Gwynne Dyer: US containment of China sets dangerous scene

If there's anyone left to write the history of how World War III happened, they might well focus on June 28, 2005, as the date when the slide into global disaster became irreversible.

That was the day India's Defence Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a 10-year agreement on military co-operation, joint weapons production, and missile defence - not quite a formal US-Indian military alliance, but close enough that China finally realised it was the target of a deliberate American strategy to encircle and "contain" it.

Since then the rhetoric out of Beijing has been unprecedentedly harsh. In mid-July last year, for example, Major-General Zhu Chenghu warned in an official briefing that the Government may drop its policy of "no first use"of nuclear weapons in the event of a military conflict with the United States over Taiwan.

"We have no capability to fight a conventional war against the United States," he said. "We can't win this kind of war." And so China would deliberately escalate to nuclear weapons: "We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of their cities will be destroyed by the Chinese."

In reality, China has no ability to destroy "hundreds of cities" in the United States - it might manage one or two, with luck - whereas the US could easily destroy every Chinese city east of Xian, and all the ones west of it, too.

But no Chinese general has talked like this since Mao's time, and it isn't happening now because the crazies have taken over in Beijing. It's happening because the decision-makers in Beijing think that the crazies have taken over in Washington, and are trying to draw most of Asia into an anti-Chinese alliance. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest they are right.

"It's not yet an official kind of alliance like Nato, it's not mature yet," explained Dr Francis Kan, a strategic expert at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. "But we will see more informal co-operation like weapons harmonisation and assigning tasks [to various members]." And later on, Beijing fears, there will be the same ring of US allies and bases surrounding China that encircled the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

It's been coming for some time now - witness America's determined attempts to re-militarise its long-standing Japanese ally. And Washington is busily reviving old alliances and forging new ones in Southeast Asia. Thai, Malaysian, Singaporean, Indonesian and Filipino forces regularly exercise with American troops, and a US-led exercise in Thailand last year even involved Mongolian troops.

Now, with the deal between Washington and New Delhi, the keystone has dropped into place: the other emerging Asian giant has allied itself with the United States and against China.

THE US COURTSHIP of India did not really begin until George W. Bush became President in January 2001. As soon as he took office, he redefined China from "strategic partner" to "strategic competitor" - and when Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh was visiting Washington in April 2001, the US President summoned him to the White House for an unscheduled meeting. Singh came out declaring "the start of a new era" in Indo-US relations. When Bush went public the following month with a speech advocating "a new strategic framework" based on global missile defence, the reaction of other major powers ranged from cool to openly hostile, but in less than 24 hours India's Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, greeted it with enthusiasm. What was now on offer was a close defence relationship with the world's only superpower, and Vajpayee's right-wing, ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was all in favour of that.

By July General Henry Shelton, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had arrived in New Delhi to resurrect the long-moribund Defence Policy Group that used to co-ordinate military relations between the two countries. After the September 11 attacks, the revived agency had agreed to "expeditious review" of Indian requests to buy previously sanctioned items of high-tech military equipment like radars and maritime reconnaissance aircraft.

US Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, number three in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, travelled to New Delhi in person in May 2002 for the next meeting of the DPG. The declared goal of the meeting was to build "stability and security in Asia and beyond", but as P. R. Chari of the New Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies acidly remarked: "What they really mean is how to deal with China."

In October, the White House formally moved India into the same category as close allies like Japan and South Korea, thus removing the need for Congressional authorisation for sales of military equipment costing less than $14 million.

"China represents the most significant threat to both countries'

[India and the US] security in the future as an economic and military competitor," argued a classified US Defence Department document revealed by Jane's Foreign Report in 2003, and Lloyd Richardson of the Hudson Institute told the Financial Times that only India had "the economic and military strength to counter the adverse effects of China's rise as a regional and world power. India is the most overlooked of our potential allies in a strategy to contain China."

A US alliance seemed equally desirable to the truculent nationalists and Hindu supremacists of the BJP, who reflexively disliked and mistrusted China (which had thrashed India in a brief border war in 1962). But then, in May 2004, the BJP Government in New Delhi lost the election to the resurgent Congress Party led by Sonia Gandhi and former Finance Minister Manmohan Singh.

Many observers assumed the whole stealthy process of sliding India into the new US alliance system would now come to a sudden halt.

After all, the Congress Party was the author and guardian of India's hallowed policy of non-alignment. But in September 2004, soon after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took office, he met privately with President Bush during the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, and subsequent events strongly suggest that this was when they reached agreement in principle to forge a de facto military alliance.

What can have motivated Singh and his colleagues to do such a thing at a time when relations with China, while not particularly warm, were as good as they have been at any time in the past half-century? One motive was certainly Indian concern about the long-standing American alliance with India's local rival, Pakistan, revived and strengthened after 9/11. Closer Indian ties with Washington were a way to erode and undermine that US-Pakistan link.

Indians often feel slighted by the greater attention and respect paid to the other Asian giant, China, so US support for the country's aspirations to be taken seriously as a first-rank great power had great appeal. Even more appealing was the promise of state-of-the-art American military technology. It seems certain that by late 2004 the list already included the Patriot PAC-II anti-missile defence system, F-16 fighters, P3C Orion maritime surveillance plane, C-130 stretched medium-lift transport aircraft, Perry-class frigates, and Sea Hawk helicopters.

IT WAS a tempting package for Indian military and civilian leaders who dream of seeing their country in the first rank of the world's nations, but there was one enormous drawback.

A close Indian-US alliance, combined with an ambitious upgrade programme for the Indian armed forces, was bound to alarm China.

"India knows what it is doing," assured Prem Shankar Jha, former editor of the Hindustan Times, citing confidential sources close to Prime Minister Singh. "It is not going to make China an enemy."

And that is no doubt exactly what India's leaders believe: that they can get what they want from those clumsy Americans without letting Washington manoeuvre them into a confrontation with China. They are smarter, more sophisticated, and they can manage China's reaction.

The arrogance of Washington's neo-conservatives has found its natural partner in the over-confidence of New Delhi's politicians and strategists, and the whole world may have reason to regret it.

On March 25 last year, in a briefing now famous in India, a State Department spokesman declared President Bush and the new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, had "developed the outline for a decisively broader strategic relationship" with India. When Rice travelled to New Delhi a few days later, she told the Prime Minister that Washington wanted to "help India become a major world power in the 21st century". The deal was about to be consummated - and suddenly China woke up.

There seems little doubt that Beijing had been asleep at the switch, broadly aware that the US was trying to lure India into an alliance but ignorant of how far matters had advanced. So Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's scheduled swing through south Asia abruptly took on a new goal: to dissuade New Delhi from signing up with Washington.

He reached New Delhi on April 10, less than two weeks after Condoleezza Rice, and he came bearing a number of gifts: an offer of a free trade area between the two countries, an official Chinese map that for the first time showed the tiny Himalayan state of Sikkim as Indian territory, and (according to one usually reliable Indian source) a proposed swap of disputed territories along the western and eastern sections of the border between India and Tibet, the scenes of the clash in 1962, that would have ended the border quarrel in one fell swoop.

It was too little, too late. India pocketed the map, agreed to open discussions on a free trade area, and refused the swap.

Two months later, on June 28, Indian Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee flew to Washington to sign a 10-year agreement on military co-operation and joint weapons production. "The United States and India have entered a new era," said the joint statement by Mukherjee and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The US strategy would be less frightening if it were only the handiwork of a band of neo-conservatives. Unfortunately, they are not alone.

From the beginning of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union unexpectedly thrust the United States into the role of the world's sole superpower, the bipartisan response in Washington has been a determination to perpetuate that exalted status indefinitely. As the projected figures for Chinese economic growth turned into concrete fact in the later 1990s, it was inevitable that US policy-makers would identify China as the main potential challenger to its power. And it was close to inevitable, given the influence of the American military-industrial complex and the degree to which US domestic debate and foreign policy have been militarised, that their response would be predominantly military. To the man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Never mind that China is becoming America's largest trading partner. Never mind that Indian sources assess the Chinese defence budget at around US$30 billion ($44 billion) a year, less than one-tenth the size of America's. Never mind that the Chinese regime is no longer a serious ideological rival to the United States, and that it has no substantial territorial ambitions (except for eventual reunification with Taiwan) beyond its present borders. China is the rising power, and therefore the next enemy, and the appropriate American response is the one that worked last time: surround it with alliances and military bases, and "contain" it.

The closest historical analogy for the Indo-US treaty of 2005 is the Anglo-Russian treaty of 1907 that completed the formation of the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) and was designed to "contain" the rising great power of that day, Germany.

That is not to say that this new entente - the US, Japan and India, plus various minor players - will also lead to a world war, but it could easily panic the Chinese regime and lead to the militarisation of much of Asia.

The main bulwark between us and the deeply undesirable outcome of war is the profound vulnerability of the current Chinese Communist regime, whose credibility with its increasingly sophisticated citizens depends on delivering continuously rising prosperity - so the one thing that it must avoid at all costs is a military confrontation with China's major overseas customers that would bring growth crashing to a halt. Even if China is doomed to face a direct military confrontation with the United States at some time in the future, any later time would be better than now, so the regime plays a long game and refuses to panic. Long may that policy continue, but US alliance-building in Asia is putting it under increasing pressure.

Chinese nationalism is not just a tool with which the regime manipulates the masses. It is a powerful emotion felt by hundreds of millions of people, and they are not all blind to what is happening around their borders. A more democratic Chinese Government might have to take a more robust line on the issue of the American military encirclement.

In a society with a free press and an elected Government, it would be much harder to prevent political parties and vocal interest groups from stirring up public anxiety about America's intentions. The sharpest irony in this sorry business is that the Bush Administration, which claims to be spreading democracy around the planet, has created a situation in which the safety of us all may depend on the survival of an undemocratic and unpopular Government in the world's most populous country.

* Gwynne Dyer's latest book, Future: Tense, will be published in New Zealand in February by Sphere.