Welcome to Moscowashington

After Sept 11, the big boys are joining hands, how do we play ours?

As the subcontinent fetes Colin Powell, step back three decades in time, almost to date. Then get down to figuring out this funny new world. This is when Henry Kissinger was asking the Chinese to beat us up so we couldn’t thrash the Pakistanis. The Cold War was at its hottest, its master player was unveiling a move that would ultimately win it for his side. Incidentally, just this week, both Kissinger and Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji flew into Delhi on the same day. They were also speaking a very different language.

Cut back 30 years again. This was also when Indira Gandhi was giving our supreme national interest a new, post-Nehru definition within four parameters. One, that the territorial boundaries of India should not diminish from what emerged after the Bangladesh war. Two, that India should become, and remain, a nuclear weapons power. Three, that India should remain the pre-eminent power in the region. Four, that India should acquire and retain the leadership of the non-aligned (mostly third) world. This last principle was easily rendered outdated by the end of the Cold War.

But remember how we protested when the Americans decided to set up a base at Diego Garcia even if it was an island nearly 10 hours of jet flying time away from our shores? Now we jubilate over the fact that the Americans have bases at Jacobabad and Pasni, just about an hour’s — subsonic — flight from New Delhi. In 1987, Rajiv Gandhi’s megaphones justified sending the IPKF to Sri Lanka because the Voice of America had set up a relay station there. Today, we might send a bouquet and a ‘‘best wishes’’ note if they were to set up full-fledged broadcast stations at Kabul or Kathmandu. In the past, we would get neurotic even if a Royal Navy ship visited Trincomalee. Now we are happy to refuel and service the US navy at our ports, or run escorts, protecting their merchantmen from the pirates in the Gulf of Molucca.

THE important thing is not that we have changed. But that everything, the world around us, has changed so completely that no one, not China, not Russia, not even Cuba, is protesting. No one questions this new global American power today except a handful of rogue states and, of course, our own Comrade Harkishen Singh Surjeet. There is, however, more to this new world than mere unipolarity. That would have been simpler to deal with. You can always stand up to a hegemony. It is a great moral position and it might always be possible to build an alliance against it. But what do you do with a world where the big boys cartelise in a manner unprecedented in history? They think and act together, with a remarkable common sense of purpose and, ostensibly, towards greater common good.

The remarkable thing about this new world is that no two big powers have an intractable problem between them. We might have one with Pakistan, the US has one with Iraq, but Pakistan and Iraq are no big powers. The US, China, United Europe and Russia, if you so wish to describe them, are the four powers that circumscribe this world. The next concentric circle in this new architecture is formed by what you might describe as the ‘‘deputy’’ big powers. France, Britain, Japan and, happily, India. None of these has a major problem between themselves. You might fantasise about a future Sino-American conflict or a militarised Japan, but those possibilities are still only in the realm of the thriller writer’s imagination. Unless a radically irredentist China acts madly enough to grab Taiwan by force tomorrow, or an Osama acquires control of the entire Islamic world and OPEC, you do not see this arrangement being disturbed in a hurry. Or, if a Zhirinovsky took over Russia. Long shot, but you’ve got to leave something for the future Le Carres and Forsyths.

Until that happens, you now have a world where the big boys would act in unison and leave you no one to run to. No one to play against the other. No Russian veto. No non-aligned unity. No refuge in alliances, no security in numbers. Today’s world, particularly after September 11, does not provide any Third Front kind of politicking opportunities. Its mind is made up on the big issues, it has a map of the world, the power equations sorted out and, frankly, no one can take on this new order. Because that amounts to taking on the world. You cannot fight this order but you can certainly work it to your advantage as we have happily done so far.

THE challenge, therefore, is not of challenging this order but of going out and engaging with it, becoming a player and in the new game. Post-December 13, we have actually done quite a brilliant job of it already. Our diplomatic drive has moved quite marvellously, powered along by a military build-up not even seen during 1971. We convinced Pakistan, and the world at large, that this was no play-acting and that we were quite open to the idea of taking the build-up to its logical conclusion. And how did the new world respond? The Americans and the British started shuttle diplomacy, that was rehearsed and choreographed to a fault. The Americans told the Chinese and the Russians to lean on their Pakistani and Indian friends, respectively. Musharraf was given that message on his two successive visits to Beijing. Similarly, it was Russia that said that India and Pakistan should be ‘‘compelled’’ to talk. If the US had said this, we would have gone ballistic. But when our Russian friends speak that language, we better listen. Also, take stock of this strange world where the presidents of the US and Russia are personal friends.

The beauty of this new arrangement is that it is fundamentally inclusivist. Syria being a member of an anti- (mostly Islamic and Arab) terrorist coalition may sound absurd. Or Pakistan? But the buzzword now is inclusion and co-option and not exclusion or isolation. Everybody is to be given a bit role in this orchestra. Why else would the conclave to find a new post-Taliban arrangement take place in Bonn? And now the international meeting on the reconstruction of Afghanistan happens in Tokyo. The unipolar world has now moved on to becoming — to steal an old expression from pioneering environmentalist Lester R. Brown — a world without borders.

DO we have the temperament to join this big boy’s club and take advantage of this change? So far we have worked this remarkably well. But we have to keep on making course corrections, to avoid the temptation of harking back on nostalgia and shooting from the hip, full of memories of the years of non-alignment and Cold War. In this world, there is no place for a spoiler, the abominable no-man. This change has far too much weight and momentum to brook any distraction now. That is why such impatience with regional conflicts: an India-Pakistan war, the Middle East crisis, a revived Iran-Iraq rivalry will come in the way of this juggernaut. Intervention will then not come from the US alone. If an India-Pakistan conflict seemed to get out of hand, for example, particularly if it got any closer to a nuclear exchange, intervention will come collectively from the US, Russia and China. Europe and Japan will also do their bit, to the extent that they matter.

India is uniquely placed to gain from this. But we have to be pragmatic, and realistic, to embrace this arrangement. There is no place here for old-fashioned nationalism and ideology. We will need to urgently forget the non-aligned nostalgia, the fantasy of playing one superpower against the other, and all other fantasies as they assail our minds or conscience: being part of an US encirclement of China or, contrarily, of a Russo-Sino-Indian axis against American power. Meanwhile, Francis Fukuyama could be penning his next classic after ‘‘The End of History’’. Could we suggest ‘‘The End of War’’ as a likely title?