An Asian Cold War?

WRITING in this space nearly five years ago, one had wondered as to how far a more assertive Bush era would disturb the fragile balance between containment and a constructive engagement that remained the hallmark of Clinton’s China policy. A retrospective look highlights a widening gap in the national agenda and policies of the two countries — a gap that has already made some US experts to visualize a protracted second cold war in the Pacific basin and elsewhere in Asia.

During this period, the United States has aggressively implemented its new security doctrines that have led to preemptive wars and an expanding network of military bases that add to US military capabilities globally as well in the regions dominating energy reserves and supplies. President Bush has also committed the United States more than ever before to reshaping the world in the name of democracy, counter-terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation. The new strategy now includes even nuclear strikes in countering perceived threats to American security.

Meanwhile, China has made great strides in economic and military fields but has remained wedded to precepts and policies stressing economic development, uninterrupted access to energy and other strategic commodities vital to its spectacular growth, peaceful coexistence, acceptance of global diversity and a gradual enhancement of diplomatic influence in Asia and in other continents.

In fact, the sheer success of its policies at a time when the United States is becoming a controversial superpower drive a section of the American strategists to advocate a more belligerent attitude towards China. Some leading ones argue that Chinese power and influence have to be reduced and circumscribed well before 2020, a marker in the anticipated timeline of China’s relentless march to economic prosperity and military capability.

China has disproved the bleak forecasts of its detractors that the post-Deng Xiaoping era would bring turbulence and decline. During the crucial period of 1989-2002, Jiang Zemin, led China to even greater achievements in every field and thus demonstrated that it possesses a leadership that had drawn some profound lessons from the debacle of the Soviet state. Hu Jintao, who combines the offices of the president, party general secretary and chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission, exemplifies another inherent quality of collective leadership, the capability to finetune a balance between market economy and state control.

The latter reduces regional and urban-rural inequalities that would strain national unity and cohesion. The current GDP at purchasing power parity is estimated at $ 7555 billion with a growth rate of nine per cent or more. Merchandise exports in 2004 were nearly $ 594 billion with imports at almost $ 561 billion. It has maintained a huge turnover with the US with a favourable trade surplus ranging from $ 100-130 billion in recent years.

It remains a world leader in attracting foreign direct investment. Its domestic market is undergoing an impressive transformation with an exponential increase in sales of automobiles, mobile phones and personal computers. No less significant is the quantum jump in civil aviation facilities and travel. China’s comparative advantage has irked certain quarters in the US and even in the European Union.

There have been demands for curbing Chinese exports and much ill-advised talk in the US of a trade war with China. When earlier this summer, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) made a bid for the American oil company, UNOCAL, the Chinese desire for enhanced energy security was considered as prejudicial to the US national interest. As China withdrew its bid, Beijing’s People’s Daily made the wry comment that Washington was still not ready for China’s new role in the global economy.

Robert Kaplan, whose access to governmental information gives his writings a touch of prophecy, has recently argued that the Middle East was just a blip and that a Sino-US military contest would define the 21st century. At one level, his article, ‘How we would fight China’ (Atlantic monthly, June 2005), reads like a bright public relations exercise by an ‘embedded’ journalist for the US Pacific Command (PACOM) and the Guam military base.

At another level, it provides an insight into the sharper edges of Sino-US relations. While the Chinese are focused on undisturbed economic growth till 2050, a school of strategic thought in the United States recommends ratcheting up a cold war to destabilize this progress. This approach to China is quintessentially deterministic and is unabashedly based on the inevitability of a conflict necessary to maintain the US hegemony over the Pacific. “Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate”, writes Kaplan, “China constitutes the principal conventional threat to American liberal imperium.” While Kaplan is largely Pacific-centric, others postulate an intense revival of the Great Game in Central Asia.

Most of us who take a friendly interest in China studies regard the Chinese naval capability well short of what should be the optimum for safeguarding its long coast, its territorial waters, its off-shore islands and the shipping lanes vital to its burgeoning economy. Ironically, Kaplan presents PACOM as the hub of American anxiety about China’s naval ambitions. He concedes that against the US navy’s warships displacement of 2.86 million tons, the Chinese warships have a full-load displacement of mere 263,064 tons. Indeed, this is the strategic field where the United States outstrips the rest of the world by a huge margin.

Nevertheless, the Chinese plans to add 17 diesel submarines and three nuclear ones to their present fleet of 70 aging submarines by the end of this decade. This is perceived as a challenge to the current naval supremacy of the United States. Kaplan fears that the Chinese can resort to asymmetrical warfare on the high seas to erode the hegemonic image of the United States.

Washington will respond by developing three kinds of navy: the navy built around aircraft carriers to project global power, a special operations navy comprising numerous small vessels to launch special operations forces and, a ‘stealth’ navy of very small boats to snatch or kill ‘terrorists’ or conduct special operations ashore. Kaplan forecasts that Guam will become the hub of a new, worldwide constellation of bases that will move the locus of US power from Europe to Asia.

In my view, China will not commit the mistakes of the Soviet Union to provide a replay of the so-called first Cold War. Instead, it will intensify its present policies that emphasize minimum but effective military deterrence, avoidance of conflict, economic development, neutralization of hostility on all its borders, particularly the one with India, consolidation of arrangements such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and augmentation of its soft power by continued insistence on international law, institutions, norms, and multilateralism.

Trying to interpret the upgraded Indo-US strategic partnership (Dawn, August 4), I had pointed to China’s efforts to keep Japan, South Korea and India — Condoleeza Rice’s strategic triangle — out of an anti-Chinese coalition by giving them a vital stake in cooperative bilateral relations with Beijing. China’s problems with Japan’s imperialistic past and in energy-rich East China Sea are handled with tact and discretion.

It has acted with great responsibility on matters pertaining to the Korean peninsula, including the nuclear programme of North Korea. Its credentials are so well established that hawkish commentators like Kaplan are concerned that on its re-unification, the Korean nation may opt for ‘Finlandization’ in its relations with China. It has deepened political and military ties with Putin’s Russia. It is determined to foil separatist elements in Taiwan; its anti-secession law of March 2005 is a warning to them to desist from such a course.

But simultaneously it increases the political space for Taiwan to accept the concept of one country with two shores. It enhances its military capability to act across the Taiwan Strait, but its diplomacy aims at making the Strait a conduit of peaceful reunification.

An article by Wang Jisi, Dean at Beijing University and Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies, Beijing, published in the September-October 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, offers a succinct account of China’s quest for stability with America. In the long term, he observes, “the decline of US primacy and the subsequent transition to a multipolar world are inevitable”; in the short term, “Washington’s power is unlikely to decline, and its position in world affairs is unlikely to change”.

The US can exert the greatest strategic pressure on China but “fortunately, greater cooperation with China is also in the US interests”. Professor Wang Jisi believes that “history has proved that the United States is not China’s permanent enemy” and that each side should ensure that the other understands its intentions. True friendship may not be on the horizon but a “slow, tortuous, limited, and conditional” improvement in bilateral relations can be achieved. This then is the Chinese alternative to a relentless Cold War in Asia.

The coming decades would present a complex dynamic of Sino-US relations. President Bush’s visit to China later this year may provide some indication of how far hawks succeed in their project of turning the current cooperation-competition paradigm into that of a cold war. Even in the best possible scenario, there would be pressure on Asian countries, especially in East Asia, to develop a tilt one way or the other. Pakistan has friendly relations with both — the sole superpower of today and the superpower of tomorrow — but it has to remember that China has been its most steadfast friend over decades and this is one strategic relationship that is not prone to fluctuations.

The only danger to it is that, from time to time, Islamabad becomes so Washington-centred that it does not invest sufficient energy into nurturing this vital bond. We need to work closely across the board but, in particular, in the large Asian region in which we are located. When we approach Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia, we should do so from a perspective of national interest that is also informed by our sympathetic understanding of Chinese concerns. It may occasionally warrant a slight distancing from the United States but that would be a diplomatic manoeuvre justified by history and geopolitics.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

The awful mess in Ukraine

ONLY nine months ago, Ukraine appeared headed for a brilliant democratic future. The ‘Orange Revolution’, a popular, democratic national uprising, had overthrown the old communist regime, with its corrupt, pro-Russian politicians, crooked business cronies, brutal police forces and rigged elections.

But today, Ukraine is engulfed by political fratricide, a vicious feeding frenzy to gobble up former state assets, and ferocious personal vendettas. As was said during the French revolution, ‘the revolution is devouring its children.’

President Viktor Yushchenko, who is still not recovered from a mysterious, near fatal poisoning last year, sacked his fiery prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko, the co-leader of the Orange Revolution, and her entire cabinet for abuse of power and misuse of funds.

This palace coup came after the president’s chief of staff resigned and accused Petro Poroshenko, head of the powerful national security council, and other high government officials of corruption, graft, obstruction of justice, and influence peddling.

Yulia Timoshenko and her allies had been bitterly feuding with Poroshenko’s men and billionaire Viktor Pinchuk over control of valuable former state property, including Europe’s second largest ferro-nickel complex. Pinchuk is son-in-law of former disgraced leader, Leonid Kuchma, and well deserves the title of ‘Ukraine’s Mr 20 per cent.’

President Yushchenko finally had enough. Unable to control or reconcile his squabbling allies, he fired them all and cobbled together a shaky new government under a little-known prime minister.

This sordid carnival of rivalry and greed undermined Ukraine’s western-oriented democratic forces and gave a boost to pro-Russian groups backed by Moscow.

Yushchenko was left looking weak and unable to control his own political family. His popularity dropped to 19.8 per cent and Timoshenko’s to 21.4 per cent. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, Yushchenko is a hero abroad but increasingly disliked at home.

Yulia Timoshenko has now turned against former ally Yushchenko and will challenge him in upcoming elections, thus splitting their former party.

It’s hard to know what to make of the beautiful, brilliant and passionate Timoshenko. I admit to finding it sometimes difficult to stay icily neutral when dealing with beautiful female politicians. Critics in Pakistan have accused me of being ‘bewitched’ by Benazir Bhutto. I was not, but spending a good deal of time with her allowed me greater understanding of her positions without changing my previous views on her family’s often murky finances.

I met Timoshenko in late 2003 and confess to indeed feeling a touch of bewitchment. But then I began receiving letters from Moscow charging multi-millionaire Timoshenko had been deeply involved in corruption when she headed her own power company. She was purported to own four aircraft and have 22 ex-commando bodyguards.

More mail followed from Ukrainian prosecutors and police officials. Timoshenko claims these were fake charges cooked up by her many enemies, who call her the ‘Robber Baroness.’ A film made in Moscow, likely by ex-KGB people, shows an actress playing Timoshenko being intimate on board a private jet with a man playing the President of Georgia.

Still lightly bewitched, I prefer to believe only the best of the exquisite Yulia — until proven wrong. But these charges do raise disturbing questions and will continue to haunt her career.

Though mostly Slavic by race, Ukrainians often seem more cheerfully Italian by spirit and politics than eastern European. Perhaps that’s why I like them so much. But like Italians, Ukrainians are unfortunately not always at the head of the class when it comes to good government or public finances.

This huge mess leaves Ukraine diminished in the world’s eyes and weakened by internal political chaos, which is scaring away badly needed foreign investors. Ukrainians are rightly disgusted that one thieving elite appears to have simply replaced another.

What a tragedy for a people that suffered six million to eight million victims murdered by Stalin, and struggled so long for independence from Soviet-Russian domination.

Hopefully, President Yushchenko will pull his nation though its current crisis and keep the spluttering economy going — if scorned political ex-wife Yulia lets him, which I doubt.

Political and economic chaos in Ukraine only benefits Moscow. Russians have long insisted that Ukrainians were incapable of governing themselves and needed their iron hand. Lately, Ukrainians have done much to support this nasty claim.

No wonder normally gloomy Vladimir Putin is looking rather cheerful. Reclaiming highly strategic Ukraine is his number one priority in building a new Soviet Union.—Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2005

Reconciliation without justice

ALGERIA may be one of those faraway countries of which we know little and care less. But there are good reasons for paying attention to what is happening there.

Lat week’s referendum on a charter for peace and national reconciliation produced an impressive 97 per cent “yes” vote, suggesting that a long-suffering people wants to look to the future, not dwell on a bloody past. The idea was to draw a line under the civil war of the 1990s when some 100,000 people were killed, many by having their throats slit, both by Islamist rebels and the security forces.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika wanted to “turn the page” — and secure a third term. But Algeria’s choice is strikingly different from what has been done in South Africa, Rwanda and Argentina, where apartheid, genocide and a dirty war have been subject to real debate, disclosure and punishment.

Instead it is offering amnesty for Islamists who committed all but the worst crimes, exoneration for the military and security forces, and cash handouts for the families of victims of the violence and the thousands who disappeared without trace after a knock on the door in the dead of night.

The problem is that peace and reconciliation without truth and justice are unlikely to work.

—The Guardian, London

Post-poll deadlock in Germany

ONE invariably thinks of Germany as a country of clever, industrious people, great classical composers and manufacturers of the world’s finest motor cars. Of beautiful forests and small towns that have managed to retain their quaint traditional charm and continue to attract tourists by the millions. Of a land where the government looks after its people, where order, discipline and a strong work ethic are ingrained in the soul, and where heavy-eyed politicians manage to initiate a series of boring, lacklustre elections.

That is why the acrimony and malice that has been displayed by the two leading contestants Gerhard Schroeder and Angela Merkel in the current national election is seen by the foreign observer as being completely out of character.

What makes the present contest significant is that the battle between the two major parties — the SPD and the CDU — is taking place amid soaring levels of unemployment and an exceptionally weak growth rate, not to mention stories of bribe-taking soccer referees which have recently popped up in the newspapers. The country appears to have lost some of the economic dynamism it displayed in the early years when it became the envy of the industrial world.

That, at least, is the general perception shared by critics of various political persuasions who believe that irrespective of who finally wins, the outcome will have little effect on the country’s sluggish economy. Predictably, this has had an effect on the currency and the euro slumped to a seven-week low against the dollar about two weeks ago, while German stocks shed 1.2 per cent.

The slide apparently started last year when Schroeder launched a package of pension, health and labour reforms to drag Germany’s economy out of years of stagnation. The measures were unpopular and failed to bring down the unemployment curve; and the SPD leader had to watch helplessly as a string of regional elections suggested that a wind of change was blowing across the country and that perhaps the German nation was looking for something different. This triggered a national poll a year ahead of schedule.

Currently the picture that has flickered into view is one of political impasse. German reforms are at a standstill. Merkel’s conservatives might have edged out their rivals by three parliamentary votes, but there is little prospect of a government being formed. A coalition is inevitable. But even in this area there are a number of hidden reefs. Both leaders have been trading verbal punches. Schroeder has said that it is quite clear the Germans do not want to see Merkel in the chancellor’s chair. He has also made it abundantly clear that in the event of a working partnership he won’t serve under Merkel whose policies in areas such as health are diametrically opposed to his.

Merkel, Stoiber’s successor in the party, on the other hand, is sticking to the theme that as the conservatives are the stronger party they have the mandate to form the government. She has come up with her own economic agenda — raising value added tax to compensate for a reduction in labour charges replacing wage-linked health insurance payments with flat fees and breaking the power of the German unions to set wages across whole sectors of the economy. While the conservatives have welcomed these proposals many Germans have found them threatening, especially the one put forward by the chief of the FDP, a partner of the CDU, who advocated a flat tax rate of 25 per cent for all.

Breaking the power of the unions in a functioning democracy like Germany is not as easy as it sounds and reminds one of the amusing story of the Bavarian trade unionist who returned from a meeting with the management and triumphantly told his supporters that henceforth they would start their shift at 10 instead of 8, knock off at 4 instead of 6 and work only on Wednesdays. Suddenly a squeaky voice was heard from the back of the hall, “every Wednesday?”

The smaller parties, the Greens and the FDP, whose alliance in past elections literally determined which national party would eventually speak for the fatherland, are playing their cards close to their chest. Their leaders have vowed not to be lured into a three-way coalition.

There has even been talk of Schroeder trying to break the umbilical cord that joins the CDU to the FDP since 1982 and to bring the latter over to his side. He would have to accomplish this by October 18 when the new parliament meets, though analysts don’t think he will be able to snap the old ties.

Coalitions often create more problems than solutions. Not only does one have to make extraordinary painful compromises, there is also the issue of personality clashes, parties jockeying for position and the question of who should get what. The bye-election scheduled to take place in Dresden on October 2 will be important only in the sense that it will help to determine if Schroeder still has his hand on the lever.

If during the next two months the parties cannot come to an agreement to form either a coalition government with an absolute majority in parliament, or a ‘tolerated minority’ government, the president will, under Article 63 of the constitution of the federal republic, be obliged to dissolve parliament and call for fresh elections. Under the present conditions that might be the best solution. It will give the German voter a chance to do a little re-thinking and to once again weigh the importance of issues like radical change to the old social market economy, immigration, Turkish membership of the European Union and relations with America.

As a political observer one cannot help but express a marked preference for Schroeder and his partner in the Greens, Joschka Fischer over Merkel and Guido Westerwelle who would be the most likely candidate for the post of foreign minister in the event of a rightist victory. It is the Social Democrats and the Greens who stood up for the rights of employees against the neo-liberal obsession with programmed redundancy.

It is these two statesmen that fought for comprehensive schools and continue to fight for the rights of the underprivileged and socially disadvantaged. It is because of the legislation they passed that hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals have gained the possibility of German residency, bringing a little colour and variety and spice into staid old Germany.

As the sage once said, sometimes it’s better to leave things as they are. Too much change isn’t necessarily good.

But one of their greatest achievements of the duo was keeping the German nation out of the war against Iraq, and reinforcing Germany’s reputation as a country that respects the United Nations and does not wish to act contrary to the norms of international law. Had Stoiber become the chancellor in 2002 instead of Schroeder, there is no doubt that German troops would have been sent to Iraq, exposing the fatherland to international ridicule, sabotage and terrorist attacks.

Memories of Germany are deep and ingrained. This writer was a kid when his tonsils were removed in a clinic in Berlin before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was a young adult when he visited the fatherland 20 years later and was amazed to see how a nation that had been through such a devastating and soul-destroying war had so miraculously sprung back to normal. It was almost as if there had never been a conflict.

Richard Strauss’ opera ‘Electra’ is still being performed in the Munich opera house, while youngsters in discotheques are still united by the vague consciousness of a shared activity.

Steamers still chug down the picturesque Rhine, watched by motorists enjoying a glass of Mosel in one of the cafes in Ruedesheim.

And in Berlin’s Tegel See bathers are still moored in the slow tides of flat calm afternoons, their bright anatomies roasting in the sun, while a warm dry breeze blows the froth off the tumblers of lager and while young boys with toy airplanes zoom at their war games at the edge of the lake, watched by grandmothers in feathered felt hats and ankle length skirts biting into sausage and bread and splashing themselves with cologne.

There is not too much danger of the images on the picture postcards changing too much because in spite of differences in policy and outlook both Schroeder and Merkel are still Germans who love the environment, who live partly in the past and partly in the future. They probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

Need for creative diplomacy

IT was comforting to hear from Jack Straw that military action against Iran is not “on the agenda” of Britain or the US, and that war is “inconceivable” — though this was still not as unequivocal as some would have wanted, and did not address the “all options are on the table” position President George Bush uses.

Nuances matter because the crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions is potentially extremely serious — and is escalating. The issue is Iran’s insistence that as a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) it is legally entitled to civilian nuclear technology.

There is however circumstantial evidence, as Mr Straw put it, that it has clandestine plans to develop weapons, a position backed by the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear agency. It voted last week to declare Iran in non-compliance with the NPT. That could be a first step towards referring it to the security council and possible sanctions.

European diplomacy was galvanised by the need to avoid the sort of divisions that fatally paralysed the EU over Iraq. But it has hit a wall over Tehran’s refusal to refrain from uranium reprocessing — a potential step towards making bomb-grade material — in exchange for technological, economic and political incentives, though these were vaguer than the accompanying demands.

President Mohammed Ahmedinejad’s uncompromising speech at the UN has been followed by warnings that Iran will reassess trade and energy ties with countries which voted for it to be declared in non-compliance. Ironically, one of those was India, which (like Pakistan and Israel) is not a signatory to the NPT but has its own (US-tolerated) nuclear weapons.

>—The Guardian, London