The presidency of Donald Trump, the first Republican businessman-billionaire POTUS since Democrat JFK, is being welcomed. The US dollar, global fund flows into America, the US stock market indices, have all strengthened in anticipation.
Conversely, the left-liberal democracies of Europe, used to American subsidies and bank credits, are apprehensive.
Trump is expected to use his developed business sense to negotiate better deals for the US irrespective of their political correctness.
Trump wants to reclaim the low-end manufacturing jobs, outsourced mainly to China, righting a severely askew balance of payments in the process. He might however, given the advance of robotics in assembly lines, end up exporting American robots to increasingly higher wage China instead!
He also wants to stop the outflow of trillions of dollars to service military pacts, reversing much of the obsolete Cold War thinking.
Trump will recast priorities, and renegotiate special relationships, terms, and treaties, into bilaterals; so that the rest of the ‘allied’ world, pays for the bulk of its own military needs henceforth.
The strategic fact that America is now energy self-sufficient in petroleum, with exportable surpluses, has also freed it from certain compulsions.
India has come a long way from its unable-to-feed-itself 1950s and 1960s, to routine food surplus, despite a quadrupled population. And, happily, it falls on the right side of America’s geopolitical divide, particularly with reference to Pakistan sponsored terrorism, and China’s hegemon tendencies.
India, the fastest growing major economy, needs no aid. It not only services its sovereign economic obligations, but pays for every rupee of its hungry military machine, en route to a comprehensive upgrade.
But even as Trump plans to reorient American policy along more nationalist lines, when did America the global superpower begin its march?
It was with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, that America first demarcated a sphere of influence, and warned others to keep off it. It ushered in the ‘American backyard’ concept, with regard to Latin America, even though Trump’s euphemistic ‘wall’ now proposes to block out illegal Mexican immigration.
The Monroe Doctrine, not only put paid to Spain and Portugal’s ambitions in Latin America, but also warned off imperial Britain.
The next big move, signalling the subordination of Europe, was the Marshall Plan of 1948. The USSR however, refused the help for itself and its communist allies, to kick off the Cold War.
Still, America gave $ 12 billion, worth ten times the figure in today’s money, to rebuild Europe.
Soon after, in 1949, the security alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), was born, to combat Communism, in what later became the Warsaw Pact countries.
ANZUS, a similar security treaty with Australia and New Zealand for the Pacific Ocean region, came in 1951. As did another, with Japan, also in the same year.
Other more recent protective treaties, with Pakistan, spawned during the American battle to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, after America was expelled from Iran, and because of its then dependence on imported oil - may well have run their course.
The US-Pakistan relationship, with its $ 33 billion in aid alone, paid out by the Obama administration, may be downgraded now.
Trump could stop the aid, and hold Pakistan’s feet to the fire on the issue of terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation too.
Pakistan meanwhile, has been shifting ground, via its $ 46 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and its extensive port infrastructure at Gwadur. It is also wooing Russia and Iran to join the CPEC, instead of the India-Japan-Iran backed alternate, at neighbouring Chabahar.
Meanwhile, NATO, grown to include 28 member states, spent $ 866,971 million in 2015. But how relevant is it, when the US involvement in the Vietnam War of the 1970s was probably the last gasp of globalised Communism? After all, NATO was used just once, as a fig leaf, after 9/11.
The new threat is certainly from global Islamic terrorism, and Chinese imperial assertion, rather than its communism.
Coming full circle, there are signs of an unprecedented understanding between Russia’s Putin, and America’s Trump.
India will benefit from America’s strategic compulsions under Trump. This will provide greater access to US military weaponry, technology, and intelligence.
The IT activity however, will not only have to meet the challenge of robotics, but probably move onshore, leveraging Silicon Valley connections.
As regards access for American business and industry into the Indian domestic market, this, on most favoured nation terms, will be the key to India’s leverage, as far as the businessman in POTUS Trump goes.
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