i wish to see a strong trilateral bond & free trade between Russia, China & India. it will help the entire regin. also the world will be multipolar & compatetive.
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Russia, China and India: The 'strategic triangle' FROM 2007
A "strategic triangle" involving Russia, China and India is not likely to come to fruition any time soon to balance US power, despite the occasional rhetoric of joint declarations.
By Harsh V Pant
When Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Russia last month, he and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, lost no time in reaching out to India.
In their joint declaration, they called for expanding trilateral cooperation with India as such interaction "enhances mutually beneficial economic cooperation among the three nations, strengthens their coordination in facing new challenges and threats, especially that of international terrorism and contributes to the cause of promoting peace and stability in Asia and throughout the world."
Of course, though it was implicit, the declaration did not mention that such a joint approach by Russia, China and India was also a good way to constrain the "hyper-power" of the US.
Increasing diplomatic interactions among the three states in the last few years have provided a major boost to the talk of a Moscow-Beijing-Delhi "strategic triangle" in popular media and political circles in the three countries.
Though this idea was not greeted very enthusiastically by the governments of China and India when it was first advocated in 1998 by Russia's former prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, it has refused to disappear from the international political discourse. It was just last year that the first trilateral meeting was held by the three states on the sidelines of the G8 summit in St Petersburg.
A window of opportunity has certainly opened for new alignments in global politics, especially with the US being stuck in Iraq and the larger "war on terror" also not going very well.
The three major second-tier powers in the international system share a desire for more strategic autonomy vis-à-vis the only remaining superpower, the US. Their bilateral and trilateral interactions reflect the close identity of views the three nations hold on a range of international issues including terrorism, Iraq, Middle East, the role of the UN, non-proliferation and regional security. In numerous declarations and communiqués, the three states have called for the construction of a multipolar world and "democratization" of international relations.
However, there are equally strong, if not stronger, constraints that prevent this remarkable convergence of interests from evolving into a trilateral strategic partnership, the so-called strategic triangle.
Moreover, though the bilateral ties among the three states in question have improved in recent years, much more effort is required to bring them to the footing of a meaningful strategic relationship. Not only are Russia, China and India too weak to balance US power in any significant measure, the allure of US power remains too strong for them to resist. The result is that the US seems to enjoy more comprehensive ties with Russia, China and India than any two of them have between themselves.
The most difficult aspect of this strategic partnership is the highly uncertain nature of Sino-Indian bilateral relationship. India and China are two major powers in Asia with global aspirations and some significant conflicting interests. India is being wooed by the US, which would like it to emerge as a major "balancer" in the region vis-à-vis China.
The other pillar of the strategic triangle, the Russia-India bilateral relationship, also does not seem very promising on closer examination. It appears to be a classic case of more style than substance, with weak Indo-Russian economic ties failing to constitute the foundation or a real strategic partnership.
Sino-Russian relations are also not as free from friction as it appears on the surface. Despite the dramatic expansion of Sino-Russian relations in recent years, Russia and China are bound to run sooner rather than later into the limits that geography imposes on two large and ambitious neighbors. Russia has reasons to worry about China’s rising profile in East and North-East Asia, about Chinese immigrants overrunning the Russian Far East, and about China’s economy dwarfing its own.
The problems in bilateral relationships between China and India, Russia and India, and Russia and China are further complicated with the special relationships that the US has been able to cultivate with each of them.
Though Russia, China and India are obviously pursuing their own interests in their engagement with the US, this imposes severe constraints on their attempts at coming together and forging a "strategic triangle" as all three attach the highest importance to their ties with the US.
The present structure of the international system gives the US enormous advantages in its dealings with the rest of the world because of the unprecedented power it enjoys.
So while Russia, China and India have tried to engage the US in various forms, they have found it difficult to overcome their distrust of each other. And as one of the three becomes more powerful, the other two might be more willing to balance it, maybe even with the US, than join its bandwagon to create a global equipoise to the US power.
The political and economic costs of countering US power are not only too high but the very idea of counterbalancing the US is unrealistic for Russia, China, and India, given the current distribution of power in the global system. On the other hand, it is worth their efforts to try to prevent the emergence of each other as a global power, possibly even with the help of the US.
The US, therefore, can rest assured that occasional rhetoric notwithstanding, there is little danger of the idea of a "strategic triangle" involving Russia, China and India coming to fruition any time soon.
