1. In either the Hudson Institution or the Council of Foreign Relations events, EAM Jaishankar said that his discussions with the Americans re: Canada was about the actual events and not the stuff that the press carries. I waited in vain for the press to pick up on that, but obviously it is not in their interests to do so. If really pushed, I can try to find that precise statement.
2. from https://youtu.be/kWdQjXzJrTY?si=raLIF0WaVGwhY_yl
Abhijit-Iyer Mitra speaking to the Hindustan Times:
…because my job involves a lot of interaction with the US government, what I find is they have a fantastic set of professionals who know what spin is, they themselves don’t take the Washington Post in New York Times seriously within the US government. Some of them read it for the food section, some of them read it for the Science and Technology section nobody actually reads it from the news, because their diplomatic cables are much more incisive – solid primary source research, it’s not a journalist who’s parachuted in for a three-year stint in Delhi and decides that they know more about usI
In response to “is the Biden Administration is better or worse than the Trump Administration for New Delhi”…there was a paper that came out in 1998 a U.S Marine Corps Colonel wrote about it - State is from uh Venus and Defenses is from Mars, you know that famous book Men Are from Mars yeah so it’s how State tends to - all foreign policy tends to be abstraction, it tends to be a lot of activity masquerading around as achievement; there is a very significant intelligence value to it but Defense hasn’t gone woke State has gone woke and a lot of the wokery that you’ll see is also being reflected in the cables back home. The cables are no longer factual there’s a lot of opinion going back in those cables and what a lot of my friends in DC tell me is that’s beginning to reflect in the way State Department views it. So it is not all hunky dory. So maybe three four five years back, it it was the fact that the Press does not reflect what the U.S government believes was true. Today that is not entirely the case and you could see that so in the meeting with Congressman Khanna.
What is this left wing virtue signaling in the Biden state department foreign policy? (Iyer-Mitra has few issues with the US Dept of Defense.)Um worse and I’ll tell you why before I would have said and this is where the problem comes about. We were always told that relations with America were institutional. People come and go but institutional relations go on forever. Mutual interests go on forever. Today America itself is so polarized and divided. An American can’t see eye to eye with an American,forget seeing eye to eye with an Indian; and in the Biden Administration especially, the kind of sort of left-wing virtue signaling that happens is far far worse than it ever was under Obama.
We now have extremely strong undercurrents against India running through the Democratic Party, it is permeating all levels of policy in America and there is only so much that a professional bureaucracy can do to fend off ideology when ideology starts wrapping itself up in righteous anger. It is always the sort of mad bishop or the mad mullah or the mad priest who wins and it’s never the voice of sanity that wins. This is why Socrates was forced to drink hemlock and I feel that a lot of these Socrates within the American establishment really don’t want to drink that hemlock.
; socially enforced restrictions on marriage, private and public segregation, and discrimination; and social exclusion on the basis of perceived status.
