INDIA’S principal strategic ambition can be stated succinctly: to ensure a stable and conducive external environment that will enable its internal economic and social transformation, and in turn allow India to play a larger international role. From this overarching aim flow two key preoccupations of India’s external policy. The first is the quest for a secure periphery, including India’s immediate and extended neighbourhoods. The second is the attempt to ensure an enabling global context for the pursuit of India’s internal objectives as well as its desire to play a role in the international system commensurate with its growing economic and strategic weight.

The pursuit of these seemingly straightforward objectives has, however, been complicated owing to important, incipient changes in the international and global context. Amidst the welter of day-to-day developments and distractions, three large strategic challenges loom before our policy makers. To begin with, there is the peculiar character of the global power shifts currently underway. Further, there is the problem of flawed or weak institutional architectures to manage security and economic problems. Finally, there is an increasing need to adopt a more complex strategic orientation to cope with these problems. New Delhi’s ability to respond to these challenges will be crucial in its pursuit of its core strategic objectives.

A curious feature of strategic discourse in India is the absence of debates around the relative merits of a multipolar versus unipolar international system. The contrast with foreign policy debates in other ‘emerging powers’ such as Brazil, China and Russia is stark indeed. This may well stem from the fact that India has done rather well for itself even at the height of unipolarity under unchallenged American hegemony. Yet, it is undeniable that we are living through a period of power transition and that its effects on the behaviour of states is already visible. The challenge is to grasp the nature of this transition.

It is a commonplace to describe the transition as principally a shift of economic power from the global West to the East.¹ This leads to the further assumption that the growing economic muscle of countries such as China will inexorably lead them to challenge the existing international order. A scenario where the ‘rising powers’ seek to revise the status quo while the established powers seek to cement it is seen as pregnant with the possibility of conflict. On the centenary of the First World War, it is tempting to think that Asia in 2014 resembles Europe in 1914.² There are many problems with this facile historical analogy, but its fatal flaw is in the underlying assumption of revisionist versus status quo powers.

 

To be sure, China wants both to assert its heft in its region and to enhance its wider strategic footprint. But it is hardly the case that China seeks a far-reaching revision of the existing international system. Much the same is true of India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and other emerging powers. This is not surprising, for these countries have been among the principal beneficiaries, economically and politically, of the current global order. What they seek is incremental change in the system, especially by way of an increased role for themselves in the centres of agenda setting and decision making on global issues. The flip side to this is another aspect of contemporary international politics that confounds conventional expectations. Significant attempts at changing the status quo are actually coming from the established powers. Indeed, the dissatisfaction of the status quo powers with the status quo is a key feature of the ongoing power transition.

Consider, for example, the global trading system. Emerging powers like China and India have benefited tremendously from globalization over the past two decades. Over time, their increasing economic importance has also given them substantial stakes in the management of this system. For instance, the old ‘Quad’ comprising of the US, Canada, EU and Japan is no longer the key decision making club in the World Trade Organization (WTO). More importantly, the emerging economies have had substantive differences with the US and its allies, and have held their own. In the wake of the global economic slowdown since 2008, it is not surprising that the West has grown increasingly uncomfortable with the existing system. The inability to compel countries like India as well as China to toe its line in trade talks has led the US to consider other ways of changing the system.

 

Thus, the US is promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Signed in 2005 by Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, the TPP has drawn the interest of five other countries: Australia, Malaysia, Peru, Japan and Vietnam. The TPP has an ambitious tripartite agenda: a regular FTA with provisions for protecting intellectual property; the creation of investor-friendly regulatory frameworks and policies; and other emerging issues, including measures to ensure that state-owned companies ‘compete fairly’ with private companies. In its attempt to push through the TPP, the US has held out carrots as well as sticks to its allies. American exports of shale gas are expected to lubricate the deal on TPP. At the time, the Obama administration has talked tough with countries like Japan that are dragging their feet on a comprehensive accord.

Negotiations are also underway since 2011 between the US and the EU for a Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP). The recent stand-off between the EU and Russia over Ukraine will lend impetus to these negotiations. Together the TPP and TTIP will undoubtedly undermine the existing multilateral trading order and will hurt the interests of countries like China and India. This poses a serious and difficult problem for India. On the one hand, India’s ability to bat for the multilateral order may be hobbled by the ease with which it is portrayed as an ‘obstructionist’ player in the WTO. On the other hand, even if India chooses to focus more on bilateral and regional free trade agreements, it is bound to come up against a situation in the future where the new standards being set in TPP and TTIP are imported onto the global agenda.

 

A similar pattern can be discerned in other areas of the international system. Take the international financial institutions – another pillar of the post-Second World War order crafted by the United States. A few years back, the US Congress refused to approve a deal that would have increased financing for the International Monetary Fund and resulted in a minor increase in the voting power of China and other emerging economies. Although this would have knock-on benefits for the US in places such as Ukraine, where a bilateral aid programme would be costlier, the Obama administration appears ready to let the IMF wither on the vine. Nor, for similar reasons, is the US much interested in strengthening the World Bank.³

In the global political order too, it is the status quo powers that are initiating change. The organization of the United Nations, particularly the Security Council, is increasingly seen by the US and its allies as uncongenial to them. While countries like India and Brazil have called for an expansion of the Security Council, the US believes that this would further complicate the management of its global interests. To facilitate the pursuit of these interests, the US and its allies have championed the establishment of norms like Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Designed to protect gross abuses of human rights by sovereign states – an agenda that is shared and championed by human rights organizations – R2P provides the perfect framework to preserve and advance US interests with the Security Council’s agreement if possible and without if necessary.

 

It is hardly surprising that the US and its allies invoked R2P for their ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Libya, secured the Security Council’s reluctant authorization and used it to overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Tyrants like Gaddafi deserve to go, but this should not mask the ruthless pursuit of great power interests. Besides, the countries that are at the receiving end of such ‘humanitarian’ beneficence continue to be plagued by political turmoil. In turn, the expected resistance of Russia and China to the application of R2P to Syria has led to a bloody impasse. What’s worse, Syria has emerged as the new breeding ground for Islamist terrorism.

The ensuing instability and violence will impinge upon India’s core interests. After all, West Asia accounts for nearly 65% of our crude imports, $93 billion of trade, and has 6 million Indian expatriate workers who remit over $35 billion every year. More broadly, the cynical invocation of ‘humanitarian’ principles could have serious systemic consequences. Think only of Russia’s use of this to annex Crimea. Unfortunately, instead of recognizing this as a consequence of their own misuse of such principles, the US and its allies are riding the moral high horse. Such a polarized context makes it difficult for India to balance its own interests between upholding the notion of sovereignty and insisting on the need to prevent gross human rights abuses.

 

The effects of this peculiar power transition are impinging upon India in the absence of established and functional institutions, especially regional ones. East and West Asia are central to the global economy. They are also the arena for great power strategic interests and rivalry. Managing economic ties and security concerns in Asia will remain a challenge owing to the lack of an overarching institutional architecture.

New Delhi has repeatedly insisted that India stands for ‘an open, inclusive and transparent architecture of regional cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region.’ India has backed the East Asia Summit as the best forum for developing such architecture in East and South East Asia. And it has resisted attempts by China to project ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and South Korea) as the ‘core’ of the emerging regional order. Yet, the fact remains that India is not at the centre of this process. It has some distance to go before it becomes a serious player in East Asia. India’s economic ties with the region are just beginning to grow. It is largely unplugged from the integrated supply and production chains that are central to East and South East Asian economies. Similarly, whilst India is seen in the region as a potential partner in counteracting China’s dominance, it is not yet in a position to act as a net security provider.

In this context, New Delhi has chosen to invigorate key bilateral relationships. The most visible of these is the one with Japan. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been a champion of strategic ties with India since his first tenure in 2006-07. He is now in the midst of an ambitious attempt at jump-starting Japan’s economy and beefing-up its military muscle. Economic and security ties with India have assumed greater importance in this context.

The Japanese are eager to diversify their foreign investments to destinations other than China. Over the past couple of years, it has become clear to Japan that the web of economic ties with China, especially their massive direct investments, are working more to Beijing’s advantage. India is already the largest recipient of Japanese overseas development aid. And Tokyo wants to give a major boost to economic relations with India. The two sides are already engaged in a range of bilateral defence and strategic exchanges at various levels. Tokyo has expressed interest in boosting cooperation on defence and dual-use technology. The Japanese have offered state of the art US 2 amphibian surveillance aircraft to India. The Abe government also wants to push ahead with civilian nuclear cooperation – an issue of considerable interest to India.

 

All of this presents an excellent opportunity for India, both in economic and strategic terms. Yet, Japan’s current trajectory is not without its downsides in a broader context. For one thing, Shinzo Abe is a vigorous proponent of TPP and Japan’s accession will have real implications for regional trade. For another, his strategic and political activism has a provocative edge – not just to China but to countries like South Korea as well. Restraining as well reassuring Japan and China will need regional security architecture of a kind that does not exist at the moment.

Meantime, it is the US that will by default attempt to fill this institutional vacuum. The Obama administration’s much vaunted ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalancing’ to East Asia was apparently aimed at this. But it is not clear that the US is putting its money where its mouth is. From New Delhi’s perspective, the evolving US posture towards China is pulling in two different directions. One line of thinking seeks to reconcile the US to Chinese ascendancy in the Asian theatre, and position it as an offshore balancer. The other sees China as a threat to US dominance, with the Asia-Pacific theatre being regarded as critical to maintaining US pre-eminence globally. US policy appears to fluctuate between these two ends of the spectrum, currently being closer to the latter end. The strategic pendulum may yet swing in the opposite direction. Here lies a key challenge for Indian policy makers – one that cannot be surmounted simply by propounding ever closer ties with the US.

 

In West Asia too, security competition is playing out in an institutional vacuum. This is already evident in the case of Syria. From the Indian standpoint, the continuing crisis in Syria is problematic for a variety of reasons. Given India’s dependence on West Asia for its energy needs and the huge presence of Indian expatriate workers in the region, protracted instability is highly undesirable. More worryingly, the Syrian crisis is fast becoming the focal point for regional rivalry centred on Saudi Arabia and Iran, both of which remain important for India’s economic interests. Equally problematic is the sharpening of the sectarian, Sunni versus Shia, divide in the region. India has sought to avoid being placed in a position where it has to make sharp choices between the Arab Persian Gulf states and Iran.

New Delhi has so far managed to walk the tightrope successfully, but in the event of a major regional crisis this strategy will come under pressure. Even seemingly positive developments can accentuate regional rivalries in West Asia. The prospect of a deal between Iran and the US has already unnerved Saudi Arabia and its smaller allies. The security architecture of the Gulf, which currently excludes Iran, is clearly unsustainable. Till such time Iran is given its due place in this arrangement, the management of regional problems will remain tricky. This is unlikely to happen in a hurry, and in consequence will continue to pose problems for India’s interests in the region.

 

In preserving its economic and security interests in a changing global context with weak regional institutions, India has to adopt a more complex strategic posture. In the past few years, the importance of the maritime dimension has acquired salience in our strategic discourse. ‘Maritime supremacy is the hallmark of a great power,’ observed the Foreign Minister: ‘There can be no two views about the fact that India’s future lies in its ability to harness the power of the Ocean –the Indian Ocean and the extended "India-Pacific" Ocean region.’⁴

Over the past couple of years, the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ has come into vogue as a way of thinking about India’s strategic challenges and opportunities in the maritime domain.⁵ This maritime turn in Indian strategic thinking is spurred by India’s strengths as well as weaknesses. On the one hand, there is India’s geographic location atop and athwart the sea lines of communication in the Indian Ocean between West and East Asia. The Indian Navy has the capability to maintain a presence and project power on both the western and eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean. And the Indian Navy’s capability and footprint is set to be enhanced in keeping with the Maritime Capability Perspective Plan, 2012-2027. On the other hand, Indian strategic planners believe that their relative weakness along the land frontiers with China could be redressed by harnessing India’s naval advantages. More broadly, India’s naval capabilities have thrown open the possibility of working with other regional players in East and South East Asia to create countervailing capacities.

Concepts like ‘Indo-Pacific’ are useful insofar as they signal India’s increasing interests in its extended maritime periphery. Yet they tend to overstate the extent to which this oceanic space is an integrated security arena. It is arguably more useful to disaggregate it into three zones – the Indian Ocean, the seas near China, and the western Pacific – each of which has its own security dynamics both in terms of capabilities and intentions of the key states.

 

Further, much needs to be done before India can emerge as a serious maritime – not just naval – player in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Although India’s trade is heavily reliant on sea lanes, only 11% of its foreign trade is carried on Indian ships. Similarly India’s ship building capacity (by dead weight tonnage) comprises only 1% of total world capacity. By contrast, China accounts for 35%.⁶ Then there is the financial dimension of maritime power. Historically, there have been few maritime powers that are not financial powerhouses as well.⁷ This was brought to the fore quite sharply by the imposition of western sanctions on Iran. European firms insure over 90% of the world’s tanker fleets. Their refusal, following the imposition of sanctions, to cover shipments from Iran poses serious problems for India. New Delhi had to extend sovereign guarantees to Indian ships that fetched Iranian crude, but the amounts guaranteed were a small fraction of the actual insurance cover extended to these ships. The absence of protection and indemnity insurance in India hampers our ability to be a serious maritime player.

While this maritime turn is a welcome development in Indian debates, there is the risk of being bewitched by its novelty and losing sight of other strategic imperatives. India is, after all, an integral part not just of the Indian Ocean or Indo-Pacific regions, but of Eurasia too. As John Darwin reminds us, following Halford Mackinder, ‘The centre of gravity in modern world history lies in Eurasia – in the troubled, conflicted, connected and intimate relations of its great cultures and states, strung out in a line from European "Far West" to the Asian "Far East".’⁸ Recent events in Ukraine culminating in the Russian annexation of Crimea are a salutary reminder that not all geopolitical competition is concentrated in the maritime zones of Asia and that strategic developments across Eurasia are closely intertwined.

India’s ability to pursue its strategic goals in this changing global environment will thus require a sophisticated strategic posture that combines a continental as well as a maritime outlook. The inner frontiers of Eurasia will matter as much as its maritime zones. The challenge for New Delhi is to foster institutional structures and intellectual resources that will enable it to play this game with patience and finesse.

 

Footnotes:

1. See, for instance, Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Public Affairs, New York, 2008; Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World: And the Rise of the Rest. W.W. Norton, New York, 2009.

2. None less than the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, has compared China with Wilhelmine Germany. ‘Japan’s Leader Compares Strains with China to Germany and Britain in 1914’, The New York Times, 23 January 2014.

3. Nancy Birdsall and Devesh Kapur, ‘America’s Neglected Financial Children’, 28 March 2014, Project Syndicate. Accessed online at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nancy-birdsall-and-devesh-kapur-ask-why-the-us-is-turning-its-back-on-the-multi-lateral-institutions-that-it-founded

4. Salman Khurshid, ‘Keynote Address’ in Rajiv K. Bhatia and Vijay Sakhuja (eds.), Indo-Pacific Region: Political and Strategic Prospects. Indian Council on World Affairs, New Delhi, 2014, p. xi.

5. The best treatment is C. Raja Mohan, Samundra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2013.

6. Shyam Saran, ‘India’s Maritime Strategy’, Keynote Address at ORF-RISS Workshop, 20 February 2014.

7. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (new ed.). Penguin, London 2004.

8. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire. Allen Lane, London, 2007, p. 19.