Amajor reason for Joe Biden winning the Presidential election was his promise of overturning many of Donald Trump’s controversial decisions. Indeed, for this reason, during his election campaign, Biden was often called ‘the U-turn candidate.’ Joe Biden proved true to his promise; within the first two days of his inauguration as the 46th president of the United States, Biden signed 17 executive orders, more than what most recent presidents had done in their first 100 days. Many of these decisions were extremely important and far-reaching; within the first three days of Biden’s Presidency, the USA had re-joined the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. Additionally, Biden ended the state of national emergency at the border with Mexico and issued an executive order revoking permission for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Momentous as these decisions were, the radical foreign policy changes that were the bedrock of Biden’s presidential campaign have not been visible so far. Rather, most of the foreign policy initiatives of the nascent Biden presidency are turnarounds from his campaign promises apart from being valuable lessons in realpolitik.

For example, during his election campaign Biden promised to make the Saudis pay a price for their role in journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and talked about redefining the US-Saudi relationship. But, after declassification of the US Intelligence Report titled “Assessing the Saudi Government’s Role in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi,” when the American public demanded action against Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, the White House insisted that punishment of the Crown Prince was never on the table. To explain matters, the Executive Summary of the US Intelligence Report unequivocally states: “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” Such a U-turn was not unexpected; after all Saudi Arabia, a country with almost unlimited oil resources was a US client of long standing, which the USA would not like to antagonise over a mere moral issue.There is also an earlier precedent of the US going an extra mile to preserve its relations with Saudi Arabia. Inquiries into the 9/11 attack on New York had revealed that all nineteen hijackers were Saudi Arabian nationals and there was some evidence of the involvement of Saudi officials in the attack. Yet, President Bush went only after Afghanistan which was pounded into dust. A Joint Congressional Committee conducting an inquiry into the performance of US Intelligence agencies vis-à-vis the 9/11 bombings, touched upon the possible involvement of Saudi Arabian government officials in the incident. The 832-page report of the Committee was released in December 2002. However, the US administration ensured that 28 pages of the Committee’s report were held back. The redacted pages and the unanswered question of Saudi involvement, left the victims’ families fuming and demanding an independent inquiry. For long, oil assets of the middle- east, particularly of Iraq, were in the cross-hairs of the US. As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden assembled a series of witnesses who gave testimony grossly misrepresenting the intent, history, and status of Saddam Hussein and his secular government, which was an avowed enemy of al-Qaida, and touted Iraq’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction that resulted in the US declaring war on Iraq. Here again realpolitik triumphed over morality in international relations. Notably, President Biden was an important player in the manipulated exercise to justify the US invasion of Iraq. Similar examples abound. The lesson that emerges is that the US is an avid practitioner of realpolitik and with a consummate artist like Biden at the helm, we should be prepared for any number of flip-flops in US foreign policy.

Coming to President Biden’s outlook in respect of our immediate neighbourhood, despite his campaign promise of restoring and repairing America’s relations with the rest of the world, there has been little effort by the US to improve ties with China or Pakistan. True, President Biden has halted the daily vicious tweets against China but there is no indication that the US is contemplating any roll-back of sanctions and tariffs imposed against China. In his first major address after taking office, Secretary of State, Antony Blinken summarised the Biden administration’s policy visà- vis China in the following words: “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be. And we will engage China from a position of strength” which is essentially Trump’s policy in somewhat more cogent words. Professor Zhu Feng, of Nanjing University wryly commented: “Continuity takes precedence over adjustment and change.”

Pakistan expected a re-calibration of its relationship with the US under President Biden, who as Obama’s Vice-President, was one of the architects of the Kerry-Lugar Bill which sought to increase civilian aid to Pakistan to $7.5 billion between 2009 to 2014. Yet, there is no change in the US-Pakistan relationship, which still hinges on US interests in Afghanistan, action against terror groups and the Pakistan- China relationship.

However, since inauguration of the Biden Presidency, there has been a sea-change in India’s relations with its neighbours. Suddenly, there has been a thaw in Sino-Indian relations with both sides agreeing to disengage and end the nine-month long military standoff along the LAC in Ladakh. Still more recently, after talks on the hotline, the Indian and Pakistani DGMOs (Director-General of Military Operations) agreed to a ceasefire along the Indo-Pak border, after increasing instances of unprovoked firing since 2014 – there were 5,100 such instances in December 2020, the highest in 18 years, that claimed 36 lives and injured over 130 persons. Surprisingly, there was no overt involvement of the political leadership in both these important foreign policy decisions.

Till now, everyone is flummoxed by the unscheduled descent of peace in our troubled sub-continent. All kinds of speculations are rife about the probable cause of the cessation of hostilities between India and China and between India and Pakistan. Full facts would emerge later but one can say with some degree of certainty that both these developments, probably, have some relationship with the end of the lame duck period of the Trump Presidency and the inauguration of Joe Biden as the US President. A possible explanation may lie in the eternal wisdom of Goswami Tulsidas: “Poison turns to nectar and foes become friends for the one who receives Lord Ram’s blessings.” (Sri Ramcharitmanas: Sunderkand:4:1)

Needless to say, considerations of realpolitik always lurk in the background of any significant international event. Trade relations between India and China are very important for Indian businesses. Thus, despite the ban on Chinese apps and the proposed boycott of Chinese goods and investment by the Indian Government, it emerges that China upstaged the USA to become India’s biggest trading partner in 2020 ~ at the time of conflict along the LAC and rising anti- China sentiments.

Again, realpolitik had probably prompted PM Modi’s steadfast refusal to name China as the aggressor in the border conflict between the two countries ~ as also his controversial statement that no one had intruded into our borders.

Brought up on a diet of truth, non-violence and Panchsheel in foreign relations, realpolitik is anathema to most of us. Yet, as India gathers pelf in international affairs, we should be prepared for our country’s foreign policy to eschew its earlier moorings, and follow realpolitik instead. As Egon Karl-Heinz Bahr, the creator of Ostpolitik, and the Secretary of State in the erstwhile West Germany had said: “International politics is never about democracy and human rights. It’s about the interests of states. Remember that, no matter what you are told in history lessons.”

The writer is a retired Principal Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax