The rules-based liberal international order “is a phrase that frankly nobody ever used until it died”, former Indian Foreign Secretary and National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon told the audience at his Victoria University of Wellington public lecture India in Asia’s New Geopolitics.
In fact, Menon wasn’t sure there ever had been such an order so much as “different forms of great-power politics”. Nonetheless, he said, despite increasing authoritarianism, nationalism and threats to global cooperation, there is still an opportunity for “coalitions of the likeminded” and “honest brokers” like New Zealand to influence for the better the current precarious state of international relations.
The grandson of India’s first foreign secretary, and a career diplomat who has served as ambassador or high commissioner to China, Israel, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Menon was named by Foreign Policy magazine in 2010 as one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers and is widely regarded as one of the Asia-Pacific region’s most astute geopolitical commentators.
He was in New Zealand at the invitation of the New Zealand India Research Institute and New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre, which are based at Victoria University of Wellington, and the University’s Centre for Strategic Studies.
Countries like New Zealand and India have got used to “the big boys doing what they have to while we go on getting on with our lives”, said Menon.
“But I think it’s time we started thinking more about taking our futures into our own hands. I don’t think we have much choice. People say wholly negative things in this situation: ‘The world’s going to pot’; ‘We should all just draw lines and sit back’. That’s not true at all. We can make a difference on the margins.”
New Zealand, India and many other countries have a common interest in maritime and other forms of “predictable and inclusive security”; in maintaining “a free and open trading environment”; in “making sure we arrive at a new equilibrium peacefully and through negotiation rather than as we have traditionally in history through conflict”.
The countries could “build coalitions of the likeminded on individual issues. I’m not ambitious, I’m not saying we need to build a huge architecture or we need to build another WTO [World Trade Organization]. No, in fact I think those days are over. There’s no Helsinki moment, there’s no grand concert of Europe or concert of Asia. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying pick the issues that matter, where there’s enough likeminded countries. Leave the door open to anyone who’s interested to participate”.
Not only New Zealand’s reputation but also its small size are to its advantage, said Menon.
“It’s important that countries that have credibility or are regarded as honest brokers and could be seen as neutral – like New Zealand, actually – do this kind of thing. The bigger the power is, the more suspicions there are about their motives, and that’s just a fact of life. And that’s why I’m here urging you.”
India, said Menon, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries, after China, of decades of globalisation, including 30 years of over 6 percent growth in gross domestic product.
This, and the geo-political environment that enabled it, is very important to the country, he said.
“Because for India there is one simple overriding goal of policy, whether that’s foreign, domestic or whatever: it’s the transformation of India into a modern and secure and prosperous country. It has to be. It cannot be otherwise. If you look at India’s condition at independence [in 1947], we had an average life expectancy of 26 years; we had 14 percent literacy; we had disease, hunger, you name it. We couldn’t feed ourselves as a country. It was obvious what you had to do. You had to concentrate on transforming India and frankly we still have to. We still have a long way to go in terms of change.”
None of what’s happening in the world is good for that transformation, said Menon, with geopolitical challenges ranging from the return of power politics – inflamed by authoritarian and nationalistic leaders wondering “how will it play at home? How will it play on Twitter?” – to a predicted imminent global economic slowdown.
“Globalisation has created whole new domains of contention,” he said. “The commons are now actually an area of competition between the powers, whether it’s cyberspace, whether it’s outer space, even the high seas.”
Countries’ insecurity mean that: “Today we have a belt of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear and chemical weapons, all the way from Lebanon and Israel to North Korea. Unbroken.”
Menon said national leaders’ focus on domestic audiences reduces the ability to negotiate and compromise – to conduct diplomacy.
“There is not give in the system,” he said, which makes for “strident politics and emotions rather than realpolitik or sensible realism”.
The biggest imponderable is what course China takes and how it chooses to use its rapid accumulation of monetary power, said Menon.
“There used to be an easy assumption that China would become more like other, western powers as she developed, as the economy grew, and there is even sometimes the assumption China will behave like the US. Which frankly is impossible, not only for reasons of history and culture, but also her geographic situation is completely different.
“She’s not behind two moats, she doesn’t have the US option of choosing between isolationism and engagement with the world or being dragged kicking and screaming by two world wars into the rest of the world. China has 14 land neighbours, she is part of a very crowded neighbourhood in which other countries are rising as well. This is a very different geopolitical situation to the US.”
Menon spoke of general nervousness about the US-China tariff war “becoming a trade war becoming a finance war” and even something worse.
“To think of the world economy no longer being a world economy, and to think of the consequences of the decoupling of the two largest economies from each other – it’s very hard to tell actually where that’s going.”
However, said Menon, while many people think US-China relations will determine the course of the future, he does not think they are as important as they once were.
“If you think of the issues we face today, look at North Korea, look at the South China Sea, none of these issues is going to be solved even if China and the US agree. China and the US agree on denuclearising North Korea, by the way, but it hasn’t happened and I’m not sure there are many people who’d bet on it happening tomorrow.
“I think we have to accept that, yes, China-US relations are a very important driver of our geopolitics today, but they are not the only ones, and their impact on what is happening around us is diminishing, especially as they get into a much more contentious relationship among themselves.”
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