Some are surprised that, after cussing out PM Narendra Modi and India for all sorts of “sins” – ranging from “human rights abuses” to playing footsies with Russia – US Pres Biden pulled out all the stops to welcome and court Modi in his state visit. What gives?? If nothing else, it shows that international politics got its own logic!! And that logic is all about protecting and furthering your country’s interests! Right now, even as China’s businessmen built it into the behemoth it’s become, its Government is petrified at the Eagle being eclipsed, not only economically – but militarily – by the Dragon!!
That gotta sting!! Imagine being pipped by a country that only the other day was the world’s poster child for poverty!! So, we saw the schizophrenia of US Secretary of State Blinken flying to Beijing to signal a softening on the latter’s Taiwan sore point to President Xi Jinping; then, two days later, Biden calls the man a “dictator!! The Chinese weren’t amused!! That’s the danger of trying to eat your cake – cheap manufactured goods from cheap Chinese labour – and having it (superpowerdom!) too!!
But back to Modi and India. The US is trying to cultivate a proxy to take on China in its own backyard – just as it did with Russia and Ukraine. Just as ex-satellite Ukraine had a beef with Russia over its annexation of Crimea back in 2014, India has a running border conflict with China on its Himalayan border, going as far back as 1962 — when Nehru’s pro-China tilt in India’s non-alignment stance didn’t stop the Chinese from invading!! And that flared up again as recently as last year.
India also aspires to be a global power, and that’s where the backscratching from Biden comes in. India’s labour is now much cheaper than China’s, and it has a pretty educated workforce. Plain and simple, it wants the US to shift its manufacturing base into its teeming masses – and so kill two birds with one stone: weakening China and shifting from agriculture into manufacturing!! Already, a major US chip manufacturer – and no, it’s not plantain chips, thank you, but computer chips!! – has invested in a multi-billion-dollar chip-manufacturing plant in Gujarat!! Not so incidentally, the US is putting the economic squeeze on China by restricting US access to its chips!!
Unlike Nehru – who enraged the pragmatic Americans back in the day with his moralising foreign policy of “non-alignment” – Modi’s as pragmatic as the Yanks. So, while they’re annoyed that India’s importing Russian crude oil, refining it, and then selling it to Europe, they can understand the logic. Money gotta be made!!
So, the tango continues, and each country pushes its own agenda!! Touché!!
…on the Marriott
Finally, it looks like we got a buyer for the Marriott. Two of the rejected bidders came up-to-scratch and upped their bids by more than US$20M. The winning one came in at US$90M – up from its previous US$65M. So, what was that? Everyone thought it woulda been a fire sale?? Hey!!…The Marriott’s now making money, and it’s still the number 1 brand-name hotel in the country!!
While some had second-guessed then President Jagdeo for putting together the deal to construct the hotel when oil wasn’t even on the smart money’s horizon – they can’t bring themselves to admit that the man’s made a brilliant move. Who cares what his reason was; it worked out to the country’s benefit, and we’re getting back every penny invested – plus some!! In the meantime, we were able to house in style all the investors who’ve been flocking our shores!!
Even the guy down the block had to raise his game!
…on “itinerant” CCJ?
The ICJ held an “itinerant” sitting in Guyana. He checked his dictionary. As an adjective, the word means “peripatetic, wandering, wayfaring, roving, roaming, rambling, touring, nomadic, gypsy, migratory, vagrant, vagabond, homeless of no fixed abode, footloose, rootless, drifting, floating, unsettled, restless, globetrotting, jet-setting, errant.
The CCJ??
