Periods of power transition among the “great powers” are always periods of great peril for world peace. The period from 1870 to 1914 marked the emergence of two new powers – the US and Germany – whose economic clout began to match (and even surpass) that of the pre-eminent power of the 19th century (Britain), and completely eclipse that of Britain’s erstwhile challenger France (which over-stretched itself under Napoleon, and has been a second-rate power since the Franco-Prussian war of 1870). Britain’s “balancing” role on the continent (of aligning with whoever opposed the ambitions of its leading rival) shifted its focus from balancing France (1800-1870) to balancing Germany (by early in the 20th century).
Eventually, Britain’s attempts at balancing Germany failed (or went too far), provoking two world wars before a new world pecking order could emerge – with the US clearly in the forefront, and Germany subsumed gradually into the broader framework of “Europe” to contain and assuage its ambitions as a great power. The second half of the twentieth century was characterized by the emergence of Russia (ideologically extended into a multi-ethnic empire called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR). Although the USSR was no match for the US as an economic power, its ideological attraction to middling powers (like China in the 1950s, India and much of Africa and the Middle East in the 1970s) made it a potent strategic competitor to the US -- which created an elaborate system of alliances (of which NATO was the most prominent and long-lasting, but CENTO, SEATO, etc. covered the rest of the world) to counter the perceived threat from the USSR and its satellites in eastern Europe. Although the world came perilously close to a war between the two superpowers (in 1956, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Suez crisis, in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis), the competition was confined to a “Cold War”, a state of permanent tension that stopped just short of full-scale war.
It is the positions of the middling powers that are most in peril during such periods of power transition. France and Russia felt most threatened by the emergence of Germany a century ago, and they responded by aligning with Britain (the pre-eminent power of that era, as the USA was perceived to be content in its own sphere of influence in the western hemisphere and the Pacific). The threat from the USSR drove Britain, France, (west) Germany, Italy and Japan to formally align with the USA in the 1950s – and communist China to do so informally by 1979.
All middling powers have essentially two options in response to the emergence of a threatening new great power – either “balancing” or “bandwagoning”, i.e., either to attempt to join an alliance to balance that power, or to join the bandwagon of its allies or followers. Finland was a classic example of a European power that chose to “bandwagon” with the USSR, giving up its independent foreign policy in exchange for non-interference in its internal affairs. Sweden was often accused of verging quite close to “Finlandization” as well (both in its foreign and domestic policy), but Norway chose to balance against the USSR by joining NATO.
After the demise of the USSR in 1991, there was a 17-year period of unrivalled US ascendancy. The 2008 financial crisis has not completely altered that, but it has highlighted the US’ growing dependence on foreign funding of its rising public debt. Talk of a new G-2 is premature, though: the US still spends more on defence than the next 10 largest spenders put together, giving it global military preponderance – with China very far from being any match for the US as a military power. China’s annual military expenditure remains just a tenth of that of the US, the Chinese navy is still building its first aircraft carrier (while the US navy has 12 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers), and China fields barely 20 nuclear missiles capable of reaching the US (all of them susceptible to a pre-emptive strike) while the US has 9000 nuclear warheads (and about 5000 strategic warheads).
The US’s only rival as a nuclear power remains Russia (which, as a single-commodity exporter with a declining population, is far from being even a second-rate economic power of the present and future). Although the US is indeed increasingly dependent on China’s purchases of US Treasury bills/bonds, the dependence in fact runs both ways: only by allowing its own currency (the Renminbi) to appreciate can China move away from rapidly increasing its foreign reserves (about 60% of which will have to be US$-denominated, simply because there is no real alternative as a credible global reserve currency).
No power other than the US has the ability to project power in more than one military theater at once in today’s world – partly because no other nation’s navy and air-force are remotely as well-equipped and effective as the US one. But no other power is currently involved in two wars – as the US is, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The experience of the wars of the twentieth century (cold and hot) shows that the bystanders typically gain economically at the expense of the combatants. Thus Germany and Japan emerged as the economic winners from the Cold War, just as the US (which only entered the First World War halfway through it, in late-1916) emerged as the big economic winner from that war. The longer the Afghan and Iraq wars persist, the more the gaping economic gulf between the US and China will begin to close – and the more meaningful it will be to talk about a new Group of Two powers determining the course of world events.
While it is still too early to talk of a bipolar world (either in economic or military/strategic terms), China is clearly now THE rapidly-emerging global power. After three decades of annual economic growth 3-4 percentage points faster than India’s, China’s per capita national income is about three times India’s. The gap in annual economic growth continued even during the 2003-08 period (the five years of fastest economic growth in India’s history), although the gap in economic growth narrowed marginally to 2.5-3% annually.
China is already the largest trading partner for virtually every Asian economy, having just achieved that status with India in the past year as well. China has large bilateral trade deficits with Taiwan, Japan and Korea. The bilateral trade deficits serve a useful political purpose: since these economies are beneficiaries of the China market, their foreign-policy stance toward China becomes increasingly conciliatory. The ASEAN nations now have a small bilateral trade deficit with China (a reversal from the surpluses of the previous five years), but they too look upon China as a vital market for their products (and as a processing and assembly base for components manufactured in ASEAN). Consequently, many of the ASEAN nations (especially Burma, Malaysia and Cambodia) have pursued a “bandwagoning” strategy toward China, acting broadly in consonance with China’s wishes on most foreign policy questions. China prefers to have the ASEAN economic community expanded into the ASEAN+3 (with Korea, Japan and China), rather than the proposed East Asia Summit (which would include India, Australia and New Zealand). Steadfast support from Singapore and Thailand has kept the momentum of the East Asia Summit going, but pressure from China and its allies has ensured that the ASEAN+3 framework progresses much more rapidly.
Until recently, Japan was steadfastly pursuing a policy of equi-distance between China and India, with a subtle tilt toward India gradually emerging in the past decade. In fact, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), especially under PMs Koizumi and Abe (and less so Aso and Fukuda) had explicitly built bridges to India – attempting to pursue a classic “balancing” approach in Asia (akin to Britain’s strategy a century ago in Europe). Although the newly-elected Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government of PM Yukio Hatoyama is yet to elaborate the details of its stance, PM Hatoyama emphasized the pre-eminence of ties with its immediate neighbours (China and Korea) in a signed newspaper article just after being elected – and followed it up with visits to those two countries, ostensibly to discuss North Korea but in reality to also forge an East Asian economic community (or at least deepen economic linkages between the three north-east Asian neighbours).
India appeared to be outside PM Hatoyama’s line of vision altogether – although at the ASEAN meetings in October, the DPJ-led Japanese delegation renewed its support for the East Asia Summit (EAS) approach (i.e., including Australia and India in the trade bloc) rather than the ASEAN+3 approach favored by China. The DPJ’s support for the EAS, however, appeared to be much more driven by its warm ties to Australia rather than to any links between the new Japanese administration and India. In fact, four months after the DPJ’s electoral victory, the old LDP talk of an “alliance of Asia-Pacific democracies” (encompassing the US, India, Australia and Japan) has been put firmly on the back-burner as Japan resumes its pre-Koizumi courtship of China (with the full panoply of ritual apologies for perceived historical slights demanded by China). The DPJ’s “shadow shogun”, Ichiro Ozawa, is after all the former leader of the LDP’s old Tanaka faction – which began Japan’s courtship of communist China in the 1970s.
PM Hatoyama’s trip to India at the end of December 2009 again underscored the world’s perception of how best to deal with India: give Indian leaders “face”, because symbolism rather than substance is what Indian politicians crave. Hatoyama’s visit was labeled the “first state visit” of his term as Prime Minister (meaning, presumably, that the alacrity with which he visited Korea and China for tripartite meetings, and Singapore for the APEC conclave, were merely courtesy trips). While making the appropriate noises about the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor, the substance of the visit boiled down to Japan asking India to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty before any civilian nuclear cooperation would be possible with the Hatoyama/DPJ administration.
Subsequent to the APEC summit, US Pres. Obama’s joint declaration with Chinese communist party chief Hu Jintao spoke gratuitously of the need for those two powers to act jointly to improve relations between India and Pakistan. The reaction in the Indian press was a bit over-wrought (since such diplomatic declarations rarely translate into actions on the ground, unless each party to the dispute is willing to allow outside intervention).
However, the Sino-US joint declaration did highlight again that India is not “top of the mind” among the Obama administration’s foreign policy concerns. Secretary of State Clinton’s first foreign-policy tour covered China, Korea, Japan and Indonesia (but pointedly left out India), just as Obama’s first tour of Asia covered Japan, Singapore, Korea and China. India was instead accorded the symbolism and rhetoric of being granted an official state visit (repeatedly emphasized as being the first of the Obama administration), being dubbed a “natural ally” and one of the US’ “defining relationships of this century”. On Afghanistan, however, US decisions (and press reportage) continue to be driven by Pakistani perceptions – with India’s allies (Pres. Hamid Karzai, defeated presidential rival Abdullah Abdullah, Gen. Rashid Dostum of Mazar-e-Sharif, Vice President Fahim of the Panjsheri group, and Herat’s Ismail Khan) all dubbed “warlords” or “corrupt”, while Pakistan’s allies (the oxymoronic “moderate Taliban”) are accorded the elusive status of credible future interlocutors. Ever solicitous of China’s concerns, however, Pres. Obama went out of his way to snub the Dalai Lama (as none of his predecessors had done over the past two decades) when the Tibetan spiritual leader visited the US.
Despite the emollient words Prime Minister Manmohan Singh heard in Washington during his state visit, India remains a “strategic partner” of the US, while Pakistan is a “major non-NATO ally”, and the strategic relationship between the US and China is of longer standing. Having signed a landmark civil nuclear agreement with the US, India is still merely a “natural ally” (ie, a rhetorical one) but very far from being a formal ally.
As a 1962-like situation begins to emerge in Arunachal Pradesh (where Chinese troops surged through 47 years ago) and the Aksai Chin border in Ladakh, India is again completely alone. After a careful wooing of the KMT – the communist party’s civil war adversaries who escaped to and ruled Taiwan from 1949 to 1996 – during its decade out of power, official relations between China and Taiwan are now the warmest they have been since 1949. With its chief adversarial obsession no longer needing as much attention, communist China has turned its gaze toward its other pesky rival in the south-west, India. Although its leadership frequently resorted to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist rhetoric (especially in the first three decades after the 1949 revolution), the communist regime clearly saw itself as succeeding to the Mandate of Heaven – and, therefore, to defending the most extreme of imperial claims made by the Qing dynasty (that ruled from 1644 to 1911) and any of its imperial predecessors.
In that imperial vision, all Asian nations (starting with Japan, Korea and Vietnam) have been seen as supplicants to the imperial court (in Beijing since the Mongol Yuan dynasty established its capital there in the 11th century). As China’s economic clout grows, all Asian nations (other than India) are implicitly ready to kowtow to China – or, at a minimum, do nothing to obstruct China’s major strategic and economic interests (including formally protesting about the under-valued renminbi, which hurts all other Asian nations’ competitiveness, but has brought not a squeak of protest from Asia in the past decade). China knows that the only Asian nation that will not follow a “bandwagoning” approach to it is India. It was to counter the long-term threat potentially posed by India that China made Ayub Khan’s Pakistan a military ally in 1963 – a relationship that has stood the test of time now for nearly five decades.
Even Mao recognized that the Indic and Sinitic civilizations have competed across the rest of Asia through the last two millennia. Since neither civilisational-state had indigenous ruling dynasties for much of the past 1500 years, their cultural competition had benign outcomes across Asia (with Sinitic influence prevailing in north-east Asia, Indic ones in south-east Asia). But with modern nation-states replacing the civilisational-states in the 1940s, Mao (and his successors) recognized that overt competition with India was inevitable – and China’s leaders have acted accordingly to gain a lead in that competition since the 1950s. In 1962, following the catastrophic famine that cost at least 30 million Manchurian and Han Chinese lives, China attacked India to administer a salutary lesson: that China (even when facing domestic distress) was Asia’s pre-eminent power.
For now, China’s military leadership is well aware that India is a considerably weaker power, militarily and economically. So continual pin-pricks on Arunachal Pradesh and the Ladakh border will continue, and India will gradually lose a few square miles of territory every year, but China will see no necessity for major military engagement with India. As long as the gap between China’s GDP and India’s remains as wide as it now is (3:1 in China’s favour), the challenge from India is inconsequential. But, if India’s demographic advantages (a declining dependency ratio until 2030, while China’s will be rising rapidly after 2015) begin to translate into a narrowing of the economic gap with India, China will become much more likely to re-establish its military dominance over India (as it did in 1962).
If India is to avoid reflexive bandwagoning – acquiescing in Chinese economic policies inimical to India’s interests (in Copenhagen, for instance, and on the renminbi), hushing-up encroachments by China into India’s territory, and conniving at increased Chinese influence over Burma, Sri Lanka and Nepal (to complement China’s long-standing alliance with Pakistan) – India needs to abandon her futile commitment to the failed policy of Non-Alignment. It served little purpose in 1962 (when NAM said nary a word in India’s support), 1965 or 1971 – and is even more useless now that the Cold War’s end has reduced the “Third World’s” ability to play off one superpower against the other.
The George W Bush Administration well recognized that there was an almost complete consonance of interests between the US and India. Those perceptions (and especially Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s strategic vision) made it unnecessary for India to formalize an alliance with the US then, since the Bush crowd clearly treated India as a genuine ally. Ironically, the Democrats have always had a more difficult relationship with India – under Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and now Obama – after Nehru failed to respond to FDR’s persistent espousal of the interests of a united and free India throughout World War II. In the absence of a formal alliance, the Democrats see no reason to accommodate India’s concerns on Afghanistan (where the Pakistan military rather than its democratic leadership now contributes most to US policies), climate change, terrorism, nuclear apartheid, or any other significant global issue.
Most importantly, the absence of an alliance means the US has no obligation to support India when our vital strategic interests are under threat. A weaker power is most vulnerable when a seemingly “natural” alliance gives way to one based on symbols rather than substance. China has been quick to capitalize on the reduced closeness to India of the Obama administration (relative to the Bush one), and the negative consequences of this situation to India will only grow over time.
All global powers – especially rising ones that are under threat from even faster-rising ones – have traditionally needed allies to bolster their defences and preclude attacks by those powers that threatened them. Thus China itself effectively aligned itself with the US after 1979 (on all issues except Taiwan), thereby bolstering its defenses against the USSR (with which it had long-standing disputes over its northern border, but suffered from a deep disparity in terms of nuclear capability and industrial capacity). The relationship helped China enormously -- not only by inducing massive capital inflows that propelled the Chinese economy (and reversed the China-Soviet industrial gap quite thoroughly!), but also by enabling China’s long-standing disputes with the ASEAN nations to morph into friendship (and some implicit alliances), including an ASEAN-China FTA that came into effect at the start of 2010, and for the US to quietly tolerate China’s proliferation of nuclear technology to its “rogue” allies (like North Korea and Pakistan).
A formal India-US Strategic Alliance will also greatly reduce the need for constant vigilance and ever-higher military spending (including procurements from dodgy sources rather than from the world’s pre-eminent military power), and allow India’s leadership to instead concentrate on pursuing the goals of rapid and inclusive economic growth (as China achieved so spectacularly in the first decade after the establishment of its strategic alliance with the US). Just as there was a consonance of interests between the US and China over Indochina (post-war Vietnam, post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia and Laos), there is now a similar consonance of interests between the US and India over Afghanistan. With the US set to reduce its troop presence in Afghanistan after July 2011, India will need to fill the socio-economic and humanitarian vacuum. Failing to do so will greatly increase the long-term threat to India from Taliban-inspired terrorism. Having long opposed outside (i.e., US) involvement in the Indian Ocean, India now sees US involvement as a relatively benign alternative to the Chinese navy’s growing blue-water ambitions in India’s oceans and sea-lanes.
Just as China’s alliance with the US imposed some obligations (leading to China voting with the US on most major global issues throughout the 1980s), so too will India need to accommodate the US if it signs up to a formal Strategic Alliance. Ironically, though, India has already started accommodating the US in this way (on Iran, climate change and most other major global issues) without receiving the reciprocal strategic commitments from the US. The only way to ensure that the relationship becomes a mutually-beneficial one (and one that imposes obligations on the US too, regardless of which party is in power there) is for India to do what China did under Deng Xiaoping in 1979 – become a formal Strategic Ally of the US. India’s long-standing closeness to “rogue” regimes like Iran (and, at a pinch, Russia) might then also be effectively parlayed into mediating a US-Iran (or US-Russia) détente that would further bolster India’s long-term strategic interests. Without an Indo-US Strategic Alliance, India is alone facing an increasingly powerful northern neighbour bent on eroding India’s territory, reducing India’s international independence – and representing a potential long-term military threat against which India has scant effective deterrents. The time for pusillanimity on this most vital strategic need of our times is long past.
(This blog was first posted on a now-defunct website called IndiaBanao in early-2009; it was updated with 2009 events before being posted here).
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