Signs of tactical change

KP Nayar

Strategic Analyst

In the three weeks since Antony J Blinken has been US Secretary of State, he has already made an impact on India and its neighbourhood. Had Mike Pompeo continued as Secretary of State in a presumptive second Trump administration, it can be said the military disengagement by India and China along the LAC would not have taken place.

Pompeo inflicted tremendous damage to Sino-Indian ties when he was the chief US diplomat, most of it since spring last year when tensions flared up in Ladakh. By dragging LAC tensions into speech after speech, Pompeo contributed more than any other politician-diplomat anywhere in the world to vitiate the atmospherics of Sino-Indian efforts to return the LAC to some semblance of normalcy.

Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) officials may bristle at any suggestion that Pompeo had a whip hand over sovereign decisions by India concerning its ties with China. But consider this: time was when diplomacy and security policies in India were left to diplomats and real experts. Politicians had the humility to be guided by plenipotentiaries, professional men and women who knew what they were doing!

In his book, Vajpayee: The years that changed India, Shakti Sinha, Vajpayee’s private secretary, devotes several pages to how the BJP’s first PM insisted, when he was in the Opposition, that on national security issues, there could be no politics. He surprised his party by standing up in Parliament and supporting the Sukhoi aircraft deal with Russia by then Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav. Contrast this with what the principal opposition party did when the Modi government concluded the Rafale plane deal with France.

More recently, on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), there was broad unanimity in South Block and among civil servants in the Commerce Ministry that India should accede to RCEP. But when the time came, they could not have their way at the ASEAN+3 summit in Bangkok in 2019 with politicians who knew nothing about RCEP. The decision to stay out of RCEP may turn out to be the biggest blunder in the history of India’s economic diplomacy.

When Jeff Bezos, the richest man ever, came to India, extending his hand for business engagement, politicians who resented stories in The Washington Post owned by Bezos, issued a fatwa that no one of any consequence should meet him. Our economic diplomats had no role in taking this decision. Similarly, when politicians stopped all work on building the new Andhra Pradesh capital, Amaravati, they paid no heed to the damage it would cause to India’s relations with countries that had put in massive amounts of money into projects there, for which they had signed building contracts. Diplomats were not even consulted about the fallout.

In Pompeo’s case, his wild card statements on China, bringing in the LAC standoff, lulled many politicians in New Delhi into a false sense of complacency that the US would be with India if the skirmishes in Ladakh escalated. They did not see through President Trump’s offer to mediate between India and China, missing the point that a mediator has to be neutral.

By remaining silent on the Sino-Indian dispute, Blinken helped lower the temperature. Those in New Delhi who did not want to meaningfully engage China bilaterally as long as Washington’s support was forthcoming had to think again. Inferences will be drawn from the coincidence that the Ladakh disengagement was announced on the very day the new US President, Joe Biden, spoke to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, for two hours. Washington has begun re-engaging China.

In India’s neighbourhood, the Myanmar coup has been a blessing for Blinken. The new US administration needed to pick on someone as part of a process which Biden sums up as ‘America is back.’ Trump’s policies made it impossible for the new administration to pick on countries which Washington is traditionally used to picking on.

Iran is out because Biden wants a rapprochement with Teheran on the nuclear issue. He wants to go back to a Cuba-friendly policy, which was set in motion when he was Vice-President. On North Korea, a policy review is under way in the State Department: no one wants to rock the boat before that is complete. Blinken is already handling Saudi Arabia in velvet gloves.

Myanmar is of a size the US can pick on without any fear of consequences. Myanmar is also not of much strategic import to Washington: so the opportunity cost of confronting Myanmar is virtually zero. It makes Biden look good that he is upholding the liberal values of his Democratic Party — human rights, democracy, political freedom. In 1983, when President Ronald Reagan wanted to demonstrate US assertiveness, he invaded Grenada, a country of merely 1.2 lakh people.

Even so, Blinken has kept parachutes in readiness to bail out in case the US suffers any equity loss in Myanmar. The State Department has taken out insurance policies in such an eventuality with India and Japan. The US is talking to these two countries which have influence in Myanmar, both with the junta and with Aung San Suu Kyi. Washington expects New Delhi and Tokyo to bail it out if any bailout becomes necessary.

Before Blinken spoke to S Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister, and Biden to PM Modi, the US administration would have taken note that India did not use ‘coup’ in describing what the MEA, instead, called ‘the developments in Myanmar’. Last Friday, the MEA spokesman said: ‘India and the US have agreed to remain in contact and exchange assessments on the situation’ in Myanmar. It is an early sign that the Biden administration recognises India as the pre-eminent power in the region and intends to develop a relationship based on that premise. From a new US presidency, this is a good augury.

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