Why a US foreign policy aimed at obstructing China won’t succeed
- India, grappling with a coronavirus resurgence, will not be pushed to take the US side against China
- Washington’s move towards a cold war with Beijing, amid frosty relations with Moscow, will only drive the two nuclear powers closer
Let’s start with India and employ the British poet W.H. Auden’s words – “the gates of hell are always standing wide open”. But, in India’s case, you have to fear that this South Asian giant, with its endless problems, looks more like a revolving door, perhaps with no way out.
Even today, it seems in little mood to play the role of new deputy sheriff to replace ever-loyal Australia, which always had a lot more bark than actual bite to offer anyway.
As many on the US East Coast still imagine that Washington remains the centre of the geopolitical universe, it cannot understand why others don’t think this way and don’t want to join in the new global gutter fight of anti-China geopolitics. Such a diplomatic passage for India, from its stance of non-alignment, would be a very tough transformation.
So, I don’t think the US understands the new China, or the new India. When you are so self-centred, you become overly self-confident, and you wind up looking old-fashioned.
‘A dark horse’ is likely to enter the US-China diplomatic game
Declaring a cold war against a government with which you so often publicly disagree not only makes you disagreeable to that government but also to that other part of the world that sees things in the multiplicity of nuances, as opposed to the binary of kindergarten right and wrong.
In a recent essay in the invaluable Times Literary Supplement in London, the human-rights journalist Caroline Moorehead insists that distinctions in political labelling must be carefully differentiated if they are to have any meaning worth following.
To illustrate, she contrasts and compares the policies of Mussolini to those of other big despots invariably mentioned in the same breath: “[H]is colonial wars were no more brutal than those of the other European countries who preceded him and whose own brutalities are too often forgiven.
“Such comparisons may sound invidious, but the casualties of Mussolini’s reign – about one million totally unpardonable premature deaths – are not in the same league as Mao’s 45-75 million, Stalin’s 40-60 million or Hitler’s 17-20 million.” The word “fascist” is used today “too often and too loosely”, she said.
China’s treatment of Chloé Zhao: how to lose friends and alienate people
So is the term “Communist totalitarianism”, thrown around like one-size-fits-all; but perhaps it fits none, in reality. Russia is neither totalitarian nor communist right now; what it is, though, is a mess – and a dangerous one.
Clinical Professor Tom Plate is Loyola Marymount University‘s Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Affairs and the Pacific Century Institute’s vice-president