Imperialism Is Very Much Alive, And India Must Factor It Into Its Policymaking
The West turning a blind eye to Israel's razing of Gaza, and the patronage to Pakistan’s army chief all highlight the unvarnished exercise of imperial power.
Three and a half decades of shared, globalised prosperity, in which the rich world deployed key parts of their production and service delivery in the developing world, not only without overt friction, but also accompanied by the creation of institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that settled disputes based on consensually approved rules, rather than by the use of force, had led many to believe that Imperialism had been rendered a relic of the past.
A red pill is held out to those so beguiled, by Israel’s aerial attack on Iran, even as its slaughter of Palestinians continues in Gaza, and US president Donald Trump’s public boast that he knows where exactly Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei, is located, but is not, as yet, choosing to take him out.
The 1999 movie The Matrix brought the red pill and the blue pill to popular culture in the English-speaking world and beyond. The world in which people believe they live in a simulation called the Matrix, created by the world’s imperceptible rulers, the machines, who use the simulation to prevent people from realising their subjugation. Taking the red pill allows the pill popper to see through this make-believe, appreciate the reality, and do something to regain his or her agency. The blue pill, in contrast, re-immerses the taker in the Matrix.
Rents in the veil of misperception have appeared before the advent of Trump — for example, the two Gulf Wars, the invasion of Afghanistan, the North Atlantic financial crisis that disrupted growth and poverty reduction in much of the developing world, treatment of Islamic extremism as a useful tool to use against inconvenient governments, such as Syria’s, or, when cordoned off from the West, the Muslim world’s problem for it to tackle as it thought fit, even as it claimed more Muslim lives than those of non-believers.
Myth Of Coexistence
But it took Trump’s first term to deconstruct the myth of harmonious coexistence of the powerful who do not flaunt their power, and the disempowered. Trump unilaterally took America out of the Paris Climate Accord, rescinded the North American Free Trade Agreement that had allowed Mexico to prosper, and scrapped the Iran nuclear deal that had been signed by the US, under Barack Obama, China, Russia, France, Britain, Germany and the European Union, besides, of course, Iran. More to the point, Trump started a trade war with China that hurt global growth, damaging the pace of poverty reduction in the developing world.
When the reins of power changed hands in the world’s sole superpower, and a more consensual figure, in the form of Joe Biden, took charge, the world conveniently convinced itself that Trump 1 was an aberration.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, it was easy to believe that Russia was the aggressor and that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was trying to rebuild the old Soviet empire. The West-dominated popular discourse did not take into account the US-led military alliance NATO’s steady eastward expansion, right up to Russia’s borders, in violation of earnest commitments made by the US to Gorbachev.
When the pro-Russian government of Ukraine was overthrown in 2014, and a West-leaning, NATO-embracing leadership took charge, that threatened the viability of Russia’s only warm-water naval base, in Sevastopol, Crimea.
Crimea had been an integral part of Russia, from the time in the 10th century, when Vladimir 1, the ruler of the territory called Kievan Rus, which had Kiev as its Capital, embraced Christianity and was baptised in Crimea, till 1954, when Khrushchev made it a part of Ukraine. The land route to Sevastopol from Moscow or St Petersburg runs through eastern Ukraine. For Russia to remain a salient global power, it needs both Sevastopol and unhindered access to the naval base.
Hence, NATO’s move to incorporate Ukraine should be recognised as aggression, rather than an innocuous desire on the part of Ukraine to be part of the West. Exercise of sovereign rights that erode the security of another country would be opposed, as the US had, when Cuba had allowed the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles on the island, just 145 km from the US.
So, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and encouraged the Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine to secede. When the West began to arm Ukraine heavily, Russia pre-emptively moved into Ukraine.
India did not join in the condemnation of Russia, precisely because it sees the need to prevent the world from lapsing into either unipolar dominance by the US or bipolar hegemony by the US and China. New Delhi has the institutional capacity not to be taken in by frilly disguises and see precisely why Grandma has such a big mouth and such big teeth.
Turning A Blind Eye
Israel’s razing of Gaza to rubble and the killing of 55,000 Palestinians is, again, not widely seen as an exercise of imperial power. After all, Hamas had carried out a terror attack on Israel in October 2023, and who can deny Israel the right to defend itself against terror?
Palestinians had been forcibly evicted from their lands when the state of Israel was founded in 1948 by Western powers, in expiation of Christendom’s sustained sins against Jews, culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust.
Instead of sharing the land with Palestinians in a composite, secular democracy, Israel formed itself into an Apartheid state, herding the Palestinians into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and using them as captive labour for work inside Israel, with no freedoms or political rights, and subsisting on external aid. When Palestinians who fretted too much about being treated as prisoners of concentration camps rebelled, the rebellion was put down with force, time and again.
Many attempts to find a political solution, in the form of two separate states for Israel and Palestine, were made, but thwarted, including by the assassination of the Israeli leader who had agreed to such an arrangement. Israel was built up by the West as the region’s military superpower, with arms supplies and liberal aid. The Jews’ cultural legacy of scholarship and learning helped Israel, with the help of liberal funding from the West, innovate military capability for their own use, and export, as well.
The West turns a blind eye to Israel’s stockpile of undeclared nuclear weapons, as it serves as America’s super-powerful regional proxy. Israel has, with liberal supplies of American weapons and munitions, destroyed all regional opponents, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad regime in Syria. It has persuaded all Arab autocracies to fall in line with American wishes, more or less. Now, it is demolishing Iran.
A Clear Message
The message is clear. The world is governed by might, and the US right now has more might than any other power. It will use that might to impose the trade regimes of its choice, and enforce regime changes in countries it deems hostile.
The patronage extended to Pakistan’s army chief, the country’s effective ruler, is part of such unvarnished exercise of imperial power.
India has to factor this in, in all its policymaking — economic, security and diplomatic.
