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The key to Asian stability

2002-01-09Asia Times

BEIJING - If India and China see the logic of stronger bilateral ties, the United States will have to face the possibility of these two Asian giants adopting an anti-American stance. Washington could avoid this by building a new long-term commitment in Asia, while considering the region as a whole and not just pieces of it, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Here the US focus can't be anything but, again, China, the only East Asian country whose geography reaches to Central, South, Southeast and North Asia. Its geography is complemented by its present economic dynamism and its huge population, which gives it the manpower and economic muscle for the projection of its influence.

Stronger China-India ties would help stabilize Central Asia, and stem the Muslim fundamentalist wave. These new ties could also be a strong guarantee for the stabilization of Pakistan. They could, furthermore, guarantee a US presence in Central Asia and strengthen Russia's position as a bridge with Europe.

We could have, then, both a stronger India-China relationship and stronger China-US relations. The whole purpose would be to strengthen, using Chinese jargon, the material and spiritual development of Asia, by which we mean furthering the economy and a more liberal political system.

Richard Holbrooke, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, argued early this month in the Washington Post ("A defining moment with China", January 2) for a new agreement with China that goes beyond the issue of Taiwan, the centerpiece of past US-China agreements. In fact, if the focus of the relationship is Central Asia and the stabilization of Pakistan, then the issue of Taiwan and possibly even of Japan become secondary.

However, this Central Asia is different from the one taken into consideration by former US secretary of state Zbigniew Brzezinsky in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. He underscored the centrality of China but considered its risks.

"A cautious cultivation of China is much to be preferred over any American-led effort toward the direct containment of China," wrote Brzezinsky. "In fact, the notion of an American-led strategy to contain China, or even the idea of an informal balancing coalition confined to the island states of Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, and Indonesia, backed by Japan and America, has had no significant appeal for the Japanese foreign policy establishment. In the Japanese perspective, any effort of that sort would not only require an indefinite and major American military presence in both Japan and Korea but, by creating an incendiary geopolitical overlap between Chinese and American-Japanese regional interests, would be likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy of a collision with China. The result would be to inhibit Japan's evolutionary emancipation and threaten the Far East's economic well-being.

"By the same token, few favor the opposite: a grand accommodation between Japan and China. The regional consequences of such a classical reversal of alliances would be too unsettling: an American withdrawal from the region as well as the prompt subordination of both Taiwan and Korea to China, leaving Japan at China's mercy. This is not an appealing prospect, save perhaps to a few extremists."

In this scenario, the focus is the possible Chinese projection toward the sea, of which the acquisition of Taiwan would be a first step toward a threat to Japan. This doctrine is grounded on Japanese fears that as development in Japan brought about Japanese expansion to China, so Chinese development would bring about Chinese encroachment on Japan. But this needn't be the case if we see that for now - and for a long time - the focus of stability will be Central Asia and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

In fact, the major threats to global stability within 20 years will not come from China or India. Even a nuclear clash involving Taiwan or Pakistan - a remote possibility anyway - would have very serious consequences regionally, but the global consequences would be marginal, as the Americas, Europe and Africa would be unscathed by such wars.

The danger of a global Chinese threat seems much smaller now after the September 11 attacks and this puts into perspective the matter of China's economic growth. In the next 20 years China could quadruple its gross domestic product, but this would bring China to a GDP of about US$4 trillion, around the present level of Japan's GDP. But such a feat would require an average annual growth rate of 8 percent, something that seems at present beyond possibility for China. A more realistic projection is a 6-7 percent annual growth rate that would bring China to a GDP of about $3 trillion by the year 2020.

In the meantime, in 2020, the US GDP, now standing at $8 trillion, could very well be over $12 trillion, and possibly even over $15 trillion. Therefore, in a generation China will not yet have caught up with Japan and will have a GDP one-quarter or one-fifth that of the United States. This will hardly put China in a position to challenge the US, which could still count on its alliances with Japan and Europe, making up a combined GDP of something well over $30 trillion. These calculations are rough and do not take into account the technological innovations that could increase the advantage of US industry over the rest of the world.

While China will not have become an industrial power large enough to take on the US, the demographic explosion of Islamic countries could by the same time have created immense problems in those nations whose economy is either faltering or ruled by a corrupt elite. Egypt and Iran might have well over 100 million people each. Algeria could have 60 million people, more than its former master, France. Pakistan and Bangladesh might have in all more than half a billion inhabitants. Indonesia could have over 300 million people and Saudi Arabia, the holiest land of Islam, could have 40-50 million people.

The Afghan war has wakened the world to the reality that Saudi Arabia, for whose safety the West fought the Gulf War, is a hotbed for terrorism.

"At least four times in the last six years, Saudis who were trained or recruited in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo or Bosnia have been among the terrorists who carried out bombings of US targets - in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen," wrote Douglas Jehl of the New York Times last month. "But not until October, after the US military campaign in Afghanistan began, did Saudi Arabia detain young men trying to join that fight."

The large ideological threat of the Wahabi movement, born in Saudi Arabia, suggests an Arab Sunni ambition to take over the leadership of the Islamic movement, which for a generation was taken up by the Shi'ites in Iran. This ambition may be coupled by threats against the West. The anthrax case has demonstrated the power of terror; the anthrax incidents originated in the US, and possibly were even unrelated to the September 11 attacks, but for months managed to multiply the scare wave that hit the US after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The next 20 years will see a very tangible threat coming from fundamentalism in Islamic countries, while the threat to stability posed by China will be iffy. In this situation, US General George C Marshall after World War II had the idea of lining up the Allies' former enemies, Germany, Japan and Italy, against the new enemy, the Soviet Union. The strategy worked so well that not only was the USSR ultimately defeated but Germany and Japan are now bulwarks of Western power in the world. The same could now be accomplished by bringing China and India into an attempt to rein in Islamic fundamentalism.

Such an accomplishment would be delicate and efforts toward it need a lot of fine-tuning, but the opportunity must not be missed. September 11 showed the direction of the wind, and the huge task facing the world: to stem the fundamentalist threat and encourage the tolerant traits of Muslim culture. For it must be remembered that it was from Islamic culture that the West learned the meaning of tolerance: at a time when Christians saw the burning of infidels and dissenting fellow Christians as a shortcut to paradise, Muslims tolerated other religions within their borders.

    Part 1: The isolation of India
    Full text (http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/DA08Df03.html)
(2002-01-09 Asia Times)

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