COMMENTARY The rise and rise of
the un-West By Coral Bell
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
said recently that Iran was the chief current
challenge to Washington. Tehran, and especially
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, ought to feel
flattered, as well as alarmed.
A Middle
Eastern society, of mostly very poor people, whose
only national asset is its oil reserves, has now
been defined as a
challenge by the richest, most
powerful society in history: a society whose
expenditure on its armed forces surpasses that of
the 10 next most powerful countries combined.
Fifty-plus years ago, when one of Rice's
predecessors, John Foster Dulles, felt equally
irritated by what was being done by one of
Ahmadinejad's predecessors, he did not even have
to glance toward the US armed forces. He just had
to get his brother, the head of the Central
Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles, to send a
resourceful agent to Tehran. "Regime change" was
put under way practically at once. Mohammed
Mossadegh, the Iranian nationalist leader of the
time, was out, and the young shah was in, almost
before you could say "covert operation".
That was in 1953-54. The change in the
years since is a neat symbol of what I will call
the rise and rise of the un-West. Or non-West if
you prefer, but the less familiar term seems to
carry an overtone of a new assertiveness, even
defiance, which rather matches the change in
relationship.
What has been happening over
those 50 years, very slowly at first but quite
fast in the past 15 years, is a revolutionary
redistribution of power internationally. The only
aspect of this redistribution that most people
have noticed is the rise of China, and maybe that
of India. But it is working also in other
countries of Asia, surprisingly fast as well in
Latin America, and even in a few countries in
Africa, despite the many disasters of that
continent.
The consequences of this
revolution - economic and diplomatic - will
dominate the history of the rest of this century.
Its origins lie in differential rates of change:
demographic, economic, technological and political
change in the countries concerned. The population
of Asia will rise toward 4 billion by about
mid-century, three-quarters of them in either
India or China.
In the past, population
numbers were not much of an indication of the
military, diplomatic or economic clout of a
country. But that was before the governments of
what was then, rather condescendingly, called "the
Third World" acquired some degree of effective
national consensus and reasonably efficient
(though not necessarily liberal) political
structures and institutions. Moreover,
communication and administrative techniques that
facilitate rule over vast territories have
dramatically improved.
Perhaps most
important of all, both China and India have
discarded political or ideological assumptions
(Maoist in China, Fabian in India) that previously
impeded economic growth. China got over that
hurdle 30 years ago, India 15 years later, so
China is at present well ahead. But the two seem
to be converging on an annual growth rate of about
8%, and India has some long-term advantages in the
way of age distribution, political flexibility,
social structure and diplomatic relationships with
the West.
The technological factor is
particularly important in the strategic area. US
President George W Bush once said (getting it
wrong as usual) that the his country could
maintain its paramountcy by "redefining war on our
own terms". Precisely the opposite has happened.
The jihadis, not just those in Iraq and
Afghanistan but those in the global conflict
symbolized by the attacks on September 11, 2001,
have in effect redefined the struggle as
asymmetric waged mostly by urban guerrilla
tactics.
America's high-tech weaponry
prevailed fast, as US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld expected, in the first three weeks of the
war in Iraq, the race to Baghdad, but has proved
relatively ineffective in the three years of the
real war since then.
The US technological
triumph of World War II, the creation of atomic
weapons, has proved a two-edged sword, as
dangerous now to US cities as it was then to those
in Japan, because of the possibility that even one
or two small nuclear warheads, "suitcase bombs" as
they are called, could fall into the hands of the
jihadis, who are not responsive to a strategy of
deterrence because they have no cities of their
own to lose.
That is of course the reason
for the present US pressures on Iran, and
Washington's markedly different attitude on
India's nuclear arsenal. But given the growing US
popular disillusion with the Iraq war, and
consciousness of the costs in blood and treasure
of quelling insurgency in even a small society
such as Iraq, it seems unlikely that military
adventurism on that pattern against a much larger
society such as Iran could seem a good idea, even
to the remaining neo-conservatives. On the other
hand, a sudden air strike on Iranian nuclear
facilities, though they are reportedly well
dispersed and hidden, cannot be ruled out.
Whatever happens there in the short run,
the impact of the changes I have been sketching
will in the longer run have a massively important
result: the transformation of the unipolar society
of states (which has been with us since 1992),
back into the more historically familiar shape of
a multipolar system.
And it will be a very
complex system, for to my mind there will be six
great powers - the United States, the European
Union, China, India, Russia and Japan, but also
probably seven very substantial powers whose
interests, ambitions and military capabilities
will have to be taken into account by the great
powers and the rest of the world: Indonesia,
Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran and
Turkey.
Only two - the United States and
the European Union - are unambiguously Western.
Five - Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, India and
Nigeria - are either Islamic or have very large
Muslim minorities. Though the full development of
so complex and potentially turbulent a world is
still probably a decade or two away, it is already
casting its shadows before it.
Coral
Bell is visiting fellow at the Strategic and
Defense Studies Center at the Australian National
University.
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