West’s Trust Deficit
Trust, once broken, is hard to repair. A collateral damage of the Russian-Ukraine war is the credibility of Western media. Some of the reportage from the BBC, CNN, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Economist has crossed the line between journalism and propaganda.
The affliction has a history. In May 1998, on a short break from work, I was vacationing with my family in the United States. We heard a news flash in our hotel room on CNN: India had conducted a nuclear test in Pokhran in the Rajasthan desert.
The Atal Bihari Vajpayee had taken office in March 1998. Moving decisively, India conducted its second nuclear test nearly a quarter century after the Indira Gandhi government tested the country’s first nuclear device in 1974.
The reaction to Pokhran 2 from Western chanceries was fast and furious. US President Bill Clinton was enraged. He promised to come down on India “like a ton of bricks”. Within days, punitive economic and technology sanctions were slapped on India. The US establishment in the Senate and the House of Representatives was united in anger: how dare India, a non-signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), test a nuclear device.
Britain and other Western nations joined the chorus of criticism. Western media amplified the incensed reaction. Watching US television networks in our New York hotel room, I was struck by both the hostility of news coverage against India and the absolute lack of balance. Anchors on CNN, for example, raged over India’s impertinence. Virtually every TV panelist echoed the US government’s position: upstart India must be punished for its nuclear transgression.
I called CNN headquarters in Atlanta and asked them to invite India’s ambassador to Washington Naresh Chandra to present India’s point of view. It took several calls and a warning to expose US media’s bias internationally to finally persuade CNN to interview Chandra. The Indian ambassador ensured that a modicum of balance was introduced into the debate.
President Clinton’s sanctions were punishing. It set India’s tech growth back by years. Clinton visited India two years later, lifted the sanctions and praised India’s incipient tech revolution. It was too little, too late.
Five years after India’s Pokhran nuclear test, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003 on the pretext that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The US did not seek approval from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to invade another sovereign country. The invasion broke every tenet of international law. According to conservative estimates, during the 2003-11 invasion and occupation of Iraq by US-led forces, over 2,00,000 civilians, including children, were killed.
No WMDs were ever found. Iraq’s infrastructure was levelled to the ground. An earlier no-fly zone over Iraq, imposed unilaterally by US-led forces through the 1990s, had starved Iraq of food and medicines, leading to the deaths of children and the elderly. Western media acted exactly as it had done after India’s nuclear test: surrogates of their government.
The Russia-Ukraine war is not a black-and-white issue. It has plenty of grey shades. Russia’s attack on Ukraine is condemnable. Nothing can justify a military invasion of a sovereign nation. The US-led invasion of Iraq was wrong; so is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Apart from exaggerated and frequently false reports by Western media on Ukraine that have shredded whatever credibility Anglo-Saxon media (principally from the US, Britain, Canada and Australia) still possessed, is the conduct of Western businesses. Hundreds of large American and European companies have boycotted Russia, dealing globalisation a near-fatal blow. Multinationals must be country-and ideology-agnostic. That trust has been broken, irretrievably.
As Rahul Matthan, a partner in the firm Trilegal, put it: “In a letter to shareholders, Larry Fink, chairman of BlackRock, declared that globalisation was over. The manner in which the Western world came together to impose sanctions on Russia, coupled with the alacrity with which global businesses terminated decades-old business arrangements with the country virtually overnight, seemed to suggest that many of the assumptions upon which global trade has been based so far can no longer be counted upon to hold true anymore. These events, Fink argued, ‘mark a turning point in the world order of geopolitics, macro-economic trends, and capital markets’.”
Who can trust Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Tesla or IBM to not cut and run at the first sign of trouble in a country? The West has always regarded commercial contracts as sacrosanct, come hell or high water. That’s no longer true. If the West’s geopolitical interests are threatened, Western companies will behave exactly like Western media: supplicants of their governments.
After India’s nuclear test in 1998, the US imposed harsh sanctions on India. That option is now closed. India is no longer sanctionable: its economy is too large, its consumer market too attractive, and its political establishment too important to be bullied as it was 24 years ago.
India will continue to buy Russian oil and gas at discounted prices. As the government pointed out to the spate of foreign ministers who visited New Delhi recently, Europe is continuing to buy Russian oil and gas in large quantities – far larger than India’s purchases – despite strict sanctions on Russia.
Besides, as the Indian experience of US sanctions proved, sanctions don’t work. Visa and Mastercard’s boycott of Russia has strengthened Moscow’s homegrown payment system. The Wall Street Journal conceded: “The domestic payments system continued to work smoothly after Visa and Mastercard pulled out. While the card giants’ exit from Russia was viewed as a significant move by many in the West, the reality on the ground was anything but. Most Russian consumers never lost the ability to use their Mastercard - and Visa-branded cards to pay for things within the country. The National Payment Card System runs the financial plumbing that underpins card transactions in Russia, even for cards bearing Visa and Mastercard logos. The system was part of Moscow’s eight-year effort to insulate the Russian economy from Western financial pressure.”
Like the global success of India’s UPI (Unified Payments Interface), this is one more sign of the West’s declining power to police and sanction the world.
