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I don't see India becoming an enemy of the free world any time soon, and the second half of the 21st century is soon in a geopolitical sense (and looming in a m

I don't see India becoming an enemy of the free world any time soon, and the second half of the 21st century is soon in a geopolitical sense (and looming in a my-lifetime sense). An inward-focussed economic superpower, yeah. (The inward focus is the part of Modi's pitch for India that makes a kind of sense). An enemy of the free world? It's the world's largest democracy with more than one seventh of the population of the free world. It might have taken Trump only four years to get really close to implementing the collapse of the rule of law in the USA, but the BJP has its work cut out achieving that in India; people will tire of the nonsense. Edited as to Russia: are you sure it'll be a single, functioning state by the end of this year, let alone for the second quarter of the 21st century? It is heading towards (within weeks of) a kind of economic status that could only be survived by a country that has never experienced modernity, like North Korea.

selimthegrim 5y ago
Kashmiris and the hanged Muslim cartoon the BJP account was tweeting the other day would like a word with you.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  "... would like a word with you" is hardly high quality discourse, but OK: Kashmir is really an example of what I mean about the likelihood that the BJP will have trouble achieving things on the kind of timescale that Trump was working to. It's an awful, very-long-term conflict in disputed territory, is it not? Things move forward and backwards. It does not surprise me that I was instantly downvoted for alluding to Trump when defending against the idea that India is going to become an enemy of the free world. I guess it's because some readers think I am "politicising" it. But you surely shouldn't automatically get to other a democratic nation of 1.4 billion people without reference to the elephant in the room -- that the USA was very recently (perhaps even still is) only one presidential term away from becoming an enemy of the "international rules-based order". You only have to look at how Trump proposed to deal with Tiktok, or how he mysteriously abruptly exempted ZTE from some sanctions, to understand what I mean -- let alone the even bigger elephant in the room, that he successfully downgraded GOP 2016 platform language about the defence of Ukraine and literally coerced Ukraine's leadership with the threatened withholding of congressionally-approved support. The reality is that this discussion about potential threats to the free world or rules-based international order simply can't be one-sided like this. It's an absurdity.

selimthegrim 5y ago

Kashmiris and the hanged Muslim cartoon the BJP account was tweeting the other day would like a word with you.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
"... would like a word with you" is hardly high quality discourse, but OK: Kashmir is really an example of what I mean about the likelihood that the BJP will have trouble achieving things on the kind of timescale that Trump was working to. It's an awful, very-long-term conflict in disputed territory, is it not? Things move forward and backwards. It does not surprise me that I was instantly downvoted for alluding to Trump when defending against the idea that India is going to become an enemy of the free world. I guess it's because some readers think I am "politicising" it. But you surely shouldn't automatically get to other a democratic nation of 1.4 billion people without reference to the elephant in the room -- that the USA was very recently (perhaps even still is) only one presidential term away from becoming an enemy of the "international rules-based order". You only have to look at how Trump proposed to deal with Tiktok, or how he mysteriously abruptly exempted ZTE from some sanctions, to understand what I mean -- let alone the even bigger elephant in the room, that he successfully downgraded GOP 2016 platform language about the defence of Ukraine and literally coerced Ukraine's leadership with the threatened withholding of congressionally-approved support. The reality is that this discussion about potential threats to the free world or rules-based international order simply can't be one-sided like this. It's an absurdity.