Parallel Quad In The Making

P Kharel

Tectonic changes in global power equation were gradually in the making since the inception of the new millennium. The mighty West that had dominated the world for three centuries began to sense the emerging threat to their vice-like grip on setting global agendas. The US-led Quad that includes India, Japan and Australia is apparently to check the influence of China and Russia in the Indo-Pacific region.

As a counterweight, China appears to be striving for a similar grouping in the shape of Russia-China-Iran and Pakistan alliance. China has repeatedly stressed that it has no intention of exporting the Chinese system to other countries. 

The West-dominated World Bank had not anticipated the growth and development on the scale being witnessed in China and Russia’s return to a superpower status. Speed and discipline seem to be Beijing’s mantra, given the rush with which plans are drafted and projects undertaken. New and ambitious China cruises with confidence.

It represents the testament to China’s dramatic rise in military might and economic height. This signals the beginning of the decline in the West’s overwhelming dominance in setting political, economic and cultural agendas on their own terms. 

In a few decades, Chinese language is likely to make a big presence in Europe, the very continent that blames China for much of the erosion of its economic clout. As Chinese expertise grows in demand, Beijing eyes Africa’s millions of unemployed, underemployed and underpaid labour. 

Emerging players

With vast but largely untapped natural resources, Africa is destined to a dramatically positive transformation within the next few decades. Whereas the populations of most other regions are declining, Africa’s keeps increasing to the extent of becoming the home of 30 per cent of the world’s total population within the next three decades.

This means a welcome presence of the largest youth population. Monopoly represents exclusion of ideas and competitors, which is non-cooperative and anti-pluralism. Behind their economic clout and technological advance, the few rich nations expected the rest of the world to automatically accept their definitions and descriptions of world values, and what is good for all. That had to change sooner or later. 

Although World War II might have ended in 1945 sounding the rhetoric of democracy, independence and human rights, the victors buried the core spirit of the rhetoric. Colonies continued to suffer and die for their struggle for independence, freedom. Decolonisation in Africa began in real earnest only in the 1960s.

From their decades of talk of democracy as being the ultimate in human governance, Western scholars have emerged talking of the death of democracy because of discrepancies in glaring approaches of the advanced democracies to dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. 

As a world body, the United Nations is a product of inequality. Its Security Council tells all about the attitude WW II’s key victors. They pocketed the majority of seats, leaving a lone seat to represent the rest of the world. Even so, they cannot stomach majority decisions that do not comply with their interests. At the end of the day — or when the crunch came — it was not majority support but West’s interests that become the prime objective. For instance, the US and British quit UNESCO when they could not have their way through the majority of its members. 

Disregarding the foreknowledge that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not possess any banned weapons of mass destruction, the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave full active support to the invasion in Iraq. He knew the lie would eventually be known to the rest of the world. In a note to George W. Bush, he had committed himself completely to the US president of full support: the infamous “whatever”.

Living with such attitude does not drive the democracy van well. Some leaders resort to sinister schemes and become submissive to the strong and dismissive toward the weak, as exemplified by Blair, who wrote from 10 Downing Street to the US President George W. Bush in 2002: “I will be with you, whatever... Getting rid of Saddam is the right thing to do.

” The invasion of Iraq a year later caused the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi civilians in the earthly phase of the war. Some say the number is more than one million. However, the issue of so many civilian deaths has never been pursued with the proactive persistence with which human rights groups are known to have pursued elsewhere is starkly missing in the Iraq case.  

Soft target

Dismayed that China has emerged as the “second superpower”, Blair the other day warned that the era of the West’s political and economic dominance was at risk of coming to an end. Not only does he advocate significant increase in NATO’s defence spending but expanding “soft power” in developing countries. Countries, long dominant in setting global agendas, exercising their powers as dictated primarily by self-interests rather in compliance with their declared policies of uniform approach find their clout and credibility sharply declining in the recent decades. 

Functioning democracies cozying up with known dictators and authoritarian regimes does not jell with their lofty declarations. Glaring discrepancies expose hypocrisy, and unwittingly offer, in a golden platter, convenient opportunities for their competitors with credible grounds for gaining points in the race for international clout. 

Hence, a rival Quad could very well emerge as an effective working partnership for those involved. If the US and India are Quad’s nuclear powers, Russia, China and Pakistan are similarly equipped in the new grouping that might be in the pipeline. The latter’s geographical spread for core strategic interests are spread more evenly than that of Quad and their combined population outstrips the US-led group.  

Even as global power equations shift, the world community cannot afford to overlook which way the wind is blowing for individual security and economic interests of individual nations. This is not time for reckless plunge but well planned policies based on careful calculations aimed at enduring benefits. And sane minds should give the highest priority to peace and humanitarian issue beyond narrow considerations. 

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)