Only India can Challenge China's Primacy in Asia (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — More than radical Islam, the threat to the primacy of the West will come from Sinic civilization, centered in the People’s Republic of China. Should China continue to grow at the pace of the last 20 years for the next two decades, by 2015 the backwash created by such progress will pull Japan and South Korea into its gravity field. This will later extend to Siberia and large swathes of Southeast and Central Asia.

As armed conflict would be a lose-lose proposition for all major players, the odds are that such an expansion of geopolitical space will take place peacefully. China’s strategy will be to make cooperation with it attractive while increasing the costs of conflict to Asian countries that may seek to present a challenge, principally India.

Obsessed as Germany is with ensuring the ethnic purity of Europe by blocking immigration even from established, English-speaking democracies outside the West, and France with the preservation of Franco-German primacy in Europe, the European Union is unlikely to adopt the only course that would enable it to retain its edge in the face of rising Sinic power. This is an alliance with India.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, with his obsessive focus on Europe and neglect of Asian Russia, has been all but begging France and Germany to admit Moscow into the European Union as an equal of these two states. This course is likely to go the way of Turkey’s application to join the club; in other words, it will end up in the refuse bin. This is likely to push Russia further toward being a partner in the Sinic alliance that will be stitched together by Beijing in a decade.

Switzerland: No place for Conferences (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — The Muslim World League, an organization funded by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, held its third interreligious dialogue in Geneva from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1.

The previous two meetings were held a year ago in Spain and Austria. Of these, the Madrid Conference was distinguished both by its imaginative choice of locale, given the historically troubled history between Spain and the Muslim world, as well as the enthusiastic participation of Spain’s King Juan Carlos himself.

As for Austria, which is the home of Gerald Mader's European Peace University, it is a picturesque location to hold an international meeting – convened to discuss how best to operate in practice the "Initiative of the custodian of the two Holy Mosques (King Abdullah) on interreligious dialogue and its impact on disseminating human values."

In the 18th and 19th centuries, and even in much of the 20th, there was a case for treating Europe as the "Middle Kingdom," the center of the universe. Asians, Africans and South Americans had almost no say in world matters, and exceptions such as Thailand were under the tutelage of one or the other European powers.

Since India won its freedom in 1947 and China began to develop economically in the 1980s, there has been a change in this situation. Global discussions should no longer be confined only to countries within Europe and those housing the European Diaspora.

More Troops not the Answer in Afghanistan (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — During the 1960s, the United States had a president who did more for the underclass than most of his predecessors put together. Lyndon Johnson introduced healthcare, civil rights and other measures designed to provide a level playing field for people of different classes and colors among the citizenry.

Instead of acclaim, what he got was unpopularity, forcing him to surrender office after just one term. The reason was an unpopular war, fought the wrong way – through the insertion of greater and greater numbers of troops.

U.S. soldiers marauding through their land converted several hundred thousand South Vietnamese into Viet Cong. As a recent editorial on Afghanistan in the New York Times put it, Americans too would be tempted to violence were a strange-looking bunch of aliens to invade and occupy Oregon.

Those who seek conventional military solutions to problems within other countries forget that the world is very different from what it was during the peak years of European colonialism. Then, mass killings were acceptable. But now, were NATO to repeat in Afghanistan the tactics of European colonial powers in South America, Africa and Asia, their own populations would halt such slaughter.

In the age of worldwide cable television, significant "collateral damage" is unacceptable. This is not a situation that would have endeared itself to Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister who once favored the bombing of undefended villages in the Middle East, and looked the other way when more than 6 million Indians died in 1944 of starvation in the single British-ruled province of Bengal.

Why is Obama silent when disaster returns? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — From 2003 to 2008 – the years when the uncontrolled greed of a handful of speculators was sending the price of commodities to intolerable levels – this columnist was among the few who pointed to such market manipulation as the cause of price fever, rather than "market conditions."

Today it is clear that it was the greed of a few financial institutions and their managers that caused the rise in food prices that killed hundreds of thousands in Asia and Africa from starvation. Super-high food prices sucked the purchasing power out of middle- and low-income consumers by raising the prices of oil and other commodities to levels where continued economic health was unsustainable.

The 2008 market crash caused not a ripple in the consciences of this handful, who continued to award themselves generous bonuses after creating economic disaster. Speculation – forward trading where the speculator need not take delivery of the commodity – caused death and hardship across the world, and it was expected, not least perhaps by U.S. voters, that President Barack Obama would make good on his promise to deal harshly with such economic depredators.

Instead, he handed over the reins of the U.S. Treasury Department to Timothy Geithner, himself a creature of the very system that is causing a second tsunami of high prices and a collapse of consumer demand. Under Geithner, the U.S. taxpayer has underwritten nearly US$2 trillion in write-offs and advances to the very agencies that caused the speculative fever which began in 2003, after the defeat of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The United States should be Quadricultural, not Unipolar (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — By granting itself a patent on individual freedom combined with democratic elections, the West has persuaded itself that it is seen as a benign entity in the rest of the world -- almost all of which decades ago was occupied and governed by European countries intent on using native resources to promote their own interests.

However, the return of Western soldiery to Afghanistan and Iraq has caused formerly colonized countries to fear that once again they are at risk of occupation. Both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki have zero control over the militaries swarming across their respective countries, or over many of the functions normally associated with sovereignty. "Advisors" in both Kabul and Baghdad have the final say, a fact that is not hidden from the local populations.

Today, NATO forces in Afghanistan and Coalition troops in Iraq are ensuring a steady increase in the insurgency. George W. Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard, Angela Merkel and other Western leaders have together performed a miracle -- they have made the Saddamites popular in Iraq and the Taliban recover its resonance in Afghanistan.

Because of the melding of the identities of the United States and the European Union into a single "Western" entity, Bush rarely ventures beyond Europe -- and countries with European-origin majorities -- in securing military allies for his numerous military sallies into distant lands. Within the United States, only the west coast has succeeded, to a limited extent, in freeing itself of the delusion that the United States is a European country transplanted across the Atlantic. The South and East are in thrall to a concept of nationhood with a European identity at its core -- a concept expressed in the many writings of Samuel Huntington.

Facing Western Supremacy (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

NEW DELHI, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- The foreign ministers of the three giants of the Asian landmass -- Russia, China and India -- will meet Feb. 14 in New Delhi to advance an old proposal for a Trilateral Global Alliance that would effectively exclude the West from a position of superiority in Asia, before achieving the same purpose in Africa and South America.

Although at present only a gleam in the eye of geopoliticians, the TGA has made enough progress in the past two years to indicate that within the next three, a framework agreement could be signed by the three heads of government that would codify the principles and objectives of this partnership aimed at limiting Western power.

It is interesting to note that European powers all won special advantages in the rest of the world not by peaceful cooperation, but by conquest. This is perhaps the reason why soldiers, sailors and airmen play a much bigger role in Western "diplomacy" than diplomats themselves.

Australia, for example, has now joined hands with New Zealand in sending armed troops to small island countries near them, in order to enforce their will over the peoples there. So dominating is Australia that even the present Timorese leadership -- the recipient of huge funds and other aid from Canberra in its long battle against Indonesia -- has now sought to distance itself from a country that seems determined to rule the territory by the gun.