This year we have the largest ideological shift in the Presidency since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. A striking difference between then and now is that everybody had a reasonably clear idea of what President Reagan was going to do. He had not only run on a platform of “change”; he had specified what changes he had in mind: lower taxes, less government regulation, sound money, tough anticommunism. President-Elect Obama remains comparatively a riddle. What we saw during the past two years isn’t necessarily what we’re going to get.
Quite a few conservatives have been heartened by Obamindeterminacy. Given how far to the Left he campaigned, any uncollapsed quantum waves are almost bound to scatter to the Right of what we anticipated. But before we get our hopes too
Immediately after being elected, Senator Obama started making phone calls to foreign heads of government. There is obvious symbolism to the order of these chit-chats. Hence, it is probably not happenstance that the Prime Minister of India was not an early recipient is almost certainly not happenstance. The omission has caused a stir in Asia.
Among the world’s democracies, India is first in population and third in gross domestic product. Though not formally an ally, it is one of America’s best friends in the Far East and a front line target of the mufsidun. It recently signed a nuclear cooperation treaty with the U.S., which is awaiting Senate ratification. Yet it didn’t even make the top fifteen on the President-Elect’s list. Asked about the “oversight”, one of Prime Minister Singh’s aides sounded, to my ears, just a little testy: “Of course, we are not in the same league as South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, and we are happy not to be.”
David Frum suggests, not implausibly, that this cosmetic downgrading of India is a prelude to more substantive slights:
The US wants fuller Pakistani cooperation against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The more motivated the Pakistani military is to help, the more successful (and less costly!) anti-Taliban operations will be.
Now what one thing could the US offer that would most strongly motive the Pakistani military? Answer: a pro-Pakistani tilt on Kashmir.
Such a tilt would compromise the important US long-term goal of developing a closer relationship with India. It would reward Pakistan for decades of state sponsorship of anti-India terrorism. But it could deliver some immediate results in Afghanistan – and that might be a trade that an administration that wishes to wriggle away from a campaign promise to send more troops to Afghanistan might be willing to make.
If so, it would be unsurprising that India would not receive an early call.
Before the election, the Indo-Asian News Service published an interview with the Democratic candidate, in which he waxed loftily about the importance of India as a “strategic partner”. But that may have been “just words”. His record brims with positions that could quickly cool relations with New Delhi, most notably his know-nothing denunciations of outsourcing. He was also an early critic of the U.S.-India nuclear pact, though he eventually came down in its favor. Perhaps, then, he ignored Mr. Singh simply because closer relations with India don’t fit the his vision of the ideal world.
Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking about anything in particular and this misstep is what we can expect from a President whose limitless confidence in his own abilities is founded on a slender base of knowledge and experience.
As with much else about our leader-to-be, we shall have to wait to find out.
I doubt it. It's getting awfully full under there; Do you think he'll have to upgrade to a semi truck?
-AOP
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Posted by: AOP | Sunday, November 16, 2008 at 07:19 PM