American security establishment’s ability and willingness to fell an incoming NSA. Interestingly, it is routine for any incoming official to make early contact with representatives of other nations. A National Public Radio report said that Flynn did not actually make any promises. ‘Flynn talked about sanctions, but no specific promises were made. Flynn was speaking more in general “maybe we’ll take a look at this going forward” terms,’⁶³ the report quoted an unnamed intelligence official, who had seen the transcript of the conversation, as saying. Later it also emerged that the NSA designate had asked the Russians not to respond to the expulsion of its diplomats and to give a chance to the incoming administration to resolve the matter.

Flynn’s downfall was a message to Trump, who is unwilling to take messages from anyone. The conflicts between Trump and the foreign policy establishment will linger for his full term and beyond, because the rift is symptomatic of a wider conflict within America. It is one thing for the foreign policy establishment to tutor an incoming President on the playbook and quite another for there to be different and often conflicting versions of it within the establishment. Interdepartmental and inter-agency rivalries in the government are nothing new, but what is new are Presidents who carry limited political authority.

A President with overwhelming political authority, clarity and perseverance could assert his opinion over rival views within the government, but Trump has none. The attempt to create a common agenda with Russia in Syria during the Obama years collapsed due to a divergence between the Pentagon and the state department. There is constant bickering between them on questions related to India as well—the Pentagon sees bilateral relations from a military planning perspective while the state department places them within a broader strategic calculation. Consequently, the defence department has been a champion of enhancing cooperation with India, and its initiatives often do not pass muster with the state.

Far from clearing the confusion and galvanizing a divided country, Trump’s America First, in combination with his Me First temperament, has added to the chaos. He had offered to bring clarity to America’s self-image and its place in the world. While his civilizational interpretations of both are popular among his core support base, in a country that is ethnically diverse, its economic powerhouses—its corporations—are unwilling to play ball in the interest of the state. Its multitude of internal actors—the courts, the media, the states and cities—are all marching to different tunes.

The crisis of American power runs deep. Trump has declared that he would pursue a hard-power strategic policy, which has translated into cutting down the state department’s international aid programmes while increasing the budget allocated to the Pentagon. US diplomats deeply resent this policy, while commentators have pointed out that this would lead to a grievous reduction in America’s global influence. In practice, this means a shift away from trying to nudge the rest of the world via global institutions and through the lure of the American market and its offer of technology, propped up by the implicit threat of American military power, to a sole reliance on military force and trade wars without any enticements.

Militarist Response to Everything

When America’s ability to sharply define itself and its enemy increasingly got limited by internal and external factors, one easy response was to use force randomly. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, an account by Rosa Brooks⁶⁴ who was an adviser in the Pentagon during Obama’s presidency, captures this expanding role of the military in American policy. Often, military strength is used as a substitute for diplomacy. War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence by Ronan Farrow explains how the dismantling of American diplomacy started much before Trump became President.⁶⁵ Trump’s public commitments to ‘hard power, not soft power’ will aggravate both trends that predate his rise. His budgetary allocations, and choice of personnel, lean towards reinforcing and furthering American militarism.

Given that Trump’s agenda is not supported by a significant segment of the American public and its corporations, a ‘resistance’ is building up, and his opponents are openly calling Democratic-controlled states and countries to not implement his policies. This adds another fault line to America’s internal war. It had appeared during Obama’s presidency, when Republican states and the Congress stalled a multitude of his initiatives. But now, this has assumed larger proportions as Democratic states such as California openly challenge policies of the federal government. In September 2018, California will host a Global Climate Summit in open defiance to the US’s exit from the Paris Agreement.

It would seem as if America is at war with itself. When Obama was President, the government system was brought to a standstill because Republicans were determined that a half-black man with a Muslim middle name had no legitimacy to govern, forget the fact that he had won two elections decisively. Now when Trump is President, the other half is fighting him because they think the 2016 election was stolen from them by an American adversary, Russia, and handed to a usurper. Trump has bruised the ego of many in the security establishment and the media world. The media–intelligence compact is running rings around Trump, who aggravates his own misery with one wrong step after another. The President’s perception of his own persuasive power is far removed from reality, often leading him into landmines cleverly laid by adversaries.

America is deeply divided on what its national interests are. It is unable to identify who its friends and enemies are. It has had to deal with questions of its own identity earlier too, but having a clear notion of the ‘enemy’ helped it through most of the twentieth century. Indian commentators who identify themselves as realists have over the years admired the US for its single-minded pursuit of strategic culture, its ability to foresee the future and its willingness to use military power to change the course of world politics. But the Trump movement is based on public repudiation of the American strategic culture of the last three decades.

This conflict between the President and his own security establishment has been institutionalized in the National Security Strategy (NSS) announced by the administration in December 2017. It names China, Russia and Islamism as threats, and marks a wide array of goals and objectives but with little clarity of strategy. Trump’s politics was to prioritize Islamism and China as threats to American power and security. Between the NSS, the NPR and the National Defense Strategy, American military planners have sought to make sense of the current era as a reincarnation of the great power rivalry in which Russia counts as the primary rival, China following it. This is, at one level, forcing an argument to seek the elusive clarity about the self and the enemy.

A less charitable view could be that American planners are itching for war, as Micah Zenko, Whitehead Senior Fellow at Chatham House, wrote in Foreign Policy in March 2018:

Perhaps most troubling about Pentagon officials’ recent comments on great-power competition is that they seem to want—perhaps even need—China and Russia to be their competitors. As one anonymous senior Defense Department official told [ . . . ] ‘Real men fight real wars. We like the clarity of big wars.’ If you have spent time in the Pentagon or a service school recently you have heard versions of this sentiment, or worse.⁶⁶

Most of the analyses on the lack of strategic culture in India have juxtaposed so-called Indian timidity with the apparent long-range view adopted by the US. It seems ironical, then, that the Americans have now elected a President who has campaigned on the single-point agenda that all that the country has done in the last several decades are strategic blunders. He believes that China’s entry in the WTO led to the downfall of American power, ‘It was also Bill Clinton who lobbied for China’s disastrous entry into the WTO.’⁶⁷ He is of the opinion that America had no business to invade Iraq and that there is no need to maintain big military presence in Asia-Pacific or West Asia. He also maintains that the big defence manufacturers are duping American taxpayers. He may not be able to reverse all that he has said is wrong with the US global strategy. But he has left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he considers the country’s strategic culture to be strategic blunders.

For any objective mind, it is not difficult to see the deleterious effects of American strategic culture, from Syria to Afghanistan. Against the backdrop of war, strife and agony across continents, most of it linked to the so-called strategic wisdom of the US, there could not have been a better time to take a hard look at the widely held certitude in India that it is a model to emulate. As senior journalist Suhasini Haidar notes, ‘It must be remembered that each of the countries today at the centre of the world’s concerns over extremism is in fact a country that has seen direct or indirect western intervention, not western absence—Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Iraq.’⁶⁸

While many of us in India are often in awe of America’s strategic culture, the events of the last thirty years and the years preceding them do not bear that out. In an article in the Atlantic in 2011, an associate professor of security studies at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council illustrated ‘how perpetual war became U.S. ideology’. ‘The United States has found itself in a seemingly endless series of wars over the past two decades. Despite frequent opposition by the party not controlling the presidency and often that of the American public, the foreign policy elite operates on a consensus that routinely leads to the use of military power to solve international crises.’⁶⁹

America First does not mean that Trump will observe military restraint or eschew unilateral interventions. It actually means that the US will assert its power and supremacy without much consideration of consequences or long-term planning. If American interests are at risk, or to show the world who the boss is, the US will attack any country it deems necessary. Beyond that, it will have no patience or appetite for supporting nation-building efforts in that country.

The one and only time Trump got approving nods in Washington from across the political spectrum since becoming the President was when he bombed Syria and Afghanistan. Bombing other countries is almost always a topic of consensus among America’s political elite, regardless of target or reason. Obama has spoken about this. ‘Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power [ . . . ] That is the source of the controversy,’ he said, explaining his decision to not bomb Syria. Till today, his decision to not bomb the country is cited as a failure of his presidency by security czars and sections of the mainstream media. ‘Obama was known for an overly cerebral commitment to the notion of strategic patience. Trump seems more committed to a policy of glandular, non-strategic impatience,’ says Goldberg.⁷⁰ George W. Bush could afford unilateralism and strategic impatience. But that was evidently a different era.

India has been a beneficiary of both these approaches in the last thirty years—the strategic restraint that Obama showed and the strategic adventurism that Bush demonstrated. The latter wanted to forcibly change the world and found India to be a partner in his strategic games. The former saw a changed world in which India was a valuable partner. At one level, the India–America friendship is a result of American weakness; a stronger America had a different approach to India. More on this later.

I would like to close this discussion on America’s relative loss of influence in a changing world with one topic of great importance to India—its association with the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). In 2006, President Bush placed a direct call to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao. According to a US official who related that story, Bush told the Chinese leader: ‘If you oppose the NSG waiver for India, that will have serious consequences for our relations with you.’⁷¹ The message was unambiguous and definitive. And the Chinese were the last to receive that call from Bush. America’s friends, who had been holding back from supporting India had already received the same message, directly from the President of the US—that you oppose the waiver for India at the cost of your friendship with the US. No country in the world, including China, could risk that confrontation with the White House in 2006.

Despite that level of assertive display, the power of America was disintegrating from within. When Bush was making such calls to world leaders on India’s behalf, America’s economic edifice was standing on feet of clay. Within two years, the economic collapse occurred, after which the country has never been the same again, its notional recovery and the macro statistics that support the claim of a revival notwithstanding.

Obama’s policy of working with rising powers and accepting a multipolar world translated in India’s favour. This was seemingly at variance from the Bush-era thinking in which India was seen as an ally against China. Obama genuinely believed that since America cannot go around the world policing the bad spots, other Asian powers could be supported in their rise. By then, more and more people in the US administration had become appreciative of the fact that India could not be pushed to be a treaty ally of the US.

A study by scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) argued that India–US relations must follow a ‘joint venture model’, a sui generis model, different from America’s other bilateral relations. While all that is good and productive, Obama could not bring enough pressure on China, Turkey, Austria, Ireland, Switzerland and New Zealand that stood in the way of India’s bid for a full NSG membership in 2016. They blocked India’s admission, and the US under Obama did not have the power to change their decision.

Despite his rhetoric, Obama did not fundamentally change the nature of American foreign policy and its strategic behaviour. A key point in support of this argument is the widespread use of drones during his presidency to target Islamist militants as also the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, where Obama acted unilaterally to sustain American interests. This point was made by Hillary Clinton, who said that she, Obama and Henry Kissinger, the Republican who remains an influential figure in American foreign policy establishment four decades after he left the government, shared their view of the world and the desirable American response to it. Reviewing his book World Order in 2014, she wrote, ‘Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.’⁷²

Kissinger has compared the Richard Nixon administration’s bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973—kept secret from the American public—to Obama’s drone strikes against Islamist militants. Kissinger was the key interlocutor for Nixon who opened diplomatic ties with China. ‘I think the principle is essentially the same [ . . . ] You attack locations where you believe people operate who are killing you,’⁷³ he said. The Obama administration has carried out 473⁷⁴ drone bombings around the world, which many see as a flagrant violation of international norms and having great civilian costs. The fact that Kissinger is one of the key advisers to Trump completes the circuit of continuity in America’s strategic behaviour at a fundamental level.

Trump’s America First agenda has aggravated the divisions that predated his rise; in fact, his rise was a result of the debilitating divisions and erosion of the soul that Clinton spoke about as early as 1991. America First’s ability to take America forward may be limited, but its potential to add to the quantum of agony in the world remains unquestionable.

The assertion of American power has become increasingly difficult in a changing world, and that is the reality that the country’s strategic community and conservative politicians are unable to make sense of or come to terms with. Obama notes that even the consequences of invading Iraq had not tempered the interventionist enthusiasm of what he calls the ‘foreign policy establishment’. America’s Cuba policy is a classic example of this. As Obama sought a new opening with the Caribbean nation, Republican politicians warned against returning Guantánamo Bay, a 45-square-mile piece of coastline that the US has been using as its territory for decades, to Cuba. America has been imprisoning its captives from jihadi badlands at a high-security facility at Guantánamo, which Obama had promised to shut down. Republican politicians were riled by this suggestion and accused him of trying to return the land to Cuba. Each year, America sends a cheque of $4095 to Cuba as lease charges for Guantánamo, which Cuba stopped cashing in 1959. American retrenchment would have happened regardless of who became President in 2009, as the cost of Iraq had become undeniable and was hurting the country.

What Is American Interest?

The reality of American retrenchment predates Trump and will outlast him. Obama warned against hubris. He wanted other countries to share the burden of global challenges. He also wanted America to take a step back in order to account for the overreach of its power and the pain it had caused to the rest of the world, and accommodate rising powers in an orderly fashion, while reshuffling America’s own definitions of the self and the enemy. Trump wants America to retrench because he believes that the country has been a loser in the world order. Though there is some similarity in action between the two, the underlying reasons are starkly different and consequently, the impact of American diffidence on the world stage will have different consequences.

Different constituencies within the American political system have different notions of what constitutes the country’s interests. In the last three decades, as the notion of common interest fragmented, the American state increasingly became in favour of the interests of the corporations, consumers and investors at the cost of the labour. America First upended this equation. Trump sees global ties from the perspective of the American labour, who got a bad deal in globalization and trade treaties. Roughly the same social group also bears a disproportionate share of the cost of America’s unending wars abroad, as soldiers. The predominant wisdom of the last three decades included a correlation between economic interests and security interests. This correlation saw America’s global ties largely from the perspective of its corporations. Trade deficits, which helped companies, were often overlooked in favour of the strategic arguments which benefited a country, for example, South Korea or even India. In China’s case, this logic allowed expanding trade with the country while continuing military build-up against it. Trump also correlates security and economic interests, but in a manner that has shocked the country’s professional strategists. He has invoked national security provisions in trade laws to impose tariffs against America’s closest allies such as Canada and Germany. Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross explained the rationale as such: ‘National security is broadly defined to include the economy, to include the impact on employment, to include a very big variety of things [ . . . ] Economic security is military security. And without economic security, you can’t have military security.’⁷⁵

The situation is analogous to India’s approach to the US under the Congress and the BJP governments. While both parties see ties with America as the most important of all bilateral relationships, the Congress’s ambitions are modest and couched and designed in a language that foregrounds India’s poverty-fighting strategic approach; the Hindutva strategic agenda, on the other hand, wants partnership with America in support of its world leadership and superpower ambitions. One comes from humility and an awareness of its limitations, while the other is a result of its soaring ambitions and perhaps an exaggerated sense of its manifest destiny.

In the case of Narendra Modi, his rise is a result of both the division and consolidation of Indian society. The consolidation of large parts of Hindu society and the papering over of the differences of caste hierarchy and Modi’s rise have been two mutually reinforcing phenomena. This consolidation comes at the cost of alienation of India’s religious minorities, but, broadly, the Hindutva Strategic Doctrine has wide acceptance in India—among its judiciary, media and most importantly its state agencies. That is not the case with Trump’s America First agenda that is constantly challenged by other actors in the power play, particularly state agencies and the mainstream media. What is, however, a certainty is American retrenchment. While Trumpians are against trade and global institutions, Democrats who are opposed to Trump also want a reversal of the liberal world order, including demands that US-based companies such as Facebook and Twitter work in the national interest and not as global corporations.

That said, one cannot but notice that Trump and Modi are natural allies. Much like Obama and Manmohan Singh were natural allies.

Parallel to Trump’s rejection of multilateralism and adherence to a questionable economic philosophy, Xi is exhorting other countries to follow the Chinese model as opposed to Western liberalism, an idea expressed openly in his Make China Great Again speech at the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017. Such a prospect is of concern for India.

Though Indian leaders repeatedly say that a strong US and American leadership of the world are in India’s interest, the history of that dynamic is more layered and nuanced. While American leadership and ability to arm-twist other countries, including China and Pakistan, has benefited India on occasions, the space for New Delhi’s global ambitions can become available only with America’s retreat. It was the US that forced China to accede to the NSG waiver for nuclear commerce for India and forced Pakistan to resolve the Kargil conflict. But a relatively weakened US is who took a friendlier view of India to begin with. ‘We are going to come down on those guys like a ton of bricks,’ President Clinton declared at an Oval Office meeting the day after India landed a blow to his non-proliferation agenda, with Pokhran-II in May 1998. But he could not stay the course of seeking to punish India, primarily because of domestic American issues.⁷⁶

The Trump administration’s disregard for the ‘world order’ would open opportunities for India’s ambitions to be a ‘leading power’, but only a gradual retreat of the existing order could benefit India. Any dramatic disruption of the world order, and the resultant instability, could be bad news for a developing country such as India. The transition from a US President (Barack Obama) who reminded India about its own Constitution, during his visit to India in the first year of Modi’s prime ministership in 2015, to a leader (Donald Trump) who does not bother much about even the US Constitution could be welcomed from the perspective of the Modi government’s nationalist agenda. Trump has declared himself a supporter of ‘great national awakening’ anywhere in the world, as opposed to global institutions. However, any abrupt creation of a power vacuum in the event of American abdication of its global role would invite conflict and chaos. More than the reassurance of order, what India needs to be watchful of are the threats of conflict. As an emerging power, any conflict is bad for India. Being party to a conflict is worse.