Trump’s South China Sea conundrum meets India’s ‘Act East’ policy

In less than a week, President-elect Donald J Trump will take over the White House as the 45^th President of the United States of America, and as a result, become the most powerful man in the world. During this process, Trump’s cabinet will also cement itself around the new (sort of) leader of the free world.

Trump hosted his first press conference this past week, a day after outgoing president Barack Obama held his farewell address in his hometown of Chicago. The Trump presser was an event to behold. He answered questions pertaining to foreign policy with next to no clarity, stumbling across a voracious press corps, before insulting a CNN reporter and walking off — giving just one more insight into how the next four years of the American presidency may look like, a property dealer with access to the world’s largest military.

However, another critical event was taking place as the world clued into Trump’s press conference. At the very same time, the US Senate was grilling the president-elect’s nominee for the Secretary of State post, CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson. The 64 years old Tillerson was one of Trump’s most important appointments, and a curious one as well, as this made both the president-elect and his Secretary of State, people with no prior-experience of even governing a school PTA, let alone running the world’s only superpower.

During Tillerson’s hearing, he was grilled on many issues of international relevance to the United States, such as Syria, Ukraine, Russia and, what could be Trump’s biggest foreign policy challenge over the next four years, China and its encroachment projects in the South China Sea. Tillerson’s response to the Senate’s questions on the topic has raised many eyebrows in both the media and the foreign policy world. Till today, even as China has gone ahead on an urgent pace to stamp its complete authority on its claims over the South China Sea, Beijing insists, skirting international legal obstacles, that the region is firmly under its purview including all matters relating to the disputed waters, which is critical for global trade.

According to Tillerson, the Trump administration could take actions to block Chinese access to its newly created islands. “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops. Second, your access to those islands also not going to be allowed,” he said. Many analysts have reacted to this posturing as unrealistic, and reports have also surfaced in the past underlining differences between the White House and United States Pacific Command (PACOM) over the former’s lack of interest over the latter’s suggestions of a more aggressive take on South China Sea. It is also said that prior to his Senate hearing, Tillerson was not briefed by the State Department, perhaps by his and Trump’s own choice.

Meanwhile, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, New Delhi has launched a more aggressive approach for greater rapprochement between India and South East Asian and the Asia Pacific countries. The results have been visible in the recent past, as India looks to counter China’s rapid rise in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), even as Beijing stretches its naval influence to the shores of Pakistan on India’s doorsteps. China has gone beyond as well, with setting up a permanent base in Djibouti on the mouth of the Gulf of Aden. In the past few days itself, as news came in of Chinese subs being docked at the Karachi port in Pakistan, reports of India offering its indigenous Aakash Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) systems to Vietnam also surfaced. India has also committed to train Vietnamese pilots on the Russian-made Sukhoi 30 airframes, operated by both the countries. Beyond Vietnam, India’s outreach has included another critical aspect, the trilateral Malabar Exercise involving military drills between India, US and Japan in the Indian Ocean.

Despite a host of initiatives and progress by India on its efforts to stamp authority in the IOR and backup its policy on the South China Sea by sending in its naval fleets through the region to clarify any doubts that Beijing may have, New Delhi would still require a radical shift in how it conducts the business of diplomacy in order to recalibrate with others on how to deal with China and its ‘historical’ claims in the region.

India has maintained a distant posture from US policy in the South China Sea in the past, despite both the nations having a similar goal, to control Beijing’s rapid rise as a hegemon in the region. The outgoing Obama administration has also been careful in its dealings with China, and as has New Delhi, which previously refused the idea of joint India–US patrols of the South China Sea region. However, Beijing is making greater inroads in IOR by setting up its defacto commercial and military presence in Gwadar and even pumping in money in Sri Lanka with projects such as the Hambantota port and airport, the latter called as the 'world’s emptiest airport', being handed over to Chinese companies. Even Bangladesh recently took delivery of two submarines for its Navy from China in a deal worth more than $200 million. This is an instance where New Delhi, the traditional cohort of Dhaka, has no face to offer as its indigenous defense establishment does not have even close to enough products compared to what China does.

In the event of a bullish Trump policy on China and the South China Sea, India will need to play a balancing power play. China still remains one of its biggest trading partners, wields an economy three times larger than India and a military budget twice the size (on paper, Beijing’s military expenditures are expected to be much larger than the estimated $150 billion). For India to become an active and integral part of any alliance to deter China’s overbearing reach, which to be fair, is a natural phenomenon for any country becoming as powerful as China is, New Delhi will need to make sure it maintains a high GDP growth for the foreseeable decades along with strategically increasing its defense budgets at a more-than-healthy pace.

While India’s ‘Act East’ policy is steadily making progress, without a well-constructed and practiced economic and military push, its aims will fall well short of China’s rapid penetration of all the areas that India has traditionally considered its influence zones. Holding on to the old guard of being the ‘regional hegemon’ is beyond India’s handling now. China the ‘near superpower’ is now a reality, and India needs to work on new alliances and uncompromising strategies to shore up its economy if it wants to successfully counter Beijing’s heavy ‘freight-train’ diplomacy in its comfort zones.