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FINANCIAL TIMES
22
May 2018
The new world disorder: is war inevitable in the Asian century?
A hard-headed realpolitik now governs the battle for influence
between China, the US and India James
Crabtree
Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping met in China’s historic city of Wuhan last
month. Greeting each other warmly, the Indian and Chinese leaders talked
over cups of tea and strolled in bucolic gardens. President Xi noted he
had only twice met a visiting foreign leader outside Beijing. On both
occasions, it was for Modi. Yet rather than demonstrating cordial ties
between Asia’s ascending giants, the meeting served mostly to highlight
divisions, given Sino-Indian relations have worsened greatly since Modi
became prime minister in 2014, in particular after a military stand-off
near the Bhutanese border last year. Both sides wanted a “reset”.
Modi’s position was the weaker of the two. India’s economy is smaller
than China’s, and its military far punier. Many in New Delhi feared that
the subtext of the summit was a plea that China should avoid more
meddlesome border incidents that could destabilise Modi’s re-election
campaign next year. Xi appeared more self-assured, having recently
extended indefinitely his term as leader. Yet for all the rapidity of
his ascent, China’s leader also often appears unsure how best to manage
the complexities of his new global reach. This
pervasive sense of uncertainty is part of what US foreign policy thinker
Robert Kaplan calls The Return of Marco Polo’s
World, meaning the emergence of a new
global order that would seem oddly familiar to the 13th-century
explorer. Conventional wisdom suggests America is in relative
decline while China, India and other emerging powers are on the up.
Kaplan’s vision is more complex. “The map will increasingly be defined
by a new medievalism,” he writes. The power of states will decline while
loyalties to “city, empire and tribe” will matter more, as they did
before the advent in the 17th century of the modern nation state
following the Peace of Westphalia. “The smaller the world becomes
because of the advance of technology,” Kaplan writes, “the more
permeable, complicated and overwhelming it seems, with its numberless,
seemingly intractable crises.” Little wonder even powerful leaders such
as Modi and Xi struggle to make sense of it.
Kaplan’s book is a stimulating account of a
coming era of global confusion. Its first chapter laying out his
thesis, which started life as a paper commissioned by the US defence
department, is especially good. The other chapters are drawn mostly from
older magazine essays, including a series of profiles of global thinkers
such as Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, and John
Mearsheimer, a controversial “realist” international affairs scholar.
Realism views the world as “an anarchic jungle” populated by anxious,
self-interested states, and basically sums up Kaplan’s views. He even
devotes a highly critical chapter to Donald Trump, arguing that the US
president’s policies do not deserve to be viewed as part of the same
school.
Geography matters to Kaplan, as does history. He is upbeat about the
future for long-lived civilisations such as Iran and Turkey, even if
their economies are shaky. Technology is also crucial to his
understanding of the coming world, both for the way it empowers
protesters and terrorists, but also because it drags major powers into
localised conflicts, as happened in Syria. Other factors, from quarterly
growth figures to military budgets, concern him less. The ideas he draws
from this worldview are divisive but compelling. In Monsoon, an earlier
book, he coined the metaphor of a “string of pearls” to describe China’s
proliferating naval bases around the Indian Ocean. Academics often treat
the concept snootily, claiming it has little predictive value. But it is
still widely used by diplomats and journalists, because it describes so
nicely what most think China is up to, namely spreading its reach across
India’s backyard. In
this latest work, the image of Polo describes a new and enlarged
geopolitical playing field. The path of Polo’s journeys across the
Eurasian landmass is often called the “silk road”, even though that
phrase was coined only in the 19th century. Kaplan thinks this same
region will now be the heart of 21st century conflict. “As Europe
disappears, Eurasia coheres,” he writes, suggesting that a weakened west
can only watch as Eurasia itself becomes the focus for international
competition. Against this backdrop the US must understand its inability
to shape global events as it did after the cold war. Instead, America’s
objective should be simple: to stop China dominating eastern Asia in the
way the US itself does across the western hemisphere.
If one project defines this new moment, it is
China’s “belt and road” initiative.
Originally known as “One Belt, One Road”, the term “BRI”
describes a series of daring energy and transport projects involving
Chinese investments of $1tn or more. Some spread overland through
Eurasia, while others — that “string of pearls” — snake around the
Indian Ocean and towards Africa. BRI’s scale dwarfs the endeavours of
earlier great powers, from Britain’s colonial rail building to America’s
postwar Marshall Plan. And although BRI’s tentacles now stretch as far
as Latin America, few places show its reach more clearly than south-east
Asia. Sandwiched between Asia’s rising giants,
the region once known as Indochina is becoming an ever more important
focus for great power competition. According to Will Doig
in High Speed Empire, a short work examining China’s plans,
Xi’s ambitions amount to nothing less than “a plan to reclaim the
country’s global centrality”. A
US-based journalist, Doig travels through Laos, Malaysia and Thailand,
spinning an engaging narrative that focuses mostly on China’s “railway
diplomacy”. This is big business: in 2015, 41 per cent of global rail
revenue went to Chinese companies. In landlocked Laos, a communist-ruled
backwater, China plans to link its own southwestern city of Kunming to
Thailand. Eventually the line will head to Malaysia and join another
mooted high-speed link, creating an artery stretching from Beijing to
Singapore, as Xi seeks to create “a region infused with Chinese
connections, influence and control”.
Yet for all its financial and engineering
might, China’s mega-projects are often troubled. Doig tells the
story of the former deputy prime minister of Laos, a rough-and-tumble
dealmaker called Somsavat Lengsavad, who brought in billions of
investment via Chinese infrastructure and property schemes. Yet the
country’s gleaming new rail line is unlikely ever to turn a profit,
while China offered loans at ruinous interest rates, leaving Laos mired
in debt. Costing about $6bn, the rail project’s budget amounts to
roughly half of the country’s gross domestic product.
Similar problems dot Asia. Debts dog BRI projects from Sri Lanka to
Myanmar. Corruption is an issue. Locals complain about projects built by
migrant Chinese workers. Doig describes a giant special economic zone in
Malaysia that was mothballed when its Chinese developer ran out of
funds. Anxieties about China also provided the backdrop to this month’s
surprise Malaysian election, when Mahathir Mohamad, the 92-year-old
opposition leader and China critic, re-took power. In Laos, Somsavat was
purged for his pro-Beijing views, opting to become a Buddhist monk
instead. His country’s troubles are not unusual across poorer parts of
Asia. “The very qualities that have helped China gain entry —
dysfunction, corruption, poverty — are also the qualities that can turn
large-scale, long-term projects into mazes with no exit,” Doig writes. So
far, India has been unable to match China’s powerful infrastructure
diplomacy, although under Modi it has new ambitions to spread its
influence abroad. Like the US, India worries that China wants to become
a regional “hegemon”, a fear that has driven the world’s two largest
democracies closer over recent years. But it is India’s own burgeoning
self-confidence that concerns Alyssa Ayres, a former US
diplomat, whose book Our Time Has Come provides a fascinating
and timely account of a nation growing “less and less reticent about its
global ambitions”. Once
a leader of nonaligned nations, India itself now aspires to be a
“leading power” able to shape events and win a greater role at global
institutions such as the UN. This new assertiveness flows partly from a
growing economy. But the accident of geography plays a role too, as
Kaplan notes: “If the early-twenty-first century has a geographical
focus, this would be it: the Greater Indian Ocean from the Gulf to the
South China Sea, and including the Middle East, Central Asia and China.”
India is especially fearful of encirclement by
China’s powerful military. Modi’s aim is therefore what Ayres
calls “attaining primacy in the Indian Ocean”, an aim India is pursuing
with plenty of US support. America’s calculus is crude but logical: if
there are two big powers in Asia, namely China and India, one alone
cannot dominate. So far, India has made only tentative steps to match
China’s big-spending infrastructure push, but in time it too will use
its economic sway to buy friends and influence allies. In
turn this explains why Indian and Chinese relations have fallen so low
of late. Competition between the two is rising not because their leaders
are belligerent. Rather, it is because as they grow, their sense of
their own self-interests is growing too. Hungry for commodities and with
people spread around the globe, both are expanding what they view as
their core national interest. As they do so they risk becoming more
entangled in the kinds of new, complex global problems Kaplan’s book
describes. Sino-Indian flashpoints are more likely too, even beyond
their long and disrupted shared border, over which they fought a war in
1962, which India lost. At their recent summit, Modi and Xi instructed
their armies to avoid any further border spats. This lessens the odds of
armed conflict, but such a scenario still cannot be ruled out.
Kaplan begins his book with a line from international relations academic
Kenneth Waltz, noting glumly that “theorists
explain what historians know: war is normal”. Later he quotes US
cold war-era diplomat George Kennan explaining the logic of colonialism:
“Unless we took those territories, somebody else would.” A similar
hard-headed realpolitik now governs the battle for influence fought
between China and the US, and increasingly India too. A new world of
geopolitical competition is being born, but one where even powerful
states cannot entirely control events. This uncertainty makes for
confusion, and potentially for conflict too. The amiable tone of summit
meetings such as Xi and Modi’s in Wuhan suggests the Asian century might
be more stable than the period of American hegemony that preceded it.
That impression is likely to be misleading.
The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American
Interests, by Robert Kaplan, Random House, RRP£15.99, 272 pages
High Speed Empire: Chinese Expansion and the Future of Southeast
Asia, by Will Doig, Columbia Global Reports, RRP$14.99, 107
pages Our
Time Has Come: How India Is Making Its Place In The World, by
Alyssa Ayres, Oxford University Press, RRP£18.99, 360 pages James
Crabtree is an associate professor of practice at Singapore’s Lee Kuan
Yew School of Public Policy. His book on India, ‘The Billionaire Raj’,
is published in July |