China on mind, US reboots its priorities

The US President, Joe Biden, has not quite secured his domestic agenda, but he is setting off this week to give shape to his foreign policy. First stop will be the UK, which is hosting the G-7 summit. After that, a hop across the Channel to Brussels, where he will participate in a meeting with NATO partners. Then on June 16, there will be a summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva.

The locus of Biden’s foreign tour is as strong a signal as you can get, that for the present, the trans-Atlantic remains the primary focus of US policy. Biden knows that to meet his key foreign policy goal — outcompeting China on all fronts-he must first repair and strengthen the US itself and revitalise America’s primary alliance network.

In recent months, the US has worked with European allies to sanction both China and Russia — the former on Xinjiang and the latter because of cyber attacks and Ukraine. Biden has also strongly emphasised prioritising democracy and human rights along with issues of trade and security, something that sits well in Brussels.

Russian cyber attacks and other such activities are in some ways an effort by Russia to get the attention of the West and work out a modus vivendi. Putin knows well that the future of Russia lies in its ties with Western Europe, and not China, and the key to that is the US. For the Americans, weakening the emerging Sino-Russian entente is an important goal since their main geopolitical rival of this century is China. The upcoming summit in Geneva could well yield some surprise results. Already, there are signals that the US may be ready to accept the Nord Stream 2 pipeline running from Russia to Germany.

With a revitalised trans-Atlantic relationship as a springboard, Biden hopes to raise the game with China, as well as take up the agenda of climate change. Though his administration's formal China policy is yet to be revealed, the US has signalled that it would involve cooperation with allies on a broad front involving technology, development and connectivity, even while going on the front foot to combat Covid.

In many areas, the administration is building upon and expanding the Trump administration’s sanctions on Chinese entities. In the next phase, a bipartisan Strategic Competition Act will provide hundreds of millions of dollars for the US competitive effort. A complementary Endless Frontier Act will boost technology research to promote US innovation by putting up $100 billion.

On the eve of Biden’s tour, the US declared a donation of 80 million vaccine doses, most of them to the global Covax facility, making it the biggest donor in the world by far. This signals the US return to multilateralism and that it has successfully overcome the Covid pandemic.

In the real world, unexpected events usurp policy goals and no region is more unpredictable here for the US than the Middle-East which has thwarted US attempts to pivot away from the region and “return” to Asia, the most dynamic economic region of the world. The region remains a powder keg, not only on account of the Israel-Palestine issue, but the Saudi-Israeli-UAE strategy of containing Iran.

Where does India fit in here? Remarkably, a recent US poll showed that in April, more Indians had a favourable view of the US (79 per cent) under the Biden administration than the Americans themselves (78). Positive views of the US were up in most of alliance countries, especially Germany, but only in Japan and Italy did they exceed 50 per cent. But it is unlikely that New Delhi can derive any payoff from this. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s recent visit suggested that there is a distinct lack of frisson in US-India ties.

The priority given to India on account of the US Indo-Pacific strategy remains strong in terms of high-level visits and virtual conversations between leaders. There is a solid foundation of defence and security ties built up in the past decade and more. Better US ties with Moscow could ease pressure on New Delhi on account of American sanctions on arms trade with Russia.

As the relative gap between its power and that of China grows, India needs the US to balance China in the South Asia-Indian Ocean Region. The Indian contribution, military or economic, towards a strong American Indo-Pacific strategy appears more nebulous. This is an asymmetry which cannot but have real-life consequences. India should not assume that antipathy to China alone will be the over-riding factor in the US global policy.

Even though the Indian economy is limping, everything looks good on the Indo-US bilateral front where trade in goods and services is flourishing, as is the FDI relationship, even though India’s protectionist turn doesn’t sit well with Washington. But this is small change compared to the US engagement with China. With Trump snapping at his heels, Biden must show results in the next year or so, which would preclude measures against China that could have a blowback on the US.

The recent spectacle of India begging for assistance because of its own bungled response to Covid could not have gone unnoticed in the Administration. New Delhi looked more of a liability than the self-confident player which is needed to boost US policy in the region.

India’s increasing autocratic turn and persecution of Muslims, too, cannot easily be ignored by the US which is critical of China on both those counts. All US administrations balance policy between American interests and values. If India can serve US interests, the values part of the equation can be adjusted.

The Tribune June 8, 2021

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/china-on-mind-us-reboots-its-priorities-265002

Need sooner, not later There’s now a publicity overdrive on the vaccine bonanza headed our way in future

The thought that comes to mind when we think about Prime Minister Modi’s BJP is muscular nationalism, Hindutva, and over-the-top-theatrics. Actually, the defining trait of the government is incompetence. Those other things are merely a cover for ineptitude. The record ranges from misreading and mishandling China, demonetisation, the shoddy GST rollout and slowing economy. But what has really revealed its true incapacity is the handling of the Covid vaccination programme. 

The PM’s virtual address on January 28 to the WEF in Davos was an essay on hubris. He declared that India’s health infrastructure, trained staff and technology application had contained the Covid challenge. Not only had India vaccinated 2.3 million health workers in 12 days, but also planned to vaccinate 300 million older people in the ‘next few months’, and supply vaccines to other countries as part of India’s humanitarian tradition.

At the onset of the pandemic last year, the union government seized the command and control of the Covid response. Lockdowns were enforced and loosened through the mildly menacing Home Ministry circulars. The pain and suffering that migrant workers faced in their sometimes epic journey to reach home was simply ignored. The government also took charge of the national vaccination campaign, creating a National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration to centralise the vaccination process through the CoWin app and dishing out certificates with the Prime Minister’s picture on it.

But no one had done any calculation about the actual number of doses that would be needed in India. The government, dependent on just the Serum Institute and Bharat Biotech, waited till January 2021 to place orders for their vaccines. On May 3, the SII head, Adar Poonawalla, said his company had received orders for 260 million doses, of which 150 million had already been supplied and the company had received an advance for another 110 million doses for the May-July period. Even with the 20 million Bharat Biotech Covaxin doses, these numbers would barely scratch the surface of the country’s requirements.

The second wave has consumed the narrative of bravado and bombast. As people scrambled for beds in hospitals and fought for oxygen cylinders and cremated and disposed of the remains of their near and dear haphazardly, they looked for direction and leadership and there was none.

There were no stern Home Ministry directives, no prime ministerial homilies. The decision to lockdown was now left to the states who were suddenly told that the responsibility of coping with the situation was actually theirs. As the vaccination programme began faltering, rules were changed and states were told to buy their own vaccines from wherever they could.

As the second wave intensified, the pace of vaccinations has faltered on account of vaccine shortage arising from poor decisions of the Central government, which now compounded the problem by opening up vaccines for all adults as of May 1. A government advisory group has since revealed that this was a purely political decision. This led to a huge surge of demand which has sent the vaccination programme into a tailspin — the number of shots declined from an average of 3.6 million a day on April 10 to just about 1.4 million on May 20.

Instead of ‘cooperative federalism’ that we desperately need to deal with the situation, what we have been getting are made-for-TV spectacles where the PM interacts with District Magistrates and Chief Ministers in a one-way monologue where no questions are asked nor answered.

Last Sunday in an interview, the Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary PK Mishra came up with all the usual platitudes and excuses — India has the fastest rate of vaccination, had vaccinated third highest number globally, the slowdown was not policy failure but a consequence of previously stockpiled vaccines running out and so on.

Mishra repeated the boast that India had vaccinated 19 crore people, the equivalent of half the US population. A look at the figures collated by Our World in Data shows, as of May 21, China has administered 483.34 million (48 crore) doses as against India’s 187.89 million (19 crore), nowhere near the PM’s claim of doing 300 million at the WEF meet.

There is now a publicity overdrive on the enormous vaccine bonanza headed our way in the coming months. As Mishra noted, ‘While kicking in with a time lag of a few months, the supply is slated to increase from 7 crore per month in April to 16 crore in July and 25 crore in October.’

This will be of little comfort to those whose near and dear have been dying at the rate of 4,000 per day since mid-May. Possibly a hundred thousand or more will be dead before ‘things kick in with a time lag.’

And all we have is the promise of vast quantities of vaccines in future. We have no way of knowing whether they will arrive, or whether the government which has singularly bungled the vaccination programme so far, can deliver it to the people. Meanwhile, those who will lose a near and dear one while waiting must take it on the chin, this is part of the resilience and positivity expected from people whose country is destined to be a Great Power.

The Tribune May 25, 2021

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/need-sooner-not-later-257879

Without Its Own China Strategy Yet, Biden Administration Maintains Trump's Hardline Stance

According to a recent Pew poll, 53% of Republicans consider China as an “enemy” as against 43% who see them as a “competitor”. Only 20% of Democrats see China as an enemy, as against a majority of 65% who see them as a “competitor.” But the jury is still out on how the US views China.

The Joe Biden administration says that it is in the process of formulating its China strategy. In the meantime, it continues to maintain the hardline stance of the Donald Trump administration. In fact, there is a great deal of pressure from the Republican Party to prevent any significant change of policy or any rollback in the penalties Trump’s team imposed in terms of tariffs and bans on exporting technology.

Pressure is now building up from a section of the Democrats as well. Last week, House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the US and world leaders to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics. Many feel that she is reflecting the views of the Biden administration, which is keen on not getting outflanked by the Republicans on this issue.

Right now, the only area in which Congress seems to be adopting a bipartisan approach is China. Outcompeting China is an area in which both parties agree. Om April 20, Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, unveiled the “Endless Frontier Act” aimed at promoting domestic critical technologies through basic research.  This is co-sponsored by Republican Senator Todd Young. The anchor of this legislation is a $100 billion funding for the National Science Foundation to create a new technology directorate.

On April 21, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Democrat Bob Menendez approved the Strategic Competition Act of 2021, which will channel more aid to Africa, Latin America to counter China’s financial aid to these countries, provide greater funding for US tech industries, strengthen the US International Development Finance Corporation to compete against Chinese institutions.

These two Bills are likely to be melded together to make for one comprehensive anti-China legislation, but the support that both Bills have been getting suggests that there will be a strong legislative push to the new US policy on China.

Michael D. Swaine, the well known American Sinologist, has called these moves a “de facto declaration of cold war on China by the US Congress”. Criticising what he says was the “demonisation” of China, he has called on the Congress and the Biden administration to take up “a more balanced, fact-based approach to China” that not only looks at the threats and challenges, but also the opportunities that China presents. More than anything else, he believes that such legislation could put off US allies and friends who will feel that the US is pushing for a “win or lose cold war with China”.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Photo: Reuters/Brian Snyder

Decoupling cost the US too

Though the Trump administration shifted US policy from engagement to competition with China, there has been criticism that the Trump approach was confusing and incomplete. After all, in January 2020, the US and China signed a significant trade deal which only came apart on account of the stress generated in US-China relations because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Actually, the Trump “decoupling” cost the US some.

In a recent article, former US diplomat Chas Freeman noted that American farmers have lost most of their $24 billion Chinese market, US companies have had to cut profits and wages and raise prices for American consumers, and almost no jobs have been re-shored back to the US. By 2025, the US can expect job losses topping 320,000 and a GDP that is $1.6 trillion less than what it would have been otherwise because of its China restrictions.

A recent report of the Rhodium Group says that FDI between the US and China fell to $15.9 billion on account of the COVID-19 pandemic and the US-China tensions. Interestingly, completed Chinese FDI to the US showed a slight rise to $7.2 billion in 2020 from $6.3 billion in 2019. Chinese venture capital also showed a slight increase to $3.2 billion in 2020 from $2.3 billion in 2019. As far as the US is concerned, both its FDI and venture capital to China declined.

For the present, the Biden administration is maintaining the restrictive policies imposed in 2020, but a great deal depends on how the China issue is playing out domestically in the US. In early April, the US Department of Commerce added seven Chinese supercomputing companies to its Entity List. The Biden team has called for a more systematic and coordinated action with allies to screen investments from China, impose export controls and consider human rights issues. This could actually see more predictable restraints and some loosening up of investment and trade issues in non-sensitive areas.

So far, the Biden inclination has been to see China policy in terms of strategic competition with China. The joint statement following the visit of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to Washington DC in mid-April was important for their call for “peace and stability” in the Taiwan Straits, but also the decision to invest together in areas like 5G, AI, quantum computing, genomics and semiconductor supply chains.

The US also categorically assured the Japanese that the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security applied to the Senkaku islands, which the Chinese claim, and this guarantee includes the entire gamut of US capabilities, “including nuclear.”

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga in Tokyo, Japan, May 7, 2021. Photo: Hiro Komae/Pool via Reuters

But the big challenge could well be Taiwan, with American military leaders saying that they believe that Beijing could attempt a forcible take over of the island, sooner, rather than later. Though these views have been dismissed as alarmist, they do provide a flavour of the situation today.

China has itself to blame

In great measure, China itself is to blame for its predicament. Take the case of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) with Europe. This was agreed to at the end of 2020 despite the problems in Hong Kong and the criticism of Chinese actions in Xinjiang and done over US objections.

But the Chinese decision to sanction a number of European MPs and scholars in March 2021, has gotten the EU Parliament’s back up. The Chinese action was ostensibly in reaction to the European/American sanctions on a number of Xinjiang officials. But where the Europeans targeted relatively junior Xinjiang officials, the Chinese went for the jugular and sanctioned Reinhard Butikofer, a prominent member of the Greens Party and four other Members of European Parliament, 2 Dutch, 1 Belgian and one Lithuanian MPs and some well-known scholars and research institutes.

As a result of this, the European Parliament has suspended the process of ratifying the CAI. More trouble could be headed China’s way as polls suggest that the Greens could play an important role in the German government after the September elections. Observers say that there is a perceptible hardline shift in European views of China.

Tensions swirl around the Indo-Pacific region and it is up to responsible leadership in Washington and Beijing to ensure that they do not reach the point of confrontation and war. The fate of Hong Kong has served as a warning as to how things can change in the region. Taiwan has been facing increasing Chinese assertiveness and could compel the United States to take a stand, though as observers have noted, as of now the position remains ambiguous.

The Wire May 24, 2021

https://thewire.in/world/without-its-own-china-strategy-yet-biden-administration-maintains-trumps-hardline-stance

Be a better democracy: The US needs a lot of self-correction but this is what it is finding so difficult to do

A defining trait of a democratic system is its ability to self-correct. Individual freedoms, systemic checks and balances, and ultimately the win-lose electoral processes are all mechanisms that help. So, it is difficult to understand why that self-correction has become so difficult for the United States of America, the proverbial “City upon a Hill” and a beacon of democracy and hope for the world.

India complains about the unfairness of the latest Freedom House index which depicted a steep decline of its democratic credentials, but it needn’t fret. The US, too, has slipped eight points from its 2009 score of 94. Now it is behind Greece and Mauritius.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that last week Republican legislators defended those who stormed the US Capitol on January 6. Representative Andrew S Clyde of Georgia said in a formal meeting that they were on a “normal tourist visit”. Actually the violent mob sought to prevent the certification of the November 3 presidential election and so it was nothing less than an attempted coup, one that was encouraged, if not abetted, by the outgoing president.

Today, 66% of the Republican Party believes that the 2020 election was “stolen from Donald Trump”. Refusing to accept the result of the election has now become the litmus test of a true-blue Republican. Those who disagree are being hounded.

The real illness of the country is racism. As historian Michael Todd Landis has noted, since 1776, “a minority of wealthy white men has always ruled, using legal and extralegal strategies.” White and black Americans arrived in the US at the same time in the 1620s, though the latter came involuntarily. Slaves were formally emancipated in 1863, but it took the social upheavals of the mid-1960s for the blacks to be given the right to vote.

Times of India May 22, 2021

A variety of means such as gerrymandering, purging voter rolls, limiting early and absentee voting, putting discriminatory ID requirements, are used to deny or suppress non-white votes. There are systemic features, too, that are the hallmark of the US-style democracy: Use of an electoral college to block popular outcomes in the presidential election, arcane voting rules in the Senate to kill and delay legislation that benefits ordinary people.

The whole system rests on money, large amounts of it, for fighting elections or lobbying and manipulating the judicial system. The 2020 election cost $14 billion, more than twice that was spent in 2016. The US has fitfully attempted to reform its election spending but Big Money has found a way around all rules and today large donations comprise 71% of total election fundraising and despite rules, election spending is increasingly opaque.

One dysfunction that stands out is the inability of American democracy to deal with repeated mass-shootings. Last year a record 20,000 people died because of gun violence. And 23 million firearms were bought by Americans, a 64% jump over the previous year. Politicians claim that the right to bear arms is to enable citizens to defend democracy. But that was for the 18th century. In the 21st century all we have seen those guns do is kill innocents in ever larger numbers.

There have been heroic attempts to reform the system, but the oligarchs always end up winners. Today’s US has regressed from the mid-1960s when it gave blacks voting rights, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programmes spent money not only to eliminate poverty and racial injustice but to promote education, medical care and transportation. Now, the Republicans’ ideologically-driven agenda looks down on public spending, whether it is on roads, bridges, education, or to give poorer and less-privileged Americans a leg up.

The challenge before the US is not an ordinary one. The world is in the midst of a huge contest between authoritarianism and democracy. As the world’s leading power and, yes, democracy, the US needs, in the words of  Chas Freeman, to show that it is “better governed, better educated, more egalitarian, more open, more innovative, healthier, and freer society”.

Times of India  May 22, 2021

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/be-a-better-democracy-the-us-needs-a-lot-of-self-correction-but-this-is-what-it-is-finding-so-difficult-to-do/

China policy in the works: Unclear if Biden administration will go for ‘semi containment’ or selective engagement

As of now all we have of the US-China policy are words, from President Biden, his aides like Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. In his first speech to the Congress at the end of last month, Biden talked tough on China, saying that Washington ‘would stand up to unfair trade practices, subsidies to state-owned enterprises and theft of US technology and intellectual property’. Adding that the US would maintain a strong military presence in the Indo Pacific ‘not to start a conflict, but to prevent one’. But the bottom line was that the competition with China was not only military, but also economic and technological. Biden has repeatedly asserted that the real issue is US recovery and that the way to go is to outcompete China in a range of areas.

The message sent out by Blinken and Sullivan is that the goal of the US policy is not to contain China, and that Quad is about an ‘affirmative agenda’ which involves upholding international law and human rights, as well as promoting strategies of development and mitigating climate change.

The comprehensive review of a new US policy towards China is still being worked out, and it's not clear whether the Biden administration will follow Trump’s policy of selective containment, or craft a new one of selective engagement. The problem is that Biden must write on a palimpsest that is not exactly blank. The US-China tariff war, US sanctions on certain technology categories, Hong Kong developments, threats to Taiwan, eastern Ladakh faceoff, are realities that a US President cannot ignore. As it is, the mood in the US is very anti-China, and Biden has to worry about being outflanked on the issue by Trump who retains an iron grip on the Republican Party which will do its best to wrest away the House of Representatives from the Democrats in the off-year elections in November 2022.

Whatever be the political imperatives, the US has to consider the ongoing economic costs of Trump’s ‘semi containment of China’. In a recent article, former US diplomat Chas Freeman noted that the US farmers have lost most of their $24 billion Chinese market, US companies have had to cut profits and wages and raise prices for US consumers, and almost no jobs have been re-shored back to the US. By 2025, the US can expect job losses topping 3,20,000 and a GDP $1.6 trillion less than what it would have been otherwise because of its China restrictions.

Biden has repeatedly asserted that the real issue is US recovery and that the way to go is to outcompete China in a range of areas. Even the Interim Security Guidance issued by his administration notes that to be strong abroad, ‘the United States [needs] to build back better at home.’ Biden has unfolded a plan whereby this can be done, but so divided is the US polity that he is likely to face an uphill struggle in trying to get the Congress to appropriate the money needed to repair the decaying US infrastructure, raise federal spending in R&D and education.

The US travails are there for all to see. The grip of racism in its political culture is only matched by the obstinate refusal by significant sections of Americans to accept that in their society today there are people — minorities, women, the poor — who need a leg-up. In the present situation, as Freeman puts it, the US needs to show that it is ‘better governed, better educated, more egalitarian, more open, more innovative, healthier, and freer society’.

Biden is not seeking conflict abroad, leave alone with China. But the poison pills left behind by the Trump team are like landmines scattered around the landscape. For example, the use of the word ‘genocide’ for the persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang. What is happening in Xinjiang is unacceptable and a gross violation of human rights, but it is not ‘genocide’ of the kind the Nazis conducted against the Jews. If Xi Jinping was actually presiding over such an act, how could the US, or for that matter the world community, have normal relations with China?

But the Democrats find themselves pushed by the Trump positions. Last year, the Democrats removed the phrase ‘one China’ from their election platform. And Biden became the first President, since the US recognised the People’s Republic of China, to invite the Taiwan ambassador to his inauguration. Last month, the US announced that it was easing restrictions on official US contacts with the Taiwan government. Not surprisingly, Chinese actions and rhetoric around Taiwan has become more belligerent. In his confirmation hearings in the US Senate, Admiral John Aquilino, the Biden administration’s nominee for the commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, has said the danger of the Chinese use of force against Taiwan ‘is much closer to us than most think’. This cannot but have the most catastrophic consequences for China itself, and by extension, the rest of the world.

But Biden accurately sees the challenge of China as being economic and technological. Militarily, actually, the US remains far superior to China, which today accounts for 30% of the world’s manufactures, and has become the largest consumer market. American, or for that matter Japanese and European prosperity, depend, in some measure, on stable ties with China. For that reason, Biden would much prefer a strategy of selective engagement. One that will seek to build the strongest possible coalition of friends and allies to push Beijing in the right direction.

The Tribune May 11, 2021 

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/china-policy-in-the-works-251010

EU Summit Focuses on COVID, But No Breakthrough on IPR Waiver

Beyond the nice words and solidarity for India’s COVID predicament expressed by the European Union leadership, the most significant outcome of the India-EU summit of Saturday was the decision to relaunch the talks on a trade and investment treaty.

The talks had been stalled since 2013 because of differences on issues such as market access for European products, mobility for Indian professionals and geographical indications protection.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi represented India at the summit, which was held in this format involving the entire EU leadership for the first time. The summit was hosted by Portugal, the EU was represented by the 27 EU leaders, as well as its apex leadership – Charles Michel, the President of the European Council and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission.

According to Michel, the two sides have now agreed to launch negotiations on “mutually reinforcing agreements on trade, on investment protection, and on geographical indications.” Whether or not these succeed is another matter given the uncompromising attitude of both sides on some key issues.

Despite Prime Minister Modi’s appeal, no common ground was found on the issue of waiving Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) related to COVID treatments and vaccines.

Last week in a surprise move, President Biden had said that the US was willing to consider a waiver, but a day later German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly opposed the waiver. Under WTO rules, such a move would require consensus that can only be worked out by extensive negotiations.

Even so, assuming the waiver is provided today, the facilities for making vaccines could easily take more than a year to be established. This would not be able to address the emergency the country confronts today.

Focus on Fight Against COVID

A major focus of the joint statement issued after the meeting was the fight against COVID-19 in the wake of the pandemic’s surge in India. Leaders expressed their solidarity with New Delhi and pledged cooperation.

Urgent shipments of oxygen, medicine and vital equipment worth 100 million  Euros had already been organised by 15 member states under the EU’s civil protection mechanism.

The two sides also took up the longer term issue of global cooperation on creating more resilient medical supply chains, vaccines and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, as well as ensuring universal and equitable access to vaccines.

Another area of interest was the importance of addressing the issue of climate change and fostering green growth. Both sides reiterated their commitments to the Paris Agreement and the need to strengthen the steps to mitigate climate change.

As part of this the two sides agreed to cooperate in deploying renewable energy, promoting energy efficiency and collaborating on smart grid and storage technology.

Widening EU’s Connectivity

Underlying the summit were the increased tensions between the EU and China. So, not surprisingly, a fourth major development was related to the connectivity partnership which will expand the EU’s connectivity initiative to enhance digital, energy, transport and people to people connectivity.

The initiative emphasized the importance of widening cooperation in third-world countries and regions, notably in Africa, Central Asia and the Indo-Pacific in the area of digital, energy, transport and people to people connectivity.

But so far, its connectivity activities have been focused nearer home in the Balkans and the Caucasus.  The EU already has a connectivity partnership with Japan and now it is seeking to expand to the Indo-Pacific

Last month, the EU announced its new Indo- Pacific strategy which seeks to promote ‘regional stability, security and sustainable development” in the region. It sought to address the increasing tensions on trade and supply chains, as well as political and security areas.

The strategy will be based on “upholding democracy, human rights, the rule of law and respect for international law.”

The very last paragraph of the Joint Statement issued after the meeting on Saturday is a long winded sentence which says that the two sides are committed “to a free, open, inclusive and rules-based Indo-Pacific space”. No one can doubt that the unstated target of the statement was the People’s Republic of China.

Equally significant is the reference to the new dialogue between the Indian Navy and the erstwhile European Union task force combating piracy in Somalia EUNAVFOR Atlanta in relation to the Indo-Pacific.

All this sounds nice in a terms of joint statements and declarations, but it should be clear that a significant gulf still separates India and the EU on many key issues. A trade and investment agreement will not come easily. Likewise, approaches to climate change will vary, IPR issues will not be easy to overcome.

Perhaps, the most important divide could be on the issue of human rights. Though India and the EU have committed themselves to resume their Human Rights dialogue, they will not find it easy to bridge their different perspectives on various issues ranging from religious freedom, to freedom of the press and democracy.

The India-EU meet has taken place when the regional and global situation is fluid and tense. Last December just after the US elections, the EU had arrived at a far-reaching trade and investment agreement with China.

But subsequently, the EU has been drawing closer to the US with both imposing sanctions against China for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Beijing’s counter-sanctions have led to a suspension of the ratification process of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) , which could have otherwise come into force in early 2022.

In this situation, the EU is seeking to strengthen ties with India which it sees as a like-minded entity which is democratic, believes in multilateralism and is ready to work with its agenda on connectivity, Indo-Pacific, climate change and dealing with the COVID pandemic. India cannot replace the value of China as a trade partner, but can serve a useful function as a hedge of sorts.

The Quint, May 10, 2021

https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/eu-summit-focuses-on-covid-but-no-breakthrough-on-ipr-waiver#read-more#read-more