http://chellaney.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!4913C7C8A2EA4A30!533.entry
Why the Australia-India-Japan-U.S. Quadrilateral Initiative makes sense
The contours of a new geopolitical line-up in the Asia-Pacific are becoming
clearer
Differential equations
The Hindustan Times, February 13, 2008
By Brahma Chellaney
At a time when a qualitative reordering of power is reshaping international
equations, major players in the Asia-Pacific are playing down the risk that
contrasting political systems could come to constitute the main geopolitical
dividing line, potentially pitting a China-led axis of autocracies against a
constellation of democracies. The refrain of the players is that pragmatism,
not political values, would guide their foreign-policy strategy. Yet the new
Great Game under way plays up regime character as a key element.
India has already faced such a values-based geopolitical divide in its region,
but singly. The Sino-Pakistan nexus against India is unique: Never before in
history has one country armed another with nuclear weapons and missiles so as
to contain a third nation with which the two share common frontiers.
Authoritarian bonds have also been employed in more recent years to try and
open a new Chinese flank against India via Burma.
Indeed, the stated aim of the 1962 Chinese invasion - "to teach India a lesson"
- was rooted in a geopolitical divide centred on incompatible political values.
For Mao Zedong, that war was a means to humiliate and demolish India as an
alternative democratic model to totalitarian China. The 32-day aggression,
which Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed "Mao's India War",
helped boost China's image at India's expense.
More than 45 years later, the speed and scale of Asia's economic rise is
bringing new players, including India, into the world's geopolitical
marketplace. The eastward movement of power and influence, once concentrated in
the West, has been accompanied by a high-stakes competition for new strategic
tie-ups and greater access to resources, making strategic stability a key
concern in Asia.
In the absence of a common identity or institutional structures, one challenge
Asia faces is to develop shared norms and values, without which no community
can be built. Yet, with only 16 of the 39 Asian countries free, according to
Freedom House, creating common norms is a daunting task, especially when some
states still flout near-universal values.
A bigger Asian challenge is to banish the threat of hegemony by any single
power (as Europe has done) so that greater political understanding and trust
could be built. This challenge pits two competing visions. On one side is the
mythical 'Middle Kingdom' whose foreign policy seeks to make real the legend
that drives its official history - China's centrality in the world. Its
autocrats believe that in their calculus to make China a "world power second to
none", gaining pre-eminence in Asia is vital. On the other side is the interest
of many Asian nations and outside powers in a cooperative order founded on
power equilibrium.
Ordinarily, the readiness to play by international rules ought to matter more
than regime form. But regime character often makes playing by the rules
difficult. As a new book, China's Great Leap, edited by Minky Worden, reveals,
China won the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the plea that awarding the
Games would help improve its human-rights record. Instead, it has let loose new
repression. But just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi
Germany's collapse, the 2008 Games could help trigger radical change in China.
Today, Beijing's best friends are fellow autocracies while those seeking to
forestall power disequilibrium happen to be on the other side of the value
divide. Political values thus could easily come to define a new geopolitical
divide. What may seem implausible globally, given America's lingering tradition
of propping up dictators in the Muslim world, is conceivable in the
Asia-Pacific theatre as a natural corollary to the present geopolitics. But for
the divergent geopolitical interests at play, the differing political values
would not matter so much.
It was China that took the lead in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization to help unite it with the Eurasian strongmen in a geopolitical
alliance. Designed originally to bring the Central Asian nations - the
so-called Stans - under the Chinese sphere of influence, the SCO is shaping up
as a potential 'NATO of the East'. Yet, when Australia, India, Japan and the US
last year started the exploratory 'Quadrilateral Initiative', Beijing was quick
to cry foul and see the apparition of an 'Asian NATO'. A Chinese demarche to
each Quad member followed.
Through sustained diplomatic pressure, mounted on the back of growing economic
clout, Beijing has sought to wilt the Quad. A new opening has come with the
Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd being elected Australia's prime minister. With the
Australian economic boom being driven by China's ravenous resource imports, the
previous John Howard government wasn't exactly enthused by the Quadrilateral
Initiative, as Beijing had already taken a dim view of Canberra's US-backed
bilateral and trilateral defence tie-ups with Tokyo. But the new Rudd
government, as reflected in its foreign minister's remarks last week, is
signalling a wish to turn its back on the Quad.
Australia's growing wariness is no different than India's. After having called
liberal democracy "the natural order of social and political organization in
today's world", Prime Minister Manmohan Singh now says the Quad "never got
going". Even the US has downplayed the initiative, whose real architect,
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, was driven out of office last fall. Yet,
the Quad staged week-long war games in the Bay of Bengal, roping in Singapore.
Rudd, though, is so mesmerized by his Mandarin fluency that he feels an
inexorable itch to cosy up to Beijing. In a strange spectacle, Canberra has
proclaimed it will sell uranium to Beijing (without fail-safe safeguards
against diversion to weapons use) but not to New Delhi, even if the Nuclear
Suppliers' Group were to carve out an exemption for India. The reason proffered
for overturning the Howard government's decision is that "India has not signed
the NPT". That rationale is flawed: While the NPT carries an Article I
prohibition on transfer of nuclear military technology outside the club of five
recognized nuclear powers, its state-parties are actually enjoined by Article
IV to pursue peaceful nuclear cooperation with all countries.
If Rudd has read the NPT, it probably was a Chinese translation, because there
is nothing in its official text that forbids civil cooperation under safeguards
with a non-signatory. But why blame Canberra for trotting out an indefensible
excuse when the Indian foreign minister is smitten by the same myth? Pranab
Mukherjee told Parliament in December that the Hyde Act was passed because "the
US cannot enter into any civilian nuclear cooperation with any country which is
not a signatory to the NPT". Unknown to the minister, US law does not condition
cooperation to NPT membership.
The Quad was never intended to be a formal institution, although John McCain
has vowed to institutionalize it as US president. Founded on the historically
valid hypothesis of democratic peace, it is supposed to serve as an initial
framework to promote security dialogue and interlinked partnerships among an
expanding group of Pacific Rim democracies. Such collaboration is already being
built. As an idea, the Quad will not only survive the current vicissitudes, but
it also foreshadows the likely geopolitical line-up in the years ahead. For
India, close strategic cooperation with Quad members plus Russia holds the key
to Asian peace and stability.
© Hindustan Times, 2008
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=2fb04386-d250-4d29-802c-1bc1f82c0ab5
