Tag Archives: realpolitik

The Quad and AUKUS-Compacts to Collar China

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Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar.

(Published in the author’s column “The Strategist” in the IPCS web journal. May be accessed at http://www.ipcs.org/comm_select.php?articleNo=5797)

Keywords: Pre-First World War Germany, China’s new era of rejuvenation, strategic culture of China’s leadership, Confucian ideology, realpolitik, South China Sea, predatory economics, Belt and Road Initiative, Great Wall, Long March, era of turbulence, AUKUS, Quad, National Defence in a New Era, Covid 19.

An historical analogy may be in order to fully understand the looming conflict between Chinese authoritarianism and the uneasy democracies of the world. In the run up to the First World War, Germany pursued a combination of militarism, overbearing diplomacy, nationalism and brinkmanship to achieve policy goals, despite the risk of war. Demanding a review of international order that would confer on it a dominant political position, in keeping with its self-perceived economic and military prevalence, Germany saw little issue in conflict being a natural corollary to its creating crises and then manoeuvring through them. In the event, it was the response to ambitious revisionism and disregard for established norms of international order that led to war.

An observer of contemporary geopolitics will not fail to note the similarity in circumstance of China’s dazzling economic growth, “military muscularity” pivotal to its geopolitical vision, ambitions, nationalism and its realpolitik instincts. The critical assumption of China’s leadership is that their new era of rejuvenation will progress per script through questionable economic deals and coercion. This assumption is flawed for as Michael Howard pointed out in his Lessons of History (pg39) “force is the midwife of (violent) historical processes.” A clash is brewing, unintended as it may be; for nationalism and predatory economics is as much a source of conflict as counterforce and economic rivalry.

The strategic culture of Chinese leadership is driven by two dynamics — Confucian ideology and Realpolitik — the former is legacy of China’s past, the latter draws strength from rigidity of a totalitarian dispensation and its propensity to ‘power-politics’. This presents a dangerous cocktail. Confucian ideology treasures virtue and conservatism; it depends largely on the sagacity of the autocrat to speak for society. However, for an unrepresentative nationalistic state, Realpolitik places power and the threat of its use central to international relations. Beijing’s grandiose territorial claims coupled with leadership’s strategic culture provide both incentive and contrivance for conflict.

China’s economic policies are predatory, a key reason is opacity of dealings, for the Communist Party is opposed to any inconvenient transparency that might compel standardising products and divulging processes. The Belt and Road Initiative, which was supposed to deliver billions of dollars in infrastructure financing to some countries in Asia, Africa and Europe, has now turned into a massive debt trap.

To interpret China’s international and domestic behaviour one needs to look over the “Great Wall” and beyond the “Long March.” The former, was conceived to hold back Northern raiders, yet its completion over 1800 years comes at a time when invaders rule within; while the “Long March” was a bloody retreat in a civil war that underscored great human loss and ruthless control. Both events were inward “racking” and do not provide advocacy for use of power in the strategic environment of today. No surprises, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), readily resorts to strong-arming when it perceives an opening window of vulnerability or a closing window of opportunity in potential victims.

The Long March (Chinese posters.net)

China’s geopolitical aims are not secret. Xi, wants to consolidate China’s control over important lands and waterways that the “century of humiliation,” ostensibly, wrested from its influence. These areas include Hong Kong, Taiwan, chunks of Indian Territory, and some 80 per cent of the East and South China Seas (SCS). Contradictions erupt when use of force is tempered by tenets of Confucian thought; so the Korean War ends in a caustic stalemate, the 1962 conflict with India meanders to an unsettled impasse, the purpose and outcome of the Vietnam war of 1979 is clouded, the frenetic creation of artificial islands for military bases in the South China Sea tramples on established international norms and the recent skirmishes in Ladakh remain a continuum of the impasse. We stand, perilously, on the cusp of an era of turbulence.

On cue, in response to China’s aggressive manoeuvres; the recent announcement of the formation of a new trilateral alliance between Australia, UK and the US (AUKUS) and the continuing strategic security dialogue between Japan, Australia, India and the US (Quad) have made it amply clear that “countering China’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific” is number one priority, and the two will do whatever it takes to succeed.  Ironically, Beijing’s recent White Paper titled “National Defence in a New Era” outlined its territorial ambitions in the South and East China Seas, Yellow Sea, Taiwan and Ladakh and warned regional powers of its willingness to use force and use it first if its ambitions are threatened.

The more palpable part of the ‘AUKUS’ is the transfer of 8 Nuclear-powered submarines (SSN); clearly, the SSNs will not be available to Australia for the next decade and a half, however they provides the basis for denial operations in these waters and gives access to a host of futuristic capabilities. AUKUS’s technology-sharing mission is complemented by the Quad presenting a new security architecture that combines both military and economic prowess amongst nations that share a vision of a free and rule-based Indo-Pacific. The resolve to strategic confrontation against revisionism in the Indo-Pacific is thus emphasised. Balance of power adherents, with justification, consider a visible demonstration of collective power as the only way to dampen Beijing’s aggressive expansionism.

That these initiatives have made China “edgy” is clear from their immediate declarations: “China will certainly punish Australia with no mercy” and Australian troops are most likely to be the first batch of soldiers to waste their lives in the SCS. President Xi Jinping avowed in July that those who get in the way of China’s ascent will have their “heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel”.

Nations have become less enthused by China’s market and more worried about its disturbing intent. Fearing forced unification, Taiwan is tightening its ties to the U.S.; Japan, is engaged in its largest military build-up since the Cold War; India is readying strike forces along China’s borders, developing strategies to occlude vital sea lanes in the Indian Ocean and has engaged partnerships that threaten China’s vulnerabilities; Australia is opening up its northern coast to U.S. forces and is readying for acquisition of long-range missiles and SSNs. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are sending warships into the Indo-Pacific to assert their rights.

 In the meantime China’s dubious role in the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has left it beleaguered.  

We began with a pre-First World War analogy of Germany. However, one may surmise that given the nuclear overhang, the rise of China with its burden of a ‘century-of-humiliation’ will demand a strategy tempered by tolerance and accommodation rather than principles of the past. But the other truth is, the fear of war, to authoritarian regimes such as China co-exists with belligerence and exalted nationalistic feelings that, while advancing concern of survival of dispensation, also boosts profitable involvement in the incessant preparedness for war. Herein lies the striking resemblance of China with pre-First World War Germany. And herein also lies the necessity to collar China through unified action that threatens regime survival by challenging its bellicosity in the Indo-Pacific.

Xi’s Disquieting Dream of National Rejuvenation

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Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar

In the run up to the First World War, Germany pursued a combination of overbearing diplomacy and brinkmanship to achieve policy goals, despite the risk of war. Demanding a review of international order that would confer on it a dominant political position in keeping with its self-perceived economic and military prevalence, Germany saw little issue in war being a natural corollary to its creating crises and then manoeuvring through them. In the event security tolerance of rival powers was persistently stretched. And, when war did break out, it was fought with colossal military ineptitude and a bizarre inability to match military design with political purpose (sadly, a recurring malaise to this day). An observer of contemporary geopolitics cannot fail to notice the remarkable similarities in the circumstances of China’s dazzling economic growth, military build-up and its twenty first century realpolitik instincts.

The world, from an era of unipolarity and then multipolar uncertainty, that dominated the three decades between the breakdown of the Soviet Union and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has moved to what may be termed as “penumbric competition”—conflicts that lack definition the nature of which is rivalry between major powers over mercantile domination. China has made palpably clear that the instruments of influence are financial inveiglement, military coercion, and exploiting instabilities.

Mearsheimer’s “offensive realism,” the realist international-relations theory, holds that in “an anarchic world with no sovereign to provide law and order, states will tend to amass as much relative power as they can and will never find security other than in accretion of power at the expense of competitors…the best defence (in this milieu) is good offense.” Revisionist China is today an avowed devotee of just such strategic logic. And therefore, to China a global economic order governed, largely, by a single set of rules not of its bidding, is repugnant.

China has announced sweeping claims to sovereignty over the South China Sea and sought to ratify them by creating and fortifying artificial islands in flagrant defiance of existing international laws and conventions. A network of Chinese naval bases, port infrastructural developments and atypical shipping control centres has been secured from the South China Sea to the East African Coast. This includes ports of Sittwe in Myanmar, Hambantota in Sri Lanka, the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, Port Sudan, port Lamu in Kenya and port Bagamoyo in Tanzania. Historically and in terms of contemporary significance to the existing maritime flow of trade, these harbours are of no weighty consequence; however from a geo-strategic standpoint they suggest springboards for sea control and envelopment of India rather than mercantile ascendancy or commercial profitability.

Chinese Military outposts in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and Gwadar have mushroomed to challenge unwelcome maritime control presence and safeguard their extensive investments in Africa. These investments have thus far resulted in either generating equities or enmeshing the victim states in a debt trap that force them to surrender sovereignty over assets being created. Learning from “colonial experience” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, China has put in place a strategy that emphasizes relatively superior organization, technological interventions, and unscrupulous financial mobilization to exploit and divide the weaknesses of the political and military systems in the host state. And if China’s growth seeks new markets and primary resources in Africa, then exclusive control of these is at its core, regardless of friction that may erupt.

Both India and China in their quest for growth with security must find ways and means to avoid threatening each other’s interests (as is happening) and advance the nous for security even if that implies establishing a ‘restraining balance.’ In the past, leadership coped with the coming challenge more by knee jerk rather than policy responses. In changed circumstances of India’s ‘Act East’ and ‘Neighbourhood First’ policies, the impact that the military will have on the developing correlation is the moot question. A scrutiny of the problem from these two distinct levels of strategic policy and military force will also precipitate several questions, answers to which hold the key to the future. First, from the strategic viewpoint, is India focussing on what comprises the strategic centre of gravity of China’s power and mercantile ‘putsch’?  Second, from the military perspective, would our forces, either singularly or in alliance, be able to balance Chinese military activities prejudicial to our interests? Clearly the answer to the first is: China’s compulsion for unremitting growth while to the second the answer lies in developing a ‘China restraining strategy’ best tempered by an appropriate alliance.

Given the slowdown of China’s hitherto stunning economic growth (a recent BBC estimate puts China’s annual growth rate as low as 5.6%), the trade and tariff war with the USA which has begun to bite, and the countries of the ASEAN eyeing markets and resources elsewhere as demand in China falters, would suggest an adverse impact on China’s current military modernization and strategic infrastructural plans (such as the Belt and Road Initiative). The other problem which may hobble China’s ambitions is the amount of debt in the economy – by some estimates close to 300% of GDP.

Two options present themselves to China’s planners as they attempt to manage these predicaments: retard pace of projects, cut back on military modernization, strategic infrastructure building and accept moderation of Xi’s “Dream of national rejuvenation, securing expanding interests overseas and developing capabilities to degrade core operational and technological advantage that influence the region ” (China defence White Paper 2015 , recalling that leadership have for long characterized the initial two decades of the 21st century as a period of strategic opportunity). Or, perceiving the window of “strategic opportunity” rapidly closing, continue to run down their strategic objectives with far greater vigour even at cost of international friction and disruption of their internal circumstances.

In either of the two options the development of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad); a security organisation which includes the USA, Japan, India and Australia must be viewed as a timely ‘China restraining alliance’ to counter China’s unrelenting power surge for an exceptionable proprietary mercantile empire stretching across the Indo-Pacific. The Charter of the Quad is yet to be fleshed out; but conceivably, it will have three objectives. The first, to reinforce a rule-based regional order that rejects nationalistic militarism. Second, to promote a liberal trading regime and freedom of navigation essential to secure passage of close to 60% of global trade through the Indo-Pacific. Third, to provide security assurances.

However, just as behind the scenes machinations from Beijing splintered the Quad at inception, the entente faces similar fragmenting stresses that threaten the whole. India is locked in a long standing border dispute with China. Similarly, Japan has maritime disputes in the South and East China Seas while China’s new Air Defence Identification Zone provides the recipe for mutual interference in the air. In the meantime the US is engaged in a self-destructive move to renege on its larger strategic responsibilities; Australia on the other hand depends on China for approximately 22 % of trade. And there are China’s assignees, the maverick nuclear armed states of North Korea and Pakistan whose disruptive influence cannot be set aside. And yet the opportunity that the current state of China’s economy presents must be grasped if the Quad is to have ready impact.

The question is, does leadership recognize that Chinese realpolitik is at play and that only a determined system based on pragmatic rather than ideological considerations can confront it? The current moves by Japan, USA and India to develop Trincomalee in Sri Lanka to stave off China’s aggressive push in Hambantota will suggest that the entente has not been altogether unsighted to events in the region.