India’s choices in a world becoming bipolar again

Last month, when India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the BRICS National Security Advisers’ meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, a possibility was born anew. Is our diplomatic engagement with China, strained since the horrific June 2020 Chinese incursion into Galwan Valley that claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers, about to improve? India faces this question at a time when its relations with the United States have been thriving, with the U.S. regarding India as a useful partner to counter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. So, must India again face a crucial choice in a bipolar world?

Two nations at odds but still connected

My answer would be a qualified yes. Yes, because two major powers, the U.S. and China, are again vying for global hegemony; but qualified, because this is not the bipolarity we knew during the Cold War. After all, the U.S. and China have multiple connections with each other that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. did not: the U.S. is the largest investor in China’s economy, China owns more U.S. Treasury Bonds than any other country, the U.S. sends more tourists to China than to any other Asian country, and there are more Chinese students in the U.S. than those of any other nationality. These are two powers at odds, but with multiple avenues of diplomatic dialogue and economic co-operation that simply did not exist during the Cold War.

That was an era when the U.S. and the Soviet Union marshalled their satellite states into their respective camps, sundered by the “iron curtain”, and competed to enlarge their nuclear arsenals. The end of this bipolarity coincided with the advent of globalisation, heralding “the unipolar moment”, which lasted a couple of decades and in which Washington enjoyed untrammelled global dominance in spheres political, military, economic, and technological.

But the U.S. did not remain uncontested in any of these spheres for long. Around the 2008-09 financial crisis, the spectre of Beijing began to rise. China’s “peaceful rise” over the last quarter of a century, fuelled by American investment in its industries and a booming export trade in manufactured goods, has rehauled the global order.

China has supplanted the U.S. as the world’s leading manufacturing and industrial giant, rivalling it in economic size and exceeding its surpluses, alongside challenging it in such new technologies as 5G. So, after decades of unchallenged American hegemony, another aspiring hegemon has emerged, with the resources to challenge American dominance across the board and deploying a new assertiveness under Xi Jinping. The U.S. is evolving a strategy to counteract China, much as the U.S. deployed “containment” during the Cold War to stem the spread of communism. Yet, just as today’s Sino-American rivalry is starkly different from the Cold War’s bipolarity, so must the contours of such a strategy — and India’s reaction to it — differ from the past.

The U.S. and China are intertwined economies, unlike the total economic separation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. Moreover, China’s economic might makes its claim to global hegemony greater than the Soviet Union’s ever was. China’s indispensability to global supply chains and, therefore, to the world economy is precisely why some observers choose not to use the label “cold war” to describe the Sino-American bipolarity, preferring instead such terms as “competitive coexistence”, “cold coexistence”, or “conflictual coexistence”. It was in recognition of this that American rhetoric shifted from “decoupling” from China — suggesting severance of ties — “to de-risking”, which implies curbing risks while avoiding a hostile estrangement.

What is more, as superpowers rising from the ashes of the Second World War, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were nearly equal militarily. But China is nearing parity with, and now, in some areas, threatens to outstrip the U.S. According to the Pentagon, the Chinese navy has surpassed America’s in the number of battle-force ships over the past decade, owing to China’s status as the world’s top ship-producing nation by tonnage. Senior U.S. Air Force officials have also acknowledged the potential of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force to become the world’s largest air force. Yet, military commentators believe that at least till the PLA’s centenary in 2027, there will remain a significant gap between China and the U.S. Unlike in the Cold War, proxy wars between the two rivals do not litter our world today. Nor is there much appetite for any in either Beijing or Washington. Positing a Cold War-level bipolarity then, overstates both the status quo and the threat China poses to the global order.

Not about ideology

In tussling with the U.S.S.R., America also aimed to establish the primacy of capitalism over communism and liberal democracy over single-party authoritarianism. The Sino-American competition, however, is not about ideology, much though Americans like to portray it otherwise. An ideological zeal to convert the world to communism does not galvanise China, which is really only interested in securing global hegemony for itself. Since 2021, Washington has futilely experimented with the Summit for Democracy, hoping to conflate its desire for subduing its foremost political and economic rival with championing democracy. But even Europeans are not buying into U.S. President Joe Biden’s “democracy versus autocracy” binary. America’s instinct to package all its vested interests as a crusade for democratising the globe has proven unsuccessful. So, instead of playing this game, China is glibly choosing to deride it as “Western-style democracy,” which, Beijing argues, serves not ordinary citizens but the forces of capitalism.

What also makes the Sino-American rivalry distinctive is that Russia, the successor state to the U.S.S.R., is never far from the action. Russia can play a menacing role in today’s brewing bipolarity; given its size, abundant natural resources, and immense stockpile of nuclear weapons, it outranks most middle powers. Many, therefore, argue that America’s bipolarity is not with China but the axis of China and Russia. Professor Josef Joffe, for instance, defines our world as a “Two-and-a-Half Power World”, where Russia “is held back from full parity with the US and China by its lack of ‘usable power.’” Moscow, with an economy smaller than Italy’s and a military budget that is only one-quarter of China’s, is far from a third pole: but it is Beijing’s junior partner, a fact manifest in China’s support of Russia’s Ukrainian misadventure, which demonstrates President Xi Jinping’s resolve not to be intimidated by the West. Though China has no allies, only clients, its emerging nexus with Russia, North Korea and Iran could yet pose challenges from Taiwan to the South China Sea.

The new canvas of the Indo-Pacific

The greatest consequence of this geopolitical churn has been the creation of an entirely new canvas: the Indo-Pacific, a term encompassing three overlapping developments. These are China’s goal of creating a blue water navy — a formidable naval force capable of operating and projecting power on the high seas — and becoming a transcontinental economic giant, India’s emergence as a possible counterbalance to China, and the role that the U.S. will play in shaping the contours of the seemingly inevitable shift in power from the west to the east: from the Atlantic to the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

The vaunted Quad, comprising the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia, is driven by the vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, and has, more recently, been augmented by the “Squad” of the U.S., Japan, Australia, and the Philippines. Added to this is AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership for the Indo-Pacific between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., through which the U.S. and the U.K. assist Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines. The Indo-Pacific arena symbolises the realignment of traditional alliances and geopolitical theatres.

With the Indo-Pacific emerging as a crucible of clashing Chinese and American ambitions, India’s deepening ties with the U.S. and the Quad bristle with both challenges and opportunities. We cannot forget that only we, and not the other members of Quad, face a land threat from China. So, we must not be deterred from safeguarding our sovereignty by restoring the status quo ante along the China-Indian border, engaging with the Chinese economically where we must, bolstering our military deterrence, and promoting our geopolitical and economic interests on our own terms. India cannot allow itself to be reduced to a pawn in this renewed bipolar contest.

Shashi Tharoor is the fourth-term Congress Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha) from Thiruvananthapuram, the author of 26 books including ‘Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century’, and the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs