Stagecraft and Statecraft: International Security

The Hype on the Rise of China and India

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:04:19 GMT

Is the India and China hype true?

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times

Today it has become commonplace to speak of India and China in the same breadth as two emerging great powers challenging the two-century-old Western domination of the world.

How justifiable is the hype on their rise? The future will not belong to China and India merely because they have a huge landmass and together make up more than a third of humanity. Being large in size and population is not necessarily an asset.

In history, small, strategically geared states have wielded global power. The colonial powers that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries were led by small Britain and included tiny Portugal and the Netherlands.

For analysts, it is tempting to make long-term linear forecasts on the basis of current trends. But such projections in the past have rarely come right. Remember the popular concerns in the United States in the 1980s that a fast-rising Japan threatened America's industrial might?

The reason why such predictions have come wrong is that statistical probability — the sole tool in forecasting — has little application in strategic analyses.

The straight-line projections on the economic growth of China and India may be too one-dimensional.

Goldman Sachs, for instance, forecasts that China's economy will surpass the U.S. economy around 2035 and that India will do so a decade later.

This could happen but it is hardly certain. To be sure, economic growth is essential to underpin political and social stability. It is doubtful the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power will survive without it continuing to deliver high economic growth. But such growth in any country hinges on several factors, endogenous and exogenous. One factor beyond the control of policymakers in India and China that could slow economic growth and create major policy challenges for them in the years ahead, for example, is climate change.

China and India, of course, have history on their side. These two were the world's largest economies for centuries up to 1820, after which they went into sharp decline due to their failure to catch up with the industrial revolution and by making themselves easy prey for European colonial interventions.

But world history is replete with instances of small states made powerful by farsighted policies and big states unraveled by weak, unimaginative leaders.

China certainly has a more forward-looking leadership than India, even though Chinese leaders, lacking popular legitimacy, tend to be more insecure. India has to pay a "democracy tax" that weighs down its decision-making and slows its economic development.

When one examines natural endowments — such as arable land, water resources, mineral deposits, hydrocarbons and wetlands — the picture that emerges is not exactly gratifying for India and China in order for them to achieve enduring great-power capacity. Bounteous natural capital is critical for a country to sustain national strength over the long run.

India and China together have more than 35 percent of the global population — or eight times the number of inhabitants in the U.S. — but just 60 percent more usable arable land than America.

The two giants would have had a better balance between land size, population and natural resources had their populations been much smaller. But even as India still adds nearly a million people a month despite a slowing fertility rate, some Indians cheer the "demographic dividend" that awaits their youthful country while the developed world ages. Failure has come to be identified as a success.

At a time when the world is confronting an energy crisis — symbolized both by the spiraling price of crude oil and gas, and the buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — India and China stick out for their fast-rising dependency on energy imports and growing contribution to carbon-dioxide emissions. Their energy dilemma causes a growing burden and threatens to slow down their economic rise.

Constraints on resources are likely to become pronounced as more and more Indians and Chinese gain income to embrace modern comforts in everyday life — from gasoline-fueled transport to water-guzzling gadgets like washing machines and dishwashers.

The global demand for resources is set to soar, along with their prices. But unlike the choices that the old economic giants had in their path of development — such as the one exemplified by the shift from scarce timber to abundant coal in 18th-century Britain — the emerging economic giants can avail themselves of no substitutes for some of the resources whose present demand is beginning to lag availability.

Of all the resources, the one with the greatest strategic bearing on the future prospects of India and China is fresh water.

Climate change will have a significant impact on the availability and flow of river waters from the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands, making water a key element in the national-security calculus of China and India. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia's great rivers is likely to be accelerated by global warming.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle over water resources.

Having entered an era of perennial water shortages that are likely to parallel, in terms of per capita water availability, the scarcity in the Middle East, India and China face the prospect that their rapid economic modernization could stall due to inadequate water resources. This prospect will become a reality if their industrial, agricultural and household demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace.

Even though India's usable arable land is larger than China's — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. While the Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet.

China's ambitious interbasin and inter-river water transfer projects in the vast Tibetan plateau, and its upstream damming of the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and other rivers, threaten India's well-being. If President Hu Jintao — a hydrologist by training who has served as party secretary in Tibet — begins China's long-pending project to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra northward to the parched Yellow River, it would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh.

Water is likely to become a cause of Sino-Indian tensions, reopening old wounds and bringing Tibet to center stage.

Asia's economic rise and the ensuing shifts in international power equations foreshadow a world characterized by a greater distribution of power. But the hype on China and India needs to be tempered by geopolitical realism centered on a careful assessment of their long-term potential to build and sustain comprehensive power.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of the best-selling "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: Wednesday, June 18, 2008

U.S. Policy on Burma

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:40:37 GMT

El celo de la primera dama

LA VANGUARDIA, May 31, 2008

Por Brahma Chellaney, profesor de estudios estratégicos del Centro de Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi:

Un desastre natural suele ser ocasión propicia para apartar a un lado las diferencias políticas y mostrar compasión. No obstante, la Birmania devastada por el ciclón, gobernada por elites militares ultranacionalistas y rapaces, temerosas de sanciones de parte de Occidente, se ha visto presionada para franquear sus áreas devastadas a la ayuda humanitaria o bien enfrentarse a una intervención armada de signo asimismo humanitario.

La politización de la ayuda ha oscurecido el papel de una protagonista cuyos esfuerzos han contribuido a ejercer mayores presiones sobre los generales birmanos. En cuanto el ciclón Nargis,con vientos de hasta 190 kilómetros por hora, devastó el delta del Irawadi, la esposa del presidente Bush, Laura, lanzó públicamente improperios contra los aislados gobernantes birmanos. En una comparecencia sin precedentes en la sala de prensa de la Casa Blanca - dominio tradicional del presidente y del secretario de Estado- Laura Bush peroró sobre política exterior y acusó a la junta birmana del elevado número de víctimas del ciclón. Y en diciembre, Laura Bush dijo en Nueva Delhi que “India, uno de los principales socios comerciales de Birmania, ya no vende armas a la junta”, para sorpresa de la audiencia.

A decir verdad, siendo China un suministrador de armas de confianza desde hace 20 años y pudiendo abastecerse de armas a través de Singapur y Rusia, la junta apenas precisa de armamento indio. India, en cualquier caso, tampoco llevará la contraria a la primera dama estadounidense, imbuida de furor moral y religioso.

Por otra parte, no es difícil optar por la prédica ética contra Birmania, uno de los países del mundo más endebles y en situación más crítica. Sancionar a Birmania de vez en cuando se había convertido en un pasatiempo tan dilecto al presidente Bush que sólo 24 horas antes del ciclón anunció otra tanda de sanciones. Ninguna instancia mundial, sin embargo, ha llegado a sugerir medidas penales (moderadas) contra China por su permanente represión brutal en Tíbet, pues las sanciones acarrearían pérdida de empleos y otros inconvenientes económicos a Occidente.

De hecho, incitado por su esposa, Bush ha firmado más medidas para sancionar a Birmania en los últimos cinco años que contra cualquier otro país. La cruzada de Laura Bush contra la junta militar que se considera a sí misma defensora de la unidad e identidad cultural birmana, predominantemente budista, obedece a la inspiración encarnada en algunas iglesias cristianas que cuentan con notables minorías étnicas, aparte de una reunión mantenida al parecer en aquel país con una víctima cristiana de una violación. En cambio, tanto Laura Bush como su marido encontraron la senda despejada en relación con una intervención militar en la política de países vecinos de Birmania, como Bangladesh y Tailandia.

Aunque la junta militar birmana accedió al poder en 1962, las primeras sanciones estadounidenses de importancia no llegaron hasta 1997. No obstante, el punto de mira sobre Birmania se fijó con mayor precisión y fuerza bajo el mandato de Bush.

Actualmente, Birmania se halla atrapada entre las sanciones lideradas por Estados Unidos y la creciente influencia de China. Azuzado por el diablo que le pisa los talones, el país se inclina hacia el profundo mar azul de la benevolencia china.

Al tratar a Birmania como un títere en el marco de un juego geopolítico más amplio e intentar llevar al país ante el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas, la Casa Blanca no hace más que aumentar la necesidad de protección política de la junta procedente de una China dotada de poder de veto, con la consiguiente obligación de agradecer tal protección a Pekín. Muestra de ello ha sido la firma de un contrato gasista de 30 años de vigencia.

Las iniciativas estadounidenses no sólo han obligado a Birmania a desplazarse del no alineamiento al alineamiento, sino que han motivado una dependencia mayor de la política estadounidense respecto de Pekín en lo concerniente a Birmania.

Como en el caso de Corea del Norte, Bush externaliza alegremente en China una parte de su política con relación a Birmania. Sin embargo, la política estadounidense acusa también el peso del celo misionero de Laura Bush sobre Birmania. Lejos de mejorar la situación de los derechos humanos en el país, este miope activismo ha contribuido a reforzar a la junta. La amenaza de una invasión por causas humanitarias de Birmania hiede a recurso desesperado y apunta a un deseo de valerse de la herramienta humanitaria para provocar un cambio político.

Ahora resulta que una mujer no electa ni titular de responsabilidad alguna secuestra la política de Estados Unidos para promover paradójicamente elecciones libres y responsabilidad pública en Birmania. Y el doblemente electo y renacido cristiano Bush da fe de hallarse bajo la influencia de su esposa, como se constata mediante la expresión “Laura y yo” en su último anuncio de sanciones contra Birmania.

Pero, como dice la Biblia, “no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver”.

Eastward movement of global power and influence

Sat, 31 May 2008 18:42:09 GMT

The Orient Express

Brahma Chellaney
May 29, 2008 India Today

Rivals: How The Power Struggle Between China, India And Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade by Bill Emmott Allen Lane Price: Rs 795, Pages: 328 The Second World: Empires And Influence In The New Global Order by Parag Khanna Allen Lane Price: Rs 695, Pages: 496 The eastward movement of power and influence, once concentrated in the West, is now the subject of an increasing number of books that are coming out by the dozen. These two volumes belong to this genre. While Bill Emmott’s focus is on the three largest Asian powers, Parag Khanna looks at the global geopolitical marketplace and determines the likely winners and losers. Emmott’s diffidence to put forward a central thesis is more than made up for by Khanna’s boldness in sketching out the next generation of global geopolitics. They symbolise different styles and generations. The changing global equations are reflected in new realities. These include the waning relevance of the international structures the US helped establish after its World War II triumph; the rise of Asia as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive; and greater international divisiveness, including on core global challenges. While the world is not yet multipolar, it is no longer unipolar, as it had been from the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse till the end of the 1990s—a period during which America failed to fashion a new liberal world order under its direction. What we have today is a world still in transition. The ongoing power shifts are linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. The seat of ancient civilisations and home to the majority of the world’s population, Asia is bouncing back after a relatively short period of decline in history. Its share of the world’s economy had totalled 60 per cent in 1820, at the advent of the industrial revolution, declining sharply over the next 125 years. Today, Asia already accounts for 40 per cent of global production—a figure that could rise to 60 per cent by 2050, when three of the world’s four largest economies (China, India, the US and Japan) would be Asian. Asia’s rise, while promoting greater international equity, need not necessarily mean the decline of the West. There is little evidence to suggest Asia is rising at the expense of the West. The spread of prosperity will signify more stakeholders in peace and stability. The EU’s attraction, for example, lies in its readiness to share the European pie with new member-states it admits into its fold. Shared interests entail shared responsibilities. That, in turn, promotes a greater distribution of power. But like some other authors, Khanna and Emmott have rushed to conclude that the spread of prosperity to more countries implies the diminution of the power of the US. American pre-eminence, Emmott writes, “will soon be over (if it is not already), and for reasons more fundamental and enduring than America’s post-Iraq weakness”. Khanna is more blunt: the moment of US supremacy is over, replaced by the imperative to “renew American competitiveness”. According to Khanna, “America’s imperial overstretch is occurring in lockstep with its declining economic dependence, undermining the very foundation of its global leadership”. America’s vulnerabilities can no longer be hidden. Today, the US is the world’s leading debtor and top importer of both manufactured goods and oil, and runs by far the largest current account deficit. A shift towards multipolarity is unstoppable, with the emergence of major new players. But for the next several decades, the US will easily remain the world’s most powerful state militarily and will also be the leader in scientific innovations. In 2050, the US is likely to still be influential enough to do almost anything, but not powerful enough to do everything by itself. Emmott’s China-India-Japan theme has seemingly been inspired by this reviewer’s 2006 book, Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, the first study of that strategic triangle. But Emmott’s book, contrary to its title, focuses not on the “power struggle” between these “rivals” and how that will “shape our next decade”, but on their supposed strengths and their determination to regain their historical power. More journalistic than scholarly, the book makes desultory recommendations— half of them addressed to the US—that have little to do with its title. Khanna’s easy-to-read, insightful book offers a rich tour of the emerging geopolitical landscape stretching from Asia and the Middle East to Eastern Europe and South America. He sees the US, EU and China as the only great powers and clubs dozens of other countries, including India, Russia and Japan, as the new “Second World”, comprising swing-states that will determine which superpower gains the upper hand. The geopolitics of the 21st century, he writes, will centre on the “new Big Three”—not Russia, a petrostate facing depopulation and run by the “Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy”; not the Islamic world; and not India, which he sees as lacking both clear, long-term goals and strategic appetite. History testifies that without establishing primacy in its own neighbourhood, no country has sustained itself as a great power. But India continues to be tormented even by smaller neighbours. So Khanna’s scepticism on India may be right. Khanna’s projected big picture appears less plausible: the Big Three will make the rules for all, and the other states will be left merely to “choose their suitors in this post-American world”. He forgets that his Big Three have interests that won’t be easy to reconcile, posing a hurdle to their rule-setting. While China wants a multipolar world and a unipolar Asia, the US wants a multipolar Asia but a unipolar world. Despite having travelled to some 40 “Second-World” countries to research the book, Khanna speciously concludes that these states are destined to play second fiddle to the “Big Three”. He couldn’t be more wrong. (c) India Today, 2007

An Unelected Laura Bush Holds America's Burma Policy Hostage

Sat, 24 May 2008 04:20:18 GMT

Missionary Diplomacy

Laura Bush’s Burma crusade, driven by a moral and religious calling, has increasingly pushed that strategically located country into China’s strategic lap while undercutting Indian interests.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 24, 2008

A natural calamity is usually an occasion to set aside political differences and show compassion. But after a powerful cyclone tore into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on the night of May 2-3, that isolated country — ruled by ultra-nationalistic but rapacious military elites deeply distrustful of the sanctions-enforcing West — came under mounting international pressure to open up its devastated areas to foreign aid workers and supplies or face an armed humanitarian intervention.

Such threats have helped lay a tentative framework for an ASEAN-led aid operation, a middle option that is supposed to end an impasse over the Burmese regime’s refusal to allow the entry of foreign relief teams other than from the Asian states it considers friendly, including India, China, ASEAN members and Japan. But even as the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has toured the cyclone-wracked areas, the World Food Programme has brought in helicopters, and aid teams from India and other neighbouring nations continue their work, the junta still faces intense pressure from the sanctions-applying states to throw open Burma’s borders to Western relief workers.

The murky politics of international assistance has helped obscure the role of a key actor whose growing activism in recent years has helped turn up the heat on the Burmese generals. The increasingly outspoken Laura Bush, the first lady of the US, has emerged as the main driver of America’s Burma policy.

No sooner had Cyclone Nargis, packing winds up to 190 kilometres per hour, battered the Irrawaddy Delta than President George W. Bush’s wife stepped out in public to toss insults at Burma’s military rulers. In an unprecedented spectacle, the first lady showed up at the White House briefing room — normally the preserve of the president and secretary of state — and held forth on foreign policy, blaming the junta for the high death toll. The next day, as announced by Laura Bush, President Bush presided at a ceremony awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the detained leader of Burma’s democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi.

In the twilight of her husband’s presidency, the 61-year-old Laura Bush — a former librarian — has left no one in doubt on who directs Burma policy in Washington. In a prepared statement that she read out at the White House briefing room on May 5 before taking questions from reporters, she thanked “the European Union, Canada and Australia for joining the United States in imposing” sanctions, and went on to “appeal to China, India and Burma’s fellow ASEAN members to use their influence to encourage a democratic transition.”

Last December, Laura Bush caught New Delhi by surprise by announcing that, “India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta.” To date, New Delhi has made no such announcement.

With China serving as a reliable weapon supplier for the past two decades and access to arms also available via Singapore and Russia, the junta has little need for India’s low-grade, mostly second-hand, arms. But New Delhi has dared not say a word in contradiction to Mrs. Bush’s statement during a December 10, 2007, video teleconference on International Human Rights Day. Who can refute a first lady whose fury on Burma flows from a moral and religious calling?

It is easy to play the morality game against Burma, ranked as one of the world’s critically weak states.

Slapping Burma with new sanctions every so often has become such a favourite Bush pastime that just one day before the cyclone struck, the president announced yet another round of punitive actions. But no one in the world has suggested any penal measure, however mild, against China for its continuing brutal repression in Tibet because sanctions would bring job losses and other economic pain to the West.

In fact, egged on by his wife, Bush has signed more executive orders in the past five years to penalize Burma than any other country.

Mrs. Bush’s crusade against the Burmese military, which sees itself as the upholder of a predominantly Buddhist Burma’s unity and cultural identity, has been inspired by three separate elements: (i) information from some of the Christian churches that have sizable ethnic-minority adherents in that country; (ii) a meeting she reputedly had with a Christian Karen rape victim; and (iii) the briefings she received from Elsie Walker Kilborne, a cousin of President Bush. By contrast, she and her husband have had little problem with the military’s intervention in politics in Burma-neighbouring Bangladesh and Thailand.

Such is Laura Bush’s activism that last September it was she, not the president, who telephoned Ban ki-moon and called for the UN to be more active on Burma. Earlier, in 2006, she moderated a roundtable discussion at the UN that sought to draw attention to the junta’s political repression. She has condemned the regime not just in official statements and congressional testimony, but also in two opinion articles published last year in the Wall Street Journal.

In an October 2007 article, titled “Stop the Terror in Burma,” she put forth her demand clearly: “Gen. Than Shwe and his deputies are a friendless regime. They should step aside to make way for a unified Burma governed by legitimate leaders. The rest of the armed forces should not fear this transition — there is room for a professional military in a democratic Burma. In fact, one of Burma's military heroes was also a beloved champion of Burmese freedom: General Aung San, the late father of Aung San Suu Kyi.” She added: “The regime's position grows weaker by the day. The generals' choice is clear: The time for a free Burma is now.” In an earlier June 19, 2007, op-ed, she said: “The Burmese regime poses an increasing threat to the security of all nations.”

In May 2007, Mrs. Bush enlisted 16 women Senators to join her in sending a signed letter to Ban Ki-Moon calling for the U.N. to pressure the Burmese regime to release Suu Kyi. And since last year, she has repeatedly met with the UN’s special envoy for Burma, Ibrahim Gambari.

After her phone call to the UN secretary-general created a public stir, she said: “I think that this is sort of one of those myths that I was baking cookies and then they fell off the cookie sheet and I called Ban Ki-moon.” That comment harked back to Hillary Clinton’s famous remark during her husband’s presidency that she was not one to stay home and bake cookies.

This week, as the junta still refuses to accept aid from four US naval ships that have been waiting in the Bay of Bengal with 1,000 Marines, 14 helicopters, and 15,000 water containers and purifying kits on board, Laura Bush went on the Voice of America — a US Congress-funded broadcaster with a Burmese language service — to tell the regime that it has nothing to fear and that “there would be absolutely no strings attached with this aid.”

The unpalatable fact is that her angry denunciations right after Cyclone Nargis had struck only contributed to the junta’s resistance to allowing Western relief workers to enter, deepening the aid crisis. As the Los Angeles Times reported on May 10, 2008, quoting several critics, “the administration’s harsh comments were poorly timed and risked reinforcing the government’s suspicions of the outside world and undermining the humanitarian effort.”

Although the Burmese military seized power in 1962, the first substantive U.S. sanctions, tellingly, did not come until 1997, when a ban on further American investments to “develop Burma’s resources” was reluctantly clamped by President Bill Clinton. But it was only under Bush that Burma emerged as a major target of U.S. sanctions.

Escalating sanctions have compelled a country whose nationalism has traditionally bordered on xenophobia to increasingly rely on China, even as its rulers still suspect Chinese intentions. Today, Burma finds itself trapped between U.S.-led sanctions and growing Chinese leverage over its affairs.

But with the devil close on its heels, Burma — which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has labelled an “outpost of tyranny” — has moved toward the deep blue sea of Chinese “benevolence.”

For a resource-hungry China, Burma has proven such a treasure trove that some northern Burmese provinces today stand stripped of their high-quality tropical hardwoods and precious gemstones. Beijing also has used Burma as a dumping ground for cheap Chinese products, besides running large trade surpluses with that impoverished country.

Aided by Western disengagement from Burma, Chinese entrepreneurs, traders, money lenders, craftsmen and others have flocked to that country, now home to between one to two million Chinese economic migrants. With their higher living standards setting them apart from the natives, these migrants constitute Burma’s new economic class.

While unintentionally aiding Chinese interests, the US-led penal campaign has cost New Delhi dear, reflected in China’s setting up of listening posts and other moves in Burma that open a security flank against India. In the Bush years, India has been losing out even on commercial contracts.

By treating Burma as a pawn in a larger geopolitical game and seeking to drag it before the United Nations Security Council, the White House only increases the junta’s need for political protection from a veto-armed China, with the consequent Burmese imperative to reward Beijing for such defence.

One reward to China for stepping in twice last year to shield Burma in the Security Council has been a 30-year contract to take gas by pipeline from two offshore fields owned by an Indo-Korean consortium. The junta first withdrew the status of India’s GAIL company as the “preferential buyer” of gas from the A-1 and A-3 blocks in the Bay of Bengal and then signed a production-sharing contract with China’s state-run CNPC firm.

The U.S. penal measures and moves have not only forced Burma to shift from its traditional policy of nonalignment to alignment, but also driven U.S. policy to become dependent on Beijing for any movement on Burma.

This is apparent both from the way the US has pleaded with China this month to use all its influence to press the junta to open up the cyclone-battered areas to outside relief efforts, and from the secret mid-2007 US meeting with Burmese ministers that was held at America’s initiative in Beijing.

The Beijing meeting, held without prior US consultations with India, Japan and ASEAN states, came six months after China had torpedoed a Security Council draft resolution tabled by the US and Britain that called on the Burmese regime to halt military attacks on ethnic minorities, release iconic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, and begin a democratic transition. By taking China’s help to set up a meeting between its deputy assistant secretary of state and senior Burmese government representatives, the US only helped validate Beijing’s rationale for maintaining close contact with the junta.

Like on North Korea, Bush is blithely outsourcing to China parts of the US policy on Burma. But on Burma, US policy is also weighed down by Laura Bush’s missionary zeal.

Far from improving human rights in Burma, the blinkered activism has helped strengthen the military’s political grip. Recent threats of a humanitarian invasion of Burma indeed reeked of desperation, suggesting a callous willingness to employ food aid in a disaster situation to try and effect political change.

Today, an unelected, unaccountable woman holds US policy hostage to paradoxically promote free elections and public accountability in Burma. And her twice-elected, twice-born Christian husband — whom she persuaded to quit drinking at age 40 — attests to being under his wife’s sway through the “Laura and I” reference in his latest Burma-sanctions announcement. But as the Bible says, “There is none so blind as he who will not see.”

© Asian Age, 2008.

(Photograph at top shows Laura Bush meeting Karen and other minority-ethnic representatives from Burma at the White House, along with a U.S. congressman and an American adviser to the Karen National Union. Photograph released by the White House.)

China's Politicization of the Beijing Olympics

Tue, 06 May 2008 16:10:40 GMT

Publicity stunt on Everest

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times May 2, 2008

(Map of original Tibet as it existed up to the Chinese annexation)

NEW DELHI — As a triumphal symbol of its rule over Tibet, China is taking the Olympic torch through the "Roof of the World" to the world's highest peak, Mount Everest, which straddles the Tibetan-Nepalese border. That publicity stunt will only infuse more politics into the Games, already besmirched by China's pressure to turn the just-concluded international torch relay into a stage-managed, security exercise to pander to its sense of self-esteem at the cost of the Olympic spirit of openness.

Taking the torch to the tallest mountain is China's way of reinforcing its tall claim on Tibet, which it invaded in 1950 soon after the communist takeover in Beijing.

The blunt fact is that China, not just on Tibet but also on other territories, employs revisionist history to rationalize its assertive claims and ambitions. Not content that Han territorial power today is at its zenith, Beijing still seeks a Greater China.

The state openly fuels territorial nationalism, centered on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas and on India's Arunachal Pradesh state — nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. And as the fairy-tale Middle Kingdom, China also claims to be the mother of all civilizations, weaving legend with history to foster an ultra-nationalistic political culture, with its leadership still steeped in opaque and paternalistic mores despite the profound changes sweeping the country.

To prevent any demonstrators sneaking in from the Nepalese side and spoiling its triumphalism atop the 8,848-meter Everest, China has pressured a politically adrift Nepal to police entry routes to the peak and deploy troops up to the 6,500-meter Camp II. Having eliminated the outer buffer with India by annexing Tibet, China now is set to expand its leverage over the inner buffer, Nepal, where the Maoists will lead the next government following elections marred by large-scale intimidation.

China specially constructed a 108-km blacktop road to Everest to take the torch to the peak, unmindful of the environmental impact of such activities in pristine areas. China's large hydro projects in Tibet — the source of all of Asia's major rivers except the Ganges — and its reckless exploitation of the plateau's vast mineral resources already threaten the region's fragile ecosystem, with Chinese officials admitting average temperatures are rising faster in Tibet than in rest of China.

The plan to take the torch to Tibet is nothing but provocative. After all, the Chinese crackdown in Tibet continues, Tibetan monasteries remain sealed off, hundreds of monks and nuns are in jail, and the vast plateau is still closed to foreigners. Yet such is the Olympics' politicization that Beijing has extended the torch relay in Tibet into June. After ascending Everest in the coming days, the torch is to travel to Lhasa on June 19. The torch's three-month route within China, as compared to just a five-week run through the rest of the world, shows that for the Chinese Communist Party, the Olympics are an occasion not only to showcase national achievements under its rule, but also to help win popular legitimacy for its political monopoly.

To some extent, the Olympics have never been separate from politics, especially national power and pride. But until this year, politics had not cast such a big shadow since the Soviet-bloc nations boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in reprisal to the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. As if the relay becoming the most divisive in history is not enough, China is stoking more controversy through the torch's Everest climb and Tibet run. While continuing brutal repression in Tibet, it has made the Beijing Olympics' success such a prestige issue that it has offered to meet the Dalai Lama's "private representative."

Blending hardline actions with ostensible concessions has been Chinese strategy for a long time. Even as it was readying to invade India in 1962, China was suggesting conciliation.

Today, while stepping up cross-border incursions and encouraging India-bashing by its official organs, with a recent China Institute of International Strategic Studies commentary saying an "arrogant India" wants to be taught another 1962-style lesson, Beijing offers more meaningless border talks with New Delhi.

Clearly, China has appropriated the Olympic torch for its own political agenda. It never tires from lecturing to the world not to interfere in its internal affairs. Still, during the international relay, it kept interfering in the affairs of other states, wanting to be kept in the loop on the local security arrangements and insisting that pro-Tibet demonstrations not be allowed.

It even helped script some counter-demonstrations by young Chinese along the international route. While Chinese embassies arranged buses to take locally resident Chinese to relay sites, the government in Beijing sent batches of young citizens to some key overseas cities to cheer the torchbearers and wave Chinese flags.

Now a pressured Nepal has been forced to restrict expeditions to Everest in the busiest mountaineering season and station soldiers with authority to open fire as "a last resort." An American mountaineer carrying a pro-Tibet banner has already been ejected from the base camp.

All this is to ensure that not a single protester or Tibetan flag greets the torch on Everest.

Yet the reality, however unpalatable, is that the only occasions in history when Tibet was clearly part of China was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when China itself had been conquered by outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing dynasty, from 1644 to 1912. When a dynasty was indeed ethnically Han, such as Ming (founded between the Yang and Qing empires), Tibet had scant connection to Chinese rulers.

For the West, Tibet is largely a symbolic issue. But for India, Tibet's security and autonomy are tied to its well-being.

Indeed, no event in the 20th century more adversely altered India's security calculus than the fall of Tibet, which brought Han forces to the Indian frontiers for the first time in history. Until the 1962 Chinese aggression, India had faced invading armies only from the northwestern direction of the Khyber Pass.

Now India is compelled to mass forces along its once-open and idyllic Himalayan frontiers, as China persists with its attempts to nibble at Indian territory. Add to this picture China's refusal to clarify the frontline with India, its frenetic build up of military capabilities in Tibet, and its latent threat to fashion water as a political weapon against India by damming rivers upstream.

Autocrats, especially those reared in a secretive and suspicious culture, tend to act in ways that ultimately boomerang. Who would have thought two months ago that Tibet would flare up and come to the center of world attention, tormenting China internally, bruising its international image and casting a pall over the Beijing Olympics? The belief was that the weapon of repression was working well there. Many had already labeled Tibet a lost cause, not realizing that history tends to wreak vengeance on artificially created empires.

An Olympic torch relay paradoxically carrying the theme "Journey of Harmony," has helped shine a spotlight on China's human rights record and the manner ultranationalism has become the legitimating credo of the world's longest surviving autocracy.

The Chinese regime's troubles indeed may only be beginning. After the Everest climb could come a fall.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: Friday, May 2, 2008

Contrasting International Response to Repression in Tibet and Burma

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:49:24 GMT

Tibet and Burma: Dissimilar Response

While a booming China openly mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and escapes even international censure, an impoverished Burma reels under widening sanctions despite smaller-scale repression.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, April 5, 2008

There are striking similarities between Tibet and Burma — both are strategically located, endowed with rich natural resources, suffering under long-standing repressive rule, resisting hard power with soft power, and facing an influx of Han settlers. Yet the international response to the brutal crackdown on monk-led protests in Tibet and Burma has been a study in contrast.

When the Burmese crackdown on peaceful protestors in Rangoon last September left at least 31 people dead — according to a UN special rapporteur’s report — it ignited international indignation and a new round of U.S.-led sanctions. More than six months later, the tepid international response to an ongoing harsh crackdown in Tibet by the Burmese junta’s closest ally, China, raises the question whether that country has accumulated such power as to escape even censure over actions that are far more repressive and extensive than what Burma witnessed.

Tellingly, despite growing international appeals to Beijing to respect Tibetans’ human rights and cultural identity and begin dialogue with the Dalai Lama, there has been no call for any penal action, however mild, against China. Even the leverage provided by the 2008 Beijing Olympics is not being seized upon to pressure Beijing to end its repression in the Tibetan region.

When the Burmese generals cracked down on monks and their pro-democracy supporters, the outside world watched vivid images of brutality, thanks to citizen reporters using the Internet. But China employs tens of thousands of cyberpolice to censor Web sites, patrol cybercafes, monitor text and video messages from cellular phones, and hunt down Internet activists. As a result, the outside world has yet to see a single haunting image of the Chinese use of brute force against Tibetans. The only images released by Beijing are those that seek to show Tibetans in bad light, as engaged in arson and other attacks.

The continuing arbitrary arrests of Tibetans through house-to-house searches are a cause of serious concern, given the high incidence of mock trials followed by quick executions in China. That country still executes more people every year than all other nations combined, despite its adoption of new rules requiring a review of death sentences.

The important parallels between Tibet and Burma begin with the fact that Burma’s majority citizens — the ethnic Burmans — are of Tibetan stock. It was China’s 1950 invasion of Tibet that opened a new Han entrance to Burma. But now the Han demographic invasion of the Tibetan plateau is spilling over into Burma, with Chinese presence conspicuous in Mandalay city and the areas to the northeast.

Today, the resistance against repressive rule in both Tibet and Burma is led by iconic Nobel laureates, one living in exile and the other under house detention. In fact, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel peace prize in quick succession for the same reason: For leading a non-violent struggle. Each is a symbol of soft power, building such moral authority as to command wide international respect and influence.

Yet another parallel is that heavy repression has failed to break the resistance to autocratic rule in both Tibet and Burma. If anything, growing authoritarianism has begun to backfire, as the popular monk-led revolts in Tibet and Burma have highlighted.

Vantage location and rich natural resources underscore the importance of Tibet and Burma. The Tibetan plateau makes up one-fourth of China’s landmass. Annexation has given China control over Tibet’s immense water resources and mineral wealth, including boron, chromite, copper, iron ore, lead, lithium, uranium and zinc. Most of Asia’s major rivers originate in the Tibetan plateau, with their waters a lifeline to 47 percent of the global population living in South and Southeast Asia and China. Through its control over Asia’s main source of freshwater and its building of huge dams upstream, China holds out a latent threat to fashion water into a political weapon.

Energy-rich Burma is a land bridge between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. China, however, has succeeded in strategically penetrating Burma, which it values as an entryway to the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Beijing is now busy completing the Irrawaddy Corridor through Burma involving road, river, rail, port and energy-transport links.

The key difference between Tibet and Burma is that the repression in the former is by an occupying power. Months after the 1949 communist takeover in Beijing, China’s People’s Liberation Army entered what was effectively a sovereign nation in full control of its own affairs.

At the root of the present Tibet crisis is China’s failure to grant the autonomy it promised when it imposed on Tibetans a “17-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” in 1951. Instead of conceding autonomy, Beijing has actually done the opposite: It has pursued Machiavellian policies by breaking up Tibet as it existed before the invasion, and by seeking to reduce Tibetans to a minority in their own homeland through the state-supported relocation of millions of Han Chinese.

It has gerrymandered Tibet by making Amdo (the present Dalai Lama’s birthplace) Qinghai province and merging eastern Kham into the Han provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu. More recently, Chongqing province was carved out of Sichuan.

The traditional Tibetan region is a distinct cultural and economic entity. But with large, heavily Tibetan areas having been severed from Tibet, what is left is just the 1965 creation — the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the central plateau comprising Ü-Tsang and western Kham, or roughly half of the Tibetan plateau. Yet China has changed even the demographic composition of TAR, where they were hardly any Han settlers before the Chinese annexation.

TAR, home to barely 40 per cent of the 6.5 million Tibetans in China, was the last “autonomous region” created by the Chinese Communists, the others being Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang (1955), Guangxi Zhuang (1958) and Ningxia (1958). In addition, China has 30 “autonomous prefectures,” 120 “autonomous counties” and 1,256 “autonomous townships.”

All of the so-called autonomous areas are in minority homelands, which historically were ruled from Beijing only when China itself had been conquered by foreigners — first by the Mongols, and then the Manchu. Today, these areas are “autonomous” only in name, with that tag designed to package a fiction to the ethnic minorities. Apart from not enforcing its one-child norm in these sparsely populated but vast regions (which make up three-fifths of China’s landmass), Beijing grants them no meaningful autonomy. In Tibet, what the ravages of the Cultural Revolution left incomplete, forced “political education” since has sought to accomplish.

China grants local autonomy just to two areas, both Han — Hong Kong and Macao. In the talks it has held with the Dalai Lama’s envoys since 2002, Beijing has flatly refused to consider the idea of making Tibet a Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong and Macao. It has also rebuffed the idea of restoring Tibet, under continued Chinese rule, to the shape and size it existed in 1950.

Instead it has sought to malign the Dalai Lama for seeking “Greater Tibet” and pressed a maximalist historical position vis-à-vis him. Not content with the Dalai Lama’s far-reaching 1987 concession to forsake Tibetan independence, Beijing insists that he also affirm that Tibet was always part of China. But as the Dalai Lama said in a recent Newsweek interview, “Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history.”

Contrary to China’s claim that its present national political structure is unalterable to accommodate Tibetan aspirations, the fact is that its constitutional arrangements have continued to change, as underscored by the creation of 47 new supposedly “autonomous” municipalities or counties in minority homelands just between 1984 and 1994, according to the work of Harvard scholar Lobsang Sangay.

Until the latest uprising, Beijing believed its weapon of repression was working well and thus saw no need to bring Tibetans together under one administrative unit, as they demand, or to grant Tibet a status equivalent to Hong Kong and Macao. President Hu Jintao, who regards Tibet as his core political base from the time he was the party boss there, has ruled out any compromise that would allow the Dalai Lama to return home from his long exile in India. Following the uprising, Hu’s line on Tibet is likely to further harden, unless effective international pressure is brought to bear.

The contrasting international response to the repression in Tibet and Burma brings out an inconvenient truth: The principle that engagement is better than punitive action to help change state behaviour is applied only to powerful autocratic countries, while sanctions are a favoured tool to try and tame the weak. Sanctions against China are also precluded by the fact that the West has a huge commercial stake in that country. But Burma, where its interests are trifling, is a soft target.

So, while an impoverished Burma reels under widening sanctions, a booming China openly mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of countless hundreds of students did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions against Beijing.

No one today is suggesting trade sanctions. But given that Beijing secured the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the promise to improve its human-rights record, the free world has a duty to demand that it end its repression in Tibet or face an international boycott, if not of the Games, at least of the opening ceremony, to which world leaders have been invited. By making the success of this summer’s Olympics a prestige issue, China has handed the world valuable leverage that today is begging to be exercised. This rare opportunity must not be frittered away.

Tibet exposes China’s Achilles heel

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:55:15 GMT

Repression May Unravel China's Monocracy

Beijing faces moment of truth on its brutal occupation of the vast Tibetan plateau

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, March 29, 2008

Growing authoritarianism more often than not rebounds. The monk-led Tibetan uprising, which has spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas forcibly incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in communist China’s history. It comes as a rude jolt to the world’s biggest and longest-surviving autocracy, highlighting the signal failure of state-driven efforts to pacify Tibet through more than half a century of ruthless repression, in which as many as a million Tibetans reportedly have lost their lives.

The open backlash against the Tibetans’ economic marginalization, the rising Han influx and the state assault on Tibetan religion and ecology constitutes, in terms of its spread, the largest rebellion in Tibet since 1959, when the Dalai Lama and his followers were forced to flee to India. Even in 1989, when the last major Tibetan uprising was suppressed through brute force, the unrest had not spread beyond the central plateau, or what Beijing since 1965 calls the Tibet Autonomous Region. Now, the state’s intensifying brutal crackdown across the Tibetan plateau — an area more than two-thirds the size of Western Europe — dwarfs other international human-rights problems like Burma and Darfur, Sudan.

Indeed, the latest revolt is a challenge to China’s totalitarian system in a year when the Beijing Olympics are supposed to showcase the autocracy’s remarkable economic achievements. It is a defining moment for a system that has managed to entrench itself for 59 long years and yet faces gnawing questions about its ability to survive by reconciling China’s contradictory paths of market capitalism and political monocracy. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

The recent events have laid bare the strength of the Tibetan grassroots resistance despite decades of oppression, including the demolition of monasteries, the jailing of independent-minded monks and nuns, the state’s wanton interference in the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism, and the forced political re-education of Tibetan youth and monks. Tibet’s rapid Sinicization today threatens to obliterate the Tibetan culture in ways the previous decades of repression could not. That threat has only sharpened the Tibetan sense of identity and yearning for freedom.

For President Hu Jintao, who owes his swift rise to the top of the party hierarchy to his martial-law crackdown in Tibet in 1989, the chickens have come home to roost. The fresh uprising, coinciding with Hu’s re-election as president, epitomizes the counterproductive nature of the Hu-backed policies — from seeking to change the demographic realities on the ground through the “Go West” Han-migration campaign, to draconian curbs on Tibetan farmland and monastic life. The Tibetans’ feelings of subjugation and loss have been deepened as they have been pushed to the margins of society, with their distinct culture being reduced to a mere showpiece to draw tourists and boost the Han-benefiting local economy.

Tibetans also have been incensed by atheistic China’s growing intrusion into their religious affairs, as exemplified by Beijing’s 2007 proclamation making itself the sole authority to anoint lamas — traditionally a divine process to select a young boy as a Buddha incarnation. Having captured the institution of the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Beijing is preparing the ground to install its own puppet Dalai Lama after the present aging incumbent passes away. So short-sighted is this approach that the rulers in Beijing don’t realize that such a scenario will surely radicalize Tibetan youth and kill prospect of a peaceful settlement of the Tibet issue, thereby spawning an enduring violent campaign.

The ongoing Chinese crackdown, behind the cover of a Tibet that has been cut off from the outside world, symbolizes what the communist leadership itself admits is a “life and death struggle” over Tibet. The likely further hardening of the leadership’s stance on Tibet, as a consequence of the uprising, will only help mask a serious challenge that carries wider political implications for the Chinese state. In the Tibetan plateau — about half of which has been hived off from Tibet and merged with Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces — the crackdown by a regime wedded to the unbridled exercise of state power promises to exacerbate the situation on the ground.

The tepid global response thus far to the bloodletting and arbitrary arrests in Tibet is a reflection of China’s growing international clout, underscored by its burgeoning external trade, rising military power and unrivalled $1.5 trillion foreign-exchange reserves, largely invested in U.S. dollar-denominated assets. Given that even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions, the lack of any attempt to penalize China for its continuing human-rights violations in Tibet should not come as a surprise.

But Tibet’s future will be determined not so much by the international response as by developments within China. After all, the only occasions in history when Tibet was clearly part of China was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when China itself had been conquered by outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing dynasty, from 1644 to 1912. It was only when the Qing dynasty began to unravel that Tibet once again became an independent political entity.

What Beijing today asserts are regions “integral” to its territorial integrity are really imperial spoils of earlier foreign dynastic rule in China. Yet, revisionist history under communist rule has helped indoctrinate Chinese to think of the Yang and Qing empires as Han, with the result that educated Chinese have come to feel a false sense of ownership about every territory that was part of those dynasties.

The truth is that the once-idyllic Tibet came under direct Han rule for the first time in history following the 1949 communist takeover in China. Just as the politically cataclysmic developments of 1949 led to Tibet’s loss of its independent status, it is likely to take another momentous event in Chinese history for Tibet to regain its sovereignty.

That event could be the unravelling of the present xenophobic dictatorship and the synthetic homogeneity it has implanted, not just in institutional structures but also in the national thought process. Today, the Chinese autocrats are able to fan ultra-nationalism as a substitute to their waning communist ideology because the central tenet of the communists’ political philosophy is uniformity, with Hu’s slogan of a “harmonious society” designed to underline the theme of conformity with the republic. The Manchu assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the natives in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts.

With 60 per cent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the Great Wall represented the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Territorially, Han power is at its pinnacle today. Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centred on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas and on India’s Arunachal Pradesh state — nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. Few realize that China occupies one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Tibet, however, is a reminder that attempts at forcible assimilation can backfire. That was also the lesson from Yugoslavia, a model of forced integration of nationalities. But once its central autocratic structure corroded, Yugoslavia violently fell apart. It will require a similar collapse or loosening of the central political authority in China for Tibet to reclaim independence. Until then, the Tibetans’ best hope is to strive for the kind of autonomy Beijing has granted Hong Kong and Macao.

Those who gloomily see the battle for Tibetan independence as irretrievably lost forget that history has a way of wreaking vengeance on artificially created empires. The Central Asian states got independence on a platter, without having to wage a struggle. Who in Central Asia had dreamt of independence in mid-1991? Yet months later, the Soviet empire had unravelled. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania twice lost their independence to an expanding Russian empire, only to regain it each time due to a cataclysmic event — World War I, and the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The post-1991 flight of Russians from large parts of Central Asia is a testament that the Sinicization of the Tibetan region is not an unalterable process.

The Tibetan struggle, one of the longest and most-powerful resistance movements in modern world history, exposes China’s Achilles heel. The reverberations from the latest bloodshed on the land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture will be felt long after Chinese security forces have snuffed out the last protest.

Hu knows that the Tibetan uprising has the potential to embolden Han citizens in China to demand political freedoms — a campaign that would sound the death knell of the single-party rule. The last time he suppressed a Tibetan revolt, his then boss, Deng Xiaoping, had to borrow a leaf from Hu’s Tibet book to crush pro-democracy protestors at Tiananmen Square two months later. Hundreds were slain.

This year could prove a watershed in Chinese history. Just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the 2008 Beijing Games — communist China’s coming-out party, already besmirched by the Tibet crackdown — may be a spur to radical change in that country. Given that recurring protests are likely to greet the Olympic torch during its global tour of 135 cities, 2008 promises to be, at a minimum, the year Tibet came back into international spotlight.

Rudderless Rudd's uranium-export decision throws a spanner in Indian goal

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 10:10:09 GMT

Rudd's uranium reversal irks India

Bruce Loudon, New Delhi | March 03, 2008

The Australian

KEVIN Rudd was lashed yesterday by one of India's most influential foreign affairs commentators over the Prime Minister's ditching of his predecessor's pledge to sell uranium to the emerging economic powerhouse.

Brahma Chellaney launched a searing denunciation of Mr Rudd's "abstruse, retrograde ideology" over his reversal of a decision made last year by John Howard to sell uranium to India.

Mr Chellaney accused Mr Rudd in The Asian Age newspaper of striking "a jarring note amid a growing convergence of strategic interests" between the two countries.

Under the headline "Rudd's rudderless reversal", Mr Chellaney noted that Mr Rudd was the free world's first Mandarin-speaking head of government, saying he "has made plain his intent to cosy up to the world's largest autocracy, China, while nullifying an important decision that his predecessor took to help build a closer rapport with the world's largest democracy."

The stridency of Mr Chellaney's attack reflects the widespread annoyance at high levels in New Delhi over the Rudd Government's reversal on the uranium issue.

The Indian Government was irked when, in January, it sent special prime ministerial envoy Shyam Saran to see Foreign Minister Stephen Smith in Perth and found itself being bluntly told - even though it had not asked - there would be no sale of Australian uranium to India.

Indian sources insist Mr Saran was taken aback by the minister's forthright stance as he had gone to Perth only to brief Mr Smith on New Delhi's negotiations with Washington over its civilian nuclear deal and specifically not to ask to buy Australian uranium.

"Chellaney is saying what many of us feel about the Rudd Government's pathetic hypocrisy on this issue," one highly-placed official told The Australian yesterday.

The criticism of the Rudd Government is in sharp contrast to the significant strides made in Indo-Australian relations in the Howard years, which are praised by Mr Chellaney.

But in overturning the decision to sell uranium to India, Mr Chellaney says, Mr Rudd has been "notably regressive".

"Driven by misplaced non-proliferation zealotry, Rudd not only went ahead with cancelling Howard's decision, but his Government also continues to parrot the same lame excuse, as if he has not read the Non-Proliferation Treaty text.

"In touting its ideological resolve to uphold the NPT, the Rudd Government wants to be more Catholic than the Pope. Far from the NPT forbidding civil exports to a non-signatory, the treaty indeed encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states.

"Rudd has no qualms about selling uranium to China but will not export to India, even though the latter is accepting what the former will not brook - stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of material to weapons use."

Mr Rudd's office would not be drawn on claims his Government had mishandled Australia's relationship with India.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister said only that it remained government policy not to sell uranium to countries who had not signed the NPT.

Shadow foreign minister Andrew Robb said the Government's handling of the relationship with India had been "clumsy".

Additional reporting: Paul Maley

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23308272-2702,00.html

Australia-India-Japan-U.S. Quadrilateral Initiative: An idea that will survive the current vicissitudes

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:15:35 GMT

Obstacles to overcome in the development of a concert of Asia-Pacific democracies

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, February 20, 2008

NEW DELHI — The new Australian government is signaling a wish to turn its back on an initiative bringing four major democracies of the Asia-Pacific together, even as U.S. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to institutionalize that venture.

Whatever its future, the nascent Australia-India-Japan-U.S. "Quadrilateral Initiative" symbolizes the likely geopolitical lineup in the coming years.

At a time when a qualitative reordering of power is reshaping international equations, major players in the Asia-Pacific are playing down the risk that contrasting political systems could come to constitute the main geopolitical dividing line, potentially pitting a China-led axis of autocracies against a constellation of democracies. The refrain of the players is that pragmatism, not political values, would guide their foreign-policy strategy. Yet the new Great Game under way plays up regime character as a key driver.

Ordinarily, the readiness to play by international rules ought to matter more than regime form. But regime character often makes playing by the rules difficult.

For example, as revealed by a new book, "China's Great Leap," edited by Minky Worden, China won the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the plea that awarding the Games would help it improve its human-rights record. Instead, Beijing has let loose new political repression in the runup to the Games. But just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany's collapse, the 2008 Games could help trigger radical change in China.

It is established that democracies rarely go to war with each other, even though democratic governments may not be more wedded to peace than autocracies.

Today, China's best friends are fellow autocracies, including pariah states, while those seeking to forestall power disequilibrium in the Asia-Pacific happen to be on the other side of the values-based divide. In that light, political values could easily come to define a new geopolitical divide.

What may seem implausible globally, given America's lingering tradition of propping up dictators in the Muslim world, is thus conceivable in the Asia-Pacific theater as a natural corollary to the present geopolitics. But for the divergent geopolitical interests at play, the differing political values would not matter so much.

After all, a major challenge in Asia is to banish the threat of hegemony by any single power (as Europe has done) so that greater political understanding and trust could be built. This challenge pits two competing visions.

On one side is the mythical "Middle Kingdom" whose foreign policy seeks to make real the legend that drives its official history — China's centrality in the world. Its autocrats believe that in their calculus to make China a "world power second to none," gaining pre-eminence in Asia is an essential step. On the other side is the interest of many Asian nations and outside powers in a cooperative order founded on power equilibrium.

It was China that took the lead in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to help unite it with Eurasian strongmen in a geopolitical alliance. Designed originally to bring the Central Asian nations — the so-called Stans — under the Chinese sphere of influence, the SCO is today shaping up as a potential "NATO of the East."

Yet, when Australia, India, Japan and the United States last year started the Quadrilateral Initiative, Beijing was quick to cry foul and see the apparition of an "Asian NATO." A Chinese diplomatic protest to each Quad nation followed.

Through sustained diplomatic pressure, mounted on the back of growing economic clout, Beijing has sought to wilt the Quad. A new opening has come with the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd being elected Australia's prime minister.

Rudd is so mesmerized by his Mandarin fluency that he feels an inexorable itch to cozy up to Beijing.

In a strange spectacle, the Rudd administration has proclaimed it will sell uranium to Beijing (without adequate safeguards against diversion to weapons use) but not to New Delhi, even if the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG) carves out an exemption for India. The previous John Howard government, which was in office for 11 years, had concluded uranium deals with both China and India.

Rudd's reason for overturning the decision to export uranium to India is that New Delhi has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. As Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith explained at a Feb. 1 news conference in Tokyo, "The current government will not authorize the export of uranium to a country which is not a party to the NPT."

That rationale is seriously flawed: The NPT has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil cooperation with a non-signatory. The treaty actually encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states. All it requires is safeguards application, which its Article III (3) stipulates shall not hamper "international cooperation in the field of peaceful nuclear activities, including the international exchange of nuclear material and equipment for the processing, use of production of nuclear material for peaceful purposes in accordance with the provisions of this Article and the principle of safeguarding set forth in the Preamble of the Treaty."

Any restriction on civil cooperation with a country like India is not in the NPT, but it is in the revised 1992 rules of the U.S.-led NSG, a cartel that was formed outside the framework of international law and the United Nations. The Rudd government, interestingly, has not come out against the proposed NSG exemption for India. On that issue, in Smith's words, "the Australian government has not come to a concluded view on those matters. We will give consideration to those matters and will do that in an orderly way, having listened to the views of the Indian government and the U.S. government."

In rushing to abandon uranium exports to India — that too on the pretext of wishing to uphold the NPT — Rudd, however, made no similar effort to go through "an orderly way" and solicit the views of others. Indeed, underscoring a holier-than-thou attitude, Rudd, despite his leftwing political base, sees no contradiction in pledging to keep Australia ensconced under American nuclear and conventional deterrence, yet refusing to accept India's sovereign right to build nuclear security in a highly troubled neighborhood without any breach of its legal commitments.

With the Australian economic boom being driven by Beijing's ravenous resource imports — which helped China to overtake Japan and the U.S. as Australia's largest trading partner in 2007 — the Howard government wasn't exactly enthused by the Quad proposal when it was first floated. Beijing had already taken a dim view of Canberra's U.S.-backed bilateral and trilateral defense tie-ups with Tokyo. But Howard was persuaded by the U.S. to take part in the initiative.

Now the Quad's future has come under a cloud following the Rudd administration's statements. With the visiting Chinese foreign minister by his side, Smith said in Canberra on Feb. 5: "One of the things which caused China concern last year was a meeting of that strategic dialogue plus India, which China expressed some concern with. And I indicated when I was in Japan that Australia would not be proposing to have a dialogue of that nature." Smith later called the Quad meeting of last May, held on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) gathering in Manila, "a one-off" affair.

Australia's growing wariness, admittedly, may be no different from India's. After having called liberal democracy "the natural order of social and political organization in today's world," Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on the eve of his China visit last month that the Quad "never got going." Even the U.S. has publicly downplayed the initiative, whose real architect, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had spoken of an "arc of freedom and prosperity" stretching across Asia, was driven out of office last fall.

Yet, it is significant that the Quad staged weeklong war games in the Bay of Bengal five months ago, roping in Singapore. Those war games came close on the heels of major military exercises involving practically all SCO members in Russia's Chelyabinsk region. The Quad was not intended to be a formal institution. McCain, however, in a recent article published in Foreign Affairs, said: "As president, I will seek to institutionalize the new quadrilateral security partnership among the major Asia-Pacific democracies: Australia, India, Japan and the United States." McCain also has larger ambitions: "A 'worldwide League of Democracies' that could be a "unique handmaiden of freedom."

The more modest Quad, founded on the historically valid hypothesis of democratic peace, is supposed to serve as an initial framework to promote security dialogue and interlinked partnerships among major Pacific Rim democracies. Such collaboration is already being built.

As an idea, the Quad will not only survive the current vicissitudes, but it also foreshadows what is likely to come. With the Asia-Pacific region becoming more divided in the face of conflicting strategic cultures, major democracies are likely to be increasingly drawn together to help advance political cooperation and stability through a community of values.

The Japan Times: Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008

Global Power Shifts: The Larger Implications

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:07:27 GMT

Geopolitical risks on the rise

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, February 4, 2008

DAVOS, Switzerland — At the recent World Economic Forum meeting of top political, business, intellectual and civil-society leaders, the discussions centered on a range of major international challenges — from new threats to the growing strain on water and other resources.

The discussions brought home the point that at a time of ongoing shifts in economic and political power, greater international divisiveness is making it more difficult to build a consensual approach on the pressing challenges.

Indeed, new fault lines are emerging. The changing global equations are reflected in new realities: the eastward movement of power and influence; the lesser relevance of international structures the United States helped established after World War II; and Asia's rise as the world's main creditor and economic locomotive. While the world is not yet multipolar, it is no longer unipolar, as it had been after the end of the Cold War.

Tectonic power shifts, as history testifies, are rarely quiet. They usually create volatility in the international system, even if the instability is relatively short-lived. The new international divisiveness may reflect such a reality.

But unlike in past history, the qualitative reordering of power now under way is due not to battlefield victories or military realignments but to a peaceful factor unique to the modern world: rapid economic growth.

The power shifts are linked to Asia's phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. After making up 60 percent of the world's GDP in 1820, Asia went into sharp decline over the next 125 years. Now, it is bouncing back and already accounts for 40 percent of global production — a figure likely to rise to 60 percent well within the next quarter-century. This development is helping alter international equations, with the International Monetary Fund in perceptible decline and troubled U.S. and European financial institutions turning to sovereign wealth funds in Asia and the Middle East for bailouts.

Another factor has also contributed to the divisiveness: While we know the world is in transition, we still do not know what the new order will look like. The ongoing shifts signify not only a world characterized by greater distribution of power, but also new uncertainties. Technological forces today are playing a greater role in shaping geopolitics than at any other time in history.

The more the world changes, however, the more it remains the same in some critical aspects. The information age and globalization, despite spurring profound changes in polity, economy and security, have not altered the nature of international relations. In fact, the rapid pace of technological and economic change is itself a consequence of nations competing fiercely and seeking relative advantage in an international system based largely on national security.

The fact is that we live in a Hobbesian world, with power coterminous with national security and success. The present global power structure reflects this reality: Only countries armed with intercontinental-range weaponry, for example, are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. However, once the economic power structure changes internationally, shifts in military power will follow, even if slowly.

At present, however, the new fault lines signal rising geopolitical risks.

The tensions between internationalism and nationalism in an era of the supposed single "global village," for instance, raise troubling questions about international peace and stability. With greater public awareness from advances in information and communications technologies encouraging individuals and even some states to more clearly define their identity in terms of religion and ethnicity, a divide is emerging between multiculturalism and artificially enforced monoculturalism. The rise of international terrorism indeed shows that the information age is both an integrating and dividing force. The emerging political, economic and security divides are no less invidious.

The world is moving beyond the North-South divide to a four-tier economic division: The prosperous West; rapidly growing economies like those in Asia; countries that have run into stagnation after reaching middle-income nation status; and a forgotten billion people living on the margins of globalization in sub-Saharan Africa.

There is also a resource divide, with the resource-hungry employing aid and arms exports as a diplomatic instrument for commodity outreach. As the specter of resource conflict has grown, the contours of a 21st-century version of the Great Game have emerged in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

In modern history, the fault line between democrats and autocrats has at times been papered over through a common geopolitical interest. But today the failure to build greater political homogeneity by defining shared international objectives carries the risk that, in the years ahead, political values could become the main geopolitical dividing line.

Also, with the rise of unconventional transnational challenges, a new security divide is mirrored both in the failure to fashion a concerted and effective international response to such threats, including transnational terrorism, and the divisiveness on issues like climate change.

There is clearly a need to improve global geopolitics by building cooperative political approaches that transcend institutions whose structure is rooted in a world that no longer exists. The reality is that just as the Group of Eight, to stay relevant, has initiated the so-called Outreach for dialogue with the emerging powers, the five unelected yet permanent members of the U.N. Security Council can no longer dictate terms to the rest of the world and need to share executive authority with new powers.

It was a mistake to believe that greater economic interdependence by itself would improve geopolitics. In today's market-driven world, trade is not constrained by political differences, nor is booming trade a guarantee of moderation and restraint between states.

Better politics is as important as better economics. That in turn calls for several major steps whose initiation so far has been frustrated: institutional reforms; greater transparency in strategic doctrines and military expenditures; and cooperative approaches on shared concerns. No international mission today can yield enduring results unless it comes with consistency and credibility and is backed by consensus — the three crucial Cs.

Seen against the significant shifts in power and influence, the world order of the past 60 years will have to give way to a truly international order. The new order, unlike the current one founded on the ruins of a world war, will have to be established in an era of international peace and thus be designed to reinforce that peace. That means it will need to be more reflective of the consensual needs of today and have a democratic decision-making structure.

With Davos attracting 27 heads of state, 113 Cabinet ministers, 74 of the top 100 global companies' CEOs and 2,300 other delegates, this unique forum seems best placed to promote innovative, out-of-box thinking. The central message from Davos is that silo thinking can only increase global geopolitical risks at a time of greater international fluidity and financial volatility.

Brahma Chellaney was on the faculty of the recent World Economic Forum meeting.

The Japan Times: Monday, Feb. 4, 2008