Bharat Karnad
The merciless tag-team beatdown of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by the US President and Vice President, Donald Trump and JD Vance, in the White House was unprecedented in the annals of history. Such humiliation in another era would have led to war. The new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, called it “deliberate escalation”. In the present time, when Ukraine cannot fight without American arms, and Europe while showing solidarity with Ukraine cannot do much by way of rescuing Kyiv’s armed forces from backing into a military cul de sac, it is the humiliated Zelensky who has had repeatedly to bow and scrape and say how thankful he is for all the assistance rendered his country by the US. It didn’t work.
US Arms aid was cutoff, leaving the former Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Dmytro Kuleba to wince and write (in the New York Times) that “It is now Europe’s war”. Europe cannot, of course, mobilise its defence industry overnight, but even so war against whom — Russia? Except, Trump followed up the Zelensky encounter by halting all US offensive cyber operations against Russia. If such incentives and his promise of trade and investment and possibly a place for Moscow in the European community induces Russia to detach itself from China, then a very grand strategy is indeed afoot to isolate China, one geared to minimising its influence and power in Eurasia and in the Indo-Pacific. This is all to India’s good — and this is the prospect the Indian government has been offered to get it to commit more forcefully to the Quad. In that situation, NATO serves no useful purpose.
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