Indian foreign policy not in step with the new realities of the multipolar world

Pravin Sawhney

India’s foreign policy is on the wrong side of the once-in-a-century change. Being projectionist, it will not help uplift the lives of India’s 80 crore (800 million) poor people who live on government dole money. Since the once-in-a-century change has coincided with coming of the Modi government in May 2014, India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar is unwilling to accept that the American century is in sharp decline. Today, India’s national interest is far better served by being an equal partner working with mutual respect in the new global governance system anchored in Asia Pacific rather than being an adjunct to a nation which 12,000km away, and is no longer the sole power amongst nations.

The American century began in 1941 with the attack on the Pearl Harbour which ended American isolationism leading to American exceptionalism with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 when prominent American political pundits declared that the history had ended. The period from 1991 to 2013 saw America spreading its ideology of liberal democracy with messianic zeal across the global, overthrowing governments with mindless bloodshed or colour revolutions in what it called ruled-based order, where rules were made and unmade by it with little regard for the United Nations based international law.

The decline of the American century began in 2013 with the arrival of Xi Jinping as China’s president in November 2012. In his carefully chosen first foreign visit, Xi went to Moscow in March 2013 where confabulating with President Vladimir Putin, the two agreed that the world had become multipolar with emerging markets of numerous aspirational Global South nations (called the third world nations during the Cold War). Given this, they concurred that the multipolar world needed a new global governance system for the Global South distinct from the existing American order to prosper. China, given its spectacular economic rise, and Russia, with its resurgence under Putin were eminently qualified to device, protect and steer the new global governance system with four exceptional features the world had not seen before. These are sovereign equality for all nations big and small to pursue their own development paths; indivisible or relative security rather than absolute security which is a zero-sum game; UN based rules order and international law; and no export of ideology.

While I will discuss these concepts fulsomely as and when they come up in my subsequent columns, suffice to say now that most of the Global South nations which constitute 80 per cent of the world population have gravitated towards the new global vision since it promises development and prosperity.

Meanwhile, the multipolar world which has come to stay has three exceptional characteristics. One, instead of one great power—America—there are, at present, three great powers: America, China and Russia. A great power is a nation which has capability and political will to influence events anywhere in the world; it can defend its sovereignty by itself; and it cannot be coerced by any nation or bloc of nations to alter its policies and actions. Thus, only these three great powers have the ability to exercise strategic autonomy in their foreign policy. The remaining 190 nations (there are 193 nations under the UN), including India, do not have strategic autonomy. They instead hedge their bets to get the best from various quarters. For example, India, a large nation with 1.5 billion population constantly balances its foreign policy especially with the three great powers, just Nepal hedges its bets between its large neighbours, India and China, whose Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) it has joined.

Two, owing to the spectacular rise of China, the global geopolitics has shifted from trans-Atlantic to Asia Pacific region as referred to by China and Russia, or Indo Pacific as America and India call it. The reality which America has still not grasped is that its contest is not with China in the Indo Pacific as it believes. Instead, it is with Global South nations where China and Russia’s interests have spread. This means that the theatre of contestation between the three great powers will be Asia (West and East Asia), Africa and Oceania with the west Pacific and Indian Oceans as the global commons where the US and European nations have territorial stakes and vested interests. Beyond the main theatre, the great powers will also contest in Europe, Latin America and especially the Arctic region which owing to climate change has become the most challenging theatre since it provides closest connection between Asia and Europe.

And three, the emergence of new dual-use technologies led by Artificial Intelligence (AI) which are building blocks of the fourth industrial revolution have coincided with the global geopolitical transformation. The peculiarities of these technologies are (a) they are software based hence are changing rapidly (b) have utility both for commercial use and in national security including warfare, and (c) for the first time have brought America and China in direct contest for global supremacy since both nations have invested heavily in them. It would be fair to say that whichever of the two great powers’ new technologies are accepted by most nations could win the global contest. This would subdue the existing global turbulence. So, it will be about nation’s adopting ‘standards’ of American or Chinese new technologies for their development and prosperity as well as in national security for deterrence and warfighting.

This in short will be the scope of Samar Vivek in the coming months. My column will intersperse geopolitics, strategy, foreign policy, technology, security and defence matters.

(This article first appeared in Loksatta in Marathi on January 8)