Biden's Secretary of State-designee Blinken sees India ties as 'high priority', important to Indo-Pacific 'order'

Antony Blinken, who has said that strengthening and deepening ties with India will be a “high-priority” in a new administration, has been designated for the post of secretary of state by President-elect Joe Biden. He said India will remain important "to the future of the Indo-Pacific and the kind of order that we all want.” 

Making the announcement of key foreign policy and national security designees on Monday, Biden said, “We have no time to lose when it comes to our national security and foreign policy. I need a team ready on Day One to help me reclaim America’s seat at the head of the table, rally the world to meet the biggest challenges we face, and advance our security, prosperity, and values.”

Kamala Harris, who will be the vice president, described Blinken as “crisis-tested” and among the “best of America.”

Blinken, who was the deputy secretary of state in the administration of former President Barack Obama, said during the presidential campaign that from “Biden’s perspective, strengthening and deepening the relationship with India is going to be a very high priority.”

Blinken is considered closer to the centre. He has met with Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar when he was the foreign secretary and Blinken was the deputy secretary of state.

India is “fair, stable, and hopefully increasingly democratic and it’s vital to being able to tackle some of these big global challenges,” Blinken said in July while speaking at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington DC.

"It’s usually important to the future of the Indo-Pacific and the kind of order that we all want,” he said affirming President Donald Trump's emphasis on the region as a counterbalance to China.

He spoke of the differences Biden has with India over Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act, which gives priority for citizenship to Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs fleeing persecution in neighbouring Muslim countries.

Rather than the punitive actions advocated by some in the Democratic Party, Blinken said at the Hudson Institute, “You’re always better engaging with a partner and a vitally important one like India, when you can speak frankly and directly about areas where you have differences even as you’re working to build greater cooperation and strengthen the relationship going forward.”

“That would be the approach and again, I think we’ve seen evidence that it works,” he said.

But that would still be an irritant in the relations between the two democracies.

Biden is taking a broader view of international relations integrating the strategic aspects of issues like climate change, for which he has given high priority.

Blinken was a key figure in the Paris climate negotiations that produced the landmark agreement on fighting global warming.

He said that US team with Biden “worked hard to persuade India that it would be more prosperous and more secure if it’s signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement. We succeeded. It wasn’t easy.”

Trump pulled out of the Paris pact, which Biden has vowed to rejoin.

An important designation was that of former Secretary of State John Kerry as the special presidential envoy for climate and as a member of the National Security Council, highlighting the high-level of importance Biden places on the environment.

A close adviser to Biden, Jake Sullivan has been designated for the national security advisor post. He had been national secretary advisor to Biden when he was the vice president.

Avril Haines, who was designated for the director of national intelligence, will become the first woman to head the intelligence community.

She is a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and deputy national security advisor and had worked with Biden when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Alejandro Mayorkas is the designee for Secretary of Homeland Security, the first Latino to hold the post if confirmed by the Senate.

For permanent representative to the United Nations, Biden has designated Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who will get a cabinet rank. She is a former assistant secretary of state in charge of Africa.

Harris said, “These crisis-tested national security and foreign policy leaders have the knowledge and expertise to keep our country safe and restore and advance America’s leadership around the world. They represent the best of America.” Source: https://southasiamonitor.org

Read More........ → November 24, 2020

Modi’s phone call to Biden to affirm bilateral ties

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi phone called newly elected US President Joe Biden and congratulated him on Tuesday night. During this, he reiterated New Delhi’s commitment to affirm good bilateral relations with Washington.

At the same time, he told Biden to greet Kamala Harris, the elected Vice President of the United States of Indian descent. 

According to Indian media, the phone call was important in the coming days for India-US bilateral relations. 

“I greet US President-elect Joe Biden over the phone,” Modi tweeted, saying: “We pledge to continue our commitment to the strategic relationship between India and the United States. Issues like climate change, cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region, tackling COVID were also discussed.”

Modi’s last meeting with Biden was in 2014. Biden was then vice president of the United States under Barack Obama.

It is to be noted that Modi’s “friendship” with President Donald Trump in the past was eye-catching that took the relationship into a different dimension with “Howdy Modi” in Houston in September 2019 or “Namaste Trump” in Gujarat in February 2020. The world has seen those programs as evidence of the chemistry of the two leaders’ personal relationships.According to some diplomatic experts, Modi and Trump are residents of the same pole in terms of political position. However, despite his good relations with Modi, Trump’s stance on US immigration policy was quite strict. On the other hand, everyone knows about the Modi government’s “tough” stance on “infiltrators” in India. Source: https://www.daily-bangladesh.com/

Read More........ → November 20, 2020

High time for Nepal to look beyond India and China

The US aid under MCC is a golden opportunity for Nepal to look beyond India and China and seek greater engagement with other powers and to derive economic benefit and relinquish meaningless geopolitical adventures, writes Vikash Kumar for South Asia Monitor

Among diverse political turbulences being seen in Nepal, one which is being less talked about is Nepal’s indecisiveness over the US aid amounting to $500 million under the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). While the government is inclined to accept it, Finance Minister Yubaraj Khatiwada incorporated this in the new budget before its parliamentary endorsement – and now the grant is facing opposition, inter alia, from within the ruling Nepali Communist Party (NCP).

The opponents are forwarding the arguments that accepting the aid may damage its blossoming ties with China. Prima facie, there may be some element of truth in this argument, but it is shorn of any understanding of Nepal’s national interest.

Nepal is sandwiched between two Asian giants which share great ambitions for its future and whose geopolitical interests are colliding as they try to sell off their versions of worldview. Nepal is, of late, becoming hotbed for this bilateral competition. History is witness to the fact that when two big powers compete for their interests in other nations it has resulted in unbearable consequences. The two examples are of the Gulf nations and Afghanistan.

Fear of the dragon

The fear of China’s reaction over a sovereign decision, essentially economic in nature, speaks volume about the intrusion of that country in Nepalese political landscape. Discussions in Nepalese media platforms and among policymakers are revolving more upon the US Indo-Pacific agenda versus China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It should, in no way, be Nepal’s immediate priority. Surprisingly, what is absent in the discussions are the cost-benefit ratio of these projects. A perusal of the MCC aid and geopolitical events of recent past shows that the cost-benefit scale skews in favour of economic advantage to the country.

Firstly, the MCC aid is a grant, not a loan. Thus, it comes with a benefit sans any obligation. There are no legal or political conditions attached to it and thus a claim that Nepal’s sovereignty will be compromised by accepting the aid is wholly fallacious. Secondly, these projects relate to electricity transmission and road maintenance. As per MCC, the electricity projects include, inter alia, laying of 300 km of high voltage power lines, equivalent to one-third the length of Nepal; the addition of a second cross-border transmission line to facilitate greater electricity trade with India; and activities to improve sector governance to increase private investment. The road project is chiefly concerned with maintaining key roads, measuring 300 km, which are vital for the movement of goods and people. 

An aid amounting to nearly 1.5 percent of the GDP must not be rejected for imaginary fear of the dragon. Thirdly, China must not be expected to react negatively just because of the fact that the aid is coming from a rival nation. If it is so, India should have acted in a similar imaginary way in 2017 when Nepal became a party in BRI, an initiative India rejects as it passes through 'Pakistan Occupied Kashmir'. Also, the sensitivity of India’s concern, which relates to the geopolitical issue, is graver than that of China’s as it concerns an economic project.

Concerns relating to the issue of provisions of MCC may be alleviated by having negotiations with the US over it. For example, Nepal can negotiate that in place of the US law, it will have provisions of international law, and that there would be an independent international tribunal to settle any disputes, whatsoever that would arise pertaining to the project. In the past, we have seen Nepal’s compulsion as it has accepted its fate of playing a role between India and China, and thus making itself more vulnerable to the whims and caprices of these two countries. 

Multi-alignment approach

US aid under MCC is a golden opportunity for Nepal to look beyond India and China and seek greater engagement with other powers and to derive economic benefit and relinquish meaningless geopolitical adventures. The best example in South Asia is of India that followed a non-aligned policy, although a shaky one, throughout the Cold War which enabled it to get benefits from both the superpower blocs and wrath of none. 

Now, of course, there has been a shift in strategic alignment of India – it is now undertaking appropriate diplomatic manoeuvring – as China’s claim of peaceful rise seems rather flimsy in view of a perennial projection of its hard power against its neighbours, while the US under Donald Trump looks more unstable now. But the time has not come, till now, for Nepal to take any sides.

Economic cooperation should not be halted due to a geopolitical competition wherein Nepal does not have any significant stakes. Nepal must free itself from China-India paranoia and should start asserting its strategic autonomy. Nepal should seek greater engagement with other powers too and not just with the US. Rather than outrightly rejecting the MCC aid, it must undertake further negotiations to ward off its concerns relating to its sovereignty. The message should go out to both Asian giants that Nepal could not be taken for granted as it will follow a multi-aligned approach in contradiction to its hitherto China-India balancing approach. This will ensure more diplomatic leverage and clout for Nepal vis-à-vis India and China.

(The writer is pursuing LLM in International Law from Faculty of Legal Studies, South Asian University, New Delhi. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vksharmaahiyapur@gmail.com) Source: https://southasiamonitor.org

Read More........ → July 29, 2020