Indian foreign policy will have to respond to the meta-trends by crafting an approach that is more than just the sum of its bilateral and multilateral engagements.
This article is part of the series — India and the World in 2021.
We enter a new year and a new decade of the 21st century as the world around us is evolving at such a rapid pace, with a scale and scope often difficult to comprehend. For scholars and pundits, older paradigms have ceased being adequate in guiding their analyses about the national and global political environment. Policymakers, for their part, are being forced to respond in real time to the challenges coming from multiple dimensions. The year that has just passed was a reminder that history can be made up of events — and their consequences — beyond anyone’s control. The world was blindsided by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has not only taken lives and livelihoods but is accentuating the trends that were already visible in the last few years: changing global balance of power, weakening multilateral institutions, growing disenchantment with the global economic order, and challenges to the extant normative consensus.
The year 2021 therefore is beginning with a certain clarity which only the turmoil of 2020 could have made possible. Consequently, key aspects of the global order this year will be sculpted by the legacy of the year gone by. And perhaps no other factor will have as much of an impact on international affairs as China’s foreign policy trajectory under President Xi Jinping. Xi has already veered away from his predecessors in carving a more ambitious and aggressive approach to the external world. As the COVID-19 outbreak reached pandemic proportions, he used the crisis as an opportunity to expand China’s geopolitical footprint across the world — from the South and East China Seas to the Himalayas, from Europe to the Middle East. As Xi lays down a blueprint for a new world order hinged on the Chinese Communist Party’s worldview, the rest of the world will be anxiously looking for a greater balance in the global matrix.
For much of the rest of the world, such anticipation extends to the wait for the Biden administration in the United States to set out its own foreign policy agenda. Joe Biden has come to power at a time when America is divided on the fundamental values it has historically espoused. And while Donald Trump will soon be leaving the White House, Tumpism is alive and well. American leadership is in great demand precisely at a time when the country’s ability to deliver on its global commitments is at its weakest because of fraying domestic consensus.
Yet one area where there is emerging consensus not only in the US but globally as well, is the challenge that China poses to US interests and to the global order. The US-China contestation is shaping up as the epochal geopolitical contest of the coming years. Even if Biden decides to engage China after assuming the presidency later in January, it is unlikely to change the longer-term trajectory of this bilateral relationship. The sharpening of their tensions will be accentuated in the domains of trade and technology — the two areas that have been driving the global economic order in the last several decades.
Attempts by key global actors towards trade and technological decoupling is setting the stage for a conflict that is challenging the fundamentals of globalisation as we have known it since the early 1990s. An ongoing backlash against globalisation is likely to gain further momentum, especially as the costs of global integration are seemingly rising by the day. Already, there is a recalibration happening across the West where even mainstream political parties have been changing their long-held positions on issues such as trade and migration. It is unlikely, however, to be restricted to the West. As the world becomes more fragmented — from supply chains to connectivity initiatives — shoring up support for globalisation will only become more difficult.
This fragmentation will influence the future of global multilateralism. While most nations continue to profess their abiding faith in multilateralism, the institutional manifestations underpinning the extant order are getting hobbled by their internal contradictions. Indeed, a global health pandemic should have been the high point of the search for a collective solution; instead, it has turned out to be its nadir. Not only is China challenging an order that it believes was created in its absence, but even the US, which was its most important founder, seems dissatisfied with the status quo. The same liberal order that has arguably been central to maintaining peace and prosperity worldwide for more than seven decades, is proving incapable of finding equitable and effective solutions to today’s common challenges. This signals a remarkable retreat: a fragmented global order is emerging not only in traditional spheres of global governance but also in those areas where new norms are needed to be set — such as space, cyber and emerging strategic technologies.
The most consequential theatre of this emerging geopolitical and geoeconomic jostling will be the Indo-Pacific, which is already the centre of gravity of global opportunities and challenges – a process that will hasten in the near future. For all of China’s attempts to discredit the idea of the Indo-Pacific, its unprecedented acceptance — from western Europe to the far shores of the Pacific — merely shows that its time has come. The churn in this maritime geography will see a strengthening of “coalitions of the willing” in the absence of any formal institutional architecture and in light of an intensified major power contestation.
The other geography that is key to unlocking the global geopolitical chessboard will be Eurasia, where the Sino-Russian entente is producing new realities and can profoundly shape the global balance of power. While unlikely to result in a formal alliance, the China-Russia relationship is disproving some of the initial skepticism about it. Its future trajectory will not only shape the geopolitics of the heartland but will also push other major powers into reacting in ways that will upend some of the traditional calculus as we know them. And then there is the Middle East, a region that tends to hog the global limelight. The Abraham Accords have managed to overturn a number of assumptions about regional politics, opening up new possibilities in the region, both for cooperation and renewed conflict.
Indian foreign policy will have to respond to these meta-trends by crafting an approach that is more than just the sum of its bilateral and multilateral engagements. The year gone by was an inflection point in India’s China policy as it made clear for New Delhi the choices that it faces in the coming years and decades. But the crisis with China continues, even as the world’s expectations for India to play a larger global role are heightening. An aspirational India in the third decade of the 21st century will no longer be satisfied with sitting on the margins; it is eager to play in the big league. Like the rest of the world, India will have to deal with its health and economic crises in 2021. At the same time, however, it will also have opportunities to mould global discourse and outcomes, whether with its purported role as the “pharmacy of the world,” or as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The ability and willingness of Indian policymakers to make use of these opportunities will not only determine India’s global footprint but will also outline the trajectory of global politics in the coming decade.
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Professor Harsh V. Pant is Vice President – Studies and Foreign Policy at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. He is a Professor of International Relations ...
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