A coalition of two or more countries doesn’t just appear out of thin air.
Make a pile of all the world’s 195 countries, take a random handful out, and you’ll find that all the countries in your hand have both common interests and serious differences.
If you then wish to bring them together in a coalition, you have to convince them to shunt their serious differences aside for the sake of capitalising on their common interests.
You could do that by gentle persuasion, hoping they’ll listen to reason. But if those particular countries are unlikely to listen to you, no matter how reasonable you sound, then there’s only one other thing you could do. You should pose such a dire threat to those countries that they join forces of their own accord.
This clarity of understanding came to me thanks to Donald Trump’s foreign policy, and I have to thank the president for that. I’m also grateful to Messrs Xi, Modi and Putin for providing a visual aid for any future course in the art of making a coalition.
When Trump started his trade war on the world, laying about him like Macduff, smiting friend and foe alike, I mentioned to my American MAGA interviewer that America may eventually run out of friends and allies. “We don’t care,” he replied with typical aplomb.
The recently concluded summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Tianjin should have disabused him of such blithe self-confidence, but probably didn’t. MAGA chaps are zealots, and zealotry is impervious to such incidentals as evidence and reason.
The three principal SCO countries, China, India and Russia, have clearly been pushed into a close-knit alliance against the West in general and the US in particular. This means they’ve agreed to downplay their differences and coalesce on their common interest: confrontation with a US-dominated West.
If this coalition perseveres, my MAGA interviewer will soon realise that America can no longer go it alone. She needs all the allies she can get because neither the US nor indeed the West as a whole any longer boasts an overwhelming strategic, economic and military superiority over those three countries combined. (It’s debatable whether this exists even vis-à-vis China by herself, but this is a debate for another time.)
The two evil regimes, Chinese and Russian, are anti-West viscerally and, shall we say, ontologically. Even so, there exist serious, perhaps irreconcilable, differences between them that a wise policy on the part of the West could have exploited.
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has been steadily colonising the Russian Far East and large parts of Siberia. Those regions are visibly moving away from Moscow and closer to Peking, something Russia is helpless to prevent but doubtless sees as a matter of grave concern.
India, meanwhile, has been moving closer to the West for years. The country inherited most of her political institutions from Britain, English is her unifying language (I mean India’s, not so much Britain’s), and no a priori enmity towards the West exists there.
There is, or rather has been, a fair amount of hostility to China though. India and China have teetered on the brink of war, possibly nuclear, for decades. Though the relations between the two countries have somewhat normalised in recent years, they are still far from normal.
Both keep huge army contingents on the border, and there are still no direct flights between India and China. The movement of people between the two countries is limited, and, even if they are no longer mortal enemies, they are certainly not friends.
Russia and India have been traditionally friendlier, and India, along with China, remains Russia’s significant trading partner. This isn’t to say that there are no frictions there. For example, both Russia and China have castigated India’s membership in Quad, the security bloc of the US, India, Japan and Australia.
India’s stand on Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine has been ambivalent. Let’s call it a position of benevolent neutrality, a tacit support of the Ukraine and no support of Russia (other than buying Russian oil). At the same time, the growing proximity between Russia and China, with the former increasingly looking like a vassal of the latter, threatens India’s strategic interests in Asia.
India is also concerned about Russia’s courtship of Pakistan. For example, Russia announced last year that she would welcome Pakistan into the BRICS group, much to India’s displeasure.
In short, there are numerous fault lines among the three major SCO members, and subtle diplomacy could have easily turned them into fissures. But Trump doesn’t do subtle diplomacy.
His first instinct is that of a bully, the new sheriff explaining to the folks who is now running their town. Except that the folks may form a united front and run the sheriff out of town before sundown.
I doubt my metaphor of a Western film is accurate, but this is essentially the situation Trump’s ill-informed aggressiveness has created. Three major countries have put their differences aside to concentrate on their main interest: standing up to America.
Some commentators hasten to allay such fears. The new coalition, they say correctly, lacks any positive programme of action, other than economic cooperation. What has brought it together is largely the negative desideratum of confronting the West.
True. But then what was the positive programme of NATO, an organisation that secured relative peace in Europe from 1949 to 2022? The sole purpose of NATO was strictly negative: containment of Soviet aggression.
Going back a bit further, what was the positive impulse behind the wartime alliance of the US, Britain and the USSR? The impulse was strictly negative: stopping Hitler in his tracks.
The coalition of China, India and Russia may be negative in its aims, but such negativity makes it stronger, not weaker. It gives the alliance a sharp focus, something that the US (and the West in general) sorely and demonstrably lacks.
Though his failure to stop the war in the Ukraine has sobered him up a bit, Trump is still striking out in all directions, picking fights against all and sundry, pushing former allies towards China and away from America.
For example, take the totally unnecessary brawl he picked with Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, and a country generally well-disposed towards the US. Out of the blue, he announced that Brazil would face 50 per cent tariffs, the highest in the world so far.
Brazil, Trump falsely claimed, runs a trade surplus with the US. In fact, Brazil runs a multi-million deficit in its trade with the US, but the punitive tariffs had nothing to do with trade. They were punishment meted out as retaliation for the prosecution of former Brazilian president Bolsonaro, who was a Trump ally.
This was a mafioso payback more than an exercise of sound politics, diplomacy or economics. So how long before Brazil joins China, India and Russia in their anti-American, anti-Western coalition? At this pace, America First may soon become America Alone, which will be a tragedy for the West at large.
The title above serves a dual purpose. In addition to introducing this article, it can do extra duty as the title of Trump’s next book, the sequel to The Art of Making a Deal. May I also suggest a subtitle, How to Turn the World Against You?