Looking For Love in All the Wrong Places

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead muses about the relationship between India and the United States:

Americans and Indians often see the same problem in very different ways. India, for example, does not see Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a threat to world order. While Americans have been disturbed by India’s continued willingness to buy oil from Russia, Indians resent the West’s attempt to rally global support for what many here see as a largely Western problem in Ukraine. Pointing out that Europeans scarcely noticed China’s attacks on Indian frontier posts in 2020, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told a conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, last week that “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems.”

More generally, Indians bristle when they sense Americans and Europeans getting together to write global rules. The more that American Wilsonians talk about a values-based international order, the more that Indians worry about Western arrogance. Many Indians want a strong Russia and, within limits, a strong China precisely to help guard against the kind of world order President Biden and many of his advisers want to build.

This is more than the postcolonial suspicion of Western intentions that India has long shared with many other non-Western countries. The Hindu nationalist movement that has replaced the long-ruling Congress Party with a new political system built around the Bharatiya Janata Party and its charismatic leader, Narendra Modi, has brought a new dynamism to Indian foreign policy. This new nationalist India wants to increase and develop Indian power, not submerge Indian sovereignty in Western-designed international institutions.

There are a couple of things I wanted to point out about that. First, note how his observation about the rise of Hindu nationalism aligns with my observation about the rise of nationalism more generally. The form that nationalism is taking in India is as religious nationalism.

Dr. Mead concludes:

These conflicts aren’t going away and will likely get worse over time. Hindu nationalism is here to stay. So are India’s communal tensions, and so too for that matter is the belief of many Americans that they have a solemn duty to tell people in other countries and cultures how to live—and to impose sanctions on those unhappy occasions when they fail to take our advice. If bilateral relations are to prosper, Indians and Americans need to find better ways to manage these chronic issues.

India and the U.S. are raucously democratic societies, and their foreign policies cannot ignore public opinion. Managing this critical relationship is never going to be easy. Building deeper ties between the two societies will help; so too will quiet, low-key conversations aimed at preventing blowups before they occur. Both sides need this relationship; we both need to focus on making it work.

I’m skeptical whether a relationship between the United States and any religiously nationalistic country can “work”. That includes not just Israel but also Saudi Arabia, other Gulf Arab states, and, possibly, Turkey. The most we can hope for is some sort of modus vivendi and they cannot be our allies and certainly not our friends. That modus vivendi will vary from country to country.

There are other issues about which we need to be more sensitive. What is broadly viewed here as “promoting our values” including promoting women’s rights and gender preference and identification rights, may not be seen that way in other countries, particularly countries in Asia and Africa. They are seen as colonialism and even considered assaults on the fabric of other societies and, indeed, religious in nature.

My rather heterodox views are:

1. The United States is and always has been an outlier in the area of fundamental rights.
2. We have lots of clients and vendors but no friends in the world.
3. Our values are not universal. Most other countries reject them.
4. Modern communications and economies require us to maintain relations with other countries including countries that are very unsavory.
5. We should do so with our eyes open. He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.

One last point and it’s one I’ve posted on before at length. Immigrants to the United States leave a lot behind them in the former countries but they bring with them their social, cultural, political, and religious views. We need to keep our eyes opened about that as well.