The problem

American President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has received a deeply hostile reception in many quarters at home, drawn profound dismay from most of its international partners, and shocked the world by its unilateralism. As the unpredictability of U.S. policy increases under Trump, it is becoming ever more important for South Asian countries and their elites to better understand the sources and consequences of the Trump disruption. This issue of Seminar is a modest first cut at making some sense of Trump’s approach to the South Asian subcontinent.

The leaders of the South Asian subcontinent have been as surprised as anyone else in the world by the Trump Administration’s policies. President Trump’s emphasis on ‘America First’, his attacks on the world trading system, and his launch of a tariff war against key economic partners, including an unprecedented economic confrontation with China, have thrown the international system, including bilateral relations between South Asian countries and the U.S., into great turmoil.

Whether Trump’s policies are just a temporary perturbation or signal the beginning of a structural change in Washington, India and her neighbours have their task cut out in coping with them given that they have tended to see the U.S. as a political monolith – with some minor variations between Democrats and Republicans. But Trump’s policies now demand that greater attention be paid in South Asian capitals to the shifting domestic political currents within the United States, the domestic uncertainty it has created, and its impact on South Asian countries’ relations with the United States.

Historically, South Asia has tended to view the U.S. through a narrow foreign policy prism. To the extent that economic issues have mattered, the focus has been on U.S. aid – military and economic – rather than trade and investment. When the economically inward-looking policies of the post-independence years were cast aside in the early 1990s, trade and interlinkages with other global economies grew increasingly important for South Asian countries, especially India which became one of the world’s large economies. The U.S. became the most valued economic partner for India and with it came new frictions on trade and investment. As Trump puts trade relations at the top of his agenda, it is by no means clear if South Asian countries appreciate the new dynamics in Washington or if they are ready to find ways to resolve the emerging trade tensions.

Enduring anti-Americanism among South Asian elites, too, has tended to limit the region’s ability to fully appreciate the complex drivers of U.S. regional policies today. Despite an important diaspora of 2.5 million resident immigrants in the U.S. today and despite the growing American tilt towards India, elites in the subcontinent often have little understanding of how America works. Many in Delhi continue to remain suspicious of U.S. intentions, while the Pakistani elite sees the U.S. as not being ‘loyal’ enough, and the Afghans who are now bracing for a potential second American abandonment, are wondering if Americans are to be trusted.

For many in South Asia, it is tempting to align with Trump’s critics, at home and internationally, and denounce the U.S. president’s disruptions. Yet the focus in South Asian capitals must instead be on better understanding the new turbulence unleashed by Trump and its consequences for South Asia.

One of the surprising elements of Trump’s foreign policy has been the attention devoted to South Asia – it has been one of the few regions towards which President Trump publicly articulated a comprehensive policy. The reasons are not difficult to discern: Trump’s eagerness to end the war in Afghanistan and to contain China’s rise. In 2017, early in his tenure, Trump announced a strategy towards South Asia and one towards the Indo-Pacific, both with a special emphasis on the role of India. However, because it has never been clear whether Trump’s South Asia policy reflected the convictions of his security team or his own, there is no guarantee that Trump’s policies will endure until the end of his turbulent administration.

Six broad themes stand out in the Trump Administration’s approach to India and the subcontinent so far. The first relates to Afghanistan. Going against his own instinct to end the wars begun by his predecessors, Trump decided to order a small increase in U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, by the end of 2018 Trump’s patience appeared to be running thin and he appointed a special envoy to find an early solution, one which would facilitate an American withdrawal from Afghanistan. By early 2019 the Taliban had stepped up its attacks in Afghanistan and gained more territorial control than ever before. It had also rebuffed Kabul’s efforts to initiate an unconditional dialogue. Yet this has not dissuaded Trump, whose domestic popularity was decreasing in early 2019, from going with his instincts and hastening the end to a domestically unpopular war. As the speed and terms of negotiation echo the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, South Asian capitals will have to make plans to deal with what increasingly looks like an inevitable pull-out of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

That takes us to the second theme – Pakistan. Trump’s predecessors certainly had no difficulty in recognizing Pakistan as very much part of the problem in Afghanistan, but given American dependence on Pakistani territory to resupply its troops in Afghanistan, Washington found it hard to confront Pakistan’s policy of playing both sides in the war on terror. In the summer of 2017, Trump signalled his intent to grasp the nettle, instituting sanctions against Pakistan for non-compliance. But as Trump’s impatience with the military intervention in Afghanistan grows, it appears his administration is now focused on winning Pakistan’s help to facilitate a dignified retreat. If he began 2018 with a tweet on New Year’s day attacking Pakistan, by the beginning of 2019 he was signalling a desire to normalize relations. This has increased the Pakistan Army’s leverage – with consequences for Afghanistan and other countries in the region.

Third, Trump’s term began with what seemed like an ‘India-first’ policy in the subcontinent. But it was not an unmixed blessing given Trump’s conviction that America’s allies, including Delhi, must do more to promote regional and global security. Unlike the policies of Obama and Bush, which put engagement with India and Pakistan in separate boxes, Trump is recognizing the greater weight of India in the region and, in keeping with his transactional approach to politics, demanding that it be deployed in support of U.S. objectives towards Pakistan and Afghanistan. On the other hand, by early 2019, Trump’s frustration with India’s cautious military approach to Afghanistan was visible as he mocked India’s genuine developmental contribution to the stabilization of the country over the last two decades.

Fourth, and even more important over the long-term, Trump has begun to put India at the very heart of a new strategic balance in Asia, one which seeks to balance China and one which must involve India. India is being pushed towards an explicit framework of strategic burden-sharing with the United States in the Indo-Pacific region. Here again, the slow and incremental approach of India towards deepening strategic ties with Washington clashes with President Trump’s transactional approach and could lead to downgrading India’s importance.

The fifth set of issues relate to immigration. The highly skilled and successful South Asian diaspora has been one of the fastest growing in the United States. America’s open borders, since the 1960s, has been a major gain for the subcontinent. However, reducing immigration is one of the major priorities of President Trump and will have considerable impact on Indians in particular, who constitute three-quarter of the applicants for the H-1B visa for professional workers.

Sixth and even more consequential, especially for India, are Trump’s protectionist trade policies. India’s annual trade with the U.S. – worth nearly $125 billion in goods and services in 2017 – makes America the most important commercial partner for India. But India’s trade surplus of about $27 billion in 2017 has also made it a target of Trump’s protectionist tariffs. While other countries targeted by Trump – including Canada, Mexico and China – have sought to renegotiate trading arrangements with the U.S., India’s trade negotiators seem paralyzed.

Trump’s approach to India and its neighbours could well be the harbinger of a major structural shift in the way Washington relates to India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and maritime South Asia. The prospect of a fundamental transformation of U.S. thinking towards southern Asia and the Indo-Pacific littoral, however, continues to be tested by issues of organizational and doctrinal coherence, not to mention rapid turnover of policy advisers, that have dogged the Trump administration. Nevertheless, Trump’s disruptions could leave the international relations of the subcontinent irrevocably altered.

 For its part, India in particular needs to rethink and retool its foreign policy engagement in a world irrevocably altered by Trump. The consensus on economic globalization and a relative harmony among the major powers – which defined the post-Cold War era – is now breaking down. The tensions between the U.S. and Russia and Moscow’s deepening embrace of Beijing have certainly created problems for India. As a late convert to economic globalization, India and the rest of South Asia will have much to lose if the current trading order breaks down. India might need a more transactional approach – a pejorative term in India’s diplomatic lexicon – to deal with the Trump effect. Claiming that it is ‘WTO compliant’ is a poor Indian strategy when the big boys are changing the current trading rules.

Equally important is the need for South Asian countries to come to terms with Trump’s deconstruction of the ‘West’. It is rare that a dominant power seeks to overthrow the status quo. Trump is doing precisely that in questioning the utility of the collective, post-war western institutions and demanding a rearrangement of burdens and benefits between the U.S. and its partners. By contrast, most South Asian countries’ foreign policy throughout the 20th century has been shaped by the impulse to stand up against the West – initially against colonialism and later against western security alliances.

In 21st century India, efforts to construct closer relations with the U.S. have been slowed by this incongruence between the presumed political centrality of retaining ‘strategic autonomy’, while also building closer relations with the United States. In the post-Cold War world, it was the U.S. that took frequent initiatives to widen and deepen the partnerships with South Asian countries. Now India and other South Asian countries need initiatives of their own to manage and advance the relationship with Washington at a time when the Trump disruption is realigning global politics. That in turn means that Delhi, Islamabad, Kabul and other South Asian capitals must get a hang of where America is headed and what they want from it.

 

RANI D. MULLEN

C. RAJA MOHAN

 

* Seminar wishes to acknowledge the help of Rani D. Mullen and C. Raja Mohan of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, in curating this issue.