Implausible reality

Without much ado, China’s first and only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, left its homeport of Qingdao in east China’s Shandong Province on Sunday for conducting tests and training missions.

How far deep into the blue sea it will sail and how long will its mission continue remains unclear. But what is clear is that unlike during its 37-day voyage in the South China Sea last December, when the guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens conducted surveillance of the Liaoning, no such provocative intelligence-gathering operation by the Americans is likely.
The Asia-Pacific is no more the same. The Associated Press reported that the emergent preoccupations on the European theatre have become “a renewed reality that may force president Barack Obama’s administration to give up its intended foreign policy shift to Asia indefinitely”.

Indeed, the looming crisis in Ukraine threatens to impact the power dynamic all across East Asia as well as the regions of Central Asia and Afghanistan and West Asia, the wide swathe of land American strategists would call the Greater Middle East. To be sure, the new government in New Delhi after the parliamentary poll on April-May can expect an external environment of great fluidity surrounding India.

The locus of the US foreign policy has shifted back to Europe. Europe has been receiving only glancing mention as a foreign-policy priority for the Obama administration, but the first sign of a reshuffling of priorities appeared at the annual Munich security conference two months ago in the speech by the US secretary of state John Kerry.

He all but admitted Washington’s realisation that the weakening of the US’ transatlantic leadership through the last decade or so, coupled with the administration’s plan to roll back military spending and shrink armed forces, steadily undercut the US’ capacity to lead from the front in global politics. Suffice to say, the US is rediscovering the core value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and this is being put to test in Ukraine.

The US hopes to rally the world to push back resurgent Russia, whereas the approach so far has been to selectively engage Russia on areas of vital American interests and to use Moscow’s considerable leverage to help solve world problems. The Ukraine problem at its core is related to Moscow’s attempt to integrate the former Soviet republics under the Eurasian Union. The Eurasian Union challenges the US’ project to present the Nato as the provider of security for Central Asia.

From the Russian perspective, on the other hand, NATO’s expansion and the deployment of the US missile defence system on its border regions would transform the global strategic balance in Washington’s favour and divest Moscow of its nuclear deterrence capabilities.

Impact on India

India may face negative fallouts of these big-power rivalries that can be expected to erupt in Central Asia, especially if the US reverts to its Cold War strategy to use the ‘jihad’ as instrument of policy to overthrow the pro-Russian regimes in that region. The recent visit by the Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Al-Saud to Pakistan and the forthcoming visit by Obama to Saudi Arabia suggest that new templates are appearing in regional politics.

Clearly, the US sees the military bases in Afghanistan as invaluable strategic assets to project power into Central Asia. On the other hand, the open-ended western occupation of Afghanistan will fuel the ‘jihadi’ elements, and the implications are serious for regional security. Syria is a telling example of the danger of the ascendancy of extremists. Any rupture in the US-Russia cooperation will only complicate further the situation in Syria and make it more difficult to find a political solution.

The big question is whether the US imposes ‘sanctions’ on Russia. Any such move would have huge consequences for the world energy market and would, most certainly, draw forth retaliation by Russia. The result could well be a showdown over the situation surrounding Iran where Moscow has so far cooperated with Washington. Obama insists that 95 percent of the US sanctions against Iran will remain in place until a nuclear deal is concluded. But Russia is under no obligation to observe the US’ sanction regime against Iran. Iran’s integration with the international community can no longer be on American terms and the implications are profound for the security of the Persian Gulf.

Over and above, the understanding shown by Beijing to Moscow’s stance in the Ukraine crisis enriches the China-Russia strategic partnership. In comparison, Japan caved in to the US pressure to toe the G7 line and the Russia-Japan normalization process would get delayed. Thus, China becomes a crucial partner for Russia in its upcoming struggle to break out of the ring of political and economic isolation that the US threatens to impose on it. In the emergent scenario, Washington would be exceedingly foolish to cause any annoyance to Beijing.
In sum, the US’ capacity to push its ‘rebalance’ strategy in Asia becomes more doubtful than ever before. How these incipient tendencies in big power politics would crystallize remains to be seen, but the Ukraine crisis holds the potential to become a ‘game changer’ in the politics of the Asia-Pacific. India, in retrospect, did well by eschewing ‘bloc mentality’, which would have proved delusional, and instead opted for a process of normalisation with China.

Of course, implausible as it may seem, the new reality is also that the Liaoning could well choose to head northward to the East China Sea to test its prowess in the vicinity of the Diaoyu Islands – even by sailing by it and putting it on a navigation chart. If that were to happen, would Japan resist or retreat? Put simply, China is the winner in the US’s confrontation with Russia.

(The writer is a former ambassador)