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.
