India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

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SRajesh
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by SRajesh »

Krita wrote:
Vayutuvan wrote: By Burundi you mean Uganda, right?
I was talking about the Burundian in the article.
Idi Amin (made popular among Indian kids by Pustak Mahal's crazy despots) was not alone in his racism. Most African despots were racist and tribal including Mugabe.
Kritaji
Part of that blame should be placed at the British Empire: Indians were taken as Indentured labourers to work on the farms who after toiling for long and getting their independence set up small businesses which became a success story under the British protectorate and even later. hence the Indians represented the legacy of the empire to these guys. Regardless of this fact, it still would count as racially motivated whatever may be the deep seated cause for the angst.
g.sarkar
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by g.sarkar »

Rs_singh wrote:
Krita wrote: Burundi forgot about Idi Amin, racist attacks led by blacks against Indians.
Blacks are as racist as the whites based on violent crimes committed on their rival tribes and outsiders in Africa. The tribes used to kill babies of rival tribes by throwing them against the wall.
Entitled pos.
I was surprised to see 2 article on cnn front page specifically targeting Indian Americans. One is quoted above and the other was about Bollywood brown facing. Can’t find the link to the second one now. What’s more (un) surprising is that the author in both cases were PIOs.
It is here:
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/india ... index.html
Gautam
Vayutuvan
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Vayutuvan »

@Krita ji I have to look up about Burundi etc. sorry wonlee.
Aldonkar
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Aldonkar »

Krita wrote:
Vayutuvan wrote: By Burundi you mean Uganda, right?
I was talking about the Burundian in the article.
Idi Amin (made popular among Indian kids by Pustak Mahal's crazy despots) was not alone in his racism. Most African despots were racist and tribal including Mugabe.
I am of Indian Origin born in Kenya. Kenya (as well as Uganda and Tanganyika ) had a Indian community of about 150,000 at the time of Independence (1962). The president, Jomo Kenyatta, progressively squeezed the Indian community (Gujratis, Punjabi Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus, and Goans) while accumulating great wealth, including five large farms which the Government had bought off White farmers to distribute to landless Africans. He had Pio Gama Pinto, A Goan communist, who had supported independence and been detained by the British, assassinated when he complained about his corruption. The Kenya government made it difficult for the Indians to become citizens and retain their businesses and replaced those working in the Civil Service with Africans. Today, Indians are almost invisible in Nairobi though I am told that many Khojas remain in business with African partners. The Indian community emigrated to the UK, Canada, US and Australia and many of the older ones returned to India or Pakistan. Note that Asian in Africa at that time were always from the subcontinent and the Swahili word for them was Muhindi (singular) or Wahindi (plural). Even the Muslims who traced their origin to what became Pakistan were Wahindi, as the term was allocated long before Pakistan existed.

The fate of the Indian community in Uganda you already know though there are interesting stories about whprecipitated Amins wrath. The Indians in Tanganyika (later Tanzania) suffered a similar fate to those in Kenya with less government corruption.
Vayutuvan
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Vayutuvan »

@Krita ji and @Aldonkar ji

Thanks. I knew that there was a very big contingent of PIOs in Kenya and was always under the impression that they are doing well. Kenyatta was supposed to be the modernizer of Kenya, sort of Nehru of Kenya. Never knew this dark side.
Cain Marko
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Cain Marko »

Krita wrote:
Vayutuvan wrote: By Burundi you mean Uganda, right?
I was talking about the Burundian in the article.
Idi Amin (made popular among Indian kids by Pustak Mahal's crazy despots) was not alone in his racism. Most African despots were racist and tribal including Mugabe.
One rather high profile author who was an Indian refugee from Uganda is Irshad Manji, definitely worth a read.
Vayutuvan
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Vayutuvan »

Isn't Mira Nair from Uganda? Her movie "Mississippi Masala" is quite good.
I always wanted to visit Zanzibar and Kenya after reading M. M. Kaye's books - Death in Zanzibar and Death in Kenya - respectively.

(Sorry for the OT)
Last edited by Vayutuvan on 12 Jul 2020 07:04, edited 1 time in total.
darshan
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by darshan »

Lot of Gujarati motel owners from 70s and 80s are from Africa that had escaped black butchers. Lot of my extended family members are married into this closely knit group of people. Even most of their kids marry within this close group scattered around US/UK.
Manish_Sharma
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Manish_Sharma »

America Must Prepare for the Coming Chinese Empire

The last thing American policymakers or strategists should assume is that somehow Americans are superior to the Chinese.
by Robert D. Kaplan
BEFORE ONE can outline a grand strategy for the United States, one has to be able to understand the world in which America operates. That may sound simple, but a bane of Washington is the assumption of knowledge where little actually exists. Big ideas and schemes are worthless unless one is aware of the ground-level reality of several continents, and is able to fit them into a pattern, based not on America’s own historical experience, but also on the historical experience of others. Therefore, I seek to approach grand strategy not from the viewpoint of Washington, but of the world; and not as a political scientist or academic, but as a journalist with more than three decades of experience as a reporter around the globe.

After covering the Third World during the Cold War and its aftershocks which continue to the present, I have concluded that, despite the claims of post-colonial studies courses prevalent on university campuses, we still inhabit (in functional terms, that is) an imperial world. Empire in some form or another is eternal, even if European colonies of the early-modern and modern eras are gone. Thus, the issue becomes: what are the contours of the current imperial age that affect grand strategy for the United States? And once those contours are delineated, what should be America’s grand strategy in response? I will endeavor to answer both questions.

Empire, or its great power equivalent, requires the impression of permanence: the idea, embedded in the minds of local inhabitants, that the imperial authorities will always be there, compelling acquiescence to their rule and influence. Wherever I traveled in Africa, the Middle East and Asia during the Cold War, American and Soviet influence was seen as permanent; unquestioned for all time, however arrogant and overbearing it might have been. Whatever the facts, that was the perception. And after the Soviet Union collapsed, American influence continued to be seen for a time as equally permanent. Make no mistake: America, since the end of World War II, and continuing into the second decade of the twenty-first century, was an empire in all but name.

That is no longer the case. European and Asian allies are now, with good reason, questioning America’s constancy. New generations of American leaders, to judge from university liberal arts curriculums, are no longer being educated to take pride in their country’s past and traditions. Free trade or some equivalent, upon which liberal maritime empires have often rested, is being abandoned. The decline of the State Department, ongoing since the end of the Cold War, is hollowing out a primary tool of American power. Power is not only economic and military: it is moral. And I don’t mean humanitarian, as necessary as humanitarianism is for the American brand. But in this case, I mean something harder: the fidelity of our word in the minds of allies. And that predictability is gone.

Meanwhile, as one imperium-of-sorts declines, another takes its place.


China is not the challenge we face: rather, the challenge is the new Chinese empire. It is an empire that stretches from the arable cradle of the ethnic Han core westward across Muslim China and Central Asia to Iran; and from the South China Sea, across the Indian Ocean, up the Suez Canal, to the eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic Sea. It is an empire based on roads, railways, energy pipelines and container ports whose pathways by land echo those of the Tang and Yuan dynasties of the Middle Ages, and by sea echo the Ming dynasty of the late Middle Ages and early-modern period. Because China is in the process of building the greatest land-based navy in history, the heart of this new empire will be the Indian Ocean, which is the global energy interstate, connecting the hydrocarbon fields of the Middle East with the middle-class conurbations of East Asia.

This new Indian Ocean empire has to be seen to be believed. A decade ago, I spent several years visiting these Chinese ports in the making, at a time when few in the West were paying attention. I traveled to Gwadar in the bleak desert of Baluchistan, technically part of Pakistan but close to the Persian Gulf. There, I saw a state-of-the-art port complex rising sheer above a traditional village. (The Chinese are now contemplating a naval base in nearby Jawani, which would allow them to overwatch the Strait of Hormuz.) In Hambantota, in Sri Lanka, I witnessed hundreds of Chinese laborers literally moving the coast itself further inland, as armies of dump trucks carried soil away. While America’s bridges and railways languish, it is a great moment in history to be a Chinese civil engineer. China has gone from building these ports, to having others manage them, and then finally to managing them themselves. It has all been part of a process that recalls the early days of the British and Dutch East India companies in the same waters.


Newspaper reports talk of some of these projects being stalled or mired in debt. That is a traditionally capitalist way to look at it. From a mercantile and imperialist point of view, these projects make perfect sense. In a way, the money never really leaves China: a Chinese state bank lends the money for a port project in a foreign country, which then employs Chinese state workers, which utilize a Chinese logistics company, and so on.

Geography is still paramount. And because the Indian Ocean is connected to the South China Sea through the Malacca, Sunda and Lombok straits, Chinese domination of the South China Sea is crucial to Beijing. China is not a rogue state, and China’s naval activities in the South China Sea make perfect sense given its geopolitical and, yes, its imperial imperatives. The South China Sea not only further unlocks the Indian Ocean for China, but it further softens up Taiwan and grants the Chinese navy greater access to the wider Pacific.

The South China Sea represents one geographical frontier of the Greater Indian Ocean world; the Middle East and the Horn of Africa represent the other. The late Zbigniew Brzezinski once wisely said in conversation that hundreds of millions of Muslims do not yearn for democracy as much as they yearn for dignity and justice, things which are not necessarily synonymous with elections. The Arab Spring was not about democracy: rather, it was simply a crisis in central authority. The fact that sterile and corrupt authoritarian systems were being rejected did not at all mean these societies were institutionally ready for parliamentary systems: witness Libya, Yemen and Syria. As for Iraq, it proved that beneath the carapace of tyranny lay not the capacity for democracy but an anarchic void. The regimes of Morocco, Jordan and Oman provide stability, legitimacy, and a measure of the justice and dignity that Brzezinski spoke of, precisely because they are traditional monarchies, with only the threadbare trappings of democracy. Tunisia’s democracy is still fragile, and the further one travels away from the capital into the western and southern reaches of the country, close to the Libyan and Algerian borders, the more fragile it becomes.

This is a world tailor-made for the Chinese, who do not deliver moral lectures about the type of government a state should have but do provide an engine for economic development. To wit, globalization is much about container shipping: an economic activity that the Chinese have mastered. The Chinese military base in Djibouti is the security hub in a wheel of ports extending eastward to Gwadar in Pakistan, southward to Bagamoyo in Tanzania, and northwestward to Piraeus in Greece, all of which, in turn, help anchor Chinese trade and investments throughout the Middle East, East Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Djibouti is a virtual dictatorship, Pakistan is in reality an army-run state, Tanzania is increasingly authoritarian and Greece is a badly institutionalized democracy that is increasingly opening up to China. In significant measure, between Europe and the Far East, this is the world as it really exists in Afro-Eurasia. The Chinese empire, unburdened by the missionary impulse long prevalent in American foreign policy, is well suited for it.

MORE TO the point, when it comes to China, we are dealing with a unique and very formidable cultural organism. The American foreign policy elite does not like to talk about culture since culture cannot be quantified, and in this age of extreme personal sensitivity, what cannot be quantified or substantiated by a footnote is potentially radioactive. But without a discussion of culture and geography, there is simply no hope of understanding foreign affairs. Indeed, culture is nothing less than the sum total of a large group of people’s experience inhabiting the same geographical landscape for hundreds or thousands of years.

Anyone who travels in China, or even observes it closely, realizes something that the business community intuitively grasps better than the policy community: the reason there is little or no separation between the public and private domains in China is not only because the country is a dictatorship, but because there is a greater cohesion of values and goals among Chinese compared to those among Americans. In China, you are inside a traditional mental value system. In that system, all areas of national activity—commercial, cyber, military, political, technological, educational—work fluently toward the same ends, so that computer hacking, espionage, port building and expansion, the movement of navy and fishing fleets, and so on all appear coordinated. And within that system, Confucianism still lends a respect for hierarchy and authority among individual Chinese, whereas American culture is increasingly about the dismantling of authority in favor of devotion to the individual. Confucian societies worship old people; Western societies worship young people. One should never forget these lines from Solzhenitsyn: “Idolized children despise their parents, and when they get a bit older they bully their countrymen. Tribes with an ancestor cult have endured for centuries. No tribe would survive long with a youth cult.”

Chinese are educated in national pride; increasingly the opposite of what goes on in our own schools and universities. And Chinese are extraordinarily efficient, with a manic attention to detail. Individuals are certainly more concrete than the mass. But that does not mean national traits simply do not exist. I have flown around China on domestic airlines with greater ease and comfort than I could ever imagine flying around America at its airports. And that is to say nothing about China’s bullet trains.

Of course, there are all sorts of political and social tensions inside China. And the unrest among the middle classes we see today in Brazil and the rest of Latin America could well be a forerunner to what we will see in China in the 2020s, undermining Belt and Road and the whole Chinese imperial system altogether. China’s over-leveraged economy may well be headed for a hard, rather than a soft, landing, with all the attendant domestic upheaval which that entails. I have real doubts about the sustainability of the Chinese political and economic model. But the last thing American policymakers or strategists should assume is that somehow we are superior to the Chinese, or worse: that somehow we have a destiny that they do not.

WE HAVE entered a protracted struggle with China, which hopefully will not be violent at certain junctures. And it may become more dangerous precisely because China could weaken internally due to economic upheavals, causing its leaders to dial up nationalism as a default option. It will be a struggle (or war) of integration rather than of separation. Throughout the human past, wars have seen an army from one place and an army from another place meet somewhere in the middle to give battle. However, in the cyber age, we are all operating inside the same operating environment, so that computer networks can attack each other without armies ever meeting or even blood being shed. The Russian attempt to influence our politics is an example of war by integration, which could not have existed even two decades ago. The information age has added to the possibilities for warfare rather than subtracted from it. The enemy is only a click away, rather than hundreds of miles away. And because weapons systems require guidance from satellites, outer space is now a domain for warfare, just as the seas became once the Portuguese and Spanish had begun the Age of Exploration. Every age of warfare has its own characteristics. Increasingly, warfare has become less physical and more mental: the more obsessively driven the culture, the better suited it will be for mid-twenty-first-century cyber warfare. If that seems offensive to the reader, remember that the future lies inside the silences—inside the things we are most uncomfortable talking about.

In functional and historical terms, this will be an imperial struggle, though our elites both inside and outside government will forbid use of the term. The Chinese will have an advantage in this type of competition as they have a greater tradition in empire building than we do, and they are not ashamed of it as we have become. They openly hark back to their former dynasties and empires to justify what they are doing; whereas our elites can hark back less and less to our own past. Westward expansion, rather than the heroic saga portrayed by mid-twentieth-century American historians, is now often taught as a tale of genocide against the indigenous population and nothing more—even though without conquering the West, we never would have had the geopolitical and economic capacity to win World War I, World War II and the Cold War.

Moreover, the Chinese have demonstrated an ability to quickly adapt, which is the key to Darwinian evolution: the continual changes that they are making to their Belt and Road model are an example of this.


The Chinese also have more capable leadership than we do.

Undeniably, our post-Cold War presidents have been dramatically inferior to our Cold War presidents in terms of thinking strategically about foreign affairs. Bill Clinton was not altogether serious about foreign policy, especially at the beginning of his presidency; George W. Bush was in significant measure a failure at it; Barack Obama too often seemed to apologize for American power; and Donald Trump is frankly unsuited for high office in the first place. Compare them to Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and the elder Bush. Compare, too, our post-Cold War presidents to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Xi is disciplined, strategically minded, unashamed of projecting power, an engineer by training, with living experience in the provinces, and perhaps, most importantly, someone with a deep sense of the tragic, as his family was a victim of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This is a man of virtu, in the classical Machiavellian sense. One could go further and say that there is not only a crisis in American leadership but in Western leadership in general. The truly formidable, dynamic leaders, whatever their moral values, are more likely to be found outside the United States and Europe. Witness, in addition to Xi, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. They have all grasped the art of power; they are constantly willing to take risks, and they are in office not only out of personal ambition but because they actually want to get certain things done.


Thus, the competition between the United States and China will coincide with a political-cultural crisis of the West against a resurgent East.

We have truly entered an American-Chinese bipolar struggle. But it is a bipolar struggle with an asterisk: the asterisk being Russia, which can always inflict consequential damage on the United States. Yet, whereas the Russians appear to our media as classic bad guys, the Chinese are more opaque and business-like, so the gravity of our competition with Beijing is still insufficiently appreciated by our media.

TRULY, THE sense of invulnerability the United States felt at the end of the Cold War and the onset of globalization is gone. Initially, post-Cold War globalization meant a Westernization of the world to go along with the adoption of Western-style management practices and America’s so-called unipolar moment. Now that this moment has passed, and with middle classes enlarging throughout the developing world—while different shades of authoritarianism compete with democracy—globalization is becoming more multicultural, with the East assuming an equal position, helped also by demographic trends. In this competition, the United States is wrong to promote democracy per se. Instead, it should promote civil society whether democratic or of the enlightened authoritarian mode. (Witness the liberalizing yet authoritarian monarchies of Morocco, Jordan and Oman. And I could give examples beyond the Middle East.) Hybrid regimes of an enlightened authoritarian mode have been more of a norm throughout history than democracy has been. Moreover, it has been my clear experience that people in Africa and the Middle East care first about basic order and physical and economic protection before they care about political freedoms. As the late liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes: “Men who live in conditions where there is not sufficient food, warmth, shelter, and the minimum degree of security can scarcely be expected to concern themselves with freedom of contract or of the press.”

Obviously there exists a hierarchy of needs, and meaningful improvement in people’s lives as a first priority should demand flexibility on our part—or else it will be harder to compete with the Chinese. The expansion of middle classes worldwide will by itself lead to greater calls for democracy: for as people’s material lives improve they will increasingly demand more political freedoms anyway. We do not need to force the process. If we do, it will be we who are the ones being ideological; not the Chinese, who have the civilizational confidence and serenity to accept political systems as they already are.

Yet, even at our worst, our political system is open and capable of change in the way that China, and that other great autocratic power, Russia, are not. A world in which the United States is the dominant power will be a more humane world of more personal freedoms than a world led by China.

I concentrate on China in this essay because China constitutes a much stronger economy, a much more institutionalized political system, and a more formidable twenty-first-century cultural genius than Russia. Therefore, China should be the yardstick or pacing power by which our diplomatic, security and defense establishments measures themselves: merely by competing with China we will make our own institutions stronger. Such competition is all that might be left to jolt our bureaucracies out of their ongoing decrepitude and decline. Indeed, the profusion of travel orders, security clearance paperwork, unnecessary receipts, and so forth, even as the hacking of our systems continues, are all ways in which we deliberately deceive and defeat ourselves. Paperwork arises out of the lack of trust. The more paperwork, the less trust that exists within a bureaucracy. The Pentagon is a prime example of this. We should always remember that there is no regulation or procedure to instill basic common sense.

September 11, 2001 might have provided the jolt that we desperately needed. But the younger Bush administration misused it. And even if it had not, 9/11, as significant as it was, was a one-time security event that cannot compete with a decades-long competition with China.

COMPETITION WITH China can teach us about priorities, which are the mainstays of grand strategy.

One priority should be to effectively get out of the Middle East. Every extra day that the United States is diverted and bogged down in the Middle East with significant numbers of ground troops helps China in the Indo-Pacific and Europe even, where China is working to establish powerful commercial shipping footholds in places like Trieste on Italy’s Adriatic shore and Duisburg in riverine Germany; to say nothing about promoting its 5G digital network. I don’t mean to say that we should pull all our forces out of the Middle East tomorrow. I mean that our goal should be to reduce our military footprint as quickly as practically possible, whenever and wherever possible.

For example, the United States has had combat troops in Afghanistan for almost two decades with no demonstrable result. The future of Afghanistan will be decided by competing ethnic alliances within that country, and Indians and Iranians squaring off against Chinese and Pakistanis. The Indians and Iranians will build an energy and transport corridor from Chah Bahar in southeastern Iran north through western Afghanistan into former Soviet Central Asia. The Chinese and Pakistanis will try to build another such corridor from Gwadar in southwestern Pakistan north, parallel with the Afghan border, to Kashgar in western China. In particular, Pakistan, which will always require Afghanistan as a rear base against India, must, therefore, struggle against India in Afghanistan. India, whose own imperial past encompasses the eastern half of Afghanistan, will do everything possible to thwart Pakistan there. Russia, which lies just to the north of Afghanistan, will also play a role because of its interest in smothering radical Islam. A great game is about to ensue in Afghanistan in which the United States will play absolutely no part, regardless of how much blood it has shed there, because it lacks a geographical basis for it, and therefore has little or no national interest at stake.

All we can do is help stabilize Afghanistan so that the Chinese and others can more safely continue to establish mining and other operations in the country. In any case, building a strong central government in Afghanistan may prove chimerical since none has ever existed in Kabul. The city has traditionally functioned as a central point of arbitration for the various warlords and tribal leaders that have exercised effective control in southern Central Asia. Covering the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, I saw vividly how the Soviets lost because the mujahidin enemy, a diverse collection of tribal-based groups which viciously distrusted each other, provided the Soviets with no useful point of attack. Afghanistan’s very disorganization defeated the Soviets, just as it has been defeating us.


Iran, of course, so populous and well-educated, and fronting not one but two hydrocarbon-rich zones (the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea), is the demographic, economic and cultural organizing principle of both the Middle East and Central Asia. But what happens inside Iran will be internally driven. Iranians have a civilizational sense of themselves equal to that of the Indians, Chinese and Japanese. Even dramatic American diplomatic actions, like signing a nuclear deal with it, and later abrogating that same deal, can have only a marginal effect on Iran’s confoundedly-complex domestic politics in a country of over eighty million people. Despite periodic street demonstrations which will continue, the very institutionalized strength of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and other regime organizations make Iran perhaps the most stable big state in the Muslim Middle East.

As for Iraq, the inching forward of political stability there, however messy and fragile, has had relatively little to do with what the United States has done; or has not done. In fact, improvement in the Iraqi political situation has, for the most part, occurred despite American actions; not because of them. One American president destabilized Iraq by toppling its totalitarian ruler. The next American president further destabilized it by suddenly withdrawing American troops. Thus, from the anarchy of Iraq after Saddam Hussein came for a time the tyranny of the Islamic State. It was the experience of living under the Islamic State that convinced many Sunnis that they were better off allying with Shiites than with radicals of their own sect. It is this fact that has given Iraq some measure of hope and stability. True, American special operations forces helped a moderate Shiite leader defeat the Islamic State. But this moderate Shiite leader was subsequently defeated at the polls. In short, Iraq will determine its own destiny, influenced by Iran, the great power next door. American influence will remain marginal, whether or not we have any troops there. I say this as someone who initially supported the invasion of Iraq, which I have come to bitterly regret.


As for Syria, Bashar al-Assad has reconsolidated power in the only part of Syria that ultimately counts: its main population centers. Israel, buttressed by massive American military and economic aid, will be able to deal with the Iranian presence in Syria on its own. If the Russians want to get bogged down in Syria for the sake of their decadeslong investment in the Assad family regime, good luck to them. And by the way, Israel, unlike the United States, has a workmanlike, albeit problematic, relationship with Russia which it can employ as a go-between with Iran. The United States benefits very little by diverting time and resources to Syria.

The United States needs to end its adventures in the Middle East begun immediately after 9/11. Of course, the Chinese hope we never leave the Middle East. For if we deliberately defeat ourselves by remaining militarily engaged in the Middle East, it will only ease China’s path to global supremacy. Indeed, China would like nothing better than a war between the United States and Iran. China is already Iran’s largest trading partner and is pouring tens of billions of dollars into port, canal, and other development projects in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, proving how America’s military involvements in the region have gotten it virtually nowhere.

NO PLACE in the Muslim Middle East can serve as a litmus test of how we are doing vis-à-vis China the way that India and Taiwan can. They are the pivots that will go a long way to determining the strength of the American position in the Indo-Pacific: the first-among-equals when it comes to global strategic geography.

India is not a formal American ally and should not become one. India is too proud and too geographically close to China for that to be in its interest. But India, merely on account of its growing demographic, economic and military heft, along with its location dominating the Indian Ocean, acts as a natural balancer to China. Therefore, we should do everything we can to enable the growth of Indian power, without ever even mentioning a formal alliance with it. An increasingly strong India that gets along with China while never moving into China’s orbit—and is informally aligned with the United States—will be a sign that China is contained.

Taiwan has been a model ally, a stable and vibrant democracy, and one of the world’s most prosperous, efficient economies. It is a successful poster child for the liberal world order that the United States has built and guaranteed in Asia and Europe since World War II. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger opened relations with China, but did so without endangering Taiwan. Therefore, if it ever became clear that the United States was both unable and unwilling to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese military attack on the island—or that an authoritarian China had consolidated its grip on Taiwan without the need of such an attack—then it would signal the end of American strategic dominance in East Asia. Countries from Japan in the north to Australia in the south would have no choice but to seek compromising security assurances from China in the event of such an eclipse of American power. This would be an insidious process often outside the strictures of the news headlines, but one day we would all wake up and realize that Asia has been partly Finlandized and the world had changed. Chinese domination of Taiwan would also, by the way, virtually confirm China’s effective domination of the South China Sea, which, together, with its port building activities to the east and west of India, would help give the Chinese navy unimpeded access to two oceans.

Grand strategy is about recognizing what is important and what is not important. I am arguing that, given our goals, India and Taiwan are ultimately more significant than places like Syria and Afghanistan. (Regarding Russia, because it is not almost at war with China as it was when the Nixon administration played the two communist regimes off against each other, moving closer to Russia now achieves little, though stabilizing our bilateral relationship is in our interest.)

WHEREAS INDIA and Taiwan are greatly affected by American sea power, the desert immensities of the Middle East are much less so. This is not an accident, but indicates something crucial. In a century when we will try to stay out of debilitating land conflicts that require large armies, we are better off relying on our navy which can project power without dragging us into bloody wars nearly as much. It is the U.S. Navy that will counter Chinese power along the semi-circle of the navigable Eurasian rimland, from the eastern Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan. And with less of a chance of drifting into costly military conflicts, we will have a better possibility of healing and invigorating our democracy at home. This is what grand strategy is fundamentally about.

Grand strategy is not about what we should do abroad. It is about what we should do abroad consistent with our economic and social condition at home.

Now, keep in mind my own, three-year rule. No matter how necessary and inspiring a military conflict, the American public will only give policymakers three years to settle it. America’s involvement in World War I lasted little more than eighteen months. In World War II, United States troops did not arrive in the Eastern Hemisphere until 1942, and by the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 there was public clamoring to end the Pacific war (as the war in Europe had already ended). The Korean War began in 1950 and by 1952 was unpopular, with Eisenhower forced to end it in 1953. American troops landed in large numbers in Vietnam in 1965 and the public turned against that war in 1968. The Iraq War was launched in 2003 and the public turned against it in 2006. We should aim never to test this three-year rule again. (In Afghanistan, we were able to break the rule only because we brought casualties down dramatically.) That means keeping a prolonged rivalry with China nonviolent in terms of blood-cost. We should engage on a number of fronts: cyber, economic, naval, diplomatic and so on, without open warfare. This can be achieved by not making a fetish out of the South China Sea. The U.S.-China relationship is too wide-ranging and organic to be reduced to a military dispute about one region. Military, trade and other areas of contention should not be kept in silos, since they can indeed interact.

To repeat, grand strategy for the United States in the twenty-first century is, in the end, about restraining from violence in order to concentrate on the home front, and yet compete with China at the same time: which, in turn, means recognizing certain geographical imperatives. (Of course, there is also the realm of ideas: so that it is tragic that President Trump abrogated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which as a free-trading alliance would have given us a big idea to compete with Belt and Road.)

For some states and empires, which are victims of geography rather than blessed by it—Byzantium, Habsburg Austria—grand strategy is a necessity for survival. Contrarily, America’s geographical blessings have meant it can incur one disaster after another without paying a commensurate price. But as technology shrinks distance, enmeshing our continental half-island deeper into an unstable world, the United States finally becomes truly vulnerable: meaning it can no longer afford heroic delusions.


Consider: during the Cold War we didn’t need to worry about grand strategy because we already had one. It was called containment. George Kennan eschewed the hot-headed approach of those in the late-1940s and early-1950s who believed that it was possible to defeat the Soviet Union by subversion, special operations forces and other such desperate measures. Kennan understood that since Soviet Communism was fundamentally flawed as a system of governance, it would eventually falter and all we had to do was outlast it (just as we are likely to outlast Communist China if only we are patient). Thus, blessed by geography for so long, and blessed by a wise and temperate grand strategy for over four decades, we lost the art of thinking critically about ourselves, which, once again, is also what grand strategy is ultimately about.

Unable to look ourselves in the mirror and see our flaws and limitations, we concentrated too much on our military, and invaded or intervened in one Muslim country after another in the 2000s and achieved nothing as a result. Intervening in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was successful in stopping a war, but the creation of ethnic cantons that followed did not lay a groundwork for the future, and even if it had done so, that would not have risen to the level of grand strategy given Yugoslavia’s secondary importance. So we are starting from scratch.


Starting from scratch means realizing that however inspiring the dreams of our elite are, those dreams will be stillborn if not grounded in both granular, local realities around the world and widespread public support at home that spans party lines—and that must be sustained over the long-term. We must be respectful of local realities, whether in Wyoming or Afghanistan.

Robert D. Kaplan is a managing director for global macro at Eurasia Group. His most recent book is The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/am ... pire-63102
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by V_Raman »

There are 2 items remaining to cement this position
NSG membership
Permanent member of UNSC - P6
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Jarita »

vijayk wrote:
Ambar wrote:Looks like CNN's weekly anti-India news quota has been met early this week -

Indians are being held up as a model minority. That's not helping the Black Lives Matter movement


https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/world/in ... index.html
Target Whites ... DONE
Move to Indians/Hindus .. IN PROCESS

Next Target - JEWS
They will never be targeted.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by kirpalbasra »

That is never going to happen any time soon , Chins will block it every way. At moment they are really pissed off with India .
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Jarita »

Zynda wrote:The current reading per news reports is that Biden has a comfortable lead over Trump and could be elected as POTUS come Nov 2020. I am stretching CT here but I think it is possible that Nidhi Razdan might be going to Harvard to advise new GOTUS on certain matters about current Indian Administration & current Indian thinking etc. She possibly may have some right insider knowledge at various levels of administration which GOTUS might use at appropriate times. She obviously is not the only subject matter expert and she would be one of many...I think she may being moved to US to prevent any sort of legal action that may be invited in India with the kind of work/content she is being contracted for. All the above is CTs ATM but I do hope I am wrong.
She would be one of many. Add to it her proximity to the Abdalas which is a family nurtured by the conglomerate. It could be advise or it could be a reward.
Remember she always had access to the interviews.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Jarita »

Dilbu wrote:Countering China's aggression: US bill seeks to train Indian fighter pilots
NEW DELHI: The United States will offer fighter jet training to India, Japan and Australia even as it plans multiple initiatives to counter China’s aggression across Asia Pacific including its standoff with India along the Line of Actual Control.

The National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) for the 2021 fiscal year starting October, which the US Senate took up on Thursday, seeks fighter jet training detachment for India, Japan and Australia in the US Pacific territory of Guam.
Further, secretary of state Mike Pompeo on Thursday said the US is moving troops from Europe and deploying them to other places in response to the Chinese threat to India and Southeast Asian nations.
Three reasons
- posturing which will lead to nothing but create the right noises amongst the so called Right Wingers
- selling maal. This is most plausible. It creates a deep impression and bias
- creating foot soldiers and allegiances beyond maal. Extremely remote
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by vera_k »

^ #4 - Ability to operate airplanes if required in a hurry. India is limited to using Russian types today.

Nehru Sought US Assistance During 1962 Indo-China War
A minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all weather fighters are essential. We have no modern radar cover in the country. The United States Air Force personnel will have to man these fighters and radar installations while our personnel are being trained
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Cain Marko »

vera_k wrote:^ #4 - Ability to operate airplanes if required in a hurry. India is limited to using Russian types today.

Nehru Sought US Assistance During 1962 Indo-China War
A minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all weather fighters are essential. We have no modern radar cover in the country. The United States Air Force personnel will have to man these fighters and radar installations while our personnel are being trained
Would have to agree....I wouldn't be surprised if some type of lease agreement was signed for this purpose. Ultimately this is what it had come to thanks to India's procurement boondoggles!
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by chetak »

ANI@ANI · Jul 16

India took extraordinary step of banning Chinese apps,incl TikTok...US shouldn't trust TikTok/other Chinese apps to protect Americans' data. Urge you to take strong action to stop CCP's sophistocated espionage campaign&protect our national security: US' Congress to US President


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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Vips »

MoU signed for India to develop strategic petroleum reserve in US.

India and the US have signed an MoU to develop a strategic petroleum reserve and the two countries are in advanced stage of discussion to store crude oil in America to increase India's stockpile, Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan said on Friday.

Pradhan co-chaired with his American counterpart Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette a virtual US-India Strategic Energy Partnership Ministerial.

"We have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to begin co-operation on strategic petroleum reserve. We are also in advanced phase of discussing of storing crude oil in US strategic reserve to increase India's strategic oil stockpile," Pradhan told reporters in a joint telephonic press conference. Responding to a question, the minister said the memorandum on cooperation in the field of strategic petroleum reserve was based on a proposal from the US after the recent historic drop in oil prices during coronavirus pandemic.

Following the historic drop in global crude oil process, the Indian government actively considered increasing its oil stockpile both inside the country and also overseas in countries like the US, he said. Very soon the government will be coming out with a concrete road map and proposal on how it can be unfolded, Pradhan said, adding that this would also include that New Delhi can invest in an American storage facility for India's requirement.

Co-operation in Strategic Petroleum Reserves Programme will further strengthen India's energy security and pave the way for greater US investments and collaborations in India's future SPR programmes, the minister said.

Brouillette said the MoU signed Friday will establish the process of moving forward. "What we would like to do is to begin the process of sharing with India, the establishment of a strategic reserve. And then accordingly, how does our SPR or Strategic Petroleum Reserve work here?" he said.

"It could ultimately look similar to what we've done with Australia, but there's no predetermined outcome as to where this conversation is going to grow into. We're excited to begin the conversation with India. We do think it's important for both of our nations" said the US Energy Secretary in response to a question.

The State Department said that the MoU on Strategic Petroleum Reserve will ensure a consistent energy supply, protects national security, and promote regional and global stability.

"The US-India Strategic Energy Partnership works to support sustainable energy development, in the 21st century and beyond. We collaborate on renewable energy, smart grids, and unconventional & clean energy sources research for the benefit of our people, now and in the future," South and Central Asia Bureau of the State Department said in a tweet.

Substantive wide-ranging conversation on the different pillars of India-US energy partnership took place during the India US Strategic Energy Partnership Ministerial, said India's Ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu.

Minister Pradhan said that during the meeting, he expressed his keenness to work closely with the US government to realise the "full potential of our Strategic Energy Partnership and also invited the US Government and companies to join our initiatives under the Atmanirbhar Mission to further strengthen the strategic energy partnership".

Asserting that India-US relationship has witnessed significant growth and expansion in the last few years, especially through the energy component, the minister said that the Strategic Energy Partnership, was now recognised as a key constituent of this bilateral engagement.

"Our meeting today reflects both our Govt's commitment in further invigorating this partnership. It is, indeed, welcome that despite the challenges of the COVID-19 situation, we are committed to strengthen our energy linkages and work together on mutually-aligned priorities," he said.

India and the United States have made rapid strides in increasing bilateral hydrocarbon trade during the last three years, he said."Our bilateral hydrocarbons trade has touched USD 9.2 billion during 2019-20, a 93 per cent increase when compared to 2017-18 figures," Pradhan said.

The Indian government is committed to transform India into a gas-based economy and universalise power supply to all households, he said."Teams from both our countries are working to develop high-efficiency technologies with low to zero emissions through carbon capture, utilisation and storage," he said.

Established in April 2018 at the direction of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, recognising the strategic importance of energy to the US-India bilateral relationship, the SEP builds upon the two countries longstanding energy partnership and sets the stage for meaningful engagements through robust government-to-government cooperation and industry engagement
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Lisa »

Aldonkar wrote:
Krita wrote: I was talking about the Burundian in the article.
Idi Amin (made popular among Indian kids by Pustak Mahal's crazy despots) was not alone in his racism. Most African despots were racist and tribal including Mugabe.
I am of Indian Origin born in Kenya. Kenya (as well as Uganda and Tanganyika ) had a Indian community of about 150,000 at the time of Independence (1962). The president, Jomo Kenyatta, progressively squeezed the Indian community (Gujratis, Punjabi Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus, and Goans) while accumulating great wealth, including five large farms which the Government had bought off White farmers to distribute to landless Africans. He had Pio Gama Pinto, A Goan communist, who had supported independence and been detained by the British, assassinated when he complained about his corruption. The Kenya government made it difficult for the Indians to become citizens and retain their businesses and replaced those working in the Civil Service with Africans. Today, Indians are almost invisible in Nairobi though I am told that many Khojas remain in business with African partners. The Indian community emigrated to the UK, Canada, US and Australia and many of the older ones returned to India or Pakistan. Note that Asian in Africa at that time were always from the subcontinent and the Swahili word for them was Muhindi (singular) or Wahindi (plural). Even the Muslims who traced their origin to what became Pakistan were Wahindi, as the term was allocated long before Pakistan existed.

The fate of the Indian community in Uganda you already know though there are interesting stories about whprecipitated Amins wrath. The Indians in Tanganyika (later Tanzania) suffered a similar fate to those in Kenya with less government corruption.
We are heading in a direction that is probably OTT for this thread but posting a reply here as the original is here.

I am also of Indian origin and born in Kenya and disagree with a lot of what has been said above. There was absolutely NO squeeze on any of the Asian community in Kenya. The option was very straight forward, surrender your British nationality, become a Kenyan citizen and carry on as normal or retain your British passport and leave Kenya. Many Indians did not trust the regime and decided to move and many elected to obtain Kenyan nationality and continue as before. There was NO bar on how an Indian could become a citizen. Pay a small bribe and all was possible.

The majority of the Indians that obtained Kenyan nationality have thrived and continue to live lives that are opulent at least. A list of the richest Kenyans bears testimony to this fact. 6 of the top 20 are Indians.

https://businesstoday.co.ke/richest-ken ... anthropic/

Let’s add to this list, the deputy Attorney General was an Indian, 3 of the Assistant Commissioners in the Police were Indians and there was also a Sikh who was a Brigadier in the Army.

With respect to Kenyatta, his personal aide in all matters legal was Judge Chanan Singh (a gem of a man, with whom we have shared more than one meal - his personal library was so extensive that it was seized for the Kenyan Government as a national treasure when he passed away) whose opinion exceeded that of Charles Njonjo who was his employer by virtue of being the Attorney General! Yes Kenyatta was corrupt but show me an African leader (other than Nyerere) who was not.

With regards to Pio Gama Pinto assassination, it was nothing to do with him being an Indian. He was simply a communist who did not know where to draw the line. James Kiriuki, Tom Mboya, Robert Ouko, George Muchai were also assassinated. They weren’t Indians. These are matters related to power, plain and simple. One should know ones place in African politics.

As a community we hosted may "Indians" whilst we were there. The 2 that remain in my mind were Atal Bihari Vajpayee who put up at NGS’ s house and General Jagjit Singh Aurora who can home for breakfast whilst staying at S-----’s house down the road from us. The thrill of being introduced to the General remain with me to this day and the memory of that breakfast clouds every discussion of 1971 as is seems so personal a matter as I have met the man!

Much as we have emigrated from there for personal reasons we as a family as with many if not all of our friends continue to be deeply embedded with all that is Kenyan Indian that includes all our social lives and economic relationships.

I am sorry for those for whom it did not work out and felt that it would be unfair if their reflection was the only opinion on this matter. Thus this response.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by KL Dubey »

^^Thanks. Agree it is OT, but very enlightening post.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Krita »

Lisa wrote:
Aldonkar wrote: .

I am sorry for those for whom it did not work out and felt that it would be unfair if their reflection was the only opinion on this matter. Thus this response.
My understanding about Uganda is based on books (never have travelled outside India). I was just pointing out the hypocrisy of the victimcard ploy of BLM.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by pankajs »

For future reference ... folks seem to forget this aspect and paint the nuclear deal a failure!

https://twitter.com/raji143/status/1284497699383828481
Raji @raji143

Lot of people seem to be thinking that the #USIndiaNuclearDeal was a "nuclear" deal but often forget that it was primarily a strategic choice that the two countries were making! #USIndiaStrategicPartnership
Added Later: https://twitter.com/donacamp/status/1284661736159580160
Donald Camp @donacamp

One of the better accounts of the negotiation of the #India-US nuclear accord is by then-Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran in his memoir "How India Sees the World." I have not seen elsewhere this inside story from a George Bush-Manmohan Singh dinner in 2008.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by darshan »

Trump considering Indian-American lawyer to head Asia Bureau of USAID
https://www.wionews.com/india-news/trum ... aid-314408

US President Donald Trump is considering an Indian American lawyer to head the Asia Bureau of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the White House said.

If confirmed, Sue Ghosh Stricklett from Maryland would become Assistant Administrator of USAID (Bureau for Asia).

Stricklett is an attorney in private practice with over 25 years of experience in national security law and foreign affairs, the White House said.

The scope of her practice includes Foreign Corrupt Practices Act compliance, intellectual property licensing and technology transfer, US dual-use and defense trade control licensing, and sanctions law enforcement.

"She has served as an Asia policy advisor to three Presidential campaigns and several major Indo-American advocacy organisations," the White House said.

Stricklett hails from Queens in New York and is a graduate of the State University of New York.

She earned her Juris Doctor from the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by darshan »

Here comes the lollipop. May be Biden should follow RaGaXi and visit some mandirs, do some puja, drop few words like Hindu Americans here and there, Ayodhya, Somnath, etc.
Biden as US president would help India get seat on UNSC: Former American diplomat
https://www.wionews.com/india-news/bide ... mat-314422

Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, if elected to power in the November elections, will help shape international bodies like the United Nations so that India get a permanent seat on the Security Council, a former top American diplomat has said.

"There's no question that under his (Biden) leadership, he would help shape international institutions like the UN to give India a (permanent) seat on the Security Council, he would fulfil its (India) status as a major defence partner," former US Ambassador to India Richard Verma said on Saturday.

Verma, Biden Unity Task Force Economic Policy advisor Sonal Shah, former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy and Centre for American Progress Action Fund CEO Neera Tanden in their address to a virtual event argued that over the past several decades, Biden has a proven track record of being the best friend of Indians and Indian-Americans, be it as a Senator from Delaware or as a vice president under the Obama administration.

"I can confidently say, there would have been no US India Civil Nuclear Deal but for Joe Biden," Verma said.

"In 2006, I remember the remarks he made where he said, 'My dream is that in 2020, the two closest nations in the world will be India and the United States. If that occurs, the world will be safer.' Think about that for a second. He made those remarks in 2006. And here we are, it's 2020. Let's make Joe Biden's dream a reality. That only becomes a reality if he becomes president," he said.

According to Dr Murthy, Biden's recognition and appreciation for immigrants and for communities like Indian-Americans is forming an incredibly important part of the backbone of the United States of America.

"This is a moment for our country when leadership matters, when values matter. When we go to the voting booth, as we think about how to build support for the candidate that will best reflect our vision and our hopes and our dreams. Let's lead with our values. Let's vote for the person who understands us," he said at the event organised jointly by the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) for Biden, the AAPI Victory Fund and South Asians for Biden.

Later in a statement, Ajay Jain Bhutoria, who is on National Finance Committee for Biden, said, "Most Indian-Americans would say without hesitation that Biden would be a better president and world leader and better for India on all counts."

"The choice is clear for voting in November 2020. The choice is even clearer for Indo Americans and South Asians. Biden is the best answer for India and Indian-Americans. The Indian community sees him as one of 'our' leaders," he said.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by achit »

Jarita wrote:
vijayk wrote:
Target Whites ... DONE
Move to Indians/Hindus .. IN PROCESS

Next Target - JEWS
They will never be targeted.
Removed due to complaint.
Last edited by achit on 22 Jul 2020 10:38, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Jarita »

This is all small fry.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by arshyam »

achit wrote:...
How is this related to India? Please don't post all kinds of stuff on this thread, there us an understanding US thread for it. Please move your post. TIA.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by achit »

arshyam wrote:
achit wrote:...
How is this related to India? Please don't post all kinds of stuff on this thread, there us an understanding US thread for it. Please move your post. TIA.
I removed my post.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Mort Walker »

darshan wrote:Here comes the lollipop. May be Biden should follow RaGaXi and visit some mandirs, do some puja, drop few words like Hindu Americans here and there, Ayodhya, Somnath, etc.
No lollipop will work until he publicly renounces his policy statement in "Joe's Vision":
In Kashmir, the Indian government should take all necessary steps to restore rights for all the people of Kashmir. Restrictions on dissent, such as preventing peaceful protests or shutting or slowing down the Internet, weaken democracy. Joe Biden has been disappointed by the measures that the government of India has taken with the implementation and aftermath of the National Register of Citizens in Assam and the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act into law. These measures are inconsistent with the country’s long tradition of secularism and with sustaining a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy.
I say 'eff you to all Indian origin people who support Jihadi Joe.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by rrao »

The Chinese and its ally , are they waiting for the US elections to be over to start a war with India? If Joe Biden comes to power will he support india the same way Trump did? Joe Biden is wooing American Muslims and is against CAA,article 370...The relations will they get reset to Obama days?
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by nvishal »

A comment on nasams and india's attempts to please the hostile west.

During the ladakh killings, india had placed an order with russia for 29k and 30mki on emergency basis. Immediately, the US threatened india with the possibility of CAATSA

When shit hits the fan, none of the american pressure tactics have any leverage over india.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by arshyam »

@achit, thanks.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Mort Walker »

rrao wrote:The Chinese and its ally , are they waiting for the US elections to be over to start a war with India? If Joe Biden comes to power will he support india the same way Trump did? Joe Biden is wooing American Muslims and is against CAA,article 370...The relations will they get reset to Obama days?
Reset to 1993 and have Islamists come out of the woodwork to lecture India and threaten sanctions.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by nachiket »

vera_k wrote:^ #4 - Ability to operate airplanes if required in a hurry. India is limited to using Russian types today.

Nehru Sought US Assistance During 1962 Indo-China War
A minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all weather fighters are essential. We have no modern radar cover in the country. The United States Air Force personnel will have to man these fighters and radar installations while our personnel are being trained
That request by Nehru would not have been stupid if he hadn't at the same time flatly refused to let the IAF actually use the combat aircraft it already had to support the ground battle. Apparently he was concerned that the Chinese would bomb Indian cities. If he had bothered to listen to the IAF he would have been cleared of his misconceptions but both he and VKK Menon had a low opinion of military officers and trusted their own (sadly non-existent) intelligence. The rest is history.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Roop »

rrao wrote:If Joe Biden comes to power will he support india the same way Trump did?
No way. Not a chance!
Joe Biden is wooing American Muslims and is against CAA,article 370
This is true of the Dems as a whole, not just Biden.

Actually, it is almost irrelevant what Biden himself thinks. The man is borderline senile, clearly incapable of meeting the high-stress requirements of the POTUS job. If he is elected, he will be a PINO (President in name only). All decisions of consequence will be made by other people and he will be handed pieces of paper to sign. So in these decisions what matters is what the Dem party brain trust decides, and they are all sympathetic to Marxists / Islamists / rioters / vandals and various other low-life characters. Look how popular Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortex, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Linda Sarsour are in the party.

We all saw what happened to the Labour Party in the UK, the same is happening to the Dems. Also, expect the same from the left-wing outlets of the US media (NYT, WaPo, and all the TV networks except Fox News. And even on Fox News, some (like anchor Chris Wallace) are openly pro-Democrat.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by Vayutuvan »

Chris Wallace is just little bit right of the center. He probably is one of the most honest reporters/anchors out there. The other is Bret Baier who took over from Brit Hume who I like as well.
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by chetak »

The folks of Thippagundanahalli, Yelahanka, Bapujinagar, Ganganahalli, Domlur, Ragigudda --all of whom have populations greater in number than the 6 US cities -- salute the peoples of Gurgaon who passed a resolution against the 6 US cities, endorse their resolution & do likewise.

The people have spoken!

but it may just be a wee bit late
You are toooooooo late. Idukki @CPIMKerala local committee has passed a resolution condemning @realDonaldTrump for support to CAA and has demanded his resignation.

the pakis and the khalistanis are wasting their money and time and also pi$$ing in the wind.

These resolutions mean j@ck$hit.

so much for the "forces of history" :mrgreen:

At this speed, by the time they get 6 more cities to "denounce", we might not need the CAA anymore....jinko India aana hoga, woh tab tak aa chuke honge

Arjun Sethi@arjunsethi81 · Jul 22

San Francisco just passed a resolution denouncing the CAA & NRC. Six U.S. cities have now condemned Modi, Amit Shah & fascism in India.
Organized Hindutva elements tried to stop the measure, but they failed. More resolutions are coming. You can't stop the forces of history.
mappunni
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by mappunni »

Not sure if this has been shared here

Secretary Pompeo's video message at the U.S. India Business Summit

pankajs
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by pankajs »

https://stratnewsglobal.com/india-u-s-s ... elligence/
India, U.S. Speed Up Key Deal On Geospatial Intelligence
This month both sides revived interest in signing BECA as soon as possible. India’s defence and external affairs ministries are said to be in consultations over the draft of the India-specific BECA agreement after Washington expressed the desire to conclude it before the U.S. Presidential elections in November.

As already reported, U.S. military satellites have provided India with detailed intelligence of Chinese PLA movement and deployments during the current standoff along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh.

The conclusion of BECA would allow India to access a range of topographical, nautical and aeronautical data, engage in subject matter expert exchanges and receive training at the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence College, those in the know point out. This agreement permits Indian military to function on high-end secured and encrypted communication equipment that are installed on American platforms obtained by Indian armed forces. These platforms include C-130 J, C-17, P-8I aircraft, and Apache and Chinook helicopters. This facilitates greater interoperability between forces and military hardware of the two countries, and also possibly with other countries that operate on U.S.-origin platforms.

The agreement would envisage reciprocal exchange of data for defence, peacekeeping or humanitarian assistance without any payment of royalties or license fees and are designed to facilitate mutual technical assistance and joint gathering of data (including hydrographic data in unchartered waters via surveys).
vera_k
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Re: India-US relations: News and Discussions IV

Post by vera_k »

chetak wrote:
Arjun Sethi@arjunsethi81 · Jul 22

San Francisco just passed a resolution denouncing the CAA & NRC. Six U.S. cities have now condemned Modi, Amit Shah & fascism in India.
Organized Hindutva elements tried to stop the measure, but they failed. More resolutions are coming. You can't stop the forces of history.
This is more because "liberals" in the USA have lost faith in democracy. They did not accept Trump's victory in 2016, and are unlikely to accept it if Trump wins again this year. They can't possibly find enough people to riot in the streets for this cause in the USA, so the resolutions are the next best option.
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