The Hindu : India and new age alliances

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Thursday, Feb 13, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

India and new age alliances

By C. Raja Mohan

For years India has sought a place at the high table in world affairs. This is the time to make a serious bid for it.

THE SUGGESTION from the New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, that India should replace France as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has not been made in jest. It reflects a growing sentiment in Washington that traditional American alliances are no longer viable instruments in the global war against terrorism. While India itself has been ambivalent about the significance of the imminent war in the Gulf, across the strategic spectrum in America, there is a new recognition of India's potential as an ally in dealing with threats to international security in the 21st century.

Writing in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago, columnist Jim Hoagland has argued: "It is possible to imagine today that America's most important alliance in the future will be built not along Europe's historical and geographical fault lines, as NATO was and is, but along a confluence of democracy and vulnerability to religious-based terrorism and state-sponsored hostility. The United States, Israel, India and Russia fall on the same side of that line. They all pursue missile defense programs that could eventually reinforce each other's security."

Put another way, both the political alliances and technological means to deal with the challenge of international terrorism need to be recrafted. It is only those nations that are victims of international terrorism that will be prepared to fight it. And the means too have to change. Thanks to the proliferation of technologies, international terrorist groups and states that sponsor them might or have already acquired weapons of mass destruction. Since they cannot be deterred by traditional means, devising new methods such as missile defence and pre-emptive conventional strikes has become urgent.

As the biggest victim of extremism and violence, India instinctively understood this when it supported the controversial U.S. plans for missile defence and enthusiastically supported the American war against terror after September 11, 2001. But India's enthusiasm has dimmed after Pakistan returned to the affections of the U.S. after September 11. Tactical considerations on the domestic front and longstanding relations with Iraq have prevented India from defining a bolder approach towards the war in the Gulf.

But if New Delhi sheds its current timidity, it stands to gain immensely after the war in the Gulf. India has rightly cautioned the world against "double standards" in the war against terrorism. The phrase "double standards" is a political jab at the American reluctance to push Pakistan beyond a point on its continuing support to terrorism in India.

This obsessive immediate focus on "double standards" might be making India blind to the historic changes that could result from the Gulf war and their long term consequences for New Delhi's standing in the world as well as its own war against terrorism sponsored by Pakistan. India should in fact be positioning itself to take full advantage of the current moment in international affairs.

The American war against Iraq that will unfold in the coming weeks is about modernising the Middle East and nudging it towards political moderation. It is the first step towards a reconstruction of the Middle East where rising levels of anger and frustration are breeding political resentments that are being exploited by religious extremists. The American project for the reformation of the Middle East is of great consequence for India, both for its own inherent value and its contribution towards the internal transformation of Pakistan.

At the global level, the American war in the Gulf has begun to give what could be a deathblow to the Cold War institutions as well as recent trends that seemed so enduring. The first casualty of the impending Gulf War has been the idea of European unity. The expanding frontiers of the European Union since the end of the Cold War had given rise to the notion of a new and powerful political force in world affairs. The Bush Administration has brutally exposed the limitations of European unity by pitting parts of "old Europe" against the new. While France and Germany are leading the charge against the U.S., the East European nations are providing active military assistance to the American war in the Gulf.

A second victim of the Gulf War has been North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), for long billed as the most stable and powerful military alliance the world has ever seen. For more than five decades, NATO has been the principal military force shaping international security. But today, NATO stands politically paralysed in responding to the American war plans in the Gulf.

The divisions in NATO are not merely about the nature of inspections and U.N. procedures. They reflect fundamental differences about the nature of threats to global security and the means that must be adopted to counter them. Alliances are built on shared threat perceptions and a commitment to fight them collectively. The U.S. and key European players no longer agree that they have a common threat, and therefore find it impossible to deal with them together.

A third casualty of the Gulf War could be the U.N. Security Council. The next couple of weeks would show if the system devised at the end of the Second World War is capable of addressing the new challenges to the international system. France and Germany are confident that they have the number of votes to push for a new resolution that would call for more forceful and extended U.N. inspections in Iraq as an alternative to a war against Saddam Hussein. The Anglo-American powers will demand another kind of resolution that will authorise the use of force. Whether they get U.N. approval or not, the Americans have proclaimed the intention to go ahead with the war plans. It is the U.N. that is in a pickle. Recall the warning by the U.S. President, George W. Bush, that if the U.N. does not rise to the occasion, it would go the way of League of Nations and become a footnote in history.

The war in the Gulf is a defining moment that will set the stage for a reordering of the international security system. It will alter the nature of global institutions as well as reconstitute the hierarchy of great powers. India, which was kept out of the decision-making structures of the old order, has little reason to mourn its passage. It has every reason to make bold in shaping a new order that must be constructed amidst the dissolution of the old. For years India has sought a place at the high table in world affairs. This is the time to make a serious bid for it by demonstrating that India has the political will and capability to act as a great power in recasting the security environment in its neighbourhood and the world.

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