What a silly storm in a small Indian teacup. We should be looking at the Chinese teacup. Obama goes to India to get something, flatters to sell by saying what the Indians wish to hear and the sated go ape. The wretched of the earth could not give a fig. They want food. Flattery is marketing, my dear compatriots, its all marketing. Those who fall for it soon come a cropper. Theres no gainsaying that the Indians fell for such crass K&F kowtowing and flattery.
Obama went to India with two objectives:
1. To get orders for US products to help kick start his economy and create jobs in his country. For this he offered India some lollipops that may not get past the new Congress.
2. To send China the message that the great USA is standing in Indias corner. China has been turning up the heat on India since early last year.
Should Obama have come to Pakistan too? Certainly not. Better this than the disgraceful six-hour Clinton visit, when he closed down our capital, changed the airport-to-city road to the wrong side, refused to be photographed with our president, lectured our chief justice at a luncheon not to hang Nawaz Sharif (no one was going to hang him anyway) and then had the gall to lecture us too. More to the point, we let him do all it.
America has now lumped Pakistan with Afghanistan, Iran and the Central Asian Republics, not South Asia. Thats their business. Its their way of looking at things. Lumping on the basis of strategic considerations is clearer than lumping according to geographical convenience.
Is China quaking? Obama has climbed the back of an Indian elephant to kill the Chinese tiger. China can appear in many incarnations. It can also become an ant who is better at guerilla warfare? An ant is like a guerilla that climbs up an elephants trunk and drives it crazy, until it is dead. Those who are riding it fall off and are crushed by the elephant or eaten when the ant reincarnates itself as a tiger. America should know this, if nothing else from Vietnam and Korea. If it still doesnt, sheer need for survival will, hopefully, make it understand. Obamas India visit should be viewed in this context.
We are in the throes of that rare seminal change that is caused by the collapse of a World Order. The period of transition turns order into disorder. The usual catalyst is acute financial strain caused by military misadventures that throw up internal contradictions long hidden beneath the surface. Stability returns only when a new order has been painfully forged with global and regional power shifting wholly or partially elsewhere, only to go again with the next great flux. Such is the ebb and flow of world power.
Todays flux is greater than those caused in the aftermath of the two World Wars with the Great Depression thrown in between. The map of Europe changed after both. Power shifted from a tired Europe to a budding United States and the Soviet Union after the Second World War, with the latter drawing down what Churchill called the Iron Curtain, resulting in the Cold War. The US became a new kind of superpower, largely without conquest and direct control colonisation without responsibility. We saw the advent of consensual rather than coercive hegemony. Instead of conquering and occupying territory (until Afghanistan and Iraq) like the European colonisers had done and the Soviets were still doing, America won world market shares and influence not only through great international marketing but more via economic domination by making countries indebted to it and its institutions. Countries always faced the threat of being left out in the cold (sanctions) the redoubtable carrot and stick policy rather than the European Divide and Rule doctrine.
America had learned well the lessons imparted by two of its early presidents. George Washington realised that America had fought its War of Independence against the British with British weapons. This was unacceptable. He set America on the course of producing its own arms and ammunition, and later marketing some often through the old gunrunner turned agent. No country was sovereign unless it was self-sufficient in defense. Quincy Adams declared that hegemony could be achieved by force or by making countries indebted that was the advent of consensual hegemony. Loans were given to create a false dawn of growth. Countries forgot the obvious doctrine of self-reliance. Loans became drugs and the countries became completely dependent on them, junkies at the mercy of the drug peddler and his touts. You see the results today. After the demise of the Gold Standard and the illusion of the mighty dollar as the benchmark currency of exchange, Americas headiness made it forget this cardinal principle and it became dangerously indebted to China. You see the results of that too today.
The Cold War was the Third World War, with the world largely divided between the US and the Soviet Blocs. And just as WWI became a new kind of war with the first-time use of aerial power and WWII with nuclear bombs, the Cold War was a new kind of war fought neither by conventional nor nuclear weapons but by the threat of the use of them. Like all wars, it too was about the control of world market shares and access to cheap labour, raw materials and markets made captive by economic dependence caused by increasing indebtedness to the US and its instruments. Proof lies in the fact that not one developing country has come out of the pejorative Third World category because of the Bretton Woods institutions. The Cold War ended with the demise of the Soviet Union and the US acquiring the mantle of sole superpower.
From 1990, we saw the dawn of a uni-polar world. It had to be brief. Unable to function outside an adversarial framework, America saw enemies where there were none. Instead, it chose to become the global bully led for eight years by the global village idiot. We then saw the advent of the Fourth World War with the events of 9/11, which is also a new kind of war. America has all but lost it in Afghanistan and is dangerously dependent on Pakistan to pull its chestnuts out of the fire.
Only one country remained outside the two main superpower blocs during the Cold War, its strength coming from its strong ideology. That was China. And it is China and only China that is emerging as the new superpower, to share global power and influence with a diminished United States. Whether it leads to another US-China Cold War remains to be seen, but if it does it will be a war America cannot win. I therefore hope that America realises that it can extract greater mileage if it works with China. That will require an extraordinary leap of maturity on its part, something that has been lacking since it acquired superpower status. It may be forced to learn now, since I find it difficult to accept that it wont realise that in an adversarial relationship with China it will be the ultimate loser. Both have a cooperative relationship with one another because right now both are dangerously dependent on one another. Andreas Lorenz calls this new possible relationship The Rise of Chimerica.
Now with another economic crisis triggered by the Afghan and Iraq wars, the uni-polar world is giving way to a multi-polar world as power shifts from West to East, from the US to China. The new Great Powers will have to again carve out the world into spheres of influence as they did in Yalta after World War II. To survive, America will have to share global power with China, and with Russia and perhaps Germany too getting some share of the pie. That could happen in Shanghai under the umbrella of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, with perhaps a new global currency, something new as benchmark and a new United Nations. Where does India come into this equation or for that matter and the so-called Muslim World?
The writer is a political analyst.
Email: humayun.gauhar@gmail.com