With China and the US At Loggerheads, Australia must choose India As Its best friend
By
Colonel Awadhesh Kumar
Scott Morrison says Australia has chosen its side and we are all in with America……better change it to India
G7 once dominated the world, at least through their manipulations. Take a look at the members …..USA, Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Japan. Except Japan and USA and Canada, the rest four are colonial powers. These colonial powers ravaged and plundered the world for nearly three hundred years and are still trying to retain their control somehow. USA and Canada became countries through blatant killing and usurping the lands of the natives and then together with the Europeans went on to stupendous level of consumption of the natural resources, leading to present day Climate crisis.
However, the self created tensions led to the two World wars, which exhausted Europe and finally shackles were broken by the two erstwhile sleeping giants of this world ….India and China.
Today just about 20 per cent of the world’s population lives in the West, yet Western nations are still trying to dominate the globe. All the post-World War 2 global institutions are still more or less controlled by these G7 countries who still think that they are as powerful as before. They are in fact now just a Club of States with their own restricted membership, as described by a political Scientist Michael Barnett.
The point is that there is no more global order based on rules made by the G7 but a contested world and American power or European power has never been virtuous or omnipotent. Harvard University Professor Joseph Nye has reminded us that “American dominance was never as great as some myths make it out to be”. The world is not the West and Western values are not universally embraced.
These Western democracies preached the virtue of liberty and freedom to the world, yet would when it suited their interests, support despots in many countries. As Barnett put it, this was not a liberal world order, but “a world order created for Western states”. The whole of West Asia / Middle East, parts of Africa and major part of South America have been and are facing problems, all created by these Western States. South Asia is still facing the turmoil due the Great Game of the Brits.
The G7 is about Western Values Japan apart and Western order. The G7 is not about a global rules based order but an explicitly Western and – Japan apart — Western-based order.
It is certainly not based any more on economy. It does not include two of the countries in the top seven economies in the world — India and China. G7 forgets that till 16th century, India and China had 55 % of World GDP ( 30% and 25% respectively ). Canada is in but why not Brazil? It is the ninth-largest economy ahead of G7 member Canada at number 10.
More accurate than the distorted GDP is the measurement of Economy done through PPP. The top 10 economies by purchasing power parity – the purchasing power of different currencies – and the picture becomes very different. As per PPP, today India is at number 3 place not very far behind China. Russia, and Indonesia are at six and seven respectively, China is the biggest economy in the world surpassing the US, and Canada drops to 15.
That’s just a picture of a changing world where the West does not exert the Central magnetic pull. The G7 now remains just a motley group of economically powerful nations or say developed nations (due to plundered wealth from rest) with high standards of living. But it no more reflects global power.
The G7 represents 40 per cent of global wealth – powerful, yes but no more dominant.
India and China today have become indispensable to the rest of the World but have no seat at the G7. China has just this year overtaken the US as the biggest trading partner of the European Union. It is the biggest trading partner of the US and Japan. It is the single biggest engine of global economic growth along with rising India.
The G7 reflects western power and US hegemony in the world. No one should pretend any thing else. Prior to the recent meeting of the G7, US President Joe Biden stressed the need for “unwavering” and “renewed” commitment to democratic values. This may be an ideal for the G7 but it is not a geopolitical reality.
Rise of India and China has ushered in, what political commentators say is the “post-American world” – not that America become irrelevant but it is no longer the dominant Unilateral power.
Political scientist Nye says the so-called global order does not need to be revised, it needs to be replaced. As he wrote recently, “it is not enough to think of exercising power over others. We must think of exercising power with others”.
This requires building stronger alliances with nations that share liberal values, while recognising that not all nation’s believe the same values. Wanting a liberal international order and having an international order governed by Western principles are two different things.
The Western Countries, it seems have realized that if They are to have anything akin to a global order in the 21st century, it Can not be an American dominated order. So they want it to be an order where the institutions that govern the order are controlled by them.
No wonder only an American can head the World Bank and a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ says only a European can lead the International Monetary Fund.
This has finally created a Contested World …..imagine India and Japan are not a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a rump of a nation like Britain is ?
Coming to Australia which has been invited to the recent G7 Meet, their PM has given some interesting views. With the Trade Spat with China growing into a major trade war, Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister says the world has not faced a period of such global upheaval since the 1930s.
Then, it was a time of depression, still reeling from World War I, the 1918 flu that had killed more people than the war was still virulent, fascism was sweeping Europe and the world was sliding to another catastrophic conflict.
Today the World is again ravaged by pandemic, the past two decades have seen global financial collapse, terrorism, endless war in Afghanistan and across the Middle East, millions of refugees on the move looking for a new home, resurgent extremist politics, retreating democracy and rising authoritarianism.
And the biggest challenge of all as per the Australian PM : the rise of China as a global power
In his speech this week as he prepared to leave Australia for the G7 meeting, the Prime Minister said the challenge “is nothing less than to reinforce, renovate and buttress a world order that favours freedom.”
He said we have to demonstrate that liberal democracy works. We have to bind ourselves to long standing unwavering allies.
This was an important and significant speech setting out a Morrison foreign policy doctrine. It was also a departure for the Prime Minister once wary and sceptical of multilateralism and the reach of global institutions now apparently a champion of that order.
It also buries the notion that Australia does not have to choose between its biggest trading partner China and its strategic alliance, shared values and friendship with the United States.
We have returned to a world of great power rivalry with the risk of war — Morrison says ever present and growing — and Australia has chosen. It was the choice we would always make: we are all in with America…… instead Morrison should start looking up at India.
Morrison’s vision is of a revived Western hegemony that harks back to the end of World War II when America emerged as a global superpower and led what the Prime Minister repeatedly referred to as a “global rules based order”.
But the post-war world got mired into a Cold War, an ideological stand off between the West and the Soviet bloc. The iron curtain then descended across Europe. In 1949 China’s Mao Zedong proclaimed victory for the Communist Revolution.
In 1950 Western troops, including Australians, were at war again in Korea where Mao’s troops backed the North and inflicted a defeat on America’s Eighth Army, driving them back to Seoul in what is still remembered today as the biggest retreat in US military history.
Then came Vietnam and another American withdrawal. So before choosing sides, Morrison should have looked around closer. …..towards India.
Both India and China also talks about a global order and playing by the rules. India has presented itself as a champion of multilateralism particularly during the Donald Trump presidency when America arguably retreated from the world.
Yet China, like America, wants to bend the order to it’s will. China will use trade as a weapon and would like to dominate the world with an iron fist. China, like America, is a big power and like America believes it is exceptional: it makes rules, it won’t always follow them.
Well both have to soon contend with India as the balancer.
It is increasingly clear that the West won’t live in a world dominated by China or India and China won’t accept a so-called Western global order. We have arrived again at a critical point of history. The balancing act will be done by India. ….no one should have any doubt over this.
Scott Morrison is right this resembles the 1930s and history tells us what happened then. The same mistakes need not be repeated. There is a huge choice now for the World in the form of a rising India.
