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.

Will the United States fall behind China? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Beijing, China — Judging by the boost given to exports from China and the flow of technology to that country from 1993 to 2000, when Bill Clinton was president of the United States, it is small wonder that even low-income ethnic Chinese in San Francisco and New York felt compelled to contribute to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential election campaign.

Although Clinton, now U.S. secretary of state, makes the obligatory warm references to the other giant of Asia, India, these seem to be motivated less by conviction than by awareness of the muscular Indian-American lobby in Washington, D.C.

As the junior senator from New York, Clinton led the effort to get India to concede to China a nuclear monopoly in Asia, by giving up its own weapons-development program. She was visibly unhelpful in promoting a policy of closer defense and technology cooperation with India, besides fiercely opposing the India-U.S. nuclear agreement, along with the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.

The Clintons have never hidden their affinity for Europeanist policy wonks such as Strobe Talbott or Richard Holbrook, who regard only the European countries as "natural partners" of the United States. They are, of course, wrong.

The United States is not a European country transplanted in North America, but a quadricontinental power that has elements of Europe, Asia, Africa and South America in its cultural DNA. Indeed, such heterogeneity is the reason why "U.S. culture" – a pair of words that many regard as an oxymoron – has had the same powerful impact on the world as the English language did during the 19th-century heyday of the British Empire.

President Hu Shows Who's Boss (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Four years before Chinese President Hu Jintao took over as both head of state and, more importantly in China, head of the Communist Party, this observer of his country had deduced that he was on a steady ascent to full power. Even in 1998 it was clear that the mild-mannered, ever-courteous lifelong Party member was a deadly player on the chessboard of power.

Over the preceding years he had avoided much entanglement with the reigning hierarchies in the only parts of China that President Jiang Zemin was interested in, the high-growth centers along the coast and Beijing. Instead, he used the anti-corruption machinery of the state and Party to prise away those who were less than completely loyal to Deng Xiaoping's personal choice to replace Jiang in 2002.

Barring a handful of provinces, by 1999 Hu had put into position individuals that he could relate to and that were far removed from the glitzy and immensely wealthy Jiang cohort. Over the next couple of years, he interacted extensively with senior military and civilian cadres, almost always leaving the impression of a thoughtful individual whose objective was to ensure the continuation of China's ascent begun under Mao and Deng.

Why India Will Sit out Iran (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat


Manipal, India — Iran's ongoing effort to master uranium enrichment technology, despite its denials, is likely to lead to a series of surgical U.S. air and missile strikes designed to cripple reprocessing capacity. The risks and rewards of such an action have been extensively detailed; hence the focus here is on a small part of the overall mosaic -- the response of India to such a strike.

Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is solicitous of perceived U.S. interests, and has been working to create an alliance between the world's two biggest democracies, geopolitical logic will dictate that New Delhi will sit out a future Iran conflict, rather than follow its instincts and back the United States.

In evidence that India-Iran strategic ties remain in good standing, the chief of the Iranian Navy, Rear Admiral S. Kouchaki, is on a March 4-9 visit to India, during which he will visit key installations and discuss joint exercises.

The reasons for India to avoid conflict with Iran are primarily four:

First is the Shiite factor. There have been a little over 17,000 Muslim-Hindu clashes since India became independent in 1947, of which less than two hundred involved Shiites and Hindus. Almost all such clashes have been Sunni versus Hindu, and 87 percent of these have been Wahabbi-Hindu, as the more moderate sections of Sunni Muslim society seldom adopt a confrontational posture with their Hindu neighbors.

America's China Blindness (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

NEW DELHI, June 21 (UPI) -- Hard times are tough, but good times can be even worse. Since the Vietnam defeat in 1975, the United States has not suffered a serious overt blow to its military power, with the result there has been no serious effort at reconfiguring strategies in a context in which India and China displace Europe as the geopolitical pivot of the Eurasian landmass.

Over the coming decade, the "European premium" that has enabled the countries of the West to enjoy a standard of life far in excess of their productive capacities, or future potential, will gradually erode. Only the countries of East Asia and West Asia are victims to this premium now. For the most part, both Arab and Sinic societies are in a time warp. They are unwilling to accept that the center of excellence is shifting from Europe to Asia and North America.

However even they are changing slowly so a secular decline in the standard of living within Europe seems inevitable.

Due of the momentum created by its size, the United States has been able to shrug off the effect of mistakes in policy, creating for itself the illusion it still has time on its side. The fact is 2005 is the equivalent of 1905. The world is about a decade from a possible major international conflagration, one that is likely to be centered in East Asia.

Constrain, not contain, China (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, June 6 (UPI) -- Second of two parts

The Clinton administration tried to recruit Communist China as a strategic ally that would help Washington defend U.S. interests, but that strategy failed because China's long-term interests are significantly different from those of the United States.

China seeks the strategic withdrawal of the United States from Asia, and sees itself as the replacement.

It would like to ensure that an Asian Common Market get formed that would give member-countries -- principally itself -- preference over countries outside the bloc.

An Asian Common Market that included the Middle East, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and South Asia would isolate Japan, suck in South Korea, and in the view of the planners in Beijing, ensure Chinese prosperity at a time of increased tensions with Washington.

Today, throughout Asia with the exception of Japan and, until recently India, China has been conducting a quiet but persistent diplomacy designed to wean the countries of the region away from their "dependence" on the United States.

This has been only partially successful in the ASEAN region of Southeast Asia, as most of the countries belonging to this group are wary of the giant nearby, seeing it afar as a safer option, at least in private.

Constraining China (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPUR, India, June 3 (UPI) -- After it became clear that Winston Churchill had been right at Fulton, Missouri after World War II and that the Soviet Union had imposed an "Iron Curtain" on postwar Europe, the United States began a policy of "containment" against Moscow.

This involved the putting in place of a cordon sanitaire that blocked Moscow from access to significant sections of Western markets and technology. Countries that were not already communist were sought to be kept away from Soviet influence, while within that bloc, those republics such as Yugoslavia that demonstrated some independence of the Soviet Union were encouraged in their behavior by access to Western financial and other resources

The Soviet Union, both individually and through its satellites, imposed a quarantine on Western -- principally American -- scholars and others from civil society, who were given either zero or highly restricted access to the Soviet bloc. However, the choking-off of such non-official contacts was not one way. Successive Cold War U.S. governments encouraged neither tourism nor investment to the Soviet bloc. In the case of countries such as Cuba, they were explicitly banned by Washington

This denial of markets and direct knowledge of the functioning of a modern economy resulted in the Soviet Union having to re-invent not one but several wheels, either by stealing or by developing technology on its own. Refused the chance of cross-fertilization with Western financial and mercantile infrastructure, the Soviet economy remained mired in a command system that often relied exclusively on quantitative measures of performance.