- Obama’s opportunity with India and its new leader
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Washington Post September 28, 2014
The writer, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, was U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2005 to 2008 and lead U.S. negotiator of the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement.
When the new Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, visits the White House this week, President Obama should seize the opportunity to revive and rebuild an important relationship with a key Asian partner that has fallen on hard times in recent years.
In strategic terms, there are few countries more important to Washington than India, the dominant power in the Indian Ocean region and, with Japan, the most important U.S. partner in Asia seeking to limit Chinese assertiveness in the region. But, from the start of the Obama administration, India has never been a top priority and the long-term U.S. project to cement a strategic future with India is currently adrift. To be fair, Obama has had a multitude of critical short-term crises — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Russia — to contend with. But overlooking India has had a price. Seeming U.S. indifference and an Indian government under former prime minister Manmohan Singh in domestic gridlock combined to put the two countries at odds on global trade, climate change, Iran and Russia.
All that could change with the arrival of the charismatic and strong-willed Modi this week. After one of the most decisive electoral victories in India’s history, Modi has become a presidential-style leader with striking power and credibility to lead India in new directions. One of his primary ambitions is to renew relations with Washington.
More than anything else, he is seeking greater U.S. investment and trade to further his top priority — to get the Indian economy moving again after alarmingly low growth rates during the past two years. Modi and Obama can begin by agreeing to conclude a long-sought bilateral investment treaty and to jump-start collaboration on science and technology, space research and the environment.
Modi’s key question in Washington, however, will be whether Obama sees India as a vital U.S. partner in Asia. Many Indians fear the United States ultimately will limit its strategic political and military engagement with Delhi in deference to a paranoid Pakistani leadership. They predict the United States will fall short of a full strategic partnership with India to avoid stoking resentments in China as well. India, after all, was never really described by the Obama team as a key partner in the Asia pivot.
Modi, however, has made clear from his first day in office that he intends to cement a security partnership with Japan — a positive for America’s own strategic ambitions in the region. He will look to Obama for assurances that the United States will accelerate growing U.S.-India security ties to balance China’s growing military power. At the same time, Modi will want further U.S. help in confronting terrorist threats from Pakistani-based groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and in dealing with multiplying cyber-challenges.
Obama has learned, as did his predecessors, that, despite all the promise of strategic engagement with India, that country can also be a difficult and sometimes disputatious friend. India has been a consistent spoiler in global trade talks and overly protectionist at home. Its environment minister said at the United Nations last week that India would not join the United States in undertaking a major effort to diminish its rising carbon emissions (now third highest in the world). India has also been an irresolute supporter of U.S. efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And Obama would be within his rights to ask Modi to repeal India’s discriminatory nuclear liability law, which scuttled the historic U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement.
Despite these differences, the upside of future U.S. strategic ties to India is obvious. With Modi’s arrival in Washington, Obama has a rare second chance to get India right after this country’s ties with Delhi atrophied over the past two years. A U.S.-India renaissance would bring the added benefit of clear bipartisan support at home. Bill Clinton began the U.S. effort to define a more practical foreign policy partnership with India at the end of his time in office. George W. Bush had great success in molding close security and counterterrorism connections to the Indian government. There is a Republican-Democratic consensus in Washington that India can be one of our central 21st-century partners. Now it is time for Obama to make his mark with India.
- Who Loves China?
OCT 2, 2014
Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators gathered in Hong Kong on Monday to continue calls for free and open elections for the city's chief executive in 2017. CreditChris Mcgrath/Getty Images
NEW YORK – Tens of thousands of people have been “occupying” the tear-gas-filled streets of Hong Kong’s Central district to fight for their democratic rights. Many more may soon join them. Though some businessmen and bankers are annoyed by the disruption, the demonstrators are right to protest.
China’s government has promised Hong Kong’s citizens that they can freely elect their Chief Executive in 2017. But, given that candidates are to be carefully vetted by an unelected committee of pro-Chinese appointees, citizens would have no meaningful choice at all. Only people who “love China” – that is, love the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – need apply.
One can almost understand why China’s leaders should be baffled by this show of defiance in Hong Kong. After all, the British simply appointed governors when Hong Kong was still a crown colony, and nobody protested then.
Indeed, the deal that Hong Kong’s colonial subjects appeared to accept – leaving politics alone in exchange for the opportunity to pursue material prosperity in a safe and orderly environment – is not so different from the deal accepted by China’s educated classes today. The common opinion among British colonial civil servants, businessmen, and diplomats was that the Chinese were not really interested in politics anyway; all they cared about was money.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Chinese history knows that this view was patently false. But, for a long time, it seemed to be true in Hong Kong. There was, however, a significant difference between Hong Kong under the British and under China today. Hong Kong was never a democracy, but it did have a relatively free press, a relatively honest government, and an independent judiciary – all backed by a democratic government in London.
For most Hong Kong citizens, the prospect of being handed over in 1997 from one colonial power to another was never an entirely happy one. But what really invigorated politics in Hong Kong was the brutal crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and in other Chinese cities in 1989. Huge demonstrations took place in Hong Kong to protest the massacre, and massive commemorations of the event are held every June, keeping alive a memory that is repressed and fading in the rest of China.
It was not simply humanitarian rage that galvanized so many people in Hong Kong to act in 1989. They recognized then that under future Chinese rule, only genuine democracy might safeguard the institutions that protected Hong Kong’s freedoms. Without any significant say in how they were to be governed, Hong Kong’s citizens would be at the mercy of China’s leaders.
From the point of view of China’s Communist rulers, this seems perverse. They regard Hong Kongers’ democratic demands as a misguided effort to mimic Western politics, or even as a form of nostalgia for British imperialism. Either way, the demonstrators’ agenda is considered “anti-Chinese.”
- Turkey’s ISIS Crisis
Project Syndicate OCT 2, 2014 0
ISTANBUL – Following the recent safe return of 46 Turkish hostages held by the Islamic State, hopes were raised in the United States that Turkey would finally commit to joining the US-led coalition now fighting the group. But Turkey’s willingness to contribute to the coalition remains constrained by the legacy of its ill-fated Syria policy, as well as by a fundamental strategic disconnect between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government and US President Barack Obama’s administration.
Since Syria’s civil war began three years ago, Turkey has provided logistical and financial support to virtually all elements of the Syrian opposition, while allowing them to use Turkish territory to regroup after launching military operations across the border. Committed to regime change in Syria, Turkey turned a blind eye to some of these groups’ brutal tactics, radical ideologies, and big ambitions. The fear now is that this benign neglect has allowed the Islamic State to embed itself in Turkey and build the capacity to conduct terrorist activities on Turkish soil – and thus to retaliate for Turkish participation in the US-led coalition.
But there is more behind Turkey’s reticent response to the coalition. Turkey fundamentally disagrees with the US in its interpretation of the threat that the Islamic State poses – and how to address it. Simply put, whereas the US is approaching the Islamic State as the Middle East’s most pressing problem, Turkey views the group as a symptom of deeper pathologies.
According to this view, any campaign that focuses exclusively on destroying the Islamic State will do nothing to prevent the emergence of similar threats in the near future. And, unlike the US, Middle Eastern countries and their neighbors cannot decide to “pivot” away from the region when the consequences of their poorly designed interventions become too unruly.
In this context, Turkey’s leaders believe that the international community’s response to the Islamic State should be far more ambitious, seeking to redress the underlying causes of the current disorder. Such a strategy would have to include efforts to compel Iraq’s new government to break with the sectarianism of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, while supporting the new leadership’s efforts to provide basic health, educational, and municipal services to all of Iraq’s citizens.
As for Syria, the only plausible route to normalcy begins with forcing President Bashar al-Assad to cede power. To this end, the US and its allies should consider striking Assad’s strongholds in Syria, while establishing safe havens for the moderate opposition under the protective cloak of a no-fly zone.
Given that the Islamic State poses a graver threat to Turkey than to any other Western country, Turkey has no choice other than to participate in the campaign against it. This means, first and foremost, adopting a zero-tolerance policy toward the Islamic State at home, aimed at preventing the group from fundraising and recruiting on Turkish soil. Continued improvement of border security and deeper cooperation with Western intelligence agencies on the issue of foreign fighters are also essential.
But Turkey’s imperative to fight the Islamic State does not trump – much less invalidate – Turkish leaders’ concerns about Obama’s long-term goals. If the US and Turkey are to work together to eradicate the Islamic State, they will first have to agree on a longer-term strategy for restoring some semblance of order to a crisis-ravaged region.
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