When the United States of America recently announced the formation of an alliance of nations, called Pax Silica, to “build a secure, prosperous, and innovation driven silicon supply chain — from critical minerals and energy inputs to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and logistics”, many in India wondered why India was left out. The US was candid.
Pax Silica is “rooted in deep cooperation with trusted partners”, aimed at reducing “coercive dependencies, protect the materials and capabilities foundational to artificial intelligence, and ensure aligned nations can develop and deploy transformative technologies at scale.” The countries included in this alliance — Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia — are clearly regarded as ‘trusted’ and ‘aligned’ nations. They are also US dependencies. Nations that host US armed forces. India is not.
Scholars and analysts have been busy trying to understand and interpret the geopolitics and the geoeconomics of Donald Trump. In Trump’s own words of “America First”, these objectives are defined by his decision to prioritise the national self-interest of the US. That, however, is an objective that defines the domestic and the external policies of every independent and reasonably large-sized country. National well-being and power come first for every nation. Everything else follows. What makes Trumpism, if we may so designate his approach, different?
The world before the emergence of the US as a global superpower has been viewed by historians as being dominated by one empire or another. While it is generally recognised that the US replaced the British empire and installed a global order defined by it, in recent writing there is very little recognition of the fact that Trumpism is not just about ‘America First’ but about ‘American Empire First’.
The assertion of US dominance over the North and South American continents, Monroe Doctrine redux as some say, and the pressure on Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea to fall in line are aimed at reminding the world that this, indeed, is the ‘American Empire’ — a part of the world that the US established its hegemony over at the end of the Second World War.
Looked at this way, there are few truly independent nations — China, India and Russia being the most important of such nations that were not ‘liberated’ by the US in 1945 or after. The US continues to view western Europe, including Germany, France and Italy, as well as Japan and the Republic of Korea as ‘subject’ nations. Most of them still offer hospitality to the ‘occupying’ armed forces of the US. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the external threat that made the US maintain its military presence in Europe. In the Gulf, Iran has been the ruse to maintain such military presence.
If Europe fears Russia and Japan and Korea fear China, the US is only happy to remind them that they are territories that the US armed forces have extended protection to after their occupation over three-quarters of a century ago. All that Trump is demanding is that they pay up for protection. Uncle Sam will not foot the bill any longer.
It is not surprising that in response to Trump’s tariff offensive, both the European Union and Japan capitulated by conceding Trump’s demands in exchange for reduced tariffs. Both are unhappy that they have had to pay tribute to the hegemon in one way or another but neither has an option. They are, to be sure, the occupied powers of the last great war of which the US remains the only survivor, with the Soviet Union having imploded.
China and India have, on the other hand, remained steadfast in their own different ways in not yet capitulating to US power. Both China and India seek to bolster their status by mobilising the post-colonial nations of the Global South.
Consider the fact that the US has kept the ‘occupied nations’ of Europe and East Asia on a tight leash and challenged them whenever they posed a threat to US dominance. In the 1980s, for example, US strategists viewed with concern the economic rise of both Germany and Japan and weaponised trade and finance to deal with this challenge.
The American historian, Samuel Huntington, famously argued in a 1993 paper titled “Why International Primacy Matters” why the US must deal with the rise of Europe and Japan as economic rivals. “Economists are blind to the fact that economic activity is a source of power, as well as well-being. It is, indeed, probably the most important source of power and in a world in which military conflict between major states is unlikely economic power will be increasingly important in determining the primacy or subordination of states.”
This thinking informed US strategy through the post-Cold War period. If initially it was focused on securing a grasp over the rise of Germany and Japan as economic rivals, the focus shifted after the 2009 trans-Atlantic financial crisis to managing the rise of China and India. This was evident in the manner in which multilateral trade was managed through the World Trade Organization, linking trade to a range of non-trade issues, including intellectual property rights. It was also evident in the approach of developed industrial economies to climate change and global warming.
In the 1990s, after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the threat posed by Soviet power, the US’s focus was on the geoeconomic containment, if you like, of the rising economies of Europe and East Asia. In managing them and in seeking to retain its global dominance, the US did not focus on the rise of China as a geoeconomic rival till Trump came along.
In his second term in office, Trump has, once again, sought to ensure that the ‘West’, which has definitionally included Japan, a group of ‘trusted’ and ‘aligned’ nations, continues to subject itself to US dominance while he turns his attention to tackling the rise of the ‘untrusted’ and ‘non-aligned’ ‘Rest’. In viewing the world in a framework of ‘West vs Rest’, Trumpism is willing to accommodate Russia, at a price, but has understandably excluded China, India and the rising economies of the Global South.
One benefit of Trump’s policy has been to remove the blinkers off the eyes of many analysts and policy makers in India. Many of them mistakenly believed that in the pursuit of its own national interest of containing China, the US would continue to favour India without demanding too much as ‘protection money’.
Some in the US did view the rise of India as being in the interests of the US but Trump decided to up the ante by making demands that the Indian political leadership has not been able to accommodate. This is the new reality that India has to come to terms with.
Sanjaya Baru was Editor, Business Standard. His most recent book is Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India