What the Biden administration is increasingly proving is that the Trumpian politics of an overtly isolationist and meaner America was not one off but a decisive turn of national mood. It is a country now that has huge internal issues and is no more interested in the world!

I’ve never seen any other time in the past couple of decades when domestic issues have occupied the administration and the Congress’s attention as much as in the recent years. Even during the peak of GFC America was engaged globally much more.

America no more wants to just stop China from out growing but wants this engg and supply chains back on shore. It is not just looking for an alternative mfg base. It is not reconsidering TPP that was negotiated when Biden and much of this admin was in office before 2016.

The America that spearheaded the Ebola response back in 2014 is gone. The America that lead the West is never coming back. So in this context it is important to probably slowly decompose the definition of what is the West and what it could mean to us.

A non American-led West is emerging with a group of middle power nations who want to continue their engagement with the world on their terms. Some of this is favourable to us. France, Australia, Japan, South Korea maybe UK. Their engagement with India is increasingly decoupled +

from the way US engaged with India. So we could end up having a set of Western nations with whom we’ll work more substantially than with the biggest Western power for their size although on absolute terms our engagement with US will be high just for the sheer size of engagement.

Our engagement with US will continue to happen in its own pace. It will not diminish. But the promise that the US India think tank/business council circuit hyped up about, that’s absolutely gone. And this is beyond just a Democrats vs Hindu nationalists issue.

And this has less to do about India’s own turn towards Hindu nationalism, as much as globalist liberals might want to attribute to. This saturation in partnership has been mainly due to US domestic politics and social churn happening. The establishment is simply on autopilot.

with regards to engaging India on defence and foreign policy issues. And I think @DrSJaishankar is one person in India has got this right largely, has articulated & practiced based on this understanding for years, even when others around were denying it as a temporary phase.

This is the problem. To make it about Biden because he is an easy bogey. The issue as you yourself mentioned in a previous tweet is larger. How many representatives and senators of the India caucus have spoken about this crisis leave alone the admin? https://twitter.com/abhina_prakash/status/1385686384921387008

Consequence of this disengagement is that Ned Price and subsequently the US admin and that country at large need to realize that overt assertion of American exceptionalism will no more be palatable to the world. https://twitter.com/sidhant/status/1385546546373005315