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New Great Game: Why India, China should be wary of Trump's West Asia visit
In a speech delivered during his recent visit to Riyadh, President Donald Trump criticised the neoconservative faction within his Republican Party that is believed to have greatly influenced American foreign policy during the George W Bush administration.
Addressing a US-Saudi investment forum, he said that the 'neocons' claim of being 'so-called 'nation builders' wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves'.
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Instead, he said, 'The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called 'nation builders'… (referring to 'Neocons')… as the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.'
With this statement President Trump bared the growing feud within the Republican Party, with the neocon group reportedly seeking a more strident US position against the Palestinian group Hamas and a war-like option for permanently resolving Iran's persistent belligerence.
As part of a charm offensive to win support in West Asia, Trump surprisingly distanced himself from the neocon group and did not even speak about supporting political or democratic reforms in the region. Apparently, Trump was towing the ideological line of his paleo-conservative constituency, which has opposed neocon-backed US-led military campaigns in West Asia for a long time.
It is important to understand that just like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, Trump largely falls under the Old-Right Republican camp, which opposes US support for the state of Israel and follows free-market libertarian economics within the US. In fact, many of Trump's policies directly correspond with the dictums of the paleo-conservative rulebook, namely the preservation of White Christian heritage, opposition to immigration from non-Western developing countries, support for free market capitalism at home but imposition of protectionist measures like high tariffs, denunciation of feminist and gay rights, enjoining of traditional family and gender roles, and general aversion to globalist ideals and institutions.
Paleo-conservatives generally view the US more as a constitutional republic and suspect majoritarian democratic rule, which they believe could potentially override individual liberties. As conservatives, they have an aversion towards a modern, secular and more permissive lifestyle and are critical of the neocon support for globalisation and the growing influence of foreign lobbies in US politics, particularly Israel's alleged role in framing US foreign policy.
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The terms neoconservative and paleoconservative came into vogue following the divide in American conservatism over the Vietnam War. Those supporting the war became known as the neoconservatives or interventionists, while the earlier 'nationalists' were rebranded as 'paleo-conservatives' or 'isolationists'. Before Trump, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul were said to be associated with paleoconservatism and US right-wing libertarian politics.
Although helpful in understanding Trump's ideological moorings, his policies are not always consistent with his avowed political ideology. In fact, Trump is using his conservative and non-interventionist rhetoric in West Asia to promote US imperialist interests in a milder form, mainly to offset China's rising influence in West Asia through its Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), BRICS and BRI initiatives.
Thus, Trump is not merely hunting for transactional deals in West Asia to salvage the faltering US economy but is essentially making a pronounced geopolitical overture to the Arab and Muslim world (notwithstanding Israeli objections) by holding negotiations with Hamas, forging peace deals with Houthis, lifting sanctions on Syria, making friendly overtures towards Turkey and rescuing Pakistan's military in its darkest hour.
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Trump has always aired his intentions of breaking the BRICS bloc to secure US hegemony over the world. In late February this year, he even bragged about having broken BRICS by raising tariffs to over 150 per cent, albeit he recently brought them down substantially.
With his recent trip to West Asia, Trump might want to decouple West Asia from China and seek to arrest the dragon's BRI outreach in the region. Meanwhile, China has been presenting itself as a prospective security provider for militarily weak Arab states and a geopolitical ally who could help resolve intractable disputes under its Global Security Initiative (GSI), which the US believes has undermined its stranglehold over a key region of the world.
Thus, Trump's charmed offensive is in itself a veiled intervention in the region, as well as an attempt to revive relations with its old allies — Saudi Arabia and other GCC states — which had strained during Biden's term. However, it would be wrong to entirely discount a more clandestine plan, as indicated by his personal meeting with Ahmad Al-Sharaa in Riyadh — the former Al-Qaeda jihadist leader and presently the transitional president of Syria. Al-Sharaa's sudden rise to glory, from being a terrorist with a $10 million US reward on his head in December last year to being the first Syrian leader to meet a US president in almost 30 years, raises many questions about the West's sudden willingness to embrace this 'former' jihadist leader.
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In this respect, two developments are important to note. First, Salafi Al-Sharaa recently swore an oath of allegiance at the hands of Sufi-Ash'ari scholars in Idlib in an attempt to restore the Ashari-Salafi break-up among jihadists during the Second Chechen War in the 2000s. The split caused Ash'ari separatist leader Akhmad Kadyrov to part ways with Salafi jihadist Shamil Basayev, and the former reverted to the Russian fold. However, Al-Sharaa's restoration of this old Ashari-Salafi inter-Sunni pact, apparently at the behest of Turkey, could now be used to reignite Sunni jihadism in several Muslim-majority governorates of Russia, such as Chechnya, Ingushetia, Tartarstan, Bashkorstan, Dagestan, and others.
The other development has been the growing outreach of the US and Turkey in Central Asian states, particularly after the victory of Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia in 2023. In fact, Turkey has already named Central Asia as 'Turkestan' in many of its educational syllabi. With Al-Sharaa having a large number of hardcore jihadists from Central Asia among the top-ranking officers of his new army, the possibility of an Arab Spring-like uprising in Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) states, followed by its jihadist takeover, has emerged as a dangerous prospect. Any influence operation to this effect has the potential of undermining China's BRI project passing through Central Asia and may threaten southern Russia and the East Turkestan (Xinjiang) province of China. Thus, Russia could face a new internal insurgency just after the Ukraine war, while SCO countries might find a resurgence in Islamist insurgency and terrorism.
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With Trump already speaking of the US reclaiming the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, which he avers is now being used by China, and with the Pakistani military using US ally (Turkey's) drones against India, BRICS nations should be wary of the US-backed Great Game unfolding in the regions of West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia.
Perhaps India should seek to decouple China from Pakistan and Turkey by reminding it of the threat posed by jihadists who may still be doing the 'dirty work of the West', as Pakistan's defence minister Khawaja Asif recently admitted his country did for many decades. In fact, China needs a strong ally in India if it seeks to rise as a global power, and the two major Asian civilisations would only benefit if they gave up their petty power struggles and fought together against the scourge of jihadism and the ongoing 'Plan for the New American Century' drafted at the turn of the century.
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Adil Rasheed is Research Fellow and Coordinator, Counter Terrorism Centre, at Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses (MP-IDSA). He has authored several books such as 'Political Islam in West Asia and South Asia' (2023), 'Countering the Radical Narrative' (2020), 'ISIS: Race to Armageddon' (2015). Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of MP-IDSA or Firstpost.
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