Kapil Sibal’s ‘Dil Se’ series, capture conversations that capture the mood of our times, the way forward, with suggestions coming from the experts. This episode is on India’s foreign Policy.
Kapil Sibal: In this episode of Dil Se, we’re going to talk about what’s going to happen to the future of the world in terms of the global economy, what impact that has on foreign policy over the years, ever since 2014, what has been the trajectory of our foreign policy? When Modiji started, his foreign policy perspective was somewhat different. He personalized foreign policy, that’s my opinion. In which case the institutional memory that’s absolutely necessary gets affected. He tilted towards the west, clearly tilted towards the United States of America. Our relationships with Israel, our positions with the Palestinians changed. And that’s reflected in our voting in the resolutions in the United Nations as well. We in the process also lost our global leadership in the South. The other thing that happened was that the ‘soft power, which is also part of our foreign policy, started becoming ‘saffronized’. And that didn’t sort of attract a lot of people around the world. We started increasing our tariffs. And when Trump came, everything changed.
So, we don’t know what’s going to happen to our foreign policy trajectory after Trump coming in, because every day something new happens. He has threatened India with tariffs on a reciprocal basis.
Now, the economy of a country has a direct impact on the foreign policy of our country. We have three extraordinary people with us today.
To what extent the foreign policy of a country is directly related to the economy and the economic relations between a nation and the rest of the world.
Jaimini Bhagwati: It should be intimately linked. Sometimes it is not depending upon the leadership and depending upon their own perspectives, short, medium, and long term, whether you are fully aware of exactly where your economy is and where your strengths and weaknesses are. Let’s look at the scenario right now. We got president Trump on the rampage. He wants reciprocal tariffs, et cetera. The US has a trade deficit in goods of about a trillion dollars. I’m going to round off these numbers. It has a surplus in service of about 300 billion. So, they are short in terms of goods and services by 700 billion. Now, this is what bothers Trump. The deficit is much more on the manufacturing side, and that’s where there is employment.
While on the services side while they have a surplus, of course, with India is roughly the same. And with us, they have a deficit of 40 billion. It’s a very small amount. So, in terms of our own take on where to go forward on this, we’ll obviously have a lot to do with what President Trump does to us or with us, or how he goes about things. We are right now told by the media that there will be some negotiation on an India-US trade deal, which should be done by fall or by the end of 2025.
Kapil Sibal:Arun, where is our foreign policy from 2014 to today? And how is it different from the past? And where are we heading?
Arun Kumar Singh: So, I think at one level, there’s certainly an element of continuity. You referred to Prime Minister Nehru working towards this policy of non-alignment. And now clearly the articulation has been that we want to maintain the strategic autonomy of our decision making, and that on each issue we should be able to take decision based on our own interests. And there are indicators, for example, when the Russia-Ukraine conflict started, certainly there was an expectation in the US that maybe our positions would be closer to the US position. But the way the government articulated its policy as I assessed, was keeping in mind the importance of India’s relationship with Russia and did not go along with the US in terms of either criticizing Russia. And eventually it was the US leadership that said, we understand India’s compulsions related to Russia.
On the convergence of economic interest and how it impacts foreign policy. Now today, if we are to see, for good or bad, in terms of comprehensive national interests, clearly the most important partner is the United States. Now, there are challenges. It’s our largest trading partner with the US as Jaimini mentioned, we have a trade surplus, whereas overall we are trade deficit, US is the largest source of foreign direct investment in India. US is also the largest destination for outbound Indian foreign investment – $40 Billion was because they are looking for market access. They’re looking for technology. At 5.2 million, US is the largest single country presence of Indian origin diaspora; at 300,000 largest single country presence of Indian students. Now the challenge is that there are many other areas where we don’t have a convergence of interest with the United States because every country takes decisions based on its own interest or the political compulsions of its leaders. And it’ll not always harmonize.
Kapil Sibal: Don’t you think that we have tilted towards the United States in these years from 2014 onwards?
Arun Kumar Singh: Perhaps been some change on the Israel Palestine issue, but not on the global issues. Because if you take for example prime minister Manmohan Singh, he staked the survival of his government on seeing the civil nuclear corporation agreement through the Lok Sabha. And because there was a no-confidence motion as a result of the relationship, which the United States has consolidated.
Kapil Sibal: Manmohan Singh had a global perspective and he kept his relations with every country on an even keel. But we see a tilt towards the United States clearly from 2014.
Arun Kumar Singh: I don’t think I necessarily agree because we look at France, for example, because as I mentioned, US is an important partner, but can be an unpredictable partner and will not always have convergence of interest. You need other hedging partners. Every Indian government, including the present one, has tried to sustain its relationship with Russia and with France because they give you hedging options.
Kapil Sibal: Trump says you’ll buy the F-35s. Trump says, you’ll have to buy our oil. You’ll have to buy our gas. We have no way of actually getting around that.
Arun Kumar Singh: I don’t think we are going to buy F-35s.
Suhasini Haidar: Well, we do, we have what are called as term limits. So, you just drag it out and wait it out. As we did when Trump won, because he insisted on us signing a deal for LNG, which was not in our favour. We announced an MOU, we announced another MOU, it was made a big deal at the Howdy Modi event in Houston. India was going to put billions of dollars into a driftwood plant. But when Mr. Trump lost power, the MOU just went away. So, India does have that going for it, that if you, if you wait it out enough. If I could just pick up from what Ambassador Arun is saying, is that maybe there was an attempt to move closer to the US maybe, but over the years there has been a realization even within this government that actually there is a safety in the strategic autonomy argument, that there is a safety in non-alignment that they can actually use to India’s benefit and to their own in a certain sense. After all, in 2017, Mr. Trump insisted that India should cut off its most vital source of oil. Iran used to be 12% of Indian oil. It was sweet oil, it was cheap oil. It came from very close by and our refineries were made for it. But Mr. Trump sent Nikki Haley here who announced publicly that India must change its policy on Iran. And lo and behold, the government caved. The government gave in and agreed to zero out Iranian oil. This was to our detriment.
When Trump said, give up Venezuelan oil, we gave it up as well. It was seen as in India’s larger interest. But in fact, you notice that by the time the Russia-Ukraine war happened and America said zero out Russian oil, it was a Biden administration, so perhaps not the same kind of worry and deterrent coming from them, the government stuck its feet in and didn’t just not zero out. They actually increased from 0.5% of the oil to 40% at one point of time. So, I think what’s happening is a kind of maybe grudging realization that perhaps some of these you know what I think external affairs minister JaiShankar has once referred to as Shibolet of the past. I’m not sure that they are still feeling that these are necessarily bad things.
Kapil Sibal: Considering that Trump is not giving any negotiating space to countries around, I’m not talking just about India. To the Europeans and it’s going to be difficult to have a trade agreement in these circumstances.
Suhasini Haidar: And we have accepted today that we will have an EU-India free trade agreement by the end of the year. We are discussing the phase one. We’ve already missed three or four deadlines with the UK. We have three or four deadlines with Australia. There are a lot of free trade agreements. So maybe India’s whole policy is going to be reworked. But you make a good point, which is that this is where the summit level diplomacy or personalizing diplomacy is never a great idea because when your interlocutor is someone as unreasonable as Mr. Donald Trump then it does not help to make negotiations just a man-to-man kind of thing. And that’s where you are right. That now we are dealing with a situation where Mr. Trump doesn’t spare anyone their blushes. He says what he feels like. We know that our Prime Minister does not like to face press conferences. And yet, Mr. Trump threw him into two different press conferences and opened him up to all kinds of questions he wouldn’t otherwise have answered. There’s a certain discourteous manner in which he speaks about India consistently. The fact that he announced the reciprocal taxes against India, not an hour before he was going to meet Prime Minister Modi, or that he’s talking about waving off taking off the Chabahar waiver for India, which is important, or the way Indians were sent back on military planes.
Jaimini Bhagwati: So, you don’t have to look only at today’s stock market crash. There are various things happening in the Indian economy, which do not allow us to, let alone flex our muscles on the international front. But I want to go back to your earlier point that somehow there was some kind of greater autonomy. You remember the sixties, PL 480 et cetera, and so on what happened and so on. So Green Revolution took care of some of that. But the world has moved, but the relative size of India’s economy hasn’t changed all that much. But China, in the meantime has grown so much. When you’re looking at the world today, the three poles are the US, Russia, China. Russia because not because of the size of its economy or how it has handled its economy, it’s far too dependent on fossil fuels. But because of technology, the S 400 missile defence system has been bought, not just by us, but also the Chinese. Our nuclear-powered submarines are provided by the Russians. So, we have not changed those basics.
Kapil Sibal: They supply us all the defence equipment. Most of it is supplied by them. So, we can’t change it. And we want the S 400s?
Arun Kumar Singh: So, one of the reasons why I said I think we stayed the course on the Russia relationship is also Russia because of its isolation from the West, was getting more and more dependent on China. I think there was a need for India to ensure that at least on India-China issues, Russia did not go over to China. And the sense I get is that there has been confidence in India that that was achieved. That in 2020, for example, when Galwan happened, Russian responses were reassuring to the Indians.
Now, while the Russia relationship is vital with defence cooperation, we also have to factor in that we had a certain comfort level with Russia because they didn’t supply defence items to Pakistan. But in China, the context is different. The Chinese defence capacity and defence industrial base has been built up initially with Russian supply. Today our concern is more China and and now the Chinese have been supplying Russia’s defence industrial base.
Kapil Sibal: See where we are today. We have no real clout with our neighbours anymore. Our relationship with the US is, you know, changing radically. The Europeans are going be very hurt. The Europeans are going to look for markets in India. We’ve lost the leadership of the global south, right? That’s my belief. Trump says, if you’re going to do anything to the dollar, if BRICS does anything for a currency, that they, that we said yes, we agree to that suddenly Jai Shankar in Doha said, no, no, we want to trade in dollars. Right? So that’s the kind of thing that’s happening around the world. Where do we stand as a country in terms of the clout of our foreign policy?
Arun Kumar Singh: So, some areas where perhaps I don’t necessarily agree is that the BRICS was never really working for a non-dollar common currency. I think in terms of leadership of the global south, clearly India is still making some effort that you saw what India did in the context of G 20. In terms of the impact on the neighbours, I think it’s a reflection of what Jaimini said, in 1980, China’s GDP was the same as India’s GDP. Today, their GDP is five times ours.
Now with that, they’ve expanded outwards. And so, as we are hedging enough foreign policy to maintain our autonomy, our neighbours are hedging against us and using China. So that’s an inevitable impact. But I think one thing that’s happening, which we should watch, is that there’s a certain emphasis now being placed in partnerships in critical and emerging technologies because they are going to define nature of work, nature of living.
Kapil Sibal: You’re far behind there.
Arun Kumar Singh: But we are getting into those partnerships. And one thing that’s helping us, that the US, despite all the unpredictability and despite whatever they may do with China, with Elon Musk and others around Trump, they believe that they are in deep technological competition with China. And China is the only country with the intent and capability to replace the US in the international system. And they still want to maintain US primacy, whatever else they may do. And they have come to accept and most leading US companies, that for them to win the technology competition with China, they need the partnership with India and 1.4 billion people. So, you have 1700 global capability centres here doing cutting edge R&D technology development work. So that gives us a peg to leverage our relevance.
Kapil Sibal: What’s your response to the issues that are raised?
Suhasini Haidar: Well, these are the issues of the moment. I think there is a broader context in which India’s foreign policy works. And there’s a reason why it has worked this way for, I would say not just the decades since our independence, but in a sense who India has been through the ages. And that is both history and geography, right? The history is the goodwill that India has always had. The sense that we have as Indians that we don’t address on others, that we don’t try to push territorial boundaries on others. That has led to a real reservoir of goodwill for India. And I think that’s why so many countries still want to deal with us even when they have other differences with us. The second I think is our geography. Where you stand, you were asking where do you stand? I would say, where do you stand is about where you sit. And we sit in a place where all our continental neighbours, if you just go upwards, are not in the America camp, all the way up to Russia on one side and China on the other. And our two biggest threats, our security threats and the challenges, and for the foreseeable future, the place where our military resources will be concentrated are on 3,500 kilometres with China, 3,000 kilometres with Pakistan. So that is where our resources will go.
And I think the third part to all of this is the idea that India has to be some kind of a leader in its own region, or has to be a country whose neighbours are stakeholders in our success, if it is to rise. Because otherwise there will always be a ring of fire surrounding India and creating problems when you least expect it. I think in terms of these three aspects, it is very difficult for our foreign policy eventually to outreach and become some alien concept from Mars, you know?
Kapil Sibal: But I think Suhasini, the mistake we made, and this is my own perspective, was that we depended far too much on politics rather than concentrating on the economy of our country. Which means that China went far ahead of us. We just don’t have the economic clout and because we were constantly talking about winning elections and winning elections on the basis of political upmanship.
Suhasini Haidar: And even today, the fact that we did not cut off trade ties with China, despite that situation but are looking to isolate Pakistan, are looking to cut off our connections to the west of India because of political issues, is going to hamper us.
Kapil Sibal: And what leverage do we have with China? We are dependent on China on almost everything such as even our pharmaceutical ingredients.
Jaimini Bhagwati: You talked about our leadership in the foreign policy arena of the past. I think the single most important factor was our championing of independence, whether it is for the African countries, whether it is for Indonesia. So that is no longer valid or relevant. So to that extent, I don’t think there is any diminution in India’s stature. The problem is what you just mentioned, why is it that we can’t produce those pharmaceutical ingredients in India? What is it that China has? It is a basic chemical. We’ve been hearing this for ages. We are also too dependent on our corporate sector who should face more competition. We have not given them enough competition. There is reasonable amount of competition domestically, but we need to give them more international competition. And that should be part of our foreign policy, not something separate.
On the political foreign policy side, you see your ability to project and to attract and to be friends with people is totally based on our own domestic economic strengths and how cohesive are we as a society without getting into the politics of India. You’ve seen the rumblings in the south and so on and so forth. We don’t want to go there because that is being watched very carefully by people outside. So we need to watch out for some of that. Who would be interested? You remember KGB and who gave how much money to whom during the Indira Gandhi years, how much. So the thing is, you know, how are we going to deal with these influences is based on our own internal strengths.
Kapil Sibal: That internal strength comes from making your economy strong. And to make your economy strong, you have to give freedom to people. Freedom to people means don’t get the ED after them. Don’t get the CBI after them all.
Jaimini Bhagwati: You, you said it. I agree with everything you just said.
Kapil Sibal: When it comes to technology, we have to start doing the hardware stuff to build a strong economy.
Arun Kumar Singh: So, I think you’ve made a valid point that certainly a lot of technology development work is happening in India but the intellectual property is not vested with Indian entities. That’s correct. It’s vested with the international entities that are getting the work done here. So, there is income generation happening here. There’s some capacity building taking place, but till you do intellectual property generation, wealth creation will not happen at the same level. So that effort has to be made. But till that is realized, at least something is happening.
Kapil Sibal: What have we done from 2014 to today? Look, we are, we are where we are. Your economy is growing at a slow pace of 6.3% or 6.7%. As I said in parliament the other day, the finance minister, even if she does nothing, we will still grow at 6%. And economists agree to that. The question is we need to grow at 8%, we need to grow at 10%. Now you can only do that if you free up the system and you are not willing to do that because politics is your main concern. How to win your election is the main concern. Your main concern should be how to make your economy strong, how can you make your foreign policy strong and how can you have clout in the world?
Suhasini Haidar: I think for the moment we make a big splash on the international scene; I don’t think you can take away from that. And I think we are able in a certain sense to give a sense of India, but you’re absolutely right that in order for us to actually be part of that global discussion, in the old days, it used to be India is not part of the problem and it’s not part of the solution. But eventually to be a part of that global discussion, you have to have the economic heft to go with it.
Jaimini Bhagwati: When you talk about foreign policy projection, it is based on domestic strength. So one area where a number of people, there are hundreds of millions of people who have got affected is SMSEs. You have really made it very difficult to create employment. You can go to any town, any place in India, in fact go anywhere in Delhi. The two things which seem to be growing in our urban areas are security guards and drivers. So that’s not the way.
Suhasini Haidar: I think another place is, while again India is seen as a growing power, when it comes to our infrastructure, is a lot of our infrastructure we are touting today is meant for a very small section of our society. It’s highspeed expressways, it is tollways, or even bullet train rail. These are all meant for people that don’t even represent 5% of India. So therefore, the infrastructure push for the rest of India is in a sense suffering. And until those large masses move up the value chain, up the income chain, I don’t think you can make the next leap in a sense to the high table.
Kabil Sibal: So if you don’t create jobs you won’t have and you don’t have employment, you won’t get people to have larger amount of money in their pockets. That will not fuel the economy. And you will only be having people at the top earning money. And with automation they will earn more money, but the employment there will also be impacted.
Suhasini Haidar: With the gold visa from the US, they might actually just leave.
Arun Kumar Singh: Ultimately economic strength is critical because I think it is through economic strength that other countries will look at you with interest, be it United States, be the Europeans. If you have economic strength and great opportunities for your neighbours, then they feel invested in our success. So, I think that has to be for a sustainable increase in foreign policy influence that has to be clearly the primary.
Kabil Sibal: Yes. And if you look at the newspapers every morning, we don’t talk about, they don’t talk about the economy at all. It’s only about politics.
I also think this is a great opportunity for us because now with the world changing Europe, having to look beyond America, right? Looking at Asia, because the two biggest countries in the world in terms of economic possibilities are China and India. So, we have a great opportunity for now negotiating very good deals with Europe and bilateral deals with the rest of the world.
Jaimini Bhagwati: The two largest countries in terms of population are China and India. Between the two of us we’re roughly 3 billion people. The biggest failure of Indian foreign policy is not anything else but the fact that China felt the need to flex its muscles in Ladakh, we should have anticipated that. We needed American help and their satellite coverage to even figure out where exactly they were. So now these are the kinds of things which make for strength in foreign policy. You can’t have a situation where you have your largest neighbour with whom you have a very large trade interaction. Whether it is in our favour or not is not relevant. Why were we caught napping? And that is a failure of the foreign policy establishment, of the army, of our intelligence agencies and so on, because that’s very concrete and it happened very recently.
But China’s there, it’ll be there after four years. Mr. Xi Jinping may be there depending upon his health for another 20 years. So, we need to focus on that. And Mr. Putin, I don’t know how long he’ll be there, depending upon his health, but he’s a very bright man. I’ve sat across the table from him, spoke fluently in English for over two hours, did not look at a single note. So while we deal with Trump and Europe, I would be less concerned about with, because they are themselves weak, they’ll reach out to India. They’re in grave economic trouble because of the age profile.
Kabil Sibal: The German economy has grown at 0.3%.
Jaimini Bhagwati: It is the demographic profile. They need to bring in workers.
Suhasini Haidar: If I could just add to that point. So, we’ve discussed how the economy is one of the cruxes of India’s foreign policy. Also, the idea of India’s own strategic impulses. But I also want to add one more thing, which we sometimes disregard or see as too idealistic, which is that if India is to be seen as a counterpoint to China, we’re not going to be seen as the counterpoint in terms of the market access or in terms of the liberalization, in terms of the manufacturing base that China has already built. We will be seen as a counterpoint to China because of our USP, which is made up of the fact that India is a democracy, that India is a pluralistic secular democracy. And that it is a rule abiding country. If India stops being one of those three, we lose our USP in a certain sense. So those who want to recast India in a majoritarian mould or those who say we need strong leadership and non-federal leadership, we need a central figure who will lead us into the future. And those who feel that India should now flex its own muscles, especially with its neighbours, take back territory that has been taken away from us. All of those ideas are actually detrimental to this idea of India that in fact makes people see us as a counterpoint.
Kabil Sibal: I tend to agree with what you’re saying. What about you?
Arun Kumar Singh: I think going back to the question, you asked about the opportunity or the challenge. So clearly this is a moment of opportunity but also a huge challenge and challenge because after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when US saw itself as the only global power, pushed the world for globalization of production, now that phase of globalization of production, which China benefited from is not available. And we lost out in that phase because manufacturing went to China, we got some services, and today China, GDP is 18% of global GDP, but they have 32% of global manufacturing. But because of that concentration today, the mood led by the US is to reorder the supply chain. There will be challenges because they’re talking of, you know, us shoring onshoring. He said if Tesla invests in India, it’ll be unfair to the United States. And that’s what Trump said. So, but still US can’t do everything. So, there’ll be an element of looking for secure supply chains, trusted supply chains, that gives us an opportunity to plug into the reordering of supply chain. And to some extent it’s happening. We just look at semiconductors. There have been fresh US investments in semiconductors and they’re also looking at how, what you can do more in terms of integrating the supply chain in terms semiconductors, both in the US and India. So that creates an opportunity. So, we can look at similar arrangements also with Europe, also with the UK and that will create opportunity for us.
Kabil Sibal: How I look at it is like this that in any case, US is number one antagonistic entity to China. They will have to look towards us. And to that extent I think they’ll be willing to make concessions to us because of that relationship. The Europeans will be also looking at China and us because if America is going to do them in, then they’ll have to look for markets themselves. So, they will be looking at China and they’ll be looking at us. So, I think there’s an opportunity there. We need to actually be a little more proactive with our neighbours, right? And as you rightly said, we must send a message to the rest of the world that we are a functioning, thriving democracy. We believe in the rule of law, right?
Jaimini Bhagwati: But I will refer to something on which you are an expert, which is how foreign investors look at us. You remember the Vodafone case and how it was overturned by legislation by then Finance minister. Going forward, if you want investment and we want investment, we are a capital deficient country, we need to also look at our legal system. That’s where, where anything and everything gets postponed for years.
Kabil Sibal: What happens is that in the legal system in this country today is in real, I wouldn’t say shambles, that needs to reinvent itself. And this starts from the bottom, from the district level right to the top. And judges have to stand up and say, we will not accept this. This is not something that, that the constitution allows you to do. As long as the legal system or the judicial system succumbs to the politics of the country, I think there’s no hope for foreign investment in this country.
Jaimini Bhagwati: I completely agree with you.
Suhasini Haidar: I think there are three things investors are looking for. The first is the ease of entry, land acquisition. Those are all in the regulatory space, actually not so in in going into the courts. The second is the rule of law and order that is not just the courts, but also your police. That if they file a complaint, they’ll be able to get justice. And the third, which we always forget about, is the ease of exit. That even if an investor doesn’t want to exit India, they should know that we will be fair on that subject. We’ve had in the last five years cases of investors needing to shut down their factories and being told you have to continue to pay people, but we will not allow you to sell your factory to others like the Chinese or others. And making India’s reputation in a sense very difficult for that kind of investment.
Arun Kumar Singh: I think ease of entry is a very important thing. And clearly a lot has been done over the years, including after 2014. But much more needs to be done. We still hear from the foreign investors that they do face challenges and in fact the prime minister, if you saw recently, has set up the deregulation commission. So obviously there’s a recognition of the need to do and more needs to be done.
Kabil Sibal: The stories that come out of India, you see in a globalized world, nothing that happens in India is not known in the rest of the world. You have resolutions being moved in the European Parliament, which is very unsavoury. I mean, I feel sorry that such a thing should happen to a country as great as ours. Those resolutions are moved. The kind of stories that come out of India about attacks against minorities will not get the support system that you need. India stands for certain values which have been diminished, I’m sorry to say over the years.
Suhasini Haidar: Our USP is to be the engine in these respects – democracy, pluralism and rule abiding.
Kabil Sibal: And if you attack that, you are not going to get the kind of vibes that you should get with people wanting to collaborate with you.
Jaimini Bhagwati: Therefore, the rule of law is very important. It’s fundamental. And therefore, you should not have government agencies pursuing certain people based on certain political beliefs.
Kabil Sibal: I’m happy that at this point in time, some judgments are coming from the Supreme Court to sort of water down the kind of things that were happening, but it’s just not enough. It’s impacting the worldview of India.
Suhasini Haidar: I think also in terms of image, the fact is we have to be prepared that as a growing country, as a country that’s being seen much more on the international stage, that we are also going to get criticized. And how we deal with that criticism is also very important. I think especially in journalism. This is something we have learned in the last few years that you have to really have a government that is willing to deal with criticism.
Kabil Sibal: Last thing I’ll discuss and then we’ll sort of close this discussion is that what has this government done in the last 10 years? What has any government done in the last, since 1950s on empowering people at the bottom of the pyramid? Very little has been done. We keep on talking about giving freebies to people, assets of our country to certain members of the corporate sector. And that has a very bad impact.
Jaimini Bhagwati: If you talk since the fifties, I think the two most important pillars on which any society rests are education and health. And they’re on the concurrent list so the state governments can do more. So instead of only looking at the centre, because we are a large country. I’m told by owners of foreign businesses when I was outside that we find it difficult to recruit people who can get trained. We are not expecting them to be trained when you arrive there.
Kapil Sibal: In other words, we come to the conclusion, the bottom of the pyramid must be strengthened. More money in the pockets of poor people, of ordinary people. Strengthen your economic base. Make yourself an economic powerhouse. You will be a strong power in the world and your foreign policy will furnish. If you don’t do that, we’ll be negotiating and we get the short end of the stick.
