Omair Ahmad 
At the height of American power, Sidney Blumenthal and James Chase coined the term “the indispensable nation” to describe the unique power that the country wielded. It was taken up by Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State under the Clinton administration and vocal proponent of NATO’s eastern expansion, and has largely been explained as suggesting the US was an ‘altruistic’ provider of global security.
In reality, though, this undersells how powerful the US was from the late 90s. By underwriting security for NATO countries and key allies such as Japan, South Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and the Five Eyes Alliance, the US was directly overseeing security for more than half the world and could extend its operations almost everywhere else.
But this was only the hard edge of US power. Through its financial heft, the US dollar being the world’s reserve currency, and the Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, the US had veto power over much of the world’s economic systems – critical to enforcing financial sanctions against ‘recalcitrant’ regimes. Added to this was the power of US-based multinational corporations, and with the rise of the internet, the tech giants, followed by the social media empires that critically shaped economic and social choices around the world.
In real terms, even this categorisation captures only a part of US power and influence, with academia, philanthropy, science investment, as well as Hollywood and US arts and culture having a massive impact. According to the UN – of which the US is the largest funder – the United States Agency For International Development (USAID) accounted for more than USD 70 billion in foreign assistance, making it the single largest provider of aid (40%) distributed all over the world. All issues of global governance, from climate change to Artificial Intelligence, bear the fingerprints of US influence.
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In the last three decades, no matter who you were or where you lived, the United States shaped your life in a significant manner. Even the ‘uncontacted’ Sentinelese living in the Andaman Islands are impacted by the US, through the way it has sheltered its high emissions fossil fuel industry and promoted fracking.
It was precisely during this period that Indian engagement with the US picked up as a post-Cold War world left India dangerously exposed to the challenge of dealing with a rapidly rising China. Other than merely balancing against its potentially hostile neighbour, India also had a core concern, one that has remained unchanged since Independence: raising the living standards of its population. Part of the rationale of the Non-Aligned Movement was that staying out of the US-USSR rivalry would allow India to focus less on defence and more on internal growth. A few commentators had always opposed this position, arguing that the countries that had aligned with the US against the USSR (Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc) had enjoyed massive economic growth. After the end of the Cold War, US dominance and the rise of China has significantly strengthened this faction, although it is important to note that they leave out key US allies that did not prosper – Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey as well as a number of African countries like the Congo and some Latin American allies.
For these strategists, US was the preeminent global power and aligning with it would help India grow as well as be a participant rather than a mere recipient of the global order that the US headed. The engagement also hoped that, in the case of US-China friction, the US and its allies would move business and investments to India.
There was just one major miscalculation, and it is one that most of US allies have assiduously ignored for decades. A country enjoying the unprecedented power that the US has doesn’t need allies. The US is so powerful that it can, in most cases, do what it wants, and the rest of the world has to endure, or as Thucydides recorded of the Melian Dialogue in 416 BC, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The only constraint on US action is the threat of nuclear war, an extreme hypothetical that nobody in their right mind really wants to think about. With the tremendous power it wields, the US does not have, in real terms, any allies. All it has are servants.
All one has to do is look at some US actions in the past. When George W. Bush declared, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” in 2001, he was not merely talking about the (misnamed and mishandled) “War on Terror”, he was stating how the “indispensable nation” saw the world.
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When the United States embarked on the patently illegal invasion of Iraq soon after, he showed how little rules or opinions or alliances mattered. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the wars were fought by the US, with its allies as self-declared participants who could not enter or manage the field without the backing of the awesome force of US military logistics.
In 2002, when the US passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, popularly known as the Hague Invasion Act, it stated in no uncertain terms that no matter what international law said, if the International Criminal Court detained or arrested an American, the United States would use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release” of said personnel.
That said, the US has been careful to keep up the use of alliances and partners because it extended its power without needing to show its hand. But Donald Trump, in his first administration and now, more forcefully, in his second, is showing the reality of power dynamics more clearly – whether by threatening to annex Canada, Panama and Greenland, or sending back Indian illegal immigrants in handcuffs.
The problem with this sort of action is that, however powerful the US is, when it works on its own instead of through institutional alliances, it loses its indispensability. As it walks out of the World Health Organisation, the Paris Climate Agreement, and ends its work in USAID, it loses the ability to directly shape the policies of the world on issues of health, climate and developmental aid.
For those in India who had sought a closer alignment with the US in the hopes that it would help India to mould the global agenda more to its liking, this is a catastrophic loss of influence, as it is for NATO countries and other close US ‘allies’. In the case of the latter, though, structures such as the European Union and the greater wealth that the countries have on their own help to buffer the loss. Not so much for India. Maybe, just maybe, it might nudge the government and foreign policy thinkers here to finally gather the courage to articulate an official foreign and security policy and an independent pathway to economic prosperity not dependent on American largesse. But don’t hold your breath.
Omair Ahmad is an author. His last novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and won the Crossword Award.