Pompeo’s to-do list

KP Nayar
Strategic analyst

Vajpayee once said whenever important Americans visited him, he had a foreboding that they were coming with an invisible ‘to-do’ list. They would tick them one by one in their mind with an imaginary blue or red pencil, depending on whether the item had been approved or not.

No high-ranking American visiting India in recent times is likely to have come with a clearer wish list than Michael R Pompeo, the most formidable Secretary of State since Henry Kissinger and James Baker. His main interlocutor in New Delhi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, will be acutely aware that Pompeo’s trophy as a four-term Republican Congressman from Kansas includes the head of Susan Rice and that he severely damaged Hillary Clinton’s bid to become America’s 45th President.

In 2012, President Obama wanted to appoint Rice as Secretary of State. US ambassador to Libya J Christopher Stevens had just been killed in a terror attack in Benghazi, and Rice, the then America’s Permanent Representative to the UN, was the public face of the Obama administration’s defence in the episode.

With his experience as a member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Pompeo was one of the Republicans on Capitol Hill who made the fiercest attacks on Rice over intelligence failures leading to the murder of Stevens. Pompeo later became director of the CIA. 

In December 2012, three months after the Benghazi attack, Rice removed herself from consideration as Secretary of State. Jaishankar had arrived in Washington as ambassador to the US a fortnight earlier, and had a ringside view of Libya-related events till he left in January 2015 to become Foreign Secretary. In 2014, Pompeo became a member of the House Select Committee to probe the Benghazi events. The committee wound up a month after Trump was elected President, but not before it ruined Clinton’s election prospects. She was Secretary of State when the Benghazi events occurred.

Preparing for his India visit, it is clear that Pompeo has adopted the dictum that it is easy to create a storm in Delhi. This dictum was propounded by Robin Raphel, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and a veteran of US diplomacy in the subcontinent. One afternoon in the early 1990s, she proved this theory by raising doubts about the validity of Kashmir’s instrument of accession to India. The storm she unleashed raged for a decade until Bill Clinton closed that chapter during his presidential visit to India in 2000.

About 10 days ago, Pompeo quoted the ruling party’s slogan, ‘Modi hai to mumkin hai’, in a speech and swept Indians off their feet by employing the dictum. When Trump said, ‘I am a big fan of Hindu’ (sic) in the course of his poll campaign, many Indians squealed in delight, which lasted for the remainder of the 2016 presidential poll season.

In the inner recesses of Raisina Hill, there is awareness of this weakness among Indians for praise from abroad, especially from the US and how it impacts popular perceptions of external affairs. When Americans made a mountain of an invitation to Manmohan Singh in 2009 and talked ‘ad nauseum’ about how the Indian PM was the first guest of President Obama for a White House state dinner, several members of Singh’s entourage privately lamented this national weakness for praise, in return for which, Washington gets away with substantive concessions. Israel, for instance, does hard bargaining with the US, often getting exactly what it wants. Singapore does the same. The Saudi royal family has bought its way into the US, getting out of situations which seemed impossible and securing the kingdom’s interests.

The only time in recent memory when Indians got exactly what they wanted was during negotiations on the Indo-US nuclear deal and in the run up to it through step-by-step high-technology cooperation. No one knows this better on the American side than their ambassador in New Delhi, Kenneth Juster, who co-founded a government-to-government High Technology Cooperation Group. He was one of the key architects of the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership initiative which eventually led to the N-deal.

During the negotiations, Jaishankar, who was the point person for the US in the Ministry of External Affairs, was tough as a nail. Ronen Sen, then ambassador in Washington, deployed the skills he acquired in dealing with the Kremlin for almost 15 years, when the Soviet Union was the fountainhead of India’s most important foreign policy priority. They got the best out of the US for India.

The Trump administration’s diplomacy machine and its media management apparatus have worked overtime to create an impression that Pompeo’s visit is about India’s S-400 missile deal with Russia which the US wants abrogated. Another smokescreen being created is that two major items on the agenda are Iran and an unfolding trade tariff war.

The US, in reality, wants India to shoulder greater responsibility in mentoring and safeguarding the Indo-Pacific, and not merely the freedom of navigation in this region that is vital to global commerce, while the US busies itself with a potential crisis in the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman.

It is an insult to US strategic vision as a superpower to suggest that it will make its thriving ties with India hostage to the S-400 deal with Russia. What the US military industrial complex, working with the Trump administration, wants is for India to abandon its defence relationship with Russia and switch lock, stock and barrel to US weapons and technology.

Earlier this month, Alice Wells, acting Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, said: ‘A strategic choice has to be made about partnerships and a strategic choice about what weapons systems and platforms a country is going to adopt.’ For Trump and Pompeo, the time has come for India to make such a choice.