Former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, raises a question about the sanity of US tariffs against India given the precarious structure of the world’s emerging powers.
Surely India is our counterweight to communist China?
‘Why would a leader who thinks Russia is more Europe’s concern than America’s, and who thinks that China has been building its economic and military strength at America’s expense, suddenly impose penalty tariffs on India because it has been buying Russian oil and gas?’
Many believe it would be a natural choice for India to join the Western alliance and, by extension, Australia. India has suffered endless hostilities along its border with China, while Russia engages in provocations across Europe suggesting a reconstruction of the USSR.
Forgotten is the complex relationship India has with Russia forged following the second world war. The British Empire left railways; Russia built ideological highways.
The history between India and Russia has been reinforced with a formal military alliance which America has attempted to lean on since the start of the Ukraine invasion. This would be like Japan trying to drive a wedge between Australia and New Zealand.
And while Western leaders have trouble remembering what they did in their last term of government, communists and their allies use their long memory to poison new alliances. Russia and China are patient creatures that believe in empire-building while Australia is bending over backwards to tear its history apart. This makes us poorly positioned to contextualise negotiations.
Australia must be careful and understand that empowering India is not a neutral decision.
While the danger of a rising communist China is obvious, a strong India would likely defend its ally Russia over and above Western needs during a Pacific conflict. India may even prove unhelpful in a future European calamity.
It is entirely within the realms of possibility that India might remain neutral in a Pacific conflict between China and the West if Putin asked them to due to Russia’s relationship with China. This is effectively the text of several agreements between the three powers.
Donald Trump understands this.
The US has watched carefully as India remained largely insulated from Russia’s wars of aggression and acts of annexation. Trump’s tariffs on India are not incongruous or mean-spirited actions against a friend, they are an acknowledgement of India’s closeness with Russia and their purchase of Russian oil and gas which has allowed Russia to circumvent sanctions. We cannot say for sure if Trump’s tariffs on Australia are part of this great tariff theatre with India. Friendly fire, so to speak, in a high-stakes game for the next century of peace…
It was always unlikely that India would isolate Russia, regardless of its trespasses against Western allies. The pair of nations continued their war-era dealings with fresh international pacts and military arrangements which include the supply of advanced weapons. It cannot be understated the role Russia has played arming India when the US repeatedly let them down.
Trump is probably not intending to drive a wedge between Russia and India (which would be largely impossible), but rather to move both nations into the Western sphere and out of China’s influence.
China is aligning itself heavily with Islamic dictators and third-world despots, all while poorly disguising its aggressive intentions across the continent. Russia knows what happens when you trust a half-crazed dictatorship. The US, and the West in general, present a more lucrative and safe trading partner than a world run by Xi Jinping and his Islamic guard. India would likely agree, as tensions rise with Pakistan and Islamic terror groups.
The Islam component of China’s world view is the weak link of the alliance.
Russia has fantasised about a world without America as king, but China would appoint itself as God. Putin has to ask himself, who comes after Xi Jinping?
Tariffs are a mechanism available to nudge leaders into fresh agreements. Who knows what Trump says to India behind closed doors… Perhaps he hints to Modi that the tariffs will evaporate if he can convince Putin to stop bombing Europe.
Modi and Trump enjoy good relations, but they have to navigate the scars of previous leaders, including those acquired during third the Indo-Pakistan war in the 1970s. Russia reaffirmed its friendship with India while the US went off and sided with Mao’s China on behalf of Pakistan under the leadership of Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Russia made their friendship with India official with theIndo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1971.
At the time, the US was giddy over China (and Pakistan) which it hoped would help them contain Russia at the expense of India. Imagine it … the US egging-on Iran to arm Pakistan while making overtures to the communist butcher, Mao Zedong. These things are forgotten by Western leaders but not by Russia, China, Pakistan, or India.
Nixon said to Chairman Mao, in the presence of Kissinger:
‘We had similar problems recently in the crisis on India-Pakistan. The American left criticised me very heavily for failing to side with India. This was for two reasons: they were pro-Indian and they were pro-Soviet. I thought it was important to look at the bigger issue. We could not let a country, no matter how big, gobble up its neighbour. It cost, I don’t say this with sorrow because it was right, it cost me politically, but I think history will record that it was the right thing to do.’
To which Mao replied: ‘As a suggestion, may I suggest that you do a little less briefing?’
It was then that Nixon, keep in mind this is 1972, tried to talk to Mao about ‘the future of Japan, the future of the subcontinent, and what India’s role will be; and on the broader world scene, the future of US-Soviet relations. Because only if we see the whole picture of the world and the great forces that move the world will we be able to make the right decisions about the immediate and urgent problems that always completely dominant our vision’.
To which we get the typical communist reply from Mao, ‘All those troublesome problems I don’t want to get into very much. I think your topic is better … philosophic questions.’
Mao and his regime would go on to kill roughly 80 million.
This is obviously not a discussion on the rights or wrongs of empowering one communist nation over another during a period of geopolitical upheaval, only an explanation as to why Trump may not be fawning over India like Albanese’s government.
These moments in history continue to inform current events.
Despite Kissinger’s influence on the meeting with Mao, this is what he had to say earlier in 1962 about the competing dangers of communist China and Russia:
‘I would say that in the long run, probably communist China is likely to be in more of an expansionist phase than Soviet Russia. At the same time, most of the recent crises have been commanded by the Soviet Union … it is my view that both of them are a menace to world peace and partly because of communist doctrine.
‘In their tactics, the Chinese communists are probably the greater menace; in their potentiality, the Russians are the greater menace, and much of the debate between them has somewhat of the character of two thieves arguing whether they have to kill you to get your wallet or whether they can lift your wallet without hitting you over the head. You lose your wallet either way.’
China never made good on the promise to abandon belligerent and expansionist policies, instead fooling Australian Prime Ministers with its mountains of gold and a rags-to-riches tale.
Perhaps Tony Abbott regrets his comments from 2014 when he said: ‘Team Australia is here in China to help build the Asian Century. China, after all, has taken to heart Deng Xiaoping’s advice thatto get rich is glorious.’
The Asian Century has come at the expense of Australia, Western values, and the rules-based order.
Communists and Islamists together hold the balance of power in the world.
Western nations, through their suicidal mass migration and multicultural policies, will no longer have unification amongst their own people. This is a disaster for policy and national security. Every general in history has assessed the allegiance of their people, but today such questions attract the label of ‘racist’ even though the question is purely ideological.
Donald Trump and his Administration of refreshingly clear thinkers are aware that future peace will be informed by history and decided by future concern.
The danger for Australia is a wayward immigration program with the two largest groups of migrants being from India and China … a potentially catastrophic decision should geopolitical tensions rise. Pro-Palestine rallies will be nothing compared to our future if this situation is not properly considered and managed.
Let us return to Abbott’s criticism about the Trump tariff plan.
He writes, ‘this action seems to put the goal of constraining Russia over the more important goal of containing China’ and that ‘it has put at risk two decades of careful cultivation of India as the essential democratic counterweight to an ascendant communist power’ and ‘[the tariffs were] unaccompanied by any simultaneous penalties on China’.
To be fair to Trump, he has been heaping tariffs on China and making trade deals that severely undercut China’s mining and manufacturing interests. Most of what Trump is doing, including the rare earths and critical minerals deal with Australia and a $200 billion investment in the UAE (including a $1.4 trillion counter-investment by the UAE in America), are concerned with offsetting China.
Trump has been universally misunderstood, woefully underestimated, and wildly successful in his business-like approach to diplomacy. He succeeded where all the sharp-suited statesmen failed.
To be fair to Abbott, India would agree that China is a huge problem. He writes:
‘Given China’s repeated declaration that it intends to be the world’s top power by mid-century, its insistence on taking Taiwan by force if necessary, and its public commitment to be capable of invasion by 2027, this is hardly the time for dissension among the Indo-Pacific democracies pledged to preserve the rules-based order…’
However, it is not clear how many of these nations wish to continue with the rules-based order.Many would prefer to violate the UN’s human rights list and wage regional conflicts they’ve been itching for since the second world war.
We must accept that not everyone has a Western mindset.
India, following its independence, adopted many socialist ideas thanks to Russia. As for tariffs, a young independent India was renowned for protectionist tariffs. India is not nostalgic for its British past as is often romanticised by Western politicians.
The world is moving on.
Russia wants to redraw the lines on the map and is engaging in aggressive acts with its former member states. China wants to retake territory. It started with Hong Kong, it will move against Taiwan, and it is establishing a silent empire across South America, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East with significant land claims, debt-trapping, and resource gathering. India is linked to China’s interests via Russia’s close relationship with Beijing. They are, all three of them, part of treaties and alliances.
‘Modi can hardly be blamed for playing up his attendance at the BRICS summit in Shanghai given Trump’s earlier White House hospitality for the Pakistani armed forces chief,’ writes Abbott.Okay, but India joined the powerful Shanghai Cooperation Organisation long ago.
India wants to rise, China has risen, and Russia wants to rebuild. None of these aspirations are in America’s favour (or ours).
India, Pakistan, China, and Russia are all nuclear states with racial, cultural, social, economic, andhistoric grievances that could intensify as populations rise and press up against the borders of the map.
Further, Abbott tells us, ‘India’s reluctance to be publicly critical of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine does not signify any tilt to autocracy.’ Contradicting this, thePew Research Centre has revealed rapidly increasing majority support in India for autocracy, technocracy, and military rule.
America’s prime concern is the Pacific threat.
It could be argued that the main reason Trump negotiated peace in the Middle East was to ward-off the Islamic powers that sit on China’s flank and use America’s new Middle Eastern friends to keep that problem under control. Meanwhile, he wants the Russia-Ukraine war to end so that the EU can get on with the re-migration of millions of migrants and, following that, the strengthening of Western powers. These two tasks, once achieved, make war more of a risk for China.
Abbott brings up Trump’s recent comments where he says: ‘Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!’ A comment which was later amended to, ‘I’ve been very disappointed that India would be buying so much oil, as you know, from Russia. And I let them know that.’
This bit of public joshing effectively confirms Trump is using India to calm Russia down.
‘India and the United States have a special relationship. There’s nothing to worry about. We just have moments on occasion,’ said Trump later.
Abbott says, ‘Trump’s ongoing readiness to engage with Putin, despite his “no limits” partnership with Beijing, suggests that his impulsive social post might have been momentary pique. A president who’s prepared for repeated futile talks with a militarist dictator, who’s lacking the slightest interest in any peace short of Ukraine’s surrender, is hardly committed to keep cold-shouldering democratic India.’
I am not sure I can agree with Abbott on this one.
Trump holds the fate of Australia in his hands and showed enormous restraint during Albanese’s White House visit last week. We were summarily handled and put into a safer strategic position should conflict arise. These tariffs, these social media outbursts… I believe this is all about Russia and China.
If he can negotiate peace in Europe, Trump’s critics will owe him a significant apology.
