Article: ‘More India and less China, please’ (Sunday Guardian)

By CLEO PASKAL | New Delhi | 20 January, 2018

Many from the strategic community who attended the Raisina Dialogue want India to play a stabilising role. 

The world needs more India and less China—that’s according to many of the members of the global strategic community who were in India last week. They came for the third Raisina Dialogue, hosted by the Observer Research Foundation and India’s Ministry of External Affairs. It was a stellar line up.

On the Indian side, among the those giving talks were Ministers Sushma Swaraj, M.J. Akbar, Smriti Irani, Suresh Prabhu, General (Retd.) V.K. Singh and Hardeep Singh Puri. The current Foreign Secretary, S. Jaishankar, was there, as well as the future one, Vijay Keshav Gokhale. Politically, the tone was kept appropriately neutral, with prominent roles for both Ram Madhav and Shashi Tharoor.

The range and seniority of foreign delegations underlined the uniqueness of India’s global position. There were high-level speakers from around the region and around the world, including the United States, Russia, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, Singapore and more.

The opening session was addressed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in attendance. It set the tone. While countries may have specific issues with Delhi, there was an overwhelming drive at Raisina to put those aside and instead focus on expanding broad and deep cooperation with India. In the case of Netanyahu, he politely ignored India voting against Israel at the UN on Jerusalem. Rather, he lauded the “natural” bonds between the two countries, the many areas of current cooperation (irrigation, agriculture, defence, etc), the potential for future cooperation, and how pleased he was that Modi was the first Indian leader to visit Israel in its 3,000-year history. It was a genuinely warm speech, and the audience reciprocated.

That desire for “more India please”, was repeatedly echoed throughout the three-day event. Especially in the context of China and the Indo-Pacific. Admiral Harry Harris, Jr., Commander of US Pacific Command, said that he believed that China was a disruptive transitional power, noting the effect on Vietnam of China moving oil research platforms into Vietnamese waters. At the same time, he lauded increased military cooperations between the US and India. Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper noted that if China is the sole emerging global power it’s more a threat to liberal world order than if free and democratic India also plays a role. Former US Ambassador to India Richard Verma underlined that the Pentagon doesn’t have a rapid response unit for any other country except India—that the relationship between the two countries is unique.

In an Indo-Pacific context, the full potential of the Quad (India, US, Japan, Australia) was on display in a uniquely powerful panel featuring Admiral Sunil Lanba (Chief of Naval Staff, India) Admiral Harris (Commander, US Pacific Command), Admiral Katsutoshi Kawano (Chief of Staff, Joint Staff, Japan) and Vice Admiral Tim Barrett, Chief of Navy, Australia. Hinting at the potential for a Quad+, also on the dais was Dino Patti Djalal, founder of the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia.

The positive role of global India was rarely questioned and, when it was, it was quickly and firmly answered. When a British Crown Prosecutor of Pakistan origin accused India of “state sponsored terrorism” in Balochistan, General David Petraeus jumped in to say “as director of the CIA, and Commander of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan, I never once heard the term ‘Indian state-sponsored terrorism’”. The audience burst into rapturous applause.

So much was covered, a summary is impossible. But key takeaways include:

1. The Indo-Pacific concept is now firmly entrenched in strategic thinking. And that means a bigger role for India. General Petraeus made clear that the shift in the US lexicon from Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific is an “explicit” recognition of the importance of India. And Ram Madhav noted that India has to “reorient strategic thinking from west thinking to east looking; from land based to ocean based,” and that it “can’t just be a spectator or a participant, it has to be a stakeholder.”

2. As a part of that, the Quad (and its various bilateral relationships) is increasingly, if tentatively, solidifying.

3. Several US delegates asked the international community to “look beyond the tweets” and see that, far from retreating, the US is becoming more engaged internationally. Participants were urged to read the new National Security Strategy and, even more important, follow the troops and the money. They’d find a stronger stance on China, increased activity in Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan, open criticism and withholding of funds for Pakistan, more funding for NATO, engagement on North Korea, and more.

4. India’s neighbours are also looking to India. Among the speakers were Hamid Karzai, former President of Afghanistan, the State Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sri Lanka and the Foreign Secretary of Nepal. Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bangladesh noted that India is the only country in the region that has the pull to host an event such as the Raisina Dialogue.

5. Europe and European countries are trying to figure how to engage with India both individually and as the European Union. While the substantial British delegation wasn’t a surprise, there were also high-level delegates from Poland, Italy, Hungary, and others, including the former Prime Minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt. France in particular seems to be looking at closer ties with India. As their Ambassador for the Oceans pointed out, France has territories all over the Indo-Pacific, including in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. Which may explain why Raisina also had dedicated closed-door track 1.5 meetings between India/France and between India/Australia/France. Perhaps Paris would like the Quad to become le Cinq.

6. China, China, China.

The theme of the Raisina Dialogue was “Managing Disruptive Transitions”. Foreign Secretary Jaishankar raised four major global disruptions: the rise of China; the choices, postures and behaviour of the US; terrorism; and non-market economics. India potentially has a stabilising role to play in each of the four. From the tone at Raisina, much of the world wants India to play that role. The question is now, what does India want?

Cleo Paskal is The Sunday Guardian’s North America Special Correspondent.

http://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/12453-more-india-and-less-china-please

Video: Raisina 2018 | Fragile World: Preventing a Scorched Earth (Panel, 17 January 2018 )

Article: Fire and Fury explodes like an IED in Washington Beltway (Sunday Guardian)

By CLEO PASKAL | New Delhi | 13 January, 2018

It is not that this Improvised Editorial Device’s salacious tidbits are necessarily true. 

Michael Wolff’s new book about the Donald Trump presidency, Fire and Fury, has exploded like an IED (Improvised Editorial Device) inside the Washington Beltway. It’s not that the book’s salacious tidbits are necessarily true. Many errors have already been called out, and Wolff was careful to give himself cover at the start of the book.

Wolf wrote: “Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”

Oh, ok then.

But at this point, the contents of the book are not the story. It’s all about the fallout. That’s where we can see who are the winners and losers from the publication of a book that may be even less accurate than the infamous “Trump Dossier”.

THE LOSERS

One of the big losers is domestic harmony in the Trump family. President Trump clearly values his immediate family, and has given relatives roles in his administration. The book takes direct aim at inner family relations, in the most personal ways possible. It implies Donald Trump thinks his sons are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. That Trump’s daughter Ivanka questions her father’s abilities and makes fun of his hair.

That there are problems with the marriage between Trump and his wife Melania. And much, much more. It is a textbook for sowing distrust, hurt and debilitating miscommunications at the core of the administration.

The biggest single loser is Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon. Bannon had already left the administration, but was still running the highly influential Breitbart news. He was also trying to lead a campaign to unseat Republican Congress members whom he thought were part of the “corrupt Washington swamp” and replace them with more members of the “Trump Army”. This failed spectacularly in the recent Alabama Senate race, in which Bannon’s candidate lost what had been a relatively safe Republican seat, to a Democrat.

In Fire and Fury, Bannon is quoted as implying that a meeting attended by one of Trump’s sons with Russians was potentially treasonous. These factors and others resulted in Trump strongly and openly criticising Bannon. That in turn led to Bannon being kicked out of Breitbart and losing important financial backers. Bannon apologised to Trump’s son and has not criticised Trump himself. Regardless, the Trump-Bannon break has meant some fracturing and deflation of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, and a weakening of Bannon.

THE WINNERS

The first winner is obviously Wolff, who stands to make millions from the book, thanks in large part to the free coverage President Trump gave him with his tweets and threatened injunction.

A much more important winner is China. With Bannon sidelined, one of the strongest voices pushing for “standing up to China” has been muted.

Bannon was consistent in questioning Chinese trade practices and expansionist policies, both of which he viewed as direct threats to the United States, and the “free world”. He was also heavily involved in trying new approaches to combating Islamist terror. As were many of the candidates he was supporting, and many of the writers he had at Breitbart. Beijing will be happy that Bannon has taken a hit.

Other big winners are the Democratic Party and the Republican establishment. Anything that hurts Trump is, of course, good for the Democrats, especially leading into the midterm elections. And anything that weakens the generals or key communicators of the Trump Republicans, like Bannon, is often good for the Republican establishment. From the point of view of MAGA supporters, this has been a great week for the DC swamp monsters.

However, counter-intuitively, another winner might be the prospects of a second term Donald Trump presidency. By getting this brutal and personal early on, it might sap opposition ammunition before 2020 and inure the public to this sort of attack. It also shears away people, like the kind of candidate supported by Bannon in Alabama, who might alienate traditional Republicans voters.

Fire and Fury isn’t particularly reliable, or groundbreaking, but it has amplified existing currents, and brought that turbulence to the surface. The book may have spurred Trump to openly lash out at Bannon, but he was already angry with him over Alabama, and more. And Bannon is not going to just disappear. The book highlights and exacerbates a political moment in time. But this week’s losers may be next election’s winners.

Cleo Paskal is The Sunday Guardian’s North America Special Correspondent.

Interview: Cleo Paskal on John Batchelor Show with Gordon Chang on the Road to Doha: The politics of the Subcontinent and Qatar.