Foreign Policy Paralysis

They say that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. This is one of those positive, life-affirming statements that, when put together with an inspiring, Hallmark-esque picture of a kitten or a baby could make for a very annoying forward. This is, however, not enough for people who aren’t merely life affirming but rather life-seizing / life’s throat grabbers, the sort that are always ‘high on life’. For them, the statement was appropriated and modified to “When life gives you lemons, bring out the salt and tequila”. Personally, though, I always thought I’d fall into the more cynical category – that if life ever gave me lemons, I’d confront life and grumble “Seriously? A citrus fruit is the best you could do???” However, the only time that life did give me a lemon, I was simply puzzled and wondered why. This was a few years ago, at the end of an ex-colleague’s wedding lunch in Kerala – everyone was handed a lemon while they were leaving. Why?

This whole business of life handing lemons left, right and centre did, however, give me an idea to look at countries’ foreign policies through the lemon lens:

USA: When life gives you lemons, befriend life, find out where the lemons are grown and invade that territory in the name of democracy.

India: When life gives you lemons, thank life for the lemons but also complain about the fact that life hyphenated you with Pakistan by clubbing the both of you together in its South Asian tour and giving lemons to both.

Pakistan: When life gives you lemons, go to China and complain that life gave India extra lemons and ask for a few more lemons.

Germany: When life gives you lemons, lecture the Eurozone on why they’re in the mess they’re in because they wastefully squandered away the lemons that life gave them.

Great Britain: When life gives you lemons, help the US when they invade the place where the lemons are grown.

France: When life gives you lemons, just to be on the safe side, surrender.

Japan: When life gives you lemons, take them to your state-of-the-art lab, reverse engineer the shit out of them and then turn them into square lemons and tell life “How about that, eh?”

Ok, that last one really had nothing to do with foreign policy, so I should stop here. On a metaphorical level, though, life did give Hong Kong a big, juicy lemon in the form of Edward Snowden recently, so it was interesting to see how the Hong Kong government reacted to it:

“Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23) on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel.

The US Government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR Government for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Mr Snowden. Since the documents provided by the US Government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law, the HKSAR Government has requested the US Government to provide additional information so that the Department of Justice could consider whether the US Government's request can meet the relevant legal conditions. As the HKSAR Government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.

The HKSAR Government has already informed the US Government of Mr Snowden's departure.” 

In the world of politics and governments, people don’t go about telling “Fuck You” to each other. Not officially, at any rate. So for those of you who’ve ever wondered how one government would express the general sentiment behind “Fuck You” to another government, this is a very good, if rather long, example. In Bollywood terms, this is more the cool, insouciant and self-assured, “Tujhe jo karna hain kar le. Dekhte hain kyaa bigaad lega tu mera.” sort of “Fuck You” as opposed to the more rabid, hysterical but hollow, “Bahut galat kiyaa yeh tu nein! Tujhe chhodoonga nahin main! Tera pura khaandaan barbaad kar doonga, dekh lena! Samajhta kyaa hain apne aap ko? Tu jaanta nahin hain mein kaun hu!” The latter is probably closer to what the US reaction has been when they learned that Hong Kong had allowed Snowden to leave the country.

With Hong Kong, you could still understand though – it is now part of China, which is one few the few countries that can stand up to the US. What was more surprising, though, was the role of Ecuador in the whole saga. Here was little Ecuador, a mountainous country named after an imaginary line and filled with Llamas and Alpacas, that was standing up to the might of the US. Being neither Communist nor Islamic, and at the same time not harbouring any ambitions for a clandestine nuclear program, you did wonder why Ecuador of all countries thrust itself into the spotlight to take on the US. Sure, many countries would have justifiable grievances against the US, but common sense dictated that they didn’t mess with a country whose foreign policy could be summed up by the statement “When push comes to shove, we’d rather pummel, bulldoze and pulverize.” Even if you tried to steer clear of the US hit list, there was still the fear that you’d wake up one day to find yourself falsely accused of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and be invaded anyway – so to willingly annoy that country smacked of an overtly suicidal streak.

Not surprisingly, the NSA revelations showed that it was the other big countries that were a target of US spying – the Europeans, Brazil, Russia, India, etc. But apart from a few small, socialist-leaning Latin American countries no one else seemed to be standing up to the US. Sure, it is the most powerful country in the world right now, but you’d still think the other countries would be fairly displeased to know that they’re being spied upon pretty much all the time. So it was pretty baffling too see barely a word of protest being registered. Unfortunately, this means that the US holds the ‘He’s got compromising pictures’ advantage over the rest of the world. For those unfamiliar, the “He’s got compromising pictures” advantage is the most popular form of blackmail in use these days, and can be described as follows:

You’ve seen them everywhere – if you’ve ever worked for or with any large organization, you’re bound to have come across one of them. The employee whose sole purpose of existence seems to be to waste some valuable space in an already overpopulated world; the employee whose IQ would be lesser than a turnip, a plank of wood and Paris Hilton put together. At first you might give him the benefit of the doubt – you might even go one step further and extend this to the benefit of uncertainty, ambiguity, perplexity, enigma and confusion – but after a while you’d realize that there’s simply no getting around his utter incompetence. Yet, he's in a senior position and wielding great power! You have no choice but to wonder – here is a big, prestigious organization full of clever people with big degrees working for them, and they have the most advanced psychometric tests and rigorous interview processes in place to recruit their employees – so what gives? You start questioning if there is any point to Human Resources as a discipline, or at least the recruiting part of it. Is it all just a sham? How does someone so obviously incapable manage to get into such a high position?

According to one popular theory called The Peter Principle, people keep getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, so that after a while all of senior management is essentially incompetent. But this still assumes there was some level of competence to begin with. I have come to the conclusion that there is something far more sinister at play – that there is only one possible explanation for such an employee – which is that he has compromising pictures of someone big and powerful. Earlier, it was probably much tougher to get hold of compromising pictures of someone – you’d have to hire a detective and wait for months. But with the advent of cellphone cameras anyone can have compromising pictures of big, powerful people with some amateur snooping. And once you have these pictures, you can just blackmail your way into senior positions in most organisations.

This, then, explains the silence of most of the world powers over the NSA revelations – why else would you be so nonchalant about the US spying on you? The Americans now have compromising pictures of most government officials across the world! And this blackmail would form the cornerstone of their foreign policy and consequently guide geopolitical decisions across the world.

Scary, isn’t it?