Fear, Uncertainty, and Suspense

The following paragraphs were written but not posted on this site when word came that India has launched what it claims are “focused, measured, and non-escalatory” actions on “nine targets” in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir: 

Screaming headlines compete. One suggests an imminent likelihood of war, even the possibility of nuclear war, between India and Pakistan. Another warns of a fresh Israeli invasion of Gaza, bigger than preceding ones, to end, this time, in “permanent capture” of most of the Palestinian territory. 

Major election results flow in from Canada, Germany, Australia, Romania, and elsewhere. Breathtakingly reassuring pictures are offered by Trump, or on his behalf, of inaccessible prisons to which “the very bad” people who make life unpleasant in the US can be deported – prisons in Central America or central Africa or even a legendary if abandoned one on an island close to San Francisco. 

Pushing these and other images aside, at least for a while, one picture stands out. A quiet picture, in fact a deeply sad one, it is of a young woman called Himanshi Narwal, resident of the city, in northern India’s Haryana state, of Gurgaon, now respelled as Gurugram. The picture was taken on May 1 in her late husband’s city, Karnal, also in Haryana. Had the husband, Lieutenant Vinay Narwal, an officer in the Indian Navy, not been killed in the terrorist attack in Kashmir’s scenic paradise of Pahalgam on April 22, he would have been celebrating his 27th birthday on May 1. 

Along with Vinay Narwal’s bereaved parents, Himanshi marked the day by donating blood. 

STOIC BUT FIRM 

NDTV reported that she was “stoic but firm as she mourned her husband.” Aware that Kashmiris in different parts of India were being targeted because of the April 22 attack, Himanshi Narwal made this remark, and reporters present jotted it down: “We don't want people going after Muslims and Kashmiris.” She added: “We want peace and justice. People who have done wrong with him should be punished.” 

Wiping tears off her face, Himanshi offered floral tributes to her late husband and blew a kiss to his photograph. The Naval officer's mother also kissed her son's photo and paid him respect with folded hands. 

According to The Hindu, Himanshi Narwal said she was speaking for “the family.” Married on April 16, the couple were on their honeymoon in Pahalgam when Vinay was shot point-blank and killed. The pair had wished to go to Switzerland but could not obtain visas. The Hindu added that Ms. Narwal wanted all of India to pray that her husband “stayed healthy, in good spirits, and at peace, wherever he was.” 

TRUMP IN THE WORLD 

After more than three months in office, is Trump gaining or losing ground? I will not attempt to dissect polling data about opinion inside the US, but trends elsewhere are worth noting. Canadians seem to agree, as of now, that the US president is not their hero. While their newly elected prime minister, Mark Carney of the Liberal Party, has just had a candid but also friendly meeting with Trump in the White House on May 6, it is undeniable that Trump’s disrespectful attitude towards Canada torpedoed what until some weeks back appeared a certainty: Liberal defeat and victory for Canada’s Conservative Party. 

Another large country in the opposite hemisphere has also, it would seem, “voted against Trump”. The victory in Australia of the incumbent Labor Party, led by Anthony Albanese, was not unexpected, but its scale was, and the linkage with Trump’s policies was again undeniable. According to the BBC, in November about 40 percent of Australians thought that Trump’s election was bad for Australia. In April that figure rose to 68 percent, thanks largely, it appears, to Trump’s tariffs. 

Though insisting that he was his “own person,” Albanese’s challenger, Peter Dutton, was, in CNN’s reading, accused of stoking culture wars in Australia and taking “aim at migrants and the news media in rhetoric that resembled Trump’s.” “Dutton spent weeks trying to distance himself from the tariff-tossing US leader, but it wasn’t enough to convince Australian voters that he was the right person to lead the country through this moment of global turmoil.” 

Trump was a factor in Germany’s recent elections, too, as was Trump’s vice-president, J. D. Vance, who had intervened directly by visiting Germany at election time and unprecedentedly endorsing an opposition party, AfD, as “a political partner.” For a few short hours on May 6, a hiccup threatened the formation of a new German government, but Friedrich Merz, leading the successful CDU-CSU alliance (which under Angela Merkel governed Germany from 2005 to 2021) is now, after a second vote in the national chamber, Germany’s chancellor. 

If on some important questions -- including Ukraine, NATO, and international coordination among democratic governments -- the new German government is likely to differ from Trump, AfD, which has gained in numbers and is now the country’s chief opposition party, appears to be an ardent Trump ally. 

BERLIN AND AfD

In a significant move, the foreign office in Berlin, refusing to forget Germany’s history prior to World War II, has classified AfD as a “rightwing extremist group.” It seems to have pointed out specifically that AfD “aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society” and that the party did not consider Germans linked to “predominantly Muslim countries” to be equal members of the German people. To the German foreign office, this was only an extension of the Nazi view that Jews could not be equal citizens in Germany. 

Vance accused “bureaucrats” in Germany of rebuilding the Berlin Wall, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio slammed the designation by the foreign office in Berlin as “tyranny in disguise.” In an unusual move, the German foreign office directly replied to Rubio on X, writing: “We have learnt from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.” The agency making the classification for the foreign office held that any discrimination “based on ethnicity and descent” goes against Germany's “free democratic order.” 

In Romania, on the other hand, a right-wing nationalist candidate who is against providing military support for Ukraine and is skeptical about the EU, and who may be placed by some in the Trump column, has won a resounding victory in the first round of the presidential election in Romania. BBC reports that George Simion has come first with 40.96 percent of the vote and will go into the runoff on 18 May as the clear favorite against the liberal mayor of Bucharest. 

Mike Pence, who was the vice president during Trump’s first term, tells CNN that “Putin doesn’t want peace, he wants Ukraine.” Critical of what he sees as Trump’s “wavering” support for Ukraine, Pence wants the US to “lead the free world.” 

The former vice president is using dated language. Trump’s stand on Russia’s war against Ukraine, and Vance’s enthusiasm for Germany’s AfD, are only two among many signs indicating that the era of transnational alliances for defending democracy may be over. What you see as your national interest is more important than any global need or international opinion.
 
And that is only one half of the new thinking. The other half holds that within your nation equal rights for all is no longer an essential principle. Some will be on top, and the rights of others, of specified others, will be curtailed. That’s the coming national and international “order”.