Opinion India and the Great Power rivalry

Meeting in Beijing last Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping proclaimed that the “friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation”. This week, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is meeting President Joe Biden at the White House, will be under enormous pressure to reassure Washington that Berlin has not gone soft on Russia and is not abandoning its NATO partners. Meanwhile, the French president is travelling to Moscow to explore the possibilities for de-escalation of the crisis in Ukraine.

Putin’s summit with Xi highlighted the convergence between the two sides on a range of issues from NATO expansion to the AUKUS alliance. Those familiar with the twists and turns in the Sino-Russian relationship over the last seven decades — allies in the 1950s, enemies in the 1960s and 1970s, and partners again in the 2000s — will point to potential contradictions in the new united front.

Despite their problems with the US, both Moscow and Beijing want a productive partnership with Washington. Both Russia and China want to leverage the united front to negotiate better terms from America. Washington, in turn, wants to explore the cleavages between Moscow and Beijing. Biden’s outreach to Putin last year was based on the premise that the US could better focus on the challenges from China in the Indo-Pacific if there was a reasonable relationship with Russia in Europe. Putin is trying to take advantage of that proposition by raising the stakes in Europe. Xi, who challenges US primacy in Asia, continues to find ways to limit confrontation with the US. If Putin is focused on military means to rewrite the European security order with the US, Xi is focused on the economic means to alter the US ties.

Xi is making a big play for the Wall Street bankers who see merits in engagement with Beijing and lobby Washington to scale down the confrontation with China. Washington too is warning that if Beijing backs Moscow in the Ukraine crisis, there might be major financial costs to Chinese companies. US officials have pointed out that the word “Ukraine” does not figure in the 5,000-word statement and suggested that Beijing might not go all the way with Moscow in Europe.

Equally important is the underestimation of American resilience in Moscow and Beijing. It has been easy for Russian and Chinese propagandists to harp on “American and Western decline”. The chaos of American domestic politics and the continuing arguments between the US and its European partners tend to amplify the dissonance within the West. It would be a terrible blunder for Putin and Xi to mistake Western disagreements for strategic divergence.

The last few years have seen the quick emergence of a new US consensus on challenging China despite the polarisation of the American political class. On the Russian question, there is no difference across the US political divide.

The idea that the US can’t risk a two-front challenge with Russia and China is popular but mistaken. The US has enough military resources to address aggression by both Moscow and Beijing. Equally misleading is the notion that the US retreat from Afghanistan reflects Washington’s weakened political will. Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan was rooted in the recognition that the time is now to move away from counterinsurgency in the Greater Middle East to focus on the conflict with other great powers.

Despite the dramatic rise of China and its new partnership with Russia, the united front can’t really match the comprehensive national power of the US and its allies. Russia does not figure in the top 10 world economies today; seven of the countries among the 10 — Japan, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, and South Korea — are allies of the US, which has been at the top of the heap for a century and more. India is now a strategic partner of the US and faces growing challenges from China, which is second in the hierarchy.

When he took charge in January 2021, Biden and his team began with the proposition that America’s greatest advantage was in its long-standing alliances in Europe and Asia. Unlike Trump, who trashed US alliances, Biden and his team focused on refurbishing and expanding them.

In Asia, Biden has revived the Anglosphere (the AUKUS alliance with the UK and Australia), elevated the Quad to the summit level, and reached out to the ASEAN. In Europe, the US is getting its NATO ducks in a row. Britain has taken the lead in the diplomatic confrontation with Russia.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who declared NATO “brain dead” a couple of years ago, is coordinating with the US in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. Berlin, which seemed unwilling to challenge Moscow and Beijing given Germany’s large commercial stakes in Russia and China, is likely to show greater solidarity with the US on both fronts this week.

If the Chinese aggression in Asia helped the US to reboot its regional alliances and draw in new partners like India, Putin’s brinkmanship on Ukraine could achieve what Russia wants to prevent — the strengthening of the NATO alliance.

Beyond the rebuilding of US alliances, Washington has an important lever that is bound to come into play sooner than later. It is the exploitation of the domestic political vulnerabilities of “Czar Putin” and “Emperor Xi”. While their strong-men rule shines bright in the face of perennial chaos in Western democracies, there is no escaping their brittleness.

Where does the return of bloc politics leave Delhi? India’s approach will depend upon the new dynamic between the two coalitions as well as its own relations with China, Russia, and the US. With the return of great power rivalry coinciding with India’s deteriorating ties with China, Delhi now stands closer than ever before to the West. The meeting of the Quad foreign ministers in Australia this week and the planned summit of their leaders in Japan during May will give some clues to India’s future navigation between the great powers.

India would like to see Russia find an accommodation with the West in Europe; but if Russia comes to blows with the West in Europe, Delhi is unlikely to let Moscow undermine its growing partnership with the US and its allies. Delhi has no power to nudge Moscow towards Washington, nor does it have a veto over Russia’s strategic partnership with China. Moscow too can’t inhibit Delhi’s new realism in the rearrangement of India’s great power relations.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 8, 2022 under the title ‘The Great Power rivalry’. The writer is contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express