Almost 75 years ago, an Iranian legislator introduced a bill to nationalise the country’s British-owned oil industry. The parliament swiftly approved it, and Mohammad Mosaddegh, hailed as a national hero, was soon elected prime minister, who then signed the bill into law. This move threatened Western oil interests, and in response, the US, along with the UK, employed a tactic it would replicate across the world throughout the Cold War in countries like Indonesia, Guatemala, and Chile: It orchestrated a coup d’état that toppled Mosaddegh’s democratic government and installed a US-friendly regime that reopened Iran’s oil industry to foreign companies in the West.
This history of US interference abroad is worth recalling in the context of the past few days, during which the Donald Trump administration has tried to impose a moral reckoning on India via tariffs for its purchases of discounted Russian crude after much of the West cut down imports because of Russian aggression against Ukraine. The sermons have manifested in the statements, op-eds and interviews of Peter Navarro, a trade advisor to US President Donald Trump, who has cast India as the chief enabler of Russia’s war. His latest salvo accusing “Brahmins of profiteering off Indian people” follows earlier claims that India has become “an oil money laundromat for the Kremlin” and that Ukraine is “Modi’s war”.
That the Ukraine war stems from Russian irredentism and Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade in February 2022 is beyond justification is a separate debate, as is the question of how India has decided to balance between Russia, the aggressor, and Ukraine, the victim. This is about questioning the locus standi of a country that has, time and again, waged wars, toppled democratically elected governments, been complicit in the assassination of democratically elected leaders and funded proxy conflicts to safeguard its own economic interests. Surely, a country with such a record cannot claim the moral high ground while slapping punitive tariffs on others.
The list after World War II is long: Iran, Guatemala, Congo (with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, as Stuard Reid writes in The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination), Indonesia, Chile, Iraq, Libya, and more. The one thing all these countries had in common was a government that fiercely resisted US interference at the cost of American investments and business interests. The convenient excuse in most cases, on paper, was the looming spectre of communism (in Iraq, it was the WMD lie), but there is ample evidence to show that commercial motives drove Washington’s hand.
Perhaps the most glaring example is Israel’s devastation of Gaza, sponsored by the very administration Navarro works under. No country has received more US foreign aid than Israel, and that money, overwhelmingly, is wired back to American arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Since the war began, Washington (with both Joe Biden and Trump in the White House) has shipped more than 10,000 two-thousand-pound bombs produced by GD to Israel, weapons that human rights groups report have been dropped on hospitals. A UN report by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, now sanctioned by the US, has shown how big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google aid and profit from Israel’s war by providing AI, cloud, and surveillance technologies.
To condemn India’s oil trade while bankrolling Israel’s carnage that has killed more than 60,000 people, a majority of them women and children, all while Donald Trump dreams aloud of a “Riviera of the Middle East”, reflects a rather misplaced sense of righteousness. US interventions abroad, whether to safeguard oil interests or to feed the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower once warned against, are so extensively documented that it is baffling how Navarro can assert moral superiority over India with a straight face.
Ultimately, what characterises Navarro’s pompous proclamations is the same we-can-do-it-but-you-cannot entitlement that has long defined US foreign policy. Washington topples sovereign governments yet invokes sovereignty when convenient. The US remains the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in war, sits on one of the world’s largest stockpiles, and still, somehow, claims the authority to decide who may or may not possess them, going to the extent of bombing another sovereign country’s nuclear facilities as recently as June. It champions human rights while cutting defence deals with some of the most egregious violators, and let’s not even get started on Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Navarro, in that sense, is not an aberration but a continuation of a recurring pattern in Washington.
saptarishi.basak@expressindia.com
