Blindsided by Trump, Modi is learning hard lessons about India’s place in the new world order

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1. The premise of this article is that beyond the issues with Donald Trump, efforts by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his predecessors to bring India closer to the United States and the West are misguided and ultimately futile. The author bases this opinion on very stark assessments about the realities of international geopolitics.

   The first is that **India is never going to be accepted into the Western camp**, try as it might.

   >The fact is, India isn’t rich enough or white enough or English-speaking enough to be a charter member of either the west or the anglophone world. Modi’s mandarins forgot that – outside the charmed circle of the west – the US doesn’t have allies, it has clients.

   American policymakers have often been frustrated at India’s reluctance to move closer into the Western orbit, but even if its leaders were willing to pursue such an arrangement with the United States, they would still be rejected, because India is

   1. Not White Enough – India isn’t and will likely never be considered ethnically and culturally close enough to be acceptable to the West. There are other nations, like Israel and the former Communist bloc, even Russia, that are seen as being close enough to pass, but not a country of brown-skinned pagans in the heart of Asia.

   2. Not Rich Enough – There are other non-white countries that have managed to deeply embed themselves into the Western order, like the Arab nations, Turkey, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. But they’ve done so only by having enormous wealth, natural resources or technology that they have generously shared with the West, and also by becoming American client states and subordinating their defence and foreign policy to American interests to a degree that India would find it nearly impossible to do.

   And the second assessment is that **Trump isn’t an aberration – He represents the future of the Western world.** A world that is getting increasingly aggressive at the prospect of poorer, non-white countries sharing in the fruits of economic prosperity and getting too big for their boots. And of immigrants from these countries finding wealth, status and influence in the West.

   >Western benevolence has always been predicated on western hegemony. Once the climate crisis and China’s rise made it clear that the west’s supremacy wasn’t future-proofed; once the promise of steady economic growth, the modern measure of secular progress, became unredeemable, western centrists began to secede from the world order they had created in their pomp. Gaza is the sum of this secession. The WTO, overseas aid, due process for asylum seekers, international humanitarian law, the UN system – the whole postwar order built by the west and led by the US – is being cast aside as rich countries circle their wagons against a needy, unruly world.

   >This has led to the near-simultaneous rise of agenda-setting far-right parties in western countries. Trump-like and Trump-lite demagogues have become inevitable. Nigel Farage, Jordan Bardella, Alice Weidel, Viktor Orbán are living proof that Trump’s mix of nativism and protectionism is the reality that India and non-western countries more generally will have to contend with for the foreseeable future.

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