 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Vijay Prashant and we will be discussing Trump's victory and assumption of office in the US. Nice to be here, thanks. Vijay, Trump has taken over office in the United States while there's been a lot of controversy regarding the size of his inauguration crowd and so on. But he seems to have also taken certain other measures which does not seem to have been registered in the media so well. One of it is trans-specific partnership, the TTP. So how do you see Trump's withdrawal from TTP which he has announced and how do you see its long-term play in the global scenario? It's true that he's pulled out of the trans-specific partnership, the 12-country trade alliance that was being negotiated largely in secret. He decided to walk away from this saying that it hurts American workers at the same time as he pledged to renegotiate the North American free trade agreement. But by the way also and less well reported from the White House website, the web page on the trans-Atlantic partnership which was the kind of trade agreement with the European Union has also disappeared. Now it's interesting, why has the Trump administration decided to go after these particular trade agreements? One reason is that this is exactly the issue that he campaigned on and he campaigned on this very strategically because in the contentious states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan where the great old American working class used to exist, sections of these states have become the rust belt. Here there's a great antipathy to trade agreements. There's a belief that it's a result of trade agreements that they've lost their job. So Trump won these parts of the United States and this is what swung the election to his side. It was impossible for him not to do something. But what has he really done? In other words, are these agreements, is the trans-specific partnership really about trade or is it about geopolitics? And it's my sense that this is really not going to impact the question of trade very much by itself. In other words, the United States has bilateral agreements with most of these countries. Trade in this circuit is largely liberalized. Of course, there are some issues on agricultural subsidies in Japan, perhaps so-called point of origin certificates on automobiles imported from Japan to the United States. There are some issues that have not been resolved and they hope that TPP would be the forum to resolve this. But really, this is not a trade pact. The main issue here is the isolation of China. In fact, in 2015 Barack Obama in a press conference directly said, we need to have the trans-specific partnership because we cannot allow countries like China to write the trade rules. In the same way, the Trans-Atlantic Partnership, which was the hallmark of the deal between Germany and the United States, in November of last year Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, wrote an op-ed together in the German press, basically saying that the values of the United States in Germany should be at the core of European-American trade agreements. In other words, Greece, Russia, these countries should not be able to influence the trade agreement. What I am suggesting is that this pushback against the TPP was on the one side a sop to the very important base that helped Trump get elected. But really, these were never about trade. These were always about geopolitics. You have talked about the geopolitics of this TPP and other issues. Now, it seems that there is a move in the United States which would like the Russia-China coming together to break, effectively detach Russia from China. Unlike what Obama and Hillary Clinton's policies had done, one using Ukraine against Russia and South China Sea against China had really brought them together. Do you see this playing out and Trump taking a different position on this? Of course, in the early days, it is hard to say definitively whether it is one way or the other. But if we accept the view that Trump has a sort of lighter, softer touch regarding Russia, then you might surmise that he has taken the position that you try to bring Russia on site and isolate China. Because his rhetoric on China is quite dramatic. Henry Kissinger, of course, has the other approach, which is join up with China to isolate Russia. Kissinger's view is that China at least is economically dynamic. It's essential to the American economy. And Russia is the real threat. But then again, Kissinger is an old cold warrior and Russia was always the enemy, which is why he made the opening to China in the early 1970s. But he takes that view. I think Trump generally the tendency seems to be is moving in the other direction to soften relations with Moscow in order to put the screws on Beijing. So I don't know. It's early days, as I said, it's hard to say whether he's going to, as Mao says, hit out in all directions or he's going to be strategic in going after one rival and then perhaps later another. But by the way, I think that this might this kind of more strategic or lighter touch might have worked when commodity prices collapsed and there was a real crisis in the economy of Russia and China enduring crisis. But I think what the Obama and Clinton strategy did in the encirclement of all of Eurasia is to really integrate the strategic understanding of the Chinese and the Russians. And along that great Silk Road project that the Chinese have, the Russians have now made some very considerable investments. And the Russians are understanding, I think that the Chinese are perhaps better customers for their natural gas than the Europeans. And I think this is a significant different context. In other words, the integration between Russia and China strategically, diplomatically, economically and militarily has gone down the road quite considerably. And I doubt now whether there is the same atmosphere of suspicion as there was, say, during the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s. Vijay, the Indian foreign policy has become very difficult to predict. It seems to be entirely predicated on Mr. Modi, the prime minister's wish of the day and how and who has reacted to him in what way. So, if you leave that out, we don't seem to see any consistency in Indian foreign policy at the moment. When you come to the Chinese-American mix, we see a very strange scenario where the United States is now trying to articulate protectionist policies. While China is following relatively aggressive move into everybody's economic policies and has been, in fact, the articulator of globalization, as we saw in Davos. Now, given that, there is this fear that the Chinese are too big and economically too powerful and therefore, Southeast Asia and East Asia will fall to the Chinese economics way. If the Americans don't act as a counterbalance to TPP, etc., do you see that as something that might really play out? Do you see that it's ironic that we seem to see a reversal from the opium war when China was being asked to open its economy by the so-called globalizers even to opium? Well, look, I think that Trump is on this more rhetoric than anything. There was a very sober study done a few years ago that showed that since 1979, the hemorrhaging of jobs in the United States cannot be put at the door of trade agreements. It said that only about 12% of American jobs were lost because of trade agreements, but 88% of American jobs it suggested was lost because of mechanization or other productivity gains. Mechanization is really the issue here and that doesn't mean one says we're against mechanization. One might ask the question, why should the share of mechanization, the productivity share, the wealth be distributed upwards and not socially among people? In other words, it's a good thing to have mechanization. Let's now move to a four hour day. Why should people work 8, 10 hours, 12 hours? Let's work for four hours. Let's share working time with other people and let's have much greater leisure. Let's read newspapers. In other words, there could be a progressive socialist way to understand mechanization for the betterment of humankind. But of course, this is not even something on the table. Nobody is discussing the real reason why there's been a hemorrhaging of jobs. It's not on the agenda. It's essentially irrational politics to blame China or Mexico for the hemorrhaging of jobs for what Trump called American carnage is actually beside the point rather than talking about what's taking your jobs away, you're talking about this. In other words, what I'm trying to get at is that there cannot be a return to protectionism. The American economy is so fundamentally integrated to economic activity around the world. I don't just mean financial integration. I mean, from the very smallest thing, there'll be paralysis in the consumer market. If you think that what Modi did to India with demonetization was insane, it was almost like a Bond villains plot against the Indian economy. If you think that was insane, the idea that you can suddenly erect trade barriers around the United States 45% trade barrier and it's not going to completely paralyze Walmart. Therefore, paralyze basically the working poor's ability to get consumer goods. I mean, you'd have to be crazy to come up with that plan. And so Trump's rhetoric about 45% is that and the other, none of his advisors are going to go for it. Let me just put one thing to you. He's exited TPP. Fine. But there are 500 American trade advisors. If you ever go to a trade meeting with the American delegation, they come with like, it's like lawyers at a courtroom. 50 of them show up with briefcases heavily armed as it were with the documents. I mean, you have to remember that at the WTO, the World Trade Organization, if the United States has a case against say Mali or Senegal, Senegal barely has representation there. The Americans come with a raft of so 500 of these so-called trade advisors, they all bought and paid corporate people. Not one of them has been fired. You know, when Trump came in, he basically fired all US ambassadors, but he has not fired the trade advisors. So let's not take seriously on the surface this exit from TPP as an exit from globalization. This is, as I said, a sock to this base, the strategic base that got him elected. His commitment to globalization is quite fundamental in the structure of the administration. And when they do renegotiate NAFTA, you're not going to have unemployed, you know, steel workers at the table. You're going to again have corporate executives, proxies sitting there negotiating rules that they like. So I mean, I think in a sense, the madness of demonetization in India is not going to be repeated in the United States with massive trade barriers. I think I really do feel this is much more rhetoric than reality or then policy. So do you agree with Jackie Ma's argument that the basic problem with the US is the trade wars, not trade, but the physical wars that it has conducted and spent $14 trillion on? Well, I wouldn't say that's the problem. I think that's one problem. Of course, another problem is that the American wealthy have been on tax strike for about 40 years. During the Reagan administration, tax rates started to decline for the very wealthy. And the very wealthy really no longer pay taxes and it's perfectly acceptable. In fact, at the hearing for Mr. Mnuchin, who's the secretary of treasury, he was asked about how his firm has basically shell companies sitting in the Caribbean and operating there. And he was asked directly, isn't this a tax shelter? And he said, no, it's just a way to do business. You know, it's perfectly acceptable for the secretary of treasury's company to have tax shelters. So the rich basically have been on strike. They've refused to pay tax. And once you have that situation, you basically dry up the exchequer. So whatever the treasury is able to collect in the way of taxes, if more than half of that is spent in war, you're going to obviously damage the capacity of the state to produce any kind of policies that are meaningful for people. So it's a combination of essentially this political strike that the rich have been involved in the wars that the country has conducted. And as I said, the general dynamic of capitalism, which substitutes human beings for machines. And if you put all this together, you're going to get immense inequality. Hence you had the Occupy Wall Street movement, the rhetoric of the 1% against the 99%. That was a very powerful vocabulary. But there was no left force in the United States able to pick that up and carry it. What you got instead is you got this kind of ventriloquist of the Occupy language, which is Donald Trump. Donald Trump essentially was the ventriloquist dummy, you know, and of kind of sometimes left rhetoric. But really he's a man fundamentally of the right. Other set of issues really what's happening in the United States. We had a huge protest led by women and fortunately this time not on the slogan that Russia has told in our elections. They seem to have really focused on Trump and his policies and identified that as a problem. The second is of course also the kind of steps he's taking. He's already seems to be moving on abortion. He seems to have talked about the pipelines that he has signed. So internally he seems to be on a trajectory which is extremely shall we say against whatever the American liberal left sections have won over the last 50, 60 years. And on a much more aggressive internal shall we say capitalist project. Well, look, in the United States the culture was that is the wars of over how one should live one's life. What family should look like, you know, what it means to have control over your privacy, your bodies, you know, the way you basically want to interact with the rest of society. These culture wars are an open wound. And it was thought every once in a while people believe that the wars are settled. You know, the question of gay marriage is settled or the question of abortion is settled, but it's not settled. It opens up. It unravels. And there are many theories of why the culture was so intense in the United States. One of them, which is often talked about is that the culture was essentially are an alibi for the other issues in society, issues of say, you know, endemic poverty, lack of health care, etc. Where the Republicans have used these so-called dog whistle issues like abortion to distract the population from other fundamental questions. I mean, I don't actually believe that this is what's happening. I think that there are real serious and genuine social debates inside the country that are alongside these other debates. I think good if these kind of issues come to the forefront, what you have just raised, instead of the Hillary Clinton versus Trump binary Russia stolen on elections, which seemed to have been the earlier kind of slogans that we saw. If it does focus, if the resistance does focus on the kind of issues we have said and they can come together, there is hope of a left platform and we will discuss that in the future. Let's see how these resistance to Trump, different resistances to Trump pan out and we'll continue to discuss this with you, Vijay. That's all the time we have today for NewsClick.