28 February 2025
Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi
E&OE
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Events like this, that bring thinkers and leaders together from different perspectives, are vital because the world is more fraught than in many years.
The Ukraine war might soon end with Russian aggression rewarded. The Gaza war could soon peter out with Hamas intact. And China is constantly ratcheting up its belligerence against practically independent, free and democratic Taiwan. China, Russia and Iran – communist, militarist, and Islamist dictatorships – are in an alliance of convenience against free countries that have rarely been as divided and confused.
Quite apart from massive loss of life , the ramifications of the Ukraine war have included much higher global energy prices and food shortages in a warning of how quickly even the best of times can change under leaders more set on world power than their people’s well-being.
Leadership matters – and here India’s leadership has delivered the world’s fastest economic growth, with rural India finally enjoying clean water, proper sanitation, reliable electricity, and connectivity; while urban India is gaining mass transit systems, motorways and an economic take-off that’s more soundly based than China’s, thanks to democratic legitimacy and government under the rule of law.
The question I want to address is the one posed earlier to Prime Minister Harper: is the Trump ascendancy going to do more good than harm.
No new president has had more impact in his opening few weeks. Domestically, he’s reversed the so-called “green transition” and stopped the policy preoccupation with climate change, that he’s called a hoax. He’s ended the woke fixations of American boardrooms, including hiring practices based on immutable characteristics, rather than character and talent. He’s declared that there’s only two genders. And he’s ended the chaos on America’s borders, via the shock and awe tactic of threatening a 25 per cent tariff; unless Mexico, in particular, militarises its border to stop the daily inflow of thousands of undocumented foreigners, and drug precursors, into the United States.
So far, so good.
But along the way, he’s mocked the Prime Minister of Canada as a potential state governor; he’s mused about turning Gaza into a Miami beachfront minus its current population; he’s said that the “most beautiful word” is “tariff”, threatening to up-end the the freer movement of goods, people and ideas, that until recently had made the world more safe, more rich, more fair, and more free for more people than ever before in history; and most worryingly, he’s falsely accused the Ukrainian president of being a “dictator” who “started a war” in order to ride an American “gravy train”, pending a deal to give the US preemptive rights over Ukraine’s strategic minerals – only today to walk that back, suggesting that this president should always be taken seriously, but not always literally.
So what’s happened to Ronald Reagan’s idea of America as a “shining city on a hill” and “the last, best hope of mankind”. And JFK’s America that was ready to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, (and) oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty”. Has it been replaced by by a fascination for powerful leaders disposed to bully their own citizens and invade their neighbours? Or is it simply a presidential desire to understand the difference between strength and weakness?
My sense, and that’s all it can be until more plays out, is that the President is shaking things up rather than changing his country’s direction; because, after all, America’s fundamental values and fundamental interests have not changed. Not one bit. Tariffs, at least on friendly countries, don’t protect industries so much as punish consumers. The same common values and common interests, and the same common anxieties too, that created the Quad are still there.
President Trump is no less a patriotic believer in America’s “manifest destiny” to be a beacon to the world’s “poor huddled masses yearning to be free”, and no less an enthusiast for the power of market freedom to drive national wealth and personal opportunity, and no less committed to helping to build a more peaceful world where people can realise their dreams. It’s just that where Kennedy saw American troops and advisers overseas as adding to his country’s moral lustre, Trump worries that they could drag America into other people’s wars. And where Reagan saw America’s big fight as against the Soviet “evil empire”, Trump sees it as against China’s economic ascendancy based on exploiting free trade without practising it.
So far, his verbal joustings have prompted a previously quasi-pacifist UK Labour government to lift military spending sharply and promise substantial forces to police any ceasefire in Ukraine; and Middle Eastern governments that have long tolerated a terrorist statelet to consider how Gaza might be rebuilt other than as a sanctuary for apocalyptic Islamism. Even India has started to reduce its tariffs against the US, in order to make PM Modi’s recent visit there a resounding success.
It’s hard to see a deal done behind Zelensky’s back, if only because no president would want history to brand him the appeaser who’d sold out Ukraine to Russia, the way Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany at Munich. Or a deal with Xi over Taiwan, if only because no one determined to put America first would give its chief economic rival control of the sophisticated micro-chips essential to the AI to power the next economic revolution.
Countries’ relations with America will be more obviously transactional under this president, with less woolly rhetoric and more practical outcomes. Countries that want America’s help should do more to help themselves, and be ready to give America a bigger stake in their on-going freedom. And if that means fewer restrictions on US investment, and fewer green hurdles for economic development – that China can usually bribe its way around – then that’s likely to leave the free world much better off.
For a generation now, as JD Vance recently warned, many democracies have been rolling back free speech in the guise of countering so-called misinformation or avoiding giving offence. To reduce emissions, we’ve damaged our competitiveness and de-industrialised. To atone for the old racism and sexism, we’ve started to discriminate over identity. We’ve even started to deny democracy itself, excluding from government parties that take the wrong voters’ concerns seriously. As the antidote to military weakness, economic stagnation and cultural confusion, Trump might not be the president the world likes but he’s the president the world needs.
As someone with a long memory and a mean streak, as the president himself admits in one of his books, it might be rhetorically brutal, at least in the short term. But the outcome of the Trump presidency should be less of the self-destructive politics of climate and identity, and ultimately freer trade between like-minded democracies, plus stronger American allies.
And this brings me to democratic India, that now has the prospect of replacing China as the “workshop of the world”; and becoming the supply chain partner that free countries can trust.
As PM a decade back, I used to call India the world’s emerging democratic superpower. Under Modi, it’s well and truly emerged as the world’s second democratic superpower; and unpredictability from the first democratic superpower provides a great opening for the second.
I’m confident that this will be the Indo-Pacific century, I hope that it turns out to be more India’s than China’s – and I believe that’s more likely if there’s no American opt-out of all the world’s struggles.