On August 16, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he was “very happy” the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement had “finally” been signed, calling it a “BIG, BOLD, AND IMPORTANT FIRST STEP” and congratulating the “Great Leadership” of Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan by name. Read narrowly, this is a burden-sharing president cheering a security pact that reduces American exposure in the Gulf. Read at the level the moment actually demands, it is something larger: the leader of the world’s dominant liberal-democratic power publicly, unhesitatingly endorsing a trilateral bloc anchored by a military-dominated state, a monarchy, and a government the EU’s own institutions have repeatedly criticized on press freedom and judicial independence, with no qualifying word about democratic character, none needed, none missed.

That absence is the story. For three decades, Indian foreign policy has operated on the premise that democratic character was a real, if partial, currency in its dealings with the West, that “world’s largest democracy” was not just a line in a joint statement but something that would, at the margin, tilt Western behavior in India’s favor. Trump’s post does not just fail to validate that premise. It actively demonstrates its opposite: that when a Western leader has occasion to praise a regional security architecture, the instinct runs toward capability and utility, expressed with enthusiasm, not toward liberal solidarity, expressed even as reluctance.

Europe’s Silence is Not a Defense of the Principle Either

It would be tempting for Indian commentary to locate the “real” West in Europe rather than in Trump’s Washington: to treat Brussels’ quiet as implicit discomfort with the pact’s illiberal cast, and therefore as evidence that the democratic alibi still has a custodian somewhere. That reading does not survive scrutiny. No EU institution and none of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)