Asia today is the pivot of global geopolitical change, but its myriad challenges are playing into international strategic challenges. With the world’s fastest growing economies, fastest rising military expenditures, most volatile hot spots and the fiercest resource competition, a resurgent Asia actually holds the key to the future global order.
The reordering of power under way in Asia is apparent from several developments: China’s increasing assertiveness, underscored by a new muscular confidence and penchant for regional brinkmanship; the new Japanese government’s demand for a more equal alliance with the US and its interest in creating an East Asian community extending up to India and Australia; the sharpening China-India rivalry that has led to renewed Himalayan frontier tensions, but which New Delhi has sought to publicly muffle by cutting off all information on the border situation since last September; and the constraints in the US’ Asia policy arising from a growing interdependence with Beijing, with the Barack Obama administration’s catchphrase “strategic reassurance” signalling a US intent to be more accommodative of China’s ambitions.
Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint
Such developments are a reminder of the need for like-minded countries to help underpin the power equilibrium in Asia by forming a web of bilateral or triangular strategic partnerships that feed into each other. After all, China’s own trajectory will depend on how its neighbours and other players such as the US manage its growing power. Such management—independently and in partnership—will determine if China stays on the positive side of the ledger, without its power sliding into authoritarian arrogance.
A multi-aligned India pursuing omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key countries is best positioned to advance its interests in a fluid Asia. Advancing strategic partnerships indeed was a key issue in the summit meetings of the past two months: with Australia on 12 November; the US on 24 November; Russia on 7 December; and with Japan on 29 December.
The Indo-Australian summit resulted in a decision to elevate the relationship to a formal strategic partnership, with a new security agreement being unveiled. A close India-Australia strategic relationship is a critical link in the larger Asia-Pacific picture, given the common security interests that bind the two democracies in several spheres.
To help underline the significance of their new accord, India and Australia have agreed to “policy coordination” on Asian affairs and long-term international issues, and to work together in initiatives such as the East Asia Summit and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) Regional Forum. They are instituting regular defence policy talks, including consultations between their national security advisers, and setting up a joint working group on counterterrorism. They also have agreed to cooperate on maritime and aviation security and participate in military exercises and other service-to-service exchanges.
In New Delhi, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd contended disingenuously, though, that his refusal to sell India uranium is “not targeted at any individual country”—though India is the only country affected by his policy. Worse still, he proffered a specious justification—India’s non-membership in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). That treaty has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil nuclear cooperation with a non-signatory. Rather, it enjoins its parties to positively facilitate “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy”, so long as safeguards are in place.
Any restriction is not in NPT but in the revised 1992 rules of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group that, paradoxically, were changed with Australian support in 2008 to exempt India. So, Canberra is likely to come round eventually to selling India uranium.
The Indo-US summit, highlighted by the first state dinner of Obama’s presidency, received intense media attention—but yielded little, partly because the US-India strategic partnership already is on a firm footing. That partnership, founded on the June 2005 defence framework accord and the July 2005 civil nuclear deal, has resulted in growing cooperation in various spheres. However, differences in some areas persist, and New Delhi is dissatisfied with US counterterrorism assistance and its tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh border issue with China.
With little room for any dramatic breakthrough, the Indo-US summit received attention either for the wrong reason (the manner three persons managed to “crash” into the White House dinner), or for being light on substance but heavy on symbolism. The state dinner, clearly, was intended to pander to India’s collective ego, which had sensed a Sino-centric tilt to US policy ever since Obama became President. But the summit’s lack of tangible result left an unwelcome impression that, while China gets respect from the US and Pakistan gets billions of dollars in annual US assistance, India gets just a sumptuous dinner.
That impression needs to be dispelled through greater cooperation on common areas of interest. The apparent crisis facing the US-Japan alliance, with some in Washington seeking to play hardball with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s government, has made further progress in the US-India partnership vital for Asian strategic stability and to hedge against the danger that a more-powerful China might turn aggressive.
The third recent summit centred on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Russia, which he had once called a “tried and tested friend” of India.
Russia, with its vantage location in Eurasia and matching strategic concerns, is a natural ally of India. A robust relationship with Moscow will help New Delhi to leverage its ties with both Beijing and Washington.
In their summit declaration, Russia and India pledged to “raise their strategic partnership to the next level”. But this won’t be easy, given the three problems that plague that partnership. The first is that Indo-Russian trade, like the Indo-Japanese trade, is low, even as Sino-Russian, Sino-Indian and Sino-Japanese trade continues to gallop.
This, of course, shows that booming trade in today’s market-driven world does not necessarily connote political cosiness, and that close strategic bonds can go hand-in-hand with low trade levels. Still, the new target to boost Indo-Russian trade from $7.5 billion to $20 billion by 2015 is unlikely to be met, partly because of Russia’s own economic woes.
The second problem is the lopsided nature of the partnership, with military hardware sales and co-production constituting the dominant element. A robust partnership demands multifaceted collaboration and interdependence that can help underpin a mutual stake. The broadening of the Indo-Russian partnership also is being necessitated by India’s increasing purchases of US and Israeli arms. In 2008 alone, according to the Indian ambassador to the US, India placed orders worth a staggering $3.5 billion to buy American arms.
The third problem the partnership faces is that, for Russia, India principally is a client, even if a privileged one. A true strategic partnership has to break free from the patron-client framework—a challenge also confronting the US-India partnership.
After all, the US values India more as a market for its goods and services than as a collaborator on pressing strategic issues.
As China’s immediate neighbours, India and Russia do share common concerns about that country’s rapidly accumulating power. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin famously described the Soviet collapse as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. But by eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space globally, that event left China as the biggest beneficiary. Furthermore, Russia’s decline in the 1990s became China’s gain. Today, the Sino-Russian dissonance may not be as eye-catching as the India-China rivalry. But the Sino-Russian honeymoon has given way to suspicion and competition.
The fourth summit at the year end was like a toast to the New Year, with India and Japan unveiling an “action plan” with specific measures to implement their 2008 security agreement. Hatoyama’s visit, intended to fulfil a 2006 bilateral commitment to hold an annual summit meeting, indicated that Japan will maintain its priority on closer engagement with India, despite the sea change in Japanese politics. Hatoyama’s election was even more historic than Obama’s because his Democratic Party of Japan ousted the Liberal Democratic Party that had held power almost without interruption for more than five decades.
India’s security relationship with Japan is one of the fastest growing, with the two countries holding an annual strategic dialogue between their foreign ministers, an annual defence ministerial meeting and other service-to-service dialogues. Now under their otherwise modest “action plan”, they have agreed to an annual senior-level 2+2 dialogue involving foreign and defence ministry officials together on both sides.
Economic ties also are taking off, with India overtaking China as the magnet for the largest Japanese foreign direct investment since 2008. The highlight of the Indian Prime Minister’s Tokyo visit this year could be the signing of a free trade agreement, if the remaining differences are sorted out in the ongoing negotiations.
The Indo-Japanese security agreement actually was modelled on the 2007 Australia-Japan defence accord. Now, the new India-Australia security accord mirrors the structure and large parts of the content of the Indo-Japanese and Australian-Japanese agreements. All three are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation and obligate their signatories to work together on security in Asia, while recognizing a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law.
These bilateral accords open the possibility of strategic triangles working in concert with each other—India-Japan-US, India-Australia-US, India-Japan-Australia and Australia-Japan-US. An India-Russia-Japan strategic triangle also can greatly contribute to Asian stability, but so long as Japanese-Russian ties remain hostage to history there is little hope of such a configuration. Last year’s Russia-Japan nuclear deal, though, offered a glimmer of hope.
The changing Asian balance of power underscores the imperative for India to forge closer strategic partnerships with varied countries to pursue a variety of interests in different settings and equations. A strategic partnership, however, cannot mean an exclusive relationship. The US, for example, is not allowing its new partnership with India or its long-standing alliance with Japan to come in the way of its growing strategic cooperation with China. Pragmatism in foreign policy demands multiple partnerships with interlocking interests, thereby guaranteeing mutual benefit and one’s own strategic autonomy.
Strategic partnerships are an aid, not a substitute to a nation discharging its primary duty to secure its frontiers and economic interests. Inadequate capabilities to deter an armed attack or an undue security dependency on a third party can easily negate the value of multiple strategic partnerships. Thus, to pre-empt aggression, a nation must have its own requisite strength and clout.
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The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters due to a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through frequent cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh.
The more muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new US-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As former US president George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.”
The Barack Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India.
Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint
Indeed, the present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago when China—taking advantage of the advent of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon—routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression.The new tensions are of recent origin. Until mid-2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled an important agreement identifying six broad principles to govern a border settlement.
But after the separate unveiling of the Indo-US defence framework accord and nuclear deal in 2005, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed. That gave rise to a pattern that has become commonplace since: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed websites ratcheting up an “India threat” scenario.
A US-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-US global strategic partnership, although it falls short of a formal military alliance, triggered alarm bells in Beijing. That raises the question whether New Delhi helped create the context, however inadvertently, for the new Chinese assertiveness by agreeing to participate in US-led “multinational operations”, share intelligence and build military-to-military interoperability (key elements of the defence framework accord) and to become the US’ partner on a new “global democracy initiative”—a commitment found in the nuclear agreement-in-principle.
While Beijing cannot hold a veto over New Delhi’s diplomatic or strategic initiatives, couldn’t India have avoided creating an impression that it was potentially being primed as a new junior partner (or spoke) in the US’ hub-and-spoke global alliance system?
India—with its hallowed traditions of policy independence—is an unlikely candidate to be a US ally in a patron-client framework. But the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to the US—a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and defence transactions.
New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that, in such a situation, the US actually would offer little comfort to India. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot.
For one, Beijing calculatedly has sought to badger India on multiple fronts: military—Chinese cross-border incursions nearly doubled in one year, from 140 in 2007 to 270 in 2008, according to Indian defence officials, with “no significant increase”, to quote the foreign secretary, in the 2009 level; diplomatic—for instance, strongly protesting a prime ministerial visit to Arunachal Pradesh and issuing visas on a separate sheet to Jammu and Kashmir residents; and multilateral—launching a diplomatic offensive to undercut Indian sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, as at the Asian Development Bank. For another, the US—far from coming to India’s support—has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the existing territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues—from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal Pradesh issue—Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing.
That, in effect, has left India on its own. The Obama administration isn’t unfriendly to India. It just doesn’t see India as able to make an important difference to US geopolitical interests. As his secretary of state Hillary Clinton did in February, US President Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China—the high spot—while skipping India.
But playing to India’s weakness for flattery, Obama is to massage its ego by honouring it with his presidency’s first state dinner. Such a glitzy affair jibes with Washington’s current business focus on India: Promoting big-ticket export items such as nuclear power reactors and conventional weapons, while prodding New Delhi to be helpful on the Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) front.
To be sure, Obama wants to advance the Indo-US partnership, as part of which New Delhi has placed arms purchase orders, according to the Indian ambassador to the US, worth a staggering $3.5 billion just last year. But he also has signalled that such a relationship with India will not be at the expense of Washington’s fast-growing ties with Beijing. The US needs Chinese capital inflows as much as China needs US consumers—an economic interdependence of such import that snapping it would amount to mutually assured destruction (MAD). Even politically, China, with its international leverage, counts for more in US policy than New Delhi or Tokyo. Indeed, as the US-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of the US’ existing military or strategic tie-ups in Asia will become pronounced.
Against that background, it is no surprise that Washington now intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal Pradesh or trilateral naval manoeuvres with India and Japan. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh issue, just as its ally Australia has done rather publicly.
Left to fend for itself both on the China and Af-Pak fronts, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any potential aggravation or confrontation with Beijing. Discretion, after all, is the better part of valour. India, however, cannot afford to be out on a limb. The Indo-US partnership has turned into a great opportunity for Washington to win multi-billion dollar Indian contracts and co-opt India in strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side or to extend political help on regional and international issues.
Joint military exercises indeed have become a basis to make India buy increasing quantities of US arms so as to build compatibility and interoperability between the two militaries. Even counterterrorism is emerging as a major area of defence sales to India, despite the US doing little to help dismantle Pakistan’s state-run terror complex against India or bring the real masterminds of the Mumbai attacks to justice.
With Obama pursuing a Sino-centric Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government ensconced in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, it is apparent that New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone terribly wrong. In its exuberance, the government had convinced itself that the way for India to carve out a larger international role was to bandwagon with the US, instead of following China’s example and rapidly developing comprehensive national power.
Yet the present muscular Chinese approach, paradoxically, reinforces the very line of Indian thinking that engendered greater Chinese assertiveness—that India has little option other than to align with the US. Such thinking blithely ignores the limitations of the Indo-US partnership arising from the vicissitudes and compulsions of US policy. Washington indeed is showing through its growing strategic cooperation with China and Pakistan that it does not believe in exclusive strategic partnership in any region.
India can wield international power only through the accretion of its own economic and military strength. In fact, the only way China can be deterred from making a land grab across the line of control or nibbling further at Indian territories is for India to have sufficient nuclear and missile capability. So, augmenting India’s deterrent capabilities to credible but minimal levels has to be priority No. 1. A stable, mutually beneficial equation with China is more likely to be realized if there is no trans-Himalayan military imbalance or Indian security dependency on a third party.