US President Donald Trump has lost control of the reckless war he began on Iran. As an Indian whose country has been at the receiving end of the Trump administration’s unstable imperialism, I wish his Iran debacle could allow me some moments of schadenfreude. But alas, I can’t draw any satisfaction from America’s crazed military delusions because of the cataclysmic consequences for our economy, our energy security, and our geopolitical calculations.
You know the numbers by now. Nearly 10 million Indians who live in the Gulf countries have been pulled into a conflict they did not plan for. Forty per cent of India’s crude imports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway today controlled entirely by the Iranians. And America’s so-called waiver on India’s purchase of Russian oil — for the record, India never stopped buying Russian oil as the White House routinely claims — won’t insulate us from the pain of higher oil prices. This, in turn, will have a spiralling impact on the Indian economy.
If this sounds like the consequences of globalisation, it is the opposite. Trump’s tenure has destroyed the defining principle of globalisation, which is not just inter-dependence but integration. If anything, as cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi come under daily drone and missile attacks from Iran, Trump’s war has demolished the idea that in a globalised age, a capitalist oasis can be kept insulated from stormy headwinds of hegemonic powers.
Behaving like a ruthless neo-imperialist, Trump first dismantled the world trading system with his weaponisation of tariffs. Now, he has gone for the rules of war and strategic partnerships.
Nothing illustrates that better than when a US nuclear submarine sank an Iranian warship in international waters, a couple of weeks after it had been a guest of India at the Milan naval exercises. The precedent set is dangerous and disquieting. Tomorrow, China might send its navy into the Indian Ocean to conduct a military operation of its own.
By all available public accounts, India did the right thing — offering assent for refuge to three Iranian ships within a day and also pressing the Navy into search and rescue when the distress signal was received from IRIS Dena in Colombo. But, it is not as if the Americans informed our Navy of their plans to expand their theatre of operations into the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Sri Lanka. And I am not speaking of operational details here, just the professional courtesy of expanded presence. After all, an Indian vessel could have been in those waters at the same time and found itself caught in an inadvertent crisis.
Not for the first time, Trump’s second term reminds us of the paradox of this Darwinian age. The Americans want to show that might is right. And the Iranians, with a staggering instinct for survival, are showing how asymmetric warfare can challenge the most powerful militaries. Their deployment of Shahed drones is the digital age version of guerrilla warfare.
For India, there are lessons on both counts.
India’s air defence did a spectacular job in Operation Sindoor. But imagine if the conflict had lasted four weeks instead of four days. Whether to insulate us from short-term security challenges — think drones in the hands of terrorists or their patrons — or focus on long-term growth, India must build hard power. Our democracy, our diversity and pluralism, and our emphasis on constitutional values must remain guiding lights in this marathon journey.
But in a Trumpian age — and the world may behave in this manner even after he’s gone — there is no better protection than the power of your markets and military.
It’s true that Trump is not the first American president to begin irresponsible wars. Right from the 1960s and Kennedy’s foray into Cuba up until the disaster in Afghanistan, regime-change wars have not just failed; they have created more extremist versions of the entities they vowed to displace. Think of ISIS in Iraq or the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But Trump’s is the first administration that has done away with the entire dictionary of diplomacy. Perhaps this lexicon was only a veneer, a pretence, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech reminded us. Even so, it gave the world a common language to conduct business in, a language that was especially helpful in grey zone warfare.
None of this is a brief for the Iranian regime or for that matter for any other authoritarian government. The answer to dictatorships or religious orthodoxy or Neanderthal regimes cannot be wars without an end goal fought by militaries that are unable to place their men and women on the ground. History is littered with proof of this basic working thesis. Nor is war a video game to be spoken of in a language so coarse that the entire claim of being the so-called good guy is in serious question.
So, unless the world comes together to push back against one man’s unbridled and unstable whims, globalisation lies in tatters and it’s each country for itself.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal
