Column

A week, it’s been said, is a long time in politics. On that count, two months is practically an eternity in geopolitics.

Barely two months ago India’s media commentators and strategic analysts had worked themselves into paroxysms of apoplectic rage over (flawed) perceptions that an emerging Sino-US détente was selling India short.

A one-paragraph mention about a shared vision for peace in South Asia — in the joint statement that the two countries issued at the end of US president Barack Obama’s visit to China — was invoked as evidence that ostensibly established that the US and China were looking to ‘box’ India within the south Asian matrix and that an economically enfeebled US was giving a resurgent China ‘overlordship’ status in the region. Much analytical angst was expended over this, but they read it horribly wrong.

The flaw in these commentaries was that they fell into the ‘Ptolemaic error’ of perspective. The 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy propounded the geocentric theory, which held — on the basis of reasonable but flawed empirical observations — that the earth was at the centre of the universe.

That theory held ground for many centuries, and it wasn’t until Copernicus came along in the 16th century and established the heliocentric theory that the centrality of the sun in the universe was widely acknowledged.

In much the same way, commentators who saw the world only through a blinkered, India-centric prism overreacted to a sapless interjection in the Sino-US joint statement and erupted in bilious, misplaced rage in the belief that the phraseology was directed at containing India.

And in the process, they were blinded to other, more powerful forces at play, which effectively showed up the emerging strains in relations between China and the US.

In any case, owing to a curious alignment of planets and political forces, those strains in Sino-US relations are almost certain to be amplified this year.

Last month, there have already been three manifestations of these pressures at work: the feisty back-and-forth between the US administration and China over the hack attack on Gmail accounts of civil rights activists in China, which prompted Google to opt out of the China market; the Obama administration’s decision to sell arms to Taiwan, the de facto independent island over which China claims territorial sovereignty; and, most recently, China’s warning that a scheduled meeting between Obama and the Dalai Lama later this year would jeopardise Sino-US relations.

Nor are these the only contentious issues between the two countries. Impatience over perceptions that China will be less of a ‘responsible stakeholder’ than the US originally envisioned runs deep.

In particular, Chinese unwillingness to abide by an emerging consensus on dealing with the Iranian nuclear crisis is giving rise to progressively shrill denunciations from the Obama administration.

And given the hyperpartisan political environment in the US in a year of crucial elections, and with unemployment still running at 10 per cent, the risk that a populist Obama might target China’s mercantilist currency manipulation —with some manner of import tariffs — is rising.

It isn’t of course a certainty that the worst-case scenarios will unfold in each of these cases. Sino-US relations are complex, and have to an extent been compartmentalised to minimise the risk of spillover from one to the other.

Yet, given the enormity of the political and economic strains they face, the diplomatic challenges are immense, and the early signs for this year are not very propitious.

For media commentators and strategic analysts, this year promises offer plentiful grist for gainful employment. As Bette Davis says in All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be abumpy night!”