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Trump University: The Former President’s Most Forgotten Defilement

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The university is the temple of intellect, and I am its high priest.”-Miguel de Unamuno, speaking against irrationalism as rector of the University of Salamanca (Spain), 12 October 1936

Amid Donald J. Trump’s multiple defilements, only one seems to have been entirely forgotten. This was the former president’s melding of his own “brand name” with the lofty idea of a university,[1] an idea that 20th century Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno held to be “sacred.” Ironically, at a time when Americans needed credible reassurance that the unending human  struggle against anti-reason could expect support from their country’s leading universities,[2] Mr. Trump could envision only one more crass opportunity for crude commerce and personal profit.[3]

               Even now, even after a defeated Trump has been convincingly associated with a litany of serious crimes (the most egregious being the January 6, 2021 US Capitol insurrection), this former president’s most sustained infraction was his announced war on intellect. Trump’s 2016 campaign assertion, “I love the poorly educated,” especially when complemented by his proud preference for “attitude” over “preparation,”[4] remains conspicuous and worrisome.

 Significantly, this calculated statement represented little more than a recycled version of Joseph Goebbels’ Nuremberg rally mantra back in 1934 Germany: “Intellect rots the brain.”[5]

                For Donald Trump, and from the start, hyperbole and simplification became useful and ready-to-use substitutes for dialectical thinking.[6] All too often, and by any reasonable standard, this president’s disjointed stream-of-conscious observations on personal meetings or planned policies were limited to monosyllabic grunts or visceral spasms of “amazing,” “fantastic,” “incredible,” etc. On several noteworthy occasions, Americans were instructed: “Barbed wire can be very beautiful.” Lest we forget, Trump’s regularly recurrent observation about his signature border wall was that “it will have a beautiful door.”  And all this from one who previously declared: (1) nuclear weapons could be used against hurricanes; and (2) “the Moon is part of Mars.”

                There is more. Donald Trump was effectively addicted to rancor and acrimony, to “sworn” enemies of Reason.For him, always, crudely ad hominem attacks represent a calculated way to ward off any daunting challenges of intellectual complexity. Similar observations may be made about his seemingly endless resort to barren clichés and empty phrases.

“This is a nation of laws….”  Trump once managed to declare from variously prepared scripts, but that contrived reassurance never had any anchorage in tangible policy. For the most part, during his tenure, matters of national and international law were casually disregarded.[7] Confronted by a president whose highest notion of refined legal reasoning was the argumentum ad baculum – that is, an overtly aggressive and illegitimate reliance upon defamation/intimidation – the American people lost all sight of any long-term legal consequences.[8]

               Now, long and short-term, these consequences (both domestic and international) are proving themselves intolerable.

               Donald Trump is no legal scholar. Still, international law remains an integral part of the law of the United States. This critically vital incorporation is codified at Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution (the “Supremacy Clause”) and at several corresponding U.S. Supreme Court decisions (principally, the Paquete Habana, 1900).

               In fashioning of US national policies, reason-based intellect should never be taken as evidence of presidential liability. Yet, as the cameras pan around the audience de jour at Trump’s fearfully adrenalized “rallies,” both during and after his presidency, it is hard to imagine even a scintilla of crowd interest in logic, law or lucidity. In the fashion of other wrongly bedazzled audiences in 20th century history, this is not a crowd that wanted its “great leader” to be learned, law-minded or in any way well-read.

This same portentous conclusion applies to present-day Trump faithful and all proponents of anti-reason.[9]

In the end, all Americans ought finally to understand that Mr. Trump himself was not and is not the underlying “pathology.” This once-unimaginable presidency was merely the most visible symptom of a more grievously systemic disorder.  This much broader illness is an American society (universities included) that persistently and wittingly turns its collective back on Reason. Within this despairingly lethal society, reason-backed citizen arguments increasingly count for nothing.

               “The crowd,” observed 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, “is untruth.” Obligingly, even today, Mr. Trump’s undaunted minions insist upon chanting gibberish in chorus. Even for those who have had just a minimal acquaintance with modern history, the dark tenor of any such ritualistic chanting should be palpably familiar[10]  and sinister. It’s the same chanting that brought this writer and his family to the United States from Europe shortly after the War.[11]

               Truth is exculpatory. The Trump Era was not by any means a normal or sustainable American presidency, not by any reasonable standards of assessment or comparison. Now, Americans must inquire, audibly, no longer in trepidation or sotto voce: “Was this in any way excusable and somehow repeatable American presidency?

               Former president Donald Trump cherishes chaos in national and international politics, an anti-Reason affection that is impossible to reconcile with the most rudimentary legal expectations of legitimate governance. The Founding Fathers of the United States did not generally believe in democracy. Most had even agreed with Alexander Hamilton’s trenchant observation that “the people are a great beast.” Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most democratic of the Founders, tied any residual hopes for a durable democracy to a proper system of citizen education. In his Notes on Virginia, however, the future third president described “the people” as “rubbish” from which a small number of gifted individuals could be “raked” once each year.

               When Sophocles, an early Greek tragedian, held “despicable” any king who would place his own personal popularity ahead of national well-being, he also (in common with Aeschylus and Euripides) lamented that corrupt leadership would inevitably spawn a corrupt commonwealth. Hence, when King Oedipus discovers his own “tragic flaw,” the Chorus recognizes distressingly causal connections to famine and disorder then prevailing in Thebes. Much later, when an American president named Trump remained focused on his own personal popularity, and not on national security and well-being, citizens faced similar connections.

               Looking back, at least on its face, Trump University was less defiling than its namesake’s multiple derelictions in law, civil liberties, war avoidance and human rights.[12] Nonetheless, in the longer term, this “university’s” open disregard for any American “life of the mind”[13] set an egregious example of leadership contrivance. By itself, Trump University’s direct harms were limited “only” to those who bought into the illusion of a real university (some of its supporters even called it an “Ivy League university”), but its most enduring and significant harms will prove vastly more difficult to extirpate.

Going forward, to suitably combat such corrosive national harms, it should become the special responsibility of university professors and students (among assorted others) to maintain their casually venerated institutions as genuine exemplars of Intellect and Reason.[14] In essence, even if our universities can no longer be taken seriously as “temples of intellect,” they can at least stand for something more deeply faithful to both human virtue[15] and scientific truth.[16]


[1] Recall, in this connection, Plato’s classic argument in The Republic that the Idea or “Form” is more meaningfully real than any of its tangible manifestations.

[2] See Karl Jaspers’ clarifying tour de force, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952).

[3] On the law-based closures of this “university,” see, inter alia: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/federal-court-approves-25-million-trump-university-settlement-n845181

[4] This preference was expressed most explicitly in Trump’s pre-Singapore Summit rhetoric on his then-upcoming meeting with North Korean President Kim Jong Un. See, Louis René Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2018/05/north-korea-nuclear-diplomacy-and-international-law/

[5] See, Louis René Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/11/louis-rene-beres-dominating-the-street/

[6] Dialectical thinking likely originated in Fifth Century BCE Athens, as Zeno, author of the Paradoxes, has been acknowledged by Aristotle as its inventor. In the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges as the supreme form of philosophic/analytic method. The dialectician, says Plato, is the special one who knows how to ask and then answer vital questions.

[7] William Blackstone, the jurist upon whose work the United States bases its own system of law, remarks at Book 4 of his Commentaries on the Law of England: “The law of nations (international law) is always binding upon all individuals and all states. Each state is expected, perpetually, to aid and enforce the law of nations as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon the offenses against that universal law.”

[8] Regarding such consequences, the peremptory rights assured by the American Declaration and Constitution can never be lawfully confined to citizens of the United States. This is because both documents were conceived by their authors as indisputable codifications of a pre-existing Natural Law. Though generally unrecognized, the United States was expressly founded upon the Natural Rights philosophies of the 18th century Enlightenment, especially Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Thomas Jefferson was well acquainted with the classical writings of political philosophy from Plato to Diderot. In those early days of the Republic. an American president could not only read serious books, but could sometimes also write them.

[9] Spanish 20th century thinker Jose Ortega y’Gasset remarks presciently in The Revolt of the Masses (1932): “The mass man has no use for reason. He learns only in his own flesh.”

[10] See, by this author: Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-rise-and-fall/

[11] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/01/opinion/the-swiss-had-their-villains-and-their-heroes.html

[12] See, by this author, Louis René Beres:  https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/the-trump-presidency-a-breathtaking-assault-on-law-justice-and-security/

[13] See, in this regard, Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (1965). See also: Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (1959).

[14] Seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarks prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further upon René Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.

[15] “There is no longer a virtuous nation,” warned the poet William Butler Yeats, “and the best of us live by candlelight.”

[16] These mutually-reinforcing goals bring to mind a question posed originally by Honoré de Balzac about the “human comedy:” “Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts or empty skulls?”

LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth and most recent book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy (2016) (2nd ed., 2018) https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy Some of his principal strategic writings have appeared in Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard University); Yale Global Online (Yale University); Oxford University Press (Oxford University); Oxford Yearbook of International Law (Oxford University Press); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (Pentagon); The War Room (Pentagon); World Politics (Princeton); INSS (The Institute for National Security Studies)(Tel Aviv); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); BESA Perspectives (Israel); International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The Atlantic; The New York Times and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

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Quad foreign ministers meet in New York for the third time

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Quad foreign ministers met in New York for the second time this year and the seventh time since 2019. The four-nation grouping’s ambit of cooperation has clearly expanded and diversified over the years. What were the key talking points this time? I analyse.

The foreign ministers of India, Japan, Australia and the United States – four key maritime democracies in the Indo-Pacific – met on the sidelines of the 78th annual session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on September 22. This was their seventh meeting since 2019 and the second of 2023. Notably, exactly four years ago, this four-nation Quad was raised to the foreign ministers’ level amid a UNGA session. Earlier in 2023, the ministers met in March on the sidelines of the G20 ministerial in New Delhi and in May, this year, the Quad leaders’ summit was hosted by Japan on the sidelines of the G7 summit. Having met twice in 2022 as well, the ministers congregated six times in person and virtually once so far.

The previous ministerial in New Delhi saw the four-nation grouping making a reference to an extra-regional geopolitical issue for the first time – Ukraine – and also the initiation of a new Working Group mechanism on counter-terrorism, a key agenda item for India and the United States, among other themes of discussion. Following the seventh meeting, India’s foreign minister Dr S. Jaishankar tweeted, “Always value our collective contribution to doing global good”, while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked that the grouping is “vital to our shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific, and together we reaffirmed our commitment to uphold the purposes and principles of the UN Charter”.

Diversifying ambit of cooperation

The ministers have clearly doubled down on the commitments taken during their previous deliberations, particularly to improve capacity-building for regional players. The joint statement that followed the meeting read, “The Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness is supporting regional partners combat illicit maritime activities and respond to climate-related and humanitarian events.” Similarly, the Working Group on maritime security promised “practical and positive outcomes” for the region. Prior to the recent ministerial, the Working Group on counter-terrorism conducted a Consequence Management Exercise that “explored the capabilities and support Quad countries could offer regional partners in response to a terrorist attack”, the joint readout mentions.

Later this year, the U.S. island state of Hawaii will host the Counter-terrorism Working Group’s meeting and tabletop exercise, which will focus on countering the use of emerging technologies for terrorist activities, while the Working Group on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) will be convened in Australia’s Brisbane for its second tabletop exercise. Earlier in August, this year, all four Quad navies participated in Exercise Malabar for the fourth consecutive year, off Sydney, the first hosted by Australia. However, as in previous meetings, the ministers didn’t specifically mention Russia or China with regard to the situations in Ukraine and maritime east Asia respectively.

On the Ukraine question, the ministers expressed their “deep concern”, taking note of its “terrible and tragic humanitarian consequences” and called for “comprehensive, just, and lasting peace”. In a veiled reference to Russia, the ministers rebuffed the “use, or threat of use, of nuclear weapons”, underscoring the respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states, and called for the resumption of the UN-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative, which allows for the export of food grains and fertilizers from Ukraine to world markets via a maritime humanitarian corridor, amid the ongoing conflict with Russia.

Similarly, in another veiled reference to continuing Chinese belligerence and lawfare in maritime east Asia, the ministers stressed upon the need to adhere to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and to maintain “freedom of navigation and overflight consistent with UNCLOS”, reiterating their “strong opposition to any unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion”, including with respect to maritime claims in the South and East China Seas. Going further ahead, the ministers expressed their concern on “the militarisation of disputed features, the dangerous use of coast guard and maritime militia vessels, and efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore exploitation activities”. The joint readout also had mentions of North Korea and Myanmar.

The evident and the inferred

Today, almost all the areas of cooperation of Quad countries happen to be the areas of strategic competition with China, the rapid rise of which necessitated the coming together of the four nations, even though this is not openly acknowledged. In this new great game unfolding in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S.-led Quad is trying to balance China’s overwhelming initiatives to capture the support of smaller and middle powers in the region and around the world. Placid initiatives such as the Open Radio Access Network, the private sector-led Investors Network, Cybersecurity Partnership, Cable Connectivity Partnership and the Pandemic Preparedness Exercises should be read in this context.

With the rise of Quad in parallel with the rise of China and other minilateral groupings in the Indo-Pacific such as the AUKUS (a grouping of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States), the existing regional framework based on the slow-moving, consensus-based Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was put to test. However, allaying all doubts, Quad deliberations at both the ministerial and summit levels continued to extend their support to ASEAN’s centrality in the region and also for the ASEAN-led regional architecture that also includes the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Despite somewhat differing regional outlooks, the Quad likes to see itself as “complementary” to the ASEAN, rather than an “alternative” to its pan-regional influence.

India, the only non-ally of the U.S. in the Quad, will host the fourth in-person Quad leaders’ summit in 2024. The Asian giant is often dubbed as the weakest link in the grouping, owing to its friendly ties with Russia, but other members intent to keep India’s bilateral equations with other countries away from the interior dynamics of the grouping, signalling an acknowledgement of India’s growing geopolitical heft in the region and beyond. This seems to be subtly reflected in the stance taken by individual Quad members in the recent India-Canada diplomatic row, in which they made sure not to provoke New Delhi or to touch upon sensitive areas, even though a fellow Western partner is involved on the other side.

  Quad Foreign Ministers Meeting  Month & Year  Venue
FirstSeptember 2019New York
SecondOctober 2020Tokyo
ThirdFebruary 2021Virtual
FourthFebruary 2022Melbourne
FifthSeptember 2022New York
SixthMarch 2023New Delhi
SeventhSeptember 2023New York

NB:- All three Quad ministerials in New York were held on the sidelines of the respective annual sessions of the UN General Assembly i.e., the first, the fifth, and the seventh meetings.

On the multilateral front, the four ministers reaffirmed their support for the UN, the need to uphold “mutually determined rules, norms, and standards, and to deepen Quad’s cooperation in the international system, and also batted for a comprehensive reform of the UN, including the expansion of permanent and non-permanent seats in the Security Council. While China and Russia, two powerful permanent members of the Security Council, continue to denounce the Quad as an “exclusionary bloc”, the Quad ministers and leaders tend to tone down any security role for the grouping.

However, a recent comment made by Vice Admiral Karl Thomas of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet during this year’s Exercise Malabar is noteworthy. He said the war games were “not pointed toward any one country”, rather it would improve the ability of the four forces to work with each other and “the deterrence that our four nations provide as we operate together as a Quad is a foundation for all the other nations operating in this region”. Even in the absence of a security treaty, in a way he hinted at the grouping’s desire to cherish its collective strength across all fronts and to check on hegemonic tendencies that may manifest in the region from time to time.

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Dynamics of the Sikh Vote Cloud Canada’s Diplomatic Relations with India

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Operating across British Columbia (BC), Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, gangs made up of Indo-Canadian Punjabis – Brothers Keepers, Dhak-Duhre, Dhaliwal, Sanghera, Malli-Buttar, and several such, are involved in arms trafficking, racketeering, extortion, narco trafficking, money laundering, and not the least, assassinations. Formed in 2004 and mandated to disrupt and suppress organised crime in B.C. the  Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU-BC), has warned the public of the nexus of Punjabi-Canadians to violence.

In the murders of Punjabi singer Sidhu Moose Wala and Ripudaman Singh Malik, acquitted in the tragic 1985 Air India Kanishka terror-bombing case,  the conspicuous involvement of these Indo-Canadian gangs with notorious criminals Goldy Brar and Lawrence Bishnoi at the helm, manifested itself.

On June 18 Sikh Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was gunned down as he left his gurdwara in Surrey, B.C., which has the  highest proportions of Punjabi Canadians. Nijjar had entered Canada in 1995 on a fake passport and claimed asylum on arrest at Toronto. In B.C. he married a local who sponsored his immigration and he was subsequently awarded Canadian citizenship. Brazenly propounding anti-India separatist sentiments, Nijjar was even placed on Canada’s no-fly list and Interpol’s red corner notice. Alongwith gangsters Arshdeep Singh Dala, Maninder Singh Bual, and Mandeep Singh Dhaliwal his outfit Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) was involved in contract killings in Punjab. Gang-related killings account for a third of all homicides in Canada’s British Columbia.

Despite this disconcerting background of Nijjar’s ties to organised crime gangs in Canada, on September 18, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged the involvement of “agents of the Indian government” in the killing of Nijjar. A claim outrightly rejected by New Delhi as “absurd” and “motivated.” If Trudeau was looking to further impair an increasingly forbidding bilateral relationship, he succeeded. Canada and India have expelled a senior diplomat each and negotiations for a free trade agreement stand suspended.

There is a palpable perversity to Canada’s position on the Khalistan issue. In 1982, Trudeau’s father and then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau

had rejected Late PM Indira Gandhi’s demands for extradition of  Khalistani terrorist Talwinder Singh Parmar, who went on to execute the bombing of Air India Flight Kanishka, killing 329 people in 1985.

Alarmed by the presence of Sikh secessionists among the diaspora, former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh during his 2010 trip to attend the G20 summit in Toronto, asked Canada “to stop people from using religious places to promote extremism.” Canadian MP Sukh Dhaliwal, had introduced a motion in the Canadian parliament to declare the 1984 riots a “genocide”.  Fast forward to 2023, G20 under PM Modi there was no attempt at all to put even a vaguely positive spin on the India-Canada equation.

The timing of Trudeau’s accusation just days after the G20 summit in New Delhi where he says he brought Khalistani extremism and “foreign interference” “directly to PM Modi in no uncertain terms” smacks of umbrage at being at the receiving end of a very hard-hitting message that the ‘extremist elements in Canada are “promoting secessionism and inciting violence against Indian.’

The Khalistan issue has got a fresh lease of life after the advent of the Justine Trudeau government. With just 32.2 percent of the popular vote, Liberal leader Trudeau has the least electoral support in Canadian history, and was backed by Jagmeet Singh’s  New Democratic Party (NDP) which openly supports the Khalistan Referendum on Canadian soil.

Canada’s Conservative opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, has urged Trudeau to show the evidence that the government has in hand. Notwithstanding this current posture the Conservative Party (CP) too, has in the past caved in to the Sikh vote bank. In 2018 when its condemnation of ‘glorification of terrorism’ was objected to by the World Sikh Organisation, the CP dropped its ‘anti-Khalistan’ motion in the House of Commons.

There is beyond sufficient evidence, to India’s contention that Canada, and other western nations including US, UK, and Australia have allowed cadres of separatist violent Khalistani groups to thrive. The UK recently set up a £95,000 fund to enhance its understanding of the threat posed by Khalistan extremism. While the amount set aside to tackle pro-Khalistan elements is not substantial, it acknowledges that a Sikh radicalisation problem exists in the west. 

Sikh temples and organisations abroad orchestrate Remembrance Days for ‘Operation Blue Star’ on June 6 and ‘Sikh Massacre’ on November 5, that serve as cultural repertoires and focal points of advocating Khalistani extremism. This year at the remembrance day parade, Khalistan supporters in Ontario exhibited a female figure in a blood-stained white saree with turbaned men pointing guns at her, to celebrate the assassination of late PM Indira Gandhi. The poster behind the scene read “Revenge for the attack on Darbar Sahib.”

Reacting to this macabre tableau, External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar said, “Frankly, we are at a loss to understand other than the requirements of vote bank politics why anybody would do this … I think there is a larger underlying issue about the space which is given to separatists, to extremists, to people who advocate violence. I think it is not good for relationships, not good for Canada.”

At multiple diplomatic and security talks, India has raised the issue of wanted terrorists and gangsters only to be defied by the Canadian government with non-committance and brazen support for extremist Sikhs. And yet Canada’s NATO allies and partners in the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing agreement, the United States and Australia, have expressed “deep concerns” over the issue. Adrienne Watson, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said, “We are deeply concerned about the allegations referenced by Prime Minister Trudeau.” Foreign Secretary of the UK, James Cleverly, posted UK’s reaction on platform X “We are in regular contact with our Canadian partners about serious allegations raised in the Canadian Parliament.” One wonders if this allegation of targeted killing by India is in retaliation to New Delhi’s steady favour of Russia, and has been levelled after reports of a brokered American deal with Pakistan for weapons transfer to Ukraine in lieu of an IMF bailout emerged.

Admonishing Canada on X, former Foreign Secretary Nirupama Menon Rao said, “Canada has an extremely spotty  and very, very poor record on the whole issue of Khalistanis in Canada. The support these lawless elements have received under the cover of  what is  called freedom of expression and democratic rights of citizens…it must control such elements with a firm hand and cannot allow them to run free to foster terrorism and violence in our country.”

Amid the hectic media coverage there was speculation that ‘Trudeau’s allegations have put the White House in an especially tight spot.’ But this were swifty checked by Adrienne Watson in her X post, “reports that we rebuffed Canada in any way on this are flatly false. We are coordinating and consulting with Canada closely on this issue.”

The manner in which copious evidence on Khalistan separatists handed over to the Canadian side have gone unaddressed and yet Trudeau’s allegation invoked strong reactions from other western nations, implies that this has moved beyond our bilaterals with Ottawa. It will have ramifications on how India deals with its strong G7 allies, especially the US.

For India the existence of Khalistani extremists and their alignment with organised crime in Canada poses security exigencies. India must at this juncture refrain from a broad generalisation of Sikh diaspora as secessionist, an incrimination that was implied during the Sikh-dominated farmers’ movement.

Political parties must rise above partisan politics over separatist movements that are a threat to nation security. Voices from Punjab attest that Khalistan supporters remain ‘fringe’ and ‘on the margins.’  Even among expatriate Sikh community leaders have challenged the anti-India narrative laid out by Khalistanis and their supporters, despite the fact that  they, and the community there, regularly face harassment and threats of violence from expatriate Khalistanis. Former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh states that Nijjar’s murder was the result of a factional feud within the management of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara situated at Surrey and that Trudeau had “walked into a trap owing to vote bank politics.”

New Delhi must ensure that overseas Sikh communities which have tried to counter pro-Khalistan disinformation shall not be left alone to defend themselves. 

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China and Venezuela Deepening Cooperation

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In a significant development that underscores the changing dynamics of global politics and economics, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro recently signed several bilateral cooperation agreements in Beijing, highlighting the changing dynamics of world politics and economics. China’s determination to participate in partnerships that promote economic stability and prosperity demonstrates its unwavering commitment to global economic recovery.

The agreements signify a strengthening of their partnerships and span a variety of fields, including trade, the economy, and tourism. The cooperation has been upgraded to an “All-weather strategic partnership,” reflecting the continued dedication of both countries to the advancement and development of the other. The decision by China and Venezuela to strengthen their ties comes as the world is witnessing a transformation in international alliances and trade partnerships.

The economic collaboration between the two countries is one of the most significant aspects of this new era of partnership. The recent agreements are expected to further cement Venezuela’s ties with China, which has long been the country’s major trading partner.Investments in infrastructure development and oil and gas exploration and production are part of the cooperation in the energy industry.

During his visit to China, President Maduro expressed his optimism for the relationship’s future, stating it heralds the start of a “new era” for both nations. Venezuela, which has recently experienced economic difficulties, views China as a dependable ally that can aid in reviving its economy. China, on the other hand, sees Venezuela as a crucial friend in the region and a valuable supply of natural resources.

China and Venezuela’s energy cooperation has broad implications. As the globe grapples with concerns about energy security and climate change, this alliance might have a big impact on the global energy landscape. China’s investments in Venezuela’s oil sector can stabilize oil prices and provide a more consistent supply of crude oil to the global market.

Aside from the energy industry, both countries have pledged to deepen their collaboration in a variety of other economic areas. Venezuela can benefit from China’s expertise in agricultural technologies and infrastructural development in one area. Venezuela may enhance food production and reduce its reliance on imports by modernizing its agricultural sector with Chinese assistance, thereby increasing food security for its citizens.

Additionally, both countries have enormous potential in the tourism sector. Venezuela has incredible landscapes such as the famous Angel Falls and virgin Caribbean beaches, which may appeal to Chinese tourists looking for new travel experiences. Similarly, China’s rich history and culture have always captured the interest of visitors from all over the world, including Venezuelans. The tourist accords aim to make travel between the two countries easier, to foster cultural interaction, and to develop tourism-related enterprises.

Furthermore, the strengthened relationship extends beyond economic interests to include political and strategic considerations. Both countries have reaffirmed their commitment to mutual support in international forums and to no interference in the other’s internal affairs. This strategic partnership is consistent with China’s aim of establishing a multipolar world and strengthening cooperation across developing nations.

The collaboration between China and Venezuela should be seen in the larger Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) initiative. The BRI seeks to establish a network of economic and infrastructure partnerships across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. A deeper integration of Venezuela into China’s global economic vision through its participation in the BRI could create new trade and investment opportunities.

The potential for economic development in Venezuela is one of the most notable benefits of the China-Venezuela cooperation. In recent years, the South American country has suffered severe economic issues, including high inflation, financial sanctions, and political unrest. China’s investments and assistance can help stabilize Venezuela’s economy, generate jobs, and raise inhabitants’ living standards.

The China-Venezuela connection is a key milestone in the shifting global political and economic landscape. In a changing world order, this partnership has the potential to provide Venezuela with economic prosperity, stability, as well as greater autonomy.

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