Political Olympics in Beijing:The US is reaching out to China because of Russia

We are witnessing another twist in the kaleidoscope of the world order. Because of their convenient quadrennial occurrence, the Olympics are a good point to mark a shift in not just sports, but global affairs. Yesterday we carried an article noting that China could overtake the US as a “sporting power” by the time of the London Games in 2012. Today, I want to look at the issue through the prism of geopolitics.
From China’s point of view, the Beijing Olympics were meant to tell us what China has achieved and that it is now a top-ranking world power in every sense of the term. Remarkably, world powers, too, underscored that verdict. I say “remarkably” because just months ago, with the Tibetan protests at their height, it appeared that the world powers were determined to rain on China’s party. But on August 7th and 8th you only had to look at the love-fest that Hu Jintao, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin were involved in during the pre-inaugural banquet and the inaugural ceremony to understand that China’s Olympian moment had indeed arrived.


The presence of the world leaders was no accident; they were responding to the shifting plates of the international system. It was not entirely a coincidence that the day Putin was watching the Olympic inaugural ceremony, Russian forces were invading Georgia.

Russia

Despite somewhat difficult relations with China during his presidency, George W. Bush came to celebrate Hu Jintao’s party in response to the oil- fueled resurgence of Russia. Beijing, ever-wary of Moscow, played its role as the good host to the hilt ignoring Bush’s for-the-record references to human rights and freedom. The Chinese may have settled their border dispute with Russia, but memories are long in Beijing, especially about the way in which China lost vast tracts of land to Imperial Russia during its century of shame. The Chinese are bound to have noticed that Russian arms exports have shown a steady downward drift as Moscow acts to preserve its own military edge over China.
Bush’s performance, a balancing act of enjoying the Games, praising China and at the same time trying to nudge it along better human rights observances is part of the new US strategy. Gone is the neocon effort to depict China as the new Soviet Union. The aim now seems to have reverted to the idea of coopting China and encouraging it to be more democratic and to play by the international rules which the US still defines.

America

The US argument on China is summed up by US Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson in an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. He said that some in the US argued that China was a threat and must be countered, while others like him felt that its growth “is an opportunity for the U.S. economy.” The challenge for Washington was to manage China through engagement.”
That this is the new strategy was underscored in an uncharacteristically nuanced speech by President Bush at the dedication ceremony for the huge new US embassy building in Beijing on August 7. He pressed all the right buttons on Chinese history, culture and its recent economic achievements. Even his references to the need for a regime of open trade giving way to a political atmosphere of open ideas was done in a tone of talking to Beijing, rather than talking down to it. “Change in China,” he declared, “will arrive on its own terms and in keeping with its own history and its own traditions.” This was a clear message that the US no longer sees the Communist party run government there as somehow transient.
All this is not about the economic rise of China alone. We know that the Chinese are now set to overtake the US as the largest producer of manufactured goods in the world, four years ahead of time because of the weakened American economy. The US will lose its 100-year dominance in this sector, but looked at another way, the Chinese will merely resume a position they occupied for four centuries till the Opium war of 1840.
This is also about the rise of Russia. They may have been intervening in a local quarrel, in Georgia, but their larger message was to tell the west that the climate in Moscow had changed and that Russia would act decisively to protect its national interests. Georgia, you may recall, is the region through which a US-backed pipeline commissioned in 2006 broke the Russian monopoly of Caspian oil. Just the other day, Russia had threatened to deploy nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba in retaliation for what it saw was an American provocation in putting their missile-shield radars in Poland and Ukraine, its erstwhile “allies.”

India

So what we saw in Beijing on those two August days was a visible manifestation of the shifting tectonic plates of the world order. There were other leaders there as well — Yasuo Fukuda of Japan, Nicholas Sarkozy of France and our own Sonia Gandhi. But we are merely a supporting cast to the larger players. Ms Gandhi was received with due courtesy as the leader of India’s ruling party. The Chinese understand dyarchy where state and political power are shared, but India was not really in Beijing, either in the sporting events or in its politics.
China itself remains opaque. While its undoubted economic prowess is on display, there are unmistakable signs that its economy is slowing down. As it moves by design into the high-tech, high-innovation regime, its leaders need to also take care of the tens of millions who work in its low-tech, high volume sectors. Despite censorship, the internet has opened up China in an unprecedented way. Beijing may have been gratified by the nationalistic feelings that erupted in the wake of the Tibetan protests, but they know nationalism is a monster that cannot be easily controlled, by the party, or by anyone. Within China, the debate over whether China needs to integrate itself with the world system or go its own way, as it has done till now, has not been decided either way.
China has so far observed mercantilist principles in its dealings with the world — putting economics ahead of everything else. But the luxury of refusing to take positions on issues like Darfur may not last too long. If China wishes to be a world leader, it must display leadership, which also means taking the world community along with it on matters of international concern.
Nothing in these trends affects India in a negative way. We may not be growing as fast as China, but we are growing. “Rising India” can take advantage of China “risen” which has become an object of envy and fear in many world capitals. We are not competing with China for anything, most certainly not in the Olympics.
Our inner divisions and weak polity inhibit any aggressive Indian response to the rise of China. On the other hand, the Chinese ascendancy has pushed many countries to come closer to us as a way of hedging their bets on China. The problem is that there is no consensus on even the most obvious measures that would help India, such as the Indo-US nuclear deal which will remove India from a set of pariah regimes and provide it the wherewithal to make up its abysmal energy deficit.
In these circumstances, India will have to be a middle-of-the-pack runner till it can gather the wherewithal and the nerve to move to the front.
This article appeared first in Mail Today August 14, 2008

Bush's system-destructive years provide a clean slate for an American renewal

The democratic world seems to be coming up with a magic figure for the tenure of a high office. It is approximately eight years. Margaret Thatcher exceeded it by three years and had to be pushed out of office, as was Tony Blair who was two years over par. The Americans, whose love for organisation is well known, have institutionalised it to two 4-year terms for their president.
But the pushing process begins early; ask George W Bush. Till two years ago he could do no wrong. He led his country into an extraordinary adventure in Iraq and they voted him back to power in 2004 with a greater majority. He used the fiscal surpluses he inherited to pursue the conservatives’ favourite agenda — tax cuts — even after defence expenditure soared. He systematically undermined American civil liberties and the people seemed not to care.
Bush has already been condemned to the prison specially reserved for democratic politicians — irrelevance. Tony Blair is there, as are V.P. Singh, Inder Gujral and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Politics is a cruel profession. It takes a protagonist to unprecedented heights and then, without fear or favour, lets go of them. You can be a dictator like Stalin or a Mao, feared and adored in their lifetimes, but getting their comeuppance in history.
The high, and the let down, for politicians in the democratic system may not be as dramatic, but it must nevertheless be painful. In the United States, the process usually begins with a president’s last state of the union address. Last year around this time, when Bush delivered the address, the economy was doing well and the war badly. Poor Dubya, he got slammed for the war and little praise for the economy. This time, the war in Iraq is doing well and the economy on the brink of recession, and no one is talking about the war.

Iraq

He was a Teflon president till last November when his party lost its majority in the US Congress because of the war in Iraq. Given the iron control that the neocons retained on the system, it is more than likely that in the coming years the Bush “legacy” will be more about discovering the ways and means through which the President damaged and devalued the system, rather than the touted achievements. Last week, the Center of Public Integrity went through the process of counting the lies of his administration on the issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction and concluded that it had lied on a grand total of 935 occasions in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Bush has sought to strike an uncharacteristically non-confrontationist tone in his latest state of the union address, hoping perhaps to use the next 51 weeks that he had to salvage something of a legacy. But his thrust still seems to be the “what’s in it for me” approach. Take the war in Iraq. Violence may be down, but anyone who believes that the addition of 20,000 soldiers changed things around in Iraq is living in cloud cuckoo land. The change has come by the creation of the 80,000 strong Sunni militia paid $300 per month by the US to police the Sunni-majority areas. As for the Shias, they run the government and are biding their time for Uncle Sam’s departure. What will happen to this militia when the US leaves, no doubt after Bush is well settled at his ranch in Crawford, Tx? No one knows. But one thing is clear, neither the Iraqi army, nor the national police are capable of providing security for the country that has been torn apart by a war of George W. Bush’s making.

Afghanistan

Typically, Bush has sought to use this last opportunity to push for institutionalising his tax cuts. The cuts, heavily weighted in favour of the rich, are supposed to produce a budget surplus by 2012 — the end of the next president’s first term. But the predictions do not take into account the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that currently cost some $200 billion per annum.
The US president has simply papered over the huge problems confronting the war in Afghanistan. They are not just those connected to fighting the resurgent Taliban and the deteriorating situation in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. They are related to the quarrels within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and its partners on the way the Afghan mission should be prosecuted, and the contribution of the nations involved. As it is, only the British, Canadians and Dutch, along with the Americans, permit their troops to fight. The others focus on “reconstruction”. Yet if there was a single issue that was to define the Bush Administration it was the “war on terror”; but the struggle in Afghanistan indicates that it is far from being won, leave alone fought with any degree of effectiveness.
The problem for Bush, and for the rest of the world, is that the American voter has moved on and is focusing on the coming presidential poll. As of now the election is wide open. We are not sure as to who would be the Democratic and Republican candidates, and circumstances could actually take the race to the summer when the delegates elected at the primaries will formally vote for their respective candidate in party conventions. Predicting what way the election will play out is even more confounding because different outcomes could be suggested with different pairs of contestants.
But certain consequences of the Bush presidency are becoming evident. According to the Economist, “the proportion of Americans who think their country should be active in the world is the lowest it has been since the early 1990s.” This is bad news. Someone recently pointed out that we have reached an era where when America sneezes the world does not catch a cold. But if the turbulence in the world economy is anything to go by, the sneeze still has the ability to generate the shivers.
But the bigger problem the world will face from an isolationist America is that of managing the world system. In an alternative world, Bush should have led the world to an era where the United Nations could fulfill its mandate of maintaining world peace and directed the efforts to combat climate change. But that and other possibilities were wantonly destroyed by Bush’s policies.
Countries like India need to reflect on a US that is less attentive to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A facile view can be that with the big bad Americans back in their own country things will work just fine. But that is simply not true. There may be 25 NATO allies and 15 partner countries involved in Afghanistan. But more than half of the 53,000 troops there are American, as is the overwhelming portion of the air and naval effort.

Renewal

The US has been an interfering busy-body ever since they became the world’s hegemonistic power. But when it comes to crises — be it in Burma, Kenya, Darfur or Pakistan —the world looks to the US for leadership. The contrast with the rising role of China cannot be more marked. Beijing’s amoral approach to foreign policy has encouraged the proliferation of nuclear weapons to Pakistan and compelled countries like India to upturn its pro-democracy foreign policy in Burma.
Every election in a democratic country shifts its political paradigm. George Bush’s system-destructive tenure may actually be setting the stage for his successor to reconstruct the US on a new basis. That seems to be the sentiment that is propelling the once implausible candidacy of Barack Obama. The change of drivers has begun in the US, the old is virtually gone, but we do not yet know who will be the new driver, or his, or her’s, chosen direction.
This article appeared in Mail Today January 30, 2008