Day: June 8, 2024

The US president Joe Biden has deputed his trouble shooter National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to travel to New Delhi no sooner than Prime Minister Narendra Modi forms his new government.;

The White House said in a;readout;that Sullivan plans “to engage the new [Indian] government on shared U.S.-India priorities, including the trusted, strategic technology partnership.”;

Of course, “strategic technology partnership” is a code word. Simply put, with the elections over and another term under Modi’s leadership assured, the integration of India into the Biden administration’s Asia-Pacific strategy will be accelerated where much has changed in the US’ favour in terms of the alignment of forces during the past six-month period with the Biden administration making significant inroads into the ASEAN and a new ecosystem of network and alliances overlapping and supplementing each other is being put in place to prepare for the unavoidable confrontation with China that lies ahead in which New Delhi under Modi’s leadership is an indispensable — and in many ways an irreplaceable — partner.;;

That said, it is predictable that Sullivan will keenly explore the positioning of New Delhi in the;tumultuous developments lately;in the confrontation between the US and Russia. He will take the pulse of the Indian ruling elite and estimate how much their fiery nationalist rhetoric is real, delusional or make-believe.;

The stakes couldn’t be any higher. Only this week, Biden made an explosive remark ruling out a US missile attack on Moscow and the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin retorted that Russia too has an option to arm the actors elsewhere who are locked in mortal combat with the US and its allies.

Strongman politics has no place;;

Specifically, India has become a mainstay of the Russian economy due to its;massive purchase of Russian oil. That is not in the US interests — although it helps keep oil prices “low”. India’s Bank of Baroda reported that the country’s imports of Russian oil soared tenfold in 2023.;Russia has successfully weathered the EU embargo on Russian seaborne oil and the West’s price cap by rerouting most of its energy exports to Asia – particularly to India and China. According to the Russian Finance Ministry, income from energy exports between January and April soared by 50% compared to the same period in 2023.

Reuters reported;that last month, India’s largest private corporation Reliance Industries and the Russian company Rosneft signed a one-year contract for monthly supplies of up to three million barrels of oil that will be paid for in rubles.

Sullivan will take a close look at this deal since cross-border settlements in local currency undercuts the West’s attempts to cut off Russia’s access to its financial system while promoting “de-dollarisation.” The US aims to use India as a “braking mechanism” within BRICS.;

The recent parliamentary election has been a big setback for the ruling BJP and Modi personally. However, across the board, there is a sense of elation in the;western commentaries, which estimate that the election has diminished Modi’s “stature as an elected strongman with a mission from God.”;

An expert opinion at the influential Council for Foreign Relations in New York noted that Modi will be leading a “fragile coalition” and will be facing daunting economic and social issues that have no easy solution. Make no mistake, Sullivan will thoroughly explore how a weakened Modi can still serve US interests.;It is not a mission that state;secretary Antony Blinken can preform.

The;Cfr commentary;concluded that “Another challenge relates to India’s foreign relations. Modi and the BJP have massively traded on his reputation of popularity and his credentials as a devout Hindu nationalist with a new vision for India. Both of these have now received a setback… there is little doubt that Modi’s stature of invincibility as a leader of a rising power and a community of Global South nations with a large mandate has been diminished abroad.”;;

To be sure, Sullivan will look for all emergent opportunities to navigate US interests from a position of strength. The US traditionally abhors “strongman” politics, especially in the Global South. From such a perspective, Sullivan can be trusted to assess the advantages that may now be opening up for smart diplomacy.;

Without doubt, India’s Russia ties will be listed somewhere at the top of his talking points. But there are other pressure points too, which the Biden administration had developed during the past several months, especially the Modi government’s alleged assassination plots in North America.

Even as the election results were heading the news cycle in India, Canada’s National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, comprising members with top security clearances,;unveiled a report;alleging that “India has become the second-most significant foreign interference threat to Canada’s democratic institutions and processes, replacing Russia… These efforts include intervention in Canadian democratic systems and institutions, including targeting Canadian politicians, ethnic media, and the Indo-Canadian ethnocultural communities.”;

Sullivan is just what the doctor would prescribe to correct abhorrent erratic behaviour by the US’ partners. There is no question that the US expects the Modi government to have a national security apparatus that is accessible, cooperative and transparent.;;

Return of the natural ally;;

Herein lies a paradox. For, at the end of the day, the election result may hold the potential to do good for the US-Indian working relationship. Consider the following.;

The election is living proof that India remains a vibrant democracy and, therefore, has much in common with the liberal democratic world — something that the western media is unwilling to acknowledge. As an;opinion piece;in the Hill newspaper put it,;

“The result of India’s latest elections is in some ways a reminder of how democracies can successfully apply self-correction mechanisms. In addition to concerns about over implementing BJP’s Hindutva ideology, which equates Indianness with Hinduism, some observers were worried about the prospect of authoritarianism in India.”;

Secondly, in a curious way, the human rights situation in India may ;improve, democratic norms such as free press may revive and, most important, the anti-Muslim state policies may get mothballed under a coalition government that reverts to consensual politics for sheer survival and also faces a strong opposition in the parliament.

Indeed, despite Modi’s best efforts to debunk Rahul Gandhi, the latter is now a serious contender for power waiting in the wings — and Modi would know he is well-liked in the West as an erudite mind with a cosmopolitan outlook suffused with humanism and compassion for the dispossessed and marginalised millions of Indians.;

All this restores the political balance in New Delhi after a decade, with the Congress in a position to insistently question the government’s policies and the ruling BJP obliged to be accountable. The BJP’s hubris has no place in the scheme of things ahead.;

Equally, the reassertion of regional parties highlights India’s ethnic diversity. Thus, the rhetoric of ethno-nationalism though the past decade, which;;pitched India’s Hindu majority against the country’s Muslim minority and helped the BJP in the previous two general elections, cannot have a free run anymore with tacit state support.;

Indeed, people’s primary concerns are about economic distress, and the limits of religious identity as a basis for voters’ choices have been reached. India cannot and will not be a Hindu Rashtra.;

Suffice to say, a major concern of the western world — that India was lurching toward ethno-nationalism and falling victim to its attendant dangers of militancy and extremism and authoritarianism — is dissipating. This will help the US-Indian discourses to regain their elan.;

In the final analysis, Biden’s decision to rush his hatchet man to New Delhi right at the birth of the new government only goes to show how much the US wants India to get back on track as its natural ally. As the saying goes, the early bird gets the worm.;;

For the Biden administration, Modi has been the most “pro-American” leader that India ever had and it has been a dream team on Raisina hill with the External Affairs portfolio held by S. Jaishankar who is trusted by the Americans and whose heart is in the right place when it comes to India’s strategic alignment to the US, all his grandstanding as the role model of an unvarnished nationalist notwithstanding.;

To be sure, the US will do all that is possible and necessary to shore up the stability of another “Modi government.” It has been a decisive influencer in Indian politics and it will not hesitate to be proactive. And, above all, it has excellent rapport with the Sangh Parivar circles in the US, who are wired into the powers that be in India.;

Biden’s hands-on role;

Make no mistake that Biden will take a hands-on role in the relaunch of the US-Indian odyssey once his preoccupations over his own re-election bid gets over. Nikkei Asia, FT’s sister publication, has reported quoting Mira Rapp-Hooper, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania at the White House National Security Council, that Biden plans to attend the summit of the QUAD in New Delhi after the US presidential election in November.;

“The preparatory work for … the [QUAD] leaders’ summit is well underway… And we are very confident that we will have really substantial deliverables that continue to build upon the QUAD’s mission,” she revealed.

In every respect, the signal that Sullivan’s visit will convey — not only to the Indian audience but also to the US’ adversaries in the epochal struggle looming ahead for the world order and the international system — is unmistakably that the Biden administration attaches the highest importance to forging a strong and enduring alliance with India.

To that end, Washington is willing to strengthen Modi’s hands in steering through choppy waters what seems a shaky coalition government setting out on an uncertain voyage — provided, of course, the Indian side also keeps its side of the bargain.;

By Wanjiru Njoya

In his 1949 book The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution, John T. Flynn warns about the “great tides of thought and appetite that run unseen deeply below the surface of society.” These unseen tides are political waves that shape the law and institutional policy, but because they are unseen, there is no widespread awareness of the danger they pose. They are barely debated in academic or policy circles. They are treated as an uncontroversial aspect of the political “consensus,” and their implementation is largely unopposed.

Flynn is concerned with the surreptitious methods by which socialism takes over society. Socialists do not overtly promote socialist values—on the contrary, they often deny being socialists. They proceed by stealth, by purporting to be concerned with the values closest to people’s hearts, offering them “fairness” and “justice,” a great plan for the good of society, and a safety net to shield them from the vicissitudes of life. Flynn observes:

“You never hear our Planners advertising the wonders of socialism. Yet they are taking over the country. They understand that people are dominated extensively by personal and group interests, that this is a natural phenomenon and that the personal and group interests at any moment exercise a more immediate and potent stimulation upon their thinking than broad ideological principles.:

Gramsci’s Long March

A good example of how this creeping revolution has unfolded is the strategy often referred to as “a long march through the institutions,” often attributed to Antonio Gramsci although Gramsci himself did not use this phrase. In his review of Patrick Buchanan’s;The Death of the West,;David Gordon;highlights how the Gramscian approach has destroyed traditional Western values from within.

Thomas Sowell;articulates a similar idea in what he calls the quiet repeal of the American Revolution:

The final chapter of;The Quest for Cosmic Justice;is titled “The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution”—because that is what is happening piecemeal by zealots devoted to their own particular applications of cosmic justice.

They are not trying to destroy the rule of law. They are not trying to undermine the American republic. They are simply trying to produce “gender equity,” institutions that “look like America” or a thousand other goals.

Sowell’s point is that the repeal of the American Revolution proceeds quietly, without causing undue alarm, precisely because those subverting it claim to be upholding it. There is no great announcement that the Constitution will henceforth be interpreted in a manner antithetical to its original meaning. This explains why there are now judges in the United States Supreme Court who aver that they do not know what a woman is and who state that racial preferences are not contrary to the Constitution, positions that strike many people as so outrageously wrong that it seems barely worth taking them seriously. These positions are dismissed with no more than an offhand “but that’s unconstitutional!”

In the view of judges sympathetic to critical race theories, the Constitution does not prohibit diversity so there is nothing wrong, as they see it, with reserving opportunities exclusively for “people of color” because in their view, that will promote diversity. For example, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in the Supreme Court affirmative action cases argued that “nothing in the Constitution or Title VI prohibits institutions from taking race into account to ensure the racial diversity of admits in higher education.”

In this way, a body of case law gradually emerges in which ideas that subvert the Constitution, primarily emanating from civil rights instruments, eventually constitute the basic law by which the country is governed. The danger lies not only in the possibility that the minority opinion in the Supreme Court may potentially one day become a majority opinion, but more so in the credence it gives to these ideas at the highest level. Incorporating socialist propaganda into Supreme Court opinions eventually creates a culture in which such propaganda is regarded as respectable and true.

These examples illustrate how the wave of socialist propaganda that Flynn warned about has now succeeded in transforming institutions in the West almost beyond recognition. The tenets of this culture are propagated daily through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training sessions, which in many institutions are mandatory.;Tom Woods;summarizes some of the core tenets of DEI training:

You’re pushing “white supremacy” if you believe in meritocracy, if you compliment a “POC” on his speaking abilities, if you insist race doesn’t matter to you, if you reject the concept of “white privilege,” if you “fetishize” “BIPOC” (so you’d better really like them, but try not to like them too much or then you’re fetishizing them), if you are committed to colorblindness, or if you call the police on black people (can you please stop bothering the poor guy while he’s trying to murder you?).

And if you try too hard, you’ll be accused of having a “white savior complex.”

Misplaced Optimism

The quiet nature of this revolution means that great optimism surrounds the banning of schemes and programs such as DEI, and many fail to notice that such bans do not capture the relentless “great tides of thought and appetite that run unseen deeply below the surface” to which Flynn referred. Thus, we see DEI offices being shut down and DEI staff reassigned to other offices to continue their work albeit without referring to it as DEI.

For example, the;New York Times;reported;in January 2024 that despite very public attacks on DEI in 2023, with over twenty states either banning or severely restricting DEI programs,

only 1 percent of the 320 C-suite executives said they had significantly decreased their D.E.I. commitments in the past year, and 57 percent said they had expanded those efforts.

In a survey of 194 chief human resources officers published by the Conference Board last month, none of the respondents said they planned to scale back D.E.I. initiatives.

However, some have reported rebranding their schemes to avoid using the toxic DEI label. A human resources officer was quoted by the;NYT;as saying, “When it comes to D.E.I., some professionals aren’t bothered by changes to branding as long as the work continues. ‘The end goals of these diversity initiatives and programs will not change.’” For example, “management training once framed as part of D.E.I. efforts may instead by discussed as a course to help managers deliver performance reviews more effectively.”

The lesson to derive from Flynn is that citizens unaware of an unfolding revolution are easily “sneaked into socialism.” Conservatives are now rejoicing at “winning” their battle to quash DEI programs, while the DEI enforcers simply slap a new label on their schemes and carry on. Being unaware of the scale of the threat, citizens fail to take effective action and are eventually “trapped in a socialist system.” A good example of how a country can become trapped is when decades of case law and legal precedent become difficult to reverse. Constitutional concepts over time acquire the meaning assigned to them by the courts, which are then entrenched in law schools and courts as the “correct” meaning. In this situation, the people’s optimism becomes their weakness.

In the United Kingdom, it was while feminists were rejoicing at their “landmark victory” in securing protection for the “philosophical belief” that sex determines who is a woman that new hate crime laws were enacted to make misgendering a “hate crime.” Speaking of the need for America to learn lessons from the rise of socialism in Europe, Flynn observes that these types of misplaced optimism may themselves be a hazard:

We have no talent as a people for pessimism. In prosperity we convinced ourselves it would last forever. .;.;. We are being drawn into socialism on the British gradualist model. We are well on the road—much further along than our people suspect. And if we do not clearly recognize that fact and abandon that fatal route, we will inevitably, perhaps in less than a decade, arrive at that state of socialization now before us in England. Not until we recognize this fact and all its implications will we be able to recognize “where we are and whither we are tending.” Not until then will we be able to judge “what to do, and how to do it.”

• About the author: Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is a Scholar-in-Residence for the Mises Institute. She is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, with David Gordon) and “A Critique of Equality Legislation in Liberal Market Economies” (Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2021).
• Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute

By Vivek Mishra and Samir Bhattacharya

Amidst a rapidly receding influence abroad, the United States (US) finds itself in yet another quagmire, this time in Africa. In Niger, both France and the US have had to withdraw troops one after the other led by the French withdrawal at the end of last year. As part of the broader trend across the ‘coup belt’ in Africa, Western troops have been ousted in favour of Russian military presence. The US and Russia are not new to power games in Africa. Erstwhile, during the era of Cold War, the erstwhile Soviet Union and the US competed against each other in several proxy wars such as Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia or in Angola.

However, this time the US may be ceding ground to Russia in a critical geography where its counterterrorism efforts were central in preventing a rapid sway of terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram across the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. In recent years, groups such as the Al-Qaeda affiliate group Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) have also grown strongly in the region. As a result of the withdrawal from Niger, the US would lose two military bases in the country that were critical for its regional counterterrorism efforts and hosted 1,000 troops. 

Over the past year, the US troops in Niger ceased active training or assistance to Nigerien forces. Nevertheless, their presence provided some resistance against Jihadist forces. With the US now agreeing to withdraw its troops from Niger, decades of counter-terrorism efforts are poised to be undone, significantly impacting future efforts. A key point of contention between the US and Niger was the transition timeline. While Niger’s Junta rulers advocated for a three-year transition back to civilian government, the US declined to work with the Junta government.

At a time of increasing global rift between the world’s major powers, with Russia and China drawn;ever closer, the last thing Washington wished for was a jostle for a continued military presence in Niger and wider Africa. Recently, the Congolese army claimed that it;foiled;a coup attempt which involved Americans.;

Turmoil in Sahel

In July last year, the West African nation of Niger came to the limelight when followed by a;coup, thousands of Niger nationals took to the streets to celebrate the overthrow of long-serving President Mohamed Bazoum. Since then, Niger has consistently been in the news. The coup was followed by the formation of the;Alliance of Sahel States, or L’Alliance des États du Sahel (AES), on 16 September 2023, where Niger joined Mali and Burkina Faso. These two neighbouring countries also witnessed a coup within last two years and are currently ruled by Junta governments.;

A loose mutual defence agreement, the Alliance of Sahel States pledges its members to support one another militarily should any of them come under attack. Under the framework of AES, all three States also agreed to cooperate to end or prevent armed uprisings. Further, on 28 January 2024, all three AES member states withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the 15-member West African regional organisation.;

The West African nation is rich in natural resources, particularly uranium, which is vital for the nuclear industry. Niger ranks;seventh;globally in uranium production and is a significant supplier to France. Prior to the coup,;nearly 15 percent of France’s uranium, and one-fifth of the European Union’s, originated from Niger. Consequently, recent developments in Niger are understandably causing discomfort for France and the wider Europe.

In addition to its role in the energy security of Europe, Niger also contributes enormously to the stability of the volatile Sahel region. With about 1,000 US troops and 1,500 French troops, Niger has been a crucial ally of the West in the fight against Islamist militancy in the whole Sahel region.;The US also maintained two drone sites in Niger: Niamey and Agadez. Only six years ago, the US invested around;$110 million;in constructing these two drone bases. In addition, the US spends around US$30 million;annually for their maintenance. France, its coloniser, also had;1,500 military;personnel;in Niger who left Niger in December 2023.

To withdraw its troops from Niger, France executed a highly perilous operation, with convoys traversing hazardous desert routes spanning nearly 1,700 kilometres before reaching neighbouring Chad, where France has stationed its current Sahel operation. Meanwhile, the withdrawal plan for US troops has yet to be finalized and remains under discussion. The US troops is expected complete its troop withdrawal from Niger by;15 September;this year. The;Pan Sahel Initiative;which the US launched in 2002 in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks has virtually met a closure.;

Great power competition

Analogies in international relations can be fraught with risks. The coup in Niger occurred precisely when several African heads of state and ministers were attending the;second Russia-Africa Summit;in Saint Petersburg. Following the French withdrawal, Russia’s private military group Wagner swiftly assumed control of its bases. Moreover, increasingly assertive and aggressive Russian military personnel have;reportedly entered;Airbase 101 in Niger, where US troops are still stationed. Given the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the proximity of US and Russian troops may potentially escalate tensions, putting them on a collision course.

In a world where major powers are increasingly vying for influence across critical regions, from Africa to Latin America, and from the Indo-Pacific to Eurasia, the US finds itself competing with two formidable adversaries: Russia and China. This competition is particularly challenging for the US as not only does it occur against the backdrop of increasing cooperation between Russia and China, but also amid the US’s escalating military commitments in Ukraine and the Middle East. These ongoing conflicts have further destabilised the global order. While Russia and China collude to form a coordinated strategy against the West, Washington’s pursuit of leadership often leaves its Western partners trailing or acting independently. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in Africa.

Future course

Africa remains critical for US efforts in the region and Washington will use its;coastal presence;in countries like Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast to gather intelligence. The US withdrawal from Niger may not be significant from a tactical perspective as countries have increasingly relied on technology for counterterror efforts but what it means for its reputation as a global leader, particularly in the backdrop of a role-reversal by Russia in Niger and a growing;Chinese;and;Iranian;influence in Sahel, is clearer.;

Optimistic projections for Niger may seem overly preposterous at present. Currently, the US appears to have only few options: imposing harsh economic sanctions, initiating military action, or a combination of both. However, any of these measures could potentially alienate the Junta further from Western alliances. There remains, however, a third option: dialogue. The transition of Niger to a democratic government and subsequent regional stability will depend on the effectiveness and genuineness intentions on both sides. The stability of Niger presents a test case for America’s Pan-Sahel vision.;

---

About the authors:

• Vivek Mishra is a Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.
• Samir Bhattacharya is an Associate Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.

Source: This article was published at the Observer Research Foundation.

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On Halloween 2023, hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller identified what he called the “worst fiscal blunder” in the history of the U.S. Treasury. That blunder occurred in the early months of the Biden administration and accelerated the U.S. government’s;unsustainable fiscal path.

A link to the video is cued to start at a key point in Druckenmiller’s comments, which he made as part of a wide-ranging discussion with his fellow hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones at a finance industry conference. Druckenmiller takes about three minutes to describe the Treasury department’s blunder, the blame for which he lays at the feet of the Treasury’s top bureaucrat.

Here’s a;partial transcript;of Druckenmiller’s analysis:;

“Janet Yellen, I guess because political myopia or whatever, was issuing 2-years at 15 basis points … when she could have issued 10-years at 70 basis points or 30-years at 180 basis points,” the former hedge-fund manager said during a conversation with Paul Tudor Jones at the Robin Hood Investors Conference, a clip of which circulated Monday on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter.

“I literally think if you go back to Alexander Hamilton, [Yellen’s approach represented] the biggest blunder in the history of the Treasury,” Druckenmiller said.

This omission seems even more egregious, according to Druckenmiller, considering that Americans refinanced their home loans at rock-bottom mortgage rates en masse, and corporations with sturdy credit ratings refinanced their debt.

“I have no idea why she hasn’t been called on this. She has no right to still be in that job.”

Missing that obvious opportunity in early 2021 to lock in low interest rates for the large amount of debt the U.S. government had accumulated at that point in time is a massive blunder. But the administration’s fiscal mismanagement didn’t stop there. The costs of that bureaucratic failure will be felt for years to come. All the more so because the U.S. government has been on an excessive spending binge in the years since.

The Costs

Druckenmiller laid out the long-running costs of Janet Yellen’s blunder:

“Here’s the consequences, folks. When the debt rolls over by 2033, interest expense is going to be 4.5% of GDP if rates are where they are now. By 2043 — it sounds like a long time but it is really not; it is 20 years — interest expense as a percentage of GDP will be 7%. That is 144% of all current discretionary spending,” he said.

According to 10-year projections released earlier this year by the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government’s nonpartisan budget agency, annual federal outlays are expected to swell to nearly $10 trillion by 2033 compared with nearly $6.3 trillion spent in 2022.

It is projected that in 2033 the deficit — that is, federal expenditures in excess of revenue — will be more than $2.8 trillion, twice the $1.38 trillion from 2022.

“Interest expense alone will be 144% of all discretionary spending, so the politicians who are telling you, and who think they are not going to cut entitlements, it is just an outright lie,” Druckenmiller said.

That’s not a theoretical problem that might occur some ten or twenty years from now. It’s;already a problem;in 2024. Because of this, the Biden administration is;already cutting entitlements.

Who needs to wait for next Halloween to get properly scared?

• This article was published at The Beacon

By Cheng-Chwee Kuik

Proponents of the United States-led hub-and-spoke alliance system must have been excited by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s visit to the White House on 11 April 2024 and the presidents’ historic trilateral summit with Japan’s Fumio Kishida the same day. It would seem that more spokes are being tied together, anchoring and advancing the hub beyond traditional bilateral links.

The Philippines is aligning itself more closely with Washington and Tokyo while expanding mutual engagement with Australia, Canada and Europe. Some commentators believe Manila is a bellwether for Southeast Asia, in particular claimant and littoral states of the South China Sea disputes, who will, sooner or later, follow in the Philippines’ footsteps and align fully with Washington and ‘likeminded’ partners to counter-balance Beijing.

This may well be wishful thinking. Under the current circumstances, the majority of Southeast Asian states are likely to;persist in hedging, rather than join with Washington and other Western powers against Beijing. Hedging is best understood as a pragmatic policy to;mitigate risks;and;maintain fallback options, rather than a fence-sitting or opportunistic act.

The conditions pushing the Philippines to return to the old alliance-first approach are not shared by other ASEAN states. An alliance-first or full-balancing policy is adopted when two conditions are present — the presence of a direct, clear and present threat and the availability of support from a reliable and robust ally. In the case of the Philippines under Marcos Jr, both conditions are clearly present and each is amplified by domestic political incentives, such as playing up the Chinese threat and privileging the US alliance to boost elite legitimation while undermining internal political foes.

Such conditions are not present for the other ASEAN states. Most Southeast Asian states do not consider China — at least not yet — a black-and-white threat, while the United States is not that straightforward a patron. Countries are like-minded;on some issues, but less so on others.

Another key reason is what I call the;’impossible trinity’. Like all sovereign actors, Southeast Asian states want to maximise security, prosperity and autonomy. But it is impossible for non-great powers to maximise all three goals simultaneously with a single policy and a single patron. Of the three goals that smaller states seek — freedom from security threats, from economic challenges and from autonomy erosion — only one, or at most two, can be attained through a single approach.

Take an alliance, or military alignment with mutual defence commitments. While this approach maximises security and often prosperity, the asymmetric nature of a defence pact inevitably presents the junior ally with risks of autonomy erosion and dependence.

Both risks have wider repercussions. The erosion of external autonomy leads to the erosion of internal authority, while a rigid alliance and dependence also expose the junior ally to the danger of alienating the opposing power. Then there is the danger of abandonment. Alliance is no panacea and there are trade-offs, drawbacks and downsides to all policy approaches.

Given the conditions the majority of ASEAN states face, these trade-offs are unacceptable. Unlike the Philippines and some of the United States’ ‘likeminded’ allies, the ASEAN states’ external outlooks remain in ‘shades of grey’. The weaker states continue to view both superpowers as sources of problems but also sources of support and solutions, albeit in different domains, to different degrees and for different reasons.

Accordingly, Southeast Asian states, except the Philippines, decline to embrace an alliance as the principal instrument of their external policies. While Vietnam and the older members of ASEAN, including Thailand, the other US treaty ally in Southeast Asia, have opted to partner with Western powers on defence and in other domains, they have also been cautious in ensuring that these arrangements are not about siding with one power against another. These ASEAN states have done so by forging partnerships in an inclusive but selective manner, forging closer partnerships in selective domains with different powers depending on their relative convergence of interests.

Indonesia, for instance, chooses to expand economic and strategic cooperation with China including through participation in Belt and Road Initiative projects, military exercises and high-level dialogues, while continuing to further develop its longstanding ties with the United States and other Western partners. Like other ASEAN states that have benefited from the accelerating China Plus One approach to investment, Indonesia has been cautious in offsetting the risks of being entrapped into any exclusive strategic bloc or supply chains by insisting on an open, inclusive diversification strategy.

Such a pattern of alignment choices may be more fragmented, less coherent and therefore less effective than a full-fledged alliance. But in the absence of a clear-cut threat, such an approach is more desirable because it allows states to maximise other goals like prosperity and autonomy while still keeping their security options open. Not putting all one’s eggs in the US-led alliance basket also enables regional states to hedge against the risk of abandonment, especially in the shadow of the possible return of former US president Donald Trump to the White House.

Hedging may not last forever and carries its own drawbacks. But hedging is at present;the most logical choice;for smaller powers in Southeast Asia and elsewhere seeking;to strike an acceptable balance;vis-à-vis the impossible trinity of security, prosperity and autonomy.

• About the author: Cheng-Chwee Kuik is Professor in International Relations  at the National University of Malaysia and concurrently a non-resident scholar at Carnegie China.
• Source: This article was published at East Asia Forum