Competition Vs Cooperation

Pravin Sawhney

Leaving the Kremlin after his March 2023 visit, Chinese President Xi Jinping said to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in the full view of the media, “Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.”

Xi was neither being pompous nor was he exaggerating. Together with Putin, Xi has unveiled an unparalleled and unbeatable vision of the new world order. Premised on the Chinese philosophy of win-win as against the traditional geopolitical mantra of zero-sum, Xi is looking at uniting the world through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): a network of cooperative roads, seas lanes, and hard and soft cyberspace connectivity for seamless flow of trade and traffic. This vision is complemented by Putin’s ‘pivot to Asia’ vision spelt out in 2012 for Greater Eurasia (Eurasia plus ASEAN, India, Pakistan, the Arab world, and Iran) which seeks to create an economic cooperation zone from Eurasia (Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) to Asia-Pacific, thereby fusing the two visions together.

That the Global South (except for India) sees in this ‘once in a 100-year change’ an opportunity to uplift its people and economy was evident from the third Belt and Road Forum (BRF) to mark the 10^th Anniversary of the BRI, held in Beijing on 17 and 18 October. Nearly 150 Global South nations had representation at the forum with 23 heads of state participating in it. Of course, Putin was the guest of honour. And India was not invited.

While the two global powers, China and Russia, are forging the path towards a new cooperative world, on the other side of the world, the third global power, the United States, still tied to old ideas of competition, is floundering in the absence of a vision for the new world. This confusion was summed up by US national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, recently. In his essay in Foreign Affairs magazine (November/December 2023), he wrote that America must adjust to “the main challenge it faces: competition (with China) in an age of interdependence.”

As the world is interdependent, the natural thing should be cooperation and not competition. And since there is a thin line between competition and conflict, in his State of the Union address in February, US President Joe Biden clarified that “the US seeks competition, not conflict.” Worse, there is no clarity on what the competition should deliver. Most agree that like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the disintegration of China cannot be the end-state since as the world’s largest manufacturing hub, it happens to be the primary trading partner of