BLUSTER AND BLUNDER?
22 January 2017Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, sent negative vibrations coursing over the entire world, but especially across Europe where NATO heads, Asia, and Pacific region leaders would have grimaced at his inauguration statement on foreign (military/security) policy with his criticism of Obama "subsidizing the armies of foreign countries while allowing the depletion of our own military".
It's this very subsidizing by Obama that helped push back terrorism the world over, wipe out Islamic State forces across Mosul, Raqqa and Sirte, and help rebels in Syria hold out to the bitter end against Putin and Assad's killing sprees. Trump stands alone as a man who has not grasped this fact.
World leaders battling terrorism and State terrorism of the type extolled and pushed through by Putin would have recoiled with serious misgivings by the new US President's statement.
It seems to have missed Trump entirely that subsidizing by Obama helped train foreign militaries and gave them the ability, technology, training and weaponry with which they have been successfully pushing back terrorism and ISIL.
Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and Japan will no doubt have received the statement with grave fear, being unable to sustain any more appropriation from their budgets for higher defence spending. Ditto with India and Bay of Bengal nations and the countries dotted around the South China Seas. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said in Davos last Friday that he does not see an immediate danger of a military stand-off between India and China in the Indian Ocean or a trade war between the US and China in the same region extending to the huge expanses of the entire Asian-Pacific area. India could be very worried should Trump revisit defence agreements entered into just last year between Obama and Modi...a prospect that can enormously encourage a shift of Chinese military policy against India in the region.
With China backing Pakistan to the hilt and encircling India across the Himalayas into southern Pakistan, Trump's declared policy can impose massive pressures on Modi to hurriedly remodel India's defence stances. What affects India will have a direct bearing on Sri Lanka and the danger of China taking advantage of Trump's stance will be a worrying possibility as far as Modi and President Sirisena are concerned. Certainly, Trump's security policy will hugely encourage both Putin and Jinping to reassess their own extra-regional military stances and thus present bigger threats to global security. Trump's decision will leave Sri Lanka in a compromised position because the government has been responding positively to all overtures made by the Obama administration and has committed the nation to a military partnership status with the US, which is presumed by all and sundry in defence affairs to mean that Sri Lanka stands with the US against any anti-American force in the Asia, Indian Ocean-Pacific region and has under that agreement given open access to the US forces to Sri Lanka's ports and airfields.
Will Sri Lanka and India rethink military foreign policy now? This is especially frighteningly so for NATO members in the face of a buoyant Putin and Assad who can now play a major role in Putin's bid to recover the glory days of pre-Glasnost/Perestroika when the Russian Federation as head of the USSR ruled the skies and waves.
Trump's statement on security policy will most of all strike fear into the Balkan States of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and closer to Moscow, Ukraine, where the panic spread fast and war became a buzzword overnight along the frontier countries between Russia and the Baltic States.
These are all members of the NATO and the European Union. Hearing that Trump might wind down aid and other forms of military assistance in the face of the huge threat from Putin, especially after the annexation of Crimea, warmer ties between Trump and Putin and the Syrian catastrophe, the leaders of these small countries will be experiencing serious fears for their security. They certainly can't take on Putin on their own, perhaps even collectively, especially from just across the border and from Syria on the other side. Aleppo and Ukraine incursions by Putin are ample evidence of his willingness to use brute force to drive weak nations into subjugation.
This is the backdrop against which Trump announces his ambiguous security strategy.
When he said that NATO States must pay more for defence, his ambivalence about Crimea, and allusions to how America may not defend members against Russian military action have unnerved not just NATO nations but the whole world. This was compounded when Russia recently moved short-range, nuclear-capable Iskander missiles into its militarized Baltic exclave, Kaliningrad, wedged between Lithuania, Poland, and the Baltic Sea. Obama promptly sent 3,000 troops to Poland. Will Trump recall them?
As an inauguration speech, a US President could have done much better.
No comments:
Post a Comment