In this 1918 file photo, American troops carrying guns with fixed bayonets climb over a sandbag revetment in France during World War One.
The 20th century was defined by five tectonic geo-strategic events. The First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War, demise of imperialism and colonialism coupled with the rise of neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism and, lastly, the end of the Cold War and the ghoul of uni-polarity.
As the millennium turned it brought with it the prospect that the 21st century would be tranquil, as humankind would have drawn lessons from the death and destruction that had stained the previous century. However, those expectations were soon belied. After 9/11, the world was acquainted with new terminologies like “war on terror”, the “coalition of the willing” and the sardonic “if you are not with us you are against us”. It was straight out of the fables of the Wild West. The irony being that the frontier this time around was the Middle East and South Asia.
Recently, China’s President Xi Jinping injected a fresh dynamic into an already unstable global environment by instructing the People’s Liberation Army to “improve their combat readiness and sharpen their ability to win a regional war in the age of information technology”.
Is then the 21st century also coasting along the trajectory of the 20th? Would the template for the future be drawn from the Great War of 1914 that heralded eight decades of turbulence, or the Concert of Vienna two centuries earlier in 1814 which brought a centenary of peace to Europe? The answer perhaps lies in an objective analysis of the opening years of this century itself. Thirteen years after the US and its allies commenced operations against radicalism on a global scale, is the world a more stable, safer, peaceful place to live in? The jury will remain out on that for quite a while.
It all commenced on October 7, 2001, with a colossal bombing campaign against Afghanistan by American and British forces. The trigger was the safe havens provided by the Taliban to the Al Qaeda. The focus shifted to regime change in Iraq, followed by Iran, Libya, Syria and the paroxysms that convulsed other regimes in the Middle East followed.
Today Osama bin Laden is dead, neutralised as he was in a military cantonment in Pakistan. But the Al Qaeda has mutated and is alive and kicking. The Afghan Taliban, led by Mullah Omar and his cohorts of the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani Network, are all still around, augmented by terrorist organisations patronised by the permanent Pakistani establishment.
Afghanistan continues to be volatile with the political transition having miscarried. The presidential elections, mired in allegations of electoral fraud, required an American-brokered Band-Aid arrangement that now sees two centres of power, namely a President and a Chief Executive, that has no basis in Afghan election law. The security transition has also floundered with the Afghan Army failing to step up to the plate. The economic transition has gone belly up with the Afghan state literally broke and requiring a $537 million emergency bailout to pay salaries to half a million government employees this month.
Iraq is in the throes of a civil war with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) threat requiring American re-intervention. Syria has been reduced to a shell state primarily because of the patronage extended by the West to forces inimical to the Baathist regime. Libya is in a mess with warring factions continuing to fight for domination and control, prompting the United Nations and 40 nations to issue an appeal to desist from violence that has displaced over 300,000 people since July this year. The nuclear talks with Iran have stalled and the stalemate seems to be becoming pervasive if not ubiquitous. If the objective was to reorder the world and promote the values of democracy, liberalism and economic engagement then the last 13 years have been a botch with radicalism aggravated, extremism enhanced and terrorism exacerbated.
Moving East, there are two important dates in the Chinese calendar that are looming over the horizon. The first is 2020, a year that would mark 100 years of the Chinese Communist Party, and the second is 2049, the centenary of the Chinese state. What do these two years have to do with President Xi’s exhortations for a regional war? The answer lies in the internal dynamics of China. As perhaps the only influential communist state to survive the vicissitudes of history, the overriding objective of the Chinese leadership is to maintain single party domination. To achieve this the Chinese Communist Party has constructed a chronicle founded on certain critical claims, namely political stability, economic betterment and preservation of core interests. Decoded, they mean sovereignty, territoriality and universal veneration.
This narrative is challenged in that country on a daily basis. A class divide has taken root within one generation, exemplified by a rich-poor, urban-rural, coastal-inland fault lines. Added to this hot-mix are a range of issues that intensify social cynicism. All this pent up dander finds a ready outlet on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, and million mutinies play out in the virtual space on a daily basis. What holds this shaky edifice together is passionate nationalism that has an overwhelming echo across the Chinese social ethos. This is where the rhetoric of regional war, unfortunately, fits in. It acts as a social adhesive by immortalising the aspirations of supremacy.
However, these domestic imperatives leave a very disquieting ricochet in their wake. Since China has a host of land and maritime disputes with its neighbours, coupled with opaque defence numbers, it compels countries in the region to take recourse to pre-emptive strategies, which includes bolstering their defence capabilities. This ends up putting an additional strain on already stretched national budgets. It also puts a very large swathe of Asia on the edge as it shatters another carefully cultivated myth that China’s rise would be peaceful and would not create any major dislocation in the existing world order.
This is the quixotic saga of two pre-eminent global powers who considered themselves to be a potential G-2. Tragically their policies have been an unsettling force rather than a stabilising influence in the last one and a half decades. It therefore becomes imperative that a truly multi-polar alternative global security architecture without the omnipotent veto emerges, one that subsumes the possibility of unilateral action by any nation or nations acting in consort disrupting the peace of the 21st century.
The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari
