Wednesday, January 20, 2021. The democratic world, after four years of agonising uncertainty and disruption in the post- war order, can at last heave a sigh of relief. For, on this fateful day, the bull-in-the-china-shop President of the United States of America will no longer be around to tear apart established covenants among democratic nations and will no longer be able to comfort autocrats and murderous potentates around the world. Donald Trump will be history when his legally, and popularly elected successor, Joe Biden, takes the oath of office.
Thanks to the toxic virus of hate injected by the outgoing president, and the still raging coronavirus pandemic, the customary fanfare and razzmatazz will be missing from Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris’s inaugural ceremony. Instead, nervous security services will be keeping a tense vigil in Washington for domestic troublemakers and rogue pro-Trump desperadoes among their own ranks. So noxious was the legacy of the flash-in-the-pan winner of the 2016 presidential race that he poisoned with oodles of hate and racism the very life-blood of the American polity.
No US president in recent memory has been as unworthy of occupying the most powerful office in the world as the not-so-successful New York real estate baron. No other president in recent times was as ignorant and unaware of the world around him as Trump. Yet, the narcissist boasted he was a stable genius. He won, in the first place, by appealing to the baser instincts of the voters who had seen better days. His anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-media, and pro-wall campaign endeared him to the white, but relatively poor voters who were rendered jobless by the flight of manufacturing jobs to China and other low-income countries.
A demagogue whose dog-whistle white supremacist message enthralled the fringe groups, such as the Ku Klux Clan or the ultra-extremist Christian, pro-life constituents, Trump nonetheless wittingly or unwittingly changed America and undermined the post-War certitudes. The Cold War era western security and economic alliances carefully crafted by several of his predecessors in the White House came unstuck under his unbridled tirade.
He was harsh on NATO allies and lovey-dovey with the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and, for a time at least, with North Korea’s murderous ruler Kim Jong-Un. He led the reversal of the globalisation process just as earlier American presidents had spearheaded the move towards globalisation. His rejection of the Paris climate accord or his insistence on fresh and more equitable terms of trade with China were no less controversial. It was under his watch that President Xi Jinping, instead of buckling under the Trump challenge, bared his hegemonic fangs, menacing Europe, Australia, Asia, Americas et al with his country’s superior economic and military power.
To be fair to Trump, he helped in spotlighting the threat a powerful China posed to the established global order. Neither Biden nor any of his successors can any longer ignore the threat China has come to pose, in both economic and military fields. Even in his relations with India, despite a public show of bonhomie with Modi, Trump was transactional, withdrawing preferential treatment for a number of Indian exports and insisting on further opening up for American goods and services.
The new president cannot, and will not restore status quo ante with China, but he will be more nuanced and measured in his dealings. The American security establishment having unanimously raised the red flag over China’s predatory and expansionist agenda, and ambitions to soon replace the US as the global superpower, Biden will keep the pressure on Xi and will have the western allies, already reeling under China’s economic muscle-flexing, to support him fully. India, as a pivotal power in Asia, is assured of the continued support of the new administration in Washington, especially due to the belated recognition by the strategic community in the US that we serve as a bulwark of freedom and democracy in this part of the world against China’s ambitious expansionist, militaristic goals.
Without joining any security alliance, without surrendering our neutrality vis-à-vis rival foreign powers, we can still cooperate and coordinate in security and strategic matters with the US and other democratic nations to safeguard our territorial integrity and sovereignty. Trump might have driven a coach and four in the established global order but the resulting disruption bared sores and painful eruptions and the democratic world would be better served if these are healed by Biden with the active cooperation of all peace-loving nations.
A new global order, say, a coalition of the willing, is slowly but certainly being birthed amidst the death throes of the post-war multilateral order. India should not be caught napping this time as it was when her first Prime Minister, a sucker for foreign praise, did not assert its rightful place on the global high tables, often when it appeared to be in his grasp.
