WAR material manufacturing/production/sale industry is pivot of US economy; it is a compulsion for US to have wider wars or war anywhere across the globe for consumption of war wares to keep its economy in a dynamic state; therefore, it is its economic compulsion either to herself trigger war or join if war is ongoing anywhere in the world; it is not one’s judgment; it is the past history of the US irrespective of war/wars finale – periodic withdrawal.
To my view, the US being the global power, should/can be a global peace father but this status impedes functionality of its war industry whose health, I think, may be contributing to the speed of its political engine. For instance, in the Middle East, the US could be a peace father by her help to implement the UN-devised roadmap of Middle East settlement, but she is not performing her ‘fatherly’ peace role, despite verbally subscribing to the two-state UN/ME settlement.
The Middle East, to her, is a strategic front; it shall keep on simmering not because the Middle Easterners want that to be, but because of open weapons sale avenues hot spots and the ME is surely one. Keeping this all in cool view, one can conclude that the US has had to keep her diplomatic face coercive, not peace tolerant.
A calculated diplomatic ambivalence seems a part of US foreign policy; in this context one can take for consideration US’s diplomatic face reading for Russia and China; she has visible niche for a sort of relations with Russia while nursing a distance with China despite occasional bilateral talks; she is nurturing India as a possible wrestler in Sino-India bilaterally estranged ring.
But India, despite having seemingly deeper trust in the US practicality towards Delhi, is cautious enough; she does not buy the concept being a playboy at someone else’s hands; Indians are using US vending influence in inching-ahead their (India’s) global reach offering expanding their economic markets to global commercial competitors. Possibility is not absent from the global scene that in some future days India shall have to be a soft rival to the US because the US does not have ownership geo-basis outside of American landmass, whereas both India and China do have this geo-advantage.
Also the diplomatic lab of the USA stands exposed when she admits Kashmir as a dispute but at the same time does not apply her diplomacy to resolve this issue between her two ‘apparent’ chums – Pakistan and India. She looks ‘satisfied’ over an alive Kashmir issue between Islamabad and Delhi as she does not seem to have calculated the Indo-Pakistan peace cost vis-a-vis war wares sales.
And tranquil global face does not suit any arms seller; suppose there is no US arms consumption hot fronts anywhere in the world and there is an all- peace across all four corners of the globe then numerous issues of domestic dimensions shall arise for her. Therefore ‘look busy abroad’ activity is a well-calculated approach of the US. An internationally related aspect is that Europe does not trust the US. A day shall certainly dawn when there shall emerge an international peace father and in whose fate is written this privilege is yet to be ascertained.
—The writer, a retired Secretary in AJK Govt, is a senior columnist, based in Rawalpindi.
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views expressed are writer’s own.
