Containment-Lite

[RobbieS]

Containment-Lite
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 9, 2010

Don’t believe everything you read in the paper. Take this headline that appeared a couple weeks ago, when I was in New Delhi, in The Hindustan Times: “U.S. Not Seeking to Contain China: Clinton.” It was referring to a statement made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while on a swing through Asia. No, Washington is not trying to contain China the way we once did the Soviet Union, but President Obama didn’t just spend three days in India to improve his yoga.

His visit was intended to let China know that America knows that India knows that Beijing’s recent “aggressiveness,” as one Indian minister put it to me, has China’s neighbors a bit on edge. None of China’s neighbors dare mention the C-word — containment — in public. Indeed, none of them want to go there at all or intend to promote such a policy. But there’s a new whiff of anxiety in the Asian air.

All of China’s neighbors want China to know, as the sign says: “Don’t even think about parking here.” Don’t even think about using your growing economic and military clout to just impose your claims in border disputes and over oil-rich islands in the South China Sea. Because, if you do, all of China’s neighbors will be doomed to become America’s new best friends — including India.

That’s why each one of China’s neighbors is eager to have a picture of their president standing with Secretary Clinton or President Obama — with the unspoken caption that reads: “Honestly, China, we don’t want to throttle you. We don’t want an Asian cold war. We just want to trade and be on good terms. But, please, stay between the white lines. Don’t even think about parking in my space because, if you do, I have this friend from Washington, and he’s really big. ... And he’s got his own tow truck.”

I’d call this “pre-containment” or “containment-lite” — triggered in the last year by a sudden upsurge in China’s assertion of claims to all of the South China Sea. It marks a stark contrast to the mood in the region just two years ago. As Christian Caryl, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, noted in an Aug. 4 essay: China for years was being praised by Asian experts for being so shrewd, so clever, so deft, in building cultural and economic ties with all its neighbors — and outmaneuvering the stupid, oafish Americans. But in just six months, China has cast itself in the role of bully and prompted its neighbors to roll out the red carpets for Uncle Sam.

“In recent months,” noted Caryl, “Beijing has elevated its claims to territory in the South China Sea to the level of a ‘core national interest’ on par with Tibet or Taiwan, and that has sparked considerable anger among the other countries in the region — including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam — that claim ownership of pieces of the sea. ... Then, just in case the Americans and the Southeast Asians still didn’t get the message, the Chinese Navy staged large-scale maneuvers in the sea, deploying ships from all three of its fleets. Admirals watched as the ships fired off volleys of missiles at imaginary enemies — all of it shown in loving detail by Chinese television.”

China has also muscled Vietnam into halting its oil exploration in what Beijing claimed were Chinese territorial waters and forced Japan to release a Chinese fishing boat captain, who was arrested after a collision with two Japanese coast guard vessels near disputed islands in the East China Sea. China got its way with Japan by halting China’s exports to Japan of rare earth elements crucial for advanced manufacturing.

“With the Chinese Communist Party increasingly dependent on the military to maintain its monopoly on power and ensure domestic order, senior military officers are overtly influencing foreign policy,” wrote Brahma Chellaney, a defense analyst at Delhi’s Center for Policy Research.

But the Indians, like their fellow Asians, really do not want to go beyond containment-lite with China — for now. Sure India and China are at odds over borders and Pakistan, but China is now India’s largest trading partner.

Also, never forget that Indian foreign policy has a long history of nonalignment. “Until a year ago, the big Indian debate was how do we deal with American hegemony,” said the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan. Many of India’s older elites still fear U.S. “imperialism” and “neo-Liberalism.”

And, finally, says the Indian defense analyst Kanti Basu: “Deep down, the Indians who pay attention in the strategic community sense that the Chinese are rising and the Americans are fading — and it doesn’t look like the Americans are going to fix their problems any time soon.” So don’t bet the silverware on America.

No, India is not going to jump into America’s arms. But we’re not asking it to. Democracy, geopolitics, geography and economics are all combining to move America and India closer together. And that’s a good thing for both. If China plays it smart, Indian-American relations will never go beyond pre-containment. But if China doesn’t play it smart, Obama to India could one day become the new Nixon to China: my enemy’s enemy is my new best friend.

An interesting read. I agree with Friedman when he says that China's neighbors, including India, are all too dependent on China but at the same time wary of its growing power and assertiveness. To me it seems like a Cold-war redux. Just replace the USSR with China and political hegemony with economic might.

 

[ThatDamnGood]

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article24145.html

Eric Margolis writes: Getting out of the Washington goldfish bowl is also good for American presidents, particularly after an electoral shellacking.

It must have been a relief for President Barack Obama to see smiling Indian officials on his visit to Delhi rather than snarling Republicans back home.

India is a hugely important nation by any measure, so it was right for the president to continue the Washington-Delhi dialogue begun by former President George W. Bush.

After six decades of hostility and distrust, the United States and India appear set on a course of warm relations and strategic cooperation.

One million talented Indians already live in the United States, with many more to come. They already play an important fundraising role in US politics.

The catalyst for US-Indian amity was the 9/11 attacks that shocked the US and India into an alliance of convenience against foes in the Muslim world. But the looming threat of China, and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal that worried Israel, also played a key role. To Republican strategists, the most obvious way to contain China’s growing power was to build up its great rival India as a counterweight.

India is now the latest international Klondike. Its $1,070 trillion economy, freed of oppressive government regulations know as the "license Raj," is booming at over 8% annual growth While the US has a mostly negative image around the globe, it is wildly popular in India.

US arms makers and high-tech industries are salivating at the thought of entering India’s market. India’s rapidly expanding military forces need modern equipment and replacement for aging Soviet-supplied weapons systems. America’s military-industrial-financial complex pushed Bush hard to make nice to India and pry open its formerly sealed gates. The pressure continued on Obama who dutifully continued Bush’s Indian policies.

However, some perspective is in order. The GDP of 1.2-billion person India is still only half of that of Italy. Forty percent of India’s 1.2 billion people subsist below even that nation’s dire poverty level. Almost half have no indoor plumbing. Childhood malnutrition and child labor are rampant. India’s evil caste system remains entrenched in spite of government efforts to uproot it, a racist system that condemns darker skinned Indians to a life of penury and servitude.

While the western media fulminates against Taliban’s or Iran’s treatment of women, a leading British medical journal reports an estimated 40,000 Indian women are burned alive each year by their in-laws to grab their dowries. Infanticide of female children is endemic. But few in the west seem to care.

India is a giant with feet of clay. A senior western diplomat in unhealthy Delhi told me that at any given time, half his staff is ill with serious maladies. India is plagued by grave health and environmental problems.

India is really two nations: modern, dynamic, high-tech urban India of about 100 million, and antique, timeless rural Mother India of 1.1 billion souls. The two are often in conflict and uneasily coexist. Per capita income is about $1,050, up 10% in 2010. By contrast, per capita income in rival China is three times higher – provided we believe Beijing’s statistics.

To China’s annoyance, President Obama proclaimed in Delhi that India should have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. India is becoming a great power and deserves a seat among the world’s big boys. But so do Germany, Japan, Turkey and Brazil.

India and its people, long disparaged by British racist jokes, are delighted to be called equals by the great powers. In fact, nuclear-armed India sees itself very much as regional hegemon of the entire Indian Ocean extending from East Africa to Australia.

The Bush administration’s deal with Delhi to sanctify and facilitate India’s nuclear weapons programs was thought at the time a clever move. But it dismayed the rest of the world, made a mockery of non-proliferation, and outraged the entire Muslim world, which has been blasting the US for hypocrisy by threatening war against Iran, which is under UN nuclear inspection, while playing nuclear footsie with India, which rejected all UN inspection.

India’s leaders are no fools and will not be easily pushed or bribed into a stronger anti-China and anti-Iran stance by Washington – unless doing so suits Delhi. India needs oil from the Gulf even more than the US and is expanding its naval power to assure its supply lines.

Delhi maintains cool but correct relations with Beijing, but behind the wintry, trans-Himalayan smiles lies growing rivalry over Chinese-occupied Tibet, Indian-ruled Ladakh and Kashmir, their long, poorly demarcated Himalayan border (another gift of the British Empire), strategic Burma, and their intensifying nuclear and naval rivalry.

India claims China is trying to surround it, using Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Burma. The two Asian superpowers have been locked in a strategic and conventional arms race for a decade. In 1999, this writer postulated that the two giants would one day clash over their contested borders.

India will follow its own strategic and diplomatic interests – which are not synonymous with those of the United States.

Delhi has a long record of clever diplomacy that has isolated Pakistan and kept the world and UN out of the burning Kashmir problem, where 40,000–80,000 Kashmiris have died in a long independence struggle against Indian rule.

But the United States is now slowly being drawn into the dangerous Kashmir dispute – which triggered the 2008 terror bombing in Mumbai. Just look for example at the embarrassing revelations that one of the men involved in the 2008 Mumbai massacre was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

The more Washington backs and arms India, the more its relations with China will deteriorate. Japan is also quietly building up India against China, to Beijing’s mounting anger.

The US could even be drawn into an India-China regional conflict. So caution is advised to US diplomats as they charge into the murky, tangled, poorly understood geopolitics of South and East Asia.

We also wonder if President Obama was briefed on India’s growing strategic arsenal. India has been steadily developing a family of long-ranged intercontinental ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads behind the cover of space-launcher vehicles.

Delhi already has enough medium-ranged Agni-series missiles to cover potential foe China. Why then is Delhi spending billions to develop a reported 12,000 km ICBM whose only targets could be North America, Europe or Australia?

India is also developing nuclear submarines and subs armed with nuclear-armed cruise missiles capable of striking distant targets, as well as the powerful BrahMos anti-ship missile whose primary function is to attack aircraft carriers and large warships. Only the US Navy operates such large vessels in the Indian Ocean. India is also intent on building more aircraft carriers to project power.

The US and India appear destined to become rivals for Mideast and Central Asian oil and influence. There is no guarantee that today’s bonhomie between Delhi and Washington will be permanent. Great powers have their special interests – and no permanent friends or enemies.

Euphoria over the new US-Indian love-in should not cloud our judgment of South Asia’s realities, nor make us believe we can cajole India into becoming a regional policeman for US interests.

Meanwhile, Pakistan, Washington’s vital ally in the failing Afghan War, is seething with ill-concealed fury over Obama’s Delhi love-in and his claim that India has an important role to play in Afghanistan – which Pakistan sees as its strategic backyard.

South Asia is a minefield. Caution, and more caution, is advised.

 

[Hafizzz]

USA is asking India to engage China :

Tough descent from giddy heights
Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan

Obama's Indian summit saw the local sherpas open new vistas on diplomacy, arms, the high-tech sector, and on Pakistan. Obama planted the flag for new US jobs and, with one eye on China, asked India not only to "look East" but to "engage East". It is on the descent from such rarefied atmosphere of a state visit that the real work must now begin.

China should respond if India takes order from their master - Uncle SAM.

 

[Ammyy]

USA is asking India to engage China :

China should respond if India takes order from their master - Uncle SAM.

Buddy we are not the one who receive USA aid money so think again who is slave of USA

 

[Peacefulll]

USA is asking India to engage China :



China should respond if India takes order from their master - Uncle SAM.

If you were intelligent enough to read the posted articles on this page, you would have realized that Uncle Sam is certainly not India's master. But Pakistan has certainly acted like Uncle Sam's slave throughout its existence.