MANIPIL, India, June 15 (UPI) -- Under
Russian President Vladimir Putin ties between India and Russia have recovered
the closeness that was a geo-political given until the Yeltsin years. Before,
the Mafia ruled in Moscow and external interests manipulated the two countries
into compromising national interests for protection abroad.
Today, India's best friend has recovered
from the chaos of those years and is on track to restoring its superpower
status and responsibilities. New Delhi and Moscow come as a package. An
alliance with the one implies an accommodation with the other.
While the United States is a
bi-continental -- in fact, quadric-continental -- power thanks to its superb
cultural amalgam of Europe and Asia, Russia is equally so because of geography.
Unfortunately, thus far, the hidden
opposition of France and Germany -- eager to retain their shared domination
over Europe, a control that would dissolve in the event of Russia's entry --
has prevented Moscow from being offered terms for integration into European
structures that are commensurate with its potential.
Similarly, China has worked with success to prevent India from playing the formal role in Asia that its location and strengths entitle it to.
Similarly, China has worked with success to prevent India from playing the formal role in Asia that its location and strengths entitle it to.
Since 1962, Beijing has reinforced the
countries around India in an alliance designed to contain New Delhi. It is only
the economic modernization begun in the 1990s -- in the teeth of opposition
from China's political allies in India, the left and what may be termed the
Buffalo Belt -- that has enabled New Delhi to escape from such restraints and
begin flexing continental muscle.
After a delay of three decades caused by
adherence to the foreign policy nostrums of founding Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, India has begun expanding its ties with the necklace of nations
beginning with Japan, South Korea, the territory of Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia
and Singapore.
The holdout is Australia, which for
commercial reasons is enthusiastically playing the Beijing game of trying to
keep India confined to the "South Asia" box. It is not accidental
that the shrillest condemnation of each Indian nuclear and missile test has
come from Canberra, a capital in angst over its self-declared goal of carrying
the "White Man's Burden" in a sea of brown.
Where India goes, Russia can follow.
Were Moscow to reinforce the potential
alliance between New Delhi and the littoral states of the China Sea and the
Indian Ocean, the strategic benefits both to it and to the other partners would
be immense.
Fortunately, there is no Paris or Berlin
in Asia blocking the integration on acceptable terms of Russia's strategic
interests with the "necklace" of alliances emerging with Japan as the
northern prong and India as its southern counterpart. However, there is a rival
vision, one promoted by the emerging superpower, the People's Republic of
China. While it had been courted in the 1970s and for the subsequent two
decades by the United States, today Washington is rediscovering the strategic
tensions that underline the competing interests of itself and Beijing.
After a period of belief that Australia
was a sufficient southern "jaw" to the emerging Asian network of
alliances designed to keep China in check, U.S. policy circles appear to have
accepted that only India has the depth needed to fulfill such a task.
Today, despite the hostility of a State
Department mired in the Cold War past, the U.S. Defense Department is pushing
for engagement with India. Clearly, shared traditions of democracy and a common
language virtually mandate that India and the United States will be partners
within the decade. This implies an accommodation of Moscow's interests, in view
of the "Siamese twin" relationship between the two old friends.
Worried about the U.S. diplomatic push to
isolate it, Beijing is attempting to play the card of a tripartite alliance
between itself and the New Delhi-Moscow duo. However, this is less out of
conviction than necessity. Within the Chinese Communist Party, where numerous
senior cadres have illegally acquired properties in Europe and the United
States, a significant faction still believes that the deal nearly consummated
with an obliging Bill Clinton -- of China being the United States' strategic
partner in Asia the way the European Union is in Europe -- can yet be reached.
To such optimists, Taiwan would be a
small price for the United States to pay to ensure the goodwill of China.
The problem with such logic is that it confuses
China with the Communist Party of China. While the former is welcome in a
future security calculus, it will apply only after the Communist Party is
removed from office the way the CPSU was by 1991. Under the straight-talking
George W. Bush, the irreconcilability between continued Communist rule in China
and U.S. national security interests has become overt. Unless Beijing were to
agree to a much-diminished role in Asia, essentially subsidiary to the U.S.-led
"necklace of allies," tensions with Washington are likely to
intensify.
India and Russia face a choice. Should it
be a linkup with Washington or with Beijing?
In both countries, there are those who
favor one or the other option. In large part, the answer will lie in the U.S.
ability to escape from the restraints of its Cold War past and offer the New
Delhi-Moscow duo terms that acknowledge the India-Russia alliance to be the
cornerstone of strategic dominance for whichever is its partner in the world of
the new century.
(Professor M.D. Nalapat is director of
the School of Geopolitics at the Manipal Academy in Mangalore, India.)
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