The New York Times published an informative piece on Tuesday titled, “As Trump Crows Over Ending a Conflict, India’s Leaders Feel Betrayed”. It cites former Indian officials and unnamed incumbent ones who agree that Trump’s repeated boasts about mediating the end of the latest Indo-Pak conflict imply that the US is once again equating, or hyphenating, the two countries. Worse still, he claimed to have achieved this outcome by threatening to cut off trade if they refused, which India officially denied.
His stated intent to mediate an end to the Kashmir Conflict also contradicts India’s long-running position that the issue is a strictly bilateral one, while his latest proposal to organize a dinner between their leaders suggests that Modi and Sharif are equals, which is incredibly insulting for Indians. It was also very disappointing to them that their fellow Quad partners, which include Australia and Japan alongside the US, didn’t express full-throated support for their country over Pakistan like many hitherto expected.
Prior to the latest conflict, there were reports that “The Future Of US-Pakistani Ties Is Uncertain Amidst Reported American Deep State Differences”, yet they now seem to have been resolved. The US evidently chose to support Pakistan’s de facto military rulers instead of continuing to pressure them into ceding power to a truly civilian-led democratic government. The Trump Administration has also been silent about the Biden Administration’s official concerns over Pakistan’s long-range missile program.
A grand deal therefore appears to be in the works. To speculate, it might involve the US tacitly applying a hands-off policy towards Pakistan’s domestic and military affairs (including Indian allegations of its involvement in cross-border terrorism) in exchange for clinching a favorable minerals deal with Pakistan. The terrorist-related threats that impede extraction, which were detailed here, might then be blamed by the US on the Taliban and/or India in alignment with Pakistani claims in order to jointly pressure both.
The US wants to restore access to landlocked Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase and is probably eying its estimated $1 trillion worth of minerals too, all of which requires cutting a deal with neighboring Pakistan, while simultaneously wanting to coerce India into the most favorable comprehensive trade deal possible. While the abovementioned terrorist claims against both could be one means to that end, more tariff threats could also be applied against India together with demanding that it formalize Kashmir’s partition.
Trump’s “total reset” with China contextualizes the huge damage that he dealt to Indo-US ties in recent days. If this trade–driven “reset” holds, then there’s less of a grand strategic imperative for prioritizing his administration’s planned “Pivot (back) to Asia” for more muscularly containing China, in which India was envisaged as playing a key role. Instead, India would become a liability since its continued rise could ruin the return to Sino-US bi-multioplarity (G2/“Chimerica”), which Trump might have agreed to with Xi.
In that scenario, the US might have also agreed to no longer obstruct the Belt & Road Initiative’s flagship project, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which runs across Indian-claimed but Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. This grand deal could also explain why the US recently toughened its negotiating stance towards Russia since it might no longer care if the Ukrainian Conflict escalates and Russia falls further under Chinese influence if a deal is being negotiated over Sino-US “spheres of influence” across Eurasia.
Of course, speculative talks over such a deal could also collapse, in which case the US could pivot back to India away from Pakistan and coerce Ukraine into Russia’s demanded concessions, thus bringing Russia and India into its “sphere” instead of “ceding” the first to China and teaming up against the second. To be clear, the preceding paragraphs are educated conjecture, but they cogently account for the US unexpectedly toughening its negotiating stance towards Russia and dealing damage to ties with India.
If that’s what’s indeed happening, then Russia and India might double down on jointly accelerating tri-multipolarity processes so as to avert the return of Sino-US bi-multipolarity, yet it’s unclear whether their leaders agree that this plot is afoot. There’s no public indication that they do, but it wouldn’t hurt them to follow this advice regardless of their views about the real reasons behind the Sino-US thaw, so policy influencers in both would do well to pitch this proposal to decisionmakers without delay.
