04-20-2006, 11:29 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>India-US: Wrong assumptions? </b>
S Raghotam | April 20, 2006 | 17:32 IST
Ever since the March 2005 visit of Condoleeza Rice to New Delhi when she announced that the US wanted to make India a global power, strategic analysts around the world have been wondering what India's reaction would be and what kind of a worldview it would be based on.
The several agreements India and the US have signed since then and President Bush's visit to India earlier this month have answered the first question: India has gratefully clutched at the US straw.
But it remains a mystery as to what assumptions regarding the big questions of global strategic order underlie India's unrestrained cosying up to the US embrace.
K Subrahmanyam's article Nuclear Deal: Boon for India, US, World offers a view into the thinking at the highest levels of the Indian government. Subrahmanyam chairs the Prime Minister's Task Force on Global Strategic Developments and is a key proponent of the recent nuclear deal.
Written primarily to critique those criticising the India-US nuclear deal, the article nonetheless offers upfront the several assumptions that Mr Subrahmanyam, and the Manmohan Singh government, seem to have made on themes far larger than the nuclear deal itself.
Unfortunately, many of these assumptions are not original Indian perspectives but those gleaned from Condoleeza Rice's public pronouncements of the US view and preferences of the global strategic order.
But regardless of the source of those ideas, it is necessary to examine whether they hold good from an Indian perspective and whether they should be the assumptions on which India seeks to build its strategic partnership with the US.
<b>Assumption 1:</b> The Cold War is over. The world is no longer bipolar but a balance of power among six powers.
But who are these six balancers? and who are they balancing against? It is not explicit in the proposition, but it is implied that the world has transited from the Cold War bipolar system through a period of US preponderance to a classical balance of power system in which the greatest power ? the US ? is being balanced by the other five powers, presumably China, Russia, the European Union, Japan and India.
If this proposition were true, India can build its relations with the US without agonising anymore over the fact of US preponderance, without agonising over whether India is inadvertently fuelling the rise of an imperium, and in the hope that it could build equally good relations with the other major powers and thus temper American power. But is the proposition true?
Let's examine the six assumed balancers, one by one and then by any partnerships or alliances they may have formed for the purpose of balancing.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has generally been acknowledged as the world's lone superpower. The French call it a 'hyperpower'. It has a nearly $13 trillion economy that is still growing at close to 4%. In dollar terms, just the New York metropolitan area produces nearly as much as the GDP of the whole of India.
The US has the most technologically advanced nuclear forces which are being continually upgraded. It will soon come to have numerical superiority as well in important categories over the rival nuclear forces of Russia.
Indeed, according to an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the US is close to achieving a first-strike capability against Russian nuclear forces.
Spending nearly $400 billion ? more than the combined military spending of the next 14 top military budgets or close to 50% of the military spending of the entire world -- the US' conventional military is the most advanced and most 'ready' fighting force. It is now in the process of a military transformation that, if successful, will put it into quite a different orbit than the other powers.
With its vast and advanced carrier task forces operating in every sea of the world, with the global reach of its air force, with major and minor military bases spread across the world, and with its military space assets, the US exercises command over the global commons ? land, air, water and space.
With the dollar as the global reserve currency and with American-led international financial institutions, instruments and trading arrangements, the US also has command of the global economy.
America also remains the most innovative ? in technology, in finance, in diplomacy and in military and strategic thinking. It continues to be the greatest magnet for talent and brainpower from around the world. European, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and especially Indian scientists, engineers, economists and managers go away to the US and help increase its economic and technological power.
Finally, the US is pre-eminent in the ability to convert every other form of power ? economic, technological, institutional, moral ? into military and diplomatic power.
Any major power or combination of powers that wishes to balance American power will need to be able to compete with the American command of the global commons, its nuclear superiority now approaching primacy, its immense economic power, its unmatched ability to attract brainpower and innovate and its ability to convert all other forms of power into strategic power.
Is Russia a balancer against US power? The rump state of the former Soviet Union continues to feature in American strategic imagination raising fears of an economic and military revival and renewed threat to the US.
American policy has therefore continued its Cold War-era quest: to diminish the one factor of continued Russian great power status ? its vast nuclear arsenal and its ability both to conduct strategic nuclear diplomacy vis-à¶is the US as well as proliferation-impacting policy with states such as China, Iran and India.
Through a combination of cleverly negotiated Cold War-era arms limitation pacts, post-Cold War-era 'co-operative threat reduction' programmes such as Nunn-Lugar, and by drawing Russia into US-led nuclear non-proliferation regimes and cartels such as the NSG and MTCR with economic and technological inducements, the US has managed to greatly diminish Russia's ability to conduct nuclear strategic policy and diplomacy in the foreseeable future.
<b>The US gives hundreds of millions of dollars each year to Russia to implement the arms reduction agreements, technologically assists in the dismantling of Russian nuclear and missile arsenals, and physically carts away dismantled nuclear material for safeguarding, which Russia seems incapable of doing on its own</b>.
Russia's own continued economic problems have forced it to cut down on its nuclear arsenal far more than stipulated under the arms control agreements. With a military budget just a fifth of what the US spends -- much of which is spent to reform a monumentally inept conventional military force ? all arms of Russia's nuclear triad have declined and degraded.
According to the Foreign Affairs article, ''Russia has 39 percent fewer long-range bombers, 58 percent fewer ICBMs, and 80 percent fewer SSBNs than the Soviet Union fielded during its last days?What nuclear forces Russia retains are hardly ready for use''.
Russia's strategic bombers and mobile land-based ICBMs rarely patrol, sit in de-alerted postures and are vulnerable to a surprise US attack.
The Russian submarine force is so rusty that several tests of submarine-launched ballistic missiles in 2004 and 2005 all failed: some failed to launch, others veered off-course.
Worse still, plans announced by Moscow to further reduce its land-based ICBMs will leave it with possibly as few as 150 ICBMs by 2010, down from the 1990 level of almost 1,300 missiles. Even most of these will be old missiles whose life has been extended beyond the original date. Plans to replace them with new missiles have been plagued by failed tests and low production rates.
As the Foreign Affairs article notes: ''The more Russia's nuclear arsenal shrinks, the easier it will become for the United States to carry out a first strike''.
Russia's economy is in a shambles, dominated as it is by oligarchs and mafias. The oil sector, which could potentially catapult Russia's economy, suffers from lack of technology and capital. Russia is forced to look to the West for these.
Even help from the West may not help Russia emerge from its spectre. It is faced with declining demographics. A rapidly falling birth rate is compounded by rapidly falling life expectancy. Russia's population is expected to decline from around 140 million today to about 100 million by 2050. Crucially, Russian men now live only 58 years on average and their life expectancy continues to fall by the year.
As its leaders struggle to come to terms with democracy and free market economics, as the population declines, as its dependence on the West continues and as the US and NATO expand all around it, Russia is in no position to balance against the United States.
Next: Could the EU and Japan Balance American Power?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
URL for this article:
http://www.rediff.com//news/2006/apr/20guest.htm
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
S Raghotam | April 20, 2006 | 17:32 IST
Ever since the March 2005 visit of Condoleeza Rice to New Delhi when she announced that the US wanted to make India a global power, strategic analysts around the world have been wondering what India's reaction would be and what kind of a worldview it would be based on.
The several agreements India and the US have signed since then and President Bush's visit to India earlier this month have answered the first question: India has gratefully clutched at the US straw.
But it remains a mystery as to what assumptions regarding the big questions of global strategic order underlie India's unrestrained cosying up to the US embrace.
K Subrahmanyam's article Nuclear Deal: Boon for India, US, World offers a view into the thinking at the highest levels of the Indian government. Subrahmanyam chairs the Prime Minister's Task Force on Global Strategic Developments and is a key proponent of the recent nuclear deal.
Written primarily to critique those criticising the India-US nuclear deal, the article nonetheless offers upfront the several assumptions that Mr Subrahmanyam, and the Manmohan Singh government, seem to have made on themes far larger than the nuclear deal itself.
Unfortunately, many of these assumptions are not original Indian perspectives but those gleaned from Condoleeza Rice's public pronouncements of the US view and preferences of the global strategic order.
But regardless of the source of those ideas, it is necessary to examine whether they hold good from an Indian perspective and whether they should be the assumptions on which India seeks to build its strategic partnership with the US.
<b>Assumption 1:</b> The Cold War is over. The world is no longer bipolar but a balance of power among six powers.
But who are these six balancers? and who are they balancing against? It is not explicit in the proposition, but it is implied that the world has transited from the Cold War bipolar system through a period of US preponderance to a classical balance of power system in which the greatest power ? the US ? is being balanced by the other five powers, presumably China, Russia, the European Union, Japan and India.
If this proposition were true, India can build its relations with the US without agonising anymore over the fact of US preponderance, without agonising over whether India is inadvertently fuelling the rise of an imperium, and in the hope that it could build equally good relations with the other major powers and thus temper American power. But is the proposition true?
Let's examine the six assumed balancers, one by one and then by any partnerships or alliances they may have formed for the purpose of balancing.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has generally been acknowledged as the world's lone superpower. The French call it a 'hyperpower'. It has a nearly $13 trillion economy that is still growing at close to 4%. In dollar terms, just the New York metropolitan area produces nearly as much as the GDP of the whole of India.
The US has the most technologically advanced nuclear forces which are being continually upgraded. It will soon come to have numerical superiority as well in important categories over the rival nuclear forces of Russia.
Indeed, according to an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the US is close to achieving a first-strike capability against Russian nuclear forces.
Spending nearly $400 billion ? more than the combined military spending of the next 14 top military budgets or close to 50% of the military spending of the entire world -- the US' conventional military is the most advanced and most 'ready' fighting force. It is now in the process of a military transformation that, if successful, will put it into quite a different orbit than the other powers.
With its vast and advanced carrier task forces operating in every sea of the world, with the global reach of its air force, with major and minor military bases spread across the world, and with its military space assets, the US exercises command over the global commons ? land, air, water and space.
With the dollar as the global reserve currency and with American-led international financial institutions, instruments and trading arrangements, the US also has command of the global economy.
America also remains the most innovative ? in technology, in finance, in diplomacy and in military and strategic thinking. It continues to be the greatest magnet for talent and brainpower from around the world. European, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and especially Indian scientists, engineers, economists and managers go away to the US and help increase its economic and technological power.
Finally, the US is pre-eminent in the ability to convert every other form of power ? economic, technological, institutional, moral ? into military and diplomatic power.
Any major power or combination of powers that wishes to balance American power will need to be able to compete with the American command of the global commons, its nuclear superiority now approaching primacy, its immense economic power, its unmatched ability to attract brainpower and innovate and its ability to convert all other forms of power into strategic power.
Is Russia a balancer against US power? The rump state of the former Soviet Union continues to feature in American strategic imagination raising fears of an economic and military revival and renewed threat to the US.
American policy has therefore continued its Cold War-era quest: to diminish the one factor of continued Russian great power status ? its vast nuclear arsenal and its ability both to conduct strategic nuclear diplomacy vis-à¶is the US as well as proliferation-impacting policy with states such as China, Iran and India.
Through a combination of cleverly negotiated Cold War-era arms limitation pacts, post-Cold War-era 'co-operative threat reduction' programmes such as Nunn-Lugar, and by drawing Russia into US-led nuclear non-proliferation regimes and cartels such as the NSG and MTCR with economic and technological inducements, the US has managed to greatly diminish Russia's ability to conduct nuclear strategic policy and diplomacy in the foreseeable future.
<b>The US gives hundreds of millions of dollars each year to Russia to implement the arms reduction agreements, technologically assists in the dismantling of Russian nuclear and missile arsenals, and physically carts away dismantled nuclear material for safeguarding, which Russia seems incapable of doing on its own</b>.
Russia's own continued economic problems have forced it to cut down on its nuclear arsenal far more than stipulated under the arms control agreements. With a military budget just a fifth of what the US spends -- much of which is spent to reform a monumentally inept conventional military force ? all arms of Russia's nuclear triad have declined and degraded.
According to the Foreign Affairs article, ''Russia has 39 percent fewer long-range bombers, 58 percent fewer ICBMs, and 80 percent fewer SSBNs than the Soviet Union fielded during its last days?What nuclear forces Russia retains are hardly ready for use''.
Russia's strategic bombers and mobile land-based ICBMs rarely patrol, sit in de-alerted postures and are vulnerable to a surprise US attack.
The Russian submarine force is so rusty that several tests of submarine-launched ballistic missiles in 2004 and 2005 all failed: some failed to launch, others veered off-course.
Worse still, plans announced by Moscow to further reduce its land-based ICBMs will leave it with possibly as few as 150 ICBMs by 2010, down from the 1990 level of almost 1,300 missiles. Even most of these will be old missiles whose life has been extended beyond the original date. Plans to replace them with new missiles have been plagued by failed tests and low production rates.
As the Foreign Affairs article notes: ''The more Russia's nuclear arsenal shrinks, the easier it will become for the United States to carry out a first strike''.
Russia's economy is in a shambles, dominated as it is by oligarchs and mafias. The oil sector, which could potentially catapult Russia's economy, suffers from lack of technology and capital. Russia is forced to look to the West for these.
Even help from the West may not help Russia emerge from its spectre. It is faced with declining demographics. A rapidly falling birth rate is compounded by rapidly falling life expectancy. Russia's population is expected to decline from around 140 million today to about 100 million by 2050. Crucially, Russian men now live only 58 years on average and their life expectancy continues to fall by the year.
As its leaders struggle to come to terms with democracy and free market economics, as the population declines, as its dependence on the West continues and as the US and NATO expand all around it, Russia is in no position to balance against the United States.
Next: Could the EU and Japan Balance American Power?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
URL for this article:
http://www.rediff.com//news/2006/apr/20guest.htm
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->