NASA’s Epic Flight, Trump’s Epic Fumble and Asian Dilemmas-by Rajan Philips

Three hours after the spectacular Artemis II flight launch in Florida, US President Donald Trump delivered a forlorn speech from Washington. Thirty three days after starting the war against Iran as Epic Fury, the President demonstrated on national and global televisions the Epic Fumble he has made out of his Middle East ‘excursion’. It was an April Fool’s Day speech, 20 minutes of incoherent rambling with the President looking bored, confused, disengaged and dispirited. He left no one wiser about what will come next, let alone what he might do next.

There was more to April Fool’s Day this year in that it brought out the nation’s good, bad and the ugly, all in a day’s swoop. The good was the Artemis II flight carrying astronauts farther from the Earth’s orbit and closer to the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The mission is a precursor for future flights and will test the performance of a new spacecraft, gather new understanding of human conditioning, and extend the boundaries of lunar science. It is a testament to humankind being able to make steady progress in science and technology at one end of a hopelessly uneven world, while poverty, bigotry and belligerence simmer violently at the other end.

Terrible Trump

The four Artemis II astronauts, three Americans, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and one Canadian, Jeremy Hansen, are also symptomatic of the endurance of America’s inclusive goodness in spite of efforts by the Trump Administration to snuff the nation’s fledgling DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) ethos. To wit, of the four astronauts, Victor Glover, a Caribbean American, is the first person of colour, Christina Koch the first woman, and Jeremy Hansen of Canada the first non-American – to fly this far beyond the earth’s orbit. All in spite of Trump’s watch.

Yet Trump managed to showcase his commitment to America’s ugliness, on the same day, by presenting himself at the Supreme Court hearing on the constitutionality of his most abominable Executive Order – to stop the American tradition of birthright citizenship. He keeps posting that America is Stupid in being the only country in the world that grants citizenship at birth to everyone born in America, regardless of the status of their parents, except the children of foreign diplomats or members of an occupying enemy force. In fact, there are 32 other countries in the world that grant birthright citizenship, a majority of them in the Americas indicating the continent’s history as a magnet for migrants ever since Christopher Columbus discovered it for the rest of the world.

And birthright citizenship in the US is enshrined in the constitution by the 14^th Amendment, supplemented by subsequent legislation and reinforced by a century and a half of case law. Trump wants to reverse that. Thus far and no further was the message from the court at the hearing. A decision is expected in June and the legal betting is whether it would be a 7-2 or 8-1 rebuke for Trump. In a telling exchange during the hearing, when the government’s Solicitor General John Sauer quite sillily dramatized that “we’re in new world now … where eight billion people are one plane ride way from having a child who’s a US citizen,” Chief Justice John Roberts quietly dismissed him: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution!”

Trump’s terrible ‘bad’ is of course the war that he started in the Middle East and doesn’t know how to end it. Margaret MacMillan, acclaimed World War I historian and a great grand daughter of World War I British Prime Minister Lloyd George from Wales, has compared Trump’s current war to the origins of the First World War. Just as in 1914, small Serbia had pulled the bigger Russia into a war that was not in Russia’s interest, so too have Netanyahu and Israel have pulled Trump and America into the current war against Iran. World War I that started in August, 2014 was expected to be over before Christmas, but it went on till November, 2018. Weak leaders start wars, says MacMillan, but “they don’t have a clear idea of how they are going to end.”

There are also geopolitical and national-political differences between the 1910s and 2020s. America’s traditional allies have steadfastly refused to join Trump’s war. And Trump is under immense pressure at home not to extend the war. This is one American war that has been unpopular from day one. The cost of military operations at as high as two billion dollars a day is anathema to the people who are aggravated by rising prices directly because of the war. Trump’s own mental acuity and the abilities of his cabinet Secretaries are openly under question. There are swirling allegations of military contract profiteering and selective defense investments – one involving Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Trump’s Administration is coming apart with sharp internal divisions over the war and government paralysis on domestic matters. There are growing signs of disarray – with Trump firing his Attorney General for not being effective prosecuting his political enemies and Secretary Hegseth ordering early retirement for Army Chief of Staff Randy George. In America’s non-parliamentary presidential system, Trump is allowed to run his own forum where he lies daily without instant challenger or contradiction, and it is impossible to get rid of his government by that simple device called no confidence motion.

Asian Dilemmas

Howsoever the current will last or end, what is clear is that its economic consequences are not going to disappear soon. Iran’s choke on the Strait of Hormuz has affected not only the supply and prices of oil and natural gas but a family of other products from fertilizers to medicines to semiconductors. The barrel price of oil has risen from $70 before the war to over $100 now. After Trump’s speech on April 1, oil prices rose and stock prices fell. The higher prices have come to stay and even if they start going down they are not likely to go down to prewar levels.

There are warnings that with high prices, low growth and unemployment, the global economy is believed to be in for a stagflation shock like in the 1970s. Even if the war were to end sooner than a lot later, the economic setbacks will not be reversed easily or quickly. Supplies alone will take time to get back into routine, and it will even take longer time for production in the Gulf countries to get back to speed. Not only imports, but even export trading and exports to Middle East countries will be impacted. The future of South Asians employed in the Middle East is also at stake.

In 1980, President Carter floated the Carter Doctrine that the US would use military force to ensure the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is now upending that doctrine – first by misusing America’s military force against Iran and provoking the strait’s closure, and then claiming that keeping the strait open is not America’s business. Ever selfish and transactional, Trump’s argument is that America is now a net exporter of oil and is no longer dependent on Middle East oil.

To fill in the void, and perhaps responding to Trump’s call to “build up some delayed courage,” UK has hosted a virtual meeting of about 40 countries to discuss modalities for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. US was not one of them. While Downing Street has not released a full list of attendees, European countries, some Gulf countries, Canada, Australia, Japan and India reportedly attended the meeting. Which other Asian countries attended the meeting is not known.

British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has blamed Iran for “hijacking” an international shipping route to “hold the global economy hostage,” while insisting that the British initiative is “not based on any other country’s priority or anything in terms of the US or other countries”. French President Emmanuel Macron now visiting South Korea has emphasized any resolution “can only be done in concert with Iran. So, first and foremost, there must be a ceasefire and a resumption of negotiations.”

Prior to the British initiative focussed on the Strait of Hormuz, Egypt, Pakistan and Türkiye have been playing a backdoor intermediary role to facilitate communications between the US and Iran. Trump as usual magnified this backroom channel as serious talks initiated by Iran’s ‘new regime’, and Trump’s claims were promptly rejected by Iran. There were speculations that Pakistan would host a direct meeting between US Vice President JD Vance and an Iranian representative in Islamabad. So far, only the foreign ministers of Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye have met in Islamabad, and Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Beijing to brief his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, of Pakistan’s diplomatic efforts.

The Beijing visit produced a five-point initiative calling for a ceasefire, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz and diplomacy instead of escalation. The five-point pathway seems a follow up to the 15-point demand that the US sent to Iran through the three Samaritan intermediaries which Iran rejected as they did not include any of Iran’s priorities. The state of these mediating efforts are now unclear after President Trump’s April Fool’s Day rambling. In fairness, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced that his country intends to keep ‘nudging’ the US and Iran towards resuming negotiations and ending the war.

While these efforts are welcome and deserve everyone’s best wishes, they have also led to what BBC has called the “chatter in Delhi” – “is India being sidelined” by Pakistan’s intermediary efforts? Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar’s rather undiplomatic characterization of Pakistan’s role as “dalali” (brokerage) provoked immediate denunciation in Islamabad, while Indian opposition parties are blaming the Modi Government’s foreign policy stances as an “embarrassment” to India’s stature.

The larger view is that while it is Asia that is most impacted by the closure of Hormuz, with Singapore’s Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan calling it an “Asian crisis”, Asia has no leverage in the matter and Asian countries have to make special arrangements with Iran to let their ships navigate through the Strait of Hormuz. There is no pathway for co-ordinated action. China is still significant but not consequentially effective. India’s all-alignment foreign policy has made it less significant and more vulnerable in the current crisis. And Pakistan has opened a third dimension to Asia’s dilemmas.

In the circumstances, it is fair to say that Sri Lanka is the most politically stable country among its South Asian neighbours. Put another way, Sri Lanka has a remarkably consensual and uncontentious government in comparison to the old governments in India and Pakistan, and even the new government in Bangladesh. But that may not be saying much unless the NPP government proves itself to be sufficiently competent, and uses the political stability and the general goodwill it is still enjoying, to put the country’s economic department in order. More on that later.