Some random thoughts on power imbalance in global order by large states:
When the US predominance in global power projection comes in competition with China's, which slowly but surely will happen, no matter how much both parties try to avoid it, they will become adversaries, Mearsheimer predicts as much:
http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0056.pdf
At present, China's biggest weakness is its unsustainable and opaque one party system of government, which is prone to nepotism and idiosyncratic/whimsical leaders who are not accountable to the Chinese voting public, but only to a small group of their elite colleague in Communist Party, PLA, PLN and PLAF etc. US and others who do not want to see China rise too much too fast, will use this weakness as a lever.
China and India are not benign powers, the term benign power and peaceful rise are both oxymoron, in my opinion. Powerful countries can never be benign, usually they will step on some toes while trying to secure their interest.
Asia is a very crowded space, there are billions of people in China and India, but around them in their neighborhood also there are billions of people in smaller countries. There are trade, transit, international water sharing, maritime space sharing and many other issues where China and India are already making neighbors nervous and jittery, it will only get worse with time.
To give some concrete examples, China, which is essentially a Han Chinese entity, have absorbed Inner Mongolia in itself, it has also occupied Tibet and Xinjiang and are engaged in demographic invasion in both of these regions to ensure that Han population there increases to more than 50-60% and eventually to 75-80%, to prevent a Soviet Union type breakup. Not only do they not share economic opportunities with the local indigenous population in Tibet and Xinjiang, they try to suppress their religious and cultural activities and try to absorb them into the Han culture, which is a form of cultural genocide. As a result you have occasional outburst of riots and mayhem, because of the suppressed rage of the locals.
If you ask the Chinese, what right do they have to occupy these regions, they mention that historically it was theirs, meaning under Yuan and Manchu dynasty rule, both of which were foreign dynasties at the time. To prevent calling them foreign, they claim them as one of their minority nations, which is true for Manchu, but not true for Mongols, who were able to save half of their country with the help of Soviet Russia. Even the area of Manchuria was a no go area for the Han Chinese during much of Manchu rule and later became a Japanese protectorate.
China is also damming up major international rivers in Tibet, such as Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra), Mekong etc., which provide sustenance to billions in downstream countries. India is damming up its shared rivers as well, at the detriment of downstream neighboring countries.
China has conflicts with Japan, Vietnam, Philippines and others about island ownership in South China Sea and Sea of Japan, there is no easy solution in sight.
India for its part, occupies half of Muslim majority Kashmir, whose population want to become either independent or join up with Pakistan. It also inherited from British Raj, the Northeastern States whose Buddhist and Christian Tibeto Burman population has more in common with Burmese tribes and are essentially much closer to South East Asians, in terms of language of ethnicity. There is insurgency in all these states to breakaway from Indian Union. India also shares border with Tibet, where China claims that India illegally occupies a portion of Arunachal Pradesh, calling it South Tibet.
China and India are able to get away with much, because they are large countries, they have competitive advantage and they are rising, so the balance of power is shifting to their favor, while the smaller neighbors cannot compete because of their smaller size.
The situation in South America is different, the population versus resource pressure is much less than in Asia. So Brazil can afford to be a benign friendly giant.
Entity of Brazil is new, but India like China are old population centers, with a lot of history of warfare, kingdoms, empires, outside barbarian invasions, just like Europe.
In the period between 80 to 150 years ago, there was rivalry mainly between European powers, Germany can be called a new European power as well I think, as well as Italy, although they were not active in colonial ventures as early and as much as Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, France and England.
USA with its huge land and increasing population, transplanted from Europe and freely intermixed, became the new great power, surpassing all other European powers in a divided, nationalistic and fragmented Europe, mainly because of its size of population, a single market, a single language, its cultural homogeneity and its "dynamism", despite the setback during civil war, due in part to the slave dependent economy in the South. USA became a more effective large country than any other and proved its performance in WW II.
Today China and India has essentially regrouped and are on the march to regain their past prominence and glory. The long term effect of the emergence of these two giants on the Eurasian land mass is fundamentally different than jockeying for power of the mainly European powers in the earlier era, except for Japan, it was essentially an intra European affair or more correctly intra Western affair.
The re-emergence of India and China has and will put further strain among its neighbors and will motivate them to form other groups or unions to offset the coming imbalance.
The world may seem to be going back to a status quo that it held between different regions before the Renaissance and its subsequent centuries, although the world today is far more populous and technologically advanced than those years in the past. What remains to be seen is what happens in the fragmented South East Asian, Middle East, Central Asian and Latin American region and the African continent.
My guess is that people will work to create their virtual large groups or unions in these fragmented regions, even while nation states still exist, so that they can compete more effectively with status quo powers such as the West and emerging powers such as China and India.
But the question about wars and conflicts and whether such calamities and catastrophes will happen while the world balance of power shifts, I think it is entirely possible, because human nature has not changed much in a few centuries or decades, but the presence of MAD(Mutually Assured Destruction) and better communication and conflict management tools work as brakes on full scale and all out existential wars. It does not mean that full scale wars will not happen, there are as many or more short-sighted people on this planet today than there ever was in the past, but effective WMD's make full scale wars between Nuclear powers terribly expensive. So people are more careful about initiating wars and escalating them, specially when both parties have Nuclear weapons. This means that Nuclear weapons will get more wide spread and every region will have its latest and greatest array of Nuclear arsenals, pointing at rivals and "enemy" nations. It is also possible that WMD's in the future will be less dirty than than they are today and may be more effective at killing just human beings and not render the land unusable for generations, so victors can come in and make use of the land.
Although large scale wars, between large systems will be less common, there will continue to be insurgencies and low scale conflicts in many volatile regions that are not yet able to form effective large systems, as there is today. It is also possible that new insurgencies will be initiated and sustained in the following areas to cut to size the threatening large countries, namely India and China:
- Muslim majority Kashmir and Christian majority North Eastern States in India
- Xinjiang and Tibet in China
A nation is like an army, economy is the field of war in times of peace. A bigger nation, even if its malnourished like that of India, or a China even if its not as well equipped like that of the US, can change with time and be a threat. Because the size of the Army always matter in war.
Lets look at the size of the countries of the world:
List of countries by population - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Now if you look at this list, there are only two countries bigger than the US, China and India, both around the same size in population and both around 4 times the size of the US.
EU may become a country in the future, so it is premature to talk about it now. Even if it becomes a country, even if it includes Russia, it would still be half the size of China or India, in population.
Whenever a developed country like the US, Germany or Israel engages in extensive trade with a big country like China or India, it becomes net loss for the countries with higher income and net gain for the countries with lower income, until the differences in income become smaller and smaller. This mainly happens because of technology transfer and the advantage the bigger countries have in acquiring technology.
Why should the US or EU help in the emergence of their own strategic competitors and then be defeated by these competitors, and is there a way to avoid it?
The political class in the West is serving the billionaires and their goals of earning more billions for their corporations. The nature of the corporation is to maximize profit, if a country is defeated in the process, it is apparently not their concern.
But when a country or set of countries are defeated, then the eco systems that helped these companies succeed, are compromised fatally, because these corporations and their share holders are usually controlled by a particular country, so although there are multi-national corporations, ultimately all corporations are national and they are one of the vital strategic weapons of a nation that determines their rise or fall. I will list some companies and their nationality, all of which are MNC's:
Toyota Japanese
Samsung Korean
Huawei Chinese
Reliance Indian
Rover-Tata Indian
Jaguar-Tata Indian
Cisco US
Intel US
Oracle US
Microsoft US
Boeing US
Airbus EU
Daimler Germany
BMW Germany
Why is size so important, many reasons, economies of scale, size of market, political stability, pool of extra-ordinary talent (leaders) etc. Also please consider why US and Soviet Union became two competing superpowers after WW II, the other colonial powers were not just devastated internally, they also lost their colonial possessions or were in the process of doing so, loosing the advantage of size, which left US and Soviet Union the two greatest countries in population. China and India just came out of colonial and imperial domination and their journey had just started as independent entities, so they have not entered the arena until very recently.
So it was the right strategy for the US to engage in trade with Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, South East Asian countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, some became spectacular successes, like Japan and then S Korea and Taiwan, but none could eclipse the US. So even if Japan reached its maximum potential with high GDP, strategically it remained under US umbrella, along with EU and ANZ countries.
US engaged with China to defeat the Soviet threat, but it should have disengaged as soon as Soviet Union fell apart in early 1990's.
So the club of developed countries should disengage China now and they should never engage India, no matter how much the corporations salivate for the big markets there. The US also must reach an agreement with EU, Oceania, Japan, S Korea and Israel (who has a habit of selling restricted technology) not to engage China or India. It does not have to be total disengagement, but anything that can be done somewhere else, should be done there, so that their growth level is brought down from 8-10% to 4-5%, at par or less than other smaller countries which are to be engaged.
Instead of engaging bigger nations such as China or India, the developed countries should engage smaller nations from the list who appear below the US. There are plenty of nations with cheaper labor than China in this list to produce what US, EU, Oceania and Israel need, plenty of nations that can provide the back end services cheaper or better than India. This engagement also means that people in these countries will stay where they are and not migrate as much to the developed countries.
There are only few nations in this world that already has the technology, highly developed man power and industrial infrastructure, these must have an agreement and understanding to ensure a stable order for the future of the world.
Thomas Friedman, Ayn Rand and their promoted free market is a recipe for disaster. We know and can see what they bring. We need to control the outcome of our trade and our engagement.
These two nations which are bigger in size than the US, are a threat not just for the US, but for Japan, Korean peninsula, South East Asia, every nation that are around them or even far away from them in Africa or South America.
Europe has been the colonial master of the planet, the planet does not need another two new neo-colonial masters. Their relative size is a threat that cannot be met by any other way than disengagement, as their size provide them with competitive advantage, which is a threat for all other countries in the world, not just the US, EU, Oceania, Japan, Korean peninsula.
When all other countries reach a sufficient momentum and parity in competitive advantage and can be grouped together in some form or fashion, to counter-balance these two large countries, only then they should be engaged again, by the developed countries, so that they can develop and progress without being a threat for other smaller nations in the globe.
I ask forgiveness to people of China and India with whom I have no enmity, who are but fellow human beings. But power imbalance is a recipe for chaos and destruction which should be avoided, and I prefer an orderly evolution of humanity, which is my motivation in presenting these ideas.
.
