New Lines of Concord
By
M.L. Sondhi & Ashok Kapur
The Telegraph, June 26, 2001
Asia's
geopolitical picture has changed rapidly and radically as a
result of several significant developments. The changes have
increased India's strategic importance to the United States.
The re-positioning of Indo-US relations reflects the new
realities which are irreversible in the foreseeable
future…..
Taiwan's
Democratic Progressive Party led to the emergence of
democracy in Taiwan since 1996, and this development in the
vicinity of the mainland fosters voices of pluralism within
China and a belief in the importance of a league of
democratic countries in the post-Cold War era.
Taiwanese
democracy is a challenge to Beijing's authoritarianism.
Also, Taiwan's increasing military capability is a sign that
China can rain missiles into Taiwan but it cannot take it by
force. China is thus a regional great power in the area: but
it is not the natural leader in Asia.
China has
special ties with Pakistan, Iran, Nepal, Myanmar and it
appears to have a plan to create a wedge between southeast
and south Asia through Myanmar, and to maintain access to
the Arabian Sea through the Karakoram highway and a new port
being built in Pakistan under Chinese auspices. China has
different policies for its neighbours. It strengthens
Pakistan militarily to contain India and seeks to do the
same through its activities in Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh,
and its missiles cover all major Indian cities. It has a
policy for the development of naval bases for its use in
Myanmar and in Pakistan, so its India-related policy has a
naval dimension which eventually also affects southeast
Asian countries and the US and its allies in Asia.
With the Koreas
however, its policy is to facilitate inter-Korean dialogue.
Its long term aim is to replace the US as the primary
influence in the peninsula and as the security guarantor in
the area. But here China is being hemmed in. South Korea and
the US continue to emphasize the ongoing need for US
military presence in the Korean peninsula, and the North
Korean leadership implicitly accepts this idea. The US-North
Korean dialogue is a step towards a strategic bargain that
would be likely to extend American strategic and commercial
influence into North Korea, across the Yalu. This will hem
in China in the north. The historic China-Japan rivalry is
resurfacing and Beijing must factor this into its
calculations.
China is being
hemmed in by alert neighbours militarily and diplomatically,
its internal situation is deteriorating significantly and
the difference between internal politics and external
policies is losing meaning for the Chinese leaders. Its
external behaviour has an impact on internal power
struggles. By creating situations in China's areas of
interest, outside forces can, as they say, "mess with the
Chinese mind" and interfere with China's decision-making
process and the inputs which go into the decision loop.
Entry into the
World Trade Organization will produce more layoffs and to
manage the negative impact Beijing is investing in its
internal riot police, and it needs to pump billions of yuan
into agriculture banks to keep the peasants happy. Growth or
corruption and criminal activity add to a picture of social
and political decay. This means Beijing must find
diversionary activity to mobilise nationalism and to manage
growing costs in terms of internal power struggles and
external relationships.
A medium to
long term element is the fact that the US government
assesses India and China as likely major players in the
world economy ahead of the Europeans by 2025 if present
trends continue and India maintains a 6 per cent annual
growth rate. Javed Burki, a former senior World Bank
official, sees India's economy at 12 trillion dollars, 40
per cent greater than the US in 2025, with Japan and Germany
falling behind.
India also has
some political and social advantages over China. It favours
pluralism in state and society and it has a legal system
which protects property and contracts, the foundation of
commerce. So the issue for India is not to be simply content
with political democracy. It is to combine political
democracy with the build up of capitalism.
Another
significant event concerns the Bush administration's plan to
develop and deploy national missile defence and theatre
missile defence. The international debate centres on the
effect of the NMD on Russia and the anti-ballistic missile
treaty rather than Japan and China and the outer space
treaty. Also the discussion centres on the military
requirements and technical problems in mounting a credible
defence. There is a view that the NMD is no good technically
and politically, and India should not accept it. This is
wrong and short-sighted. A broader political view shows that
the focus on Russia requires attention to its prestige, and
a negotiated termination of the ABM treaty is possible,
which has been reinforced by the recent Bush-Putin meeting
in Slovenia.
NMD is less of
a military problem for Russia than it is for China because
Russia can manage to maintain a capacity for both nuclear
deterrence and missile defence. It wants to be taken
seriously as an international partner of the US. It is not
an equal but appearances count.
China's
political concerns are different. The TMD stimulates
Japanese militarization, encourages Taiwanese autonomy, and
signals US determination to be the pre-eminent space cop and
a hegemon in Asia, which enjoys the consent of the US's
Asian partners. Moreover, the TMD will degrade China's
offensive missile capability even if the TMD is not 100 per
cent effective. The costs of Chinese defence therefore, will
go up and this will play further into the already intense
internal power struggles and debates in Beijing.
Also, China
calculates that even if it increases the size of its nuclear
and missile arsenal against India, India can match the
increases, so the argument that China can frighten India if
it joins the US on this issue makes no sense. Presently and
in the foreseeable future, China has no military advantage
over India. It has a capacity to confuse and distract the
thought processes of the Indian political class but it does
not have an edge on the ground.
These
developments clearly indicate that the re-positioning by
India and the US vis-à-vis each other has a deep and broad
Asian geopolitical and a modern military-technological
framework. The re-positioning is not a passing flirtation
rather it is grounded in new realities. Geopolitics and not
simply global economy is the new game in many Asian and
Western capitals. The Indo-US re-alignment rests on a number
of concrete factors which make India important for American
interests and strategies.
Foremost, there
is a triangular rivalry among the US, Russia and China in
Eurasia. Although the US is presently the sole superpower
because it alone can project power globally, it is aware
that its hegemony is temporary. Experts like Zbingniew
Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger acknowledge this.
Russia, China
and India are regional great powers. There is a possibility
that India is encouraged by Russia to join the coalition
with China and Russia. The US would like to pre-empt this
possibility. The new American ambassador is an expert in
Russian and Chinese affairs and the choice of a strategist
points to the importance of Eurasian geopolitics in Indo-US
relations. The other alternative is the more likely.
Historically,
India is a rival of China and the civilizational differences
along with policy and prestige disagreements will stimulate
the rivalry further. So India joins the US without declaring
that the common ground is China in addition to the
attraction of the market place and the twinning of two
democracies. The Sino-Indian rivalry is reinforced by
China's policy of special support for Pakistan as a threat
to India because China itself cannot militarily upset India.
So as US-Pakistan relations cool over the growing influence
of Taliban and Islamic forces in the region which Pakistan
supports, and China is seen as a long term problem for the
US, there would come to be a natural affinity between the US
and India in the strategic and other spheres. The growing
attraction of the Indian economy is an additional element. |