Photo/White House Flickr
U.S. President Donald Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea on Sunday when he met its leader, Kim Jong Un, in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas and agreed to resume stalled nuclear talks.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Indian Foreign Affairs Minister S. Jayishankar in New Delhi. Photo/PIB
Playing down the divergences in the Indo-US economic relationship, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo Wednesday underscored their political points on strategic, regional and global issues that include the S-400 defence deal with Russia, approach towards Iran and China, and common cause on terrorism.
U.S> Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Photo courtesy: Department of State
The key to successful engagement with the US is to keep the negotiations going and make progress wherever one can. Americans are always ready to split the difference and move on. Delhi has been notorious for its inability to bring any negotiation to a close.
Seemingly endless threats, insults, punishment, and attempts at coercion have been a leading feature of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The pervasive bullying so far has not been matched by a comparable degree of positive results, as many have noticed. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is no smaller than it was when Trump took office, it’s larger. The trade war with China is escalating rather than being resolved. Policy toward Iran is a multifaceted failure.
The ballots hadn’t even been counted yet when the deals were announced. On April 26, just two days after Election Day, Indonesia signed 23 memorandums of understanding with China, worth $14.2 billion in all, for several major infrastructure projects. They came after months of silence about Chinese investment in Indonesia—by design, as President Joko Widodo feared attempts by the opposition to paint him as being too pro-China.
More to the point, when it comes to China, we are dealing with a unique and very formidable cultural organism. The American foreign policy elite does not like to talk about culture since culture cannot be quantified, and in this age of extreme personal sensitivity, what cannot be quantified or substantiated by a footnote is potentially radioactive. But without a discussion of culture and geography, there is simply no hope of understanding foreign affairs.
Trump is wrong about a lot of things when it comes to trade, including that the trade arrangements to which the United States is a party reflect poor negotiating skills. To the contrary, they overwhelmingly reflect U.S. negotiating preferences. But Trump does have a point that some of the negotiators’ priorities don’t reflect those of many Americans.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s maiden state visit to Pyongyang this week may signal an economic re-engagement with the hermit kingdom, according to Chinese state media. Ahead of the visit, Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily has suggested, via its social media account, that restoring bilateral economic relations would be on the agenda.
Empirical evidence of China’s aggression is increasingly common, from its attempt to dominate the South China Sea, the neo-imperialist effort to gain control of states through the Belt and Road Initiative, to its technological imperialism to control 5G and artificial intelligence technologies. What is rather less frequent are statements from high-level Chinese officials proclaiming the country’s intent to be aggressive and offering an attempted legitimising principle justifying that aggression.
Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behaviour?
