Politics: The real Sinha

Zack Snyder’s testosterone-drenched “300” opens with an envoy’s demand that Sparta pay tribute to Xerxes, superpower Persia’s monarch. Xerxes, says the envoy with lip-curling arrogance, commands an army so large that the ground shudders when it marches. Better bow than face an earthquake. Leonidas, the Spartan king whose anger issues prove useful later, kicks the envoy into the maw of a conveniently placed well, delivering the line that launches the movie, and later birthed a thousand memes.

Donald Trump is no Xerxes but several rhetorical boots have landed on Anjani Sinha, his recently arrived envoy to Singapore. Sinha, who rose to infamy as a comically incompetent interviewee during his confirmation hearing, justified the US’s 10 percent trade tariff on Singapore thus: “Over many decades, American taxpayers and service members have underwritten regional security, playing an important role in making Singapore’s economic miracle possible. Now, we are asking our friends to help us rebalance the economy.”

A half-truth, crudely put. Singapore owes its prosperity to US “benevolence” as much as the US owes its ability to project power into the Pacific to Singapore’s bases and naval facilities. An imprecise equivalence, sure, but a reminder that the relationship has always been transactional. Sinha’s loan shark approach, born of a reductive understanding of geopolitics, trade, and commerce, drew intelligentsia indignation. “Singapore facilitated and encouraged the US forward presence and pushed for economic liberalisation. This is not altruism. It was a mutually beneficial collaboration,” Ian Ja Chong, NUS professor, told the South China Morning Post. Echoed Joanne Lin of the ASEAN Studies Centre at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute: “[A]ny suggestion that Singapore ‘owes’ the US naturally feels off-key.” Online, the response was less measured, with Sinha’s words likened to a thug asking for “protection money” or justifying “outright robbery”. 

Like the Persian envoy, Sinha was merely parroting the words of his (wannabe) king who is remaking the international order in his own venal image. The path he’s set the US on diverges dramatically from what social scientists have been recommending for decades. “Magnanimity and restraint in the face of temptation are the tenets of successful statecraft that have proved their worth from classical Greece onward,” wrote a duo in a 2002 essay considering ways in which the US could extend its unipolar moment. Instead, Trump is fast depleting all the goodwill his predecessors accrued since the second world war by his belligerent use of diplomatic and military power in service of goals his constituents seemingly care about. Shellshocked allies with little room to manoeuvre will comply for now, but the question is: as Rome, Persia and virtually every other empire before or since, is this one too capsizing in a sea of corruption, delusion, and hubris?