OBAMA’s CHINA VISIT
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
The templates of the world order created by the industrial revolution in Europe have begun to shake. The birthpangs of a new world order are disorienting many actors across the planet. What is known as South and South-East Asia was, until the mid-20th century, colonies of the European powers. The end of empires gave birth to the groups of sovereign countries which now comprise SE and South Asia. India is the largest single
country in the two regions. Mainly because of the partition of India into India and Pakistan, India’s influence remained limited in the post-colonial world.
However, Europe declined, and the United States of America emerged as the leader of the post-European world order. Now, in the 21st century, this U.S.-dominated world order is changing under the pressure of China emerging as a mammoth economic power. The templates of the “Western” world order, which, for the power elite in India, implies, in effect, the Anglo-Saxon world order, are shaking. The ‘awesome economic growth of China’, ( words used in a New York Times report on Obama’s visit to China, the rise of India as a significant economic heavyweight, the relative ease with which Asian countries have broken out of the global economic and financial crisis, the rise of Russia and Brazil as significant aspirants to economic and political height are tell-tale signs of the global economic and political order slipping out of the leadership grip of the Anglo-Saxon( or ‘Western’, club. The corporate media in India, and its political patrons ---- a large segment of the top bureaucracy, the top military brass serving and retired but not unemployed, upper crust of the business houses, a very good portion of the political class including the Congress party, and a majority of academic intellectuals--- have taken a dim view of Barak Obama’s failure to affirm the superiority of U.S.-Western zeitgeist in his transactions with the leaders of China. on democracy, human rights, currency issues,and Tibet. . Rather, the U.S. president seemed to be anxious to build a U.S.-China G2 forum to deal with global issues and problems. No recent world event has engaged the minds of the power elite in India, both within and outside the government, as worrisomely as has Obama’s China visit and the immediate, short-term and medium-term consequences thereof. The corporate media in India is, at times openly, otherwise opaquely, pro-West, more precisely pro-AangloSaxon,___which means American ‘hard power’ softened by seasoning of ‘soft’ British diplomacy,. This disposition is shared by most of the top bureaucracy including the executives of the vast public sector of the economy. And no doubt by the upper crust of the military. This large power elite, assembled primarily in New Delhi, was literally taken aback by what it saw
as Obama’s ‘gift’ to China of a stake in South Asia, regarded by it as
India’s sphere of influence. The Times of India, the largest-circulated English daily in India, and also the most avidly anti-China, suggested that Obama “bowed” to China by giving it “a larger role” in South Asia, and said that “new equations” between
Washington and Beijing “cast a shadow on Manmohan’s US visit” next week.
The PM0 issued immediate instructions forbidding any official, including ministers, to make public comment on Obama’s China visit. After a meeting with the PM, the foreign minister, M. Krishna, issued a terse statement, through the ministry’s spokesman, saying that “a third party role” in India-Pakistan transactions “cannot
be envisaged.” The PMO immediately set out a serious effort to find out whether the relevant 74-word portion in the joint statement issued at the end of Obama’s visit was an American idea or was accepted by the US president at China’s behest. It seemed that the initiative was American. India is not likely to welcome a Sino-American G-2 leadership of world affairs, The concept is unmistakenly American. It was endorsed
Earlier this year by no less a man than by Zbignuiew Brzeznzki, president Carter’s national security adviser. India is comfortable with the G-20 forum which has almost an equal membership from Europe and Asia. G-20 has definitely overtaken
the rubric of G-50 which was the first “Western” digitization of a changing world order to replace the one ushered at the end of World War II that did
not wrap up a peace treaty but gifted the international community an entirely new torrid confection: the Cold War. The Cold War lost its raison d’etre when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Americans claimed that the “soft war” of containment did the
USSR in. Containment was indeed a major factor, but perhaps a greater
Cause of the Soviet collapse was the Brezhnev Doctrine of logistrical support to whatever “Marxist” regimes were set up by whichever brand of
Marxist pretenders anywhere in the world----there were about 35 of them
in the 1980s including the Saur revolution regime in Afghanistan to save
which the Soviets had to send a ‘limited’ army of 100,000 soldiers and
failed to secure it from the U.S.-backed Taliban invasion.
To cap it all, a cold war broke out between the USSR and the People’s
Republic of China, two communist giants who joined together to strike a mortal blow at the long-entertained myth of ‘proletariat internationalism.’
Now, some 20 years after the end of the Soviet brand of a world socialist order, China has scaled tremendous heights in economic power
to claim to be seated at the high table of global leadership with the “West.”
Unlike the USSR, it is not an equal of the U.S. in nuclear and hydrogen weapons, but it is the banker to the United States, and is poised to equal
and then overtake America in wealth. China has rescued the American economy from a depression worse than that of the 1930s. China alone seems
to have the power to lend generously to scores of governments in Africa,
Asia and Latin America keeping so many of them afloat in difficult times.
China alone has shown that it is possible for a long-laggard nation of 1.3
billion people to redeem itself by sheer hard work, iron will to grow and
develop, build a huge mass of poor, impoverished, long-exploited people
into a dynamic humanity of rising living standards and modern social and
economic infrastructure in the incredibly short span of sixty years!
China strides in a world that has shrunk into a global habitat in
which nations need each other to keep the planet afloat. The United States
was on top of the world when China was reborn as the People’s Republic.
Americans have overspent their resources and are now reaping the bitter
harvest of the follies of their leaders. The U.S. has over 300 military bases
across the world, maintains the world’s most expensive military machine,
has hardly spent a year since 1945 without fighting a war somewhere in
the third world, often more than one at the same time, and have invited
its own decline. When Barak Obama came down from the Great Wall of China
and looked around his honest unlined face glowed with a sense of wonder
at a civilization five thousand years old, with a historical continuity unachieved by any other nation and people in history. His own countrymen failed to appreciate the majesty of history that Seemed to have moved their President. They wanted him to hector the leaders of China on what the Chinese people had “lost” under communist
rule--- freedom of speech and association, right to political diversity, blessings of Democracy. They lamented that their President did not rebule
his hosts for denying Tibet and Xinxiang “real autonomy”, that he had
postponed meeting the Dalai Lama until after his China visit.
In Britain, inheritors of the lost empire on which the sun once did not
Set, tried their best to keep up the sangfroid with only the minimum of gasps and yelps. For The Economist, it was Obama’s ‘Asian adventure’
with results dubious at best.The Europeans were less alarmed. They had
achieved something almost of equal importance as China’s. The European
Union united 27 countries of a continent that was the mother of wars for
Centuries including the two World Wars of the 20th. Britain’s magisterial
stature was derived from its ability to exploit Europe’s divisions and conflicts to its own advantage. The Union of Europe has rendered another
world war almost impossible to happen.
Indeed, war and peace in the world of the 21st century will be determined by relations between the United States and China. They fought
In Korea in the 1950s, and a cold war for the next 20-30 years over Taiwan
and learned the need to treat each other with circumspection and respect.
Obama’s visit to China was a culmination of a long process of incremental
mutual understanding that the centre of gravity in the strategic global dynamics had shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that the issues
of world war or peace would now be determined by dynamics of relations
between the U.S, and China. This of course does not mean that India’s importance in global affairs has shrunk. India and the European Union are the two other principal actors in the current constellation of power in the world. It is imperative for India
and China to live in peace and cooperation to advance the cause of the
countless millions of humanity inhabiting Asia and Africa. And the
addition of Russia to the two Asian giants creates a formidable, indeed
unassailable template for stability, peace and prosperity of the bulk of
the earth’s population as well as geography.
India and China need each other to build a better life of one-third
of humanity. This is one of the stern imperatives of the 21st century that
journalists often fail to appreciate. Gone are the days when regional conflicts
and tensions could be resolved in geopolitical enclaves exclusive of one
another. And here even India’s ministry of external affairs failed to resist
the pressure of the country’s corporate media which saw in Obama’s China
visit as a give-away by America to China at India’s cost.
The United States needs China’s cooperation to douse the war
in Afghanistan and to resolve the Afghan-Pakistan cocundrum.
Obama asked for China’s help and was probably assured that
He would get it. Obama needs Pakistan to move a good number
of its troops from the eastern to the western fronts to fight the Taliban
in Pakistan and help Kabul to get the better of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Pakistan Army has already asked the United States a quid for quo ----
pressure on India to reopen the negotiations for settling the Kashmir
issue. Obama has apparently asked the Chinese leaders to help persuade the Pakistan Army as well as the bureaucracy to relent on
both demands. If China can persuade Pakistan to relent, it
will be in India’s interest , not against India. And probably China
will try to help in only because it would want to insulate Xinxiang,
a neighbour of Afghanistan with a shared border, from Islamic
insurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan./////
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
The templates of the world order created by the industrial revolution in Europe have begun to shake. The birthpangs of a new world order are disorienting many actors across the planet. What is known as South and South-East Asia was, until the mid-20th century, colonies of the European powers. The end of empires gave birth to the groups of sovereign countries which now comprise SE and South Asia. India is the largest single
country in the two regions. Mainly because of the partition of India into India and Pakistan, India’s influence remained limited in the post-colonial world.
However, Europe declined, and the United States of America emerged as the leader of the post-European world order. Now, in the 21st century, this U.S.-dominated world order is changing under the pressure of China emerging as a mammoth economic power. The templates of the “Western” world order, which, for the power elite in India, implies, in effect, the Anglo-Saxon world order, are shaking. The ‘awesome economic growth of China’, ( words used in a New York Times report on Obama’s visit to China, the rise of India as a significant economic heavyweight, the relative ease with which Asian countries have broken out of the global economic and financial crisis, the rise of Russia and Brazil as significant aspirants to economic and political height are tell-tale signs of the global economic and political order slipping out of the leadership grip of the Anglo-Saxon( or ‘Western’, club. The corporate media in India, and its political patrons ---- a large segment of the top bureaucracy, the top military brass serving and retired but not unemployed, upper crust of the business houses, a very good portion of the political class including the Congress party, and a majority of academic intellectuals--- have taken a dim view of Barak Obama’s failure to affirm the superiority of U.S.-Western zeitgeist in his transactions with the leaders of China. on democracy, human rights, currency issues,and Tibet. . Rather, the U.S. president seemed to be anxious to build a U.S.-China G2 forum to deal with global issues and problems. No recent world event has engaged the minds of the power elite in India, both within and outside the government, as worrisomely as has Obama’s China visit and the immediate, short-term and medium-term consequences thereof. The corporate media in India is, at times openly, otherwise opaquely, pro-West, more precisely pro-AangloSaxon,___which means American ‘hard power’ softened by seasoning of ‘soft’ British diplomacy,. This disposition is shared by most of the top bureaucracy including the executives of the vast public sector of the economy. And no doubt by the upper crust of the military. This large power elite, assembled primarily in New Delhi, was literally taken aback by what it saw
as Obama’s ‘gift’ to China of a stake in South Asia, regarded by it as
India’s sphere of influence. The Times of India, the largest-circulated English daily in India, and also the most avidly anti-China, suggested that Obama “bowed” to China by giving it “a larger role” in South Asia, and said that “new equations” between
Washington and Beijing “cast a shadow on Manmohan’s US visit” next week.
The PM0 issued immediate instructions forbidding any official, including ministers, to make public comment on Obama’s China visit. After a meeting with the PM, the foreign minister, M. Krishna, issued a terse statement, through the ministry’s spokesman, saying that “a third party role” in India-Pakistan transactions “cannot
be envisaged.” The PMO immediately set out a serious effort to find out whether the relevant 74-word portion in the joint statement issued at the end of Obama’s visit was an American idea or was accepted by the US president at China’s behest. It seemed that the initiative was American. India is not likely to welcome a Sino-American G-2 leadership of world affairs, The concept is unmistakenly American. It was endorsed
Earlier this year by no less a man than by Zbignuiew Brzeznzki, president Carter’s national security adviser. India is comfortable with the G-20 forum which has almost an equal membership from Europe and Asia. G-20 has definitely overtaken
the rubric of G-50 which was the first “Western” digitization of a changing world order to replace the one ushered at the end of World War II that did
not wrap up a peace treaty but gifted the international community an entirely new torrid confection: the Cold War. The Cold War lost its raison d’etre when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Americans claimed that the “soft war” of containment did the
USSR in. Containment was indeed a major factor, but perhaps a greater
Cause of the Soviet collapse was the Brezhnev Doctrine of logistrical support to whatever “Marxist” regimes were set up by whichever brand of
Marxist pretenders anywhere in the world----there were about 35 of them
in the 1980s including the Saur revolution regime in Afghanistan to save
which the Soviets had to send a ‘limited’ army of 100,000 soldiers and
failed to secure it from the U.S.-backed Taliban invasion.
To cap it all, a cold war broke out between the USSR and the People’s
Republic of China, two communist giants who joined together to strike a mortal blow at the long-entertained myth of ‘proletariat internationalism.’
Now, some 20 years after the end of the Soviet brand of a world socialist order, China has scaled tremendous heights in economic power
to claim to be seated at the high table of global leadership with the “West.”
Unlike the USSR, it is not an equal of the U.S. in nuclear and hydrogen weapons, but it is the banker to the United States, and is poised to equal
and then overtake America in wealth. China has rescued the American economy from a depression worse than that of the 1930s. China alone seems
to have the power to lend generously to scores of governments in Africa,
Asia and Latin America keeping so many of them afloat in difficult times.
China alone has shown that it is possible for a long-laggard nation of 1.3
billion people to redeem itself by sheer hard work, iron will to grow and
develop, build a huge mass of poor, impoverished, long-exploited people
into a dynamic humanity of rising living standards and modern social and
economic infrastructure in the incredibly short span of sixty years!
China strides in a world that has shrunk into a global habitat in
which nations need each other to keep the planet afloat. The United States
was on top of the world when China was reborn as the People’s Republic.
Americans have overspent their resources and are now reaping the bitter
harvest of the follies of their leaders. The U.S. has over 300 military bases
across the world, maintains the world’s most expensive military machine,
has hardly spent a year since 1945 without fighting a war somewhere in
the third world, often more than one at the same time, and have invited
its own decline. When Barak Obama came down from the Great Wall of China
and looked around his honest unlined face glowed with a sense of wonder
at a civilization five thousand years old, with a historical continuity unachieved by any other nation and people in history. His own countrymen failed to appreciate the majesty of history that Seemed to have moved their President. They wanted him to hector the leaders of China on what the Chinese people had “lost” under communist
rule--- freedom of speech and association, right to political diversity, blessings of Democracy. They lamented that their President did not rebule
his hosts for denying Tibet and Xinxiang “real autonomy”, that he had
postponed meeting the Dalai Lama until after his China visit.
In Britain, inheritors of the lost empire on which the sun once did not
Set, tried their best to keep up the sangfroid with only the minimum of gasps and yelps. For The Economist, it was Obama’s ‘Asian adventure’
with results dubious at best.The Europeans were less alarmed. They had
achieved something almost of equal importance as China’s. The European
Union united 27 countries of a continent that was the mother of wars for
Centuries including the two World Wars of the 20th. Britain’s magisterial
stature was derived from its ability to exploit Europe’s divisions and conflicts to its own advantage. The Union of Europe has rendered another
world war almost impossible to happen.
Indeed, war and peace in the world of the 21st century will be determined by relations between the United States and China. They fought
In Korea in the 1950s, and a cold war for the next 20-30 years over Taiwan
and learned the need to treat each other with circumspection and respect.
Obama’s visit to China was a culmination of a long process of incremental
mutual understanding that the centre of gravity in the strategic global dynamics had shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that the issues
of world war or peace would now be determined by dynamics of relations
between the U.S, and China. This of course does not mean that India’s importance in global affairs has shrunk. India and the European Union are the two other principal actors in the current constellation of power in the world. It is imperative for India
and China to live in peace and cooperation to advance the cause of the
countless millions of humanity inhabiting Asia and Africa. And the
addition of Russia to the two Asian giants creates a formidable, indeed
unassailable template for stability, peace and prosperity of the bulk of
the earth’s population as well as geography.
India and China need each other to build a better life of one-third
of humanity. This is one of the stern imperatives of the 21st century that
journalists often fail to appreciate. Gone are the days when regional conflicts
and tensions could be resolved in geopolitical enclaves exclusive of one
another. And here even India’s ministry of external affairs failed to resist
the pressure of the country’s corporate media which saw in Obama’s China
visit as a give-away by America to China at India’s cost.
The United States needs China’s cooperation to douse the war
in Afghanistan and to resolve the Afghan-Pakistan cocundrum.
Obama asked for China’s help and was probably assured that
He would get it. Obama needs Pakistan to move a good number
of its troops from the eastern to the western fronts to fight the Taliban
in Pakistan and help Kabul to get the better of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Pakistan Army has already asked the United States a quid for quo ----
pressure on India to reopen the negotiations for settling the Kashmir
issue. Obama has apparently asked the Chinese leaders to help persuade the Pakistan Army as well as the bureaucracy to relent on
both demands. If China can persuade Pakistan to relent, it
will be in India’s interest , not against India. And probably China
will try to help in only because it would want to insulate Xinxiang,
a neighbour of Afghanistan with a shared border, from Islamic
insurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan./////
