The "post-post-Cold War" era has begun. In
fact, it began in early 2006, by which time it was
clear that the hyperpower of the 1990s, United
States, had been checked in its tracks in one of
the most vital theaters of our times, the Middle
East.
The US debacle in Iraq, however,
coincided with equally dramatic developments in
Eurasia. The unprecedented resurgence of Russia,
shortly after it was written off, has infused the
international system with a balance of power that
can only
suggest the multipolar order
has arrived. The geopolitical arbitration by
Russia on the Iran issue has been the watershed
event.
As New Delhi gradually adjusts to
an altered geopolitical environment, vestiges of
an earlier era of foreign policy ineluctably
continue to influence the strategic discourse. The
discord and collaboration among the Great Powers
over the past year can easily be misinterpreted
and produce narrow policy choices. Thus, it is
imperative to discern the pertinent variables in
today's global politics before debating specific
tactics.
A world restored To be
sure, tectonic shifts in the geoeconomic sphere
over the past decade have underpinned the
structural change that is visible today. At its
core lies the well-documented economic renaissance
of the Asian region in general and the Chinese
economy in particular, a process that entailed a
massive reallocation of productive capacities in
favor of these economies that in turn supply the
US and European Union primarily via China. In
mid-2006, China surpassed the US as the world's
second-largest exporter (third-largest importer).
The current phase of globalization must be
contrasted with previous episodes. Unlike earlier
eras where industrial structures were vertically
integrated and thus nationally concentrated,
today's system, with the exception of core
strategic sectors, is characterized by
horizontally integrated transnational production
value-chains. This stems from technological
innovations whereby physical and virtual
connectivity has risen steeply. But in this
"flattening" trend also lie the roots of systemic
change - the relative ease and frequency of
transfer of manufacturing industries from the US
and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development to Asia, with China at the epicenter.
Two significant trends may be noted. First, the
Western monopoly over international capital flows
has been broken. This is underscored by the fact
that Asian economies account for the bulk of
global foreign exchange reserves, a manifestation
of the large trade surpluses that these economies
run with the US and EU.
There are already
indications that a portion of such reserves will
be an important source of future investment flows.
Second, the global energy order has witnessed
seminal reconfigurations. The national oil
companies of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries and Russia, today, account for
about 85% of hydrocarbon reserves. The cumulative
surplus (2002-2007) of oil exporters is estimated
at US$1.7 trillion. The structural effects of the
concentration of supply and demand patterns
suggest that high hydrocarbon prices may not be a
temporary phenomenon.
Besides the obvious
consequence that Western oil majors no longer
dominate energy security issues, is the
geoeconomic implication of the petrodollar (or
petroeuro) economies now deploy a high portion of
their surpluses toward internal rejuvenation,
consumption and foreign direct investment (FDI) in
Asia and Europe (by Russia), whereas previously
revenues were recycled primarily to the US.
Gulf oil exporters, the seventh-largest
"emerging market", are now actively promoting
two-way linkages with Asia, supplying energy and
redeploying their financial wealth in return for
technology, inexpensive Chinese products,
infrastructure and military hardware.
Suffice it to say, such developments have
significantly reduced the leverage of the United
States and made its economic instrument
ineffective at best or self-defeating at worst,
thus leaving few alternatives to multilateral
solutions.
Military power is, undeniably,
the ultima ratio in international politics,
and the aforementioned geoeconomic patterns are
insufficient to make the world multipolar. The
United States continues to be the largest defense
spender by far and has been relentless in its
drive for innovations in high technology.
Additionally, the partial autonomy of
action of the US's alliance partners - the EU
through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and
Japan through the 1952 security treaty - in
military affairs ensures that it has a favorable
alignment externally to complement its internal
military capabilities. Indeed, the US has sought
to link these disparate bilateral military
alliances into an integrated security system.
If this were all, the system would still
be unipolar. However, the addition of Russia, a
state geographically placed to influence multiple
theaters on the geopolitical chessboard, as an
autonomous actor in foreign affairs, has altered
the relative power of US-led alliances. The
sophistication of Russia's military-industrial
complex, a legacy of over 60 years of research and
development, and the fact that it is the only
Great Power that possesses a credible nuclear
deterrent vis-a-vis the US, ensures that the
current distribution of military power, albeit
asymmetric, is enough to ensure that unrestrained
US action is no longer possible. For such is the
logic of nuclear weapons.
Indeed, American
attempts at nuclear primacy (ie missile defense)
are predicated on circumventing this logic, first
explicitly demonstrated by US's unilateral exit
from the Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty in 2001.
The inadvertent result, however, is that the
US-Russia nuclear status has been perpetuated and
Russian innovations in the ballistic missile
sphere will preserve its leverage in global
geopolitics by its ability to offer its nuclear
umbrella.
China, though a formidable
military power, has yet to indigenously develop
conventional and strategic capabilities to match
the US-Russia duopoly. Nonetheless, China's
military doctrine that lays emphasis on asymmetric
acquisitions and strategies has ensured a balance
of power in the theater most vital to it - the
Strait of Taiwan.
Patterns of
interaction India, it can be stated
unequivocally, today faces its most propitious
environment, after almost 15 years of
"unipolarity". Given a range of options hitherto
unavailable, it would be unfortunate and extremely
costly if New Delhi's external conduct was unable
to exploit the present diplomatic revolution.
Some commentary, however, continues to be
predicated on the operations of a system that no
longer prevails. Such confusion partially stems
from the complexities of current interactions,
which if interpreted in narrow terms may indeed
lead to fallacious assumptions and consequently
influence the conduct of Indian foreign policy.
An example may be instructive. Strategic
coordination between Russia and China as it
manifested itself in the Iran issue, while not an
irrelevant development, led to predictions of new
blocs emerging to contain the US, with the
corollary that India would need to choose between
the US and its allies or Russia-China. The
emergence of multilateral "blocs" such as the
Russia-China-India trilateral format and the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) have lent
currency to such views.
This is a false
choice. While Russia and China have enunciated
their desire to coordinate their actions on
several issues, first expressed in their strategic
partnership agreement of 2001, and have done so
subsequently, they have simultaneously sought to
deepen their interaction with the actors they seek
to balance.
This stems from the
geoeconomic patterns that were alluded to earlier.
Today, China is a $1 trillion exporter (37% of
gross domestic product) that is heavily immersed
into the system, and in 2008 will become the
world's biggest exporter. The economic realism
underlying Russia's energy strategy in particular
and the expansion of its natural resource complex
in general implies it, too, is seeking to
integrate into global economic processes. In sum,
neither state is seeking to cultivate exclusive
partnerships.
Multilateral endeavors,
manifested in the trilateral format and the SCO,
are but pragmatic attempts at collective diplomacy
to manage regional interaction in a common
geopolitical space and perhaps more importantly to
exploit geoeconomic opportunities: given the
dearth of effective pan-Asian institutions, hardly
an unwelcome development.
To appreciate
this phenomenon it is vital to distinguish today's
multipolar system with its bipolar predecessor.
One of the most important variables that
differentiates the current plural order with the
bipolar era is that in the latter, each bloc was
almost entirely self-sufficient, with minimal
economic interdependence.
Indeed, economic
interdependence between the superpower blocs was
so peripheral that it led Kenneth Waltz, the dean
of contemporary realist thought, to dismiss the
trend altogether. Of course, military
interdependence between the US and Soviet Union
was vital, and from that stemmed the strategic
stability witnessed through the Cold War.
Today, however, the erstwhile "blocs" are
much more engaged at an economic and thus
political level. This is not to suggest that
geoeconomic competition has ceased and that states
will pursue an international division of labor
over relative national gains. For that would be
suicidal. But certainly the zero-sum premise has
been tempered where opportunities for mutual
benefit exist. US-China relations epitomize this
phenomenon: the mutual dependence of the US
economy whereby it is the largest importer from
China, which in turn finances a major portion of
the huge US current-account deficit. Note that the
relationship has transformed from the asymmetry
that existed in the 1990s when China was highly
dependent on American markets and investment,
toward the "common vulnerability" that currently
prevails.
Energy linkages between
Russia-EU - originally with and via Germany, but
now extended to an array of direct bilateral gas
deals between Gazprom and EU members, ranging
across Ukraine to Portugal - is another example of
mutual dependence. This is since supply security
for the EU is as vital as the demand security for
Russian hydrocarbons, especially gas, where
buyers-sellers are entwined by rigid delivery
infrastructure (ie pipelines).
The
implication is that traditional alliance-based
relationships are being affected and states are
adopting a relatively multidimensional foreign
policy. Of course, states that are already
integrated within US-led alliances are finding it
relatively harder to chart an autonomous course,
given their overwhelming military dependence on
the US - especially the EU and Japan. Yet, even
for such states or groupings there is unlikely to
be an inevitable consensus with the alliance
leader. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has
expressed it succinctly: "Any attempts to restore
the bygone trans-Atlantic unity as an isolated
aspect of international life can have only partial
success."
For New Delhi, the implications
of the current patterns of interaction must be
clear. Bluntly put, neither Beijing nor Washington
will sacrifice their bilateral relationship over
India, despite US efforts to cultivate India as a
potential alliance partner. This, arguably, has
more to do with enhancing US leverage on India
rather than solely containing China. Similarly, in
China-Japan relations, the bilateral economic
interaction is too high for Japan to seek
exclusive relations with India. Thus, exploiting
the interstices in today's balance of power
requires far more sophistication than in the
bipolar world, where neither bloc had economic
leverage on the other.
Even Russia, which
is economically the most self-sufficient actor in
the system, an autonomy that stems from its
possession of every major natural resource in its
frontiers, would be unwilling to forgo its
privileged nuclear duopoly with the US. And given
the dual-use of the atom, it would thus be
unwilling to unilaterally overturn the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) order, as Iran has
discovered. However, considering the US has
already accepted India as a unique case in the
NPT, there is no good reason to assume that Russia
will not follow suit.
Finally, it can be
opined that the global architecture of
international relations, constructed in the
aftermath of World War II, and perhaps
illegitimate to some, still retains a measure of
durability.
Two reasons can be put
forward: first, the US, Russia and China as joint
managers of the international system are, in the
final analysis, status-quo powers that can advance
their foreign-policy objectives (including
balancing the US or each other) within prevailing
institutional arrangements. This despite the
redistribution of comprehensive power in favor of
the latter two.
A balanced US would prefer
bargaining in the United Nations Security Council
to the alternative - "multipolar chaos", a system
without rules. Similarly, the incentive for Russia
and China to rewrite rules would be limited. What
is likely to evolve is that the US unilateralism
of the 1990s will be replaced by multilateral
bargaining on major international issues.
Second, since the advent of the nuclear
age, diplomacy among the Great Powers has occurred
against the backdrop of the unprecedented
destructive power of contemporary military
technology, which is perhaps the strongest
argument for peaceful systemic change going
forward. Suffice it to say, the overlapping
bilateral linkages that involve all the major
centers of power imply that a "friend" or "foe"
choice for India can no longer be pursued without
high costs. Rather, India must adopt a
multi-vector philosophy - a multi-dimensional
principle will facilitate greater maneuvering
space within the dynamic web of international
alignments, and enable New Delhi to wholly exploit
the geoeconomic and geopolitical options that may
become available at any given moment.
One
can classify such a foreign policy as "neutral",
"independent", "autonomous" or even a contemporary
"active non-alignment" purged of its ideological
baggage.
Zorawar Daulet Singh,
who holds a master's degree in international
relations from the School of Advanced
International Studies, Johns Hopkins University,
is an international relations and
strategic-affairs analyst based in New Delhi
zorawar.dauletsingh@gmail.com
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