Franz Ferdinand

Gwynne Dyer has an excellent article in The Walrus magazine this month about the US's ambitions to use India as an Asian bulwark against China. It's not online, but I would definitely reccomend that you pick up a copy when you can. The article is relatively short, so if you know a library that carries it, check it out there.

However, I was struck by Dyer's comparison between the US and Japan using India against China on the one hand, and the UK and France using Russia against Germany on the other. The Indians seem to believe that their relationship with the Americans can be negotiated according to India's needs, not the eccentricities of the US Senate. I'm not optimistic. India could easily find itself dragged in to a war with China over Taiwan, much as Germany was "dragged" (according to some historians) in to a war with the Entente powers over a dispute between Austria and Russia.

(And now I hope that my post title will accidentally attract readers looking for the band.)

The two real questions in my mind as to the future of asia are 1) How long does the Communist party last, and what effect does that have on Sino-US relations, and 2) Am I (and Dyer, for that matter) wrong - can India in fact have it's cake and eat it too? History's not optimistic on that second count, but it is only history, right?

The first question is more interesting, to my mind. Some liberal PoliSci theorists argue that war between democracies is impossible. While I'm sympathetic, I'm not optimistic. A newly-democratic China could if anything be more impatient with what it might see as foreign interference in Taiwan, or Japanese insults about the history of the Pacific War, or Indian obstinacy over border disputes. If you think a democratic China would get along better with Japan, remember that it was the Communists who suppressed anti-Japanese protests earlier this year.

It's not at all difficult to imagine, in my mind anyway, a young democracy in Beijing, full of nationalist fervor, demanding the reunification of China (i.e. subordinating Taiwan within the new government.) Unless Japan and the US decided this was an internal matter for the new democracy (which I think is unlikely) this could easily lead to war. Even if Japan didn't directly attack China or Chinese forces, if it was perceived to be "aiding" or "sympathetic" to the Taiwanese (which it probably would in fact be) this could widen the war.

There's a third question, come to think about it: Whither Europe? I think we naturally assume that in a major war, Europe would be on the side of the USA, but Russia and China both have impressive leverage on Brussels, Berlin and Paris. At the very least, it's possible that they could convince the Europeans to sit out a major fight in the east - and it's questionable what Europe could do to help, anyway. The Russians, I think, would almost certainly be in Beijing's camp. There's the natural (to Moscow's mind, anyway) Chechnya/Taiwan analogy, and of course Moscow and Beijing share a strategic vision of trying to roll back US power.

But back to Dyer: One of the other neat tidbits from the article is simply the number of countries the US has enlisted in it's encirclement of China. Except for Russia, the US has essentially every one of China's major neighbours in Southeast Asia as an ally or partner. While Dyer rightly notes that this is meaningless with modern military technology, it's still a non-trivial psychological game to play. If the Chinese leadership (Communist or post-Communist) feel they're surrounded and for whatever reason they don't believe they can secure China's interests through peaceful means (like Germany was convinced in 1914, and Japan in 1941) then the world is in serious danger.

So why does the US (and India, for that matter) want to play this game? Nobody wins, right?