Retreating US opens way for new regional power rivalries : Asia’s heated military atmosphere in 2017 | Sunday Observer

Retreating US opens way for new regional power rivalries : Asia’s heated military atmosphere in 2017

15 January, 2017

As we begin 2017, the military seems to have superseded business, for once, in the Asia region, the world’s most populous, by far. Barely had India let off steam about a Chinese Navy attack submarine patrolling the Indian Ocean than world attention was drawn to a visit to The Philippines by two major Russian Navy warships.

As 2016 ended, India proudly announced the fourth successful testing of its longest range missile rocket - the Agni-5, which can carry nuclear warheads and reach Beijing. India’s External Affairs Ministry, of course, denied that any specific country was the target of missile development.

But just to spice things up in the nuclear rhetoric, just a couple of months ago, Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikkar, known as a hawk, alarmingly remarked to a TV audience that he would be happy to scrap India’s current ‘no-first-use’ nuclear military policy. China, too, observes the same policy, and responded with suitably cautionary noises even as Parrikkar emphasised that they were his “personal” views.

Nuclear

And then earlier this month, North Korea announced success in developing an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) rocket which, of course, will be used to carry nuclear warhead. Western analysts say that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is not likely to have a fully operational, nuclear-tipped, ICBM for some time to come, leave aside whether that impoverished country can actually afford to sustain a viable missile arsenal.

An inter-continental ballistic missile, first developed by the two old super powers, USA and USSR, is a long distance, ground or sea-launched, rocket with a range of over 12,000 km, thereby capable of striking at targets in another continent. Treaties between the two super-powers during the Cold War attempted to limit their production of ICBMs, but still today, the US remains the dominant nuclear power with over 1,200 officially acknowledged ICBMs. Each ICBM, of course, can carry multiple warheads that can be independently targeted to hit several different targets once over the enemy country.

Between them, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea may hold a combined arsenal of over a thousand nuclear warheads and rockets capable of launching them over varying distances. And we should not forget that Russia is also an Asian power as well as being a European power.

Russia’s original Cold War deployment of nuclear missile arsenal saw the positioning of missile batteries all across Siberia to be able to strike the breath of the USA from across the North Pole. Such deployment in Siberia today implies that Russia wields its nuclear military influence across the northern hemisphere, covering the Asia-Pacific as well.

Offer

North Korea, in the statement that announced the development of an IBM, made an oblique offer for further talks with the US which had, earlier led the way in trying to curb Pyongyang’s grandiose militaristic ventures. The Barak Obama administration may have successfully cobbled together a multilateral treaty with Iran to curb that emerging power’s nuclear military efforts, but Washington, absorbed with multiple wars in West Asia, just gave up on Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, The Philippines’ recently elected President Rodrigo “Rody” Roa Duterte, having earlier announced closer ties with Beijing and rejected The Philippines’ singular Cold War era dependency on the US, last week announced closer military cooperation with Russia. This was announced even as two Russian warships visited The Philippines.

The Filipino foreign ministry later emphasised that the country’s existing close military alliance with the US remained for the time being. Officials further disclosed that military links with Russia would be expanded within the scope of a current limited military cooperation agreement between the two countries, initiated during the Cory Aquino presidency that had not been properly utilised previously.

And, of course, there is the yet festering wound that is Afghanistan right in the heart of the Asian continent, while the new wounds in West Asia, both Iraq and Syria, are beginning to fester as well.

Till recently, Asia, in the final decades of the twentieth century and after, was the envy of the world in terms of new and rapidly blossoming market economies and hybrid statist-capitalist economies like China, Vietnam and Cambodia. Asia, famous for its trade craft and innovativeness since ancient times, was seen evolving into a new economic powerhouse.

Territorial

Today, most of these new economies are no longer new – they are maturing industrially, social demographies are evolving into middle income status, and, the growth of markets are spurring new resource security concerns with corollary new territorial interests as well.

Thus, for China, the Straits of Malacca are too restrictive and must be complemented by trans-Asian land routes along its own, ancient trade routes to the West. Hence, the ‘Silk Road’ and ‘Maritime Silk Route’ programmes encompassing much of continental Asia as well as the northern sea board of the Indian Ocean. Such outlooks are little different from the geo-political approach of the old European colonial enterprises but incomparably more civilised in implementation. Beijing’s current global projection of its power echoes, in terms of its rationale, that of the US in the 20th century, but Beijing is proceeding with cash, gifts and glossy (if ruthless) deals and not simply with military alliances or with outright invasions.

Indeed, during the several decades that the US remained as the sole, pre-eminent super-power, it has been a stark failure as a responsible power. Rather, it has been cruelly disastrous for large parts of the world, especially in West Asia.

West Asia now sees the emergence of new powers – Turkey, currently the most powerful and, Iran, currently the most stable society and a future regional power if allowed to work things out.

It is in the larger Asian continent that 2017 portends to be an area of geo-political rivalry with a military edge to it, if not necessarily a warlike one.

Fortunately, Asia’s business acumen is not failing it. Even as China and India rival each other militarily, they are doing great business together! In fact, the Shanghai agreement and the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) coalition proceed successfully, within few years a new global pole of power will emerge as a counterpoint to the old Western power bloc.

Friendships

Meanwhile, once hostile Vietnam and China are reverting to ancient friendships with Hanoi realistically going along with giant neighbour China’s regional dominance and China bending over backwards in lavishing economic goodies on Vietnam as it seeks more investment and development of its infrastructure, none of which is any longer forthcoming from the West.

And if incoming US President Donald Trump follows up on his promise not to ratify the Trans Pacific Partnership trade network that would have brought together several smaller Asia-Pacific economies, China, who was left out of the TPP is ready to step in and do so with greater mutual benefits within the region.

What is needed is a greater calibration of two sets of dynamics: one of economic needs and interests common to bilateral and multilateral groupings and the other of militaristic calculations hinged on nationalistic fallbacks on the economic and political security concerns of individual states.

Tradition

Fortunately, unlike the USA, the Asia region is heir to an immense tradition of complex, vast and sophisticated state systems straddling multiple cultures and geographies - from the Urals in the west, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to the south, the now ecologically fragile Arctic in the north to the Pacific Ocean to the east. 

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