P Kharel

After intense speculations and a variety of conflicting opinion poll predictions, Democratic Party candidate Joe Bidenis set to be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States next January, replacing Donald Trump. But that is not the whole story. Proving the pollsters wrong for the second successive time, it was no cake walk for Biden, who served as vice-president during Barack Obama’s two terms in office (2009-2016).
Analysts and news media do not deliver electoral victory in an assertive voting community such as America. Psephology-devotees, analysts and media expertise came to doldrums, especially their expectations of a massive victory for the Democratic candidate. Trump’s support base was grossly underestimated by the sections that had been highly upset with their predictions in 2016 that Trump would not win that year’s election. Last week showed that 2016 was not a fluke victory for the billionaire candidate. The Congress composition, too, reiterates this.
There is a sense of division, disappointment and distrust on account of the close call. The new president will have to take into consideration the demands of the Trump supporters. His huge task is to bring the sagging economic superpower back from the brink.
The world’s most populous region of South Asia will watch closely what impact or implications will the Biden administration have for it. Increasingly gravitating to the floor under global spotlight on account of the emerging new power equation, the stakes are too high for indifference and drift. Nations and their neighbours cannot overlook far-away manipulative states striving to play proxy wars at the expense of the weak and perched precariously under uncertain circumstances.

Correction course
Trump went out of his way to dismantle some of his predecessor Barack Obama’s key achievements. Biden could be tempted to reverse the billionaire president’s several key initiatives, including the wall construction along the border with Mexico, snapping off ties with WHO, threatening NATO of reducing US financial support, scrapping of the nuclear deal with Iran and casual approach to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic everything but outright exaggeration.
Probably running out of reckoning for a second term four years hence, the 78-year-old Biden’s major thrust will include South Asia with China’s new found proactive posture right across the Himalayas and high hills. Whatever Washington’s the new administration’s style, Beijing will be its fierce target of strategic onslaught. Complacency left the US and its close allies less than prepared for China’s rise and rise. Portents of new challenges excite many a Western capital’s nerves, as echoed by their daily diet of China-bashing fed to the American press and public.
Biden is likely to give continuity to the Trump administration’s legacy of Quad - a nascent NATO clone for the Asia-Pacific pathway. The recent creation comprising the US and its two most loyal allies - Australia and Japan - plus India. Described by some as “Asian NATO”, Quad is a move to checkmate China as an economic superpower and military might with global influence.
Communist China has come the hard and long way, not by exercising colonial cruelty but as a victim of merciless multilateral aggression and exploitation for more than two centuries until the Mao Zedong-led communists took over in 1949. Beijing prepares to fighting back anything that threatens to adversely affect what it considers to be its bona fide rights.
Americans like to forget the Vietnam War because they lost some 50,000 lives before pulling out defeated and forlorn. Instead, the Ho Chi Minh’s communist warriors ruled a united Vietnam. In Iran, they could do nothing for 30 years except clamping sanctions. In Afghanistan, $1.3 trillion went down the drain in 18 years of a war that has reduced Washington to consider as a big breakthrough the first few inches to dialogue with the Taliban it chased away from Kabul in 2001. The US-led group invaded Iraq in 2002 knowingly on a trumped up charge that President Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons of mass destruction.
The sight of a matching competitor brings out the worst in an incumbent dominant leader. The first signs of this are when the threat and heat of growing competition are when the side wanting a status quo begins baring its teeth and sabre-rattling. That’s an unwitting admission of the arrival of another credible contestant for the top slot or at least sharing equal space in the global sphere of influence.
NATO and the Indo-Pacific Strategy, whose vital component is Quad, are going the American way all out, though Turkey might air differences. It is to be seen how the Beijing-Moscow combine will assert its yet-to-be explicitly exhibited expanse of their influence from Central Asia through West Asia to Africa in particular. Washington is banking on its India policy to counterbalance China’s growth. New Delhi will, however, have to worry about renewed signs of trouble in its north-east states and Naxalite strongholds.
But then Pakistan’s bonding with China, too, offers a significant advantage to the Sino-Russian scheme of things. Its Prime Minister Imran Khan last fortnight announced that his government would engage in talks with India only after Kashmir was freed from “military siege.” He also admitted: “Our economic future is now linked to China.”

Age factor
Whether Biden will be able to meet the rigorous demand of stemming erosion in American international clout remains a nagging question against the background of being the oldest president entering the White House. Age might nibble at his public image.
During the only vice-presidential 90-minute debate, Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris said Trump “betrayed our friends and has embraced dictators around the world”. Never mind, Washington has supported scores of dictators like the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, military coup leaders in Egypt and Thailand, and absolute rulers in oil-rich West Asian sheikhdoms, among many others, in the post-World War II decades.
In the lack of due updates and required changes, the potential maze of problems might make a mess of an already uneasy situation in South Asia. It is here that the Zone of Peace, the late King Birendra proposed in 1975, reiterates its relevance, as did a former prime minister last winter and a senior leader of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) this autumn. Whereas the major powers tussle for agenda leadership, the call of the hour for all is to adapt to the seismic changes in the world order about to spring in the foreseeable future.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)