Round two: the rest versus the rest

By Philip Stephens

Published: June 16 2011 20:20 | Last updated: June 16 2011 20:20

Once in a while received wisdom is upturned by a fleeting headline. It happened the other day when the FT reported that “Vietnam seeks US support in China dispute”. The stylised view of the new global order frames it as a contest between the established west and the rising rest. The more interesting story is the one about the rest versus the rest.

The spat between Hanoi and Beijing is the latest in a series of disputes over control of the resource-rich South China Sea. In crude terms, China claims all of it. But the dotted line that marks out this ambition on Chinese maps is hotly contested by just about everyone else. The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have their own territorial and maritime claims. Japan has a separate argument with China about a cluster of islands in the East China Sea.

These clashes, then, are not new. Nor is the animosity between Vietnam and China. The Americans had not been gone five years before the two countries fought a vicious border war during the late 1970s. What’s new is the marked heightening of tension as China has adopted a strikingly assertive neighbourhood policy.

Strategically sited on the South China Sea, Cam Ranh Bay served as a pivotal US air and naval base during the war between South and North Vietnam. Now Hanoi says foreign (that means American) ships could again be given access to the naval facility. The signal to Beijing is clear enough. Push too hard and Vietnam will provide physical support to the US fleet in guaranteeing freedom of navigation.

Others have also been mending fences and warming their relationships with Washington as China waves its stick. There is more to such disputes than Beijing’s desire to restore the tributary system that afforded imperial China suzerainty over its smaller neighbours.

They are a harbinger of a global geometry more complex than the assumed standoff between status quo and emerging powers. Convenient as it is to paint a geopolitical landscape in which the interests of rising nations are in symmetrical collision with those of the west, the new order is more likely to have irregular and overlapping contours. Some among the rest will prefer the company of the west.

The relationship between the US and China looks set to be the most important of the present century, but the most volatile will be those that see the rest square up to the rest. The new powers, of course, have aspirations and instincts in common, not least in challenging western domination of the global commons. As often as not, however, the rivalries between these states are deeper than those with the west.

The decade-old Shanghai Co-operation Organisation speaks to an apparent confluence of interests between China, Russia and central Asian states such as Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The SCO counts India, Pakistan and Iran among states with observer status. Some might consider the organisation a natural counterpoint to Nato. Yet to list the participants in the SCO is also to see the fragility of the enterprise.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has put itself firmly on the side of the rest. Curiously for a state that still likes to pretend it is a superpower equal to the US, it seems happy to be designated one of the Bric nations.

This positioning is an accident of post-cold war history. Mr Putin’s worldview was shaped by national humiliation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He is of a generation of Russians that cannot shake off the notion that Russia’s natural adversary is the US-led Nato alliance.

An objective strategic assessment would say the opposite. The biggest threats to Russia are internal – economic obsolescence and rapid population decline. The external challenges come from the south and east: from Islamist extremism and the pressures on a depopulated Siberia from a burgeoning China.

China scorns Russia as a declining nation, unable to produce anything useful except oil and gas, and slowly but surely drinking itself to death. Even its military technology now falls short of Beijing’s ambitions. Russians must know this. A strategic outlook unburdened by emotion would see Moscow exchange the part of useful idiot in Beijing for economic integration with the west.

The more obvious competition is between India and China. Half a century has passed since the two countries went to war. Indian officials say the country’s border with China is now one of its quietest. Yet the rapid expansion of trade and investment flows has not removed the suspicions.

China is the strongest opponent of India’s pitch for permanent membership of the UN Security Council. Indian military strategy is still shaped by the possibility of war with its powerful neighbour – its suspicions nourished by Beijing’s close military ties with Pakistan.

This month the Pakistan government suggested China could be offered a naval base at the south-western port of Gwadar. Nothing could be more calculated to heighten Indian neuroses about Beijing’s naval ambitions in the Indian Ocean; nor to nudge Delhi a little further in the direction of Washington.

These may seem peculiarly Asian problems, the legacies of past wars and still-disputed borders. But the rise of new powers will also create stresses elsewhere. Turkey is seen by the west as overly sympathetic to the present regime in Iran. Yet the two countries are also natural rivals for regional primacy.

Shared interests have pulled rising economies closer together. They are less dependent on the west. The expansion of south-south ties will fuel the next round of global growth. But it is far from self-evident that Latin American and African states will be forever content with the role of raw material producers for the Asian giants. Brazil already counts itself as one of the sternest critics of China’s exchange rate policy.

What emerges from all this is a global landscape in which competition and rivalries and regional alliances and hedging criss-cross the notional boundaries between the west and the rest. Europe may well choose to sit on the margins of influence. The likely role of the US will be that of the indispensable balancing power.