K.C. Singh | As major powers jostle, world to face instability

The world has of late seen several new four-member geopolitical groupings of major powers, termed as “Quads”, rise. Australia, India, Japan and the United States created a Quad in 2007, on the sidelines of an Asean Regional Forum (ARF) meeting. Early this year, the foreign ministers of India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the US met in Israel to christen a new West Asian Quad. This complemented on India’s west what the original Quad had created to its east in the Indo-Pacific region.

But a different kind of Quad is now in play where four big powers are elbowing for strategic space. Of the four, two are rising, one slipping and the fourth defending the status quo. This involves China, India, Russia and the United States. In the past month the leaders of all four have had bilateral summits amongst each other. The meaning of this interplay needs to be deciphered.

At the core of this drama is the tension between India and China as well as America’s troubled relationship with China and Russia. China has been unwilling to revert to the pre-Galwan mutually agreed principles of troop deployment along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). This has kept bilateral relations from fully normalising.

China has continued deployment of troops in larger numbers than normal along the LAC despite the onset of winter. The Indian military has therefore also been compelled to mirror these deployments to stymie any fresh Chinese military adventure. Russia in turn has similarly testy relations with the US and the European Union over the deployment of 1,15,000 of its troops close to the Ukraine border. Fear has gripped Kiev that Russia is waiting to intrude militarily in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin’s trip to India was to demonstrate that Russia was not isolated internationally. Mr Putin held his virtual summit with US President Joe Biden only days after his visit to India on December 6, for the 21st annual bilateral summit.

President Putin conveyed to President Biden, during their summit, that the Russian “red lines” are that Nato should rethink its forward military activities and deployments in the former Warsaw Pact nations, abutting the Russian border.

Many analysts have pointed out that when the Soviet Union allowed the peaceful reunification of Germany and withdrew its troops from the East Bloc nations, then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had demanded that Nato, the Western alliance system, should not admit the newly liberated nations. Seeing a weakened Russia under President Boris Yeltsin, the US and its allies ignored that unwritten understanding.

President Putin has been trying to retrieve that lost strategic buffer. Russia has adopted a multi-pronged approach. One is an attempt to undermine the major Western democracies by manipulating the social media during elections. The controversy during the 2016 US presidential election was never fully resolved.

Two, Russia has allegedly used mercenaries to intrude into contested areas to alter the ground realities. Three, it has employed its energy resources to create divisions in the Western alliance. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline across the Baltic Sea serves to stir up differences between the US and Germany. It also punishes Ukraine by denying it crucial revenues which earlier pipelines through it generated. Russia is thus trying to stop further shrinkage of its strategic space in Europe. It would at the very least want that the 2008 Nato offer to induct Ukrainian and Georgia is aborted. It is against this background that India and Russia met at the summit level.

One irritant for Russia has been India diversifying its weapons purchase sources. Israel’s defence industry did not threaten Russia as much as the United States because of the sheer depth of platforms that the US can offer. Also, US weapons sales are never merely commercial transactions. They are a means to influence the foreign policy choices of the recipient nations, if not compelling them to align fully with the US. The partisan divisions in the US Senate also enable the US to use legislative hurdles to seek unrelated strategic concessions.

How complex the task is when balancing relations between two powers at loggerheads becomes apparent from simply looking at the trade figures. India-Russia trade last year was $8.1 billion, compared to $146 billion with the US. Even with the EU, it is $71 billion. But Russia has always been more forthcoming in sharing critical technologies in the field of space, missiles, aviation and submarines. However, Russia has a shrinking population and overdependence on its oil and gas resources, which may be in a sunset phase in the coming years.

Besides accessing technologies that the US may not share, India also wants to ensure Russia does not move too deeply into the China-Pakistan corner.

India-Russia relations, spelt out as the “Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership” in the 99-point Joint Statement, sound hyperbolic. The military dimension dominated the outcome. The resolve to hike bilateral trade to $30 billion by 2025 seems unrealistic. The agreement to jointly produce 6,00,000 AK-203 rifles appears more doable. The reiteration of the order for the S-400 battery system, despite the threat of US sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), would have reassured Russia that India was retaining strategic independence despite its growing relations with the US. Russia would also be sharing India’s concerns about the post-Taliban developments in Afghanistan as well as the growing Chinese role in Central Asia. But India also hosted the Summit for Democracy hosted by President Joe Biden, which Russia and even more so China condemned. The fact that China was able to compel Pakistan PM Imran Khan to skip it despite an invitation shows how alignments shift depending on the subject. China claimed its democracy, called “consultative democracy”, was the most effective. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has argued that it has “dang nei min zhu”, or intra-party democracy. A premier Chinese university posed 10 questions to the US, alleging the role of money and the prevalence of hunger as degrading US democracy.

With a major global power shift underway, this kind of jostling between major powers is inevitable. In the 19th century, the interplay in Europe was between five powers — England, France, Prussia (Germany after 1871), Russia and Austria. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck quipped that the aim was to be with three or more, never two or less. When diplomats could not maintain the balance, the First World War followed. The world may again be slipping towards similar instability due to the big powers’ jostling for space and influence.