India in a World Adrift: A Rising Power Takes its Place Among Rivals

Asian geopolitics has changed rapidly in the recent past, and the pace of change is accelerating. This book, by one of India’s most senior and respected foreign policy minds, examines this moment of flux, and argues that we should prepare for dimming economic prospects and rival power blocs.

What is the outlook for India in such a world, including its increasingly close relationship with Australia? Shivshankar Menon argues that India will work ever more closely with the West, as part of New Delhi’s broader quest for strategic autonomy.

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Chapter 1

A World Between Orders

Asian geopolitics do not present a pretty picture, yet the post-Cold War peace has held, prosperity has spread, and there are opportunities even in today’s confusions.

In the five centuries after Vasco da Gama came to Kozhikode on the Malabar coast in 1498, European powers imposed their order on the world, relying on their dominance of the sea. The last in the line of dominant powers was the United States, which, after defeating Japan and Germany in the Second World War, established primacy over both the Atlantic, the centre of gravity in world politics at the time, and the Pacific. In those five centuries, countries and nations across the world were homogenised into the European ‘Westphalian’ state system of sovereign nation-states.

That era is now over in several fundamental respects. Western control of Asia’s maritime spaces and dominance of the Eurasian landmass, and the superiority of Western economic and political models, are being credibly challenged. They are being challenged by continental powers, first Russia and then China, which have also sought to become maritime powers. Globalisation, technology, the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, and the resulting course of domestic politics have combined to shake the geopolitical certainties of the last two centuries. If the First World War was primarily a European war, the Second World War a European war fought also in Asia, and the Cold War truly global, then today, the centre of gravity of world politics and the global economy is Asia. It is the possibility of conflict in Asia that concerns us for its global impact.

We are now in a world between orders, a world adrift, as it were. This is an era of contention such as we have not seen before and which seems likely to remain contested for the foreseeable future.

The signs of a world between orders are manifold. We see great power rivalry and competition, and a shifting balance of power. This is evidenced by the pathetic international response to the Covid pandemic; by the retreat from globalisation and free trade back to industrial policy and protectionism by the very powers that initiated globalisation; by tensions in hotspots ringing China from the East China Sea through Taiwan to the India–China border; by the contention over the European security order in Ukraine; by the Israeli–Palestinian dispute; and by the faltering, absent, or ineffective responses to transnational issues such as developing country debt, climate change, and terrorism. When was the last coherent international response to a transnational challenge that produced an acceptable outcome? We have not seen one since April 2009, when the London G20 summit prevented another Great Depression and stabilised the world economy. There has not been a generally binding international agreement of any consequence on major transnational issues for decades.

In these circumstances, to speak of an international order, and to use adjectives such as ‘liberal’ or ‘rules-based’ to describe it, seems inaccurate, to say the least. In any case, the order, such as it was before the 2008 financial crisis, was never very liberal or orderly for most of the world outside the West. The killing fields of the Cold War were in Asia. Whichever way the Cold War may be described, in Asia it was neither a ‘long peace’ nor particularly cold. An average of more than 1200 people died in wars of one type or another in Asia every day of the Cold War. And while the primary focus and origin of the Cold War was Europe, its emphasis shifted steadily to Asia, with the most violent and lethal confrontations occurring between the Mediterranean and the Pacific in what historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin called ‘the Cold War’s killing fields’. Seven in ten people killed in violent conflict between 1945 and 1990 died in rimland Asia, in the almost contiguous belt of territory from the Manchurian Plain, through Korea, Indochina, and west across Central and West Asia. Here, along Asia’s southern rim, more than 14 million people were killed in warfare. The Cold War also solidified the partitions of India, Korea, Palestine, Indochina, and Germany, often by local wars.

The post-Cold War era is paradoxical. We see an upsurge in deaths by conflict and forced displacement of people around the world, including in Europe, while increasing numbers of people live longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than ever before in human history. We see around us a world where major powers disagree on the rules of the system…