• Deepen the partnership with the European Union

• Hindustan Times
• Shyam Saran

o Theme - The EU’s emergence as an independent pole is good for India

o Brexit is over -- India will need to review its policy both towards Britain and the EU

o Till now
• Britain’s attraction was as a most convenient platform to do business in
Europe.
• Britain influenced EU’s policies towards India, claiming a familiarity with its
former colony that other member countries lacked.
o Going forward:
• Relations with Britain will lose some salience as London will no longer be a
critical capital in Indian calculations
• It will remain as important global financial markets and as a centre of
technological innovation and knowledge
• Britain will remain an opinion leader in the Anglo-Saxon world.

o Thus India should conclude an early trade deal with Britain

o EU, without Britain, would be weaker but more coherent orgainisation.

o Why ?
• Britain's presence provided EU's strongest link with the United States (US)
thereby sometime compromising its independence
• With Britain gone and Trump dismissive of the EU/NATO, it is likely that
Europe will begin to look at a more cohesive and relatively independent
international role.

o China factor
• Anxiety over China’s predatory investment in European strategic assets such as
ports and logistic hubs.
• China has been courting a group of former central and east European and
southern European countries under the 17+1 forum.

o Opportunity for India

• To revive its strategic partnership with EU( 2004) which fell short of
expectations .
• Why?
1. The EU priority to relations with China, which was seen as a bigger
economic opportunity than India
 2. Europe’s inward turn in the aftermath of the global financial and
economic crisis of 2008.

o India and the EU also have a convergent interest

• In a multilateral rule-based international trade and investment regime
embedded in a reformed WTO
• Climate crisis, cyber security, peaceful uses of space, international terrorism
and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
• Both are Multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual and multi-cultural plural
democracies.
• Both sides will need to shed the growing protectionist tendencies in their
countries.

• Delhi should find ways to step into spaces the new American politics open up
• Indian Express
• C. Raja Mohan

o Context - India prepares to host US President Donald Trump

o Trump’s visit is an opportunity for Delhi to limit the potential negative fallout from
two developments and take advantage of the emerging possibilities.

o Which two developments?

i. The impeachment drama - Expected to conclude on Wednesday with the
Senate acquitting Trump of the charges framed by the House of
Representatives.
ii. Challenge posed by Senator Bernie Sanders’ in the contest for Democratic
Party’s presidential nomination - The Democrats are heading towards a
political blood bath.

o Now:
• Free from the prospects of impeachment, Trump is expected to lay out an
optimistic vision for America’s future
• While the Democratic Party is nervous that the radicalism of Sanders ( who has
long identified himself as a socialist ) will only help Trump win a second term

o Socialism is not new to American politics

• Socialists and progressives had significant influence in the early decades of the
20th century
 • Post-war Era - the two traditions lost out .
▪ Reason?
• Unprecedented expansion of economic prosperity at home
• The prolonged confrontation with international communism.
• Post Cold war era - marked by deregulation and globalisation--socialism had
become a dirty word

o Sanders, however, appears to have broken the taboo amidst the widespread
economic discontent .

o Similarities between Trump and Sanders:

• Radicalism - They both either promise or threaten to overturn the established
order in the US
• Both are “outsiders” who rose to prominence in the teeth of the insiders’
opposition.

o Trump managed to
• defeat far more powerful candidates in the Republican race for the presidential
nomination in 2016
• survive the attempts by the so-called “deep state” and the Democratic Party to
undo the results of the 2016 presidential elections
• Defeat popular Hillary Clinton
• Overcome attempts to question his legitimacy
▪ Russian interference in the elections
▪ Alleged abuse of presidential power for personal gain in Ukraine
• Overturned the conventional wisdom on trade, migration and American role in
the world
• accelerate economic growth and reduced unemployment rate.

o Unlike Trump,Sanders’
• Suggest radical steps against concentration of wealth and the declining
opportunities for those at the bottom of the pyramid
• Significant increase in the minimum wage for workers
• Renewal of trade unions
• Universal healthcare, abolition of college debt and free tuition,
• Shift away from fossil fuels to hundred per cent renewable energy
• Massive taxes on what he calls “extreme wealth”.

o Common agenda of Trump and Sanders:

• Both oppose FTAs

 ▪ India will have to adapt to this new dynamic where bilateral trade deals
are replacing the multilateral regime
• Both calling end of America’s “endless wars” especially in the Middle East and
Afghanistan.
▪ Will create a potentially dangerous vacuum, it also opens space for India
to step in and take larger responsibility for regional and global security
affairs.

o Way Forward for India:

• India has always claimed such a role and in more recent years
• Trump’s visit is an opportunity for New Delhi .
• In the past, the US tended to discourage India’s role in the Middle East and
the Indian Ocean. Today, Washington is urging Delhi to do more for peace
and security in India’s near and extended neighbourhood.

• Delhi must make foreign policymaking transparent

• Hindustan Times
• Nicolas Blarel and Avinash Paliwal

o EAM S. Jaishankar recently observed:

• India requires an “unsentimental audit” of its foreign policy
• The need to move away from the so-called Delhi dogmas

o What is Delhi dogmas?

• A criticism of the intellectual traditions that have defined India’s international
thought, practice and policy.

o India’s foreign policy has straddled the uncomfortable space between being either
overly doctrinaire or utterly ambiguous.

o However the actual process depends on many other factors like :

• Ideas, ideologies, or personalities
• India’s complex domestic polity and bureaucratic apparatus
• Partisan preferences
• Legislative-executive checks and balances, as well as coalition politics

o Thus an unsentimental audit must go beyond an ideological critique of Nehruvian

non-alignment and avoid similar pitfalls of policy grandstanding.
o Example - India’s decision to condemn Sri Lanka at the UNHRC in 2012-13 was due
to the coalition bargains between the Congress and the DMK
 o Reasons why India’s foreign decision-making process is an enigma:
• Methodological obstacles to the systematic study of foreign policy -
▪ Difficulty to access primary data.
▪ Restricted access to archived documents
▪ Centralised and behind closed doors decisions
• Memoirs and autobiographies give inaccurate picture
▪ Written for different motives and audiences
▪ Are post-facto rationalisations of past decisions rather than a sober
assessment of the multi-level pressures and processes that lead to the
decision-making moment.
• Scholars interested in the study of Indian foreign policy have traditionally
focused on actions rather than actual process of decision-making

o Conclusion
• The transparency in the thought process behind India's foreign policy would be
of value not just for scholars interested in the study of India’s international
relations, but also to practitioners across political and bureaucratic lines.

• Welcoming the MEA’s overhaul

• Hindustan Times

o Theme - India’s foreign policy machine has got a long-due restructuring

o MEA has made a laudable first step towards making a strategic culture possible by
carrying out a major administrative restructuring.
o The idea is to make the ministry more responsive to the multiplicity of tasks that
constitute 21st century diplomacy
o Current drawbacks
• MEA’s staff strength is low
• Continues to lag in trading negotiations
• Larger percentage of Indians remain unaware of their government’s worldview
• Unable to tap the large pool of expertise that resides in the civil society.
• Lack of a strategic thinking .
o How?
• Some departments will be aggregated to focus on India’s burgeoning aid
programme and its economic diplomacy.
• More senior diplomats will be freed up to serve as strategic interlocutors
rather than mere overseers.
• New West Asia today is rife with small state, non-state actors pitted against each
other
• Indian Express

o Mid 20th century was marked by a single overarching and permanent tension
which existed between Israel and Arab world.
o Today, while Israel - Palestine is still unsolved.There is a broader struggle among
multiple players seeking regional hegemony.
o Competing forces:
• Fractious groups of militias
• Religious groups
• Tribal forces
• Financed and controlled by Iran and Saudi Arabia.

o The Iranian revolution of 1979 galvanised Islamists across the region.

o The civil war in Lebanon and Islamist insurgency against the Soviet presence in
Afghanistan, and the eight years war between Iran and Iraq, also strengthened the
hand of armed groups outside the control of governments.
o As a result, contemporary West Asia has been shifting constantly between state
actors and non-state actors .
o At times, non-state actors like the Hezbollah of Lebanon have been more
influential than the national governments.

o Case of Iran
• Its pre-eminence in proxy wars was born out of the Iran-Iraq war.
• Opposition to the American-Saudi support for Saddam Hussein that the Iranian
government decided to create its Shiite proxies and militias in the region.
• Today, Iran considers itself as a model state, self-appointed leader of the
world’s Shiite Muslims
• The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Qassem Soleimani, played a
key role.

o The Saudis
• viewed Iran as a domestic threat from 1979 onwards.
• In the 1990s, Saudi Arabia, wishing to contain Iran’s influence on the region’s
minority Shiite populations, sought to harden Sunni-Shiite rifts.
o After the fall of Saddam’s government post American invasion. Iran raced to fill
the post-war vacuum.

o With soleimani killed and considering imbalance in terms of conventional warfare

with USA -- Tehran will certainly expand the model it perfected in Syria and Iraq —
namely, fostering the creation of numerous smaller groups
o Way forward
• At the end of the day, even an ideologically-oriented country like Iran needs a
breakthrough with the Donald Trump administration if regional calm is to be
restored.
• What Brexit means for the EU and its partners
o January 31, 2020 - Brexit happened for which 52% of the British electorate voted
in 2016
o A structured exit
• Withdrawal Agreement
▪ Provides for a transition period, until the end of 2020.
▪ U.K. will continue to participate in the EU’s Customs Union and in the
Single Market, and to apply EU law, even if it is no longer a Member
State.
▪ U.K. will also continue to abide by the international agreements of the
EU
• Still the 27 Member States of EU
▪ Form a single market of 450 million citizens
▪ More than 20 million businesses
▪ Remain the largest trading bloc in the world

• Brexit Is Fake News

• Foreign Policy
• BY CHRIS MILLER

o Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted: “Happy first full
day of UK Independence.”
o But Brexit is not done. Nor will it ever really happen.
o In a strictly legal sense, of course, Britain is out. But this means little
• All the things that drove the United Kingdom to vote for Brexit—the need to
comply with EU regulations, debates about migration, a sense that Britain is
not in control of its own laws—none of these will change or go away.
Neither, therefore, will Brexit.
• Right now, the United Kingdom is in a transition period during which both
London and Brussels agreed that almost nothing would change, except for
the flag.
• The European Court of Justice, hated by Brexiteers for violating British
sovereignty, will continue to judge U.K. law.
• Even migration from other EU member states will continue as before.
• The only real difference is that now the country will have no votes in the
European Council or the European Parliament, despite agreeing to follow
their rules until at least the end of the year.

o Even post the transition period:

• Market - The EU forges 27 different nations into a single market
 • Trade - Roughly half of the UK’s trade is with the European Union, even higher
if countries such as Turkey, which is not in the EU but is in a customs union
with Europe, are included.
• Size of economy - The EU’s economy is more than five times bigger than
Britain’s
• Trade deals - Its has been three years since the British government began
negotiating its own trade deals with other countries. Thus far, London has
signed deals with partners, including Georgia and Jordan, that constitute only
8 percent of British trade.

o The Swiss provide a template

• Switzerland also stands outside the EU
• But many Swiss firms choose to implement EU laws because it makes cross-
border trade easier.
• Political Cost - Laws dictated from Brussels.

o Although UK is no longer a member of the EU, but it has not really left.Sovereignty
will be circumscribed so long as Britain wants access to EU markets.