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ShareBarack Obama will probably end up fighting more wars than George W Bush, his much-pilloried predecessor. Not because he is a warmonger — he is, after all, a Nobel peace prize winner — but because he does not seem to have a viable vision for peace.
Peace is never the result of good intentions alone: it is forged in the real-world through a balance of power. We had peace for half a century after World War II because we had two superpowers, both more or less equally matched.
The minute one collapsed, stable peace ended. The resultant unipolarity led America to believe that it had the sole right to play globocop. But that led inevitably to wars in eastern Europe, the Gulf, and now Afghanistan.
Wars are always the result of one guy thinking he can win. Obama will probably spend all his years fighting little or big wars that he thinks he can or must win. What he needs is a coalition that will keep the peace.
Unfortunately for Obama, the US is the sole superpower without enough solus power to overawe secondary or tertiary powers. The No 2 power, China, is not big enough to engage America as an equal. Moreover, America’s current decline is economic in nature, not political or military.
Theoretically, economic decline should lead to a fall in other power parameters, too, but in America’s case its economic problems are mirror images of China’s. In short, No 1 and No 2 will rise and fall together, because American indebtedness to China makes the latter vulnerable, too.
Two drunks are propping each other up. If the American dollar collapses 50 per cent, China’s external wealth will be wiped out by the same percentage.
During the Cold War, the US and the erstwhile USSR served as counterweights to each other because their economies were not interdependent. They were independently constructed on different foundations.
In the current scenario, the US and China cannot provide alternate nodes around which we can construct a new, stable bipolarity. The power balance is inherently unstable. The duo will be allies in some areas, antagonists in some others.
This makes all their remaining alliances unstable, too. Allies and enemies will not be able to sign up with one side or the other permanently.
India is a complicating factor in the global power game because we are already a second rung power and in the next 40 to 50 years we could be the world’s No 2 economy.
Europe and Japan are in relative decline, but will be aligned to one of two big powers. While Europe will stay hitched to America, Japan may be willing to operate under China’s shadow due to the economic advantages.
Latin America will be aligned to north America, but Russia will have to choose between Europe and Asia: geographically it straddles both regions, but in terms of economic clout, it will be torn between China’s economic strength, its strategic interests in eastern Europe, and its old ties to India.
But the biggest uncertainty ahead is the rise of political Islam. Throughout much of history, Islam has been a superpower organised under some caliphate or the other. Creating a new caliphate is one of Osama bin Laden’s dreams — a dream possibly shared by many moderate Islamists, too.
While the 50-and-odd Islamic states currently in existence do not share common geopolitical interests, a caliphate, if it gets created, can create a new power vector that cannot be ignored. It could have an appeal that cuts across Muslim countries.
All these factors, and future developments, make for an extremely unbalanced power structure. The world has to move towards a new bipolarity that would include a coalition of interests on each side.
If we take the US and China as the two basic nodes for the next 20 to 30 years, it follows that any future alignments will have to start with the US widening its commercial interests to include India, because otherwise it will be permanently tied to China.
The future of the new bipolarity will have to be a coalition of democracies, with some exceptions, led by the US and India on the one side, and another coalition of theocracies/autocracies on the other, led by China, and several dysfunctional west Asian and African countries, including possibly Pakistan.
Japan and Russia will have to hitch themselves to one of the two alliances, or become the new non-aligned. Nobody can predict the shape of future alliances and Pakistan could be the joker in the pack. Its polity will have to make a choice: it can look east towards India as the model, or west, towards Islam and the Saudi-Taliban model. The disadvantages of the latter are obvious to civil society in Pakistan. But the army establishment can always convert fear and concern about India into a permanent obsession, and there is every possibility that Pakistan will be China’s conduit to the Islamic world.
Peace in the subcontinent depends on whether Pakistan looks east or west. Peace in the world depends on how soon a new bipolarity emerges.
