India's Perspective on a U.S.-China Grand Bargain

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India's Perspective on a U.S.-China Grand Bargain
Saurav Jha | Bio | 08 Mar 2011

With Indian newspapers still carrying obituaries of the country's strategic doyen, K. Subhramanyam, who passed away in February after almost a half-century at the forefront of New Delhi's strategic debates, it is worth considering the object of Subhramanyam's concern during his final days: the implications for India of a proposed U.S.-China grand strategy agreement hammered out by a group of policy experts in Washington and Beijing. The document proposed a series of strategic compromises between China and the U.S., including a massive Chinese investment in the U.S. economy in return for an informal nonaggression pact, particularly with regard to the U.S. military's posture toward China in Taiwan. Indian analysts led by the late Subhramanyam, however, saw the proposal as a ploy by the Chinese to "use the U.S. to attain hegemonic power in Asia."


In the proposal, Subhramanyam heard echoes of the Nixon-Deng compact, born out of the expediency of the Cold War. That agreement saw the United States push huge sums of commercial technology investment into China, ultimately followed by the outsourcing of mass manufacturing. Now, by contrast, it is high technology that would be transferred to China in return for the $1 trillion that Beijing would invest in the U.S. private sector. Over time, these transfers would enable China to leverage its demographic advantages to become the world's dominant economy.

However, Thomas P.M. Barnett, one of the proposal's architects, rejected the significance of China's advantage in absolute demographic numbers. "The volume of bodies no longer determines strength in this world, especially when hundreds of millions of [those bodies] are impoverished, as they are today and will remain for decades in China," said Barnett. "It is much smarter to consider age." As Barnett explained, both China and the United States currently have a median age of 36. But with China aging four times as quickly as the U.S., its median age will hit 48 in 2050, while the U.S. will only have reached 39.

While acknowledging this point, Subhramanyam was unwilling to discount the numbers game altogether and actually saw in it a potential selling point for India. "The U.S. will have the advantage of having a younger profile of its population and of being able to attract skilled immigrants," he wrote. "If the U.S. is able to get a partner nation with a population comparable to China but a younger age profile and high potential skills, then the U.S. will be able to sustain its technological pre-eminence. Such a partner is India."

The United States has clearly begun to see the value of closer ties with a democratic, English-speaking India. Following President Barack Obama's November 2010 visit to India, Washington removed key Indian technology institutions from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Entity List, which had excluded them from technology transfers. But just as the U.S. now finds it counterproductive to maintain such barriers to an India that has emerged as one of the engines of global growth, it will not be able to restrict the movement of high-tech items to China indefinitely. As Barnett points out, China simply turns to Europe for high-tech purchases that the U.S. refuses to provide. "Dreaming of denying the Chinese high technology as part of a containment strategy is just that -- a dream," he insisted. Enabling high-tech trade is arguably closer in line with the Obama administration's stated principle of seeking not containment, but competition with China and other rising nations such as India and Brazil.

Nevertheless, any détente between two major nodes of global power that does not involve consultation with other major affected nodes is bound to raise suspicions.

Subhramanyam highlighted the fact that, despite spelling out agreements on Taiwan and Iran, the strategic proposal is completely silent on Pakistan and its nuclear and missile-technology relationship with China. He questioned whether that amounted to conceding Pakistan and South Asia to the Chinese sphere of influence. Barnett disputes that interpretation. "The proposal wasn't meant to be universally inclusive," he says, "but to reference only those issues that created deep strategic mistrust between the U.S. and China. [For the U.S.], Pakistan doesn't qualify, for obvious reasons."

The proposal does, however, indirectly impinge on Indian strategic considerations. It calls for the parties to demilitarize the Taiwan standoff "by an informal U.S. presidential moratorium on arms transfers to Taiwan, China's reduction of strike forces arrayed against it, a reduction of U.S. strike forces arrayed against China and ongoing joint peacekeeping exercises by U.S., Chinese and Taiwan militaries." The problem for India is that China can redeploy offensive forces that are no longer needed opposite Taiwan and in the Pacific theater against India -- in Tibet and in the Indian Ocean. After all, India is the only one of China's 14 neighbors with whom Beijing has open border disputes. China has also refused to enter into a "no first use" agreement for nuclear weapons, while recently building up its military infrastructure in Tibet and ratcheting up tensions on Kashmir. For obvious reasons, the thought of a drawdown in China's military posture on its other flanks is not a very comforting one for India. As a result, India's capacity to step up its role in guarding the global commons would be reduced -- exacerbating what is already a common object of criticism from the United States.

The timing of the strategic proposal was also suspect in Subhramanyam's eyes, who felt that its release just after Obama's visit to India was an attempt by Beijing to tempt Washington away from New Delhi with the offer of a major U.S economic bailout. His prescription was for India to move more quickly on forging closer ties with the U.S. and for proponents of nonalignment in India to reconsider their stand.

Clearly, despite the world's shift toward multipolarity, the remaining superpower is still highly sought after by the most dynamic new poles, located on either side of the Himalayas. And the fact that an unofficial backchannel proposal attracted the attention of such a heavyweight as Subhramanyam reflects the stakes involved.

Saurav Jha studied economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He writes and researches on global energy issues and clean energy development in Asia. His first book for Harper Collins India, "The Upside Down Book of Nuclear Power," was published in January 2010. He also works as an independent consultant in the energy sector in India. He can be reached at [email protected]

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8116/indias-perspective-on-a-u-s-china-grand-bargain

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