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Three of a kind: India, China and Russia
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - As the foreign
ministers of India, China and Russia meet this week in
New York as part of a trilateral process that began two
years ago, diplomatic observers and analysts are busy
appraising the strategic implications of their growing
affinity. Some see it as leading to the establishment of
a "strategic triangle" to save the world, particularly
Asia, from the uncertainties of a unipolar world that
resulted from the collapse of Soviet Union. Others
dismiss it as routine and inconsequential, pointing to
the primary foreign-policy goal of all three to get in
the good books of the sole superpower and to resolve
their bilateral problems.
All observers,
however, agree on one point. The foreign-policy
compulsions that brought the three together in the first
place two years ago have only grown stronger since the
US-led coalition invaded and then occupied Iraq. The
United States went to war claiming that its security was
in grave and immediate peril from Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and his terrorist
links. But no WMD have been found in Iraq, and no link
between Saddam's regime and international terrorism has
been discovered. This has nearly silenced those in India
and Russia, and perhaps behind closed doors in China,
who continued to claim despite overwhelming evidence
that the US had no imperialist ambitions and was only
trying to rid the world of terrorism and WMD.
Officials in all three capitals, New Delhi,
Beijing and Moscow, keep stressing that their growing
strategic closeness is not directed against any third
country, meaning the United States. Indeed, all three
are separately engaged in improving their bilateral
relations with that country; economic compulsions and
demands of globalization force them to do so. But the
historical and contemporaneous context in which this
axis is being forged slowly and cautiously makes it
difficult to hide the fact that, like the rest of the
world, they, too, are scared of US unilateralism and the
so-called doctrine of preemption.
The United
States with its daisy cutters and tactical nuclear
weapons and a long history of using them on false
pretexts is their newest neighbor in whichever direction
they look. This does nothing to calm their fears in the
post-Cold War world. But neither are they quite
comfortable with one another, with unresolved or
irresolvable bilateral problems dogging their relations,
nor happy with the idea of their strategic alliance
being eventually forced to take anti-US positions.
After all, even in the war against Iraq, all
three took a position, though individually and without
any prior consultation, that went against the US stand.
Even earlier they had declared together that they would
strive to promote a "multipolar world". This obviously
doesn't suit the United States, the lord and master of
the present unipolar system, in which it even threatened
last year to make the United Nations obsolete. Indeed,
if the UN is back in US reckoning, it is only because
the Iraqi people are fighting the occupation and the US
requires both troops and financial assistance to hold on
to its occupation of Iraq.
While a different
picture was beginning to emerge in the last decade of
the 20th century, none of the three countries was
particularly close to the United States for several
decades prior to that. Russia, of course, was the leader
of the Soviet Union and waged a Cold War against the US
for almost half a century. Russian President Vladimir
Putin and before him presidents Boris Yeltsin and
Mikhail Gorbachev were all soldiers of the Cold War.
China had managed to grow out of the Soviet embrace and
developed a detente of sorts with the US much earlier.
But India had continued to take a non-aligned position,
which in effect turned out to be pro-Soviet on most
issues, almost until the end of the Cold War. Yet India
never really had a relationship of hostility with the
United States, except briefly when the nuclear-powered
US Sixth Fleet moved into the Bay of Bengal as a show of
support for Pakistan during the 1971 India-Pakistan war
that led to the creation of Bangladesh.
It is
not surprising, therefore, that among the three nuclear
powers gradually and rather inexorably being thrown
together by the tide of history, India is the most ill
at ease. Though determined to make the 21st an Asian
century and committed to work for a multipolar world,
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Hindu
fundamentalist colleagues have for long considered the
West a civilizational ally against Islam. Not
surprisingly, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
government declared India and the United States, the
world's biggest and the most powerful democracies, as
"natural allies". US President George W Bush could not
have forgotten "the irrational exuberance" - the
expression used by The Times of India - of New Delhi's
response to his declaration on May 1, 2001, that the
United States needs "new concepts of deterrence" and to
create these it needs to "move beyond the constraints of
the 30-year-old ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] treaty" and
work toward deploying a ballistic-missile-defense
system.
Similarly quick and unprecedented in its
haste was India's offer of unlimited support to the
United States after the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attack against the US. Even on Iraq, the Indian
opposition virtually had to force the government to pass
a resolution in parliament deploring the US-led
invasion. Even now, speaking in the UN on Thursday,
Vajpayee condemned terrorist attacks in Iraq, though
speaking earlier Bush refrained from citing India as one
of the victims of terrorism, obviously for fear of
offending his friend and front-line ally in his "war
against terrorism", Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf.
In contrast, the other two parties to
the emerging alliance, Russia and China, realized the
dangers of a unipolar world led by the US much sooner.
The Kosovo crisis became the trigger. Both powers wanted
Yugoslavia's national sovereignty to be respected. If at
all intervention became necessary, both countries felt
if it should consist of UN forces from neutral or
secondary and tertiary powers, with Russian forces in a
leading role.
US-led North Atlantic Treaty
Organization intervention in Yugoslavia without a UN
sanction made both unhappy. Russians found themselves
marginalized in a country they had considered part of
their sphere of influence. The Chinese sincerely
believed, despite vigorous US denial, that the bombing
of their embassy in Belgrade was deliberate and showed
complete disregard of the United States for consequences
of its actions.
Very early on in the Bush
presidency, therefore, US relations with both Russia and
China deteriorated. It is this that led to the standoff
over the EP-3 plane with China and the espionage
tit-for-tat with Russia. The United States expelled
hordes of Russian diplomats and the Chinese intercepted
a US spy plane and did not release it quickly enough for
Washington's liking. Russia and China had already
decided that the US was out of control and required
effort on their part to keep it from interfering in
their respective spheres of influence - the Caucasus and
Central Asia for Russia and, for China, Taiwan and the
international waters around it.
At stake,
therefore, is the very composition of the international
system of checks and balances. India, too, is realizing
that it is not enough to have seemingly good relations
with the US and listen to Washington praising Indian
democracy. Thus despite India's growing ties with
Israel, which is considered the shortest route into the
heart of the Bush administration, India is disappointed
and getting angrier by the day. Bush's failure to
mention terrorism in Kashmir in his UN speech this week
may well prove the last nail in the coffin.
Indian grievances are mainly related to what
Vajpayee condemned in his UN speech on Thursday as
cross-border terrorism in Kashmir sponsored by Pakistan
and the latter's effort at blackmail to bring India on
the negotiating table. While US officials strained every
nerve to keep India from attacking Pakistan when it
moved its army on the border after a terrorist attack
against the Indian parliament in December 2001, killing
eight policemen, they didn't compel Pakistan to turn off
the terror tap.
The India-Pakistan military
standoff lasted an entire year; India pulled back its
troops after assurances that Pakistan would not allow
terrorists to infiltrate into Indian territory. For a
time infiltration did come down considerably, but it has
resumed. India believes that if the United States could
force Pakistan to change its policy toward the Taliban,
it can also force it to change its attitude toward
militants operating in Kashmir and bring infiltration to
a halt.
Nothing much is given out to the media
after foreign ministers' annual trilateral meetings. But
one Chinese scholar has identified India's positive
factors in favor of trilateral cooperation. This gives
an indication about the subjects that come up in these
discussions.
One, the three powers are faced
with a similar security environment and tasks and have
similar or close positions on many international issues.
All of them advocate a multipolar world and the
establishment of a just and fair new international
order. Indeed, this is the cornerstone of the emerging
strategic alliance, though some scholars are wary of
describing it as "strategic" and say that one should be
more careful in using such expressions. It is
noteworthy, however, that all three countries label
their mutual bilateral relations as strategic.
Two, all three countries need to develop their
economies and revitalize themselves. To their good
fortune, their economies are complementary.
Three, Russia has a special position among the
three - it is a traditional ally and partner of India
and also has close ties with China. Its special role
could help facilitate development of trilateral
cooperation.
Four, this cooperation, though just
started, has already gained strong momentum, largely
because of the deteriorating world security environment
since the US invasion and occupation of Iraq that has
exposed the fault lines in the unipolar world system
much sooner than would have otherwise happened.
Along with the foreign ministers' annual
trilateral meeting, another practice that began about
the same time in 2001 and has now become
institutionalized is a consultative meeting of
pro-government or semi-official scholars from the three
countries, providing vital ideas and feedback to the
governments leading to the setting up of agendas for
future talks and providing direction to the respective
governments. Academics involved in this practice are
from the China Institute of International Studies, the
RAS Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Moscow, and the
Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi.
The
first consultative meeting of scholars from these
institutions was held in September 2001 in Moscow, the
second in November 2002, and the third is scheduled for
November this year in New Delhi. The published accounts
of these meetings have repeatedly emphasized the anxiety
of all three governments that the regular trilateral
meetings are not seen as an attempt to forge an anti-US
alliance.
The press release issued after the
first meeting made the following three points:
Trilateral cooperation among India, China and Russia
had a rich and positive potential based on common or
similar positions on a broad range of international
issues such as democratization of international
relations, formation of a multipolar world, opposing
hegemony, construction of a fair and rational new
international order, and countering international
terrorism, extremism, separatism, organized crime and
illegal circulation of drugs.
All three countries are firm supporters of
panchsheel - the five principles of peaceful
co-existence. The strengthening of trilateral
cooperation does not imply any diminution of national
autonomy or of the national identity. On the contrary,
constructive interaction must become a guarantee for the
full development of the most valuable qualities and
genius of all three peoples.
Trilateral cooperation does not imply the formation
of alliances, blocs, etc.
The most significant
aspect of the scholars' discussions in the past two
years has been the concern expressed over the dangers of
unilateralism and the strategy of preemption. They have
emphasized active cooperation to promote multipolarity
and democratize international relations. As all three
suffer from terrorism, they have unanimously called for
international cooperation to combat that scourge.
But some felt that the US-led coalition needed
to adopt a more cautious approach. In some cases, the US
objectives could not be shared and, in other situations,
there were strong reservations to the means used by it.
In their view, the United States appeared to be
motivated by three goals - to eliminate Islamic
extremism, to enhance its status as the sole superpower,
and to increase control over the energy resources of the
Middle East and Central Asia.
Globalization was
seen as having both positive and negative elements.
Among the suggestions to contain the negative factors
were:
Joint steps to build defenses against the movement
of speculative capital.
Sharing their experiences in dealing with
multinationals.
Establishment of a trilateral study group on the
World Trade Organization.
The alliance has the
potential of emerging as a powerful grouping of nearly
half the world's population and playing a significant
role in world affairs. But one important step would be
that all three countries make sincere efforts to sort
out their bilateral territorial disputes. Some progress
has been made recently in this direction, particularly
in Sino-Indian relations. Since Vajpayee's recent visit
to China, a joint boundary commission has started
discussing the issue seriously. China and India fought a
bitter border battle in 1962.
In Sino-Russian
relations, too, progress continues to be made. Chinese
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart
Mikhail Kasyanov, for instance, agreed in Beijing on
Thursday in the eighth such "regular meeting" to deepen
and diversity their strategic ties. Significantly,
Russia invited China to participate in the development
of Siberia and also Russia's far east, regions where the
presence of a large number of Chinese immigrants has
caused some disquiet since a recent census.
There are a great many suspicions regarding
long-term Chinese intentions, however, both in India and
Russia. China must move to convince its partners in this
alliance that it wants to solve its border disputes once
for all. Merely signing "eternal friendship" treaties
that may lead to war in a mere 20 years, as happened in
Sino-Russian relations, will not do. Those two countries
fought a short but bitter border battle in 1969 when
Chinese troops occupied a Russian island on the Amur
River and the Russians fired Grad multi-barrel missiles
to wipe out the intruders.
In 1997, Russia and
China signed a border-demarcation accord that settled
most of their border disputes, except over three islands
on the borderline rivers. As exhaustive negotiations
over the disputed islands continue, according to one
report, the Chinese have been spotted trying to link
their territory with the islands by dropping rocks into
the river and sinking sand-filled barges in order to
have more grounds for claiming the islands.
Two
years ago, Russia and China concluded another political
treaty, this time only for 20 years, but one that
declares the two countries "friends forever, enemies
never". The treaty stated for the first time that the
two sides had no territorial claims to each other's
land. It is to be hoped that this treaty will not meet
the fate of the eternal friendship treaty, as it is
meant to last only 20 years.
Those who want to
fight foreign imperialism successfully must try to keep
their own imperialist instincts in check. For, many a
time in history, imperialists have benefited from
exploiting just this instinct. Since the age of
Confucius, the world has looked toward China for wisdom.
One cannot help wonder whether some slice of Confucian
wisdom is still intact in the Middle Kingdom.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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