Team Trump vs. the North South Corridor

The North-South Trade Corridor: Russia-Iran-Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea-India has been one of the key routes eroding the US hegemony over the world's most vital sea lanes and thus world trade. Additionally, the route has been expanding to other nations, enhancing stability in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan and threatening the US proxies in Pakistan.

After decades of GWOT drone strikes on wedding parties and more recently overthrowing the popular Prime Minister Imran Khan, Washington's stooges in Islamabad are highly unpopular with the Russia-friendly and pro-Chinese Pakistani people. We should add here that the Chinese refer to Pakistanis as their "Iron Brothers", meaning that the CIA rents Islamabad's political class, while Beijing plays the long game of owning the board. Many of the Pakistani compradors' children and grandchildren are learning Mandarin and see glittering Chinese cities as safer and cleaner compared to the homelessness and decaying infrastructure they've seen while studying in New York or San Francisco. To summarize, some in Washington understand that they're operating on borrowed time when it comes to tying down Islamabad, which makes their next moves likely to be more extreme.

Buckle Up for the New Trump Era Across the Middle East and South Asia

As we discussed in a previous article, the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), interlinking Russia, Turkey, the Caucasus and Iran with China's Belt and Road investments into Pakistan and across Central Asia, could break all control for the US as overlord, while bringing stability and prosperity to Eurasia. This is a looming future permanent Washington is increasingly desperate to prevent. In no small part, because prosperous nations are hard to bring to heel and vassalize through Color Revolutions.

The Trump-Elon Musk team's highly publicized war on USAID would suggest that they realize the post 1989 Age of Color Revolutions, which culminated in Washington's 2014 Maidan coup seizure of Ukraine, is coming to an end. But the question still remains what will replace the USAID Color Revolutions machine, even if it proved too toxic and via the Summer of Floyd riots, a threat to the stability of America herself. Will it be naked imperialism, with Trump stripping off the LGBT and woke masks? Or will we see some honest re-evaluation followed by sincere efforts to improve relation with everyone, even previous pariahs like North Korea with Trump again courting Kim Jong Un? We won't be betting on the latter.

The fact that we just saw a color revolution last year in Bangladesh suggests Washington is far from giving up on South Asia. The fact that Russia just offered India its most advanced export 5th generation fighter jet the SU57E points to Moscow knowing the stakes are high as well. The visiting SU57's superb aerobatics display made the F35 located on the same tarmac at Aero India 2025 look like a bloated white elephant in comparison.

The Iron Triangle of BRICS Multipolarity: Russia-India-China

Eager to please his staunchly pro-Israel donor base, Trump signed an executive order rescinding the sanctions waiver on Indian investments in Iran’s Chabahar port project. Trade volumes year-over-year via Chabahar have soared 43%. On the one hand, this undermines Washington's strategy of using India as a counterweight to China, which will make the Russian-Chinese alliance and economic ties even stronger, a trend that pro-Trump voices like Tucker Carlson and Elbridge Colby have declared is bad for Washington. But Trump's re-election and growing awareness that NATO is losing the war against Russia in Ukraine has driven much of Foggy Bottom into desperation. Strategic and long-term thinking has gone out the window.

Russia has become Beijing's rear echelon in their economic confrontation with Washington and London, just as China is Russia’s. Russia as a food producing superpower allows Chinese countersanctions to hit the main US export sector, after oil and liquefied natural gas, which is agricultural exports. With burgeoning inflows of Russian meat and grain into China, the Chinese can afford to strike back hard against a key part of Trump’s electoral base, the farmers, without risking their own food security. But how does this relate to India, which also has billions of mouths to feed?

As the world's most populous nation, recently surpassing China in the number of people, India has recently become Russia's second-most important Asian market. Indian oil refiners have made fat profits processing Russian crude oil and selling it to hypocritical, posturing as no-longer-needing Russian hydrocarbons Eurovassals. But the strong U.S. Lobby in New Delhi has sought to appease the Americans, so as not to jeopardize Indian dependency on US IT industry outsourced jobs, including via the hotly debated but highly coveted H1B visas. The latter being a subject that recently generated online shitposting and sometimes anti-Indian racist rancor within Trump's MAGA movement between Elon Musk, the supposed richest man in the world, and native-born tech workers.

From a Chinese perspective, Beijing sees New Delhi's growing ties with Moscow as a way to reduce India's reliance on the US dollar and historic and present tendency to appease the Western powers. In short, the Russia-China-India triangle is mutually beneficial and promotes all three states achieving greater independence from the decaying Collective West, both in terms of ditching the dollar in mutual trade, and in gaining diplomatic self-confidence. Something that India as an ancient civilization in its own right should not lack, despite many upper caste Hindus idolizing their high-status cousins in London and New York.

After the Fall of Assad, Will Trump and Netanyahu Push for a Second Lebanese Civil War to Finish Off Hezbollah?

For Trump’s team and senior partner Israel, hitting the Iranian economy is seen as a win-win, even if it keeps the Americans and Israelis on the cusp of war with the Iranians and their combat-proven missiles and drones. The US is seeking any means it can find to disrupt the often fragile Iranian unity and weariness with sponsoring the 'Axis of Resistance' from the Houthis of Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon. With their reluctant ally Bashir Al-Assad finally removed, Hezbollah could be subjected to a Syrian proxy invasion by the Western praised 'moderate rebel' jihadists who've seized Damascus, only 110 kilometers from Beirut.

As a backdrop to this frightening prospect, Trump is boasting about returning to the “maximum pressure” policies of his first term, that saw him tear up the Obama-promoted nuclear deal with Iran and murder a team of peace negotiators, via the notorious drone strike on Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. The blows to the USA's reputation and second-order consequences for assassinating Soleimani across the Mideast, which led the previous archrival of the Iranians the Saudis to seek a Chinese-brokered cross-Gulf détente, were downplayed by the US and Western media. All that seemed to matter to Trump's inner circle were satisfying the desires of the Administration's senior partner, Israel, whose powerful Lobby facilitated Trump's historic political comeback.

Trump's Middle Eastern and Shale Oil Strategy is Predictable and Therefore Likely to Be Easily Countered by the OPEC+ Players

By pressuring Russia and India, Trump hopes to achieve renewed maximal pressure on Iran to come to terms, cementing his second term legacy of achieving 'peace through strength'. But the recently signed Russian-Iranian mutual defense pact has made attacking Iran an extremely hazardous adventure, no matter the desires of Trump's fans in Tel Aviv and their ridiculous propaganda about taking out Iranian air defenses in one night. Thus a one- sided agreement with the Iranians getting pressured into appeasing the Collective West in return for promised sanctions relief, is the new Holy Grail for the Trump Administration. But why should the Iranians trust Mr. Art of the Deal not to tear up any agreement and press them even harder, pushing for full regime change? Like the Chinese, the Persians are a proud and ancient people, who saw what happened to ordinary Russians once Gorbachev gave Reagan and Bush 41 everything they could've dreamed of in negotiations to 'end the Cold War' (in reality, to achieve a 20-year pause in it, once post-Soviet Russia under Putin began to regain her strength).

Trump’s drive to damage Iran and particularly Russia in the run up to the Russian-US negotiations, has driven him to risk his pile of political capital, especially with his 'no more stupid wars' MAGA base. Despite having intelligent 'China hawk' advisors like Elbridge Colby, Trump's moves are not only empowering the PRC, but ruining relations with Delhi as a potential counterweight to Beijing. That's because secondary sanctions against Russia's oil exports have zero chance of success without causing real pain to the aforementioned Indian refiners. But raising the cost of Russian crude and hence global oil prices is one thing, actually forcing any change in Russia's favorable negotiating position in Ukraine is another.

Thanks in part to Trump's first term failures in the Middle East, Moscow enjoys excellent relations with all the key players in the OPEC+ pact, making any effort to repeat the 1980s Saudi production spike to bankrupt the late USSR a General Keith Kellogg Boomer-con pipe dream. Behind closed doors, regardless of the GCC's public fondness for Trump, the Saudi princes surely don't appreciate Trump's demands that they simultaneously boost production and lower their revenues, while investing trillions more into the USA. Meanwhile Russia's diplomatic and economic relations with the UAE are closer than ever. Simply put, the Gulf Arabs aren't going to do jack to help Washington undermine Russia's strong position in the global oil market.

Washington is Running Out of Road to Kick the Sanctions and Military Escalation Cans Down

The fact is after imposing 15 rounds of sanctions, America has no real economic leverage over Russia, short of a total naval blockade that would quickly start WW3. But that scenario would swiftly expose how much of the US and NATO surface fleets are vulnerable tin cans that within days if not hours of a general shooting war, would be sent to the bottom of the Atlantic and Mediterranean by Russian missiles and submarines. Even flirting with a so-called limited blockade of Russia's tanker fleet in the confines of the Baltic Sea, the dream of some barking Baltic State political chihuahuas, would likely result in the swift destruction of not only the local NATO powers' toy surface fleets, but more critically refineries, power plants and other infrastructure across the region. Although Kiev would welcome any such escalation as potential salvation for the dying Zelensky regime, the new Trump Administration needs such confrontation like a hole in the head.

Standard US sanctions have all failed and have back fired and considering that US-Russian trade for all of 2024 amounted to a mere $3.7 billion, and that was heavy-sour crude and uranium fuel rods, both of which the US cannot do without (especially amid a trade war with Canada whose tar sands and uranium mining output has been declining for years). There's nothing that the US can do directly without risking WW3, and even before that, alienating Trump's very online MAGA ideological base. Thus the US has been forced to strike asymmetrically, or in this case, at the perceived weakness of Russia's top trade partners, one of the biggest being India.

An Aside on Whether Some Online Racism Toward Indians is Manufactured

Already, some India-bashing on the too online racialist trans-Atlantic 'Right wing' tips the hand of telltale CIA influence. For Russians like myself, it looks all too familiar to those of us who observed the rise of online Bandera-ism and Waffen SS rehabilitation in the Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe preceding the Maidan and spiking again after the SMO. In the rest of the Anglosphere, Modi loyalists and the Indian security services are being accused of ordering the assassinations of the Khalistan separatist cult leaders in Canada.

Any smart Indian can clearly see that the haughty and decadent British elites cannot and will not accept the brown sub continentals, whose ancestors worked for the British East India Company, as true equals. This mindset includes many Subcontinental origin politicians especially in the UK, who have internalized Anglo-supremacy, despite the visible rot of the British and Canadian economies and societies over the last several years.

On the flip side of the coin, for Westerners genuinely concerned about the globalist weaponization of open borders and the excessive Indian-ization of Canada, the humane and Christian solution is to promote prosperity back home through Eurasian integration. So not only the richest and most educated immigrants, but also many ordinary migrants will begin to see repatriating as attractive. We've already seen this trend with many Western-educated Chinese, who in recent years have begun to see perceive and find better opportunities to found their own tech companies in Shanghai, Shenzhen or Guangzhou than in Silicon Valley. And this could be the case with many Indian immigrants turning into 'repats' headed back to Bharat as well, especially as Western countries like Canada and the UK continue to spiral downward, to the point that even poorer Indian migrants no longer see them as attractive destinations.

How India's Modi is Likely to Manage Trump Admin 2.0

India’s Modi, of course, is no fool, and he can see where all this is going. He quite well realizes that most of the US elites do not desire a bright future for India, but want to exploit the Indians as an economic and military counterweight to the Chinese. In Washington’s wildest geopolitical fantasies, after exhausting Europe in NATO's struggle against Russia, India and China could destroy each other in a monumental blood bath, while the US would reap the rewards as it steps over the two sides' corpses.

Modi definitely needs the US economically, but knows that if India continues to grow and seeks to move up the manufacturing value chain, it will be equally condemned and attacked by the US as has been China. To try and pacify the US, Modi is proposing to purchase some overpriced and unreliably sourced US LNG, not enough to impact the Indian economy but enough, hopefully, to give Trump and his Texas/Louisiana energy industry supporters a “win” and pacify his ego. However, this plays out well only if Trump’s mission is to force more American oil, LNG and soybeans sales to India. Since Team Trump’s mission is now waging sanctions by other means against Russia, Trump will more than likely push for maximal Indian dependence on the US. A result that is of course, out of the question. In recent days we've seen even US partners in a much weaker position than India such as Canada, Mexico and Egypt push back.

For one, cultivating such Indian dependence on the US would create new severe risks of financialization of farmlands and excessive dollar dependency for the Indian economy. That in turn could spark civil unrest and possible renewed insurgencies within India’s many religiously and ethnically diverse states. As an enormous civilization state, India's Achilles heel has always been division and nepotism along caste and ethno-religious lines, and it is along these lines that Mother India's adversaries attack her. Secondly, India’s Hindu nationalists are less than happy about being forced to heel by the Americans or any other Westerners, who they know have pillaged India since the 1700s. For the rank and file of the BJP, the history of British exploitation as well as US attempts to set Delhi against Moscow during the Cold War are a very sore subject. Modi, himself a devout Hindu, is highly sensitive to and mostly shares his supporters' views of this Anglo-American history with India. Besides that history, Indian nationalists have the US sponsored overthrow of the Bangladeshi government last year in recent memory to drive the push for Indian and BRICS self-reliance.

India is Much More Important to the Fate of the Dollar Than Many in Delhi or Washington Wish to Acknowledge

As with the blowback from assassinating Soleimani and from being more Israeli than the Israelis on removing the Palestinians from Gaza, whether Trump stops at trade concessions or goes for the full pressure campaign on India will have major consequences for the US, which easily outstrip any short-term gains. India will hand Trump a small “win” and invite him to Delhi with all pomp, but Modi won't commit to socio-economic suicide. Any maximum pressure campaign on India can and will backfire.

India is one of the founding nations in BRICS+, as is Russia. Egypt, Iran and the UAE came in the first wave of expansion. India has also been the main brake on the development of a BRICS+ currency or basket of currencies system, playing Washington’s spoiler in the room. However if India gets pressured too much, where its economic safety and the survivability of Modi and his people are in danger, India may shift the balance and go fully in on the alternative reserve currencies--an admitted nightmare for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has admitted that global dedollarization is rendering US sanctions increasingly toothless.

An Indian-Chinese reapproachment and long-term peace would be sunlight to the DC vampire. Peace breaking out, like that which happened between Iran and Saudi Arabia, after China’s involvement and US’s exclusion, would be a curse for Washington, which itself survives on fomenting conflicts all over the world.

The upcoming visit to DC by Modi and the next weeks and months of retired General Keith Kellogg's 'sanctions on Russia dialed up from 3 to 9' impacting Indian refiners could determine just how fast the Empire falters. Will we see a steady decline slowed in part by Trump, or a ham-fisted faltering grab at control, followed by a violent drop in America's global reputation and living standards? In either case, for this moment in history, Modi may hold the keys to America’s fate, whether or not he or Trump realize this.