Donald Trump (Image: X)
President Donald J. Trump of the United States of America may indeed go down in history as being the cause of the collapse of the “Rulesbased International Order” set up by the victors of World War II in 1945-46. The victors were the US, KMT China, the Soviet Union, Britain and France, and the “permanent” set of rules that “responsible players” ought to strictly adhere to were designed to maintain the global supremacy of the five. With the passing of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his replacement by Vice-President Harry Truman, the US and the Soviet Union were transformed from friends to foes. Truman had a horror of Communists, and saw them everywhere he looked, a factor which led to the persecution of many (mostly wrongly) on whom the cloud of suspicion of being a “Russian agent” had settled. Truman was the opposite of Roosevelt, a genial aristocrat who had the foresight to see in Hitler the source of evil that he was. In contrast, several of his contemporaries in the leadership ranks of the US political class saw Hitler as a lesser evil than the Communists he was exterminating. Only after the US entered the war on the Allied side following the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, more than a year after World War II had started in Europe did such a misguided view get abandoned. Even after such an attack by an ally of Nazi Germany, the majority in the US Congress was reluctant to go to war with the Nazis.
The problem was solved by Hitler rashly declaring war on the US when he was embroiled in a war with the Soviet Union. Roosevelt, now unrestrained by the US Congress, flooded Britain and the Soviet Union with US weapons, with the help of which the latter was able to turn the tide against Hitler in 1943. Had Truman been President instead of Roosevelt, it is unlikely that the US would have supplied the Soviets with enough weapons to finally defeat the Nazis. Roosevelt died only after Nazi Germany had lost the war to the Allies. After that, the first and so far only nuclear bombs used in combat at Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in the surrender of Japan. There has been some criticism of President Truman for using nuclear bombs, but had he not done so, the Japanese forces would have carried on a program of defending each part of their land tenaciously, and many more lives of US soldiers would have been lost, was the logic used by Truman when he approved the bombings.
Since then, the West-tilting “Rulesbased International Order” has served to keep countries in the group of those favouring the West. During the past few months, this is what has been torn to shreds by President Trump. Now he has ended the Atlantic Alliance between most of Europe and the US through his demand that Danish-administered Greenland be handed over to the US, “the only power that can safeguard it from China”, according to Trump.
Gone the same way are several of what were seen as permanent pillars of the US-dominated order. Among these is the US-Japan alliance that had been the bedrock of Japanese security since the close of World War II. NATO has gone the same way, but it could be argued that the continued fixation of NATO on Russia is obsolete in a situation where China and no longer Russia is the principal challenger. NATO, now that the alliance is fractured by the effective separation of the US from Europe and Trump is no longer fixated on Russia the way President Biden was, is imperilled. President Trump is making history, he is creating a new geopolitical landscape, one that other countries will need to adjust to as long as the Trump Presidency lasts. Even afterwards, the US as a security and economic partner will no longer be trusted in the way it earlier was.
India has to be watchful of the efforts of certain US entities to take as much profits out of India as they can. An example is the manner in which hyper-profits are being made through depleting the pockets of citizens of India is through shortselling the rupee by buying rupees and thereafter using their accomplices in the bureaucracy to ensure that the dollar-rupee rate keeps rising to the detriment of citizens of India. Several US hedge funds are engaged in short-selling the rupee. Small and medium investors have therefore lost heavily, because of the inflation caused by the fall of the rupee value, thereby causing losses to citizens of India. Such short-sellers need to be taught a lesson through the rupee value going up, something which must be uppermost in the mind of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, as indeed in that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself.
Several countries, and not just China, are looking enviously at the rise of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and are seeking ways of reversing that rise, including through the stock market. By 2029, India should be on a double digit growth track so that the BJP gets a majority of Lok Sabha seats on its own. The rising curve of progress ever since PM Modi took over the administration in 2014 should be maintained. That would ensure a fourth term in his present office for Prime Minister Modi.
