When Janet Yellen left Beijing on Sunday after four days of talks, the US treasury secretary in effect admitted that the delegation achieved its main objective simply by sitting down with top Chinese officials.

After years of dangerous and deepening separation between the people running the world’s two biggest economies, they were finally back in a room together.

At a brief press conference that was the only tangible outcome of the talks, Yellen listed her hopes for the future. They included something that a decade ago would have been taken for granted: regular “senior-level diplomacy” between Washington and Beijing to manage their relationship.

Now the US can be more confident of that, and the relief is tangible. The meetings between Yellen and Chinese financial officials were particularly urgent, given there is a changing of the guard under way in Beijing.

Personal relationships between the US political elite and outgoing Chinese decision makers that dated back to before the pandemic are being rendered obsolete.

Yellen’s visit is part of a broader push to put ties back on what she called a “surer footing”. She was following in the footsteps of the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who last month led the first senior US delegation to China in more than three years.

After years of deepening economic and military mistrust between the superpowers, they were finally back in a room together

Better communication is vital because it reduces the risk of misunderstandings or disputes between two nuclear-armed superpowers spiralling towards unintended hostilities – whether economic or military.

But if the effort to rebuild these relationships is bearing fruit, it also throws a far greater challenge into relief. Now the two sides are talking, will their diplomacy aim only to stave off crisis, or can they use it to make constructive progress in a difficult relationship?

Yellen highlighted areas where collaboration is desperately needed, and should not threaten the core strategic interests of either side, from financing investments to tackle the global climate crisis, to dealing with the heavy debts of some of the world’s poorest countries.

But the milestones of this trip may be challenging to build on. The Covid-19 pandemic cut off in-person meetings, and accelerated a shift in the relationship between China and the west, perhaps best captured in a term coined by the EU. In 2019 it officially designed Beijing a “systemic rival”, even though China remains one of its top trade partners.

The consensus of the previous decades, that economic engagement with China would bind the country into the post-second world war world order and that economic liberalisation could catalyse political liberalisation, has been firmly put aside.

Replacing it is an uneasy mix of mutual dependency and mistrust. China has accused the west of trying to choke off its economic growth to prevent its rise as a global power. In March, Xi Jinping accused the west, led by the US, of “all-round containment, encirclement and suppression”.

Many policymakers in the west fear China will use western-developed technology to build a military more powerful than the US’s. That prompted the US to bar the sale of the most advanced microchips to China last year.

Looming over disputes about trade, AI, Beijing’s close ties with Russia as it wages war in Ukraine, China’s human rights record and other controversial issues, is the remote but real risk the countries could end up in a war precipitated by a Chinese military campaign to capture Taiwan.

Xi has told China’s armed forces to be ready to do this by 2027, US intelligence believes. Military ships and planes were sent into waters and airspace near Taiwan during Yellen’s visit, keeping up pressure on something Beijing sees as a core issue.

There is a greater and more immediately urgent risk, that sanctions and other tensions could escalate towards an economic war. Beijing has accused the US of seeking to “de-couple”, or try to separate their countries’ closely entwined economies.

That would be catastrophic for both, something Yellen acknowledged on Sunday morning, saying US moves to protect national security would be narrow and carefully targeted. She described decoupling – attempting to separate the two countries’ economies – as “virtually impossible”.

If it were attempted, it would be “disastrous for both countries and destabilising for the world”; US policymakers now prefer to talk about “de-risking” their relationship.

This fear of mutually assured economic destruction is one reason to hope that both countries will try to build on this diplomatic thaw, even as they manage mistrust and security tensions that are here for the long term.

But it was perhaps a sign of how bad things have got between the US and China that one of the most senior visits to Beijing in years had the most modest of aims: better communication. The question now is where the relationship goes next.

By Emma Graham-Harrison in Taipei – The Guardian

L’article Analysis. The US and China are talking again, but what happens next? est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

With Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi slated for a June 22 State Visit to Washington, India will, if briefly, be front-page news in the United States. Since President Clinton ended a chill in U.S.-India relations almost 25 years ago, successive American and Indian administrations across political parties have worked to strengthen ties.

So it’s fair to ask: how robust is this relationship today? As with the blind men and the elephant, the answer varies. Is India a bad bet, or is it, as the White House senior Asia policy official said recently, “the most important bilateral relationship with the United States on the global stage”?

Despite careful nurturing by Washington over the years, many aspects of U.S. ties with India remain challenging. Bilateral trade has grown tenfold since 2000, to $191 billion in 2022, and India became the ninth-largest US trading partner in 2021. But longstanding economic gripes persist, meriting 13 pages in the 2023 Foreign Trade Barriers report from the U.S. Trade Representative.

Multilaterally, India’s role in the fast-consolidating “Quad” consultation (comprised of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan) has brought shared purpose to Washington and New Delhi, both of which harbor concerns about China. But New Delhi also champions alternative non-Western groupings like the BRICS, and it remains outside bodies central to U.S. diplomacy like the U.N. Security Council and the G7.

Today, U.S.-India cooperation spans defense, global health, sustainable development, climate, and technology, among other things. But deep differences remain, including concerns in Washington about India’s democratic backsliding under Modi, and India’s failure to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In other words, the U.S.-India relationship has been transformed over the past quarter-century, but that transformation has not delivered a partnership or alignment similar to the closest U.S. alliances.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. India is not a U.S. ally, and has not wanted to become one. To see relations with rising power India as on a pathway that culminates in a relationship like that the United States enjoys with Japan or the United Kingdom creates expectations that will not be met. Indian leaders across parties and over decades have long prioritized foreign policy independence as a central feature of India’s approach to the world. That remains the case even with Modi’s openness to the United States.

For India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, protecting his country’s hard-fought independence was a guiding principle for foreign policy. Speaking in the Indian Parliament in March 1951, Nehru noted that “By aligning ourselves with any one Power, you surrender your opinion, give up the policy you would normally pursue because somebody else wants you to pursue another policy.” Twelve years later, evaluating his country’s nonalignment policy in the pages of Foreign Affairs, Nehru went on to observe that it had not “fared badly,” and that “essentially, ‘non-alignment’ is freedom of action which is a part of independence.”

American President Harry S. Truman shakes hands with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on the tarmac as Nehru’s sister, diplomat Vijaya Pandit, and daughter, future Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, stand with them, in Washington D.C., on October 11, 1949.

PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

For famously allied Washington, nonalignment in the 20th century was a bridge too far; in 1956 then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proclaimed that neutrality was “an obsolete conception…immoral and shortsighted.” It did not help matters that the United States had entered an alliance with India’s arch-rival Pakistan in 1954, and sided with the Pakistani military in the bloody civil war that gave birth to Bangladesh in 1971. Nor, too, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed a “Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation” with the USSR in 1971, definitively tilting India toward the Soviet Union even as the United States had tilted toward Pakistan.

Especially since the end of the Cold War, Indian leaders have sought to improve ties with Washington, but not by curtailing India’s independent approach to foreign policy. Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee proclaimed India and the United States “natural allies” in a landmark 1998 speech in New York. Yet this was perhaps more a term of art than a call for an alliance as it occurred against the backdrop of India’s nuclear tests, underscoring New Delhi’s willingness to upset global nuclear nonproliferation conventions, which it never joined. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose 10 years at the helm greatly improved Indo-U.S. relations, pursued a civil-nuclear agreement with Washington and ushered in new cooperation in high technology, defense, and clean energy. But his government too defended its principle of “strategic autonomy” as a redline for its foreign policy even as it moved closer to Washington than ever in the past. Defending the civil-nuclear deal with Washington before Parliament in 2008, Singh twice asserted that “Our strategic autonomy will never be compromised.”

In important ways, Prime Minister Modi represents a break with India’s past, most notably in his emphasis on India’s Hindu, rather than syncretic and secular, cultural heritage. But his approach to the United States remains consistent with the history of his country’s foreign policy independence.

Modi has deepened ties with the United States, now across three U.S. presidents, through increased partnership in defense, in advanced technology, and in energy, just to name a few, as well as through moments of high symbolism, like his 2015 Republic Day invitation to former President Barack Obama, the first time an American president joined this day honoring India’s constitution. Even so, Modi has leaned into the United States while leaning into many other partners around the world. The Modi government invokes a Sanskrit saying, the “world is one family” (vasudhaiva kutumbakam), to frame Indian diplomacy. This approach has been termed “multialignment,” a theory of seeking positive ties as far and as widely as possible, without seeing contradictions in this approach.

In practice, New Delhi has carefully managed its relationships with Saudi Arabia as well as Iran; with Israel as well as the Palestinian Territories; with the United States as well as Russia. India’s G20 presidency this year encapsulates this orientation, with its Sanskritic theme of “One Earth, One Family, One Future,” and its twin efforts to lead the forum for the world’s 20 largest economies while self-consciously presenting itself as the “Voice of the Global South.”

With this history in mind, it’s easier to perceive that momentum in the U.S.-India relationship does not necessarily imply a path to a formal alliance or mutual defense treaty. In the United States, the mental model for positive international cooperation defaults to seeing “ally” as the ultimate endpoint. For India, that suggests a curtailment of independence. And with India, even as cooperation becomes more extensive than ever in the past, consequential differences remain.

For many in Washington, the dramatic growth of coordination and joint activities under the Quad consultative group fills a growing need in light of China’s rise, encompassing subjects as far-flung as maritime security, infrastructure, climate and resilience, vaccines, technology standards, and higher education—all underlining Indian strategic convergence with the United States in the Indo-Pacific. Yet strategic convergence there does not mean everywhere: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its year-long war has elicited a tepid tut-tut from New Delhi, while India has escalated its purchases of cheap Russian oil at a time Washington seeks to isolate Moscow.

On closer examination this foreign policy independence and desire to define its own path so prized by India may offer lessons for U.S. foreign policy. The unipolar moment has passed; in its place we have more actors with their own perspectives, and a rising China with global ambitions and its own priorities increasingly shaping the priorities of others. The array of special relationships and alliances nurtured by the United States over decades are still in place, but many of these are now inflected by divergences with Washington. Take Turkey, or France, or Egypt, Pakistan, or Brazil. These U.S. allies do not always see their alliance relationship with Washington as barriers to taking decisions that contradict U.S. preferences. Indeed, President Emmanuel Macron too invokes “strategic autonomy.”

It’s here that India’s ambivalence offers a lens onto the world Washington is likely to encounter on a growing scale. In this world of more diffused power—a world with more diverse actors taking more distinctive foreign policy steps—partnerships and even alliances marked by substantial disagreements might be the new normal. In fact, managing ambivalence may be the central skill for American foreign policy in the years ahead.

World Opinions – Time.com

L’article Analysis. India Is Not a U.S. Ally—and Has Never Wanted to Be est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Behind the announcement Thursday that Israel and Morocco will establish their first formal diplomatic ties, there lies almost six decades of close, secret cooperation on intelligence and military matters between two nations that officially did not acknowledge each other.

Israel has helped Morocco obtain weapons and intelligence-gathering gear and learn how to use them, and helped it assassinate an opposition leader. Morocco has helped Israel take in Moroccan Jews, mount an operation against Osama bin Laden — and even spy on other Arab countries.

The collaboration — uncovered in an array of interviews conducted and documents unearthed over many years — reflects a longstanding Israeli policy of building covert ties to Arab regimes where common interests — and enemies — could be found. In particular, Israel pursued a so-called periphery strategy, reaching out to more distant states that were far removed from the Israeli-Arab territorial dispute or that had hostile relations with Israel’s own enemies.

Moroccan Jews on the beach in Gibraltar in 1961 while in transit to Israel.Credit…Jack Garofalo/Paris Match, via Getty Images

The Moroccan-Israeli relationship stemmed in part from the large number of Jews in Morocco before the birth of Israel in 1948, many of whom would migrate there, making up one of the largest parts of Israel’s population. Some one million Israelis are from Morocco or descended from those who were, ensuring a deep, abiding interest in that country more than 2,000 miles away.

When Morocco gained independence from France in 1956, it banned Jewish emigration. Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, smuggled out many Jews, but the operation was exposed in 1961, when a Mossad ship carrying such migrants sank, killing most of those aboard.

The next month, a new Moroccan king, Hassan II, took power, and Israel made a highly successful effort to cultivate him. Israeli agents met with the Moroccan opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, who asked for help overthrowing the king; instead, the Israelis told Hassan of the plot.

The king permitted mass emigration of Jews and allowed Mossad to establish a station in Morocco. Israel provided weapons and trained Moroccans in using them; it supplied surveillance technology and helped organize the Moroccan intelligence service; and the two shared information gathered by their spies — the start of decades of such cooperation.

King Hassan II of Morocco, right, confers with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, second from left, and Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, left, in Rabat, Morocco, in 1993.Credit…Nati Harnik/Associated Press

A crucial moment came in 1965, when Arab leaders and military commanders met in Casablanca, and Morocco allowed Mossad to bug their meeting rooms and private suites. The eavesdropping gave Israel unprecedented insight into Arab thinking, capabilities and plans, which turned out to be vital to Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces in preparing for the 1967 war.

“These recordings, which were truly an extraordinary intelligence achievement, established our feeling, of the top I.D.F., that we will win the war against Egypt,” Gen. Shlomo Gazit, who later become the chief of military intelligence, said in a 2016 interview.

Shortly after that intelligence coup, at the request of Moroccan intelligence, Mossad located Mr. Ben Barka, the opposition leader, and helped lure him to Paris. There, Moroccans and allied Frenchmen abducted him. He was tortured to death, and Mossad agents disposed of the body, which was never found.

A decade later, King Hassan and his government became the back channel between Israel and Egypt, and Morocco became the site of secret meetings between their officials, ahead of the 1978 Camp David accords and normalization of relations between the former enemies. Israel later helped persuade the United States to provide military assistance to Morocco.

In 1995, Moroccan intelligence joined in an ultimately unsuccessful Mossad plan to recruit Osama bin Laden’s secretary, to find and kill the leader of Al Qaeda, according to a former Mossad official who was a partner in that planning, and who asked not to be named when discussing intelligence operations.

For years, Hassan II’s successor, King Muhammad VI, has sought Israel’s help in winning American acquiescence to Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara, which finally came to fruition in Thursday’s announcement. Since 2006, Serge Bardugo, a leader of the small Jewish community remaining in Morocco, has been the king’s ambassador in that effort, meeting with Israeli officials and American Jewish leaders.

Occasionally these meetings were attended by Yassin Mansuri, a longtime friend of the king’s who heads Morocco’s external intelligence agency. Mr. Mansuri, in turn, met directly with his Israeli counterpart, Yossi Cohen, the chief of Mossad, conducting some of the negotiations that led to the agreement to normalize relations.

By Ronen Bergman – nytimes.com

L’article Israel-Morocco Deal Follows History of Cooperation on Arms and Spying est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.