How Trump’s ‘disruptive ways’ still have a silver lining – Firstpost

On the face of it, US President Donald Trump’s ‘disruptions’ since before being sworn into office for a second time after a break threaten the world more than anything in the post-war world. At the same time, bereft of conventional wars with a nuclear-weapons threat looming in the background, new-generation ‘distant’ weapons like unmanned drones and the unpredictability of AI use in wars between nations, Trump’s trade wars, if taken forward, might be more complex but less destructive.

Whether it’s Trump’s ‘directive’ for Canada and Mexico to merge with the US, and for Denmark to hand over Greenland, and a series of executive orders for his country to walk out of WHO and UNHRC—and who knows what next— involving international organisations, and very many on domestic issues, they are unsurprising yet shocking. The best, or then worst, of them is one renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘Gulf of America’, as if the rechristening alone would change things for the better on that score for America and all Americans. Then, of course, is what many in the international community may feel is the ‘most atrocious of them all’, in his wanting to develop/re-develop Gaza after the Palestinians are replanted (as citizens?) in Saudi Arabia and Jordan…

The list is endless and includes one on the deportation of illegal immigrants literally on a war footing. Some of those nations have protested; some have acquiesced to the fact. India, to an extent, belongs in the second club, after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told Parliament that it was the international norm in such matters.

Unending, unwieldy

Yet, there is the reality of the nation feeling hurt at the way illegal immigrant Indians were packed in a US Air Force transporter with their hands and legs chained or tied, with many more awaiting deportation.

The chances are New Delhi might wake up to the reality and obtain permission for Indian civilian aircraft to be dispatched to bring back those hapless victims of personal greed and worse. Considering that the total number of illegal Indian immigrants is reportedly around 7.25 lakhs or 725,000, the chances of any American administration being able to deport them back home will be an unending and, at times, unwieldy process.

It might thus suit American self-interest to let India and other nations handle the transportation of their illegal citizens back home. Yet, the very nature of it all could even discourage Establishment America to go slow on such deportation, if not outright put it off to another day, another presidency. If the number of Indian illegals is so high, imagine the total number of those from across the world that the US authorities would have to identify, isolate, and then deport.

That raises a more important question, which is purely of domestic nature in the US that Indians and other foreigners don’t have to be concerned about: If many, or if not most, of these illegal migrants are actually lending their labour (of whatever kind) to American homes and the economy, how much of their overnight removal is going to impact the domestic constituency and its mood? Can Trump endure over the medium and long terms? And how far would the economy suffer if he is not able to find local replacements for these low-end jobs in their thousands and millions?

Fragile system

If there is something that Trump’s fiat-driven policy-making has shown the Americans and the rest of the world, it is the fragile nature of the nation’s democracy, which their leaders and bureaucrats, INGOs, and media persons market to the rest of the world as the greatest of ‘em all. In particular, USAID workers, whom Trump has left jobless overseas by stopping funds, were doing precisely this and more. In nations like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in India’s neighbourhood, and even in this country, there are many who have been complaining for long about how USAID funding was behind ‘regime-change’, both successful and not-so-successful.

That is still only a tip of the iceberg. On larger issues of constitutional democracy, the world had always believed—and that includes governments and their diplomats posted in the US or studying the US system for long—that it’s the Congress that initiates/takes all ‘wrong decisions’ viz their countries. The perception was that it was easy to ‘manage’ the president and his administration on contentious matters through accommodation and compromise, but in Congress, they would have to ‘manage’ diverse and diversified individuals and groups, both individually and collectively.

It is not that previous presidents had not passed executive orders, at times ad infinitum, but only through phases and stages through their four-year/eight-year term. Yet, it is Trump, more so in these early weeks of his second and concluding term, who is showing Americans, their allies, and adversaries alike how ‘autocratic’ the US presidency all along has been and how by being unconventional and undemocratic, he has exposed the inherent strains and stress points in the nation’s highly credited democratic scheme, division of powers, et al.

With the result, from now on, American interlocutors will be facing tough questions and slide remarks whenever they start selling the ‘American model’ to the Third World. Trump, in his current mood and present methods, may then want to hit back harder and harsher than now, but how geopolitical and regional equations develop from now on may also influence/interfere with his decisions at the time.

Real highlights

In the present-day world, these are all sidelights. The real highlights in Trump’s pronouncements relate to Russia, China, and Iran—and by extension and otherwise, Europe. On all three fronts, even while sounding harsh, uppity, and unthinking, Trump has left the other side with a lot of food for thought and space for negotiations.

On Russia, rather, the Ukraine War, it is generally accepted that both warring nations want an honourable way out. If Trump, even while being seen as arm-twisting both, is able to facilitate/negotiate a fair deal, who knows, he would have actually earned a Nobel Peace Prize, which a Democrat predecessor, Barack Obama, prematurely ‘stole’ from a faceless deserving candidate.

Already, senior Trump aides have said that there was no question of Ukraine getting back territories lost before 2014. What is negotiated is only territories that were lost during the war that commenced in February 2022 (if at all?). More importantly, not just for Ukraine but for America’s NATO allies and the rest of the world is the Trump administration’s reiteration that there was no question of Ukraine being given membership in the transatlantic military alliance. This was the only condition on which Putin had launched the unilateral war.

In the process, America’s NATO allies, especially those who have been funding and arming Ukraine at the instance of Washington until now, may feel even more cheated than they already do. For taking off from where he left on NATO nations having to pay for ‘American security’, Trump has indicated that he would not hesitate to pull out.

Now, Trump has sidestepped Europe in his bid to placate Vladimir Putin in Moscow and also to bring Ukraine around into accepting some form of an honourable deal; Europe would have to decide on their own future equations with Russia. Whether they want to continue with the Ukraine-centric adversity, or do they want to roll back to the pre-war situation, when they were procuring fuel from Russia even while strengthening post-Cold War NATO, at America’s bidding?

Either way, the Trump strategy may revive European strategic ambitions and autonomy as was shaping up prior to the Ukraine War. In the face of the evolving scenario, European powers like France and Germany, jointly and severally, may decide to go back to the drawing board for their nations and their EU alliance to reorient and reformulate geopolitical, geostrategic, and geo-economic policies and programmes with definite deadlines.

This time round, their ideas may find favour both within NATO and more so in the America-less EU grouping. In their attempts of the kind prior to the Ukraine War, powerful EU members found out to their dismay that the post-Soviet entrants into the EU were more loyal to the US chequebook diplomats than their fellow European powers with a much longer history, dating back by decades and centuries.

First port of call

Then, there is China, which has joined Trump’s tariff war equally sportingly, by increasing their own export tariffs, hitting the US equally so. Trump is already on record that Beijing, and not Europe, would be his first port of call, meaning that he would want a trade-and-tariff deal with China first, more than anything else on the international plane. How, if successful, it would tackle America’s past concerns over Taiwan and the South China Sea would then be a problem of those littoral states to worry more than either Washington or Beijing.

Then you have Iran, where Trump, unlike in his first term, has indicated that he does not want a nuclear Iran. Now that he has agreed to work for/with a ‘nuclear-free’ Iran, West Asia/Middle East may see some possibilities of lasting peace and/or lesser tension.

That Iran has somehow gotten more linked to Gaza now than during Trump’s first term makes it that much easier or tougher for him to work with Tehran. But to expect not just Iran, but also the entire Arab world, to attest to his freak idea of packing off Palestinians out of Gaza and developing it is not going to happen. The question also remains: if he wants to develop Gaza, would it be for Gaza residents to return some other day, or for Israel to annex it, or for the US to hold on to it, like Trump’s idea for Greenland, among others?

Wrong message

In the midst of all this, India would still have to be aware of possible hiccups in bilateral relations, as Trump would have taken up his declared expectations and concerns on what he called “trade barriers with Prime Minister Modi”. He had also said that India should procure more weapons from his country.

There may also be pressure on New Delhi to purchase American oil, whose cost price and transportation costs would make it less attractive compared to current sources, including Russia, which, in the face of the Ukraine War, had drastically cut oil prices. Yes, in a post-war period, Russia may also want to increase oil prices to pay for reconstruction and rehabilitation, but that situation has not been reached as yet. Overall, it is about India’s ‘strategic autonomy’ over the decision to procure Russian oil against appeals and admonitions from the US and other friends from the West.

Today, if New Delhi gives up ‘meekly’ to Trump’s threats and/or endearments, it could well send out a wrong message to India’s friends in the Global South. It will thus remain to be seen if, how, and at what stage in the Indo-US talks under Trump, New Delhi is able to lay out its course on strategic autonomy as peacefully and as firmly as during those early months of the Ukraine War. Needless to say, it’s this along with India-led appeals emanating from India’s presidency of the G20 Summit in 2023.

As may be recalled, what otherwise was a summit of rich G-nations and 13 other large economies sent out the message of the Global South, with everyone concurring with India’s draft. The position that India had held as a leading light of the Global South in an era gone by, but from a position of inherent weaknesses, was resuming and reasserting from a position of strength and courage.

New Delhi cannot lose out on this position in negotiations with Trump’s US, nor can it be seen as yielding even negotiation points and positions, even in the bilateral context. Convincing the domestic constituency, which, like in the US, has become increasingly ‘inward-looking nationalistic’, may be as important for Prime Minister Modi and his ruling BJP as it has been for President Trump.

The latter does not have to win another election for his party, but that is not the case in India. Nor does an outgoing president in the US have to ensure the victory of his party after his term as his counterpart, the prime minister in India, has to.

The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.