Green Views: Tiger Elephant play in Islamabad

: The Cold War or as Humayun Gauya calls it--the 3rd world war Wikipedia

Humayun Gauhar has written a prodigious article on the tempest in a tea-pot in Delhi. There were a lot of statements made for the consumption of the media in Delhi. We would however like to challenge the the hocus-pocus of creating 50,000 jobs is far removed from reality. The jobs mantra is to try to stem the tide of the Anti-Outsourcing legislation that is coming down the pike. In fact $10 Billion doesn't really create that many jobs. Much has been written on how complicated it is to create high level defense jobs.

To put things in perspective The American defense budget is larger than the GDP of India. The US spends $10 billion in a few days in Afghanistan. According to some estimates it has spent more than $3 Trillion in the past decade. Trumpeting $10 billion is funny to say the least.

The Bharati GDP is smaller than the GDP of tine Benelux countries of Europe. The US just signed a $60 billion defense deal with Saudi Arabia, without the hoopla of a state visit or the bad dancing. The Gulf States are in the midst of signing defense deals with the US worth $120 billion. The US president didn't take 3000 people to the Gulf and didn't spend $200 million per day on the trip--or a fraction thereof if the White House is to be believed.

China is now building a lot of Boeing, Airbus parts, and is exporting planes to airlines. Its trade with the US exceeds $5000 billion (mainly exports to the US) dwarfing Bharat's trade (mainly imports from the US) $50 billion. China's trade surplus with the US is no laughing matter--it is a major chunk of the Bharati GDP. Bharati trade with US measures to less than 2% of US trade. Bharat has nothing to sell to the US except Call-Center Services which total only $50 billion per annum--and this industry is now facing a colossal backlash from the businesses in America. Bharat has not been able to produce products or software which Americans want to buy. Mangoes don't count. The influx of 100,000 students to the US has not impacted Bharat's trade balance or its basic infrastructure. The Indians simply buy motels and Subways.

Opening up to the West has impacted India in a negative manner. While it has created a couple of billionaries, the latest slide in HDI indices show that the Bharati general population has not benefited from the money--most of money now hidden in overseas account. The increase in trade has taken corruption to astronomical levels where $1.5 Trillion is sitting in Swiss banks. The Bharati PM is engulfed in theft personally attributed to him worth $29 billion. The opposition BJP holds him personally culpable. The recent CWG games vividly described the sorry state of corruption and incompetence in Delhi. The failed Kevari and LCA (was supposed to be the mainstay of the IAF) defense project are just shining examples of how money can be wasted without any results.

If the US wanted to send a message to China, then we are right on the money--however Obama's support for Delhi runs counter to any logic on the subject. Chinese help is necessary, indeed crucial to expand the UNSC. If the Obama Administration really wanted to help Delhi, it would have worked behind the scenes with Beijing to get India in the UNSC. How silly is it to stand in Delhi, show Bharat as a long term partner, display India as a counter-weight to China, and then announce support for India's UNSC hopes. Wouldn't that kill any chance of China witholding the veto? Why would China allow another US ally to get into the UNSC so that both of them can pass resolutions on Tibet, Taiwan, South China Sea and the disputed islands.

It doesn't really make sense.

Here is how the Indian press would have us believe it sounds "Hey! China--Screw you! The US has a new buddy, that we are building to a challenge you. BTW: will you let our new partner India in the UNSC, so both of us can harass you on Tibet and Taiwan".

In all likelihood, Obama was trying to salvage a failed trip to Delhi and used a carefully crafted line in the parliament to assuage fears of an Anti-US backlash. In all likelihood Beijing already knew about the "we will welcome India--sometime in the future--if India listens to us" statement. Those Neocon PNACers who envisage India as an Anti-China Counterweight are in the minority and are on the wrong path.

President Obama's UNSC announcement has to be taken with a grain of salt--actually it would require a Sahara desert of salt to digest it. The US doesn't hold all the cards in the UN--despite the fact that the UN is billed as a US Club. The waning Superpower wants to push in acolytes which will help it numerically--however the Africans, and the CFC will fight the G4 tooth and nail. The Forbes map of Africa with a Chinese flag on it is the reality of Africa. Beijing's investment in all of Africa is unprecedented and dwarfs American presence on the Black continent. Africa would never go against China. The new world let by China will not allow the status quo to be maintained, and surely it would not allow a Chinese enemy in the UN--at lest not with veto powers.

Mr. Gauhar, a seasoned analyst has described the 4th world war and the growth of Chinese power in the news century.

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, it’s all marketing. Those who fall for it soon come a cropper. There’s 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 India’s 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. That’s their business. It’s 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 elephant’s 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 doesn’t, sheer need for survival will, hopefully, make it understand. Obama’s 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.

Today’s 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 – colonization 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 colonizers 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 realized 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, America’s 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 realizes 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 won’t realize 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 Organization, 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’? Indian elephant, Chinese tiger, Humayun Gauhar. humayun.gauhar786@gmail.com