By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

A new surge of COVID-19 in the United States — highlighted by President Joe Biden and his health secretary, Xavier Becerra, both testing positive — serves as a fresh reminder that there is still no accountability for a pandemic originating in China that killed more people than World War I. In his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump referred to the “China virus.”

But, paradoxically, it is the U.S. under Biden that has effectively let Beijing off the hook for obscuring the origins of the COVID virus, including stonewalling international investigations into the credible possibility that the pathogen was functionally enhanced at China’s military-linked Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence has grown that the virus escaped from the Chinese lab due to inadequate safeguards.

The U.S. role in aiding China’s coverup is all the more ironic because America has led the world in total COVID case counts and number of deaths since the first year of the pandemic. Biden, despite being vaccinated and boosted, is battling his third bout with COVID.

Almost 1.2 million Americans, according to U.S. federal data, have died from COVID; worldwide, according to the WHO, around 7 million people died from this disease. Excess mortality studies, however, suggest that the American total is vastly undercounted. For example, one important study this year concluded that that many excess deaths attributed to natural causes in the U.S. were likely “unrecognized COVID deaths.”

Had the COVID virus originated in Russia, especially in a military-linked lab similar to the one in Wuhan, would the Biden administration have been as forgiving as it has been toward China?

To be sure, the key reason why the U.S. government seems uninterested in getting to the bottom of how the COVID virus originated is that the coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab was part of a collaborative U.S.-China scientific program funded by the American government. Washington has up to now offered no explanation why U.S. government agencies, either directly or through the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, were funneling money to the Wuhan lab that they knew was linked to the Chinese military.

More fundamentally, the most important lesson from the pandemic is that “gain of function” research (of the type U.S. government agencies funded in Wuhan) is the greatest existential threat to humankind ever produced by science — a threat bigger than nuclear weapons. Such research, aimed at studying pathogens by altering their genetic make-up to enhance their virulence or infectiousness, is still continuing in some labs in the West, China and Russia. These experiments represent a mortal threat to humanity.

Viruses leaking from laboratories are not uncommon. In 1979, anthrax escaped from a Soviet laboratory in Yekaterinburg, killing 64 people. The 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing also resulted from a lab leak. COVID originated in the city that is the center of Chinese research on super-viruses.

Unfortunately, the role of American government agencies in the Wuhan coronavirus research led to a concerted effort, extending to U.S. scientific and bureaucratic institutions, to obscure the truth on how the pandemic began. Beijing’s own efforts to conceal the virus’s origins received unexpected help from Western governments, American mainstream media, Silicon Valley social media giants and some prominent American scientists who hid their conflicts of interest, including their ties with Chinese scientists.

Until Biden in May 2021 publicly called the Wuhan lab-leak theory one of “two likely scenarios” on how the pandemic originated, major American media outlets treated that hypothesis as a crazy idea or fringe theory. Social media companies aggressively censored references to a possible lab leak, and even suspended accounts for supporting that hypothesis.

The long suppression of an open debate on the COVID origins was intended to obscure America’s probable culpability. But the prolonged silencing of free discussion likely aided China’s efforts to destroy any incriminating evidence of its negligence or complicity in the worst disaster of our time.

Simply put, the world’s most powerful autocracy and most powerful democracy were effective partners in covering up the likely genesis of a severely disruptive pandemic after their research collaboration backfired, imposing global costs. While China conducted dangerous experiments on coronaviruses with poor safeguards, U.S. funding from 2014 to 2020 enabled that reckless lack of responsibility.

Understanding what caused COVID is essential to prevent the next pandemic, yet the truth may remain hidden forever.

Against this backdrop, is it any surprise that public trust in scientists has declined sharply in the U.S., according to a Pew Research Center survey? COVID-related policy excesses, from stringent lockdowns to vaccination mandates, have also contributed to the eroding trust.

There was some hope that the widespread death and suffering from COVID would force governments to ban lab experiments that, by genetically enhancing the pathogenic power of viruses, could trigger another pandemic. A U.S. panel early last year recommended stricter rules on lab experiments that could cause a pandemic.

But, with dangerous lab research still continuing in several countries, that hope has dissipated. This is reminiscent of how the horrors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led not to a ban on nuclear weapons but to a major nuclear arms race.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

Polarization stokes incendiary rhetoric despite risk of breeding extremism and violence

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

The perceptible decline of political ethics in many democracies, coupled with hyperpartisanship, is fostering incivility in discourse and greater discord. This, in turn, is hardening political polarization and stoking incendiary rhetoric, despite risks of it breeding extremism and violence.

The spotlight on the attempted assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has gone from being an alleged promoter of political violence to a victim of it, should not obscure the fact that toxic discourse has become a central challenge for democracies from Europe and North America to Asia.

In polarized times, the national discourse often reeks of partisanship and pettifoggery. Fake news, conspiracy theories and fear-mongering, meanwhile, have become common, thanks to the reach of social media and the eroding objectivity of the mainstream media.

Worse still, tolerance for opposing political views is now increasingly in short supply. In fact, rival political forces have self-segregated themselves into their own ideological silos, unwilling to have dialogue across the deep divide. Distrust, contempt and anger define such broken politics.

Without the inflammatory political rhetoric giving way to civil discourse, democratic challenges will likely intensify, possibly tipping into violence.

The crisis of democracies has come ominously at a time when authoritarians are on the march, resulting in a decline in global freedoms. An estimated 72% of the world’s population now lives in autocracies.

The coarsening of public discourse and the strengthening of divisive politics in democracies are rooted in increasing polarization, with rival political parties or leaders peddling disinformation and denouncing each other as “extremist” or a “threat” to democracy. Political opponents are targeted by whatever means possible, as they are seen not as rivals but as enemies.

The fever of polarizing politics also persists because the quality of political leadership has declined across the democratic world. Instead of advancing political compromise and national unity, many leaders have fanned the embers of divisive politics.

The larger threat from bitterly polarized politics was laid bare in May when Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia was shot multiple times at close range by a gunman. Fico’s allies accused his liberal opponents of creating the atmosphere for the assassination bid, just as Republicans in the U.S. have blamed what they say is inflammatory rhetoric from President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign for the attempt to kill Trump.

Police officers stand next to police vehicles outside the hospital where Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was taken after a shooting incident in Handlova, Slovakia on May 17. © Reuters

The attempt on Trump’s life occurred in the context of a poisonous U.S. political environment, which is accelerating the decline of political and legal norms and even degrading institutions. An earlier poll found that more than two-thirds of Americans believe U.S. democracy is broken.

The left’s surge in the recent British and French elections may have bucked the rightward trend in European politics but it has underscored the intensifying polarization in Europe, whose widening political divides threaten to resurrect the violent ghosts of its past. Internal divisions have produced political gridlock in France, which is looking nearly ungovernable at present.

Extreme polarization is also blighting a number of non-Western democracies, ranging from Brazil and South Africa to Israel and South Korea.

In India, for example, hyperpartisan politics have been plumbing new depths, poisoning national discourse, widening internal fault lines and threatening to tear it apart.

The narrow victory that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party secured in the recent election is fueling greater polarization by emboldening a reenergized opposition. This is redolent of how the U.S. emerged more divided and polarized from the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The BJP, in fact, has accused the opposition of inciting violence against Modi by using rhetoric similar to that which it says led to the attack on Trump.

By weighing down the world’s largest democracy, India’s debilitating polarization has made it virtually impossible to build consensus on tackling national challenges. By fanning hate and fear, divisive politics in India has even triggered riots in recent years, including over farm reform bills and passage of a legal amendment to grant citizenship to refugees who fled religious persecution from neighboring Islamic countries.

With the Indian discourse no longer about contending ideas, political parties openly pander to class, caste, ethnic and sectarian interests, thereby deepening the divides in society.

Against this backdrop, dealing with the broader crisis of democracies has become imperative. The crisis is fostering low public trust in governments.

The choice for democracies is to stay mired in polarized politics, with venomous discourse stoking hate and violence, or move toward national healing and unity. Today, every important democracy needs to be led by a unifier and not by a divider.

By keeping partisan warfare in check, divided democracies will be able to embrace traditions of pragmatic accommodation. But if little is done to transcend hardened polarization and heal the deep splits in democracies, national institutions could begin to decay, raising the specter of civil unrest.

The essence of democracy is that political battles are settled at the ballot box, not on the streets. It is time to move past the politics of polarization and vituperation.

Uncivil discourse must cease to help extinguish uncivil war. A little respect for political opponents would go a long way in lowering the temperature on partisan conflicts and helping to begin the process of reconciliation and healing.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent, New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press), which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.

Political malaise at home, by exposing chinks in the US armor, is fraying America’s global image and contributing to the decline of US global leadership. Alas, the attempt to assassinate Trump will likely widen domestic divisions and make political discourse more toxic.

Brahma Chellaney, OPEN magazine

The United States, which believes it is the leader of the ‘free world’ and the guardian of the ‘rules-based order’, faces a deepening political crisis at home that has engulfed its leadership and democracy. Lawfare (or using the legal system as a weapon against political opponents) and the politicisation of American courts are seen as posing a threat to due process and the rule of law.

It is telling that more than two-thirds of Americans, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, think US democracy is broken. One international study has even designated America a “backsliding” democracy.

Meanwhile, with the shifts in global economic and political power, America’s relative decline is accelerating. The US has only one challenger at the global level, China, which does not hide its ambition to emerge as the world’s foremost power. But through short-sighted policies, including a sanctions-centred approach, the US is inadvertently helping China to accumulate greater economic and military power.

Domestic maladies, for their part, are directly contributing to the decline of US global leadership. Hyper-partisan politics and debilitating polarisation, for example, impede the pursuit of long-term American objectives. In foreign policy, the partisan divide can be seen in divergent perceptions of international challengers to the US: Republicans are most concerned about China, while Democrats worry about Russia above all.

Political malaise at home, by exposing chinks in the US armour, is also fraying America’s global image. As former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has put it, “a palpable loss of domestic confidence in the US is corroding America’s external projection and potency.”

Lawfare, by laying bare the manipulation of the judicial system by the Justice Department and district attorneys, is backfiring on the ruling Democratic Party by helping to make former President Donald Trump a stronger candidate for the November presidential election. By citing the principle that no one is above the law, Democrats have waged an unprecedented legal offensive against Trump in an effort to derail his candidacy, hoping that the legal system would box him in.

Instead, the different cases against him not only helped Trump cruise to an easy victory in the Republican Party primaries but also have boosted his bid to win the November election. The day Trump was convicted in Manhattan of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payment to a porn star, small donors contributed a record-shattering $34.8 million to his campaign.

The politicisation of the judicial system has raised the spectre of retaliatory Republican lawfare in future. But, fortunately, the recent US Supreme Court decision effectively shielding Trump from prosecution for actions he took as president blocks a future Republican administration from seeking retribution against President Joe Biden. By ruling that a president enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his core constitutional duties, and presumptive immunity for other official acts, the judgment protects every president from partisan prosecutors.

However, hardened polarisation and partisan attacks on institutions are contributing to a systemic loss of faith. Consider the Democratic Party’s vitriol against the Supreme Court over its recent judgments on several key issues, including presidential immunity. Or take the alarming poll finding that about one-third of Americans still believe that Biden did not legitimately win in 2020 because the election was rigged.

With India gaining greater salience in American policy, the general trajectory towards closer Indo-US strategic cooperation is unlikely to be altered after Biden is out of office. There is strong bipartisan support in Washington for deepening the US engagement with India. Indeed, the US-India relationship serves as the fulcrum of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy

Even public trust in scientists has declined sharply in the US, thanks to Covid-era excesses, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Nearly 40 per cent of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents have little or no confidence in scientists.

As if all that were not bad enough, the US has finally woken up to the unpalatable reality that its sitting president, Joe Biden, may not be up to the task due to cognitive decline.

But contrary to how the US mainstream media is portraying it, America’s Biden problem did not arise all of a sudden. In fact, the mainstream media was more than complicit in ignoring or obscuring over several years the president’s cognitive decline.

To be sure, Biden performed poorly in his first debate with his political opponent, Trump. Biden repeatedly appeared to lose his train of thought during the June 27 debate. He frequently paused and stumbled over words, struggling to present a coherent and cogent narrative.

Biden’s cognitive issues have been apparent since at least 2020. But the increasingly partisan US mainstream media chose not to report on the state of Biden’s mental health until the decline progressed to such an extent that the president virtually crashed in the debate with Trump. The major media outlets then reacted with shock, as if they had been unaware of Biden’s diminishing physical and mental capacities.

THE LEADERSHIP CRISIS

The American ‘deep state’ has a long record of concealing, with the help of a pliable media, the significant physical or mental disability of a sitting president or a favoured presidential nominee.

Take the example of two icons of the modern Democratic Party, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D Roosevelt, both of whom are still placed in the ranks of America’s greatest presidents.

After President Wilson suffered a paralysing stroke in October 1919 that left him incapacitated until the end of his presidency in March 1921, his wife, despite little formal education, ran the government for the remainder of his term, without the public knowing about it. The wife, Edith Wilson, effectively became America’s first woman president months before women officially won the right to vote in the US.

Roosevelt, a polio survivor, won the presidency by a landslide in 1932 with most Americans unaware that their president had to spend much of his time in a self-designed wheelchair. According to the 2003 book, <FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability> by academics Davis W Houck and Amos Kiewe, “Roosevelt’s disability was carefully concealed not only from the media, and thus the public, but also from some members of his own family.” The Secret Service was tasked to prevent the press from taking a photograph of FDR in a “disabled or weak” state. Still, FDR won the presidency four times—twice during the Great Depression and twice more during World War II. As Allied forces were nearing victory in World War II, Roosevelt’s health deteriorated steadily before he died of a stroke.

Less than two months after he took office, Biden, while climbing up to board Air Force One, tripped three times on the stairs. But the fall, like other subsequent incidents, was obscured or played down by the mainstream media. In the three-and-a-half years that Biden has been in office, he has grown increasingly frail and forgetful

Against this backdrop, the American mainstream media, in one of the worst journalistic cover-ups in decades, hid from the public Biden’s increasing cognitive decline. Right through his presidency, Biden’s cognitive issues have largely confined him to carefully scripted public appearances.

Without relying on teleprompters and pre-written scripts, Biden not only has had difficulty in publicly articulating his ideas or thoughts or making policy-related comments, but he also has tended to stumble over words and speak incoherently.

The major media outlets turned on Biden only when their cover-up became impossible to sustain. As if acting on cue, the entire mainstream media, after his halting debate performance, began suddenly calling on the president to exit the presidential race.

But more than the poor debate performance, it was polls since May showing that Biden is losing to Trump that set off alarm bells in the ‘deep state’, which is determined to stop the former president from returning to the White House by whatever means possible. This then led to the media just turning on Biden. Now the mounting crisis threatens to topple Biden’s presidency.

The truth is that concerns about Biden’s mental acuity and physical fitness first surfaced during his 2020 presidential campaign, when he limited his campaigning and used teleprompters even for basic stump speeches to small audiences. Those concerns amplified after he entered the White House in January 2021.

Less than two months after he took office, Biden, while climbing up to board Air Force One, tripped three times on the stairs, falling to his knees the third time, despite having his hand on the railing for support. But the fall, like other subsequent incidents, was obscured or played down by the mainstream media. Instead, the major US media outlets ran speculative and baseless stories about Russian President Vladimir Putin being “seriously ill”.

In the three-and-a-half years that Biden has been in office, he has grown increasingly frail and forgetful. Biden’s history of two brain aneurysms, high cholesterol and the heart condition atrial fibrillation are all risk factors for cognitive decline.

Biden’s unscripted public events have been rare. But even at scripted events, Biden has often appeared confused in the past one year about where to exit a podium after having finished delivering prepared remarks. This has led his staff to provide him detailed visual instructions on how to enter and exit a podium.

Meanwhile, Biden’s gaffes have increasingly drawn attention to his declining memory. Earlier this year, for example, he mixed up French President Emmanuel Macron with ex-President François Mitterrand, who died in 1996. Answering a question about the Israel-Hamas negotiations over hostages, Biden appeared confused and disoriented, unable to recall even Hamas’ name. And at a South Carolina rally, he called Trump the “sitting president”.

Yet, scoffing at Republican Party efforts to keep questions about Biden’s mental health front and centre, the US mainstream media insisted since 2021 that there was virtually no evidence to indicate the president was in cognitive decline.

Even Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report that depicted the president as suffering from mental decline was dismissed as a partisan job. The report, released in February, described Biden’s memory as “hazy”, “fuzzy”, “faulty”, “poor”, and having “significant limitations” and said the 81-year-old president displayed “diminished faculties”.

A campaign has begun to replace Biden with vice president Kamala Harris as the presidential nominee. Democratic party strategists are already working to build up Harris, with a leaked ‘case for Kamala’ document stating that the ‘most important priority above all others is defeating Donald Trump’

Despite the media cover-up, ordinary Americans understood the risk to the nation posed by Biden’s diminished physical and mental capacities. Almost a year ago, an important poll found that three-quarters of American adults believed that Biden was too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president. And according to another poll, which was released in May 2023, 62 per cent of respondents said that Biden’s mental competence was a concern.

Yet, to stop Trump, Democrats and the media continued to shield Biden so as to help re-elect him, despite growing evidence that he would not be capable of serving four more years in office. With no real challenger in the primaries, Biden unofficially clinched the Democratic Party nomination as early as March in a process that was much shorter than the one in 2020.

But now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, with major media outlets going after Biden harshly. They are spearheading a campaign—in breach of media ethics—to force him out.

The New York Times, which claims to strive to maintain the highest standards of journalistic ethics, published a supposedly investigative story on July 2 that said several people who had encountered Biden behind closed doors noticed “he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations”—the very evidence the newspaper ignored for over four years despite its open availability.

The US media narrative for four years until recently was that America’s big problem is not Biden but the menace to US democracy posed by Trump. Biden himself has hawked the narrative that American democracy hangs in the balance, even declaring that “democracy is on the ballot in the 2024 election”.

Yet, ironically, a Washington Post-Schar School poll released last month showed that over half of American voters in six key battleground states view Biden as a threat to US democracy and not its saviour. Indeed, 44 per cent of the respondents said that Trump would do a better job in protecting American democracy, while only 33 per cent believed Biden would be better. “Those most sympathetic to an authoritarian form of government,” according to the <Washington Post> analysis of the poll, “include demographic groups that have traditionally voted heavily Democratic.”

This is an international reminder that those loudest in claiming that their political rivals pose significant threats to democracy are often perceived by a majority of voters as the real threats to democracy because of their actions. In India, for example, those who oppose even parliamentary references to the draconian 1975-77 Emergency rule claim that the present government, despite recently being elected to a third term, poses a unique threat to Indian democracy.

Today, US Democrats and their media allies, by stepping up pressure on Biden to withdraw, are openly rejecting the result of the primaries. They want to effectively invalidate the 14 million votes Biden received (87 per cent of the total) in a democratic nominating process.

Until Biden’s cognitive impairment started becoming a political liability, the ‘deep state’ was pretty happy with him, as he largely delivered on its demands, including in the Ukraine war. But in the weeks before the debate, Biden’s approval rating began slipping sharply and polls showed that he would lose to Trump. To the ‘deep state’, nothing on Earth is more important than defeating Trump.

Against this backdrop, Biden appears to have outlived his utility for the ‘deep state’ as his impairment makes him a weak candidate against Trump. In keeping with the Anglo-American saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” Biden’s debate performance became a convenient handle to launch a campaign of sustained pressure to make him end his 2024 candidacy.

There is now even quiet discussion on Capitol Hill about whether the constitution’s 25th Amendment could be invoked to remove Biden from office. The amendment permits a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” to step aside or be removed and have the vice president “immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

Trump built a personal rapport with Prime Minister Modi. During his February 2020 visit to India, Trump spoke at the largest rally any American president has ever addressed. Those were the Halcyon days of the Us-India relationship. The Biden administration has sustained the momentum with India. Biden’s personal interactions with Modi have been characterised by ease and warmth

But invoking the 25th Amendment is clearly a long shot. More practically, a campaign has begun to replace Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as the presidential nominee. Democratic Party strategists are already working to build up Harris, with a leaked ‘Case for Kamala’ document stating that the “most important priority above all others is defeating Donald Trump.”

Until recently, as one prominent American newspaper put it, Harris was “an afterthought and a punchline in the party.” Harris has had a low favourability rating all along. A poll last month showed her to be as risky for the Democrats as the president: Biden at 43 per cent favourable and 54 per cent unfavourable; Harris at 42 per cent favourable and 52 per cent unfavourable.

In this light, what explains the fact that Democrats are starting to coalesce behind Harris as the best option to replace Biden? It is all about money.

The party has contenders whose favourability ratings may be better than Harris, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. But only Harris, as the president’s running mate, would lawfully be able to use the huge funds already raised by Biden’s campaign committee. At the beginning of this month, Biden had $240 million in cash on hand.

If stepped-up pressure eventually forces Biden to exit the presidential contest, it would deny Republicans their weakest opponent, upending Trump’s re-election prospects.

 THE POST-BIDEN ERA

With India gaining greater salience in American policy, the general trajectory towards closer Indo-US strategic cooperation is unlikely to be altered after Biden is out of office. There is strong bipartisan support in Washington for deepening the US engagement with India. Indeed, the US-India relationship serves as the fulcrum of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

Booming American exports to India, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, reinforce such bipartisan support. The US has already become an important source of crude oil and petroleum products for India, the world’s third-largest oil consumer after America and China. And American arms exports to India now run into billions of dollars yearly.

No American administration can ignore the fact that India’s international profile and geopolitical weight are on an upward trajectory. The world’s largest democracy is now the world’s fifth-biggest economy, after surpassing Britain in 2023. By next year, India is set to become the third-largest economy by overtaking both Japan, which is straining to avert recession, and former economic powerhouse Germany, currently the worst-performing developed economy.

Today, with its global supremacy eroding, the US’ principal adversaries, China and Russia, deepen their entente. Instead of driving a wedge between these two natural competitors, US policy has helped turn China and Russia into close strategic partners

India’s incredible economic growth has made it a crucial pillar of the global economy. India is projected to account for 12.9 per cent of all global growth between 2023 and 2028, more than America’s share of 11.3 per cent.

When Biden unveiled his administration’s “free and open Indo-Pacific strategy” in 2022, it largely mirrored the strategy of his predecessor, Trump. The Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy was declassified in early 2021 just before the Biden administration took office. That declassified document gave India pride of place in American strategy, saying a “strong India” will serve as a “counterbalance to China”. It also committed to “accelerate India’s rise and capacity to serve as a net provider of security.”

Today, with its global supremacy eroding, the US needs India, especially as its principal adversaries, China and Russia, deepen their entente. Instead of driving a wedge between these two natural competitors, US policy has helped turn China and Russia into close strategic partners. If the US is not to accelerate its relative decline through strategic overreach, it has to build closer collaboration with India.

Indo-US relations thrived during the Trump presidency. The Trump administration instituted fundamental shifts in US policies towards China and Pakistan, India’s regional foes, whose strengthening strategic axis imposes high security costs on India, including raising the spectre of a two-front war. In his most lasting legacy, Trump, by instituting a paradigm policy shift, reversed the US policy since the Nixon era of aiding China’s rise. His administration also cut off security aid to Pakistan for not severing its ties with terrorist groups.

Moreover, Trump built a personal rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with whom he shared a love for big audiences and theatrics. Trump joined Modi’s September 2019 public rally in Houston, attended by 59,000 Indian-Americans and a number of US Congressmen and Senators. Then, during his February 2020 standalone visit to India, Trump spoke at the largest rally any American president has ever addressed—at home or abroad.

More than 100,000 people packed the world’s largest cricket stadium in Ahmedabad as Trump declared, “America loves India, America respects India, and America will always be faithful and loyal friends to the Indian people.” After returning home, Trump called India an “incredible country”, saying, “Our relationship with India is extraordinary right now.” Those were the halcyon days of the US-India relationship.

To be sure, the Biden administration has sustained the momentum in the relationship with India. This has little to do with Vice President Harris’ Indian heritage. The fact is that the Biden administration has recognised India’s centrality in an Asian balance of power. Biden’s personal interactions with Modi have been characterised by ease and warmth.

But the Biden administration has also struck some discordant notes. For example, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it tried in vain to force New Delhi to choose between Washington and Moscow. Biden’s top economic adviser, Brian Deese, crassly threatened that “the costs and consequences” for India would be “significant and long-term” if it refused to take sides. And Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has repeatedly taken a swipe at India over alleged human rights abuses.

It has also become increasingly apparent that America under the Biden administration has no intent to forego the Sikh militancy card that it holds as potential leverage against India. US security agencies continue to shelter and shield Khalistani extremists, despite some of these US-based militants making terrorist threats against India from American soil.

For example, the New York-based militant Gurpatwant Singh Pannun warned Air India passengers last November that their lives were at risk while threatening not to let the flag carrier operate anywhere in the world. Pannun had previously threatened to also disrupt Indian Railways and thermal power plants, according to India’s National Investigation Agency.

Still, the strategic partnership between the US and India is likely to continue strengthening over the long term because it serves both countries’ interests and is pivotal to building power equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific region. The post-Biden era will come with its own opportunities and challenges for India.

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

For over three years, all signs of President Biden’s cognitive decline have been ignored or obscured by his allies and the mainstream media. Even Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report just months ago highlighting Biden’s “poor memory” was dismissed as partisan hackery. Now America faces a leadership crisis at home when it is at a crossroads in a rapidly changing and increasingly volatile world.

Just when its principal adversaries, China and Russia, are more firmly aligned than at any time since the 1950s, and the dangers of an accidental NATO-Russia nuclear war cannot be discounted, the U.S. is looking overextended, with its military resources stretched thin due to its involvement in the wars in Europe and the Middle East.

The crisis in American leadership, and the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine has largely tied down the U.S. in Europe, might make Chinese President Xi Jinping believe that China has a window of opportunity to achieve the “historic mission” of forcibly incorporating Taiwan into the mainland Chinese state. Xi recently made his Taiwan goal clearer by declaring that the “essence” of his national rejuvenation drive is “the unification of the motherland.”

Putin, for his part, seems determined to get back at the West for its recent actions against Russia, including seizing Russian money to arm Ukraine.

Despite Putin’s warning of “serious consequences,” Biden has let Ukraine use American-provided weapons to strike deep inside Russia. Biden’s action to take the war inside Russia came after the U.S. followed Britain and France in sending long-range missiles to Ukraine for use far beyond Russian front lines.

Biden’s memory issues, including doing things that he had earlier pledged not to do, may well explain why his risk appetite has grown.

With the flow of sophisticated Western weapons to Ukraine failing to stem Russian advances or force Russia to retreat from the areas it has occupied, Biden has progressively escalated American involvement in the war by embracing ideas that he had earlier said were taboo. For example, he had categorically declared earlier that any Ukrainian attack on Russian territory with U.S.-supplied missiles would go against his mandate to “avoid World War III.”

To launch strikes deep inside Russia with U.S., British or French long-range weapons supplied to Ukraine, satellite reconnaissance data is needed, which Kyiv lacks. So, in effect, the supplier states have control over target selection and transmission of coordinates to Ukraine for striking Russian positions beyond Ukrainian borders.

Biden’s punitive focus on Russia has come at the expense of effectively countering the threat from America’s bigger challenger — China.

China has more than doubled its nuclear-weapons arsenal since 2020. It is also expanding its conventional forces faster than any other country has since World War II.

China already dwarfs Russia in terms of economic output, military spending and other material measures. As Biden acknowledged in his 2022 national security strategy, China is “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective.”

Yet China has been the main beneficiary of Biden’s efforts to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Unprecedented sanctions, which have included weaponization of international finance, have been a boon for Beijing, turning it into Russia’s banker and expanding international use of the Chinese yuan. Russia now generates much of its international export earnings in the Chinese currency and keeps these proceeds mostly in Chinese banks, in effect giving Beijing a share of the returns.

For China, the longer the U.S. battles political malaise at home and stays distracted by conflicts elsewhere in the world, the better.

In fact, the likely defining moment that formally brings the era of America’s global preeminence to an end would be surprise Chinese aggression aimed at subjugating Taiwan. Such aggression could come sooner than many in Washington expect, given ominous signs that Xi is preparing his country for this war.

China’s recent military drills that encircled Taiwan seemed to be a rehearsal for implementing at least a blockade with the aim of slowly throttling the island democracy. Indeed, this was the third Chinese dress rehearsal in less than two years for an assault on Taiwan, with the latest drills more sophisticated, elaborate and geographically expansive than the previous exercises.

If Xi perceives a strategic opening to move against Taiwan without triggering a full-fledged war with the U.S., he will likely employ military force. Is the U.S. prepared for a Taiwan contingency?

America today is at a vulnerable moment. Political tumult and uncertainty at home could make it even more vulnerable to international geopolitical shocks.

Even if pressure from fellow Democrats and donors compels Biden to drop his bid for a second term, he would stay president for another six months. And he will still be dogged by doubts about his mental acuity and fitness to lead America in an increasingly turbulent and dangerous world. By advertising weakness, such a situation could embolden America’s adversaries to test U.S. resolve.

Much of the democratic world would like the U.S. to remain the preeminent global power. But, with hyper-partisan politics and profound polarization already weighing down American democracy, the U.S. confronts a leadership crisis at a critical juncture — when its adversaries are intent on reshaping the world by ending the era of American primacy.

Unfortunately, at home and abroad, the U.S. has become its own worst enemy. And it seriously risks accelerating its relative decline through strategic overreach under shortsighted leadership.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”