Biden-Trump: Hobson’s Choice

The 2024 United States presidential election promises to be a theatre of the absurd. Former US President Donald Trump is a convict. President Joe Biden has early signs of dementia. For India, it doesn’t matter greatly who wins. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has established a rapport with both candidates. The India-US strategic partnership now has bipartisan momentum.

 

For the rest of the world, however, the contest between Biden and Trump presents with a Hobson’s choice. A Trump win is dreaded in Europe. Trump has promised to cut military aid to Ukraine and end the Russia-Ukraine war within months of his inauguration as president. Trump’s position on the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is less clear. But the former president is fond of boasting how, on his watch, no new wars erupted.

 

Biden advocates a sovereign Palestine state living in peace next to Israel. Biden has for decades been the recipient of funds from the American Israel Public Accounts Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobbying organisation with wealthy Jewish donors. Many are self-declared Zionists. They reject the very idea of a separate sovereign Palestinian state.

 

Apart from Biden’s cognitive infirmity, immigration and inflation are two issues that could swing the election in Trump’s favour. The US is deeply polarised. Most states are unchangeably blue (Democratic) or red (Republican). The key swing states are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump is ahead in opinion polls in all four. 

 

In the US, policies on security, intelligence, technology, defence and trade are set by technocrats and bureaucrats a layer beneath the political leadership. Washington operates differently from the Westminster model India follows. Members of the US cabinet do not have to win elections or be members of either the Senate or House of Representatives. If Trump wins, whoever replaces Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a Jew of Hungarian descent, will be a career technocrat like Blinken, not a career politician. 

 

This can be a double-edged sword. The US president’s cabinet is small. The layer of bureaucrats beneath the cabinet significantly influences US policy, especially on foreign affairs and defence. A section of this subterranean layer has elements of the deep state with neo-cons and operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

 

Many are Cold War veterans, bred on an America First policy that Trump advocates. Several have close ties to the country’s military-industrial complex (MIC). The MIC thrives on war. Weaponry valued at over $100 billion manufactured by US firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics has been exported to Ukraine and Israel.

 

More than 1,00,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed in the two wars so far, mostly with US-made weapons. The $100 billion funding for US weaponry flows into US defence companies not into Ukrainian or Israeli treasuries. Both countries’ economies are in deep decline due to war while the US economy is expanding and its stock market booming.

 

What do the neo-cons and cold warriors have in mind for India, irrespective of who is the next US president? There are three trigger-sensitive issues: Russia, technology and defence.

 

Russia is a key irritant for Washington. The US has largely ignored India buying discounted Russian crude oil and defence equipment. It understands India-Russian ties pre-date the Ukraine crisis. The two countries have tip-toed around India’s position on the Ukraine-Russia war. In his defining third term, however, Modi has decided to push the envelope. He travels to Moscow in July for the annual India-Russia summit. Significantly, the summit was not held since 2021, due to the Covid pandemic and then the war in Ukraine.

 

The optics of Modi and a strong Indian delegation meeting Russian president Vladimir Putin will play badly in Washington. Why has Modi opted to poke Washington in the eye at this critical point? It goes back to the US-Canada allegation that agents of the Indian state were responsible for the murder of fugitive Khalistani gangster Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

 

The US entrapped Indian businessman Nikhil Gupta at Prague airport. The FBI arrested him without a court order and locked him up in a Czech jail for a year before extraditing him to the US where he will stand trial in a Manhattan court on murder-for-hire charges against proscribed Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. No evidence against Gupta has been revealed publicly.

 

For Modi, enough clearly is enough. The US has a long history of being a fair-weather friend. India was at the receiving end of harsh economic sanctions after the Pokhran nuclear test in 1998. It was only after Washington recognised the importance of India’s economy, military, technology and markets in the early 2000s that the US recalibrated its India policy, elevating it to a strategic partnership.

 

For the US India is a useful counterweight in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) against the looming threat to US hegemony: China. Modi knows India’s geostrategic location and expanding economic, military and technological strength makes it an indispensable ally for the US. Washington knows this too. It will therefore take the Modi-Putin summit in Moscow this month in its stride and comfort itself by using the Nijjar and Pannun cases as a mild warning to New Delhi to moderate its Russia outreach.

 

Meanwhile, Washington is consumed by the forthcoming presidential election. It won’t rock the boat in India except using NGOs and peripheral adjuncts of the United Nations to lecture New Delhi on religious freedom. Following the robust 2024 Lok Sabha election, the drumbeat of India’s “backsliding democracy” has, however, fallen silent.

 

As Europe turns sharply right and US voters consider the Hobson’s choice between Biden and Trump, Washington knows the ground is shifting beneath its feet.