Whoever becomes the next US president, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, US foreign policy will not change materially. – Minhaz Merchant
The deep state inside the Pentagon and the State Department runs US security and foreign policy. Made up of former Cold War veterans, they have three primary objectives: weakening Russia, challenging China, and backing Israel. All else is detail.
The US state-within-the-state openly disobeys presidential orders. In his recently published book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, former US National Security Advisor (NSA) Lt. General (Retd) H.R. McMaster writes: “It was difficult to get State and Defence even to comply with Trump’s directive to stop certain activities. I discovered that contrary to the South Asia strategy, which called for the suspension of all aid to Pakistan with a few exceptions, when Defence Secretary Jim Mattis visited Islamabad in the coming weeks, the Pentagon was going to deliver a military aid package that included more than $150 million worth of armoured vehicles.”
McMaster was shocked at the Defence Secretary’s defiance of stated US policy. He immediately sought a meeting with Mattis. “I started by noting,” McMaster writes in his book which was published last week, “that President (Trump) had been very clear on multiple occasions to suspend aid to the Pakistanis until they halted support for terrorist organisations that were killing Afghans, Americans, and coalition members in Afghanistan. … We had all heard Trump say, ‘I do not want any money going to Pakistan’”.
Whoever becomes the next US president, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, US policy will not change materially. Washington regards Israel as a strategic Western security toehold in West Asia which must be supported at any cost. It regards Russia as a declining military power that must be crushed. And it regards China as a growing economic and technological threat that must be challenged.
Where does India fit in? As a subaltern helping police the Indo-Pacific, India serves a useful purpose. That is why Washington turns a blind eye to India buying nearly 40 per cent of its crude oil from Moscow.
Besides, India has large consumer and financial markets for US companies. It serves as an offshore R&D engineering centre. Indian software engineers are smarter and cheaper than US software engineers.
America is a transactional power. It built the world’s most powerful nation from scratch between the 1600s and the 2000s by enslaving Africans, occupying Native American land and using the profits to create the world’s greatest innovation and military ecosystem.
Kamala or Trump won’t change the DNA of a country their respective families emigrated to—Trump’s in the 1880s, Kamala’s in the 1950s.
A democratic oddity
The United States is an odd democracy. You can win a presidential election even if your opponent gets a higher national vote share. Each American state has a fixed number of electoral voters. Every state has two senators and hence two electoral votes to start with plus votes allocated by the number of members in the House of Representatives which is based on a state’s population.
Vote shares are collated state-wise, not nationwide. The winner of each state gets all the state’s allocated electoral votes.
Kamala currently leads nationally by between two and four percentage points. But what matters is vote share in each of the 50 states. The total electoral vote count is 538. The winning majority is 270 electoral votes.
The first Trump-Kamala TV debate on September 10 may not alter the ground situation since 43 of the 50 states are committed blue (Democratic) states or red (Republican) states. Of the other seven battleground states, six are divided evenly between Trump and Kamala.
That leaves the seventh and most important battleground state—Pennsylvania—with 19 votes. In the latest electoral map of 49 states excluding Pennsylvania, accounting for 519 out of 538 total electoral votes, Kamala currently leads Trump by 268 to 251 votes.
To win, Trump therefore has to secure Pennsylvania’s 19 votes to get to the 270 majority mark. If Kamala wins Pennsylvania, she’ll end up with 287 votes—a comfortable majority. The final total: Kamala (287), Trump (251). If Trump wins Pennsylvania, the final total would be a much narrower 270-268 victory for Trump.
Trump advocates were delighted when Kamala chose Tim Walz as her running mate rather than Josh Shapiro. Walz is governor of Minnesota, a Democratic state that has voted Republican only once in over 60 years. He therefore brings little to the ticket.
Shapiro is governor of Pennsylvania. Having him as her vice-presidential running mate would have almost certainly secured Pennsylvania—and the election—for Kamala.
When Kamala was shortlisting candidates to choose her running mate, Shapiro was top of the list. He was the Democratic party’s first choice as well.
What made Kamala change her mind? Shapiro is an observant Jew and a strong supporter of Israel. Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Shapiro has expressed misgivings over a two-state solution that will give Palestinians a sovereign state co-existing next to Israel.
A pro-Israeli hawk like Shapiro, Kamala believed, could lose her votes among three key US demographies: Arab-Americans, college-educated under-35s who are largely opposed to the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza, and the left wing of the Democratic party which has a sizeable following among independent voters.
Could the decision to drop Shapiro in favour of the mild-mannered Walz torpedo Kamala’s chances to become America’s first woman president? Pennsylvania’s 19 votes could well win the presidency for Trump unless Kamala carries at least five of the other six swing states to make up for Pennsylvania’s loss. The six are Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia.
Much will depend on the September 10 televised debate between Kamala and Trump on ABC News. In her first sit-down interview with CNN last week, Kamala delivered a confident but cautious performance.
Walz was seated next to her so it wasn’t quite a one-on-one grilling. CNN anchor Dana Bash asked some tough questions but also tossed a few soft balls that Kamala batted away gratefully. CNN was careful not to telecast the interview live in order to give it time to edit any bloopers. It initially released short clips from the 26-minute interview before airing it in full the next day.
Whether Kamala or Trump is the next US president, the deep state will however continue to have the last word on global policies. – Firstpost, 3 September 2024
› Minhaz Merchant is an editor, author and publisher.
Filed under: india, USA | Tagged: 2024 US elections, deep state, donald trump, kamala harris, US foreign policy | Comments Off on US deep state defies the White House on foreign policy – Minhaz Merchant
