M.K. Bhadrakumar
The United States used to be an ardent supporter of the rechristening of the Asia-Pacific region as the Indo-Pacific, and in all fairness, President Donald Trump should have included India in his itinerary of Asia tour, the first in his second term. Delhi would have been more than happy to schedule a Quad summit to peg such a visit but evidently, Trump was uninterested.
Trump has no need for India as a ‘counterweight’ to China in the dramatically changing Asian (and international) environment. Trump has other ideas toward engaging with China in a constructive spirit. Quad has become an albatross Trump can do without. Never once after setting foot in Asia on the current tour, Trump made even a cursory reference to Quad. Life is getting even more complicated for India.
In the cold war era, ASEAN would have been the US’s ‘natural ally’ but by the mid-2010s, the southeast Asian grouping had already begun tapping into China’s phenomenal growth. The blossoming of the adorable China-ASEAN bromance, an exceptionally tight, affectional, homosocial bonding relationship by itself, began almost unnoticed in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 when China
toppled the US’ traditional role as the locomotive of the world economy by accommodating the US’ distress calls to Beijing to keep US interest rates low by buying billions of dollars of new Treasury debt, and by launching a US$ 586 billion fiscal stimulus in 2008 (an amount more than 12 percent of China’s GDP at that time) by way of an aggressive, dare-devil monetary policy.
By a curious coincidence, 2008 also happened to be the Year of the Rat by the Chinese Zodiac calendar which is associated with the smart, quick-witted, flexible, adaptable, and outgoing human traits. At any rate, as the US, UK and Japan all fell into recession (and probably are yet to see a real recovery), amidst an increasing disdain and lack of trust among many in the southeast Asian region of the West’s financial practices, China turned out to be the single biggest factor in why Asia managed to escape the global financial crisis relatively unscathed. Suffice to say, China’s massive stimulus package not only helped to stabilise and revive China’s economy, its market, but became the lifeline for the rest of Asia. China never looked back, and has remained the largest trading partner of the ASEAN for 16 consecutive years.
Such stark realities influence Trump’s strategy toward China. His mothballing of the Indo-Pacific strategy is not whimsical but an acknowledgment of emergent geopolitical realities. Indians are still on a learning curve here.
In the run-up to Trump’s Asia tour, RAND, Pentagon’s think tank, brought out a research report entitled Stabilising the US-China Rivalry. The report’s key findings are that: some degree of modus vivendi must necessarily be part of the US-China relationship; both countries should accept “the essential political legitimacy of the other”; they should develop “sets of shared rules, norms, institutions, and other tools that create lasting conditions of a stable modus vivendi; each side should “practice restraint in the development of capabilities explicitly designed to undermine the deterrent and defensive capabilities of the other”; the two countries should accept “some essential list of characteristics of a shared vision of organising principles for world politics that can provide at least a baseline for an agreed status quo”.
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