The geopolitical context is changing rapidly and hence the search for a new framework is imperative.
The world in flux.
Very early on after the end of the Cold War, Christopher Layne wrote a seminal article, “The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise” contending that America’s unipolar moment was transitory and that competing powers will eventually rise over a course of time. Such a proposition broadly postulated the eventual rise of multipolar features in the international system. By then, the Chinese economy had opened as a trading nation for more than a decade, and was steadily socialising into the global economic structure under the guiding hands of the United States that had co-opted China since the rapprochement. India’s economic opening roughly coincided with the end of the Cold War, and was taking nascent steps to becoming an emerging economy. Economies in East Asia, also called the “Asian tigers”, were emerging as pivotal stakeholders of the global economy, alongside Japan and China. The world really seemed poised for a more multipolar future in the economic realm while being still unipolar in the military dimension given the oversized influence of the US military firepower and technical edge, particularly after the demonstration of its revolution in military affairs (RMA) during the first Iraq war. Beijing watched acutely and adopted the RMA in its own military modernization, which was yet to become a challenge for the United States. But around the turn of the new century, the United States started sensing the rise of a potential competitor to its hegemony.
The turn of the century also brought an extended era of America’s global war on terrorism, and the “imperial overstretch” that Paul Kennedy wrote about in “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” began to take shape through America’s costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, dubbed as “forever wars”. Such a strategic distraction for the US allowed Beijing the vacuum to increase its material capabilities and influence, relatively unchallenged. China found the geopolitical space and opportunity to put into practice Sun Tzu’s stratagem of subduing the enemy without fighting, particularly in what is now called the Indo-Pacific region. With the United States losing its economic sheen with the onset of the 2008 financial meltdown, Beijing left no stone unturned to trumpet the fall of the American model and the rise of the Chinese one. Indeed, the history of the battle of “best form of governance” had just about started and not ended as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his post-Cold-War thesis. The “Washington Consensus” of open economies leading to democratic reforms seemed to have met its strongest nemesis, in what began to be called the “Beijing Consensus” mixing the returns of an open economy with a polity centred on the mission and vision of a single political party.
In many ways, China was gradually becoming the indispensable trading nation of the global economy, reshaping the dynamics of global supply chains, and the very mechanics of a globalised economy. As such, the bubble of America’s unipolar moment was bursting and the illusion became more pronounced, as the United States woke up to the China challenge and went looking for strategic partners, to add to the quiver of its traditional transatlantic and transpacific allies. The new partners would be countries that shared the concerns of a rising China, that was asserting its power in the eastern hemisphere and globally. New strategic realities had emerged and the superpower clearly could not go alone. America’s 20th century alliance framework needed to adapt to a 21st century strategy of dealing with more independent partners, that had mutuality of interest in managing an assertive China, but at the same intended to practise their strategic autonomies and maintain their playbooks of dealing with Beijing tailored to their own strengths and vulnerabilities.
This new strategic landscape emitted clearer signals of a world order in transition to a multipolar one, with Washington recognising its inherent limitations and adapting to the ongoing power transition and diffusion. However, as the two largest economies of the world, and with China acquiring growing power projection and forward posturing to deny access and area of operations to the US military in the Western Pacific, loud murmurs of a potential duopoly, dubbed as a power condominium or a G2 emerged. Such a composition clearly challenged the emergence of a multipolar world, and exposed the inherent inertia of great power relationships to adopt more bipolar features. Recently, US President Donald Trump’s reference to “G2” before the meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping ignited some unease, particularly in New Delhi. Such a reference came in the midst of extended uncertainties in the India-US strategic partnership and a breakthrough in India-China relationship that continues to be seen with cautious optimism at best.
Conflict zones are often the laboratories of a shifting world order. Some are in the midst of hot wars and are literal battlefields, while others are theatres of power projection and politico-economic tussles among major powers. Strategic ramifications of the Russia-Ukraine war, geopolitical turbulence in West Asia, a fractured transatlantic alliance, shifting amity and enmity in Asia, supply chain transitions and the new scramble for critical and rare earth minerals reflect a world where developments far outpace states’ capacity to negotiate new terms of engagement and normative structures. The world is undergoing an era of uncertainty where the difference between noises and real issues is unsettling to say the least. Noise can become policy and policy can become noise quite literally. Amidst the unsettled negotiations of the Russia-Ukraine war, the fissures of the old West will take long to heal. Washington is showing limitations in intent and capability, and forces within the United States that determine its foreign policy outcomes, are clearly showing extreme hesitations to undertake any grand steps, that is not weighed on economic returns.
India needs to navigate the strategic ramifications of a “New West” besides dealing with the new permutations and combinations emerging in geopolitical theatres closer to home. In this task, New Delhi needs to be acutely mindful of the limitations that power asymmetry vis-à-vis countries materially more endowed than itself, will impose on its strategic and tactical decisions. The stress tests of strategic autonomy will be high in times of erratic behaviour of great powers and the inertia towards more bipolar features of the world order. Lately, a proposition had emerged that stronger multipolarity can lead to weaker multilateralism but even the first proposition is questionable in the current scenario. Is multipolarity really becoming stronger, or is it passing through its greatest test of survival even before it had truly taken confident strides? Is multipolarity in more precarious conditions than just being messy? To paraphrase an earlier proposition vis-à-vis unipolarity, is 21st century multipolarity merely a moment, and if so, are the illusions of multipolarity becoming starker and unmistakable? Does this call for a rethinking on one of India’s most identifiable foreign policy dictums: that the country’s interests would be best served in a multipolar world order? Does this call for New Delhi to prepare for the “good, bad, and the ugly” of a world seemingly turning more bipolar, as the quest for multipolarity passes through the roughest storms in its contemporary lifetime? The geopolitical context is changing rapidly and hence the search for a new framework is imperative. Does this mean the search for the practice of a strategic autonomy that can withstand the pressures of a new world order that might not be as multipolar as was broadly expected?
Monish Tourangbam is a Senior Research Consultant at the Chintan Research Foundation (CRF), New Delhi.
