realpolitik – The Acorn

Geopolitics in Trump’s age

Perhaps it’s time for new champions of democracy, liberty and open economies

I was in a panel discussion with Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and T K Arun, senior editor of the Deccan Herald at the Deccan Herald Spotlight, Taj West End, Bangalore on 9th January 2017. The topic of discussion was Trump and geopolitics. The following is an outline of my initial remarks. (Read the newspaper report here)

The bases for US global leadership have become uncertain
- Resilience of its democracy is uncertain (more than merely risky)
- Its status as a magnet for the world’s most talented people is also uncertain
Trump’s rhetoric and posturing will cause others to adopt protectionist policies and withdraw behind walls and fences, at least in the short term.
- This might reverse in the longer term but we can’t be sure how long that will take and what we’ll have to endure in the meantime
For the first time, the factors that propelled India’s & China’s unprecedented growth will come under a cloud. China is luckier because it started earlier and was most focused.
- For India the challenge will be to generate 8% growth without a benign external environment
- How fast can India integrate domestically and iron out the kinks regarding movement of people, goods and capital across state boundaries
- How fast can India create external relationships that will allow growth to take place?
In geopolitics, it all the more clear that India will have to become a swing power. This means selective alignment with the US and China where interests coincide, without joining any one camp.
- Better relations with US and China than they have with each other
- Ability and willingness to inflict pain and give pleasure
Finally, a more mischievous point: if the West is ceding leadership of values of democracy, liberty and free markets, then India should stake its claim to that leadership.
- Do we really need so many illiberal democracies and authoritarian states in the permanent membership of the UNSC?
- Do we need four or five Putins in the UN Security Council

Trump is not Putin’s puppet

Stop worrying about Trump being in Putin’s pocket. Start thinking of how to deal with him.

Donald Trump’s attitude and statements both during the election campaign and after his victory have led many analysts to conclude that the new president of the United States will share an unprecedented cosy relationship with Vladimir Putin, the long-time president of Russia. The uncharitable view is that Mr Trump is in Mr Putin’s pocket. The charitable view is that Mr Trump’s affinity for Mr Putin will cause US foreign policy to be less antagonistic to Russia.

Here’s the thing though: for all his statements, posturing and actions, it is unlikely that Mr Trump is a sellout. Why so? First, his populist credentials will not survive a concession to Russia that hurts the United States’ interests or prestige. Second, the Republican party might have changed over the past few years, but cannot condone a pro-Russia policy where that is against the party’s institutional interests. Third, there are strong bureaucratic bases for foreign policy that cannot simply change because a new president is in power. Like every new head of government, Mr Trump will discover that once he occupies the office. Finally, for all appearances and commentary there is the possibility that Mr Trump is not Putin’s puppet at all.

Some of the more astute analysts I have discussed the issue with think that Mr Trump will be the dealmaking, transactional president. What this means is allies, partners, neutrals and adversaries will need to figure out what they are prepared to concede to the United States obtain what they wish to procure. A deal is a deal only when there is mutual agreement on the give and the take. Mr Trump’s prejudices, campaign rhetoric and political interests will both determine his administration’s priorities and constrain his dealmaking. With Russia as with Japan. With China as with India. On climate change as with nuclear weapons, trade and so on.

Seen from this perspective, Mr Trump might well have — intentionally or willy nilly — created favourable negotiating conditions with respect to Mr Putin. Consider. Will Mr Putin be willing to risk jeopardising a friendly relationship with Mr Trump should the United States push Russia to yield a little more on some issue? With Mr Trump in the White House, the Russian president will have to choose between a hard line on a specific issue and the long term advantage of having a friendly relationship with his US counterpart. He is unlikely to want to throw away his advantage quickly or cheaply.

And if Mr Trump is the dealmaker that he believes he is, he won’t pass up this chance to secure an advantage.

Trump is fantastic. Don’t worry.

Mr Trump’s telephone conversations with world leaders are indicative of his style, not substance.

Donald Trump’s phone calls with world leaders, screams a headline in the New York Times are “upsetting decades of diplomacy.” An already excited commentariat — around the world — is aghast at the fantastic manner in which the new US president-elect has been conducting the sublime act of statesmanship that is a telephone conversation. Just after some experts assessed that his fantastic phone call with the Pakistani prime minister might be unwelcome in India, their were jolted into assessing that Beijing would be upset (okay, make that apoplectic) after he announced that he spoke with the Taiwanese president. He even reportedly spoke to Rodrigo Duterte, the foul-mouthed president of the Philippines who had recently made a great show of insulting Barack Obama and kowtowing to Beijing. Oh yes, Mr Trump has violated the norms of the subtle, contrived and staid world of international diplomacy.

That is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is it much of a bad thing as far as US foreign policy towards Pakistan, China and the Philippines is concerned.

Mr Trump’s remarks to Nawaz Sharif appear more like the polite comments tourists make to their hosts regardless of the reality they observe. If he really meant what he said, then Pakistanis need to be worried right after they get over the surprise and puzzlement. Whoever believes that India should be concerned, less consider them unwelcome, is living in the 1990s. Analysts who believe that New Delhi is vying with Islamabad to court Washington’s favour must enlarge their frame of reference to the Indo-Pacific region, and set their watches to the present.

What about China? Hasn’t Mr Trump provoked the People’s Republic of China by exposing Beijing’s most dearly held—and most forcefully enforced—myth that the Republic of China on Taiwan does not exist as a normal state? Yes, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Perhaps due to the Western perception of its supposed exoticness, Beijing has usually had its way by pressing foreign governments to ‘respect its sensitivities’ over the Taiwan, the Dalai Lama, Xinjiang and the various territorial disputes it has with its neighbours. When the United States yields to this coercion, the rest of the world follows. If the United States were to be less inclined to ‘respect China’s sensitivities’, others are more likely to follow suit.

Beijing is quite likely to retaliate, but then, it has taken sharp foreign policy positions over the past decade without provocation. Let Beijing decide how long it wishes to play tit-for-tat with a much more powerful adversary. It remains to be seen if Mr Trump has the stomach for such a game.

It makes good sense for Mr Trump to reach out to Mr Duterte: at worst, it will confuse the Philippines establishment as it explores alignments with China and Russia. At best, it can cause Mr Duterte to execute a wild swing back towards Washington. To argue that Mr Trump must shun or punish Mr Duterte merely because the latter insulted President Obama would be to trade in foreign policy realism for soap opera sentimentalism. There is no evidence that the latter outperforms the former as a basis for pursuing a state’s interests.

For all his bluster, Mr Trump is out of his depth on matters of statecraft. He’s likely to learn on the job. Regardless of the value judgements we place on their content, it would be incorrect to take the fantastic man’s telephone conversations as indicators of his future administration’s real foreign policy positions.

Diplomacy, politics, power and norms in the neighbourhood

Can New Delhi shape and use a normative consensus?

In today’s Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta carries forward the debate on neighbourhood policy that I attempted to initiate last week through the columns of Business Standard.

In short, I had argued that New Delhi finds itself in reacting to events around the subcontinent in an ad hoc manner because it has not yet thought out a policy framework on how to deal with the region. I recommended a new neighbourhood doctrine:

First, India must continue to generate high rates of economic growth so as to remain the economic engine of the subcontinent.

Second, India must unabashedly back pro-India political parties in neighbouring countries and make it more expensive for anti-India parties to hold their positions. [Business Standard]

Mr Mehta qualifies both these arguments. The influence of economic growth is gated by the fact that “region is still populated with leaders and political forces that will cut off their own nose to spite their face; and investments in enmity override the well-being of populations.” As for backing pro-India parties, he contends that, a short-sighted partisanship will not work, and “in the long term, these forces can only be those that have the potential to build a new normative consensus” in the subcontinent.

These are well-considered qualifications. It is easier to respond to the proposition that economic growth alone is unlikely to persuade political parties that would rather keep their populations poor than abandon their anti-India politics. This is rational from their perspective because they see it as politically advantageous. For precisely this reason, New Delhi must back pro-India parties and chip away at the perceived political advantage of being anti-India.

The issue of building a normative consensus is harder to crack. It is a challenge at the best of times to balance respect for sovereignty and a particular domestic political order at the same time. It is easier if the attempt to balance these is discarded: ASEAN, for instance, solved this dilemma by placing sovereignty over democracy (or authoritarianism) by enshrining the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs. India cannot take this escape route: a large democracy constitutionally and popularly committed to human rights and pluralism cannot be completely oblivious to the state of its neighbourhood. This is so even when New Delhi might prefer dealing with assorted despots and authoritarians. There has always been a strong constituency in parts of Indian society that stands up for democracy and human rights in neighbouring countries. (Admittedly, this constituency has been inconspicuous recent months.This is very likely due to the unusually high level of preoccupation with India’s domestic politics and economy.)

Even if New Delhi somehow manages to walk the tightrope, its ability to enshrine and enforce norms is an altogether different matter. K Subrahmanyam expounds realism when he notes that “norms can have power despite being marked by organised hypocrisy”. That said, states usually use the language of values on three occasions: when they are too weak to employ power; when they want to mask the employment of power; and when they are too strong and would rather not use power.

So a weak, newly-independent India championed liberal internationalism; during the Cold War, the United States cloaked its use of power by invoking the language of freedom and in the proximate post-Cold War era, the West hopes that enshrining norms will reduce the need for it to take the expensive route of employing hard power.

Where does India stand today in the context of its subcontinental neighbourhood? It is certainly not so weak that it has to rely on moral platitudes alone. On the other extreme, at current levels of national income and given the increasing openness of the region to external powers, it cannot be said that India can enshrine and enforce norms relatively easily.

At the risk of leaving idealists and other well-meaning people aghast, this leaves New Delhi with the middle option: use norms to cloak the use of power, participate and even lead the organised hypocrisy.

Therefore, I agree with Mr Mehta that India must build a new normative consensus as part of its neighbourhood policy doctrine—although I suspect it is for different reasons.

Related Posts: The paradox of proximity — my paper on why neighbourhood policy is difficult and a short, quirky look at the power-principle matrix.

A world full of barbarians

China is unlikely to succeed in using moral power to upstage the United States

Yan Xuetong is one of China’s finest minds on international relations. His recent volume, Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power is an excellent introduction to the schools of political philosophy in the Chinese civilisation. His op-ed in the New York Times today presents his view on the essence (if at all an essence can be distilled from diverse, rich strands of wisdom) of what ancient Chinese thinking might mean for contemporary geopolitics.

According to the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi, there were three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny. Humane authority won the hearts and minds of the people at home and abroad. Tyranny — based on military force — inevitably created enemies. Hegemonic powers lay in between: they did not cheat the people at home or cheat allies abroad. But they were frequently indifferent to moral concerns and often used violence against non-allies. The philosophers generally agreed that humane authority would win in any competition with hegemony or tyranny.
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How, then, can China win people’s hearts across the world? According to ancient Chinese philosophers, it must start at home. Humane authority begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.

This means China must shift its priorities away from economic development to establishing a harmonious society free of today’s huge gaps between rich and poor. It needs to replace money worship with traditional morality and weed out political corruption in favor of social justice and fairness. [NYT]

Mr Yan argues that China must display humane authority abroad by developing better relations with other countries than the United States does. China must protect weaker states and strengthen regional security arrangements like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. He calls for China to be open to foreigners and attract talented immigrants. This is the way, he says, China can defeat the United States—not through hot or cold wars, but through strategic competition.

There’s much to recommend Mr Yan’s vision of China’s role in the world, not least because it might be a better template for Beijing’s foreign policy than whatever is on offer today. However, Mr Yan’s conceptualisation of humane authority being the route to global hegemony has two fundamental problems.

First, nations of the world resist the idea of an external authority, humane or otherwise. This resistance grows when the said authority is illiberal and inequitable. It is unlikely that nations that have tasted freedom, or are yearning for it, would willingly accept authoritarianism even of the humane variety. The best that can be said is that China’s civilisational ethos makes its people accepting of authoritarianism, but a look at Taiwan and Hong Kong suggests otherwise. If people value liberty more than whatever domestic or hegemonic humane authority offers them, then China is unlikely to gain influence. Mr Yan might be betraying the Middle Kingdom mindset, implying that “what Chinese people consider good, everyone else ought to consider good”.

Second, if China interprets ‘humane authority’ as discarding the Middle Kingdom mindset and accepting liberalism, plurality and diversity, then it might be indistinguishable from the United States. What then would be China’s competitive advantage vis-a-vis its primary rival? To defeat the United States, China will have to become more like the United States. If it becomes more like the United States, would it be a victory for China at all?

Traditional Chinese political philosophy is at its weakest when analysing a diverse, heterogenous world with multiple sovereignties. As Mr Yan’s arguments show, it finds it hard to reconcile values, beliefs and behaviours that are just different. In ancient China, people who didn’t subscribe to the norms were termed “barbarians”, to be kept out using great walls, kept away through diplomacy or subdued by military force. Chinese strategy has the unenviable task of dealing with a modern world that is full of such ‘barbarians’.

Related posts: On the Middle Kingdom mindset; and how it interacts with India’s geopolitical worldview.

Reconstructing Afghanistan’s natural balance

Why India must try to bring the United States, Iran and Russia together over Afghanistan

Imagine Afghanistan without extra-regional powers like the United States, NATO and others. Its stability would depend on the stability of the balance of power between Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan and India. The external actors would broadly fall into two camps, based on the degree of convergence of their interests: China, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the red corner, and India, Iran and Russia in the blue. This was roughly the situation obtaining in Afghanistan in the second-half of the 1990s towards the end of which the red corner seized a dominant upper hand through the military success of Mullah Omar’s Taliban regime. After 9/11, the US and NATO stepped in and disrupted the natural geopolitical dynamics of the region.

Once external powers withdraw Afghanistan the natural geopolitics will again kick into action: with the China-Saudi-Pakistan triad seeking dominance over the landlocked country against the interests of India, Iran and Russia. The United States has the power to set the future trajectory by choosing sides. The tragedy of the last decade is the sheer inability or unwillingness (complicity or incompetence?) of the United States to appreciate the intrinsic geopolitics of the region. It would have done much better for itself and for Afghanistan if it had recognised how the fundamental interests of the region’s powers were stacked up, and aligned itself accordingly.

The single most important reason for this, perhaps, was the dysfunctional relationship between Iran. There still is no love lost between Washington and Tehran. Worse, even as China consolidates its alliance with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the United States seeks to split India and Iran. For its part, India has shown no appetite for bringing about a rapprochement between the United States and Tehran.

This must change, and 2011 has opened a window for India, Iran and the United States to attempt to increase co-operation over Afghanistan. Writing in the Washington Post, a well-connected Saudi commentator has declared a US-Saudi split. The Pakistani establishment is checking how much support it will receive from China before deciding how much to part ways with the United States. Before the killing of Osama bin Laden upset the scoreboard, General Kayani and Prime Minister Gilani had asked Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, to cut his links with the United States. In the current circumstances China doesn’t have to do anything bold: it just needs to wait.

In contrast, even after Abbottabad, the United States remains wedded to a failed strategy of pretending that the Pakistani military establishment is its ally. This only strengthens the position of the China-Saudi-Pakistan triad, and weakens its own. New Delhi is unlikely to be persuaded that it enjoys a genuinely strategic relationship with the United States as long as the latter continues to scaffold Pakistan. Tehran has many reasons to be opposed to the United States. A good part of that is ideological. What gets less attention is the fact that the realists in Tehran have reason to be wary of the United States because they see Washington as the protector of both Israel and, more importantly, the Sunni bloc consisting of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. There are some differences between New Delhi and Tehran, but nothing that can’t be resolved if Washington were to change course. Russia enjoys good relations with both Iran and India, and is likely to prefer such a re-arrangement of relations.

If realism prevails in Washington, New Delhi and Tehran, their diplomats will be galvanised into working out how the three could co-operate, albeit in a limited context, over Afghanistan. It may be that nearly three decades of estrangement has left the tribal world of Washington policymaking with few advocates of making up with Iran. That’s why India has a role—it must muster up the imagination and diplomatic chutzpah to attempt this project.

It is frustrating to see resigned minds give up before even trying.

Related Links: Lubricating a US-Iran rapprochement (from this blog’s archives) and Neil Padukone’s issue brief at CLAWS.

How to lose friends and alienate people

India’s decision to reject US fighter planes is strategic stupidity

New Delhi, it is reported, has shortlisted two European vendors for its long-drawn procurement of fighter aircraft for the Indian Air Force. Now, military analysts can have endless debates and even objective opinions on which among the American, European and Russian aircraft is technically superior and better suits the stated requirements of the IAF. Financial analysts can have similar debates and objective opinions on which is the cheapest or the best value for money. These opinions may or may not converge. But when you are buying 126 planes worth more than $11 billion dollars, you are essentially making a geostrategic decision, not a narrow technical/financial one.

The UPA government’s decision to reject both American proposals, of the F-16 and F/A-18, demonstrates either a poor appreciation of the geostrategic aspect or worse, indicative of a lingering anti-American mindset. While the US ambassador has resigned, whether or not it will prove to be a setback for India-US relations remains to be seen. Damaging the careers of pro-India American officials is a silly thing to do.

This move will most certainly reduce India’s geopolitical leverage with the US military-industrial complex, at a time when India needs it most. From the unfolding dynamics in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, to the changing balance of power in East Asia, to UN Security Council reform, to a number of geoeconomic issues, the United States can take positions that can have long-lasting consequences for India’s interests. Is the United States more likely to be sympathetic to India’s interests after a $11 billion contract—which means much needed jobs for the US economy —is awarded to someone else? Long used to complaining that the United States doesn’t care for India’s interests, will awarding the contract to some European firms help change the situation?

The argument that the European bids were ‘technically’ superior are not entirely credible either, for two reasons. First, at sufficiently high levels of technology, the difference between the planes on offer is marginal. To suggest that the European models are vastly superior defies logic, because some of the world’s most powerful air forces are flying F-16s, leave along F/A-18s. Second, the notion that combat requirements can be perfectly defined at the time of procurement is false. It is the combination of man and machine that wins battles. The focus on machines ignores the reality that much swings on the man flying it. Moreover, given the nuclear deterrence relationships obtaining in the subcontinent and across the Himalayas, those planes might never see an aircraft-to-aircraft dogfight in their lifetimes. For other tasks like air support for ground operations, the specifications are even lower.

What about those alphabet soup agreements and fine-print contracts that the US insists that India sign, that might prevent the planes from being used when needed? Those who make these arguments do not understand what war means. War means all bets are off, and India will do whatever necessary to protect its interests. While the existence of those agreements was a usual bargaining chip for India, to get a discount, to believe that such arguments will hamstring India’s military options is naivete. The government might not need to spell this out in public, but it should know it.

It has been this blog’s argument that in the contemporary geopolitical environment, India’s interests are best served by being a swing power, holding the balance between the United States and China. It must enjoy better relations with each of them than they have with each other. It must also have the credible capacity to give pleasure and inflict pain. In this context, buying fighter planes from the United States would have been an excellent move.

And who has New Delhi shortlisted instead? European companies. The European Union is a bit player in the international system, zealously safeguarding its own legacy position at the United Nations Security Council, the G-20, the World Bank, IMF and other places, against India. Italy is engaged in process of blocking India’s UNSC candidature. An order placed with Eurofighter or Rafael isn’t going to change its plans. EU busybodies can be found everywhere from inviting Kashmiri separatists to speak, to attending court hearings of Binayak Sen. Some small EU states almost wrecked the India-specific waiver that the United States was obtaining at the Nuclear Supplier’s Group. When it’s crunch time in Afghanistan, does anyone in New Delhi think that the EU will or can make any move that’ll safeguard India’s interests? Why is India being gratuitously generous to Europe when there is much to gain from giving the contract to the United States?

Yes, France, Britain and Germany are countries that India must engage. There are ways to allow them to benefit from India’s growth process—from power projects to manufacturing to services. The fighter aircraft contract need not be awarded to European firms, because it has higher strategic opportunity costs.

The downshot is that the UPA government has squandered a unique opportunity to gain leverage in Washington at a crucial time when closer ties are in India’s interests. It first took way too long to decide, dragging the procurement process even China built its own new fighter plane. It now decided to pick two vendors who might well sell a technically superior and cheaper product, but do no more than that. To put it mildly, this is strategic stupidity.

Update: [April 29th] This post and related tweets were quoted in the Times of India and New York Times today.
My colleague Dhruva Jaishankar has a different take over at Polaris. Offstumped has it in a nutshell.

To be a real power

On the real challenges facing India’s foreign policy

Here’s a video of my opening remarks at a roundtable a few days ago at the India International Centre, New Delhi. It dealt with India in a globalised world and was organised by Vivek Dehejia, featuring Ashutosh Varshney (professor of political science at Brown University) and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (journalist and documentary film-maker) in addition to me. You can watch the entire 90 minute programme on Mr Dehejia’s Vimeo page, of which the following is a short excerpt.

Note: In the talk I state that Singapore has more diplomats that India. This is an exaggeration, but only just. According to Daniel Markey, Singapore has 487 professional foreign service officers while India has 669. However, not all of India’s foreign service officers are engaged shaping foreign policy or conducting diplomacy. Some of them, for instance, are passport officers.

Pax Indica: Use religion in foreign policy

The missing ingredient in India’s soft power

“We have allowed,” today’s Pax Indica contends “our misunderstanding of secularism to keep religion out of the foreign policy toolkit.”

Excerpt:

No one bats an eyelid when someone argues that we should use democracy, free-market capitalism, socialism or “South-South solidarity” to promote India’s interests abroad. But mention religion and all sorts of people jump at you. The first objection you hear is that “it’s against our secular values”. This is absurd, as I’ve just argued, because secularism applies only to India’s internal affairs.
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It is unacceptable for a country with one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, one with the longest experience of practising the Islamic faith in a multi-religious society to have no voice at all in one of the most important geopolitical dynamics of our time. India’s lack of Islamic soft power is a symptom of its, well, secular rejection of religious soft power. If we are serious about being a major global power, if soft power is to be something more than a feel-good story, and indeed for our own survival and security, we must dispassionately begin to make strategic use of our religion and culture. [Read the rest at Yahoo! India]

The Asian Balance: On the East Asian dance floor

It’s up to you to find your partner

In my Business Standard column today argue that “the (East Asia Summit) club only provides the dance floor. India will have to court its dancing partners on an individual basis.”

Excerpts:

[Although] the EAS is set to become the pre-eminent regional grouping, bilateral alignments remain in a state of flux.

A divide is emerging between countries that have a dispute with China, and countries that don’t. The former — a list that includes Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei — will seek greater security in the form of alliances with the United States and India.

These countries want a closer tango, not least in the security arena. During Defence Minister A K Antony’s visit, his Vietnamese counterpart General Phung Quang Thanh welcomed Indian Navy ships to make more port calls and offered maintenance facilities at Vietnamese ports. Last month, South Korea signed two defence cooperation agreements with India encompassing a broad range of activities, including exchange of visits, R&D, training and joint exercises. An agreement is still some distance away, but the very fact that India and Japan are currently negotiating a civil nuclear agreement is already a sign of how far Tokyo has travelled.

India will have to go beyond defence and invest in building deep, broad and balanced economic relationships with these countries. As the experience with Russia has taught us, a merely defence-centred bilateral relationship can often be troublesome.

On the other side of the divide, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and even Australia — countries which do not have territorial disputes with China — while desiring an outcome where the big powers balance each other out, will be reluctant to do anything that might attract Beijing’s unpleasant attention. Not unlike the Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms of historical South East Asia that preserved their independence by paying nominal tribute to the Chinese Emperor in return for being left alone. [Business Standard]