📰 India, U.S. to upgrade ties, call on Pak. to curb terror
Joint statement at the end of President Trump’s visit underscores Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, including security cooperation
•India and the U.S. on Tuesday resolved to upgrade their bilateral relationship to a Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership that will include issues such as defence, security cooperation and revitalisation of the Indo-Pacific quadrilateral dialogue.
•Both sides also called upon Pakistan to rein in cross-border terror threats and sought justice for the victims of 26/11 attack and the Pathankot terror attack of 2016.
•“They called for concerted action against all terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the Haqqani Network, TTP, D Company, and all their affiliates,” said a joint statement issued at the end of President Donald Trump’s visit late on Tuesday evening.
South China Sea
•Both sides also took note of the efforts of the ASEAN region to create a code of conduct in the South China Sea region. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mr. Trump also agreed to undertake development activities in third countries and intensify cooperation in the space domain
•The statement said both sides had resolved to maintain the Internet as a free and secure arena. “India and the United States recognised the need for an innovative digital ecosystem that is secure and reliable, and facilitates the flow of information and data,” the statement said.
•Earlier in the evening, Mr. Trump said the U.S. was working with Pakistan to defeat terrorism.
•Addressing journalists at Hyderabad House, he said the Indo-Pacific region should be free and open for navigation and the 5G technology should be used for spread of freedom and not for suppression of people.
•Mr. Modi observed that defence had a major role in the relationship between India and the U.S.
•“In the last few years, there has been unprecedented growth in interoperability between our militaries,” he said, adding the Indian military undertook the maximum number of exercises with the U.S. military.
•Mr. Trump also said the U.S. and India were working to revitalise the quadrilateral initiative consisting of Japan, the U.S., India and Australia. Both countries were also working on cybersecurity and counter-terrorism issues.
The new U.S. approach to China is bipartisan and likely here to stay regardless of the outcome of November’s elections.
•A tectonic shift in America’s relations with China under Donald Trump’s presidency — one that Indian officials believe is here to stay and will outlast the current U.S. President — is providing a new impetus to defence, security, trade and technological cooperation between New Delhi and Washington in the region.
•The U.S.-China trade and technology war is the clearest manifestation of the change, and the sense in Delhi is this widening rift is neither a Trump phenomenon nor transient. The new U.S. approach to China is bipartisan and likely here to stay regardless of the outcome of November’s elections. In fact, Trump is being seen as far from the most hawkish voice on China in Washington, given his well-known proclivity for wanting to “cut a deal”.
•Shared concerns about China’s rise are not new, and have underpinned India’s relations with the United States going back to the 1950s. These concerns provided the backdrop for the landmark nuclear deal finalised during George W. Bush’s 2006 visit, as well as for the joint strategic vision unveiled during Barack Obama’s visit in 2015.
•But “the dynamic has now changed in a fundamental way”, said former Indian Ambassador to China Ashok Kantha. In 2005, the U.S. and China were largely cooperative despite differences. Now, the U.S. is clearly looking at China as a strategic “competitor” and “revisionist power”, as a 2017 national security strategy put it.
•This offered opportunities and challenges for India, which has carefully expanded ties with America while reluctant to upset China — a neighbour with which it shares an unresolved border. “Calibration becomes tougher as we are under greater pressure from both,” said Mr. Kantha. “My own view is the situation creates openings which we should take advantage of, rather than only think of balance.”
•One such opening is the Quad Initiative with the U.S., Australia and Japan, which Mr. Trump said on Tuesday he and Prime Minister Modi were “revitalising” including through expanded cooperation on maritime security “to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific”.
•On Tuesday, both countries inked a $2.6-billion defence deal for 24 MH-60 Seahawk helicopters, another indicator of growing defence ties, which have seen a logistics exchange agreement in 2016 to provide mutual access to designated military facilities and a communications compatibility agreement in 2018 to enable greater interoperability and sales of high-end technology.
•“It’s no secret that Chinese submarines and warships have begun regular operations in the Indian Ocean over the past decade and this arguably provided some of the impetus behind greater joint efforts on maritime domain awareness, intelligence sharing, and naval exercises including the first-ever tri-service military exercise last December,” said Jeff Smith, South Asia scholar at the Heritage Foundation, stressing that “shared concerns about China are defensive in nature, rather than intended to produce an offensive, containment-style strategy”.
•Mr. Kantha said India should do more with the Quad, starting with including Australia in the trilateral naval Exercise Malabar with the U.S. and Japan and working more closely in humanitarian and disaster relief and protecting sealines of communication. “Working on such initiatives does not mean we are looking to contain China and will in no way undermine India’s strategic autonomy,” he said, adding that India had no reason to be overly sensitive to China’s concerns, noting how China considered Indian sensitivities in its ties with Pakistan.
•Mr. Trump on Tuesday highlighted regional connectivity and the Blue Dot Network pushed by the U.S., Australia and Japan to promote private sector-led, sustainable and ‘trustworthy’ options for infrastructure — a veiled criticism of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Mr. Modi said India agreed with the U.S. on the importance of sustainable and transparent financing in the development of connectivity infrastructure across the world.
•Hurdles, however, remain. As a January 28 study by the Centre for New American Security in Washington put it, the U.S. effort in the region remained “inconsistent, uncoordinated and under-resourced”. Convergence may be growing, but walking the talk is still a challenge.
📰 Counting birds together
The State of India’s Birds Report has two distinctivefeatures that define a new approach
•The State of India’s Birds Report 2020 represents the first collective attempt in India to understand and assess how the avifauna are doing. The results of this exercise are broadly sobering. While there are several species, including globally threatened ones, whose populations are doing reasonably, more bird species are showing declines in population than are showing population stability or increases. During the last two decades, over half the species assessed have declined. This trend is even more pronounced in recent times, with nearly 80% of the species assessed showing declines over the last five years. And these declines are particularly acute for certain groups of birds, including birds of prey, migrant shorebirds, birds of forests and grasslands, and endemic birds of the Western Ghats. The report further suggests that more bird species deserve immediate conservation attention than previously thought. To the list of 67 globally threatened Indian bird species previously identified by the IUCN (as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable), the report adds 34 more species. The number of species of high conservation concern in India is now 101.
A collaborative effort
•But the news is not all bad. The report also provides strong reasons for hope that we can further strengthen the understanding and conservation of our avian heritage. In particular, the report has two distinctive features that define a new approach: first, that the information it builds on comes from citizens like us all, and second, that the report’s data and analysis are in the public domain, inviting critique and further refinement.
•Assessing the status of our birds poses a variety of challenges. For a start, there are over 1,300 species of birds in India. While some are loud, colourful or diurnal, and hence relatively easier to detect, others are quiet, shy, or nocturnal. Further, finding them also means having to look in a wide variety of habitats: in forests, wetlands, farmlands, cities, mountains and even open oceans. And to complicate matters further, hundreds of species migrate into and out of our country at different times of the year. Addressing these challenges and achieving a coverage both of species and of habitats has been possible only because of an alignment in the formidable energies and efforts of a large and inspired community of birdwatchers across the country. Only through the efforts of over 15,500 birdwatchers, it became possible to assemble a dataset of over 10 million records, with data points going as far back as the 1970s. Upon this foundation, a large multi-institutional consortium of researchers drawn from both non-governmental and government institutions collaborated to analyse and put together the report.
•While the report describes key patterns of change in the populations of certain bird species, answering why these changes have taken place, or developing conservation action that address these changes, are logical follow-up actions that are inconceivable without focused and sustained collective efforts. Just as we have collectively collected, curated, compiled and analysed bird data, we must remain engaged with the results, and continue to further not only an understanding of our avifauna but also actions to conserve them.
Open access to data
•Besides collaboration, another key value that the report seeks to acknowledge is the importance of making, not just its outputs, but also the entire process open. The data that has gone into this report are not only collected by thousands of citizens, but are open for any researcher to use. The analyses (and the code) that form the basis of this report are in the public domain. Finally, the report and its results too are entirely open. A better public and scientific understanding of our biodiversity can grow only from wider and open access not only to data, but also from opening the entire process of scientific inquiry to wider peer and public scrutiny and challenge. And we are hoping that, as more and more people come in and examine the data, the analyses and the results, and ask questions, it only adds greater strength to our understanding of our precious birds.
•Of all the forms in which humans encounter nature, birds perhaps touch our lives most closely. Birds are nearly everywhere. They are colourful, they sing and they display. They perform vital functions like predation and seed dispersal. They pervade nearly every aspect of our cultural lives. Given our shared bonds in a timeless journey, to paraphrase ornithologist Nigel Collar, we need to continue building and strengthening models by which citizens, scientists, conservationists and managers collaborate not only to understand our birds, but also to enable them to fare better on our fast-changing planet.
📰 Rights, duties and the Constitution
It is only after a guarantee of the sum of all promised by the Constitution that citizens can be asked to do their duty
•At the height of the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s government enacted sweeping changes to the Constitution, through the 42nd Amendment. These changes were intended to entrench the supremacy of the government, permanently muzzle the courts, and weaken the constitutional system of checks and balances which was designed to avoid concentration and abuse of power. And in the Amendment’s Statement of Objects and Reasons, one line stands out: “... it is also proposed to specify the fundamental duties of the citizens and make special provisions for dealing with anti-national activities.”
•“Fundamental duties” and “anti-national activities” came into the world fused at the hip. And while Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime has long been consigned to the dustbin of history, its legacies endure. “Anti-national” has become a boundlessly manipulable word, that, in the spirit of Humpty Dumpty, can mean whatever those in power want it to mean. “Fundamental duties” have been making a comeback as well: at an International Judicial Conference 2020 this weekend, the Chief Justice of India, S.A. Bobde, drew attention to the Constitution’s Fundamental Duties chapter. He then went further, and citing Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj , observed that “real rights are a result of [the] performance of duty.”
•There is, of course, an intuitive plausibility to the CJI’s words. They conjure up the image of the ungrateful and selfish citizen, happy to pluck the fruits of civilisation, but unwilling to do their bit to water the tree. Nonetheless, despite its plausibility, this conflation of rights and duties ought to be resisted.
Webs of duties
•The first thing to note is that as citizens, there exists a wide range of duties that bind us in everyday life. These duties are owed both to the state, and to other individuals. We have a legal duty to pay our taxes, to refrain from committing violence against our fellow-citizens, and to follow other laws that Parliament has enacted. Breach of these legal duties triggers financial consequences (fines), or even time in jail. At any given time, therefore, we are already following a host of duties, which guide and constrain how we may behave. This is the price that must be paid for living in society, and it is a price that nobody, at least, in principle, objects to paying.
•Our duties and the consequences we bear for failing to keep them therefore exist as a self-contained whole. They follow a simple logic: that peaceful co-existence requires a degree of self-sacrifice, and that if necessary, this must be enforced through the set of sanctions.
The logic of rights
•Rights, on the other hand, follow a different logic entirely. This is a logic that is best understood through history. At the time of the framing of the Indian Constitution and its chapter on Fundamental Rights, there were two important concerns animating the Constituent Assembly. The first was that under the colonial regime, Indians had been treated as subjects. Their interests did not count, their voices were unheard, and in some cases — for example, the “Criminal Tribes” — they were treated as less than human. Apart from the long and brutal history of colonialism, the framers also had before them the recent example of the Holocaust, where the dignity of more than six million people had been stripped before their eventual genocide.
•The first role of the fundamental rights chapter, therefore, was to stand as a bulwark against dehumanisation. Every human being no matter who they were or what they did had a claim to basic dignity and equality that no state could take away, no matter what the provocation. One did not have to successfully perform any duty, or meet a threshold of worthiness, to qualify as a rights bearer. It was simply what it meant to be human.
•Second, the framers were also aware that they were inheriting a deeply stratified and riven society. The colonial regime had not been the only oppressor; the axes of gender, caste and religion had all served to keep masses of individuals in permanent conditions of subordination and degradation. The second role of rights, thus, was to stand against hierarchy. Through guarantees against forced labour, against “untouchability”, against discriminatory access to public spaces, and others, fundamental rights were meant to play an equalising and democratising role throughout society, and to protect individuals against the depredations visited on them by their fellow human-beings.
•The twin principles of anti-dehumanisation and anti-hierarchy reveal the transformative purpose of the fundamental rights chapter: the recognition that true democracy could not exist without ensuring that at a basic level, the dignity and equality of individuals was protected, both from the state as well as from social majorities. It was only with these guarantees could an individual rise from the status of subject to that of citizen. And, as should be clear by now, it was only after that transformation had been wrought, that the question of duties could even arise.
•This is not to suggest, of course, that duties are unimportant. As indicated above, duties exist in every sphere of society. Moreover, the language of duties can play an important role in a society that continues to be divided and unequal: in such a society, those who possess or benefit from entrenched structural and institutional power (starting with the state, and going downwards) certainly have a “duty” not to use that power to the detriment of those upon whom they wield it. That is precisely what the guarantees against “untouchability”, forced labour, and discriminatory access in the Constitution seek to accomplish.
Issue lies in conflation
•The problem, however, lies in the conflation of rights and duties. As Samuel Moyn points out in an illuminating article in The Boston Review , “the rhetoric of duties has often been deployed euphemistically by those whose true purpose is a return to tradition won by limiting the rights of others”. Moyn’s target here are traditions that invoke the language of duty (often alongside terms such as “community” or “family”) in order to subordinate or efface the individual in the face of the collective (whether state or community). In that context, it is always critical to remember Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s words in the Constituent Assembly (which were also cited by the CJI in his speech): that the fundamental unit of the Constitution remains the individual.
•If the position of the individual and the Constitution’s commitment to combating hierarchy is kept in mind, then the language of duties can be understood in its proper context. Without that, however, we risk going astray. A good example of this is a Supreme Court judgment from the early 1980s, which upheld the differential treatment of male and female flight attendants on the ground that women had a “duty” to ensure the “good upbringing of children” and to ensure the success of the “family planning program” for the country.
•The judgment is a stark reminder that without the moral compass of rights and their place in the transformative Constitutional scheme the language of duties can lead to unpleasant consequences. It can end up entrenching existing power structures by placing the burden of “duties” upon those that are already vulnerable and marginalised. It is for this reason that, at the end of the day, the Constitution, a charter of liberation, is fundamentally about rights. It is only after guarantee to all the full sum of humanity, dignity, equality, and freedom promised by the Constitution, that we can ask of them to do their duty.
📰 More psychological than an empowering voter option
The meagre share of NOTA votes, and NOTA in its current form, are pointers to it being a toothless option
•The recently-concluded Delhi Assembly elections were the 45th Assembly polls since the inception of the none of the above (NOTA) option in 2013. Delhi has now provided data from five elections with the NOTA option: three Assembly (2013, 2015, 2020), and two Lok Sabha (2014, 2019); no other state has yielded this yet. And Delhi, although mostly urban, is widely regarded as the microcosm of India.
•However, Delhi’s preference to NOTA is less than the national average. From 0.63% in 2013, Delhi polled 0.39% of those favouring NOTA in 2015, a statistically significant reduction indeed. It now increased to 0.46% in 2020; again statistically significant. While 96% of the constituencies had a reduced percentage of NOTA votes in 2015 than 2013, the NOTA percentage has increased in 71% constituencies this year. In the Lok Sabha elections, Delhi polled 0.47% and 0.52% of those favouring NOTA, in 2014 and 2019, respectively. Thus, roughly one in 200 voters of Delhi opted for NOTA in the last six to seven years, with relatively larger support for NOTA in reserved constituencies.
•Interestingly, in the 2017 Gujarat Assembly elections, despite being 1.8%, NOTA got more votes than any political party other than the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (except the Independents). Again, in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election, NOTA became a runner-up in two constituencies — Latur (Rural) and Palus-Kadegaon. Do these cases mark any significant shift in the voter mindset?
Its essence
•In 2013, India became the 14th country to institute negative voting through NOTA. However, it is not a “right to reject”. NOTA in India is a toothless option;, former Chief Election Commissioner of India S.Y. Quraishi, had observed in an article: “Even if there are 99 NOTA votes out of a total of 100, and candidate X gets just one vote, X is the winner, having obtained the only valid vote. The rest will be treated as invalid or ‘no votes’.” NOTA enfeebles the electorate as it does not empower to “select” either. Certainly NOTA provides democratic means to express resentment anonymously rather than boycotting the polls outright. In her 2017 book, The Dramatic Decade: Landmark Cases of Modern India , Indu Bhan has given examples such as a group of women activists in Kerala out on the road urging people not to elect any candidate if no woman was present in the fray, and a youth group in Tamil Nadu that campaigned for NOTA as a protest vote against corruption.
•There have been pleas to extend the scope of NOTA. In 2018, a former CEC, T.S. Krishnamurthy, has recommended holding elections again in those constituencies where the victory margin is less than the total numbers of NOTA. A PIL has been filed in Madras High Court seeking the full right to reject in place of NOTA.
•In June 2018, the Maharashtra State Election Commission (SEC) issued an order that said: “If it is noticed while counting that NOTA has received the highest number of valid votes, the said election for that particular seat shall be countermanded and a fresh election shall be held for such a post.” In November 2018, the SEC of Haryana went a step further and issued an order where NOTA is treated like a “fictional candidate” in municipal polls from December 2018. If NOTA gets maximum vote, none of the “real” candidates will be declared elected, and the elections will be cancelled and held afresh. What is more, the candidates securing votes less than NOTA would be barred from contesting in that re-election. Interestingly, in Makassar, Indonesia, the only candidate in the 2018 election for mayor received 35,000 less votes than NOTA, which forced a repeat election in 2020.
•While introducing NOTA, the Supreme Court anticipated that “there will be a systemic change and the political parties will be forced to accept the will of the people and field candidates who are known for their integrity.” Thus, its percentage should either increase to enforce the political parties to field candidates with “integrity”, or NOTA percentage should consistently decrease if the electorates feel that the system has achieved the desired level of cleansing. In contrast, the share of NOTA votes in India remained around a meagre level of 1% on an average; 1.11% in the 2014 Lok Sabha, and 1.08% in 2019, if we consider constituency-wise averages. This perhaps represents a confused state of mind of the electorate. Has the perceived cynicism of Indian voters regarding the right to reject been exaggerated? What would happen if the ECI empowers NOTA with teeth, for example candidates securing lesser votes than NOTA (and possibly the political party concerned also) are barred from contesting in the next election from that constituency?
Another ‘option’
•Is NOTA, as the last button of all EVMs in the country, a psychological issue as far as the electorates is concerned? Delbert A. Taebel, in a seminal article in the American Journal of Political Science in 1975, and Jonathan G.S. Koppell and Jennifer A. Steen, in their 2004 article in The Journal of Politics , have discussed the possible advantage of the first position in the ballot, at least in the U.S. context. Although there is no such concrete study to gauge the Indian voter’s mindset that I know, I wonder whether using NOTB (‘none of the below’) instead of NOTA — with such an option as the first on the electronic voting machine — might produce a significantly different outcome or not. An experiment, after changing the rule suitably, can be attempted, at least.
📰 Two rising powers in two different eras
Comparisons between the rise of China and the rise of imperial Germany are not accurate
•The rise of China is an epochal development that could change the international system drastically. If China was primarily an agrarian, feudal, backward country in 1949 at the time of the revolution, it is radically different today. Decades of economic reforms under the tight control of the Communist Party has transformed the country into an industrial and technological powerhouse. It is only a matter of time before China overtakes the U.S. to become the world’s largest economy.
•This economic rise has had strategic consequences as well. China, the world’s second-largest military spender after the U.S., has established itself as the mightiest force in the Asia-Pacific, with the clear ambition of becoming a global superpower. This rapid rise has upset the existing equilibrium of the global order, which has been largely centred around the U.S., at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
•These events have historical parallels. The rise of imperial Germany in the late 19th century and the rise of the Soviet Union in the 20th century shaped the global order too. While the roots of the First World War can be traced back to imperial Germany’s quest to become a superpower, the Soviet Union challenged the U.S.’s hegemony after the Second World War, pushing the world into the Cold War. With China rising as the next superpower, these comparisons are often brought in, sometimes with alarming warnings.
The German example
•Imperial Germany’s rise as an industrial and military power after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the subsequent unification of Germany disrupted the power dynamic in Europe, which was dominated by Great Britain and France. Germany’s quest for new markets (colonies) for its products, backed by the national big business and the financial oligarchy, heightened tensions between colonial powers. The economic tensions spilled into the military arena, with Germany adopting Weltpolitik (world politics, its expansive foreign policy doctrine). Threatened by a resurgent Germany, Britain and France joined Russia to form the Triple Entente. This, in turn, heightened Germany’s paranoia that its natural rise was being curtailed. To break this ‘maximum moment’ (where its natural rise had come to a stall), Germany was ready to go to war. The result was the First World War.
•Similar to how imperial Germany’s rise upset Great Britain, China’s rise has upset the reigning superpower, the U.S. And similar to how Britain and France joined hands with Russia to contain Germany, the U.S. is doing its best, through alliances in the Pacific, to contain China.
Then and now
•Yet, there are fundamental differences between the rivalries of the 19th and 20th centuries and those of today. The tensions between imperial Germany and Britain were primarily a result of the race for new economic territories between the colonial powers, which Lenin called “inter-imperialist rivalry”. Both countries were supported by their national industrial and financial oligarchies, or monopoly capital. Today, it’s not a competition between colonial powers. Both China and the U.S. are closely integrated into the global economic system. They are each other’s biggest trading partners.
•Second, imperial Germany was ready to go to war because it thought war was the only way to break its ‘maximum moment’. But in reality, Germany’s rise was halted by the First World War. The country was humiliated internationally. Anger and discontent led to the revolution in Germany, the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Second World War. On the contrary, China is still a growing power. In 40 years, it hasn’t fought a war. And the path to growth and development is still open for China.
•Does this mean that the competition between the U.S. and China could lead to a new Cold War? It’s likely, but in a different global scenario. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were the two pillars of the global system. There was no major third pole. Most countries, including those part of the Non-Aligned Movement, were drawn closer to either of these two blocs. The Cold War was the defining phenomenon of the post-war world.
•Today’s situation is different. First, China is not seeking to build an ideological bloc against the U.S. Its focus is on its own economic rise and in reshaping the international order. Second, the world is more dynamic today. There are many regional powers on the rise: Russia continues to be a geopolitical hegemon in Central Asia and Eastern Europe with global ambitions; India is a rising big power in South Asia; and Turkey seeks to be a dominant power in West Asia. In effect, the U.S. and China are competing in a multidirectional world, dissimilar to the bipolar world which saw the Soviet-American rivalry.
•The U.S. would still want to contain China, like it did the Soviet Union, as China represents the biggest challenge to the western international order. During the Cold War, the U.S. aided the redevelopment of western Europe, built trans-Atlantic military alliances, forced the Soviet Union into an arms race which hurt its economy, exploited the Sino-Soviet rift, and launched an anti-communist crusade across the globe. Now, it’s trying to build a strategic alliance in the Asia-Pacific, mainly with India, Japan and Australia, to tackle China, and has taken the battle into the trade and technological realms. But there are at least three problems with this new containment strategy.
Containment 2.0
•First, an anti-China strategic alliance is yet to take shape despite the U.S.’s earnest efforts. Even India is wary of joining an American defence bloc aimed at containing China. This is largely because the global system is multipolar. There’s no NATO yet in the Asia-Pacific. Second, even the trade and tech wars launched by the U.S. are not meeting their declared goals. Earlier this year, after months of a tariff war, the U.S. and China agreed to sign phase one of a trade deal. China agreed to buy more American goods and the U.S. suspended upcoming tariffs, while core issues such as technology transfer remained unresolved. The U.S.’s attempts to isolate Chinese tech giant Huawei have also failed with most major economies, including India, the EU, and the U.K. deciding not to ban Huawei from rolling out 5G.
•Third, one of the key aspects of the containment during the Cold War was the U.S.’s ability to exploit the rift in the Communist bloc. George Kennan, the author of America’s containment strategy, warned in 1954 against the “association of resources” in Europe and Asia against America. He was warning against a potential Sino-Soviet alliance. During the Cold War, it didn’t materialise, and the U.S. reached out to China. But today, the Sino-Russian alliance which Kennan had warned about is already in place. Today’s Russia is not the China of the 1970s. It is much more powerful and has trans-continental ambitions. It will not be easy for the U.S. to wean the Russians away from the Chinese. In effect, the U.S. is facing a rising China, far from its maximum moment, in a multipolar world. It’s an all new challenge.
