On Jan 25, co-chairman of the ruling Nepal Communist Party Pushpa Kamal Dahal seemed to have gotten nostalgic for his revolutionary past and decided to call out the ‘imperialist’ forces for their designs on Venezuela. A statement signed by Dahal under his revolutionary nom de guerre denounced the US and its allies for ‘intervening in the internal affairs of the Bolivarian republic.’Dahal’s statement reportedly caught key officials off guard. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, who was returning from Davos after making an investment pitch, had to feign ignorance, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) officials were left scrambling for an answer after the US Embassy sought a response on whether Dahal’s statement was Nepal’s official position.
Stuck in a time warp
This comes only weeks after high-level dialogue between Nepal and the US in DC, the first in nearly two decades. The dialogue was expected to provide impetus, at least from Nepal’s side, to its effort to secure more funding from the US for its development needs. Instead, Nepal felt unilaterally sucked into the American Indo-Pacific strategy. In recent years, the US has increased its funding for Nepal under the Millennium Corporation Challenge, and the kind of reciprocity the US expects from this government has put Nepal in a bind. Nepal cannot go against China, nor can it entirely oppose the US moves. Perhaps that was the reason for Nepal’s hot and cold approach to the BIMSTEC military exercises. While Kathmandu eventually pulled out of it, it laid bare the big leverage the US has over different actors in Nepal.
After years of prioritizing relations with India and China, particularly between 2006 and 2016, Nepal has finally begun to see that the world is bigger than just the neighborhood. But given the reactive, rather than proactive, nature of our engagement, this newfound wisdom has not necessarily translated into benefits for Nepal. This is largely due to the absence of clarity, capacity and cohesion within Nepal’s strategic community. The foreign ministry officials, with all due respect, seem stuck in a time warp. There has been no investment in the training of the MoFA cadres in line with the rapidly changing diplomatic landscape. As a result, career diplomats at the MoFA have been unable and unwilling to temper the instincts of successive foreign ministers. Nor have they been able to coordinate and control whimsical prouncements by political leaders on sensitive geopolitical topics.
It is a clear sign of this dysfunction that the MoFA wasn’t involved in clearing Dahal’s statement on such a sensitive issue. There is no doubt a protocol in place for such matters, but not the required competence and willingness to enforce it.
Repeat inevitable
More worrisome is that the lobbying by Venezuelan diplomats, as reported in The Kathmandu Post, seems to have gone unnoticed by the foreign ministry officials. This also, perhaps, speaks volumes about how uninformed our officials are about contemporary issues. When big powers are on opposite sides of an equation, it is only logical to assume that both would try to rope in other states for support and small states like Nepal are particularly vulnerable. A robust MoFA desk on Latin America would have maintained a risk log and would have proactively held briefings for key political leaders on the dangers of taking sides in the evolving crisis in Venezuela. Given that Nepal has no shortage of left-leaning parties, a repeat of this kind of faux pas is inevitable.
We can ill afford this level of dysfunction at our diplomatic nerve center as winds of a second cold war blow. As the recent incident involving Huawei shows, the US-China rivalry can quickly take an ugly turn—forcingcountries such as Canada to pay a disproportionate price of this conflict between the giants. While Canada as a G-7 country has the ability to endure such a crisis, poor countries like Nepal will not be so lucky if they do not pay attention.
This is not the first time this dysfunction has left the Nepal government scrambling to form an official position on a geopolitical issue—and given the lack of internal coherence and under-investment in the MoFA, it is unlikely to be the last.
