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AN Indian poet was at his creative peak in 1942, the year US President-elect Joe Biden was born, and he may have anticipated the quandary the American victor would face in leading the troubled superpower. Biden’s country today is more racially divided than Margaret Mitchell would have bargained for, while slowly waning in prestige abroad. The world, wrote Majaz Lucknavi, was more tangled than the beloved’s tresses, a challenge to ravel. (Bahot mushkil hai duniya ka sa’nvarna/ Teri zulfo’n ka pench o kham nahi hai.)
The tangled world of Majaz has historically posed insurmountable challenges to rulers and plebeians alike, but it could be a little more of a handful for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Biden’s electoral victory is already being likened to a poisoned chalice brewed by Donald Trump. The mess he created at home and abroad, economically and politically, has also singed Europe and Asia in equal measure. The prospect of working with a hostile Republican Senate must deepen Biden’s worry at the starting line. If the threat doesn’t abate quickly with tact and concessions, it could condemn him to four years of a shackled presidency. Worse for the winner, the coming weeks permit the outgoing president some more time to wreak vengeance on his opponents at home and abroad.
An Israeli minister has warned of war with Iran if Biden wins the final count, while Haaretz has reported a secret military plan to take out scattered Hezbollah bases in Lebanon. If the Middle East burns who would be safe? Trump ominously holds the dog whistle to Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden, like Barack Obama, claims little leverage with Netanyahu’s Israel.
On environment, Biden is sworn to return to the agenda of slowing and stopping climate change. But he has given conflicting signals on fracking, a toxic and environmentally unsound method of extracting oil and gas from deep recesses of the earth. He will need to negotiate this tricky challenge between left-wing supporters and friendly business lobbies.
There are raging problems that are not of Trump’s making, but are rooted instead in domestic and regional habits.
Early February marks the deadline to revive a strategic nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Trump hasn’t responded well to Russian overtures to extend by five years the only remaining US-Russian nuclear arms control agreement. Instead, Washington demands that an unprecedented broader agreement involving Russia and China must be negotiated. Biden’s political acumen is on test. Meanwhile, current and former UN officials have been ecstatic over his victory, which they say presages urgent repairs to the world body’s waning relevance and prestige during Trump’s tenure.
The all-round damage done by the coronavirus pandemic offers no easy answers. Biden can do little to tame the disease frontally. How would he deal with millions of resisting Americans who refuse to wear a mask or observe social distancing prescribed by science? As for the vaccine, it will come when it comes.
There are raging problems that are not of Trump’s making, but are rooted instead in domestic and regional habits. India-Pakistan tensions are a good example. The flare-up over Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan has opened another tangled complexity. Sunni Turkey and predominantly-Sunni Pakistan have aligned with overwhelmingly Shia Azerbaijan, while Shia Iran supports the mostly Christian Armenia, which also has the blessing of Russia. Gulf states are taking sides in a conflict, ironically, in which Iran and Turkey make the rival sides.
The bloodiest raging conflict was set off under Biden’s watch, however, when Hillary Clinton guffawed at the brutal murder of Muammar Qadhafi. The ensuing ethnic conflict in Libya has torn Nato members apart, France and Russia together with Egypt and the UAE being vehemently opposed to the side shored up by Italy and Turkey.
Majaz would be watching Biden’s arrival in the midst of this tangle he created.
Significantly, France had led the war on Qadhafi just as Britain joined the US in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, two secular Arab leaders with the will and capacity to crush Islamist extremism that now dogs Paris, London and other European capitals.
In a way, both the Nagorno-Karabakh flare-up and India-Pakistan tensions have their genesis in the fall of the Soviet Union. That’s when India clamoured to supplant Pakistan as America’s blue-eyed boy in South Asia, courting two of the most unpopular US presidents of their time, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
If the US used Pakistan to checkmate the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was the recent trip to New Delhi by Trump’s secretary of state with a China-specific agenda a rehashed version of the fateful visit by Richard Armitage to Pervez Musharraf 16 years ago? How would Biden balance the China-specific Pivot-To-Asia, which co-opts India, and the concerns Kamala Harris and he have expressed on human rights abuse in Kashmir and against the discriminatory citizenship laws that Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to rally communal support in next year’s elections in Assam and West Bengal?
How will Biden regard Pakistan’s opposition parties clamouring to repair the fraying democratic institutions in the country, while needing Islamabad’s help to pull out of Afghanistan with minimum collateral damage?
Majaz’s tangled world is looking askance at the Sino-Indian tensions, trying as it does to figure out how two cordial neighbours whose leaders were rocking together on a swing here, and raising a toast there, have suddenly become aloof.
What could be the consequences of interdicting China on the Karakorum Highway and in the Straits of Malacca? That’s the question Biden may have to ask, but would not need to should Sino-US economic ties become mutually normal. Also, excessive focus on China could undermine Hillary Clinton’s quest for a pound of Vladimir Putin’s flesh for allegedly destroying her political career.
In a tangled world of prejudice and violence, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party is looking at a re-election in Myanmar. The gut-wrenching reward for the genocide of a defenceless minority may not go unnoticed in the Biden-Harris tenure.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2020
