Asian Juggernaut

Brahma Chellaney

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780061987625
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

In Asian Juggernaut, the revelatory and important International Bestseller by Brahma Chellaney, a renowned authority on Asia's political and economic development offers an incisive and insightful analysis of the region's pivotal role on the world stage. Examining the rise of China, India, and Japan as preeminent powers and their key position in the global future, Asian Juggernaut is a book that must be read by anyone interested in the shape of tomorrow's world.

Chapter 1
The Asian Renaissance

WITH THE CENTRE OF GRAVITY IN WORLD AFFAIRS moving to a dynamic and thriving Asia, this continent’s significance in international relations is beginning to rival that of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More than half of the global population lives in Asia, a rapidly changing region that has come up dramatically in less than a quarter century. At the same time, the problems that confront Asia are evident from just one piece of information — the continent accounts for three-quarters of all terrorism casualties worldwide, placing it at the centre of the global war on terror.

Economically and politically, Asia appears poised to determine the new world order. With the world’s fastest-growing markets, fastest-rising military expenditures and most serious hotspots (including the epicentre of international terrorism), Asia holds the key to the future global order.

The Asian renaissance is underscored by the high gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of Asian states. Such rapid growth is likely to continue in large parts of Asia in the coming years. In fact, Asia is expected to remain the world’s economic locomotive for the next couple of decades or more, with its larger economies increasingly scouring the world for energy and raw materials to feed their growth. The Asia-driven energy and resource competition has sharpened the political dynamics of the global energy markets. A twenty-first-century version of an energy-related Great Game is already on, although in more subtle ways than the colonial-era hunt for raw materials and other resources.

The Cold War produced two Koreas, two Chinas and two Vietnams. Today, with growing competition among the major Asian players and the rise of regional powers, Asia faces new challenges in an era of globalization, including how to move beyond historical legacies and tap the continent’s dynamism and growth for greater security and prosperity. The colossal shift in global geopolitics presents an opportunity for Asia as well as tests its ability to assume a central role in international relations.

Broadly, Asia confronts two contradictory trends. On one side are the territorial and maritime disputes, competition over scarce resources, improved military capabilities and increasingly fervent nationalism that threaten to imperil security and growing prosperity. On the other side is the rising Asian interdependence through trade and investment, communications, technology and tourism. Asia also has to cope with resilient jingoism, protectionism and diverse kinds of negative transborder influences, including terrorism, subversion and illegal migration.

Starting with Japan’s economic success, followed by the emergence of other continental tigers and now the rise of China and India, a resurgent Asia has been bouncing back from its historical decline. That decline began in the period after the nineteenth century, when Asia dropped behind Europe during the Industrial Revolution. The Asian Development Bank has estimated that Asia, after making up three-fifths of the world’s GDP at the beginning of the industrial age in 1820, saw its stake decline to one-fifth in 1940, before dramatic economy recovery has helped bring it up to two-fifths today. By 2025, according to the same estimation, Asia might return to its 1820 position in terms of world product.

Simultaneously, with its rapid economic growth, Asia’s arts, fashion and cuisine are now regaining international recognition. Even Japan’s giant economy has finally rumbled back from the worst recession since the end of World War II. Asia as a whole is on the rise. As home to several information-technology giants, Asia, with its rising soft- and hard-power resources, is likely to help shape the future of globalization.

Indeed, the ascent of Asia, as symbolized by China, India and Japan, has in some quarters conjured up a perceived threat to Western pastures. This found an echo in a State of the Union address of then U.S. President George W. Bush, who said: ‘In a dynamic world economy, we are seeing new competitors, like China and India, and this creates uncertainty, which makes it easier to feed people’s fears. So we’re seeing some old temptations return. Protectionists want to escape competition, pretending that we can keep our high standard of living while walling off our economy. Others say that the government needs to take a larger role in directing the economy, centralizing more power in Washington and increasing taxes’.¹ The reality is that the balance of economic power in the world has been changing recurrently in history, and will continue to do so.

The new international clout of Asia can be seen not only from China’s long streak of fast economic growth but also from the fact that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia alone hold $2.5 trillion in Western debt. China in particular inspires both admiration and unease. As a U.S. national-security strategy report put it, ‘China encapsulates Asia’s dramatic economic successes, but China’s transition remains incomplete. In one generation, China has gone from poverty and isolation to growing integration into the international economic system. China once opposed global institutions; today it is a permanent member of the UNSC (United Nations Security Council) and the WTO (World Trade Organization)’.² The report added: ‘China’s leaders must realize, however, that they cannot stay on this peaceful path while holding on to old ways of thinking and acting that exacerbate concerns throughout the region and the world. These old ways include: Continuing China’s military expansion in a nontransparent way’.

The opportunities and challenges faced by Asia need to be seen in the context of the larger global trends and developments. Internationally, conflict remains rife, and only the forms and dimensions of conflict have changed,³ as evidenced by the rise of both intrastate strife and unconventional aggression in the form of terrorism.⁴ Interstate war, however, is unlikely to disappear as a feature of international relations. In fact, ‘the only thing more common than predictions about the end of war has been war itself’.⁵

Equally significant is the manner momentous international events continue to be shaped by changes in political geography. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the crumbling of Yugoslavia and the separation of East Timor from Indonesia have had far-reaching ramifications. Despite the sanctity attached to existing interstate frontiers and the prevailing international norms against redrawing borders in blood, the desire of some states to extend their frontiers to territories they covet is a major cause of regional tensions. Examples in Asia of such irredentism include China’s claims over Taiwan and India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Pakistan’s belligerence on Kashmir. Export of terror as an instrument of state policy is also tied to regional ambitions.

Centre of Transnational Terrorism

The scourge of transnational terrorism in the twenty-first century is both a response to, and derives assistance from, rapid technological change. Terrorism, drawing sustenance from murderous ideologies, seeks to get round the military-deterrent capabilities of target-states by employing unconventional means. The growing gap between the technologically advanced and backward nations also inspires terrorists to take recourse to unconventional methods in an asymmetrical situation.

The rise of extremism in totalitarian Muslim states is linked not only to the lack of avenues for free expression and debate but also to the sense of disillusionment over the widening technology gap between Islamic states and the rest of the world. The oil boom of the 1970s created an ‘illusion that power had come to the Islamic world’.⁶ Subsequent events have shown that despite their huge oil revenues, the oil-exporting Muslim states from West Asia to Southeast Asia face an increasing ‘knowledge gap’ with the West.⁷ The internal dynamics in Islamic states — many trapped in a cauldron of political tyranny, religious bigotry and social tensions — have helped spur militancy. What the world is witnessing, according to Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American psychiatrist, is not a clash of religions or civilizations, but a battle between modernity and barbarism — a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.⁸ It is more a clash about civilization than a clash between civilizations.

Technological forces today are playing a greater role in shaping geopolitics than at any other time in history. In the same way textiles, railways and coal built up the power and wealth of some countries after the advent of the Industrial Revolution, information technology is at the centre of power and force today.⁹ Real military prowess and dominance over the battlefield are now derived from the ability of a great power like the United States to collate, process, amalgamate and harness militarily useful information from space-based surveillance, high-speed computers and other instruments of the information age.

The unprecedented pace of technological progress can be seen from the fact that the globe has amassed more scientific knowledge after World War II than was generated in the previous 5000 years. The swiftest advances in technology, however, have been occurring since the late 1980s with the advent of the information age, with scientific information now increasing twofold about every five years.¹⁰ Asia has impressive information-technology resources, and there is every possibility that by 2050, the global economy will be led, in addition to the United States, by Asia’s three behemoths — China, India and Japan.

In the face of continual technological revolution, the tolerance for rapid change is one important characteristic distinguishing the successful cultures from the no-so-successful ones. Insular, conservative, inward-looking societies are less competent to rapidly exploit or absorb new innovations. A liberal culture and professional work ethics are certainly an advantage.

The more the world changes, however, the more it remains the same in some critical aspects. The information revolution and globalization have not changed the nature of international relations or the make-up of the international system, even as they have helped trigger fundamental changes in polity, economy and security. The rapid pace of technological change is itself a consequence of nations competing fiercely and seeking relative advantage in an international system based not on collective security but on national security. While state sovereignty remains paramount,¹¹ the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of another state has come under open pressure as a result of internal wars, externally driven ideological battles and transborder challenges. State sponsorship or protection of terrorism makes this principle even more difficult to uphold.

As Asia illustrates, the rise of international terrorism is a reminder that the information age is both an integrating and a dividing force. Greater public awareness flowing out of the advances in information and communications technologies has encouraged individuals in many societies to search for their roots and more clearly define their identity. At a time of greater international fluidity and uncertainty,¹² the rise of religious orthodoxy, ethnic or localist affiliation, jingoism and even xenophobia in some societies in an era of supposed internationalism and a single ‘global village’ raises troubling questions about international peace and stability. So does the location of four-fifths of the world’s oil resources in politically troubled areas,¹³ especially when international competition for oil and other natural resources is sharpening as a consequence of the rapid economic growth in Asia.

Terrorism is a challenge that stares squarely at Asia, which is home to several failed or failing states. Asia, which already accounted for 75 per cent of all terrorism casualties worldwide by 2000,¹⁴ has been facing mounting terrorist and extremist violence in recent years. Growing terrorism carries the risk of economic disruption, besides threatening the freedoms and tolerant spirit of pluralistic societies. The challenges Asia faces are apparent from the fact that the epicentre of international terrorism is located in the Pakistan–Afghanistan belt. The U.S. State Department has diplomatically called South Asia ‘a central theatre of the global war on terrorism’,¹⁵ while Steven Hadley, the then U.S. national security adviser, characterized a nuclear, Talibanized, Sunni Pakistan as ‘both an ally in the war on terror and, in some sense, a site where the war is being carried about’.¹⁶

The U.S. occupation of Iraq made the world forget that the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in the United States happened not because of Iraq but because of the terrorist nurseries in the Pakistan–Afghanistan belt, some of which remain in business, especially in the northern and western parts of Pakistan. Pakistan remains a principal recruiting ground and logistical centre for global terrorists. As the Pakistani military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, acknowledged on July 21, 2005, in an address to the nation after the London subway bombings, ‘Wherever these extremist or terrorist incidents occur in the world, a direct or indirect connection is established with this country’.¹⁷ Ominously, Pakistan has emerged as a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism.

The global spread of the jihad culture is rooted in the Afghan war of the 1980s and the U.S. and Saudi funnelling of arms to the anti-Soviet guerrillas through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. To fight Soviet-style atheism, then U.S. President Ronald Reagan did not hesitate to use Islam in Afghanistan, just as he readily utilized the Catholic Church in his intense anti-Marxist campaign in Central America. Islam was employed to unite the Muslim world and spur the spirit of jihad against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Terrorism and the modern-day Frankensteins are the haunting byproducts of the war against atheism and communism that the West was supposed to have won.

The Afghan war veterans came to haunt the security of India, the West and several Muslim states. Many members of the Afghan war alumni returned to their homelands to wage terror campaigns against governments they viewed as tainted by Western influence. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination was one of the first to be linked to such inspired terror. Large portions of the multibillion-dollar military aid to the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was siphoned off by the conduit¹⁸ — the ISI — to ignite a bloody insurgency in Indian Kashmir from 1990 after the agency had failed to trigger an uprising in India’s Punjab state despite arming Sikh dissidents.

Against that background, draining the existing terrorism-breeding swamps in Asia will not be easy, given the way the culture of jihad is now deeply woven into the social fabric of certain communities. For instance, some of Pakistan’s 15,000 madrasas are not just seats of medieval theology but also schools imparting training in arms. What has made this incendiary radicalization so difficult to reverse is that it claims the imprimatur of religion.¹⁹ U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2006 that, ‘Pakistani militant groups represent a persistent threat to regional stability and U.S. interests in South Asia and the Near-East. They also pose a potential threat to our interests worldwide’.²⁰

To be sure, the entire expanse from West Asia to Southeast Asia is home to militant groups and wracked by terrorist, insurgent and separatist violence in a manner unmatched elsewhere in the world. This poses a serious challenge to international and Asian security. The radicalization of Muslims in Southeast and Central Asia, where Islamist groups such as the Jemaah Islamiyah, Mujahidin Kompak and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan are becoming increasingly entrenched, demonstrates the ideological power of religious extremism. With the radicalization has come virulent anti-Americanism. The visceral hatred towards America has drawn sustenance from the polarizing effects of the Iraq conflict and potent symbols of abuse, such as the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba and the secret rendition, or transfer, of suspected terrorists to countries that have engaged in torture. In addition, there has been outrage over the massacre of Iraqi men, women and children by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi village of Haditha and the killings at American camps in Afghanistan.

The debacle in Iraq, and the civil war there resulting from America’s hubris, are likely to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of U.S. leaders. In fact, by deceptively linking Iraq with Al Qaeda to justif...