Three sides in search of a triangle : Singapore-America-India relations 9789812308856, 9812308857, 9789812308863, 9812308865

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The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) was established as an autonomous organization in 1968. It is a regional centre dedicated to the study of socio-political, security and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia and its wider geostrategic and economic environment. The Institute’s research programmes are the Regional Economic Studies (RES, including ASEAN and APEC), Regional Strategic and Political Studies (RSPS), and Regional Social and Cultural Studies (RSCS). ISEAS Publishing, an established academic press, has issued almost 2,000 books and journals. It is the largest scholarly publisher of research about Southeast Asia from within the region. ISEAS Publishing works with many other academic and trade publishers and distributors to disseminate important research and analyses from and about Southeast Asia to the rest of the world.

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Asad-ul Iqbal Latif

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Singapore

First published in Singapore in 2009 by ISEAS Publishing Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Pasir Panjang Singapore 119614 E-mail: [email protected] Website: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. © 2009 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore The responsibility for facts and opinions in this publication rests exclusively with the author and his interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views or the policies of ISEAS or its supporters. ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Latif, Asad-ul Iqbal. Three sides in search of a triangle : Singapore-America-India relations. 1. United States—Foreign relations—Singapore. 2. Singapore—Foreign relations—United States. 3. United States—Foreign relations—India. 4. India—Foreign relations—United States. 5. India—Foreign relations—Singapore. 6. Singapore—Foreign relations—India. I. Title E183.9L35 2009 ISBN 978-981-230-885-6 (hard cover) ISBN 978-981-230-886-3 (PDF) Typeset by Superskill Graphics Pte Ltd Printed in Singapore by Utopia Press Pte Ltd

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For My Parents-in-law, Sri Phani Lal Ghosh and Srimati Eva Ghosh

Shob thai mor ghor aachhey, aami shei ghor mori khujiya. Deshey deshey mor desh aachhey, aami shei desh lobho jujhiya… Ghorey Ghorey aachhey poromatyio, tarey aami phiri khujiya. — “Probashi”

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface xi I Pax Americana 1 II State of Play 44 III Terrorism 65 IV China 98 V Democracy 137 VI Conclusion and Prospects

171

Bibliography 181 Index

199

About the Author 213

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Acknowledgements

This work is an updated version of a monograph that I wrote at Harvard University as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in 2006–07. It is the outcome of a research project that was initiated at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), where I work as a Visiting Research Fellow. I wish to thank the Fulbright Scholarship Board for selecting me for the award, Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs for hosting me, and Ambassador K. Kesavapany, the Director of ISEAS, for supporting my work at Harvard. At Weatherhead, I am grateful to Professor Alastair Iain Johnston for agreeing to be my faculty host; to Professor Beth Simmons, the Director; to Mr Steven Bloomfield, the Executive Director, for accepting me as a visiting scholar; and to Ms Michelle Eureka and Mr Tom Murphy, whose cheerfulness and care and concern ensured that I never felt that I had left my first home, ISEAS. At ISEAS, I would like to thank Ms Sheryl Sin Bing Peng for her careful editorial eye in checking and proof-reading the manuscript.

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Preface

Singapore is America’s closest security partner in Southeast Asia. The United States has decided to help India become a major world power in the twenty-first century. Singapore’s relationship with India is an increasingly pertinent feature of Southeast Asia’s political and strategic landscape. Whether these three realities lay the basis of a triangular relationship among America, India, and Singapore is the question that this book seeks to answer. This book is an essay in diplomatic history. It begins with a review of the literature on the notion of a Pax Americana, which provides an introductory framework for the subsequent arguments. The book then goes on to describe the state of bilateral relations among the three countries as they stand since the end of the Cold War. Subsequently, it analyses three core issues — the Global War on Terror, the rise of China, and the agency of democracy in international relations — that play a defining role in relations among Singapore, the United States, and India. The book concludes by suggesting some directions in which the relations might move. Several caveats are in order here. No attempt is made in this work to study each bilateral relationship — say, between Singapore and the United States — in terms of the other two relationships, that being an exciting exercise, no doubt, but one fraught with the dangers of hypothesis given the paucity of official or scholarly material on how each relationship affects and

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Preface

is affected by the others. Clearly, too, an essay of this scope cannot hope to provide a detailed analysis of America’s prosecution of the Global War on Terror; the complexities of China’s rise and its effect on relations with the United States, Singapore and India; or of the consequences of America’s desire to spread democracy, itself a contested term in the regional contexts in which it purportedly is taking place. Nor are these imperatives the only factors that bear on the possible emergence of a triangular relationship among Washington, Singapore, and New Delhi: there are economic, social, and security issues, including energy security, that are important in themselves and deserve scrutiny separately. There are also regional institutions, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, and the East Asian Summit process, that will influence eventual outcomes. Last but not least, policies pursued by Japan and Russia impinge on those outcomes; these policies are outside the scope of this study. What this book seeks to do is to demonstrate the nevertheless critical roles played by the War on Terror, China and democracy in relations among the three countries, while keeping in view the broader international context in which these factors originate and function.

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Pax Americana

1 CHAPTER I

PAX AMERICANA

It is inevitable perhaps that historical analogies should become insistent at turning points in history. So it is with the end of the Cold War, a denouement that rewrote the rules for great powers such as the United States, middle powers like India, and small states like Singapore. At issue was the very nature of the global order. In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John Mearsheimer notes that bipolar systems tend to be the most peaceful; unbalanced multipolar systems are the most conflict-prone; and balanced multipolar systems fall between the two extremes. Bipolar systems are characterized by two great powers neither of which is decidedly more powerful than the other. Unbalanced multipolar systems are dominated by three or more great powers, one of them being a potential hegemon. Balanced multipolar systems are dominated by three or more great powers, none of which aspires to be the hegemon. In bipolar systems, the most stable of the three systems, great-power wars occur infrequently and,

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Reproduced from Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs Vol. 30, No. 3 (December 2008) (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are available at < http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg >

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when they do, are likely to see a great power fight a minor power, not the rival great power. Unbalanced multipolar systems are very dangerous, primarily because potential hegemons are likely to fight all the other great powers. In balanced multipolarity, greatpower war is more likely to occur than it is in bipolarity but less likely than in unbalanced multipolarity. If wars do occur between the great powers, they are likely to be one-on-one or two-on-one engagements and not system-wide conflicts.1 In the wake of the Cold War, Mearsheimer argues, Europe remains bipolar, with Russia and America featuring as the region’s principal rivals. Northeast Asia, by contrast, is a region with a balanced multipolar system in which China, Russia, and the United States are the three great powers, and none with the character of a potential hegemon. While the United States is a hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, it is not a global hegemon; it is certainly the most powerful actor in Northeast Asia, but it is “an offshore balancer without territorial aspirations”.2 Mearsheimer places his theory, which he labels “offensive realism”, in the grand tradition of E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, which was published in the United Kingdom shortly after World War II began; Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations, an essay in human nature or classical realism that was published in the United States in the early days of the Cold War; and Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, a study in defensive or structural realism that appeared in the latter half of the Cold War.3 Mearsheimer’s own work marks the maturing of the Realist strand in American thinking on international affairs in the opening decade of the post-Cold War century. His analysis of the global scene is predicated on his analysis of the distribution of power in Europe from the outbreak

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of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in 1792 to the end of the Cold War in 1990. He divides the period into seven phases: Napoleonic Era I, 1792–93 (balanced multipolarity); Napoleonic Era II, 1793–1815 (unbalanced multipolarity); the nineteenth century, 1815–1902 (balanced multipolarity); the Kaiser Reich Era, 1903–18 (unbalanced multiipolarity); the Inter-War Years, 1919–38 (balanced multipolarity); the Nazi Era, 1939–45 (unbalanced multipolarity); and the Cold War, 1945–90 (bipolarity).4

A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY What should America’s role be in the post-Cold War world? There is little doubt that Washington intended to preserve its influence in regions where the end of the war could provoke instability. In August 1990, President George H.W. Bush announced the “Aspen Strategy” — so named after the Aspen Institute where he delivered his speech — in which forces would be cut by a fourth but they would be involved in preserving international stability and would possess the ability to intervene in regional threats to that stability. Given the unlikelihood of a superpower conflict, Washington’s emphasis turned to military contingencies that might entail war with a Third World power. This strategy, known also as the “New National Security Strategy” and the “Strategy for a New World Order”, was reflected in the first Gulf War.5 In 1992, the contingencies that could attract U.S. intervention broadened to include another Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a North Korean attack on South Korea, a Philippine coup, a Panamanian coup that threatened the canal zone, and a war between Russia and Lithuania, Poland and Byelorussia with intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).6 Linking trade and security, The National

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Security Strategy of the United States of America, published in July 1994, based American interests on enlarging the community of market democracies while deterring and containing a range of threats to the nation, its allies, and its interests. America’s central goals were to maintain a strong defence capability and promote cooperative security measures, to open foreign markets and spur global economic growth, and to promote democracy. The “presumption” that U.S. military force “could or should unilaterally enforce a global order” was dramatized by the 1994–99 Defense Planning Guidance document, which stated clearly America’s desire to prevent the emergence of a rival to its global supremacy.7 Washington must “endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia”.8 Although the classified document envisioned American domination as being benevolent and as furthering the interests of Washington’s allies along with its own, it did not shy away from emphasizing “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” and “the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated” or in a crisis when a quick response is required. In sum, the draft document made the case for “a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy”.9 Although the Pentagon later removed the muscular “one superpower” section of the document, from whose more controversial formulations the White House had

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distanced itself quickly, the case was established for a new military “Pax Americana”.10 In keeping with this broader outlook, the U.S. Department of Defence issued a report on East Asia in 1995 that — unlike its 1990 and 1992 reports, which had anticipated reductions in its forward deployed forces in the region — confirmed America’s intention to maintain approximately 100,000 troops in East Asia for the foreseeable future, while increasing its efforts to share security responsibilities with its friends and allies, and to broaden bilateral and multilateral engagement. In a pointed response to what it saw as the evolving security situation in Pacific Asia, the United States strengthened its alliance with Japan through the April 1996 Joint Security Declaration and the September 1997 revised Guidelines for U.S.-Japan Defence Cooperation. It also expanded its security cooperation with, and military access to, countries in Southeast Asia while working with the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to enhance regionwide dialogue and confidence-building through the ASEAN Regional Forum. Moreover, the United States reaffirmed its security alliance with Australia through the 1996 Joint Security Declaration (the “Sydney Statement”). Pax Americana was taking shape. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) — a neoconservative think-tank, some of whose members would come to play prominent policy-making roles in the George W. Bush Administration — elaborated on the requirements of the American peace in its statement of principles declared in June 1997. Arguing that America had a vital role to play in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, it warned: “The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to

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shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.”11 How to shape circumstances was spelled out in a PNAC report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,12 which proposed four core missions for the U.S. military: to defend the American homeland; to fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars; to perform “constabulary” duties in critical regions; and to utilize the Revolution in Military Affairs to transform itself. To carry out these tasks, the U.S. would have to increase military spending gradually to a minimum level of 3.5 per cent to 3.8 per cent of its gross domestic product; expand its military from 1.4 million to 1.6 million activeduty personnel; modernize its forces selectively; maintain its nuclear strategic superiority, basing its nuclear deterrent on the entire spectrum of current and emerging threats, not merely the balance with Russia; develop global missile defences that would protect the American homeland and American allies; move forces to permanent bases in Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia; change naval deployment patterns to reflect growing U.S. strategic concerns in East Asia; and move to control the international commons of space and cyberspace.13 It was a comprehensive agenda.

A NEOCONSERVATIVE EMPIRE? That agenda was in keeping with the over-reaching tendencies of neoconservatism, a school of thought that began as a campus ideology in the 1930s among lapsed Trotskyites disenchanted by the mutation of Marxism-Leninism into Joseph Stalin’s bureaucratic totalitarianism. Neoconservatism was “the last remake of US exceptionalist nationalism” that offered an intellectual and political “exit strategy from the abrupt

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disappearance of those moral and political certainties that had provided the pillars of US Cold War policies and discourse”.14 The neoconservative ascendancy in American public affairs is traced to the Reagan presidency, which brought down the “evil” Soviet empire by outspending it in military competition. Influential during the George H.W. Bush Administration, members of the movement fell out of favour intellectually in the Clinton Administration. Nevertheless, they continued to make a case for a robust role for America in the post-Soviet world. “What should that role be?” William Kristol and Robert Kagan asked. Their reply: “Benevolent global hegemony.” Having defeated the “evil empire”, the United States enjoys “strategic and ideological predominance”. Hence, the first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to “preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America’s security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.”15 Deeply influential in the George W. Bush Administration, particularly in the Pentagon, the neoconservatives defended their maximalist agenda for American influence. Among the neocon defence intellectuals were former Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz; Richard Perle, ex-chairman of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, who helped shape the “creative destruction” agenda for reshaping the Middle East, beginning with the invasion of Iraq; former Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith; Lewis Libby, chief of staff and national security advisor to Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had been deputy undersecretary of defence for policy; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who had been undersecretary for arms control at the State Department;16 Elliott Abrams, deputy assistant to the President and

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deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy; and consummate Washington insider Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Defence Policy Board. They were guided by the thinking of neoconversatives outside the Administration, intellectuals such as Irving Kristol, “the godfather of neoconservatism” who once defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality”.17 Drawing on Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, the “favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs”, Kristol summarizes the key tenets of its worldview. First, patriotism is a “natural and healthy sentiment”. Secondly, by contrast, “world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny”, and so international institutions that point to “an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion”. Thirdly, statesmen should be able to distinguish friends from enemies. Finally, for a great power, the national interest is not a “geographical term”. It is natural for a smaller nation to have a defensive foreign policy. “A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.” Defending fellow-democracies is one such interest, witness America’s defence of France and Britain in World War II and its need to defend Israel today. The “incredible” military superiority of the United States vis-à-vis other nations, based on its strong economic growth, gives it the wherewithal to afford its ideological inclinations, unlike the Soviet Union, which “spent profusely but wastefully, so that its military collapsed along with its economy”. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, after two decades during which

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the contending fears of imperial decline and imperial overstretch had become watchwords, the United States has emerged as uniquely powerful. “With power come responsibilities, whether sought or not, whether welcome or not”, Kristol argues. “And it is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it, or the world will discover them for you.” Older and traditional elements in the Republican party might not be able to acknowledge “this new reality in foreign affairs”, but “our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment”.18 The overthrow of a vile dictatorship in Iraq, both to ensure Israel’s security and to build the first Arab democracy, became the key pursuit of the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush Administration. This goal had become a part of their agenda even before the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, but after them, world events seemed to be pointing to an inevitable and imminent collision between the interests of the United States and its ideological adversaries like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba and, further down the road, China. Diplomatic unilateralism — including a barely-revealed loathing for the United Nations, seen as a painless multilateral means for other countries, including the impossible French, to tie down the United States — and military pre-emption became the keywords of the neoconservative strategy on Iraq. In the aftermath of the disaster in Iraq, prominent neoconservatives — Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and David Frum — are blaming White House incompetence for undermining their grand designs.19 Francis Fukuyama, a leading neoconservative intellectual, officially has signalled his departure from neoconservatism. He

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argues that his The End of History presented “a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism”. By contrast, in the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, “the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will”. Fukuyama argues that “Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.”20 The neoconservative interregnum in American foreign policy has provoked, meanwhile, a cottage industry of literature on whether the United States is, should be, cannot be, or should not be an empire. In a review of several books on the theme,21 John Ikenberry makes the fundamental point that the United States “is not just a superpower pursuing its interest; it is a producer of world order”. If empire is defined as “a hierarchical system of political relationships in which the most powerful state exercises decisive influence, then the United States today indeed qualifies”. However, he argues that it is important to note that for most countries, the U.S.-led order is “a negotiated system wherein the United States has sought participation by other states on terms that are mutually agreeable”. While it is true that Washington has pursued imperial policies, especially towards weak countries on the periphery, its relations with Brussels, Tokyo, Beijing, or Moscow are not imperial. Instead, the advanced democracies operate within a security community in which “the use or threat of force is

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unthinkable”. Also, their economies are interwoven deeply. “This is not empire; it is a U.S.-led democratic political order that has no name or historical antecedent.” Ikenberry concludes: “When all is said and done, Americans are less interested in ruling the world than they are in creating a world of rules.”22 While non-Americans disagree over the degree to which the United States should create the world of rules, they are concerned about the nature of world order that is shaping up in the post-Cold War era. The British diplomat Robert Cooper compares the end of the Cold War with the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the emergence of the modern European state system at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Following the end of a second thirty years’ war, from 1914 to 1945, the Cold War brought the international system together in a global confrontation.23 What came to an end in 1989 was not only the Cold War or even World War II — since the “2+4” Treaty ending the post-war arrangements for Berlin and Germany represented the final settlement of the Second World War, too — but, in Europe, three-century-old political systems formed around the balance of power and the imperial urge. Both balance and empire ceased to be the ruling concepts in Europe and consequently, “the world no longer forms a single political system”.24 Cooper divides the world into three co-existing systems: a pre-modern system consisting of failed or failing states like Somalia, Afghanistan, and Liberia where the state has lost the legitimate monopoly of the use of force; a modern system (including the United States) where the continuing resonance of power and raison d’etat reflects a Machiavellian and Clausewitzian calculus of interests and forces; and a postmodern system, exemplified by the European Union, that has

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moved beyond both state sovereignty and the balance of power. Modern Europe was born with the Peace of Westphalia; postmodern Europe started with the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and began to take shape through the adoption of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Ottawa Convention banning anti-personnel mines, and the treaty establishing an International Criminal Court.25 Given the chaotic possibilities of the pre-modern system, Cooper proposes a “voluntary imperialism”. This would operate via the assistance programmes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in return for whose offer of a way back into the global economy, a country would accept advice and supervision; and United Nations trusteeship in cases of a more general failure of the state.26 The pre-modern world — existing today in what was the Third World created by the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union — would have to be taken under the tutelage of the institutions of the modern and postmodern worlds.

THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE The need for a world order legitimized by the consent of free peoples has produced a vision of America’s place in global affairs, alternative to that of the Realists. This vision is presented by Liberals in the tradition of Joseph Nye, who has made his case in books such as Soft Power and The Paradox of American Power.27 Although not since imperial Rome has any nation possessed such a combination of military, economic, and cultural power as America, its power is still insufficient to resolve global problems such as terrorism, environmental degradation, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, he argues, calling for America to adopt a

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more cooperative engagement with the rest of the world in dealing with global issues. The way to do so involves the use of soft power, which means getting others to desire the same outcomes as the United States does. The conditions for projecting soft power have been transformed dramatically in recent years by the growth in the number of democracies. Nye’s argument has a bearing on the prosecution of American interests through non-military means, particularly the international promotion of democracy and human rights, or the Liberal Peace. It is consonant with the Administration’s view that market democracies are beneficial to international security. The (free) “market” part of that equation caught the contemporary public imagination in the mid-1990s, when Thomas Friedman announced his charming “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”: that no nations had gone to war with each other since a branch of the McDonald’s burger chain had opened in either.28 The theory is based on the notion that countries that support a McDonald’s have achieved a level of economic prosperity and political stability (and social complacency) to make war unattractive to their citizens.29 Friedman was not quite right: McDonald’s, present in the United States since the mid-1950s, opened a branch in Panama in 1971, thus making the 1989 war with the United States an exception to the Golden Arches “theory”. In any case, scholars lost no time in warning that if the company continued to expand at its present rate, war might yet take place between the lands of McDonald’s. Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History, said that he would “not be surprised if, in the next 10 years, several of these McDonald’s nations go to war with each other” because the average income in many countries which boasted branches of the chain probably was too low to guarantee economic

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and political stability.30 That was soon proved true. On 24 March 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began its air attack on Yugoslavia. “Faced with angry nationalism, vandalism and boycotts, all the McDonalds in Yugoslavia shut their doors on 26 March. This means that for two full days, McDonaldland was wrenched asunder by its first intramural war ever.” There was also the Kargil exception. India’s first McDonald’s opened on 13 October 1996, and Pakistan’s on 19 September 1998; the 1999 Kargil War made “a mockery out of all our truisms”.31 Whatever the fate of “market democracies”, democratic peace is “the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations”, one scholar contends.32 This “law”, which has either structural/institutional or normative justifications, holds variously that liberal democracies never have, or rarely have, fought one another, and leads to the assertion that they will not, or are unlikely to, do so in the future — although democracies do go to war against non-democracies, which are wont to fight other nondemocracies or democracies. The history of this idea is problematic. Democratic peace theory excludes the American Civil War (on the basis that the South was not an independent state, although both sides were democracies) and various wars between American troops and American Indian tribes. The latter wars represent an incipient critique of the ontology within which American democratic self-perceptions are inscribed. Scholars note the founding influence on the American Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace, which was the product of a political system that embodied characteristics that would be associated easily with liberal democracy, for example, political representation, gender equality, and individual

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freedoms. Yet the wars with Native Americans are excluded from the purview of the democratic peace argument. As the ultimate guarantor of peace, as claimed by the argument for democratic peace, “the American (and Western) conception of liberal democracy creates the binaries necessary for the warmaking practices of the United States and other like minded allies such as Canada”.33 Looking at Europe, Sebastian Rosato excavates an entire era — the imperialism of European great powers between 1815 and 1975 — that weakens almost fatally the notion that liberal wars are fought for liberal purposes. Even apart from the questionable argument that it is justifiable to conquer “barbarous” nations to “civilize” them for their own benefit, European imperialism “provides good evidence that liberal democracies have often waged war for reasons other than self-defense and the inculcation of liberal values”. Although there were only a handful of liberal democracies in the international system in that era, he notes, they were involved in 66 of the 108 wars cited in the Correlates of War dataset of extra-systemic wars, with 33 wars being imperial — fought against peoples who previously had been independent — and 33 wars were colonial, or waged against existing colonies. The need for self-defence did not provoke imperial wars: these were often preventive and not defensive wars motivated by the quest for profit, the need to expand overseas spheres of influence so as to influence the balance of power in Europe, and imperial competition that created buffer states. The colonial wars were “conflicts in which imperial powers sought to perpetuate or reimpose autocratic rule”, while the imperial wars “simply replaced illiberal indigenous government with authoritarian rule” or underwrote

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unjust political systems through external rule. “In short, despite protestations that they were bearing the ‘white man’s burden’, there is little evidence that liberal states’ use of force was motivated by respect for human rights or that imperial conquest enhanced the rights of nonEuropeans”, Rosato observes.34 Is democratic peace theory, then, far from being a law, a myth? The key issue here is to settle on definitions. James Lee Ray defines democracy as a polity that has competitive elections in which at least two formally independent political parties (or other groups) present candidates; in which at least fifty per cent of the adult population is allowed to vote; and in which the country has witnessed “at least one peaceful, constitutional transfer of executive power from one independent political party to another by means of an election”. As for war, Ray proffers the definition produced by the Correlates of War project, which stipulates that only military conflict between independent states leading to at least 1,000 battle deaths (that is, the deaths of soldiers) will count as an interstate war.35 This definition is controversial, of course, since it serves to exclude the American Civil War and the wars with American Indian tribes; indeed, shifting definitions of democracy and war prevent democratic peace theory from being challenged seriously by the Anglo-American War of 1812, the Spanish-American War of 1898, Finland’s World War II alignment with the Axis powers against the Allies, the Israeli attack on the U.S. naval vessel Liberty in 1967, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Ray contends, though, that if the political threshold for democracy in his definition is applied to controversial cases such as the War of 1812, the American Civil War, the Boer War, or the Spanish-American War, “it is possible to argue that no dispute between states has

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ever escalated to interstate war unless at least one of the states involved was not (sufficiently) democratic”.36 The link between democracy and the absence of war has been debated extensively between Realists and Liberals, especially on the pages of the distinguished theoretical journal, International Security, which forms the nucleus of a reader, Debating the Democratic Peace.37 Michael Doyle makes the case for such a peace succinctly in the book’s opening chapter: “Even though liberal states have become involved in numerous wars with nonliberal states, constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with one another… A liberal zone of peace, a pacific union, has been maintained and has expanded despite numerous particular conflicts of economic and strategic interest.”38 Noting exceptions, such as Peru and Ecuador, he observes that these occurred before the pacifying effects of liberalism could become ingrained deeply in their political systems.39 He notes that statistically, war between two states within a short period of time is of low probability. War between two adjacent states over a long period may be somewhat more probable. Hence, the absence of war among “the more clearly liberal states”, whether adjacent or not, for almost 200 years is significant. Even more significant is the reality that when states are forced to decide on which side of a world contest they will fight, “liberal states wind up all on the same side, despite the real complexity of the historical, economic and political factors that effect their foreign policies”. 40 Bruce Russet underlines the argument by noting that long-term rival states have gone to war or have had substantial fatal clashes “only when one or both of them was not governed democratically”, witness the Greek-Turkish dispute over Cyprus, or democratic India and Pakistan, whose

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disputes did not produce any fatalities during Pakistan’s most democratic periods of 1962–64 and 1988–92.41 He summarizes his arguments for the democratic peace thus. Violent conflicts between democracies will be infrequent because in those political systems, checks and balances, the division of power, and the need for public debate slow decisions to use large-scale violence and reduce the likelihood of those decisions being taken. Leaders of other states perceive democracies as “so constrained”. Hence, leaders of democracies will expect, in conflicts with other democracies, time for processes of international conflict resolution to work, and they will not fear surprise attacks. By contrast, violent conflicts between non-democracies, and between democracies and non-democracies, will be frequent because leaders of non-democracies do not face the constraints of their democratic counterparts and so can move more easily and quickly, and can initiate attacks secretly. Leaders of states, whether democracies or nondemocracies, that are in conflict with non-democracies may initiate violence for fear of a surprise attack. Knowing the constraints under which leaders of democracies function, leaders of non-democracies may press for greater concessions over issues in conflict. Rather than succumb to the pressure, democracies may begin hostilities.42 John M. Owen qualifies that assertion somewhat by noting that states with liberal elements may be undemocratic, such as Great Britain was before the 1832 Reform Act, whereas some democratic states may be illiberal, such as the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. “Not all liberal democracies will forgo war with one another”, he argues. “A liberal democracy will only avoid war with a state that it believes to be liberal.”43

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Making the case against democratic peace theory, Christopher Layne contends that it fails to account for the fact that democracies have made threats against other democracies, which they would not do should democratic norms and culture explain the democratic peace, and that these threats have ended in “near misses” that avoided war narrowly.44 He makes four case studies of near misses: the Anglo-American Crisis over the Trent Affair of 1861, the Anglo-American Crisis over Venezuela in 1896–96, the Fashoda Crisis of 1898 between Britain and France; and the Ruhr Crisis between France and Germany in 1923. 45 John Mearsheimer’s observation that “democracies have been few in number over the past two centuries, and thus there have not been many cases where two democracies were in a position to fight each other”46 provides the background for David Spiro’s use of probability analysis to refute the significance of the “statistic” that democracies never, or rarely, fight among themselves. He argues that, empirically, the absence of wars between liberal democracies is not “a significant pattern for most of the past two centuries”.47 The empirical bases of the democratic peace literature come under further attack from Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, who find that “there is no statistically significant relationship between democracy and war before 1914”. Indeed, they find that the probability of disputes short of war occurring significantly is higher between members of democratic dyads than between members of other pairs of states in the same period. It is only after 1945 that the probability of war or serious disputes is lower significantly between democratic states than between members of other pairs of states. The Cold War results “may be a product of common interests, rather than of common polities”.48 On that

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note, Ido Oren argues that the democratic peace claim is not about democracies per se as much as it is about countries that are like America or of its kind. Glancing at the rationale that democratic peace theory provides for promoting democratization as a pillar of American foreign policy, he observes: “The apparently objective coding rules by which democracy is defined in fact represent current American values.”49 In a final assault on democratic peace theory, Edward Mansfeld and Jack Snyder point out the uncomfortable fact that countries making a transition to democracy actually become “more aggressive and war-prone, not less, and they do fight wars with democratic states”.50 Democratizing states, a variant of “illiberal democracy”,51 are driven to Bonapartism precisely by the confidence that their actions are legitimated and supported by vast popular energies, hitherto oppressed, that they have released. In this volume, the Liberals survive the first strike by the Realists and launch a counter-attack. Russett argues that neither an “unfavourable strategic costbenefit evaluation nor shared democracy is a necessary condition for avoiding war” but that, “allowing for some possibility of irrationality or misconception, either may well constitute a virtually sufficient condition”.52 He warns against the danger from “vulgar realism’s” vision of war of all against all, “in which the threat that other states pose is unaffected by their internal norms and institutions”. Looking at democratic peace, he repeats Galileo’s admonition: “Epure si muove”.53 From the Realist bastion, Spiro launches a second strike, charging that Russet “chooses definitions of key concepts and data and methods so that they always yield results favoring the Liberal Peace” and stands by the argument that there are not many wars among democracies because both “wars and democracies are rare”.54 Layne, too, aims his missiles at Russett, arguing

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that once democratic peace theory’s causal logic is proved to be threadbare, then little is left but the consolation of statistical correlations; the theory offers “no convincing explanation of why democracies purportedly do not fight each other”. 55 In his interventions at the end of the volume, Doyle returns to the wider purpose of Liberal Peace arguments, which is to highlight in an insecure world the fundamental Kantian distinction between a state of peace in liberal relations and the state of war characterizing liberalnonliberal and nonliberal-nonliberal relations. 56 Defiantly, he asks that criticism of Liberal theory be judged against the “comparative validity of other theories of similar scope”, primarily Realism and Marxism.57 In the last chapter, he revisits that theme by noting that an “absence of war is not the same as a state of peace”, a state that rests on the expectation that war is not a legitimate or likely recourse — the basis of Liberal prescriptions for peace.58 Arguing that other theories like Realism and Marxism “need some catching up”,59 he concludes that “our very bloody 20th century” has taught everyone something about peace, war, and cooperation. “We have paid a high tuition; let us hope we have learned that liberal democracy is worth defending. The promise of peace may well be one more reason for doing so.”60 The importance of democratic peace theory lies in that it legitimates America’s self-perception as a global power, a view that ranges from Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen points, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, the Truman Doctrine and Ronald Reagan’s invocation of democracy in his jousting with the Soviet’s Union “evil” empire, to George H.W. Bush’s muscular internationalism, Bill Clinton’s assertion of the virtues of democratic enlargement, and George W. Bush’s agenda of regime change and nation-building pursued

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through diplomatic unilateralism and pre-emptive war. Speaking of the democratic peace theory, one observer comments that the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton made frequent public appeals to the theory, which appears to have motivated their support for democratization in former communist countries and in Haiti. “The current Bush administration, however, has gone much further in its faith in the idea, betting the farm that the theory holds and will help Washington achieve a peaceful, stable, and prosperous Muslim world as, over time, Iraq’s neighbors, following Iraq’s example, democratize.”61 Josef Joffe, who believes that the Iraq War might go down as the worst strategic blunder in American history, calls for Kant to be banished from the seventh floor of the State Department and the West Wing of the White House (the loft of the National Security Adviser) because a “great power must think realpolitik first, idealpolitik second”. The sequence proved by America’s Cold War alignments with dictators in Spain, Portugal, and South Korea was “security, then development, then democracy”. That lesson appears to have been forgotten with regard to the Middle East, “a perfect Hobbesian world” where “security and power will come first for a very long time”. The point was not to make the world safe through democracy but to make it safe for democracy.62 Kenneth Waltz goes farther, acerbically observing that if “the world is now safe for democracy, one has to wonder whether democracy is safe for the world”.63 Joffe overstates his case, since ideas cannot be banished. Iraq’s failure to become a model of democracy in the Middle East might not affect the core features of democratic peace theory, the argument that democracies do not fight one another. However, Iraq is certain to cast a very long shadow on American attempts

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to engage in democracy-building by changing regimes through the use of military force.

PAX ISLAMICA? While Iraq’s role in the spread of terrorism is contested, there is no denying the awesome reality of the 9/11 attacks on American soil, which drew immediate parallels with Pearl Harbour before entering the analogical lexicon of the Cold War. The War on Terror that followed was a particularly challenging one. A war that could not be won conclusively within a predictable period of time, it involved the conduct of asymmetrical warfare64 with a non-state adversary that could not be deterred through traditional, including nuclear, means — while avoiding the inflammation of the religious sentiments of a sixth of the world’s population among whom the terrorists and their sponsors were embedded. It was legally a war on terror rather than an attempt to deal with a group of international criminals because Al-Qaeda had clear political aims, having declared jihad against the U.S. Government; because it harboured territorial ambitions, these including the spread of Islamic law over all the lands dominated by ancient Persia, from North Africa to South Asia and as far west as Spain; and because the scope of damage that terrorists today are capable of inflicting is closer to the action of a state enemy than a mere criminal act.65 America’s antagonist also was a gang of religious zealots who were obsessed with turning the clock back to a putative golden age when their societies, now mired in poverty and oppression, would be clean and pure again. This could be achieved only by forcing “infidel” America from their lands and repudiating the West’s “sinful” economic and political

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influence in their midst. To this end, Al-Qaeda’s members were prepared to wage a war of attrition that required them not only to kill — as all wars do — but to also die by their own hand. The greatest power on Earth was up against those who were more than willing to go to Heaven; killing as the defining form of warfare was up against suicide as a form of warfare. In this sense, the analogy of the Cold War was misleading. The Soviet Union was a more formidable military protagonist than Al-Qaeda was, but the Cold War ultimately was based on the grim rationality of nuclear deterrence generated by the possibility of MutuallyAssured Destruction. In spite of rhetorical assertions to the contrary — “Better dead than red” — and notwithstanding the unstable nature of nuclear deterrence demonstrated by the Bay of Pigs incident, the contest had occurred between systems to which rationality essentially meant the same thing: calculating costs and benefits from the point of view of selfpreservation. With terrorism, rationality itself became contested territory. The rationality of free markets, free societies, and free thought that characterized the official American (and Western) narrative confronted the discursive rationality of being free to live under revealed laws that were immutable across space and time. Muslim societies, with their own vocabulary of the good life, did not see why their political, economic, and social ideals, legitimated by the ways of God, had to answer to man-made categories such as capitalism and democracy. (During the Cold War, there had been no dispute over the fact that the contending categories of capitalism and socialism were both man-made.) Terrorists and other extremists took their stand on the shore of the ontological gulf with a West that had

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secularized its Judeo-Christian heritage. They could not be deterred because, as Thomas Schelling observes, the concept of deterrence requires that there be “both conflict and common interest between the parties involved; it is as inapplicable to a situation of pure and complete antagonism of interest as it is to the case of pure and complete common interest”.66 There was no common interest between the two sides; conflict was inevitable. True, terrorism had material causes. They included America’s support for Israel in its conflict with Palestinians; the tribulations of Muslims stretching from Chechnya and Kashmir to Patani and Mindanao; the global economic disparities that burden the Arab and wider Muslim world; the political disenfranchisement suffered by citizens in Muslim rentier-states whose rulers owe their existence to their alliance with the United States; and the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia. To these causes came to be added, following 9/11, the American expedition to Afghanistan that overthrew the Taliban regime and flushed out the Al-Qaeda terrorists whom it was harbouring; and the second Gulf War of 2003 to topple the Saddam Hussein dictatorship by invading and occupying Iraq. These were material causes, but whether they were root causes is debatable. After all, the departure of American forces from Saudi Arabia — a key demand of Al-Qaeda — has not mitigated Osama bin Laden’s hostility towards the United States or the Saudi regime. Also, while it is true that a proper balance in U.S. ties with Israel and its neighbours would have a propitious impact on perceptions of America among ordinary Muslims, it is far from certain that it would affect Al-Qaeda’s determination to bring down an international order upheld by American might, from which Israel derives

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military, economic, and diplomatic protection.67 The terrorists’ determination is religiously-derived. It is inspired not by Islam but by a virulent and deviant strain of belief in which the protection of Muslim lands and the establishment of an international community of believers, sanction scandalous departures from what mainstream Muslim scholars (who are not welldisposed towards the United States necessarily) consider proper Islamic rules of warfare. On the other shore of the religious gulf, United States President George W. Bush sees the attacks on America as the opening salvo in the establishment of a “violent political utopia”, a Caliphate that “would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia”.68 Although not a principal player in the Age of Hydrocarbons, as is the Middle East, Southeast Asia is of both strategic and economic importance to the United States, which recognizes it as the second front (after the Middle-East) in the War on Terror. The region sits astride the sea routes from the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean to the Pacific, through which much of the world’s trade and energy shipments flow, making maritime terrorism a direct threat to the interests of the United States and other powers. Trade and investment create other stakes. The combined gross domestic product of the region, home to more than 500 million people, is more than US$750 billion and is growing. In 2005, U.S. exports to the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were almost US$50 billion, while America imported US$99 billion — making the United States one of the most important trade partners for almost every country in ASEAN and a major contributor to growth there. Washington has a Free Trade

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Agreement with Singapore, it is negotiating an FTA with Thailand, and talks have begun with Malaysia. American Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in ASEAN was a third higher than FDI to China and Hong Kong as of 2004 (at US$79.9 billion versus US$59.2 billion).69 Terrorist groups threaten the status quo of the region, in which the United States is heavily invested economically and politically, by seeking to create independent Islamic states, overthrow secular governments, and set up a supranational Islamic state that cannot but be hostile to American interests. Citing the regional and bilateral initiatives against terrorism in which the United States features heavily, U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Patricia L. Herbold focuses on the importance of maritime security and border control. In the Straits of Malacca, the littoral states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore are enhancing maritime security through coordinated naval patrols and other programmes. “With the littoral states in the lead, the United States joins other user states in standing ready to assist in these endeavours.”70 Yet, there is a problem. Since 9/11, it is the War on Terror that has driven U.S. policy towards the region. While most governments in the region have quietly supported America’s anti-terrorism efforts, “most Southeast Asians are not yet convinced this is their fight”. U.S. policy in Southeast Asia has been essentially one-dimensional in its emphasis on the counterterrorism agenda. “This preoccupation with terrorism has promoted an impression among the people of Southeast Asia that the United States does not really care about them or their interests, and has given China and India an opportunity to gain influence in the region at America’s expense”, one analyst observes. “Southeast Asians question both the wisdom of U.S. policies, and

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the benign nature of U.S. intentions.”71 Other analysts, emphasizing the fact that maritime Southeast Asia primarily consists of Muslim-majority countries, comment pertinently that although most regional governments feel threatened by home-grown or imported Islamic militant groups and therefore desire to cooperate with the U.S. anti-terrorist campaign, they have to balance their security concerns with domestic political considerations. “Although proponents of violent, radical Islam remain a small minority in Southeast Asia, many governments view increased American pressure and military presence in their region with ambivalence because of the political sensitivity of the issue with both mainstream Islamic and secular nationalist groups.”72 How to counter terrorism through a concert of interests with Southeast Asian countries, remains work in progress.

PAX SINICA? PAX INDICA? Meanwhile, other historical theatres are opening up. The benchmark for Mearsheimer’s offensive realism is the European historical experience. It is also with an eye to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe that Aaron Friedberg asks whether Europe’s past foretells Asia’s future,73 reiterating his earlier pessimism that Asia is “ripe for rivalry”.74 In a combative rebuttal, David C. Kang thinks not, arguing that the Westphalian model, with its formal equality between states but real inequalities that made European history so violent, does not have to presage the future of postCold War Asia, where another historical model is available: the Chinese world order, marked by the formal hierarchy of states in a Sino-centric system but guided by a benign and judicious internationalist outlook from the centre.75 “Historically”, Kang suggests, “it has been

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Chinese weakness that has led to chaos in Asia. When China has been strong and stable, order has been preserved. East Asian regional relations have historically been hierarchic, more peaceful, and more stable than those in the West.”76 Amitav Acharya agrees with Kang against adopting an exclusively Eurocentric view of Asian security, but questions the basis of his assertion that Asian states today are more likely to bandwagon with China than balance against it.77 “Contrary to Kang’s argument, Asia’s future will not resemble its past”, Acharya argues.78 In a rejoinder, Kang reasserts his view that scholars should be less Eurocentric when studying Asia and should consider more carefully the empirical anomalies in the Asian experience.79 The subtext of Kang’s argument — the need for an Asian theory of international relations — is undeniable; the question is whether that theory has to be a Sinocentric one for the continent’s regions, including Southeast Asia. Apart from the Sinic tributary system, early Southeast Asian history is mapped by the Indic mandala system.80 The term, which extrapolates from the mandala of the Hindu and Buddhist worldview, emphasizes both the “radiation of power” from each power centre as well as the “non-physical basis” of the system. Unlike European feudalism, the overlordtributary relationship of the mandala system gave subordinate states greater independence; it emphasized personal rather than official or territorial relationships; and it was often non-exclusive. “Any particular area, therefore, could be subject to several powers or none.”81 A similar idea underlies Stanley Tambiah’s notion of an East Asian “galactic polity”, or a hierarchical structure drawing meaning from a symbolic centre.82 Although mandalas “lacked territorial specificity”, they represented an “acute concentration of political management and moral authority, which made it

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possible to speak of a distinctive political order in Southeast Asia”, Acharya argues. One crucial difference between the Indic and Sinic models is that, unlike the existence of a centre in the Middle Kingdom that was legitimated by the notion of the Mandate of Heaven, there was no imperial centre for the spread of Indic influence in Southeast Asia.83 Acharya cites the Dutch economic historian Jacob Van Leur as challenging the notion that Indic cultural and political ideas were imposed on or imported into Southeast Asia through commerce (by Indian merchants, or Vaisyas) and conquest (by Indian warriors, or Kshatriyas). Instead, Southeast Asian rulers “called upon” Indian civilization through the medium of the Brahmans because “Hindu political concepts helped them to enhance their legitimacy and organize their small territorial units into larger states.”84 That, too, remains an Asian model.

INDIA A return to pre-colonial models of international relations in Asia, however, is not a stated goal of either China or India, both of which remain wedded to the diplomatic operations of the Westphalian system. For India, the end of the Cold War represented an opportunity to return to the West, a process that C. Raja Mohan describes in sophisticated detail in Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy.85 As a country that had invested much political capital in Moscow, India was marginalized in the international system when the Soviet Union imploded. India’s balance-ofpayments crisis at the start of the 1990s represented the economic equivalent of its political predicament of not finding a place in the post-Non-Aligned order. However, within the end of the decade, India re-

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emerged on the global scene, its economy rejuvenated by reforms and its political and military power transformed by the nuclear tests that it had carried out in May 1998. Following the end of the Cold War, India’s great experiment with democracy, comparable to the American and French Revolutions,86 provided the route for the return to the West. India’s founding fathers had never seen its interests as being in fundamental conflict with the West’s, but during the Cold War, India, like the United States, had not emphasized democracy as “an organizing principle in international affairs”.87 Much as American and West European energies had been absorbed by the East-West struggle against Soviet expansionism, India’s energies had been expended on defending its side of the international political economy in the North-South divide. “It attached more weight to the anti-Western criterion than the internal democratic credentials of its Eastern and Third World friends.” The brutality of a Third World leader had not mattered so long as he had been an ally in the North-South struggle.88 After the Cold War ended, “India no longer wanted to remain in the Third World”.89 Democracy provided the way out of it. Although India remained opposed to the “new international interventionary agenda” of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and U.S. President Bill Clinton — from whose Administration had emerged the idea of setting up a Centre for Asian Democracy, “with all the attendant overtures against China”90 — New Delhi was aware that an international grouping built around politically plural countries would exclude two of its principal rivals, Beijing and Islamabad. The advent of the Bush Administration and the shock of 9/11 injected “substantive content to the notion of an

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Indo-US alliance based on democratic values”.91 The Atlantic rift that appeared over the U.S. invasion of Iraq92 saw India move closer to the United States, whose military power had deterred the Soviet Union and had made possible the miracle of a postmodern Europe. Indeed, New Delhi had greater reason to be worried over the “new liberal imperialism” being championed by European postmodernists such as Robert Cooper than over the Bush Administration’s unilateralism, which was directed at the common Indo-U.S. enemy of terrorism.93 India also had a “fundamental interest” in a regime change in Islamabad that would move Pakistan away from the “deadly combination of militarism and religious extremism”.94 In the Bush Administration’s agenda of Asian democratization, India was a crucial partner because it was sandwiched between the Middle East and the Sinic world, both of which continued to resist the “core values of (the) Enlightenment”, and against which there were visions of an “arc of democratic stability that could include Turkey, Israel, Russia and India”.95 Unlike Europe, a “satiated power”, India announced its arrival as a “revisionist power” in the sense of its “determination to improve its own standing in the global order, if necessary by working to change the rules of the system”.96 Raja Mohan’s blunt assertion of Indian realpolitik appears to underline the relentless realism of Mearsheimer’s observation that there are no status quo powers in the international system, save for the occasional hegemon.97 Having crossed the nuclear Rubicon and, equally important, having negotiated American acknowledgement of its arrival on the other shore, India is ready to engage its allies and balance its adversaries within what remains, for the time being at least, the contours of Pax Americana. “No two countries

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can ever be natural allies”, Sunanda K. Datta-Ray writes in a sober reminder of global realities. “The US is a South Asian player to secure its own geopolitical ends. As the Lone Superpower, it must enforce its imperial authority against all challengers, real or potential. For India, the first priority is the people’s agenda. India needs peace, not power. It cannot be only America’s licensed gatekeeper in the Orient.”98 However, the truth is that India is too powerful to need to be a gatekeeper, and its power is helping to shape the Asian security order within the boundaries of Pax Americana.

SINGAPORE In an impassioned acknowledgement of the world’s debt to America, Singapore scholar-diplomat Kishore Mahbubani writes of his gratitude that the United States, instead of becoming a colonial power in the twentieth century, “peeled off the European layers of world history and in so doing opened the door for billions of non-Europeans to enter the modern world”.99 He does criticize the United States for its handling of the Islamic and Sinic worlds after the end of the Cold War, and warns that “if the delegitimation of American power in the eyes of the world continues to grow, there will be real costs for America and its people”.100 However, striking a constructive note, he calls on Washington to decide that a stable world order is in its interests; consider the impact that its major decisions have on the rest of the world; change its policies towards multilateral institutions from the pursuit of short-term American interests; and continue building the best human society in history.101 Singapore especially has benefited from Pax Americana. The “San Francisco System” — the

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interwoven strands of political-military and economic commitments binding America and its Pacific allies that were catalyzed by the San Francisco Peace Treaty process of 1950–51102 — made a crucial contribution to the Pacific order from which Singapore benefited on its independence in 1965. The system incorporated a defeated Japan into a network of Washington-centred relationships that protected Tokyo from Moscow and Beijing, and protected smaller countries that had been victims of Japanese wartime aggression from the strategic consequences of Japan’s post-War economic rise. In obtaining security through prosperity, the system provided the parameters within which a trading citystate like Singapore could survive and thrive. It conditioned as well the country’s approach to the United States, which it viewed as the primary offshore balancer that stabilized the East Asian balance of power, of which Southeast Asia was a part, which underpinned peace and prosperity. Singapore’s view of America as a benign hegemon made the city-state continue to support Washington’s forward presence in Asia after its precipitate withdrawal from Vietnam. The end of the Cold War vindicated the choices that Singapore had made, and laid the basis for closer relations that were cemented in the forthcoming War on Terror. Singapore leaders are not coy about acknowledging their country’s debt to the United States. Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father who remains a guiding force in its foreign policy, notes that the post-World War II economic revival in East Asia and now in South Asia would not have occurred without the presence and participation of the United States. America was involved in three wars in Asia: against Japan in 1942 after Pearl Harbour, in the Korean War of 1950–53, and in the Vietnam War of 1965–71.

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“Much blood and treasure have been spilled”, he observes. Yet, in the process, he adds, America “revitalized” Japan, “rebuilt a destroyed South Korea”, and helped transform Taiwan. The four Asian dragons — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore — bloomed in the new East Asia of the 1970s. By the mid1980s, the four Asian tigers — Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines — were doing well.103 True, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “Americans have become as dogmatic and evangelical as the communists were”. They wanted to promote democracy and human rights in every place except where that pursuit would hurt them, as in oil-rich Arab lands. “Even so, the United States is still the most benign of all the great powers, certainly less heavy-handed than any emerging great power”, he writes. “Hence, whatever the differences and frictions, all noncommunist countries in East Asia prefer America to be the dominant weight in the power balance of the region.”104 Turning to the current world situation, in which America must continue to shoulder its historical role, Lee declares: “The US is not in imperial overreach. Contrary to conventional wisdom of the 1970s, Americans overcame the setbacks of the war in Vietnam, checkmated Soviet expansion and became the indispensable super-power.”105 Along similar lines, Foreign Minister George Yeo recalls how, during the Cold War, “under an American peace”, Japan developed, followed by the four tigers. When the Plaza Accord in September 1985 forced a sharp upward revaluation of the Japanese yen, the Korean won and the New Taiwan dollar, investments from those countries and the territory flowed into Southeast Asia, causing a decade of rapid growth. Today, the United States “as a Pacific power is an

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integral part of the strategic political and economic equation of East Asia”.106 Against this ideational backdrop to the American peace, we now turn to the state of play among the United States, Singapore, and India before examining the substantive issues that are at work in their evolving relations.

NOTES 1 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 337– 38. 2 Ibid., pp. 380–81. 3 Ibid., pp. 14; 18–19. 4 Ibid., p. 348. 5 Simon Dalby, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy and the Bush Doctrine, Working Paper no. 90 (Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, October 2005), p. 4. 6 Ibid., p. 5. 7 Ibid., p. 6. 8 Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop”, New York Times, 8 March 1992. The quotations are excerpts from the leaked draft document. 9 Ibid. 10 Dalby, op. cit., p. 7. 11 . 12 Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, A Report of The Project for the New American Century, Washington, D.C., September 2000. 13 Ibid., pp. iv–v. 14 Mario Del Pero, “The Historical and Ideological Roots of the Neoconservative Persuasion”, in The United States Contested: American Unilateralism and European Discontent, edited by Sergio Fabbrini (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 43. 15 William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996 .

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16 He resigned his UN post in December 2006. 17 Ronald Bailey, “The Voice of Neoconservatism”, Reasononline, 17 October 2001 . 18 Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion”, The Weekly Standard, vol. 8, issue 47, 25 August 2003 . 19 David Rose, “Neo Culpa”, Vanity Fair, VF.COM, 3 November 2006 . 20 Francis Fukuyama, “After Neoconservatism”, New York Times, 19 February 2006 . 21 Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2004); Benjamin R. Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy (New York: Norton, 2003); Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (New York: Verso, 2003); and Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 22 G. John Ikenberry, “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order”, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004 . For a critique from the left, see Alejandro Colas and Richard Saull, The War on Terrorism and the American ‘Empire’ after the Cold War (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 23 Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Grove Press, 2003), pp. 3–5. 24 Ibid., p. 16. 25 Ibid., pp. 16–27. 26 Ibid., pp. 70–71. 27 Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2004); The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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28 Thomas L. Friedman, “Foreign Affairs Big Mac I”, New York Times, 8 December 1996. 29 James Langton, “McDonald’s Claims Nobel Peace Fries”, Sunday Telegraph, 15 December 1996 . 30 James Langton, “Peace on Earth and Big Macs to All Men”, Focus: New World Fast Food Order, Ibid. 31 Matthew White, “Democracies Do Not Make War on One Another. … or Do They?”, . Following the downing of the Arches theory, there appeared the “Greens Peace” theory: seriously golfing nations do not fight one other. A country needed one course per million people to count as a golf nation because fewer than one course per million suggested that golf was confined to rich citizens and tourists. Meeting the standard were about fifty countries, led by New Zealand and including the United States, France, and Singapore. David Plotz, the author of this theory, compared golf statistics with a list of the about 300 major conflicts since World War II, and the evidence was “irrefutable”: golfing nations had not fought one another in fifty-odd years and “they aren’t very likely to fight one another today”. The link between golf and peace was not an accidental one. “Golf has no physical violence, unlike basketball, soccer, football, rugby and so on”, Plotz observed. “Golf is not zero-sum. Your performance is independent of your opponent’s, and nothing you can do to your opponent can improve your score. War, which is founded on violence, cheating and crushing your rival, is golf’s antithesis.” See David Plotz, “Greens Peace”, The New York Times Magazine, 4 June 2000. Disputing the causal connections that such “theories” make, Matthew White points out that the three “suggested agents of world peace’’ — democracy, McDonald’s and golf — all are characteristics of rich countries. A simpler theory might calculate “a more basic measure of wealth” and show that no two countries with more than 160 cars per 1,000 people have ever warred with each other either. About thirtythree countries fall into this category, and none has fought another since it passed the milestone. All of them were democratic, with the exception of Saudi Arabia. See Matthew White, op. cit.

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32 Jack S. Levy, “Domestic Politics and War”, in The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars, edited by Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 88. 33 Kyle Grayson, “Democratic Peace Theory as Practice: (Re)Reading the Significance of Liberal Representations of War and Peace”, YCISS Working Paper no. 22 (York University, March 2003), p. 1, . 34 Sebastian Rosato, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory”, American Political Science Review, vol. 97, no. 4 (November 2003): 588–89. 35 James Lee Ray, “Does Democracy Cause Peace?”, Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998): 27–46, . 36 Ibid. 37 Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 10. 38 Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs”, in Debating the Democratic Peace, p. 10. Italics in the original. 39 Ibid., ff. 7. 40 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 41 Bruce Russett, “The Fact of Democratic Peace”, in Debating the Democratic Peace, p. 79 42 Bruce Russet, “Why Democratic Peace?”, in Ibid., pp. 102–03. 43 John M. Owen, “How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace”, in Ibid., p. 131. Italics in the original. 44 Christopher Layne, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of Democratic Peace”, in Ibid., p. 165. 45 Ibid., pp. 168–90. 46 John Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War”, International Security, vol. 15, no. 1 (Summer 1990): 50–51. 47 David E. Spiro, “The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace”, in Debating the Democratic Peace, p. 203. 48 Henry S. Farber and Joanne Gowa, “Polities and Peace”, in Ibid., p. 240. Italics in the original. 49 Ido Oren, “The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace:

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Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany”, in Ibid., p. 263. 50 Edward D. Mansfeld and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and the Danger of War”, in Ibid., p. 301. 51 Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy”, Foreign Affairs, November 1997, FareedZakaria.com, < w w w. f a r e e d z a k a r i a . c o m / A R T I C L E S / o t h e r / democracy.html>. 52 Bruce Russett, “The Democratic Peace: And Yet It Moves”, in Debating the Democratic Peace, p. 340. Italics in the original. 53 Ibid., p. 350. Italics in the original. 54 David E. Spiro, “The Liberal Peace: And Yet It Squirms”, in Ibid., pp. 351; 354. 55 Christopher Layne, “On the Democratic Peace”, in Ibid., p. 355. 56 Michael W. Doyle, “Reflections on the Liberal Peace and Its Critics”, in Ibid., p. 360. 57 Ibid., p. 362. 58 Michael W. Doyle, “Michael Doyle on the Democratic Peace: Again”, in Ibid., p. 365. 59 Ibid., p. 369. 60 Ibid., p. 373. 61 John M. Owen IV, “Iraq and the Democratic Peace”, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005 . 62 Josef Joffe, “Kennan 101: A Primer for Democratic Dreamers”, The Berlin Journal 13 (Fall 2006): 31. In the same issue of the journal, Anne Applebaum studies how America’s mixed signals on democracy contributed to the crises in Hungary in 1956 and Iraq in 2006: “Promoting Democracy: Have We Learned the Lessons of 1956?”, pp. 18–21. 63 Stephen Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War”, in America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power, edited by G. John Ikenberry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 37. In Realist tradition, he contends that the “democratic peace thesis will hold only if all of the causes of war lie inside of states”, p. 32. 64 The 9/11 attacks themselves underlined the asymmetry. Osama bin Laden, cited by President George Bush, said that Al-Qaeda

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had spent US$500,000 on the attacks, while the lowest estimate of America’s losses ran into US$500 billion, meaning that every dollar of Al-Qaeda defeated a million dollars of America. Osama concluded from this “bleed-until-bankruptcy” plan that America’s military strength and vibrant economy had a hollow foundation. If Al-Qaeda could target even a tenth of America’s weak points, it could crush and destroy the might of the American state. See George W. Bush, “Iran & The War on Terror: Address to the Military Officers Association of America”, Washington, D.C., 5 September 2006 . 65 Elizabeth Gehrman, “Chertoff Charts Tactics and Initiatives in War on Terror”, Harvard University Gazette, 19–25 October 2006. 66 Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 11. 67 Of course, this objective of changing the perceptions of ordinary Muslims is laudable in itself. Indeed, it would succeed no doubt in drying up some of the empathic support that these Muslims have for terrorists, who are seen as risking their lives for Islam against the West’s secular hegemony, in contrast to “pliable” Muslim statesmen and officiallyappointed religious leaders who preach coexistence. However, the terrorists themselves, whose agenda is predicated not on coexistence but on victory, are another issue. This said, the need for a balance in America’s approach to Middle-Eastern countries is indisputable, and is necessary in itself. 68 George W. Bush, “Iran & The War on Terror: Address to the Military Officers Association of America”, Washington, D.C., 5 September 2006 . 69 U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Patricia L. Herbold, “Terrorism in Southeast Asia: The Threat and Response”, Singapore, 12 April 2006, Embassy of the United States in Singapore, . 70 Ibid. 71 Robert M. Hathaway, “George Bush’s Unfinished Asian Agenda”, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,

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13 May 2005 . 72 Mark Manyin, Richard Cronin, Larry Niksch, and Bruce Vaughn, Terrorism in Southeast Asia, Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., 18 November 2003 . 73 Aaron L. Friedberg, “Will Europe’s Past Be Asia’s Future?”, Survival, vol. 42, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 147–60. 74 Aaron L. Friedberg, “Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia”, International Security, vol. 18, no. 3 (Winter, 1993/94): 5–33. 75 David C. Kang, “Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks”, International Security, vol. 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 57–85. 76 Ibid., p. 66. 77 Amitav Acharya, “Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future?”, International Security, vol. 28, no. 3 (Winter 2003/04): 149–64. 78 Ibid., p. 150. 79 David C. Kang, “Hierarchy, Balancing, and Empirical Puzzles in Asian International Relations”, International Security, vol. 28, no. 3 (Winter 2003/04): 165–80. 80 O.W. Wolters, History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, revised edition (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999). 81 “Mandala”, Wikipedia, . 82 Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 83 G. Coedes, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, edited by Walter F. Vella and translated by Sue Brown Cowing (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968). 84 Amitav Acharya, “Southeast Asia: Imagining the Region”, Himal, . See Amitav Acharya, The Quest for Identity: International Relations of Southeast Asia (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 2000). 85 C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy (New Delhi, Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 57–82.

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86 Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997), p. 4 87 Raja Mohan, op. cit., pp. 63–64. 88 Ibid., p. 64. 89 Ibid., p. 58. 90 Ibid., p. 65. 91 Ibid. 92 For an influential American view of this divide, see Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). For European versions of the rift, see Josef Joffe, Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); and Sergio Fabbrini, The United States Contested: American Unilateralism and European Discontent, op. cit. 93 Raja Mohan, op. cit., p. 78. 94 Ibid., p. 79. 95 Ibid., p. 81. 96 Ibid., pp. 79–80. 97 John Mearsheimer, op. cit., p. 2. 98 Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India and The India Today Group, 2002), p. ix. 99 Kishore Mahbubani, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), p. 10. 100 Ibid., p. 190. 101 Ibid., pp. 195–210. 102 Kent E. Calder, “Securing Security through Prosperity: The San Francisco System in Comparative Perspective”, The Pacific Review 17, no. 1 (March 2004): 136. 103 Lee Kuan Yew, Speech at the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, Tate Lecture Series, 19 October 2006 . 104 Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World To First The Singapore Story: 1965–2000 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), p. 498. 105 Lee Kuan Yew, Speech at the Southern Methodist University, op. cit. 106 George Yeo, Address to the Annual Conference of the Council of Americas in Washington, D.C., 3 May 2005 .

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Three Sides in Search of a Triangle C H A P T E R II

STATE OF PLAY1

SINGAPORE-U.S. RELATIONS The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the dismantling of bipolarity in international affairs saw one of the clearest reaffirmations of Singapore’s foreign policy outlook. On 4 August 1989, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs George Yeo told Parliament that Singapore was prepared to allow the U.S. to use some of its military facilities to make it easier for the Philippines to continue hosting the American bases at Clark airfield and Subic naval bay. Singapore’s stance basically was that the Philippines Government was coming under increasing domestic pressure on the American bases; and although all non-communist Southeast Asian countries enjoyed the protection of the U.S. cover, Manila was the only capital to have to bear the political burden of hosting them. Although the military facilities that Singapore was offering were negligible in physical terms — all of Singapore could fit into the Subic naval base — the

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move was a pointed gesture of support for the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia. Such gestures were seen as being necessary because the end of the Cold War was coinciding with a deepening of America’s economic problems and a strengthening of U.S. domestic sentiments in favour of military disengagement abroad and the diversion of saved resources to the domestic economy. By making it easier for the U.S. to remain engaged abroad, beneficiaries of its presence would be furthering their own interests in an era when the domestic mood in the U.S. was in favour of isolationism. Following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in November 1990 and a visit by President George H.W. Bush in January 1992, Singapore agreed in principle to accommodate a U.S. naval logistics element from Subic. (Meanwhile, the Philippines had served notice on the United States that it would have to vacate Clark and Subic by the end of 1992.) The American presence, predicated on a “places, not bases” strategy, reflected a policy of forward deployment adjusted to suit changing strategic and economic needs. The concept — devised in 1991, when the Pentagon had difficulty in moving large numbers of troops and armament to eject Iraq from invaded Kuwait2 — gained in appeal in the looming closure of the Subic Bay base. Essentially staging points, the “places” were a “logistics rather than a strategic concept”, and Singapore was the model. 3 Bilveer Singh speaks of a quasi-alliance relationship,4 while N. Ganesan5 goes so far as to declare that a clear policy of alignment with the United States has marked Singapore’s foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Khong Yuen Foong6 and Evelyn Goh,7 among others, have discussed various aspects of this relationship, which revolves around a

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palpably close identification of the city-state’s security imperatives with the interests of the United States. A series of arrangements between 1990 and 2000 cemented Singapore’s ties with America. They permitted the United States access to Singapore’s military facilities, rotational deployment of F-16 fighters, and the location of the command and logistics arm of the U.S. Seventh Fleet (COMLOG WESTPAC) in Singapore. The arrangements reaffirmed the importance of the citystate’s strategic location to the interests of Asia’s primary offshore balancer. As logistics agent for the Seventh Fleet, COMLOG WESTPAC plans the re-supply of food, ordnance, fuel, and repair parts for ships spread over fifty-two million square miles of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, stretching from the International Date Line to the east coast of Africa, and from the Kuril Islands in the north to the Antarctic in the south. The region is more than fourteen times the size of the entire continental United States. More than half of the world’s population lives within the Seventh Fleet’s area of responsibility. Indeed, more than eighty per cent of that population lives within 500 miles of the oceans, making it an inherently maritime region.8 Access to Singapore’s facilities enabled the U.S. military to deal quickly with contingency situations in the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, the Korean Peninsula, and Somalia, according to the Singapore Government. During the first Gulf War, the U.S. armed forces used Singapore as a transit point for American ships, troops, and aircraft on their way to the Gulf. The use of Paya Lebar Air Base helped the U.S. to support its airlift operations to Somalia.9 When, in 2001, the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk berthed at Singapore’s Changi Naval Base, it was the first time that an American carrier had been given pierside access to port facilities in the region since the

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closure of the Subic base.10 Built at Singapore’s own expense to facilitate the deployment of the Seventh Fleet in Southeast Asian waters, the Changi base was not exclusive to the Americans — large Chinese ships, for example, could call there — but given that few countries possessed aircraft carriers, the base clearly was intended to help the United States project its naval power.11 Indeed, Changi is the only port in Southeast Asia where aircraft carriers can berth. Commenting on the Kitty Hawk’s visit to Changi, Stratfor went so far as to argue that Singapore’s defence strategy was dovetailing with American efforts to contain China. Singapore appeared to be becoming a “de facto” U.S. base in the region, a base that now provided the Americans with direct access to the South China Sea. The modernizing of Singapore’s armed forces was “transforming it into a key link in the security chain that the United States is building around China”. Within the decade, Stratfor predicted, Singapore would “evolve from a relatively neutral participant to a major regional player”, and emerge as “a front-line outpost in the escalating military confrontation between the United States and China”.12 Improbable as that argument is in the light of Singapore’s investments in China, what are interesting are the city-state’s burgeoning links with America and the perceptions that they create. Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, relations grew even closer, and Singapore became a member of the “coalition of the willing” to help in the reconstruction of Iraq after the U.S. invasion. One essential reason for the closing of ranks was the arrest in Singapore in December 2001 of members of the Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah, which was plotting to attack American, British, Australian, and Israeli interests in

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the city-state.13 Although the planned attacks were thwarted, they dramatized Singapore’s vulnerability to the plans of a regional network, drawing support from a global one, that was dedicated to the violent establishment of an Islamic state in Southeast Asia covering Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and the southern parts of Thailand, and the Philippines. America’s pre-eminent interest and preponderant role in acting against terror networks created a natural confluence of interests with Singapore. In October 2003, Singapore and the United States announced their intention to expand cooperation in defence and security, and to negotiate a Framework Agreement for a Strategic Cooperation Partnership. That agreement, signed in July 2005 during Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s visit to the United States, laid the basis for an anticipated expansion of cooperation in counter-terrorism, counterproliferation, joint military exercises and training, policy dialogues, and defence technology. The United States recognized the important role played by Singapore as a “Major Security Cooperation Partner” and its place in the global network of strategic partnerships for the promotion of peace and stability, and the war against global terrorism.14 Singapore has supported vigorously American counter-terrorist initiatives, becoming the first country in Asia to join the Container Security Initiative, which ensures that all containers that pose a potential risk of terrorism are identified and inspected at foreign ports before they are placed on vessels headed for the United Sates. Singapore was also the first country in the region to join the Megaports Initiative that uses radiation detection capabilities at key ports around the world to screen cargo for nuclear and radioactive materials. Singapore participated actively as well in the global

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Proliferation Security Initiative aimed at stopping shipments of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, and related material worldwide.15 Countering the threat of maritime terrorism in the Malacca Straits in particular was another objective that drew Singapore and Washington together. Singapore now has the strongest security relationship with the United States in Southeast Asia even though it is not an ally, as are the Philippines and Thailand.16 Singapore’s Ambassador to the United States Chan Heng Chee captures the essence of the relationship in her description of Singapore as “less than an ally and more than a friend”.17

SINGAPORE-INDIA RELATIONS Singapore leaders note that the origins of contemporary Singapore lie in Stamford Raffles’ establishment of an entrepot on the island to service the East India Company’s China trade; indeed, they recall, Singapore was ruled from Calcutta from 1819 to 1857.18 True, Singapore has declined vicarious invitations to be India’s Hong Kong, another historical entrepot, as when Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo noted dryly during one of his visits to India that his country does not wish to be as close to India as Hong Kong is to China19 (which has now incorporated it). However, as these by no means frivolous throwbacks to history suggest in an era of China’s rise, New Delhi’s rising profile in Singapore’s foreign policy is unmistakable. Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, who, as Prime Minister from 1990 to 2004, guided Singapore’s engagement of India, has declared as being increasingly untenable, notions that South Asia and East Asia are discreet strategic theatres that interact only at the margins. The

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question is how to “fold a growing South Asia and East Asia into one equation”.20 Since India is the dominant power in South Asia, his remarks appear to welcome the emergence of an economically resurgent India as a confident strategic player in Southeast Asia. Goh’s remarks have immediate precedents. India’s Look East policy was unveiled by its Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, in Singapore in 1994. The gesture acknowledged symbolically the fact that the divergence between the two countries on Cold War-generated issues, primarily the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, had ceased with the end of that war. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Singapore invested much energy in encouraging India’s domestic economic reforms and inviting it to move beyond its central role in South Asia. This expansion of Indian influence began to take shape when, between 1992 and 1996, India first became a sectoral dialogue partner and then a full dialogue partner of ASEAN. In 1996, India joined the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) — a post-Cold War exercise in engaging the great powers and other players in Asian security issues — after Singapore had lobbied hard to overcome ASEAN’s reluctance to include New Delhi because of fears that its entry would import the subcontinent’s political and military tensions into the ARF. India’s efforts to become a stable participant in the ASEAN process culminated in the first IndiaASEAN summit held in Phnom Penh in 2002. 21 “Singapore has accepted the role of India’s ‘sponsor’ in Southeast Asia”, Satu P. Limaye avers. 22 Kripa Sridharan, too, believes that Singapore in particular among the ASEAN states has been “most alive and sensitive” to the changes underway in India.23 Although India is not, unlike China, Japan, and South Korea, a part of the ASEAN+3 process, its status as an ASEAN

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dialogue partner and its expanding economic, political, and security engagement with Southeast Asia have broken the impasse once created by the Cold War’s attritional political economy, including New Delhi’s dismissive attitude toward the region’s pro-capital, proAmerica, “Coca Cola governments”.24 Indian power in the Indian Ocean will be instrumental in the execution of its Look East policy. India’s Maritime Doctrine, released in 2004, outlines a shift from defending India’s coastline to pursuing its interests throughout the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), the seas from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Straits now being identified as India’s legitimate area of interest. However, the long dream of excluding the great powers from the Indian Ocean has been replaced by the realization that America is amenable to security arrangements involving India to secure common vital interests in the IOR. Those interests include the security of sea-lanes and the stability of markets, especially in energy resources. The Indian naval doctrine has embraced the emerging possibilities of the American notion of littoral warfare and expressed a desire to guard the littoral region, match China, and thwart its Indian Ocean aspirations.25 As part of growing military cooperation with the U.S., Indian missile boats patrolled the Malacca Straits alongside U.S. Navy vessels for a year after 9/11. Two Indian patrol craft provided security cover for a World Economic Forum meeting in Mozambique in June 2004, following a July 2003 initiative when the Indian Navy provided protection to the African Union summit in Mozambique — the farthest that it had ventured. At home, India has expanded and upgraded its base on Andaman Island, called Fortress Andaman (FORTRON), from which “the entire stretch of the

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entrance to the Malacca Strait is easily reachable”.26 In an even more significant development, New Delhi has embarked on Project Seabird, an ambitious plan conceived of in the early 1980s but cleared finally in 1999, to help develop a genuinely blue-water navy. The exclusive naval harbour — visualized as an integrated defence facility incorporating a mega naval base, an air force station, a naval armaments depot, and a missile silos naval base — is located in Karwar in the southern state of Karnataka. Project Seabird will be the first operational base with a port controlled exclusively by the Navy, thus permitting it to position and manoeuvre its operational fleet without having to worry about the movements of merchant vessels. The Navy’s existing bases, including those in Mumbai and Vishakhapatnam, are located in enclaves within commercial ports, creating difficulties in times of war.27 Also, Karwar is farther from Karachi than Mumbai is, making Karwar safer as a node in India’s naval calculations. Simultaneously, India is moving ahead with plans to dredge a deep-water canal in the Palk Strait between southern India and northern Sri Lanka. The aim of the Sethusamudram project, dubbed “India’s Suez Canal”, is not only to facilitate commercial shipping but to permit faster deployment of the Indian Navy.28 When completed, it will stretch from Tuticorin port on India’s southern coast to Adams Bridge in the Gulf of Mannar and northwards to the Bay of Bengal. The idea was first mooted by the British Commander of the Indian Marines, A.D. Taylor, in 1860 and was floated again by Indian Governments in 1955 and later. However, the project received the go-ahead only in 1995 “in line with India’s developing economic and strategic interests”.29 The canal’s strategic purpose is to enhance the Navy’s ability to move warships between India’s east and west

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coasts and to different parts of the Indian Ocean. The Sethusamudram canal will be “an obvious complement” to the Karwar base, enabling warships to move more quickly to India’s eastern coast and the Bay of Bengal. “The reduced sailing distance of 402 nautical miles is likely to be far more critical from a military standpoint than for commercial shipping. While the planned canal will only allow medium-sized ships through the Palk Strait, it could be readily dredged to allow larger vessels in the future.”30 To the west, India has invested in modernizing southeastern Iran’s Chabahar port, giving it a presence as far up as the Persian Gulf. What appears to be taking shape is an expectation of India’s Asian maritime role advanced by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He has declared that India’s avowed desire to prevent another dominant power from emerging between Singapore and Aden would be compatible with American interests.31 In framing his remarks within the legacy of Britain’s East of Suez policy, Kissinger has provided a fillip to Indian neo-Curzonians who see their strategic neighbourhood as stretching from West Asia to Southeast Asia.32 Kissinger also expects India to conduct its strategic Aden-to-Singapore policy in China’s neighbourhood.33 Indian policy-makers and strategic thinkers seem to be taking seriously Curzon’s emphasis on India’s centrality in the Indian Ocean littoral, an essential ingredient of a forward policy in its extended neighbourhood — a point reiterated in Kissinger’s delineation of the Indian Ocean as India’s natural strategic space.34 The challenge for Singapore, which welcomes India’s role as a Southeast Asian player, is that India’s East of Suez heritage intersects with what might be called China’s West to Suez aspirations in Singapore’s

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maritime vicinity. China’s “string-of-pearls’’ strategy connects the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf through military-related agreements with Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Pakistan, where the Chinese-assisted Gwadar port is located. Pakistan’s interest in hosting the port lies in gaining strategic depth further to the southwest from its major naval base in Karachi, which has long been vulnerable to Indian naval action. In the event that Gwadar, which provides China with a strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, becomes a Chinese submarine base, pointed both at the Gulf and the western entrance to the Malacca Straits, it would transform China’s unfolding Indian Ocean aspirations.

INDIA-AMERICA RELATIONS India’s nuclear tests in May 1998 were crucial to the country’s recasting on the world stage. America did not intervene decisively against the Indian action. C. Raja Mohan speaks of New Delhi’s nuclear defiance of Washington from 1996 to 1998 and the diplomatic reconciliation between the two capitals from 1998 to 2001 as “the most complex, daring and successful political manoeuvres the nation ever initiated”.35 True, India’s nuclear blasts had the effect of pushing the United States and China closer temporarily, as when, during his visit to the People’s Republic in June 1998, President Clinton proclaimed Beijing a strategic partner and issued a strong joint statement with his Chinese hosts on preventing nuclear proliferation in the subcontinent.36 However, Clinton himself visited India to initiate a political rapprochement in 2000. The same year, Indian President K.R. Narayanan visited China

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and a formal annual security dialogue began that enabled India to raise concerns about China’s nuclear and missile cooperation with Pakistan and other issues of nuclear arms control.37 American and Chinese criticism of India’s nuclear blasts proved short-lived. What was more significant than the passing criticism was that, as with China three decades earlier, the possession of nuclear weapons and the diplomatic ability to get the United States to accept those weapons as a fait accompli transformed India’s status on the international stage. In an article written not long after, Mohammed Ayoob made the explosions crucial to an argument for enhanced partnership between Washington and New Delhi. “As the lone superpower and major provider of public goods in the international system, the United States has come to realize the importance of pivotal regional powers and the fact that international order can attain legitimacy and stability only if these same qualities are first achieved within regional orders.”38 Given the potential for Sino-American discord over Taiwan, trade, human rights, and China’s place in the international order,39 it made sense for Washington to help New Delhi become South Asia’s “regional security manager, and to acquire the capabilities needed to counterbalance China in the wider Asian region”.40 India’s interests vis-à-vis China complemented American interests, but Indian aspirations were limited to managing the South Asian order, not the East Asian one. Yet, “because it shares America’s objective of balancing China’s power in Asia, India would willingly work with the United States toward this end outside of South Asia, especially in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean”.41 In the early months of 2001, the George W. Bush Administration rejected the notion of China as a

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strategic partner and identified it as a potential competitor, “raising the prospect of a new American policy aimed at balancing China and placing some weight on India’s strategic role in Asia”.42 In May 2001, Washington announced its National Missile Defence (NMD) initiative, which was attacked by many countries as a recipe for an arms race and was seen by China as a means of eroding its deterrent vis-à-vis the U.S., although the NMD’s stated objective was to protect America and its friends from rogue states such as North Korea. India supported the controversial initiative, drawing attention to the NMD’s ability to offset some of its own military imbalance with China. The terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 saw Washington state or reiterate the key goals of its security policy. The need to fight against terror loomed large on the pages of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, released by the White House on 17 September 2002. “Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. Today, the world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side — united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos. The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security”, the document read. “The war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration. America will help nations that need our assistance in combating terror. And America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror, including those who harbor terrorists — because the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization”, it declared. Yet, even while these goals were cited, others were reaffirmed. The United States,

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the document said, sought to create “a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty. In a world that is safe, people will be able to make their own lives better. We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.” Indeed, the United States would use “this moment of opportunity” to “extend the benefits of freedom across the globe”. It would work actively to “bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world”.43 The terrorist attacks on the U.S. transformed India, once an irritant in American grand strategy, to a primary, if potential, player in the post-9/11 world order. The government of Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee communicated to the American mission in New Delhi that it would extend whatever support the U.S. desired, including military bases, in its global war on terror.44 In September 2002, the White House put India for the first time in the category of great powers, “suggested an Indian role in (the) Asian balance of power and contrasted a positive approach toward India with a more critical one toward China”.45 The Next Steps in Strategic Partnership agreement, announced in 2004, was a breakthrough that committed Washington and New Delhi to working together in the arenas of civilian nuclear energy, civilian space programmes, high-technology trade and missile defence “where India’s possession of nuclear weaponry had previously made meaningful cooperation all but impossible”.46 Pranab Mukherjee, the Indian Defence Minister, and

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his American counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, signed a ten-year defence agreement, the New Framework for the U.S.-Indian Defence Relationship, in June 2005; and the U.S.-India Joint Statement followed during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington in July 2005. American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice spoke of the United States helping India to become a major world power in the twenty-first century.47 The Indo-U.S. entente cordiale culminated in March 2006, when Bush and Singh announced in New Delhi an unprecedented agreement to provide American nuclear power assistance to energy-starved India while allowing it to step up its nuclear weapons production substantially. “Our agreement with India is unique because India is unique”, Rice said. “India is a democracy, where citizens of many ethnicities and faiths cooperate in peace and freedom. India’s civilian government functions transparently and accountably. It is fighting terrorism and extremism, and it has a 30-year record of responsible behavior on nonproliferation matters”, she added.48 The pact, which marked a significant break from decades of American nuclear policy and was signed into law by Bush in December 2006, was read widely as an important part of a White House strategy to accelerate New Delhi’s rise as a global power and as a regional counterweight to China. To Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the agreement was “an emphatic acknowledgment of India’s transformation from a regional to a global power, an important step in transforming the rules of the world order to accommodate the aspirations of a rising power”. For the first time in India’s history, the fortunes of its elites were tied “comprehensively and intimately” to America’s fate.49 New Delhi appears to have decided to

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rise in concert with American expectations and not in opposition to them — in sharp contrast to Beijing’s choice of peaceful development on terms that nevertheless have attracted American vigilance ranging from barely-concealed concern to outright hostility. In deciding to partner India’s rise, the United States has chosen a country which, when ranked by composite measures of national power — the weighted combination of gross domestic product, defence spending, population, and technology growth — is expected to possess the fourth most effective concentration of power by 2015. Although it would come after the United States, the European Union, and China, an interesting feature of India’s rise is that it is the most important “swing state” in the international system.50 Therein lies its attractiveness to the United States. America’s engagement of India, like Washington’s engagement of Singapore, is occurring also in the unfolding context of what was named the Long War in the Quadrennial Defense Review Report (QDR) released in early February 2006. The Long War is of broader scope than the War on Terror, in which it originated after the 2001 terror strikes on America. The Pentagon’s new twenty-year strategy envisions American troops being deployed in dozens of countries simultaneously to fight terrorism and other non-traditional threats. The strategy builds on the lessons learned by the U.S. military since 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan and in counterterrorism operations.51 Although the report focuses on placing the war on terror in the larger perspective of the challenges facing the U.S., that war is not its sole concern. It singles out China as the country that has “the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States”, and Washington’s strategy in response

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calls for accelerating the fielding of a new Air Force long-range strike force, as well as for building undersea warfare capabilities.52 Interestingly, under the 2001 QDR, the Pentagon had planned to be able to swiftly defeat two adversaries “in overlapping military campaigns, with the option of overthrowing a hostile government in one. In the new strategy, one of those two campaigns can be a large-scale, prolonged ‘irregular’ conflict, such as the counterinsurgency in Iraq”. 53 Although this refinement of American objectives does not imply a direct targeting of China, it suggests strongly that the war on terror does not detract from Washington’s ability to address another contingency simultaneously, should it have to. NOTES 1 This chapter summarizes several argument made in Asad-ul Iqbal Latif, Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007). 2 Alan Boyd, “US Reorganizes its Military Might”, Asia Times, 21 November 2003. 3 Diplomat quoted in Ibid. 4 Bilveer Singh, The Vulnerability of Small States Revisited: A Study of Singapore’s Post-Cold War Foreign Policy (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1999). 5 N. Ganesan, Realism and Interdependence in Singapore’s Foreign Policy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 6 Yuen Foong Khong, “Singapore: A Time for Economic and Political Engagement”, in Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power, edited by Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross (New York: Routledge, 1999). 7 See Evelyn Goh, “Singapore’s Reaction to a Rising China: Deep Engagement and Strategic Adjustment”, in China and Southeast Asia: Global Changes and Regional Challenges, edited by Ho Khai Leong and Samuel C.Y. Ku (Singapore and Kaohsiung: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and Centre

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for Southeast Asian Studies, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan ROC, 2005); Great Powers and Southeast Asian Regional Security Strategies: Omni-Enmeshment, Balancing and Hierarchical Order, Working Paper no. 84 (Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, July 2005), ; Meeting the China Challenge: The U.S. in Southeast Asian Regional Security Strategies, Policy Studies 16 (Washington: East-West Center, 2005); “The ASEAN Regional Forum in United States East Asian Strategy”, The Pacific Review 17, no. 1 (March 2004): 47–69; “The Great Powers in the AsiaPacific: Examining US-China Relations in the ‘Post-Post-Cold War’ Era”. Talking points prepared for the China Reform Forum-IDSS meeting on Asia-Pacific Security, Beijing, 19 July 2002 . United States Navy Commander, Seventh Fleet, . Factsheet on Singapore-U.S. Defence Relations, Ministry of Defence, Singapore, . John J. Tkacik Jr. and Dana Dillon, “China’s Quest for Asia”, Policy Review, no. 134 (Stanford: Hoover Institution, December 2005 and January 2006), . Trish Saywell, “ ‘Places not bases’ puts Singapore on the line”, Far Eastern Economic Review, 17 May 2001. Strategic Forecasting, Inc., (Stratfor), “U.S. Builds an Asian Tiger Cub in Singapore”, 18 July 2001 . For Singapore’s White Paper on the Jemaah Islamiyah arrests and the threat of terrorism, see . The Defence and Security Working Group, . U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Patricia L. Herbold’s remarks on terrorism in Southeast Asia, Singapore, 12 April 2006 . Ganesan, op. cit., p. 122. Ambassador Chan Heng Chee, “George W. Bush and Asia:

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Three Sides in Search of a Triangle An Assessment”, Keynote Speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., 9 November 2004 . Speech by George Yeo, Minister for Trade and Industry, at the Economic Society of Singapore Dinner, 28 June 2004 . George Yeo at the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Summit 2002 . Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, “Reconceptualizing East Asia”, Speech at the official launch of the Institute of South Asian Studies, 27 January 2005 . J.N. Dixit, “Courting South East Asia”, siliconindia.com, 11 November 2002 . Satu P. Limaye, “2004: A Year of Living Actively”, Comparative Connections, Pacific Forum CSIS, . Kripa Sridharan, “Regional Perceptions of India”, in India and ASEAN: The Politics of India’s Look East Policy, edited by Frederic Grare and Amitabh Mattoo (New Delhi and Singapore: Manohar, Centre De Sciences Humaines, Centre for the Study of National Security Policy and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2001), p. 85. See also her “Transcending the Region: Singapore’s India Policy”, in Emerging Asia: Challenges for India and Singapore, edited by N.N. Vohra (New Delhi: India International Centre and Manohar, 2003), p. 20; and the general argument of her book, The ASEAN Region in India’s Foreign Policy (Dartmouth: Aldershot and Brookfield, 1996). India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru’s disdain for these governments is related in J.N. Dixit, Makers of India’s Foreign Policy: Raja Ram Mohun Roy to Yashwant Sinha (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India and The India Today Group, 2004), p. 12. “Indian Maritime Doctrine Revisited”, India Defence Consultants, . Sudhir Devare, India & Southeast Asia: Towards Security

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Convergence (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006), p. 100. Ravi Sharma, “A Base for a Blue-Water Navy”, Frontline 22, issue 11, 21 May–3 June 2005 . Sarath Kumara, “New Delhi Presses Ahead with Plans for An Indian ‘Suez Canal’ ”, World Socialist Web Site, . Ibid. Ibid. Indian Express, 16 November 2004. George Curzon, The Place of India in the Empire: Being an Address before the Philosophical Institute of Edinburgh on October 19, 1909 (Elibron Classics, 2003), replica of 1909 edition by John Murray, London. For a study of Curzon’s influence on Indian foreign policy thinking, see C. Raja Mohan, “Rediscovering Lord Curzon”, in Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 204–36. Indian Express, 16 November 2004. Raja Mohan, op. cit., pp. 204–07. Ibid, p. 89. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 148. Mohammed Ayoob, “Potential Partners: India and the United States”, Asia Pacific Issues, no. 42 (Honolulu: East-West Center, December 1999), p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 7. Raja Mohan, op. cit., p. 110. . Raja Mohan, op. cit., p. xi. John W. Garver, The China-India-U.S. Triangle: Strategic Relations in the Post-Cold War Era, NBR Analysis 13, no. 5 (Seattle, Washington: The National Bureau of Asian Research, October 2002), pp. 110–11. Ashley J. Tellis, India as a New Global Power: An Action Agenda for the United States (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), p. 5. U.S. Ambassador to India David C. Mulford, “U.S.-India

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Three Sides in Search of a Triangle Relationship to Reach New Heights”, Op-Ed, Times of India, 31 March 2005. Secretary Condoleeza Rice, “Our Opportunity With India”, Op-Ed, Washington Post, 13 March 2006. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Nuclear Pact Launches India Into Uncharted Waters”, YaleGlobal, 7 March 2006 . Ashley J. Tellis, India as a New Global Power: An Action Agenda for the United States (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), p. 30. Ann Scott Tyson, “Ability to Wage ‘Long War’ is Key to Pentagon Plan”, Washington Post, 4 February 2006. Ibid. Ibid.

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Terrorism

65 C H A P T E R III

TERRORISM

Three defining imperatives in relations among the United States, Singapore, and India are suggested by this brief overview: meeting the threat of terrorism, managing the rise of China, and strengthening democracy internationally. The possibility of a triangular relationship forming among Washington, Singapore, and New Delhi depends on the extent to which their interests converge over these key imperatives. It would be useful to analyse, therefore, how each country views each imperative. As the analysis below will show, their interests converge most completely over the need to fight terror. There is only a partial congruence of interests over how to meet the rise of China, with India veering close to the sharper edges of the American view, from which Singapore’s stance varies. Strengthening the democratic peace is the weakest link, with America’s and India’s approaches not really coinciding, but both diverging markedly from Singapore’s view.

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We begin with the War on Terror, which unites the three countries most closely.

AMERICA President George W. Bush’s immediate reaction to 9/11 — “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while” — had observers fearing that the bornagain Christian would launch a punitive clash of civilizations against the global Muslim community that had produced the perpetrators of the enormity. For example, for Soheib Bensheikh, Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseilles, the use of the word “crusade” recalled military operations against the Muslim world by Christian knights who had made repeated attempts to capture Jerusalem over several hundred years.1 Fears of a clash erupting along religious lines, precisely what the instigators of the 9/11 calamity had hoped to provoke, grew as Taliban deputy leader Mohammed Hasan Akhund called on Afghans to prepare for jihad against America if its forces attacked Afghanistan,2 and a fax from Osama urged Muslims in Pakistan to “fight the American crusade”.3 The demography of Bush’s support base — which included evangelical Christians and Christian Zionists whose support for the state of Israel was “visceral” — and the apparently pervasive and allegedly insidious influence of Neocons on policymaking in his Administration roused concerns on the Left4 over the war on terror being hijacked by religious considerations that would obscure the need to address terrorism’s material causes effectively.5 Years after 9/11, the War on Terror has not turned into a clash of religious civilizations (any more, though, than it has addressed the material causes). One understated reason is the way in which American

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society handled the impact of 9/11. Politics took a turn to the right with the passage of the Patriot Act of 2001, which gave far-reaching powers to the Executive to handle suspected terrorist threats and was accused of curtailing civil liberties; indeed, more than 5,000 ArabAmericans were subjected to “aggressive questioning” immediately after the attacks.6 However, there was no pogrom of internment or deportation inflicted on Muslims in America. “In the wake of September 11, the government quite self-consciously avoided the kinds of harsh measures common in previous wars. The exclusion and detention of American citizens of Japanese ancestry who resided on the West Coast in World War II is only the most infamous example”, Michael Chertoff argues. “During the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, the government responded to domestic violence with a panoply of extraordinary measures, including suppression of criticism; separate treatment of noncitizens; arrests and searches without warrants; and preventive detention.” Post-9/11, the government’s policy “was to seek to detain aliens only based upon evidence of a violation of criminal or immigration law that provided a basis to deny bail”.7 There was no attempt to discriminate against Americans on the basis of their ethnicity. Instead, soon after 9/11, Bush led an ecumenical service at the National Cathedral that included a spokesman for American Muslims, and a few days later, he visited a mosque in Washington where he warned against Americans making threatening gestures towards Muslims.8 This said, the Administration’s “hearts-and-minds” campaign, to convey to Muslims abroad that the war was not on them but on terrorists, has been less successful. The creation of an Office of Strategic

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Influence, reflecting official worries that the United States was losing support in the Muslim world following the bombing of Afghanistan, ended in a fiasco.9 The appointment of Charlotte Beers, the former head of the advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, as Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in October 2001 was meant to achieve for the United States what she had done for IBM in the 1990s: to “rebrand” it.10 In the event, this curious mutation of an attempt to influence wartime opinion abroad into a form of Madison Avenue merchandising, reflected more the epicurean possibilities of American consumerism than the Spartan realities of heart and mind created by the war abroad. The invasion of Iraq incensed Muslim public opinion when television brought into living rooms the horrors of war visited on Iraqis, especially children and the elderly, who had already suffered terribly under economic sanctions intended to punish their dictator for his invasion of Kuwait. Nevertheless, Muslim nations have not closed ranks against America or the West. Many Muslims worldwide condemn particular American policies, but they do not fail to understand the values of the West at its best. “To Muslim parents, terrorists like Bin Ladin have nothing to offer their children but visions of violence and death. America and its friends have the advantage — our vision can offer a better future”, argued the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, set up in 2002. Its final report, released in 2004, recognized that while the war’s objective was to dismantle the Al-Qaeda network, in the long term, it required prevailing over the ideology that contributed to terrorism. In fighting the war, the United States would have to use all elements of national power: diplomacy,

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intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defence, the commission argued. Addressing the issue of America’s ties with despotic governments, the report remarked: “Where Muslim governments, even those who are friends, do not offer opportunity, respect the rule of law, or tolerate differences, then the United States needs to stand for a better future.” America also would have to communicate and defend its ideals in the Islamic world: “Our efforts here should be as strong as they were in combating closed societies during the Cold War.”11 That remains work in progress. So does the actual war. The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, released in September 2006, provided an update on progress made and the challenges ahead. Among the successes it claimed were depriving Al-Qaeda of a safe haven in Afghanistan. “Once a terrorist sanctuary ruled by the repressive Taliban regime, Afghanistan is now a full partner in the War on Terror.” Similarly, a multinational coalition joined by the Iraqis themselves is aggressively prosecuting the war against terrorists in Iraq, “now a new War on Terror ally in the heart of the Middle East”. The Al-Qaeda network had been “significantly degraded”. Most of those in the network responsible for 9/11, including the plot’s mastermind, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, had been captured or killed. Other key members, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the group’s operational commander in Iraq, had been killed. The United States had led an “unprecedented international campaign” to combat terrorist financing that had made it harder, costlier and riskier for AlQaeda and related terrorist groups to raise and move money. There was a “broad and growing global consensus” that the deliberate targeting of innocents

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was never justified by any calling or cause. In that context, many nations had rallied to fight terrorism by cooperating on law enforcement, intelligence, military, and diplomatic activity. Indeed, the Administration noted, without mentioning names, that numerous countries which had been “part of the problem” before 9/11 were now increasingly becoming “part of the solution” — and that this transformation had taken place “without destabilizing friendly regimes in key regions”. Within the United States, the counter-terrorism architecture had been enhanced through the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Centre. The United States and its partners had disrupted several serious plots since 9/11, including Al-Qaeda plans to attack targets inside the United States. Among the challenges were that terrorist networks were now more dispersed and less centralized, relying more on smaller cells inspired by a common ideology and directed less by a central command structure. Not all terrorist attacks had been prevented, with terrorists striking in places from Bali to Beslan and Baghdad. Terrorists had declared their intention to acquire and use Weapons of Mass Destruction to inflict even more catastrophic attacks on the United States, its allies, its partners, and other interests around the world. Then, some states, such as Syria and Iran, continued to harbour terrorists at home and sponsor terrorist activity abroad. On the psychological front, the Administration acknowledged that the “ongoing fight for freedom” in Iraq had been “twisted” by terrorist propaganda as a “rallying cry”. On the wider front, the increasingly sophisticated use of the Internet and the media had enabled terrorists to communicate, recruit, train, rally

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support, proselytize, and spread their propaganda without risking personal contact.12 Critics of the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq paint a far grimmer picture of the challenges. Among the plethora of accounts of the consequences of action on these two theatres of the War on Terror, is an account,13 which argues that, far from being routed, since 9/11 Al-Qaeda has directed, financed, or played an important role in 30 fatal operations in 12 countries, causing 2,500 casualties, including 440 deaths — even excluding the activities of al-Zarqawi in Iraq and independent groups friendly to Al-Qaeda. Indeed, terrorism has grown worse, not better, since 9/11. The author cites the terrorism incident database maintained by the Rand Corporation for the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), which is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to point out that the rate of terrorism fatalities for the 59-month period following 11 September 2001 is 250 per cent that of the 44.5 month period preceding and including the 9/11 attack. As for terrorist incidents, their rate for the post-9/11 period is 268 per cent that of the period prior to and including 11 September. In spite of the American military having a free hand in Iraq and Afghanistan, the insurgency in Iraq is producing attacks at a higher rate than ever before and Afghanistan is witnessing a “dramatic resurgence” of Taliban activity, with the incidence of attacks up 74 per cent from 2005 and the fatality rate up 140 per cent. Politically, Afghanistan is a “ten block democracy” where the central government’s writ extends barely beyond Kabul before vanishing in the face of warlord rule. The journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran provides a comparable account for Baghdad. “From inside the Green Zone, the real Baghdad — the checkpoints, the

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bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams — could have been a world away. The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin’s call to prayer, never drifted over the walls”, he writes. “The sub-Saharan privation and Wild West lawlessness that gripped one of the world’s most ancient cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside, the calm sterility of an American subdivision prevailed. Iraqis needed help — good advice and ample resources — from a support corps of well-meaning foreigners, not a full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered in a palace of the tyrant, eating bacon and drinking beer, surrounded by Gurkhas and blast walls.”14 Carl Conetta argues that in Iraq, insurgency and communal violence affect areas containing half the population if Basra is included. The central government effectively shares power with the U.S. mission and with provincial, local, and factional centres. Are the Afghan and Iraqi operations, then, worth the political investment in them? Apart from their cost — the subject of massive and disputed calculations — there is the question of their effect on the American military. “Not since the Vietnam era has the United States had such a large portion of its active-component armed forces at work overseas or deployed in operations as today. And not since the Korean war has it asked so much of its National Guard and Reserve troops.” On the diplomatic front, too, there are reverses as countries, including those allied to the United States, try to balance against it or obstruct its policies. For example, Germany, France, and Turkey impeded Operation Iraqi Freedom during its initial phase. More importantly, the formation and expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) — which includes China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan — seek to

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limit U.S. efforts to secure new and lasting military bases in Central Asia.15 Against the background created by these problems, Conetta cautions Washington against seeing regime change operations as being essential to achieving basic security goals. In such cases, “stable, predictable outcomes are very difficult to achieve, usually very costly, and often require protracted engagements. Also, they often are corrosive to the armed forces that undertake them”. That being the case, the challenge for the United States is to achieve essential security goals without resorting to “large-scale high-risk adventures”. Likewise, warning against America conducting a generalized “war on terrorism”, much less a “war on Islamic extremism”, he recommends the conduct of dedicated, counter-offensive military campaigns that target networks and organizations, and are decided and undertaken on a case-by-case basis, not viewed as part of a single grand “war”. Also, Washington should exercise greater restraint when considering the involvement of the country as “a combatant or a partisan” in complex regional conflicts over which it has little control. “The fact that terrorists or terrorism may play a role in a larger conflict does not by itself warrant direct US military involvement. Insurgencies, secessionist movements, and anti-regime movements often involve real and legitimate grievances. A common danger is implicating ourselves in conflicts that are partly driven by the actions or policies of allies over whom we have limited influence.”16 In the context of the goals that the U.S. Administration has set for itself, this is a call for retrenchment that is unlikely to be heeded. The Administration visualizes the global conflict ahead to dominate the next twenty years. The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism elaborates

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on the nature of this Long War. The military, it says, is expanding the Special Operations Forces, increasing the capabilities of the general-purpose force to conduct irregular warfare in an asymmetric environment, and “initiating the largest rearrangement of its force posture since World War II”. Drawing a parallel with the Cold War, when the United States created a number of domestic and international institutions as well as “enduring partnerships” to defeat the threat of Communism, the strategy argues that similar structures are required now to win the Long War on Terror. These structures include establishing international standards for counter-terrorism through consultations with the G-8 countries and others, and building the capacity of foreign partners. “Through the provision of training, equipment, and other assistance, the United States will enhance the ability of partners across the globe to attack and defeat terrorists, deny them funding and freedom of movement, secure their critical infrastructures, and deny terrorists access to WMD and safe havens.”17 At issue, in particular, is the nature of fourthgeneration warfare, where “the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point”. Fourth-generation warfare might have no definable battlefields or fronts; the traditional distinction between “civilian” and “military” might disappear; and actions would take place concurrently “throughout all participants’ depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity”. Major military facilities, such as airfields, fixed communications sites, and large headquarters, would become rarities because of their vulnerability; and the same might be true of their “civilian equivalents, such as seats of government, power plants, and industrial sites (including knowledge as well as manufacturing industries)”.18 In that new

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world, the Long War would reflect, not the drawing down of American power or the will to intervene abroad, but the finessing of that power in order to achieve expanding goals.

SINGAPORE Singapore has never shied away from acknowledging the importance of American power for itself and the region. Singapore’s demography — the only Chinesemajority state outside Greater China — its geography — bordered on the south by Indonesia, which contains the world’s largest Muslim population — and its history — ejection from its northern neighbour, Malaysia, in 1965 because of its insistence on multiracialism and meritocracy as the building blocks of politics — all underlie the city-state’s vulnerability. In classical balance-of-power theory terms, it therefore has borrowed security from outside its immediate region. The United States, as the pre-eminent military and economic power in East Asia and the wider world, has provided the external counterweight to offset the possibly inimical influence of regional heavy weights. Michael Leifer notes that since Britain’s withdrawal in the 1970s, the United States has been the “preferred primary source of external countervailing power” for the island-state because the superpower does not possess any territorial ambitions in Pacific Asia but has economic and strategic interests that complement those of Singapore.19 Indeed, America’s role as the offshore balancer in East Asia is seen as holding the ring between Japan, whose brutal rule in Southeast Asia during World War II was followed by its role in providing the impetus for East Asian economic development, and China, a post-insurrectionary rising power that needed to be

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engaged and incorporated into the regional and global status quo. America was indispensable to the balance of power in East Asia, including Southeast Asia. A theme running consistently through the public interventions of Singapore’s founding father, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who is now Minister Mentor, is noncommunist Southeast Asia’s debt to the United States. In a speech, he recalled the time between 1966 and 1971, when American leaders used to stop by Singapore after visiting South Vietnam to discuss the regional situation with him. The outcome of the Vietnam War, in which the U.S. had sent in about 500,000 troops “without sufficient knowledge of the history of the Vietnamese peoples”, dented U.S. prestige and became a “psychological block to US responses to crisis” until the 1991 Desert Storm operations against Iraq. However, Lee added, there had been enormous collateral benefits to East Asia from the Vietnam War. “It prevented the dominoes of Southeast Asia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, from falling.” Also, after Hanoi invaded Cambodia in December 1978, China attacked Vietnam in February 1979 and stopped Hanoi from threatening Thailand. Without American intervention, there would never have been the four East Asian dragons — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore — followed by the four tigers, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. On a global scale, “consistent and comprehensive” U.S. policies to contain the Soviet Union led to its implosion. “The US contested the Soviet system and held the line militarily.” Lee tied his comments on the Cold War to the War on Terror that had begun in 2001.20 Terrorism escalated traditional threats to the citystate’s security. The arrest of operatives of the Al-Qaedalinked Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) in Singapore in December

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2001 and subsequently in 2002 and 2004 dramatized the extent of the new threat. The operatives had planned to rig six trucks, with three tons of explosives each, and simultaneously crash them into six locations in Singapore. The targets covered American, Australian, British, and Israeli interests, including embassies, and subway stations frequented by Westerners. That apart, the JI planned to hijack an airplane and crash it into Changi Airport.21 Indeed, the terrorist organization had planned to blow up the pipelines that supply water from Malaysia to Singapore to provoke a conflict between the two countries, portray a “Chinese Singapore” as threatening a “Muslim Malaysia”, and exploit the ensuing confusion to try and overthrow the Malaysian Government and establish an Islamic state in Malaysia.22 Even if only the attacks on Western targets in Singapore had occurred, they would have dealt a deadly blow to the trade-dependent country’s ability to attract foreign investment and Multinational Corporations, which are large job creators in Singapore. An attack on the airport would have been catastrophic; war with Malaysia a nightmarish scenario of another order altogether. In each of these cases, the JI had an eye on the demography of Singapore’s population — which consists of 78 per cent Chinese, 15 per cent Malays, 7 per cent Indians, and others — and was hoping to set off racial clashes that would shatter the coexistence, built up painstakingly since 1965, that underpins the country’s social stability and economic vibrancy. Following the abortive 2001 attacks, the Singapore Government handled the ethnic situation “admirably”23 by ensuring that the arrests did not inflame passions in the Malay/Muslim community or drive a wedge between it and other ethnic communities. Muslim

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religious organizations and leaders reached out to the detainees’ families with financial and emotional support so that they, and other Muslims, would not labour under the idea that they were being victimized; the detainees themselves were given religious guidance provided voluntarily by respected religious leaders. Muslim community leaders also held public talks and other colloquia for non-Muslims to show that Islam did not condone terrorism. However, there is no evidence that these moves made any impression on foreigners who wanted to subvert the city-state’s peace and prosperity.24 Why this animosity towards Singapore? According to then-Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, speaking in 2004, the threat stemmed from “a religious ideology that is infused with an implacable hostility to all secular governments, especially the West, and in particular the U.S”. The terrorists wanted to recreate the Islam of seventh-century Arabia, which they regarded as the Golden Age. The JI’s objective was to create a Daulah Islamiyah, an Islamic state in Southeast Asia, to be centred in Indonesia but including Malaysia, southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, Brunei, and Singapore. The JI’s ultimate goal was a caliphate, by definition not confined to Southeast Asia. Goh remarked that the “dream of a caliphate may seem absurd to the secular mind. But it will be a serious mistake to dismiss its appeal to many in the Islamic world, though the majority do not believe in killing and dying for it. But there are radicals and militants who do.” Islamic militancy was not new to Southeast Asia. However, what was new was this “type of fanatical global ideology (including the phenomenon of suicide bombers) that has been able to unite different groups and lead Southeast Asian groups to subordinate

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local interests to the broader struggle”. Southeast Asia became, then, an inextricable part of the global struggle against terror. Believing that the “war against terrorism could shape the 21st century in the same way as the Cold War defined the world before the fall of the Berlin Wall”, Goh concluded: “Just as the Cold War was an ideological as well as a geopolitical struggle, the war against terrorism must be fought with ideas as well as with armies; with religious and community leaders as well as police forces and intelligence services… Unless we win the battle of ideas, there will be no dearth of willing foot soldiers ready to martyr themselves for their cause. This ideological struggle is far more complex than the struggle against communism because it engages not just reason but religious faith.”25 This difference impinged on developments in Singapore’s immediate vicinity. The JI’s Singaporean operatives were not marginalized members of a minority community driven by local grievances but were well-integrated into the economic and social structures of the country. This fact was a matter of concern to the Singapore authorities26 because it meant that the motivations of the JI Singaporeans could not be addressed domestically by economic or political means, but were expressions of globalized religious disquiet originating outside Singapore, a disquiet that Singapore could do little about. The JI’s activities brought the importance of the region into full view. The organization’s headquarters in Indonesia underlined the nature of the changes that had occurred in Southeast Asia’s linchpin country. Not too long ago, under the authoritarian rule of President Soeharto, Indonesia had been a country of co-existence, where devout santri Muslims had lived and had let live nominal abangan Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and

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others. Observant Muslims had cast a quizical eye on beer-drinking and pork-eating Muslims, but no one had tried to cleanse Indonesia of apostates, heretics, infidels, heathens, and pagans. That had changed with Soeharto’s downfall in the aftermath of the Asian Economic Crisis that had begun in 1997. The JI, founded in the mid-1990s and led by the charismatic Indonesian preacher Abu Bakr Bashir, reflected the changed Indonesian landscape. In an interview with the Malaysian academic Farish A. Noor for the Al-Jazeera television station, Bashir summarized his view of international relations. Indonesian leaders during Soeharto’s time were “secular, pro-American and entirely corrupted by global capitalist forces”. As for Malaysia, how could it sign a free-trade agreement with America and Japan, kafir countries? America was, of course, an enemy of Muslim states and the supporter of Israel. “In Islam that makes America a kafir harbi (enemy) state, and we Muslims are obliged to cut off all ties, diplomatic and economic with such an enemy state”, Bashir declared. There could be no dialogue for peace in the Arab world so long as Israel existed. “Israel cannot dream of having peaceful borders because Israel has no right to exist, no right to be there. That is the land of Palestine, for the Palestinians. How can any Muslim leader say that Israel has the right to safe borders? It should not be there in the first place!”27 It was this worldview that motivated the JI’s armed engagement with “unbelievers” outside and “hypocrites” within. According to a report by the International Crisis Group, the JI, which communicated with and received funding from Al-Qaeda, was set up as a military organization and divided into units known as mantiqis and wakalahs — originally defined as districts and sub-districts — which reflected a territorial

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command structure of brigades, battalions, companies, platoons, and squads. Senior members of the central command trained in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Subsequently, the Afghanistan veterans trained a new generation of mujahidin fighters when the JI set up a camp in Mindanao from 1996 to 2000 “in a reciprocal arrangement” with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The JI draws its strength from pesantrens, Muslim boarding schools. Although only a small number of the more than 14,000 such schools in Indonesia are committed to the principles of jihad, there is a JI “Ivy League” attended by the children of JI members. Chief among these is Pesantren al-Mukmin, better known as Pondok Ngruki, founded by Abu Bakar Bashir.28 The 2002 Bali nightclub bombing, the 2003 Mariott Hotel bombing in Jakarta, the 2004 Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta, and the second Bali bombing of 2005 were the more spectacular demonstrations of the power of terrorist networks that are active across the region, from southern Thailand to the southern Philippines. The JI, which also has been implicated in the Manila bombing of December 2000, is believed to be associated with other groups, including the Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia, and there have been efforts to coordinate the JI’s activities with those of Muslim radicals in Thailand and separatists in the southern Philippines. Although not in the JI’s league, there are other Muslim groups that espouse violence. Among them is the Laskar Jihad, the paramilitary wing of Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunnah wal Jammah, the Communications Forum of the Followers of the Sunnah, established in Jogjakarta in early 1998. In 2000, it sent several thousand fighters to Maluku, where they

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participated in a communal bloodbath involving Christians. The Front Pembela Islam (FPI), the Islamic Defenders’ Front, is another Indonesian group; its stated goal is the full implementation of Islamic sharia law and it has a paramilitary wing called the Laskar Pembela Islam. Well-known for organizing raids on bars, massage parlours, and gaming halls, the FPI in late 2001 took the initiative in threatening to throw Americans out of Indonesia because of the U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Abu Sayyaf, Bearer of the Sword, is more a group of bandits that specializes in kidnapping for ransom than it is a terrorist organization with political goals, but it has carried out terror and criminal attacks since 1991 and was responsible for a wave of attacks against Christian civilians in 1993.29 Singapore’s support for the War on Terror and for America’s leadership in that war derives from the citystate’s acute awareness of the threat to it from insecurity and instability in Southeast Asia. Hence also Singapore’s open support for the American intervention in Iraq. “We were and are in firm support of President George W. Bush and his team”, Lee Kuan Yew declared. “The President was right to invade Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein and remove the weapons of mass destruction that all intelligence agencies in Europe and America assessed Iraq to have.” Following Saddam’s fall, Singapore had helped to train Iraqi policemen, had deployed a Landing Ship Tank to the Gulf on three occasions, each with about 170 personnel, had supplied a C-130 detachment, and had sent three separate KC-135 detachments for air-to-air refuelling missions, he said. Lee believed that Washington had made a mistake after the invasion by disbanding the Iraqi army and police and dismissing all Baathists in the Iraqi Administration. These actions had created a vacuum

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and, since the army had neither surrendered nor been neutralized as prisoners-of-war, soldiers melted away, only for many of them to re-emerge as insurgents. However, he was even more forthright in warning the United States against cutting its losses and pulling out of Iraq. He noted that Washington had long relied on its traditional Sunni Arab allies — Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia — to keep the Arab-Israeli conflict in check. In the new Iraq, however, the United States had allowed the emergence of the first Arab state in Iraq with Shiites in power, thus stirring aspirations for equal treatment among some 150 million Shiites living in the region’s Sunni countries. “With Sunni control of Iraq now removed, Shiite-Iran will no longer be checked from extending its influence westwards towards Shias who are significant minorities in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States”, he said. Thus, the power of the Sunni bloc might no longer be able to counter an Iran that supported Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon and Sunni Hamas in Palestine. On the other hand, if Iraq broke up in civil war, it would destabilize the whole Middle East by drawing in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey. Lee looked back to the American withdrawal from Vietnam and observed that the consequences would be worse this time. The Vietnamese wanted to reunify their country, but if the Americans departed from Iraq prematurely, jihadists everywhere would be emboldened “to take the battle to America and to all her friends and allies”. Having defeated the Russians in Afghanistan and the Americans in Iraq, “they will believe that they can change the world”. His advice to Washington was for it to be multilateralist in its approach and rally the European Union, Russia, China, India and all nonMuslim governments, and many moderate Muslims

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leaders, to its cause. “Multilateralism won the Cold War and will win the Terror War.” He also called for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem. “But it must be a viable Palestinian state, one they would find worth making peace for.” In spite of Hamas and Hizbollah, the United States should urge Israel to encourage such a Palestinian state to emerge and “help it prosper”. “The Palestinians will have reason to avoid wars if wars will destroy the future they are building for themselves.”30

INDIA As it is for Singapore, terrorism is an insistently regional problem for India. Indians have claimed consistently that the sources of the insurgency in Punjab till 1995 and the resurgence of militancy in Kashmir in 1989 lie across the border. Pakistan’s position is that it provides only moral and diplomatic support for Kashmiri freedom fighters, who are carrying out an indigenous struggle against Indian oppression in pursuit of their legitimate right to national self-determination. However, the U.S. State Department’s report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, released in April 2001, blamed Islamabad as the chief sponsor of extremist groups active in the disputed Kashmir region; so had an earlier report by the National Commission on Terrorism. According to another report, published in Jane’s Intelligence Review on 1 September 2001, Pakistan’s role took the form of providing the fighters with training camps and logistical, financial, and doctrinal support. Much of the ideological indoctrination for the Kashmiri conflict, for example, was coordinated through Pakistan’s network of madrasahs, or Islamic seminaries. “Many of these schools equate the concept of the jihad

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— which most Islamic scholars interpret as ‘striving for justice’ — with guerrilla warfare and explicitly exhort their students to fulfil their ‘spiritual obligations’ by fighting in the name of the pan-Islamic cause.” According to the report, Pakistan fundamentally altered the dimensions of the conflict in Kashmir, first by increasing the firepower and overall proficiency of the militants on the ground, and second by turning what had been a secular, locally-based struggle in Kashmir to one conducted largely by foreign militants and rationalized in pan-Islamic terms. For example, the prominent Laskhar-e-Taiba (LeT) group’s annual diary declares its intention to bring the jihad to the United States, Israel, Russia, Britain, and France and plant Islamic flags in Delhi, Tel Aviv, Washington, Paris, and London.31 Some Indians are critical of America’s own role in all this. To B. Raman, a retired Additional Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India, Muslim terrorism in India is a by-product of the “USinspired and orchestrated” jihad of the 1980s against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. To make the Soviet troops bleed, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “encouraged” Muslim fanaticism and incited unemployed Muslim youth from around the world to go to Afghanistan to fight against communism. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was “entrusted” by the CIA with the task of motivating the jihadists religiously, and training and arming them. An estimated 6,000 to 10,000 such fighters participated in anti-Soviet activities. The majority of them were Arabs, but a small number came from India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, the southern Philippines, Chechnya, and Xinjiang. They were joined by unemployed Muslim youth from the South Asian

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Muslim diaspora in Western Europe and the United States, and Afro-American youth from North America and the Caribbean. The majority of the Muslims from India (about 100) who went to Afghanistan came from Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).32 Raman’s views are corroborated by those of General Hamid Gul, the former ISI chief who was instrumental in cementing his country’s ties with the Taliban. Gul has said on the record that “Islamic fundamentalists got their big boost in the modern age as CIA assets in the covert campaign I was also involved with to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan.”33 Nuclear weapons, tested by India and Pakistan in 1998, exacerbated the possibilities of non-conventional threats to security in the subcontinent. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian relate how, soon after India defeated Pakistan in the 1971 war that led to the emergence of Bangladesh, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto called a parley of Pakistani nuclear scientists in Multan to chart out a nuclear weapons programme. The Indian test in May 1974 pushed Pakistan “further into the nuclear arena” and, following the Indian tests of May 1998, Pakistan went in for its own. After that, however, “countering India’s nuclear weapons became secondary”, and Pakistani nuclear weapons became “the means for neutralizing India’s far larger conventional land, air, and sea forces”. In fact, nuclear weapons became tools for achieving foreign policy objectives — and led to “breath-taking adventurism in Kashmir”. Pakistan sent troops out of uniform along with Islamist militant fighters across the Line of Control to capture strategic positions in the high mountains of the Kargil area, sparking the Kargil War of 1999. Pakistan’s withdrawal, under American pressure, prevented all-out war with India, and Pakistani leaders

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claimed that it was the country’s possession of nuclear weapons that had deterred India from crossing the Line of Control or the international border.34 According to a former Indian chief diplomat, the formal nuclear weaponization of both India and Pakistan since 1998 generated “a certain dangerous confidence in Pakistan” that it could pressure India “through terrorist means without attracting military consequences against Pakistani interests”.35 The terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001 was a spectacular demonstration of changed realities on the subcontinent, if indeed the militants belonged to Pakistan, as they were alleged to have done.36 New Delhi responded with massive troop mobilization along the IndiaPakistan border, and Pakistan did the same. The two neighbours came to the brink of war — with India seemingly prepared to move in and flush out militant camps across in Pakistan-administered Kashmir — till in October 2002, New Delhi announced a phased withdrawal of its forces from the border to peacetime locations. Against this backdrop of India’s tensions with Pakistan, the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 dramatized the fact that the main ideological and operational locus of international terrorism for India, in its western neighbourhood, was the area in which the main problem lay for America as well. “That is why I have often said that India and the United States are threatened by the same source of terrorism. I am told by my American interlocutors that (the) US Government now also perceives these links.”37 A senior American official would concur: “At least since the beginning of the Cold War, India’s regional concerns have been of more than passing interest to Washington’s top policymakers. But the attacks of 9/11 have literally turned us

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into neighbors.”38 The attacks on the United States in September and on India in December 2001 led to growing closeness between Washington and New Delhi. During his January 2002 visit to the United States, Indian Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani emphasized the two countries’ “unique role” in the struggle against terrorism. “The common threat that we face, and the coordinated struggle that we have had to wage against this common menace, have underscored the need for a strong and longer-term partnership between us, anchored in our shared values and driven by the congruency of our common interests”, he said. International terrorism had made India and the United States its principal targets because the two countries celebrated what the terrorists abhorred: “We both believe in pluralism and secularism, which is rooted in respect for all faiths. We are both open societies, in which freedom of the press, judiciary and enterprise are constitutionally guaranteed.” Above all, they both were democracies, he said, going on to describe India and America as the “Twin Towers of Democracy”. “The terrorists may have destroyed the steel and concrete structures of the WTC (World Trade Centre in New York), but they can never harm the structures and the spirit of our two democracies.”39 Three years down the road, Indian Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee revisited these themes, which overlap with American interests and concerns. He noted that India was located at the centre of an “arc of fundamentalist activism, terrorism and political instability between North and East Africa and Southeast Asia” that had witnessed some of the most dramatic acts of terror over the past decade: the U.S. Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Mombasa, incidents in Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bali, and Jakarta,

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and the Bombay blasts of 1992. Now, India faced daily a “proxy war” from across its borders using terrorism and local insurgencies, even as it had to contend with the possibility of Weapons of Mass Destruction falling into the hands of terrorists and non-state actors in its vicinity. Instability arising from failing states in its neighbourhood could provide breeding ground for terrorists and other non-state actors. Indeed, the entire Indian Ocean region from East Africa to Southeast Asia was an area rife with fundamentalist, terrorist, and militant, separatist, or extremist organizations. The United States and India, which often had been referred to as “estranged democracies”, shared common values and security concerns. There was “an objective convergence of interests”.40 This convergence has taken concrete form across a range of fronts in the War on Terror. Following 9/11, India announced that it would allow U.S. troops and equipment to be based temporarily on Indian soil for the first time in the country’s history, and gave Washington a new degree of strategic flexibility to combat terrorism in the region.41 Allowing American forces the use of Indian airbases during the military campaign in Afghanistan helped turn India into a “vital ally” in the campaign to destroy Al-Qaeda. Diplomatic cooperation between India and America “has been unprecedented in our relationship”. No such offer to provide bases had been made even to the Soviet Union. The two countries have worked together at the United Nations, building support for the India-sponsored Comprehensive Convention Against International Terrorism. Their cooperation has contributed to the arrest of “hundreds of terrorists around the world” and they have strangled the financial assets of terrorists, with well over 100 nations issuing blocking orders and

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freezing assets used to finance attacks. The U.S.-India Joint Working Group on Counterterrorism, which was set up in 2000, was revitalized by the 9/11 attacks and led to intelligence-sharing, training, cooperation against terrorism, financing and money laundering, and efforts to enhance border security. “As the two top centers of development of computer software in the world, India and the US are natural partners in another front of the war against terrorism — cyber terrorism.” They consulted each other on how to combat threats to their critical national infrastructures, with the new U.S.-India Cyber-Security Forum providing an on-going platform for cooperation.42 Indian missile boats joined U.S. Navy vessels in patrolling the Malacca Straits for a year after 9/11. In May 2002, Indian paratroopers and American special operations forces participated near Agra in their largest-ever joint army and air exercise since India’s independence. The specific goal of the exercise was to conduct joint parachute training and mutual familiarization with small arms, but the larger, longterm goal was more ambitious: Indian and U.S. military forces now were developing actively the capability to work together effectively.43 In September 2002, Indian and U.S. forces held a joint mountain-warfare exercise in Alaska, the first time that Indian troops had taken part in an exercise in the United States. The training took place at the U.S. mountain warfare centre in Alaska that specializes in cold-weather warfare skills — pertinent to the mountainous reaches of Kashmir. Beyond the specific cooperation against terrorism, what occurred in the years since 2001 was a strategic realignment in which India enthusiastically endorsed Bush’s new strategic framework in spite of “decades of objections to U.S. nuclear policies, at a time when even

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formal American allies withheld their support”; expressed no opposition to Bush’s decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty in the face of widespread international and domestic condemnation of the U.S. action; endorsed the U.S. position on environmental protection and global climate change in the teeth of global opposition; and signed a 10-year defence cooperation framework agreement with the United States that identified common strategic goals and the means for achieving them in spite of “strong domestic opposition to, and regional suspicion about, such forms of collaboration with Washington”.44 The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 divided Washington and New Delhi only temporarily. India’s traditionally warm ties with Arab states, including Iraq, were meant to contain Pakistan’s links based on religion and culture; a particular interest in Iraq as a secular bulwark in a region rife with Muslim radicalism; a consequently deep scepticism about the Bush Administration’s “strenuous attempts” to link Saddam Hussein with Al-Qaeda; a similar scepticism about his ability to produce Weapons of Mass Destruction that would destabilize the region and be made available to terrorists; and the substantial number of Indian workers in the Gulf, whose lives and remittances back home would be affected severely by war made the Indian decision-making elite prefer a strategy of containment against Saddam and oppose the use of force and regime change.45 Washington’s disregard of the United Nations rankled the wider public, especially the left-liberal intelligentsia and citizens who were against a widening of America’s military intervention in the region. However, as Sumit Ganguly noted presciently, the Iraq war did not strain the Indo-U.S. relationship because “pragmatism and the willingness of the major players

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in the Indian government to embrace the utility of force in international affairs” carried the day.46 India eschewed the international chorus of opposition to the campaign against Iraq in spite of “repeated entreaties” from other major powers and Third World states. Indeed, New Delhi considered seriously — and “came close to providing” — an Indian Army division for post-war stabilization operations in Iraq in spite of widespread national opposition to the war.47 That said, the Iraq war complicated prospects for the subcontinent. By setting a precedent for pre-emptive strikes on hostile states, it created the potential for India and Pakistan to adopt that policy towards each another. Indeed, both Indian and Pakistani spokesmen argued that the grounds on which the U.S. had attacked Iraq existed in each other’s country as well. Pakistan is the reason for the convergence of U.S.Indian interests over terrorism not being as close as Indians would like it to be. After 9/11, they had hoped that Washington would recognize at last the biting reality of Indian complaints about cross-border terrorism, complaints that had gone unheeded because of the geopolitical reasons for America’s support for Pakistan during the Cold War and beyond it. Indians were disappointed because, instead of bringing Pakistan to book for its alleged complicity in aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan, from which Al-Qaeda had planned 9/11, Islamabad under General Pervez Musharraf had became a key U.S. ally in the War on Terror. All that New Delhi could expect was Washington keeping on “jawboning” Musharraf to end support for insurgents in Kashmir while urging New Delhi to address human rights violations by its security forces, promote economic development, and restore public order and security in Kashmir.48

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This said, India has not fared badly in the larger realignment of security postures created by the War on Terror. Its support for the United States was rewarded when Washington lifted sanctions that it had imposed following New Delhi’s 1998 nuclear tests. Indeed, America’s nuclear accord with India is part of a dramatic change of attitude reflected in the superpower’s decision to accept India as a de facto member of the nuclear club and help it become a major world power in the twentyfirst century. Pakistan’s arrival as a nuclear power at the same time as India’s has not elicited a comparable response from the United States; Islamabad is not a member of the club. As India’s influential then-National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra put it to Americans, “what really stunted the growth of our bilateral relations in past years was the tendency to look at India’s role only within a South Asian canvas and to see South Asia solely as the theatre of an India-Pakistan zero sum game. India has broken free of these limiting confines, which the Cold War ideologies sought to impose.”49 NOTES 1 Peter Ford, “Europe Cringes at Bush ‘Crusade’ against Terrorists”, The Christian Science Monitor, 19 September 2001. 2 Ibid. 3 Jack Krupansky, “The Neocon ‘Crusade’ ”, . 4 Paul Rogers, “Christian Zionists and Neocons: A Heavenly Marriage”, . 5 Some Americans, like critics abroad, dismissed the declared rationale for the war altogether. A few went so far as to argue the attack had been staged as part of a diabolical Israeli and/ or American plot to fabricate a casus belli for all-out war on Muslims, while others viewed 9/11 as a disaster that the United States had brought upon itself because of its imperious foreign policy. Yet others castigated America’s economic and

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Three Sides in Search of a Triangle cultural power, along with its political and security policies, in explaining why it attracted hatred. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why Do People Hate America? (New York: Disinformation Company, 2002) is one of the more sober analyses of global reactions to America’s hyper-power. Profile of Michael Chertoff, International Relations Center, Right Web, . Michael Chertoff, “Law, Loyalty, and Terror”, The Weekly Standard, vol. 9, issue 12, 1 December 2003 . Mr Chertoff is the current Secretary for Homeland Defence. Joshua Muravchik, “Hearts, Minds and the War against Terror”, 1 June 2002, AEI Online, Washington, . Ibid. Ibid. Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (The 9/11 Commission Report), Executive Summary, . National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, The White House, September 2006, “Today’s Realities In The War On Terror”, . Carl Conetta, Pyrrhus on the Potomac: How America’s post-9/11 Wars have Undermined US National Security, Commonwealth Institute Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Report no. 18 (Cambridge, MA, 5 September 2006), . Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, reviewed by Michiko Kakutani, “Behind Baghdad Walls, Rosy Plans in the Green Zone”, New York Times, 13 October 2006. Carl Conetta, Pyrrhus on the Potomac, op. cit. Ibid. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, op. cit, “Institutionalizing Our Strategy for Long-Term Success”, . William S. Lind, Colonel Keith Nightengale (USA), Captain John F. Schmitt (USMC), Colonel Joseph W. Sutton (USA), and Lieutenant-Colonel Gary I. Wilson (USMCR), “The Changing

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Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation”, On Point, . Michael Leifer, Singapore’s Foreign Policy: Coping with Vulnerability (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 26. Lee Kuan Yew, Speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Award, New York, 11 October 2006 . Mahan Abedin, “Singapore: Continuing Threats and Progress in the War on Terror”, Interview with Singapore High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Michael Eng Cheng Teo, Spotlight on Terror, vol. 3, issue 1, 25 January 2005 . Goh Chok Tong, “Beyond Madrid: Winning Against Terrorism”, Speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C, 6 May 2004 . Andrew T.H. Tan, “Terrorism in Singapore: Threat and Implications”, in Southeast Asia: Threats in the Security Environment (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2006), p. 206. Even inside Singapore, the controversy that erupted in early 2002, over the suspension of two Muslim schoolgirls who insisted on wearing the tudung (the Islamic headscarf) to school, saw the emergence of a “range of dissenting voices” among local Malay/Muslims. A local website, fateha.com, became a catalyst for many of those opinions, raising fears that the debate could widen communal fissures in Singapore amidst the atmosphere of mistrust created by the JI plot; Ibid. Goh Chok Tong, op. cit. Mahan Abedin, “Singapore: Continuing Threats and Progress in the War on Terror”, op. cit. “We should not fear being called radical”, Interview with Abu Bakr Bashir by Farish A. Noor, Al-Jazeera, 18 August 2006 . Jemaah Islamiyah in South East Asia: Damaged But Still Dangerous, International Crisis Group, Asia Report no. 63, Jakarta/ Brussels, 26 August 2003 .

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29 Frank Frost, Ann Rann, and Andrew Chin, “Terrorism in Southeast Asia”, Current Issues, 11 April 2003, Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Australia, . 30 Lee Kuan Yew, Speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, 11 October 2006, op. cit. 31 Peter Chalk, “Pakistan’s Role in the Kashmir Insurgency”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, 1 September 2001 . 32 B. Raman, “Islamic Terrorism in India: The Hydra-Headed Monster”, South Asia Analysis Group, Paper no. 526, 3 October 2002 . 33 Interview with Arnaud de Borchgrave, United Press International Editor-at-Large, 14 September 2001 . 34 Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, “The India Pakistan Conflict: The Failure of Nuclear Deterrence”, Nautilus Institute, 24 November 2002 . 35 From a summary of a presentation by J.N. Dixit, former Indian Foreign Secretary, at the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing on Kashmir, 20 June 2002 . 36 The Bombay blasts of 1993, carried out after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu fanatics in 1992, were the most serious before that. Kashmir has been the terrain of deadly and repeated attacks, but the Mumbai blasts were shocking because they occurred so far away from the Kashmiri theatre of conflict. Mumbai, India’s economic capital, was attacked again in 2003 and 2006. 37 Address by Indian Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 12 June 2003, Embassy of India, Washington D.C., . 38 “The United States and India: Moving Forward in Global Partnership”, Remarks by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca, New Delhi, 11 September 2003 . 39 Statement issued by Shri L.K. Advani, Home Minister of India at a press conference, Embassy of India, Washington, D.C.,

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9 January 2002 . Address by Indian Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., on India’s Strategic Perspectives, 27 June 2005 . India Day Celebration Remarks, Congressman Joe Knollenberg, Novi, Michigan, 19 August 2002 . “Transforming US-India Relations”, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca, 14 May 2002 . India Day Celebration Remarks, Congressman Joe Knollenberg, op. cit. Ashley J. Tellis, “The U.S.-India ‘Global Partnership’: How Significant for American Interests?” Prepared Testimony to the House Committee on International Relations, 16 November 2005 . Sumit Ganguly, “The Start of a Beautiful Friendship? The United States and India”, World Policy Journal, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2003 . Ibid. Ashley J. Tellis, “The U.S.-India ‘Global Partnership’: How Significant for American Interests?”, op. cit. Sumit Ganguly, “The Start of a Beautiful Friendship? The United States and India”, op. cit. “India, United States and the New World Order: Prospects for Cooperation”, Speech by Shri Brajesh Mishra, National Security Adviser of India, at the Council of Foreign Relations, New York, 7 May 2003 .

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Three Sides in Search of a Triangle C H A P T E R IV

CHINA1

Singapore, the United States, and India agree only partially on the implications of the rise of China.

AMERICA In an essay that goes against much of conventional wisdom, William J. Dobson argues that, rather than treating 11 September 2001 as the iconic inauguration of a new world order, it was New Year’s Eve, 1991 that changed the world forever. “It was on that day, far away from any cameras, that the Soviet Union finally threw in the towel, dissolving itself and officially bringing an end to the Cold War.”2 Comparisons between momentous events are controversial, but there is no doubt that the end of the Cold War was a defining moment for America’s place in the world. That moment was also a defining moment for China because it could unravel Beijing’s relationship with Washington, which now, as the sole remaining

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superpower, was best positioned to either facilitate or constrain China’s emergence as a global power.3 The Sino-American relationship, based on a common opposition to the growth of Moscow’s power, had been established in the closing two decades of the Cold War. America’s overtures to China — beginning with Kissinger’s secret trips there in July and October 1971, and culminating in President Richard Nixon’s visit in February 1972 — had signified the difference that China could make in a world situation marked by the failure of the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve a stable balance of power through détente. Beijing’s estrangement from Moscow had made it a natural partner for a Washington that had been seeking to reverse the strategic defensive into which Soviet advances had pushed it. The Sino-American rapprochement, which had received a tremendous boost with China’s decision in 1978 to modernize and open up its economy to the world, had set the tone for a new era in international, and particularly Asian, affairs that had affected the outcome of conflicts such as the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and Beijing’s punitive expedition against Hanoi the following year. Perhaps more than any other country, China had benefited from American choices made in those two decades. However, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which set in motion the events that would climax with the implosion of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, combined with the military suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square also in 1989, reversed the direction in which U.S.-China relations had been moving. The China Card turned into the China Threat. “The US no longer needed China as a potential ally against the Soviets, and the threat of China opening a

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second front during a world war was no longer a necessary deterrent.” American military planners, faced with downsizing but buoyed by the “peace dividend”, focused more attention on China as “a potential future adversary”. The first Gulf War that followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 in essence pitted Chinese equipment and their strategy of overwhelming numbers against America’s high-technology and force-multiplier strategy. Surprised by the results, China embarked on an ambitious military modernization programme.4 With the end of the Cold War, Chinese and American approaches to international security began to diverge. To sceptics, the problem lay more with the United States than it did with China. China, given its population, economy, and the remnants of a Stalinist political system, began to answer to the Pentagon’s post-Cold War search for a potential rival with which to replace the Soviet Union; 11 September 2001 merely put this quest on hold.5 Contemporary American thinking on China is encapsulated in a series of official pronouncements, such as the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, released in September 2002, and the Quadrennial Defense Review reports. These documents view China’s defence spending and its military modernization as threats to the established world order, although the country is rising without the support of an alliance system, which the United States possesses. The U.S. Quadrennial Defense Review of 2001 and the National Security Strategy of 2002 signify a hardening of views on China in the first George W. Bush Administration. The latter document declares: “In pursuing advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path that, in the end, will

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hamper its own pursuit of national greatness.”6 That cautionary note is evident as well in the 2005 annual report to Congress on China’s military power, reflecting views in the second George W. Bush Administration. “China does not now face a direct threat from another nation. Yet, it continues to invest heavily in its military, particularly in programs designed to improve power projection. The pace and scope of China’s military buildup are, already, such as to put regional military balances at risk”, the report notes. Given trends in its military modernization, China could have a force capable of “prosecuting a range of military operations in Asia — well beyond Taiwan — potentially posing a credible threat to modern militaries operating in the region”. The report does acknowledge that Beijing has described “its long-term political goals of developing comprehensive national power and of ensuring a favorable strategic configuration of power in peaceful terms”. Nevertheless, it frets that as China’s military power grows, its leaders may be tempted to resort to force or coercion “more quickly to press diplomatic advantage, advance security interests, or resolve disputes”.7 Washington’s pessimistic view of the implications of China’s rise is clear. Indeed, Cold War terms such as “encirclement” and “containment” have entered the vocabulary of America’s China-watchers as relations have moved through crises such as Chinese “missile diplomacy” near Taiwan in 1995–96, which the United States rebuffed by dispatching the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait; NATO’s 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; and the EP3 spy plane incident of 2001. Chinese scholars wonder why Washington needs to strengthen its military alliance with Tokyo, “bring Taiwan under the protective umbrella of the

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U.S.-Japan Security Treaty”, and take its relations with New Delhi to a higher level — unless it is to set in place a strategy of containing China at reduced cost to the U.S.8 The reappearance of Cold War thinking is problematic because, unlike the Soviet Union, China is very much a player within the global economic system into which it was brought by the United States and within which it continues to prosper. Wang Jisi notes the views of mainstream Chinese writers, who argue that “the growth of Chinese power today is integrated into economic globalization and therefore is vastly different from the emergence of the Soviet Union, whose development was separated from the industrialized world. Unlike Japan and Germany before and between the two world wars, they point out, China today is far from being militarized.”9 Indeed, the interdependencies created by China’s economic links with the rest of the world are nurturing constituencies inside China that have anything but an intrinsic interest in hostility towards the United States. A paper by Paul A. Papayoanou and Scott L. Kastner makes a strong case for treating internationalist economic constituencies in China as a constraint on national belligerence. The authors do this by studying the divergent behaviour of two non-democratic powers: a largely-responsible Czarist Russia, which became a credible ally for a democratic France with which it had close economic ties; and Wilhelmine Germany, a highlyaggressive power in spite of its economic links with democratic Britain. Drawing analogies with the past and asking which way China might go, they focus on the crucially different roles played by economic and political constituencies in Russia and Germany in determining strategic outcomes. They conclude that a

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policy of engagement with Beijing is beneficial because it empowers “more pacific economic internationalists in China, while containment would likely weaken those forces and might bring to the fore more aggressive political and economic interests”. Also, the risks of engagement are insignificant in the near term. “Because U.S. economic stakes in China are fairly small, they do not carry the danger of tying the hands of U.S. leaders should the Chinese pursue conflictual policies that require the United States to balance against China”, they argue.10 By contrast, China’s economic stake in a peaceful international order — an order that ultimately is upheld by America — makes it a stakeholder in the international system. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has embraced a “responsible stakeholder role” for China, a phrase that is the brain child of her former deputy, Mr Robert Zoellick. ”Now, the rise of China is something we don’t only take note of, but we believe that there is an obligation by all of the powers, but perhaps particularly the United States, to engage in policies that will encourage … the responsible stakeholder China, the China that sees it has an obligation in the international system to promote and, in fact, to defend peace and security”, Rice said.11 However, it is important to note the qualified nature of the American statements on China. Neither Zoellick nor Rice said that China currently was the responsible global stakeholder that they envisioned. Rather, they emphasized that U.S. policy should strive to urge China to become a responsible global stakeholder. “This is in fact the crux of U.S. policy toward China today, a policy that combines active engagement to maximize areas of common interest and cooperation, along with a recognition that we need to maintain strong U.S. regional capabilities in case China does not eventually

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move down a path consistent with our interests”, Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Thomas J. Christensen clarified. America did not seek to contain China but to “help channel China’s growing influence in a positive direction”.12 For the United States, its relations with China are complicated by the premium that Washington places on Beijing’s stance on Taiwan. It might well be asked whether Taiwan is a part of America’s One-China policy or whether China is a part of America’s Taiwan policy: perhaps both are true, with Washington seeking to balance the two objectives through the simultaneous invocation of the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 and the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) of 1979. Contrary to the American view of Taiwan’s centrality in its relations with China, it is quite possible to argue that China’s strategic and political intentions towards Asia should not be inferred from its posture towards Taiwan, which to Beijing is not merely a territorial issue but one that goes to the heart of China’s integrity as a nation and a state. However, it is also undeniably true that Washington would be unable to “dump” Taiwan without suffering a severe blow to its own credibility as a security guarantor in the rest of Asia and beyond. The passage of the Anti-Secession Law by Beijing in March 2005 — an escalation in Beijing’s demands for re-unification prompted by what it saw as Taipei’s quickening moves towards independence — heightened the need for the United States to continue to play a stabilizing role in the Taiwan Strait. At the heart of Washington’s role is the policy of deliberate strategic ambiguity that it has adopted towards Taiwan. That policy, which emanates from the Communiqué and the Act, has two major components. The first component acknowledges Beijing’s position

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on Taiwan’s status but it does not necessarily accept that position; and it understands that the Taiwan issue has to be settled by Taipei and Beijing without Washington’s intervention or mediation, but it insists that the question be resolved by peaceful means. The ambiguities inherent in this position are reinforced by the policy’s second component, in which the TRA commits Washington to providing defensive weapons for Taiwan to defend itself from a military threat or invasion but does not oblige Washington to defend Taiwan — unless it chooses to. The optional nature of the American response should Taiwan be attacked, and then, too, the American reading of the circumstances of the attack hold the key to the policy of strategic ambiguity.13 The problem with American policy is less that, as its Chinese critics argue, it emboldens preindependence forces in Taiwan to cross the threshold and declare de jure independence, precipitating retaliation by China, whose promises on this account are convincing because inaction would threaten the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power itself. The danger with strategic ambiguity is that a misreading in either Taipei or Beijing of its applicability to an escalating situation could provoke the very conflict that it seeks to prevent. Certainly, the policy provides Washington with options that it would not possess otherwise, but it does not appear to provide a resolution of the Taiwan issue. Instead, Chinese fears of external support for Taiwanese separatism have been heightened by the role that the United States apparently has proffered Japan, China’s historical antagonist, in regional affairs. The Japan-U.S. Joint Declaration on Security, which made the case for revising the original defence cooperation guidelines of 1978, appeared in April 1996,

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a month after the Taiwan Strait missile crisis.14 The revised Guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defence Cooperation were agreed upon in 1997. The most important revision to the 1978 guidelines was the provision — passed into law with partial amendments in 1999 — for “cooperation in situations in areas surrounding Japan that will have an important influence on Japan’s peace and security”. The ambiguous reference to “areas surrounding Japan” predictably drew Chinese objections because it might include Taiwan, and tempers rose in Beijing when Japan’s chief cabinet secretary declared that the guidelines were relevant to the Taiwan Strait area. Tokyo later said that the term was “not geographic but situational”, but China rejected the semantic ingenuity. Taiwan remains a key issue in relations between China and America. Driving U.S.-China relations is a palpable tension that is inherent in the rise of a power in the face of the preponderant global power. Evelyn Goh notes that, regardless of the new power’s intent, its rise poses a potential threat to the dominant power’s influence, especially when the two powers have different worldviews, political systems, and cultures. The conflict between a rising and an incumbent power lies in conflicting ideas of what the international or regional order should be like, with order meaning both the international hierarchy and the ordering principles and rules of the international system. Notably, the United States has not granted China peer status, demanding instead that China should recognize it as a legitimate and benign Asia-Pacific power and play by the rules of international conduct.15 This insistence in itself is not an impediment to stable relations because, empirically, it should be possible for the two countries to agree on complementary spheres of influence since China

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basically is the incumbent mainland power in East Asia while the United States is the incumbent maritime power.16 However, the issue is complicated by the question of whether China is a status quo power.17 The Bush Administration sees China as a revisionist power, a view on which is based the American containment discourse, whereas many Chinese analysts view the United States as a revisionist power because of its pursuit of unilateralism, its development of Theatre Missile Defence, and its abrogation of the ABM treaty.18 Even as many Chinese bristle at the thought of the United States presuming to shape the course of China’s rise, one observer argues that Washington already is running a “covert neo-containment strategy” to counter China’s rising power by augmenting its network of military bases and alliances in Asia that surround China. He says that, instead of emulating the policies of preWorld War I Britain towards Germany, the United States should look to a more fruitful chapter in British history, in the late 1800s. Then, although not without tension, the British peacefully allowed the United States to rise as a great power because both countries were protected by the Atlantic Ocean that separated them. “Taking advantage of that same kind (of) separation by a major ocean, the United States could also safely allow China to obtain respect as a great power, with a sphere of influence to match. If China went beyond obtaining a reasonable sphere of influence into an Imperial Japanese-style expansion, the United States could very well need to mount a challenge.”19 The most appropriate historical parallel perhaps is suggested in Walter Russell Mead’s argument that focusing exclusively on China’s rising power vis-à-vis the United States, with China in Germany’s former

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role, would make Europe circa 1914 the historical model; whereas the more congenial model is provided by widening the focus to include Japan and India, in which case Europe in 1815 gives a good example of a balance among several powers in which Britain — whose mantle now would be worn by the United States — maintained the balance at very little cost to itself.20 Warning of a move in the opposite direction, Aaron Friedberg is right to say that any move from “constrained competition to direct confrontation” would have serious consequences for both Washington and Beijing, and would push Eastern Eurasia into division and a new Cold War, whereas continued cooperation could result in the growth of the world economy, the peaceful resolution of regional disputes, and progress on global issues such as terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. No matter what the outcome is, the United States and China are likely to have the world’s most important bilateral international relationship in the coming decades.21

SINGAPORE Although Singapore troops train in Taiwan, creating a strategic link that does not exist in Singapore-China relations, the city-state’s approach to the territory differs from that of the United States. Singapore’s One-China policy is predicated on the recognition that Taiwan is indeed a part of China; that any Taiwanese declaration of independence would be a disaster for the territory, the mainland, and the Asia-Pacific region; and that what matters is when and how the reality of Taiwan belonging to China is translated into a political and juridical framework for re-unification. Lee Kuan Yew believes that Washington may be able to stop China

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from using force for another two to three decades. “Within that time, China is likely to develop the military capability to control the straits. It may be wiser, before the military balance shifts to the mainland, to negotiate the terms for an eventual, not an immediate, reunification.”22 Singapore’s recognition of Taiwan as a vital interest of China and its urgings to others to stop challenging the reality that Taiwan and Tibet belong to China have endeared it to Beijing without affecting its ties with Taipei. China and Taiwan chose Singapore as the venue of their first-ever talks in April 1993. The Wang-Koo talks — named after Wang Daohan, chairman of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, and Koo Chen-fu, chairman of Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation — did not improve relations because the two sides had different agendas, but the talks themselves were seen widely as being historic. More than a decade after the talks, Taiwan remains firmly a part of Singapore’s One-China policy.23 It is not difficult to see why. More than any other country, it was Singapore that had played an interlocutory role for China as Deng Xiaoping’s dramatic reform programmes from the late 1970s reversed China’s economic isolation, brought the country into the mainstream of international affairs, and laid the basis for a reordering of the international system itself. Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of Singapore’s China policy, was aware keenly of the possibilities that underlay this epic transformation of both China and the international order. The interlocutory role that he, and other Singaporean leaders, played was two-fold. First, Singapore, a country that had modernized its economy without being forced to liberalize its softauthoritarian system of governance, said to China in effect that there was a third way between the poverty

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that Mao Zedong’s economic autarky had inflicted on China, and the danger that the Communist Party would necessarily have to relinquish its hold on a modernizing China. To the West, particularly the United States, Singapore argued effectively that demanding democracy of early-modernizing China would antagonize the Dengist economic radicals who could lead the country out of the grip of Maoist conservatives. Singapore’s realist recognition that, ironically, it was not democracy but a measure of Leninist absolutism that was required to modernize China’s economy went down very well in Beijing. Indeed, when Deng toured southern China in 1992 to accelerate his reforms, he called specifically for his people to learn from Singapore how to promote rapid economic development while maintaining good social order. Chinese officials came in droves to learn from Singapore’s development model, and its political system attracted the attention of party school officials. Singapore’s position, a consistent one, was displayed in its refusal to condemn the Chinese authorities following the Tiananmen Square killings. It offered permanent residence to several thousand Hong Kong residents when nightmarish visions of tanks rolling into the colony after its looming return to China made them rush to foreign embassies for passports. If that was a signal to Beijing of the critical need to ensure the prosperity of post-handover Hong Kong, Singapore’s larger message to Hong Kong residents was that they should do what they were best at — creating prosperity — and not demand political change in China as a way of securing their economic interests after Hong Kong’s return. The people of Hong Kong could do no worse than put their fate in the hands of Western and Asian liberals, the international media, non-governmental organizations, or the political

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programme of Hong Kong’s last colonial Governor, Mr Christopher Patten. Beijing would never allow departing governors, international lobbies, and foreign powers to re-set the terms of Hong Kong’s return to the mainland. Indeed, if worst came to worst, Beijing would let Hong Kong collapse to prevent demands for political change seeping in from the territory and subverting the stability created by the party’s iron grip on power. It was an unsentimental message, keeping with the tenor of the city-state’s outlook on world affairs. To the West, Singapore presented China not just as a land of economic opportunity but as a key player in the defining arena of war and peace. This was so even during the Cold War. Speaking at a joint meeting of the United States Congress in Washington, D.C., in 1985, Lee said: “I want to refocus your attention, distracted by the problems of trade imbalance, job loss, high value of the dollar, and budget deficits, back on the basic issues of war and peace.” More than the atomic bomb had been responsible for the four decades of relative peace since World War II, he said. Decolonization; the establishment of an open and fair trading system under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; and the creation of a stable currency exchange system under the original International Monetary Fund Agreement at Bretton Woods had laid the basis of a world order in which the explosive growth in trade, banking, and finance had provided nations with a realistic alternative to seeking power through territorial aggrandizement. Japan had taken off, followed by South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the ASEAN countries. Placing post-Maoist China’s decision to modernize its economy firmly within the possibilities of this peaceful economic order, he reminded his audience that a “poor but ideologically fervent China” had been

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a “ceaseless spoiler of other countries’ economic plans” from 1949 to 1976, undermining their stability by exporting revolution. China had discontinued support for guerrilla insurgencies in Southeast Asia “for the present”, Lee said in a pointed reminder of what Beijing could relapse into doing should it be rebuffed by the international system. Hailing the significance, of China’s decision to modernize, for peace, stability, and growth in Asia, he framed his remarks against the contest between democracy and the free market versus communism and the controlled economy, the ideological binaries through which Cold War Americans viewed and judged the world. He asked Americans whether they wanted to abandon the contest for Third World hearts and minds that they had nearly won. Calling on American legislators to abjure protectionism, he asked their country to uphold rules of international conduct that reward peaceful, cooperative behaviour and that punish transgressors. “In every age, the leading power has to carry the burden of encouraging the peaceful acceptance of the status quo”, Lee observed.24 That observation did not lose its edge with the end of the Cold War; if anything, the disappearance of the Soviet Union renewed the urgency of Washington drawing Beijing into the status quo because the United States was now not only the leading global power but the only superpower. Emerging as ASEAN’s most ardent advocate of engagement with China, Singapore leaders touched on the need for engagement in almost every speech they made or interview they gave on East Asian affairs.25 In 1994, Lee said: “For the world’s stability and security, integrating China into an international framework is not a question of choice but of necessity. The world does not need another Cold

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War.”26 Lee encapsulated Singapore’s expectations of China’s role in 1996, when the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom honoured him with the Architect of the New Century Award. “Trade does not prevent wars, but it does require peace”, Lee quoted Richard Nixon as having written in his book, Beyond Peace.27 He drew on the former U.S. President’s words to argue that China should be engaged. “China has repeatedly stated that it will never become a hegemon. It is in everyone’s interest that before that moment of choice arrives, China should be given every incentive to choose international cooperation which will absorb its energies constructively for another 50 to 100 years”, Lee declared.28 Lee made his case in the context of America’s historical role in Asia. He recalled how East Asian industrialization had been hastened by America’s military interventions in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; and by its economic initiatives, ranging from the reconstruction of Japan, to helping South Korea rebuild, and to buying time in Vietnam to enable Southeast Asia to get its act together and lay the foundations of ASEAN’s growth. China’s entry into this East Asian industrial system had “sparked off the most spectacular economic transformations in the history of man”. Indeed, Lee forecast, American policies had initiated a process that in the next two to three decades would move the world’s economic centre of gravity from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The United States should now use the time available to help China integrate itself into the world community and play a role in shaping the international order. Lee’s insistence on economic cooperation as a source of peace was accompanied by a ready reminder of the other strand of Singapore’s approach to global affairs: the city-state’s belief in a balance of power among

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major international players, a balance that should be supple enough to incorporate rising powers that might otherwise threaten the status quo, but a balance by whose rules the rising power must play as well. Thus, if China did not have economic opportunities to grow peacefully, the world would have to live with a “pushy” Beijing, Lee said. In that case, however, the United States would not be the only country to be concerned about what China would do when it was able to “contest the present world dispensation”.29 Asian countries shared the concern: would China seek to re-establish its traditional pattern of international relations in which vassal states had a tributary relationship with the Middle Kingdom? “Any signs of this will alarm all the countries in the region, and cause most countries to realign themselves closer to the US and Japan”, he forecast.30 Lee characterized Nixon as a “pragmatic strategist” who today would engage and not contain China, but the former American leader would also “quietly set pieces into place for a fall back position should China not play according to the rules as a good global citizen”. In that eventuality, which would force countries to choose sides, Nixon would make arrangements to win over to America’s side Japan, Korea, ASEAN, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the Russian Federation.31 Lee was aware of how decisively the Asian balance of power could shift should an economically resurgent China assert itself strategically. However, such a change would occur only after turns down the road — and turns that were by no means inexorable — in the evolution of the post-Cold War security order. What the emerging contours of that order required was not China’s containment but its engagement. This goal called for the managers of the global order to take a clear view of their responsibilities. “The world will not

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be better off with a China that is not bound by its rules”, Singapore’s elder statesman declared.32 Sensitive to how its relations with China would be viewed by its neighbours and the West, Chinesemajority Singapore made it clear that it was not an interlocutor for an ascendant China wishing to exclude the external powers from Asia in a China-led future. All that Singapore was saying was that the external powers, primarily the United States, should not seek to exclude China from supping at the table of existing powers. Singapore has had no illusions about its ability to influence foreign policy outcomes in Washington — or Tokyo or Brussels. There, chanceries would fashion strategies towards Beijing on the basis of their own power, interests, and imperatives — much as China would treat these capitals in terms of its own calculus of strength, interests, and exigencies, not in terms of Singapore’s arguments on behalf of an apposite international system into which it would like to see China incorporated as a great power. Speaking of the city-state’s approach to Beijing, Khong Yuen Foong declares that engagement is a process in which “interested members of the international community can participate”, there being nothing to suggest that “to qualify as an ‘engager’, states like Singapore — or Malaysia or Indonesia — must be able to unilaterally move the ‘engagee’ toward the goal of using its power responsibly”.33 Rather, the interlocutory aspect of Singapore’s engagement of China has reflected its leaders’ awareness of the importance of “voice” in shaping the terms of a debate.34 Over the years, Singapore’s interlocutory role has receded as a factor in its relations with China. This is because reformist Beijing does not need an interlocutor as it did in the

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early years of its entry to the global system. Its own leaders, particularly young, Western-educated technocrats moving up the political and corporate ladders, are more than capable of arguing China’s case to the rest of the world. The hobbled fortunes of the Suzhou International Park (SIP), an ambitious attempt to build a Chinese township with Singaporean characteristics,35 tested the limits of Singapore’s engagement with China. The SIP, which began as a 65–35 joint venture between Singapore and China, encountered problems that ceased only when the two stakes were reversed. The Asian Financial Crisis in the closing years of the twentieth century played a role in the park’s problems by exacerbating its competition for investment with a neighbouring industrial park; but the causes of the conflict in Suzhou went deeper: to a seemingly intrinsic incompatibility between the Singaporean and Chinese ways of doing business in spite of ethnic affinity and empathy with each other’s political systems. What Singapore brought to the table was a system in which politicians, bureaucrats, technocrats, and businessmen worked together to achieve national ends defined by the executive. The software to be transferred to China was embedded in an almost total organization of society. It was quite another thing to transfer that system to China, where “the mountain is high and the emperor is far away”.36 Lee’s memoirs reveal his disappointment over what turned out to be “a chastening experience”, “a partial success” although not “a total failure”.37 He put the Suzhou episode in grand historical context. “After two centuries of decline that began with the Qing dynasty, China’s leaders face the formidable task of installing modern management systems and changing the mindsets and habits of officials steeped in the traditions of the imperial mandarinate.”38

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INDIA Chinese aver that India’s quarrels with them originated in a pernicious imperial past that estranged India from its natural neighbours. Using India as a springboard, the British expanded their empire to cover the territories of present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, to administer Aden and some areas of the Persian Gulf, to exercise control over the Himalayan kingdoms of Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim, to extend the imperial sphere of influence to Afghanistan, and to “encroach” on Tibet. “While expanding the Indian empire, British colonialists deliberately fostered the ideology of great power chauvinism and national egoism among Indian politicians, administrative officials and intellectuals.”39 The Sino-Indian rift that came to a head in 1962 brought the colonial issue to the fore. The rift centred on the legality of the McMahon Line demarcated by the British at the Simla Convention of 1914. China refused to accept it as the border by arguing that historically “no treaty or agreement on the Sino-Indian boundary had ever been concluded between the Chinese central government and the Indian government”.40 Frequent border clashes beginning in 1959 culminated in the war and the Indian military debacle of 1962 that Indians have not forgotten. They blame China for aggressively imperial behaviour based on the self-serving use of revisionist history. The Chinese and Indian military frontiers met for the first time in history in 1950; within twelve years of having become India’s neighbour, China invaded it, Brahma Chellaney declares.41 However, had Beijing not set out to “teach India a lesson” (in the words of then Premier Zhou Enlai) Chellaney believes that India “probably would not have become the significant military and nuclear power that it is today. The invasion helped lay the foundation of

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India’s political rise.”42 The stakes were raised by China’s nuclear explosion in 1964. A decade later, India tested a nuclear device. Although it called the event — known as Pokhran I after the site of the blast — a “peaceful nuclear explosion”, India’s security trajectory was clear and was confirmed by the 1998 blasts, Pokhran II. China featured prominently in Indian justifications of Pokhran II. It is also no secret that New Delhi’s evolving doctrine of “minimum nuclear deterrent” and the development of the Agni III indigenous missile factor in China’s capabilities. Chellaney makes an essential connection between China and India. India’s possession of nuclear weapons and the diplomatic ability to get the world’s dominant power — the United States — to accept those weapons as a fait accompli transformed India’s status on the international stage. China had done just that in 1964, when its nuclear tests announced the extent of the Sino-Soviet split and made China a valuable potential recruit to the American side of the Cold War — a possibility that was fulfilled in 1971 — in spite of Beijing remaining on the other side of the ideological divide between international capitalism and proletarian internationalism. In 1998, India did not even have to devise an apology for its domestic system, which was a Westminster-style democracy embracing capitalism. India found it easier to be a cartel-breaker in 1998 than China had found it possible to do so in 1964. Following on from New Delhi’s success in replicating Beijing’s entry into the ranks of nuclear weapons states, there is a view that India could be doing a “China” on China. Venu Rajamony, political counsellor in the Indian mission in Beijing from 1999 to 2002, cites Chinese concerns that, just as China and the U.S. put aside ideological and other differences in the early 1970s to

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forge a tacit alliance against the Soviet Union, India and the U.S. might find common ground by uniting against China. Was Washington trying to set off New Delhi against Beijing? Also, “is India emulating China’s own example by displaying unprecedented pragmatism and diplomatic dexterity by aligning itself with the United States to obvious mutual benefit”?43 If so, one consequence would be India’s success in breaking free of its South Asian confines. China’s response is to continue to tie down India in its immediate neighbourhood through Pakistan. Cold War developments from 1971 onwards caused India to view China as being aligned against it with Pakistan and the United States, and China to see India as being ranged against it with its arch-enemy, the Soviet Union. Even the end of the Cold War did not end the distrust, as China’s supply of arms, missiles, and nuclear technology to Pakistan encouraged Pakistani “adventurism”, discouraged “acceptance of ground realities in Islamabad”, and altered the balance of power on the Indian subcontinent. Strong China-Pakistan links contribute to “tying down India and preventing realization of its potential as an Asian Great Power”.44 In Pakistan, of course, that last assertion would be greeted as a vindication of the policies that it had adopted since its inception. “Pakistan, a peripheral regional power that was yet too large and too well armed to be forced into submission, frustrated the regional and global ambitions of its much larger neighbor — the seemingly natural and inevitable postcolonial inheritor of regional domination”, Robert G. Wirsing writes.45 Islamabad found a steadfast ally in Beijing. True, China’s commitment to Pakistan was not unconditional, witness Beijing’s refusal to intervene

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militarily to prevent East Pakistan’s secession with Indian help in 1971. Premier Zhou Enlai wrote to President Yahya Khan in April 1971 promising Chinese support for Pakistan’s efforts to “safeguard State sovereignty and national independence”. These words were significant. China’s support for Pakistan’s independence and State sovereignty rather than the latter’s “national unity and territorial integrity”, which was the commitment that Rawalpindi had sought, was a precise indication of Beijing’s stake in Pakistan. China had a strategic and economic interest in the existence of Pakistan’s western wing. West Pakistan was a crucial gap in what would be otherwise a hostile ring around China’s weakest salient; and also it was a trade outlet for China to the Indian Ocean. Support for President Yahya’s moves in the east would be given only to the extent that such support would deter India from attacking the western wing. So long as the status quo in West Pakistan remained undisturbed, Beijing would not risk a possible confrontation with the Soviet Union by intervening militarily either in the East Pakistan civil war or in larger India-Pakistan hostilities.46 Although Chinese support fell short of what Rawalpindi had hoped for, West Pakistan’s survival cemented a vital relationship with China, with Islamabad’s determination to block Indian aspirations to be South Asia’s security manager fitting neatly into Beijing’s interest in preventing New Delhi from using the subcontinent as a launching pad for its wider Asian aspirations. India is not the subcontinent’s predominant military power because China, through its proxy efforts, has built up Pakistan as the “regional spoiler” state.47 Beijing’s links with Islamabad are replicated, albeit in much diluted fashion, by its military and other ties

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with Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, which India sees as a Chinese attempt to encircle it.48 These positions bring to mind John Garver ’s prediction of a “protracted conflict” between the two countries rooted in their divergent self-perceptions as Asian powers. This conflict will continue unless India accommodates itself to China’s dominance and preeminence as the Asian power in every part of Asia, including Southern Asia; or unless China accepts India’s predominance in South Asia and accommodates India’s expanding reach into other parts of Asia.49 Surjit Mansingh disagrees with his pessimistic analysis, arguing that the dynamic post-Cold War international environment poses many security dilemmas for both established and aspiring powers. “Military conflict is neither the best nor the only means of resolving such dilemmas, the more so in an age and area of nuclear weapons”, she insists. “The vital interests of India and China are not at stake in their differences or even in their rivalry.”50 She makes an important point. Former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s decision to recognize Tibet as belonging to China, during his visit to Beijing in 2003, removed an issue that once had caused tensions in bilateral relations. China’s reciprocal readiness to recognize Sikkim, which India annexed in 1975, as an Indian state revealed that differences or even rivalry does not preclude realism. Indeed, in the wake of the current thaw in Sino-Indian relations, there is even talk of a Sino-Indian strategic partnership. It is based on the idea, formulated neatly by Indian former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, that China and India “are too big to contain each other or be contained by any other country”.51 Indian elites do not seek to be a part of any

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U.S. or other strategy to contain China, maintaining that the growth of their national power, combined with rapprochement with Washington, would prevent Chinese power from threatening vital Indian interests directly.52 Speaking of Southeast Asia, the region south of China and east of India in which the interests of the two powers interact increasingly and can compete, the distinguished former Indian diplomat Sudhir Devare insists that “India does not and should not seek closer military ties with Southeast Asia as a bulwark against China or Pakistan.”53 Devare — a former Secretary in India’s Ministry of External Affairs who was associated closely with the evolution of its Asia-Pacific policy — places his remarks in the context of the fact that, unlike during the Cold War, India-Southeast Asia ties today are driven by internal rather than external factors.54 There is, moreover, tremendous growth in Sino-Indian trade, which is creating a new basis for healthy relations between Asia’s two most populous countries. However, China’s and India’s diplomatic manoeuvrings do not measure up always to expectations of warmer relations. In the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which brings together China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, Russians wary of the Chinese presence in their backyard invited India as an observer in July 2005. To counter the move, China brought Pakistan into the SCO as an observer. In a replay of that manoeuvring, this time in the opposite direction, China entered the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) as an observer at the 13th SAARC summit in November 2005 (that pointedly met at the Bangladesh-China Friendship Centre in Dhaka). Bhutan sided with India to try and block China’s entry, but a pro-China group that included Nepal pushed for

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Beijing’s entry as a condition for admitting Afghanistan into SAARC, which India sought. India responded by helping Japan to join the association as an observer. Japan’s presence would help to provide some diplomatic balance to China’s strategic links with South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The impasse at SAARC rankled the Indian strategist K. Subrahmanyam so much that he suggested that New Delhi review its South Asian strategy and shift it away from the association.55 The problem with this suggestion is that without Indian interest, SAARC would lose all relevance as a regional organization, but without India interested and with China in, SAARC would represent an encirclement of India more formal than anything that exists now. The turf war between China and India widened at the inaugural East Asian Summit (EAS) in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005. With the exception of Malaysia, Southeast Asian countries supported India’s participation in the EAS, viewing it as a counterweight to China, and they backed Australia’s participation if it acceded to the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, which it did. Having failed to exclude India, Australia, and New Zealand from the EAS, Beijing proposed on the eve of the summit that the existing ASEAN Plus Three (APT) group, and not the new sixteen-member East Asia Summit, “control the formation of any Asian community-building exercise”.56 “In other words, China insisted that EAC formation remain the responsibility of the core group, or APT. A proposal to divide EAS into two blocs — the core states with China as the dominant APT player, and the peripheral states with India, Australia and New Zealand, ‘outsiders’ according to a recent People’s Daily editorial — led to a major rift.”57

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The EAS fracas revealed China’s “substantial antipathy” towards Japan and India. Remaining leery of India’s attempts to extend influence in China’s backyard, Beijing regards New Delhi’s Look East policy as part of a wider “congage China” strategy pursued by the Washington-Tokyo-New Delhi axis. Beijing therefore seeks to confine India to the periphery of a future East Asia Community.58 The Sino-Indian competition for influence is not limited to the diplomatic arena, either. The MekongGanga Cooperation (MGC) Initiative — an avenue of India’s entry to Southeast Asia that was launched in Vientiane in 2002 by India, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar to increase cooperation in tourism, culture, and education — overlaps with China’s Kunming Initiative, whose members include China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and India and which seeks to create direct commercial, economic, and cultural links in the sub-region. The MGC and the Kunming Initiative are seen in competitive terms, “as parallel Indian and Chinese attempts to increase their respective influence in the Indo-China region”.59 Also, India’s dramatic about-turn in engaging Myanmar, whose autocratic regime it had treated with gingerly alacrity earlier, is explainable eminently by New Delhi’s need to prevent Beijing’s entrenched influence in Yangon from deepening even further. The competition continues. One area in which competition is intensifying is energy security, which is critical for the continued prosperity and rise of the two powers. China and India are “battling each other in oil patches from Sudan to Siberia” as they seek to secure the resources they need to fuel their growing economies.60 In the past few years, Chinese national oil companies have acquired interests

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in upstream oil projects in Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Oman, and Azerbaijan, as well as small shares in projects in Canada and Australia. China has become one of the largest investors in Indonesia by buying into oil and gas interests worth US$1.2 billion. The China National Petroleum Corporation plans to spend US$18 billion in overseas oil and gas development till 2020. India, like China, has increased its “energy diplomacy” with states in South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. India’s governmentowned Oil and Natural Gas Company has invested in gas fields in Vietnam, as well as in energy projects in Algeria, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Venezuela, Libya, and Syria, while private-sector firms have pursued projects in Iran, Yemen, and Africa. Pipelines involving Iran, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh have also been considered.61 True, the two countries are cooperating as well on energy. Early in 2006, they signed memoranda on energy cooperation covering upstream exploration and refining in the oil sector, the laying of national and transnational oil and gas pipelines, frontier and cutting-edge research and development, and a joint energy efficiency programme. Acknowledging that unbridled rivalry between China and India only benefited the seller, they agreed to strengthen the exchange of information when bidding for oil resources in a third country. In the first instance of cooperation in bidding for overseas oil resources, they won a joint bid to buy Petro-Canada’s thirty-seven per cent stake in Syrian oilfields.62 However, welcome as these moves are, they do not override the securitization of energy issues, which is turning into a matter of the “high politics” of national security and is no longer just an issue of the “low

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politics” of domestic energy policy. Energy is driving foreign policy choices that affect overall relations between the two countries. The growing potential for “an increasingly mercantilist competition” between them over control of energy supplies and transport routes “risks fueling tensions between the two”, and there have been several instances where they have come “head-to-head” over energy supplies. Moreover, there is some wariness as each assesses the other’s future intentions in augmenting naval power, which impinges on the control of vital sea lanes in the Indian Ocean and of the Malacca Straits, critical to energy transport.63 Relations between the two powers are affected by their quest for energy security.64 Notions of a protracted contest between the two Asian giants point to an interesting parallel between the United States and China, and China and India: America is the incumbent power in the world, where China is on the ascendant; and China is the incumbent power in Asia, where India is rising. In both cases, there is apparent the tension that is attendant on a rising power’s demand for a new distribution of power and the incumbent’s reluctance to give it peer status. Washington, whose dominance makes it the only power capable of influencing Beijing’s behaviour, would find its rise acceptable only on condition that the Chinese acknowledged the universal agency of democracy and human rights as it has been shaped by the Western historical tradition. Whether or not the American stance amounts to “peaceful evolution” — the term that China uses to describe foreign ideological attempts to subvert its political system through non-violent means — is debatable, but there is hardly any doubt that Washington does not believe that Beijing has fulfilled the conditions to arrive as a peer power.

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In the case of China-India relations, the parameters of acceptability are less philosophical and more empirical. An influential survey notes that “India generally thinks about China more seriously than China thinks about India.” Indians and Chinese view their own nation as a rising power that should be treated as a central player in the international system, but while Indian officials treat China in those terms, the Chinese convey the impression that they do not have to worry about India becoming “a worthy strategic adversary or an economic competitor in the foreseeable future”.65 Beijing’s refusal to have a security dialogue with New Delhi, till the 1998 nuclear tests gave India the wherewithal to embark on the quest for nuclear parity with China, exemplifies Beijing’s hierarchical view of the international order.66 The two-fold tension between incumbency and ascendancy — between Washington and Beijing, and between Beijing and New Delhi — is creating possibilities for greater U.S.-India cooperation. India’s reluctance to play second fiddle to China in Asia and its relative comfort in working with a distant superpower, create a structural reason for New Delhi to favour greater security cooperation with Washington.67 Concurrently, a nuclear India is valuable in American grand strategy because Washington shares with New Delhi normative values, such as democracy, and strategic interests, whereas Beijing’s ties with both capitals are driven more by contingent than by structural interests.68 Should Washington manage to restrain Beijing’s growing power, it would create an opportunity for a balance of power to emerge between India and China. However, there are dangers for India in making China central to its relations with the United States. If

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American containment plans for China fall through, geography allows the United States an exit from a destabilized regional order that geography does not permit India. If, at the other extreme of possibilities, should a containment strategy be so successful as to lead to the marginalization of China as an Asian power — unlikely though this outcome is — or should a SinoAmerican conflict over Taiwan destroy the peace on which China’s rise is conditional, India (and Japan) would be the main beneficiary of the change. Going by the logic implicit in the rise of challengers, India also would become a player on the Asian scene that could elicit American concern in the way that rising China is doing. Without China as the common security concern, cooperation could be replaced by rivalry — as, indeed, occurred when the Soviet Union’s demise destroyed a key basis of the Sino-American compact. Since Japan’s alliance with the United States precludes, at least for the time being, competition between Washington and Tokyo of a kind that could provoke conflict, it is India’s new status that would be likely to attract keen American attention. India’s doing a China on China could entail the United States doing a China on India. Even now, when the contest with China acts as glue in Indo-U.S. relations, American reservations over Indian aspirations for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) ability attest to the superpower’s desire to preserve its nuclear lead over its South Asian partner. Washington would like New Delhi to have a nuclear force that has no ICBMs, to increase its nuclear force slowly, and to keep the number of weapons it builds low. “The no ICBM, slow and low approach satisfies Washington because it does not give India a military capability to threaten the continental United States”, Amit Gupta observes.69 American concerns extend to the agreement with India on cooperation in space, a

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deal in which the possibility of India utilizing transferred U.S. technology to improve its ICBMs or to expand its capacity to construct ICBMs remains a “major source of controversy”.70 While most Indian security analysts tend to dismiss the idea of ICBMs playing a role in India’s balance of power with the United States, some are not so coy. Soon after the second Gulf War, Subhash Kapila warned that India needed to take note of America’s wars of pre-emption. “While the United States and India are not set on any collision course, it does not take long for international equations to change. India is an emerging regional power with aspirations for a global role. In the pursuit of such goals, India’s actions could contradict American national interests”, he said. Noting that a central American objective was to retard the growth of a regional hegemon that could seek to undermine the U.S. role in Asia, he declared that the emergence of any regional power, even when it functions peacefully in the region in which it is pre-eminent, could be misconstrued as hegemony, hegemony in any case being a quality that is apparent only to the eye of the beholder. Since the United States in future could view India as being hegemonic, he called on New Delhi to acquire ICBM capabilities under a crash programme71 to provide an essential component of a credible nuclear status for India. In that case, should China cease to be a reconciling factor in Indo-U.S. relations down the road, the security trajectories of Washington and New Delhi could diverge considerably. NOTES 1 This chapter is drawn largely from Latif, Between Rising Powers, op. cit. 2 William J. Dobson, “The Day Nothing Much Changed”, Foreign Policy, September/October 2006, p. 23.

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3 F.S. Northedge, The International Political System (London: Macmillan, 1976) sets out three criteria that determine the status given to states in the international hierarchy. First, there is actual strength, measured by population, size of territory, economic resources, and military might. Secondly, a power’s interests and the extent of its stake in the international system determine its standing. The third criterion is recognition of a state’s status by other members of the system. On the first two counts, China does not need American (or any other) recognition to be a great power seeking global status, but on the third count, it does require the recognition of other great powers as being one of their kind. It is here that the United States, given its full-spectrum dominance of international affairs — its military, economic, political, and soft-power preeminence — is in a position to encourage or obstruct China’s rise as a global power. 4 “Strategic Partner, Strategic Competitor: What can the U.S. do about China?”, . 5 Andrew Fong, “Bargaining with China”, The Roosevelt Institution, . 6 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington: The White House, 17 September 2002), p. 27, . 7 The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 2005, Annual Report to Congress (Washington: Office of the Secretary of Defense), . 8 Da Wei Sun Ru, “Trend in Bush’s China Strategy Adjustment”, Contemporary International Relations 15, no. 11 (November 2005): 3–4; 7–8. 9 Wang Jisi, “China’s Changing Role in Asia”, Asia Programmes, January 2004 (Washington: The Atlantic Council of the United States), p. 4. 10 Paul A. Papayoanou and Scott L. Kastner, Assessing the Policy of Engagement with China, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Policy Paper 40 (San Diego: University of California, July 1998), p. 6. 11 “Rice: China has Important Role to Play”, Xinhua Online,

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China View, 29 January 2006 . Remarks before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission by Thomas J. Christensen, Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Washington, D.C., 3 August 2006 . This summary is drawn from Philip Y.M. Yang, “From Strategic Ambiguity to Three Noes: The Changing Nature of the U.S. Policy Toward Taiwan”, Taiwan Security Research, . Chris Rahman, “Defending Taiwan, and Why It Matters”, Naval War College Review LIV, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 80–81. Evelyn Goh, “The Great Powers in the Asia-Pacific: Examining US-China Relations in the ‘Post-Post-Cold War’ Era”, Talking points prepared for the China Reform Forum-IDSS meeting on Asia-Pacific Security, Beijing, 19 July 2002 . Robert Ross, “The Geography of the Peace: East Asia in the Twenty-First Century”, International Security, vol. 23, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 81–118. For an excellent discussion of this question, see Alastair Iain Johnston, “Is China a Status Quo Power?”, International Security, vol. 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 5–56. Evelyn Goh, op. cit. Ivan Eland, “Coexisting with a Rising China?”, The Independent Institute, Commentary, 11 April 2005, . Cited in Rich Lowry, “Asia Rising”, National Review Online, 21 April 2006 . Aaron L. Friedberg, “The Future of U.S.-China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?”, International Security, vol. 30, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 7–45. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First The Singapore Story: 1965–2000 (Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings and Times Editions, 2000), p. 633. A private visit to Taiwan paid by Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in July 2004, shortly before becoming Prime Minister, led to severe criticism from China. Beijing accused Singapore of having violated its commitment to the

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Three Sides in Search of a Triangle One-China policy and hurting China’s core interests, cancelled bilateral visits and exchanges, and threatened to delay talks on a bilateral free trade agreement. Beijing was mollified only after Singapore emphasized its support for the One-China policy and its opposition to Taiwanese independence. Lee Kuan Yew, “Peace and Progress in East Asia”, Speech to a Joint Meeting of the United States Congress in Washington, D.C., on 9 October 1985, in Speeches: A Bimonthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches, vol. 9, no. 5 (September–October 1985): 5–14. Ian Storey, “Singapore and the Rise of China: Perceptions and Policy”, in The China Threat: Perceptions, Myths and Reality, edited by Herbert Yee and Ian Storey (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p. 217. Storey, Ibid., p. 217. New York, Random House, 1994. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Yuen Foong Khong, “Singapore: A Time for Economic and Political Engagement”, in Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power, edited by Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. Dana M. Liu, The China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park: Singapore’s Role in China’s Development (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, no date), p. 2. Proverb cited in Foo Choy Peng and Barry Porter, “Suzhou: Sino-Singapore Bid Fails Test”, South China Morning Post, 30 June 1999. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First, pp. 723–24. Ibid., p. 724. Lin Liang Guang, “India’s Role in South Asia: A Chinese Perspective”, in India’s Role in South Asia, edited by Vernon L.B. Mendis (Colombo: Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies, 1992), p. 45. Quoted in G.V. Ambekar and V.D. Divekar, eds., Documents on

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China’s Relations with South and Southeast Asia, 1949–1962 (New Delhi: Oxford, 1964), cited in B.M. Jain, India-China Relations: Issues, Trends and Emerging Scenarios, Centre of Asian Studies, China India Project, Occasional Paper no. 1 (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, 2003), . Brahma Chellaney, “Beijing’s Historical Fantasies”, International Herald Tribune, 12 December 2005. Ibid. Venu Rajamony, “India-China-U.S. Triangle: A ‘Soft’ Balance of Power System in the Making” (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2002), . Surjit Mansingh, “India-China Relations in the Context of Vajpayee’s 2003 Visit”, Sigur Center Asia Paper 21 (Washington D.C.: Sigur Center for Asian Studies, 2005), p. 9. Robert G. Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security Under Zia, 1977–1988: The Policy Imperatives of a Peripheral Asian State (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 19. For a study of the issue, see Asad-ul Iqbal Latif, “India and the Emergence of Bangladesh: A Study in Diplomatic History”, a thesis submitted to the University of Cambridge for the degree of Master of Philosophy in International Relations, 1988. Subhash Kapila, “India’s National Security and Defence: Prescriptions”, South Asia Analysis Group, Paper no. 1118, . Surjit Mansingh, op. cit. John Garver, Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). Surjit Mansingh, op. cit, p. 10. Parwini Zora and Niall Green, “China and India Manoeuvre to Secure Energy Supplies”, World Socialist Web Site, 31 January 2006 . Lionel Martin, “Mistrust and Cooperation: Analyzing Sino-Indian Relations”, The Jamestown Foundation, China Brief 4, no. 21, 28 October 2004 .

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53 Sudhir Devare, India & Southeast Asia: Towards Security Convergence, op. cit, p. 72. 54 Ibid., p. 210. 55 Tarique Niazi, “Sino-Indian Rivalry”, China Brief, 16 February 2006 . 56 Mohan Malik, “The East Asia Summit: More Discord than Accord”, YaleGlobal, 20 December 2005 . 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Sonika Gupta, “India and China: Cooperative Border Development”, ORF Strategic Trends II, issue 47 (New Delhi: Observer Research Foundation, 29 November 2004), . 60 “China and India: A Rage for Oil”, BusinessWeek Online, 25 August 2005 . 61 “Energy Trends in China and India and their Implications for the United States”, Remarks by E. Anthony Wayne, Assistant Secretary of State for Economics and Business Affairs, Testimony before the Committee of Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., 26 July 2005 . 62 “China, India Sign Five Memoranda on Energy Cooperation”, People’s Daily Online, 13 January 2006 . 63 “Asia’s Energy Insecurity, China and India: Implications for the U.S.”, Testimony by Mikkal E. Herberg, The National Bureau of Asian Research, Seattle, Washington, United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 26 July 2005 . 64 For a good overview of how China’s and India’s quest for energy security is influencing their diplomatic choices, see Chietigj Bajpaee, “India, China Locked in Energy Game”, AsiaTimes Online, 17 March 2005 . For some of the latest trends, see Siddharth Srivastava, “India, China Work Out New Energy Synergies”, AsiaTimes Online, 26 September 2006

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. For analysis that highlights areas of Sino-Indian cooperation that could transform the Asian energy market scene, see Siddharth Varadarajan, “India, China and the Asian Axis of Oil”, The Hindu, 24 January 2006 . The India-China Relationship: What the United States Needs to Know, The Asia Society and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Conference Report, 30 November 2001 (New York: The Asia Society, 2002), p. 13, . Countering this perception of India-China relations is the view that China’s willingness to transfer technology to Pakistan proves that Beijing considers keeping New Delhi bogged down in South Asia a priority. Also, although China asserts that it does not see India as a major security concern, it has targeted India since the 1970s and currently has sixty-six nuclear missiles that can reach all of India’s major cities and military areas. China’s strategic respect for India might increase if Washington decided to use New Delhi as a counterweight to Beijing in the region, some participants believed. Ibid., pp. 15–17. C. Raja Mohan, “India and the Balance of Power”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006 . Jing-Dong Yuan, “Sino-Indian Relations: Perspectives, Prospects and Challenges Ahead”, Power and Interest News Report, 30 March 2005. Amit Gupta, The U.S.-India Relationship: Strategic Partnership or Complementary Interests? (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, February 2005), p. 19. To the author, the problem is that America’s no, slow and low approach condemns India to a third-tier nuclear status that makes it difficult for the country to achieve a credible nuclear capability: p. 19. In Gupta’s classification, first-tier nuclear states, the United States and Russia, have far more nuclear weapons than their nearest rivals, possess global reach with their nuclear weapons and can deter nuclear retaliation by other states. Second-tier nuclear states have smaller nuclear forces, technologically are less advanced than first-tier states, have extra-regional but not

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global reach, possess first-use but not first-strike capability against more powerful states, and do not have a credible deterrent capability against first-tier states. Third-tier nuclear states, such as India, Israel, and Pakistan, have small forces, technologically are not advanced, are limited in range to their regions, and do not have a deterrent capability against firstor second-tier nuclear states: pp. 17–18. “For India to be viewed as more than a regional nuclear power that is obsessed with Pakistan, it has to develop a nuclear deterrent that is taken seriously by China as well as the other first and second tier nuclear states”, Gupta argues, chiding New Delhi for its reticence in testing the Agni III missile that would give it the ability to target China’s eastern seaboard and offer a commensurately credible deterrent against Beijing. A credible deterrent would also require the acquisition of a nuclear submarine fleet that would provide a second-strike capability against both China and Pakistan: pp. 18–19. 70 Jennifer Kline, “U.S.-India Space Cooperation Reaches New Heights, Despite Lingering Proliferation Concerns”, WMD Insights, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, . 71 Subhash Kapila, “Gulf War II: Military Lessons for India”, /.

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DEMOCRACY

America’s desire to entrench democracy as the norm in international relations is the least unifying element in the possible emergence of a triangular relationship among Washington, Singapore, and New Delhi because the interests of these three capitals are not invested equally in the prospects of an ideational and prescriptive goal whose success it is difficult to measure anyway.

AMERICA From an American perspective, Samuel Huntington speaks of three historical or “long” waves of democratization. The first wave began in the early nineteenth century with the extension of the franchise to a large proportion of the male population in the United States, and continued until the 1920s. During this era, about twenty-nine democracies came into existence. This wave began ebbing in 1922 with Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy and lasted until 1942, when the number

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of the world’s democracies had gone down to twelve. The second wave began with the Allied triumph in World War II and crested in 1962, when the number of democracies had risen to thirty-six. The ebbing of the second wave between 1962 and the mid-1970s reduced the number to thirty. Since 1974, democracy’s third wave has added about thirty new democracies, doubling the number of such societies.1 The third wave began in southern Europe in the mid-1970s, moved on to Latin America and Asia, and crested at the end of 1989 with the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, which was followed soon by the disintegration of the Soviet Union.2 At the end of the twentieth century, there were around 120 democracies in the world.3 While American arguments for universalizing democracy appeared to be borne out by the end of the Cold War, Washington’s zeal in spreading democracy abroad has been marked by a series of compromises. These were most notorious during the cruelties unleashed by the proxy wars, insurgencies, wars of “national self-determination”, and coups of the Cold War, when the challenge from the Soviet Union — armed with an egregiously legitimating narrative of its own — led the United States to support even viciously anti-democratic regimes so long as this would help check the spread of Soviet influence. So serious have the lapses been, particularly in Central America and the Middle East, that they have easily drawn accusations of double standards, special pleading, bad faith, or outright hypocrisy from trenchant critics of American policy such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.4 In a milder statement assessing the prospects of American democracy-promotion into the post-Cold War era, Thomas Carothers argues that democracy-building work has long been greeted with “skepticism abroad

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by persons unsure about the true motivations of democracy promoters and wary of what sometimes appears to them as foreign-sponsored political interference”. Spurring the international backlash to democracy-promotion is the Bush Administration’s justification of the Iraq War in terms of its democracypromotion policy in the Middle East. This link associates democracy-promotion with “the assertion of American military power and security interests”. Given the opposition to the U.S. intervention in Iraq, “the legitimacy of the general concept of democracy promotion has suffered accordingly”. Also, the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan have contributed to a “growing global unease”. The political breakthroughs in those countries did advance democracy, but as accounts of American support for opposition groups spread, so too, did “the incorrect but seductive idea that the United States was the shadowy guiding hand behind those events”. The coincidence of the Iraq War and the colour revolutions has caused many authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments to take a harder look at democracypromotion activities on their territory conducted by a United States “bent on carrying out regime change against governments it does not like”.5 Such left-liberal views do not deny the need for democracy in international development; what they do aver, to varying degrees, is that the United States has been wanting in spreading democracy — to say nothing of the times when it has actually obstructed popular democratic movements on the ground. At the other end of the critical spectrum are realists — from Walter Lippmann and George Kennan to Henry Kissinger and Charles Krauthammer — who read America’s preoccupation with promoting democracy

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as a disingenuous sign of dangerous idealism, as a neo-Wilsonian impulse under which American foreign policy is shaped more by values than by interests and which reduces Washington’s options in a vile and brutal world of realpolitik. However, in a seminal essay in which he rejects this view and justifies the primacy accorded to the international spread of democracy, John Ikenberry argues that the American promotion of democracy abroad, particularly since the end of World War II, reflects “a pragmatic, evolving, and sophisticated understanding of how to create a stable and relatively peaceful world order”. This American “liberal” grand strategy is based on “the very realistic view that the political character of other states has an enormous impact on the ability of the United States to ensure its security and economic interests”. The strategy draws support from different parts of the intellectual and policy establishments. “Some advocate promoting democratic institutions abroad, some lobby for free trade and economic liberalization, and others aim to erect ambitious new international and regional economic and security institutions.” Each group has its own agendas and nuances, but over time they have complemented one another to create a liberal grand strategy 6 that advances American interests while protecting American values. Indeed, in the neoconservative vision underlying the Bush Doctrine, “the realistic interests of America” are served by “fidelity to American ideals, especially democracy”.7 The key variable here is the theory of democratic peace. To the extent that democracy becomes an international norm, peace benefits. Democratic peace justifies the investment made in universalizing democracy as the yardstick of international acceptance and respectability.

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To Francis Fukuyama, the ideological defeat of the Soviet Union provided grounds for grand musings. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, he declared in 1989. He acknowledged that the victory of liberalism had occurred “primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world”, but he found “powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run”.8 It is difficult to know what Osama bin Laden thought about Fukuyama’s final form of human government, and looming over triumphalist references to the long run is Keynes’s annoying reminder that in the long run we are all dead, but there is no mistaking Fukuyama’s sincere belief in the logic of America’s defeat of the ideological challenge from the Soviet Union. He did not proclaim that the day of universal peace had appeared, but he did believe that a lasting basis of that peace finally had been laid with the appearance of Western liberal democracy as the only viable organizing principle in the conduct of states’ domestic and international affairs. The centrality accorded to democratic peace clearly is evident in the principle, announced by the Project for a New American Century’s, that Pax Americana requires the United States military to secure and expand “zones of democratic peace” even as it deters the rise of a new great-power competitor, defends the key regions of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, and preserves American pre-eminence through the Revolution in Military Affairs.9 The National Security

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Strategy of the United States of America, released in 2002, restates that principle in part. “Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage”, it declares. “We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty.” The United States would “defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants”. It would “preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers”. It would “extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent”.10 While the Strategy’s three-fold purpose — defending the peace, preserving the peace, and extending the peace — is sound, a key idea on which it hinges and which forms the motif that runs through the entire document, is America’s need to build a balance of power that favours human freedom. What such a balance entails bears on America’s commitment to the international spread of democracy. Theoretically, there are four ways to ensure peace in the international system: peace through a balance of power; peace through collective security and international law; peace through submission to the writ of a hegemonic, unipolar empire; and, premised on the democratic peace theory, peace through a global democratic revolution.11 In practice, “since democracy is slow to impose itself, the last two systems have been mixed in Bush foreign policy” on the premise that a benevolent hegemon is required to ensure the democratization of the world.12 Not only is the American premise not accepted universally, but also, it pits the idealist and realist

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impulses of U.S. foreign policy against each other. Ivo Daalder, James Lindsay, and James Steinberg note that, in committing the United States to “fighting terrorists and tyrants” and “encouraging free and open societies on every continent”, the Strategy ignores the fact that the two goals are often in conflict. A prominent example is the post-9/11 multinational coalition that the U.S. Administration built to wage war on terror. Many countries in this coalition — among them China, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan — do not share America’s commitment to liberty. “While it speaks of creating a balance of power to further freedom, it in fact advocates a balance of power to counter terrorism.” Hence, contrary to its insistence on the “nonnegotiable demands of human dignity”, the Strategy criticizes no country of consequence to the United States in the war on terror for specific human rights abuses. Tellingly, when it calls on Palestinians to embrace democracy, it does not make a similar demand on Egypt or Saudi Arabia. No less troubling, it seems to gloss over the fact that “the denial of human freedom feeds the problems of terrorism and failing states”. In many Muslim countries, “both the rulers and the ruled” see the United States as buttressing authoritarianism instead of opposing it. Terrorists manipulate the nexus of poverty, failed institutions and resentment to serve their own ends. “Unless the United States closes the gap between its words and its deeds, it risks fueling the very threats that imperil its security.”13 The consequences of trying to recreate regional orders on the basis of a balance of power that favours freedom are dramatized by outcomes in Iraq, which (along with Afghanistan) the United States has made central to its determination to bring the Middle East into the zones of democratic peace. Of all the motives,

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claimed by the U.S. Administration or imputed to it, for invading Iraq, none is as ambitious as democracy. Speaking after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, President Bush declared that the United States had adopted a “forward strategy of freedom” in the Middle East. Framing his vision of a democratic Middle East in historical terms, he took issue with sceptics of democracy who asserted that the traditions of Islam were inhospitable to representative government. Quoting former President Ronald Reagan, he said that this “cultural condescension” had a long history. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a Japan expert had asserted that democracy in that former empire would never work. Similarly, another observer had declared the prospects for democracy in post-Hitler Germany “most uncertain at best”, a claim that he had made as late as in 1957. That Islam was consistent with democratic rule, Bush said, was proved by the democratic progress found in many predominantly Muslim countries such as Turkey, Indonesia, Senegal, Albania, Niger, and Sierra Leone. Muslim men and women were “good citizens” of India and South Africa, of Western European nations, and of the United States itself. “More than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom under democratically constituted governments. They succeed in democratic societies, not in spite of their faith, but because of it.” Castigating the Middle East’s postcolonial military dictators — some of whom had adopted the dogmas of socialism, had tried to exercise total control of their societies, and had allied themselves with the Soviet Union — for causing the region’s “freedom deficit”, he noted the new threat from the “ideology of theocratic terror” behind which lay an ambition for absolute power. Now, in a break from that

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tradition of oppression, the vital principles of democracy were being applied in Afghanistan and Iraq. After three decades of tyranny, this work was not easy in Iraq. The former dictator had left behind deeplyingrained habits of fear and distrust, while remnants of his regime, joined by foreign terrorists, battled “against order and against civilization”. However, the U.S.-led coalition was responding to their attacks with precision raids, guided by intelligence provided by the Iraqis themselves, even as it worked with Iraqi citizens as they prepared a constitution and moved towards free elections. “As in the defense of Greece in 1947, and later in the Berlin Airlift, the strength and will of free peoples are now being tested before a watching world. And we will meet this test”, the President declared. The stakes were high. “The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region.” Instead, he insisted, Iraqi democracy would succeed, and that success would send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran, that freedom could be the future of every nation. “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”14 It was an ambitious claim to make. Historical analogies with Japan and Germany were not wrong but, like all such parallels, they were incomplete, and the gaps mattered almost as much as the links did. Unlike those countries, where democracy took root under Allied Occupation, Iraq was marred by ethnic and religious fault lines. These separated Kurds from Arabs, and Sunnis from Shi’ites, and within each group created sub-loyalties to tribal leaders. Four centuries of Ottoman rule had contained these hostilities. The

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British, who had taken over from the Ottomans in 1920, had devised a solution by putting Iraq under strong Sunni control from Baghdad, a method continued by the Saddam Hussein dictatorship. Any movement towards democracy, which depends, after all, on a consensual agreement by citizens to live together in spite of their differences, would have to contend with the burden of history. In particular, it would have to answer what a reposing of power in the Shi’ites would mean.15 Even before the Iraq War, observers had questioned the notion that an American intervention would make that country “the first Arab democracy”, in the words of then-Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The idea envisioned a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq — secular, middle-class, urbanized, and oil-wealthy — that would “replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf” and allow the United States to withdraw its troops from the kingdom. The presence of a victorious American Army in Iraq then would boost moderate elements in Iran, speeding up its evolution towards a more moderate course. This change would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other radical groups, isolate Syria, and reduce pressure on Israel. The undercutting of support for radicals on Israel’s northern borders and in the West Bank and Gaza would end Yasser Arafat’s grip on the Palestinian cause and create the momentum for a favourable solution of the Arab-Israeli problem. It was “a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical”. For America, however, the danger of this “new crusade” was that it might lack the political will to see it through. The American people, “unprepared for the imperial ambitions about to play out in the Middle East”, might

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“quickly lose heart if the project comes to grief”. It could be that after “inevitable setbacks”, the occupation would grow unpopular and that even modest visionaries in the Administration would “want to cut and run, leaving ruin once more in America’s wake”.16 Whether that would occur depended, not on the invasion, but on the occupation, of Iraq. The military invasion was a success and many Iraqis, as predicted by the Administration, greeted the unseating of Saddam Hussein as liberation. However, the occupation, necessary to create the conditions for the new institutions of democracy to take hold, quickly turned out to be another matter. Unresolved ethnic differences, held down by the firm hand of Saddam’s dictatorship, erupted in the fury of freedom. The looting in Baghdad that accompanied the welcoming of American troops ominously presaged a larger disorder when the occupying power embarked on a mass purge of military, security, and civilian officials implicated in the evils of the old Baathist order. The de-Bathification of Iraq was a key goal of Pentagon Neo-conservatives, who wanted nothing less than a complete social revolution. However, that quixotic revolution “would take a Baathist Party-run autocracy, complete with a Baathistled army and vast domestic spying and security services, and transform it into a functioning democratic polity — without the participation of former Baathist officials”, Mark Danner observes with disbelief. Elsewhere on the political front, the idea of forming a provisional government-in-exile built around Ahmad Chalabi, “the brilliant, charming, cunning impresario of the Iraqi exile community”,17 came and mercifully went. However, the “unity government” that was established after the holding of fractious elections reflected, as it could not but have, the deep differences

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in society that had produced the new Iraqi governing elite. Instead of moving towards democracy, Iraq today is the site of an insurgency that is out of control; is undergoing a civil war in all but name; is a body politic so wracked by violence on the ground and dissension among rulers that American politicians talk openly of partitioning the country to save Iraqis from themselves; and, most telling of all, suffers from a terrorist problem that simply did not exist before the occupation. “The Bush administration’s fears about Iraq’s possible collaboration with terror groups, largely conjectural, have since Sadam’s fall attained a terrible reality”, Danner writes.18 The regional implications of this disaster are almost as stark as the mayhem in Iraq is. Instead of Iraq becoming the first Arab democracy and acting as a midwife to the arrival of the first Persian democracy in Iran, Iran’s expanding influence conceivably can turn Iraq into the first Shi’ite Arab state. With Sunni control of Iraq gone, Iran cannot be checked from extending its influence westward towards the significant Shi’ite minorities in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Indeed, the emergence in Iraq of the first Arab state with Shi’ites in power has stirred aspirations among 150 million Shi’ites living in the region’s Sunni countries. In the light of these possibilities, the power of the Sunni bloc now may no longer be able to counter an Iran that supports Muslim militants against Israel.19 The larger objective of the invasion of Iraq — the desire to secure a foothold from which to pull the Middle East into the zones of democratic peace — is resonating in the appearance of its exact opposite. The American expedition was driven along by visions of devastating military power overthrowing the old Iraqi order and unleashing forces kindred to those that had overwhelmed

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the post-totalitarian streets of Prague, Budapest and East Berlin, and the Taleban’s Kabul. “Here was an evangelical vision of geopolitical redemption”,20 Danner writes. It did not occur. Instead, American public opposition to the Iraq War — one of the reasons for both Houses of Congress going over to the Democrats in the mid-term elections of November 2006 — led swiftly to the departure of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the war. Now, the policy goal of instituting democracy in Iraq, although not abandoned by Washington, is far less of a political imperative on the Beltway than the search for an exit strategy that extricates U.S. troops from Iraq without allowing its fractious regions to be incorporated into the contending spheres of influence of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Warning of the dangers of a precipitate withdrawal, the Iraq Study Group Report, released in December 2006, calls on the United States to build a “new international consensus” for stability in Iraq and the region.21 Outcomes in Iraq have not only regional but global implications. Some believe that American reverses over democracy-building in Iraq are moderating its stance on the agency of democracy in international relations. The 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America had proclaimed, with Fukuyamaian confidence, that today, the international community “has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war”. The great powers “find ourselves on the same side”, united by “common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos”. Elaborating on the common values that should bind the great powers, it had noted that Russia was in the midst of a “hopeful transition, reaching for its democratic future”. Chinese leaders, on their part,

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were “discovering that economic freedom is the only source of national wealth” and in time would find that “social and political freedom is the only source of national greatness”. America would encourage the advancement of democracy and economic openness in both nations “because these are the best foundations for domestic stability and international order”.22 The document had been at pains to note that the United States welcomed the emergence of a “strong, peaceful, and prosperous China”. However, Washington’s reservations about Beijing’s position in zones of democratic peace had been clear in its reminder that the “democratic development of China is crucial” to the evolution of a strong, peaceful and prosperous China. Worryingly, then, “a quarter century after beginning the process of shedding the worst features of the Communist legacy, China’s leaders have not yet made the next series of fundamental choices about the character of their state”. India had been cited as a case in contrast. “The United States has undertaken a transformation in its bilateral relationship with India based on a conviction that U.S. interests require a strong relationship with India. We are the two largest democracies, committed to political freedom protected by representative government.”23 Several years later, the emphases might have begun to change, rather imperceptibly. “American diplomacy has actually toned down its insistence on democratization”, Justin Vaisse believes. He notes that nowhere is America’s new line more visible than in Asia, where the model now being followed answers more to a nineteenth century balance-of-power one (in which America is balancing China’s rising power by accelerating its ties with Japan and India) than to a model of a global democratic revolution that would

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make such balance-of-power alignments unnecessary. In a sign of a change that has “far-reaching theoretical implications”, while U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice declared in January 2006 that the “fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power”, in March 2006, when a new National Security Strategy of the United States was released, the American formulation was that “the fundamental character of regimes matters as much as the distribution of power among them”. The shift from “more than” to “as much as” is a revealing one.24 True, the new Strategy restates familiar values: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” However, it is one thing to support indigenous democratic movements, and another to create the international conditions, using force if necessary, to effect democracy through regime change. It is one thing for Taiwan, the first Chinese democracy in history, to teach by example. It is another thing for America’s relations with the People’s Republic to be submitted to the means test of Taiwanese democracy. Max Boot’s call for a policy of “internal subversion” to “Taiwanize” the People’s Republic is exactly what the United States does not need.25 Globally, America’s support for democratic movements is in danger of being tarnished by democracy’s association with the Iraqi expedition. Warning of the implications of this link, Thomas Carothers says that the pushback against democracypromotion is occurring most prominently in Russia, not an international outcast but a partner of Washington in the Group of 8 caucus of the advanced industrialized nations. Also, the high price of oil and gas is bolstering

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the bargaining power of many non-democratic governments, especially in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Some of these governments, particularly those in Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, are “taking advantage of this revenue windfall to fund their own cross-border political work”, which has little to do with promoting democratic evolution along American lines. Vitally, again, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, democracy “no longer enjoys an unchallenged place on the international scene as the only political system viewed as successful and credible” because of the model provided by authoritarian China’s success with economic development. This success has led authoritarian leaders in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere to justify their repressive tactics by citing the Chinese example. Separately, in the very Middle East where a secular Iraq was supposed to have become a launching pad for democracy, the strong showing of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the victory of Hamas in Palestine have rekindled debates about the proper response to democratic advances made by Islamist parties whose coming to power might harm American interests. Some “quiet voices” in the U.S. Administration are urging it to retreat from its embrace of a democracy agenda for the region. “The United States now faces some very hard choices about whether to sacrifice its commitment to democracy for the sake of opposing political forces it believes are dangerous to U.S. interests.”26

SINGAPORE27 Singapore’s refusal to use democracy as a yardstick for measuring international respectability emerges from the intersection of its soft-authoritarian domestic

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political culture and its foreign policy outlook, which essentially is a realist view based on balance-of-power politics and the critical importance of state sovereignty. In that outlook, a state’s choice of political system is a part of its sovereign rights; what matters is how it uses that sovereignty to function in the international system. A good example of Singapore’s aversion to domestic politics being dragged into the international arena was seen in its approach to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In spite of the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) opposition to communism, an ideology against which it had fought a bitter political battle to retain power in the early years of Singapore’s independence, and in spite of the city-state’s closeness to the United States, Singapore never held the Soviet Union’s domestic political system against that country, preferring to view it as a superpower with legitimate interests in Southeast Asia. It was only when Soviet expansionism — seen in the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam, Moscow’s regional proxy, in 1978 — threatened the status quo in Southeast Asia that Singapore became a vocal critic of Soviet designs and led ASEAN’s diplomatic efforts to end the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. Similarly, Singapore’s economic and strategic links with the United States, which are crucial to its well being and security, have not translated into a confluence of views on the agency of democratic development in international security. Instead, the “Singapore Model” — a strong state intervening in almost every area of social life to create the conditions for rapid economic growth — attracted the attention of post-Maoist China. Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the city-state in 1978, during which he witnessed what a soft-authoritarian system could achieve economically in a country that was similar ethnically

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to China, encouraged him to launch his modernization drive later that year. Contrary to Western models of development, in which a free-market of ideas flourishing within a protective framework of civil liberties creates the basis of innovation and risk-taking necessary for economic growth, China saw in Singapore a stable political system that allowed the government to anticipate change and stay in power even while taking unpopular decisions. This guiding principle was transferred to China, where the Chinese Communist Party exercised its political hegemony to make the socially wrenching change away from socialism. Singapore became reformist China’s most vocal interlocutor to the West. It refused to condemn Beijing for the Tiananmen Square killings and became one of the severest foreign critics of Hong Kong’s last Governor, Mr Christopher Patten’s attempts to democratize the British colony before its reversion to China. Singapore’s differences with the United States over human rights — which Washington has made a central part of its democracy agenda — were dramatized in the caning of an American teenage vandal in Singapore in 1994. 28 Where the American Administration, to say nothing of liberal elements in society and the media, saw a harsh violation of human rights, Singapore argued that it merely was applying a tough law against vandalism that applied to its own citizens. Whether in its occasional run-ins with Western media for their coverage of domestic issues, or in answering foreign criticism of its death penalty for drug trafficking, the city-state has been adamant in upholding its sovereign right to implement its laws on its own territory. Consistent with that outlook, it has rejected the idea that states should be subject to

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international scrutiny and sanction on the basis of others’ normative ideas of democracy and human rights — unless rights violations are so extreme as to make states obviously culpable. It is not known whether the United States considers Singapore to be a part of zones of democratic peace, but it is clear that Singapore does not subscribe to the idea, either that democratization necessarily contributes to international security or to the consequent notion that the benefits accruing to all countries from this security gives the leaders of the international system — the United States, par excellence — a kind of mandate to intervene abroad to spread democracy. These sentiments came to the fore during the Asian Values debate of the 1990s, when Singapore (along with Malaysia) led Asian voices arguing against treating Western standards of human rights as applicable universally and without reference to a country’s stage of development. Advocating a culturally specific approach to human rights, the Asians introduced the concept of Asian values as the core of a “community-based set of cultural values of Asian societies and the moral basis for economic success in the East Asian region”. Key values include respect for and trust in the public authorities, social security and public order, harmony between different levels of society, and an emphasis on collective commitments. Moreover, individual rights were to be subordinated to economic development because economic development was considered a prerequisite for achieving benefits and prosperity for society as a whole. 29 Indeed, human rights norms based on Western liberal democratic values actually could be inimical to the international competitiveness of Asian economies, it was argued.30

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At the Asia Intergovernmental Meeting held in Bangkok from 29 March to 2 April 1993, just before the Second World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, representatives of Asian governments came out with a declaration that affirmed the universality of human rights but emphasized that these “must be considered in the context of a dynamic and evolving process of international norm-setting, bearing in mind the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds”. At the Vienna Conference held on 14 June 1993, the Asian representatives held their ground, with thenIndonesian Foreign Minister Ali arguing that his country and the rest of the developing world did not subscribe to an individualistic approach towards human rights. The Singapore School that was among the Asian groupings to articulate such ideas globally was formed around Lee Kuan Yew and the scholar-diplomats Chan Heng Chee, Bilahari Kausikan, Tommy Koh, and Kishore Mahbubani. In their different but related ways, they argued for the need for Asian societies to prioritize economic development and growth over political and civil rights, and treat the community’s needs, rights, and security as paramount vis-à-vis individual liberties. Since these values are associated with varieties of Confucianism in China, it was believed that Chinesemajority Singapore was making a case for Confucian values in the guise of Asian values. However, it is more likely that the Singapore School was making a case for contemporary values that would serve Asia, including a modernizing China that needed time to consolidate itself without being subjected, in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, to immediate acceptance of Western standards of human rights and democracy.

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Nevertheless, arguments for Asian — or any other cultural — exceptionalism were criticized not only in the West but by prominent Asians such as the Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen.31 He argued that there was little general evidence that authoritarian governance and the suppression of political and civil rights encouraged economic development. In reality, the statistical picture was more complicated. “Systematic empirical studies give no real support to the claim that there is a general conflict between political rights and economic performances. The directional linkage seems to depend on many other circumstances, and while some statistical investigations note a weakly negative relation, others find a strongly positive one”, he noted. “On balance, the hypothesis that there is no relation between freedom and prosperity in either direction is hard to reject. Since political liberty has a significance of its own, the case for it remains untarnished.” The debate over Asian values occurred in the aftermath of the Cold War, when a clash of discourses announced the arrival of a new order. On one side were the victorious polities of the United States-led West, which were tempted to see history coming to a Fukuyamian end on their terms. On the other side were the ascendant economies of Asia, principally China, emboldened to believe that a new era of history was appearing. Each side invoked an entire zeitgeist based on its particular arena of success. The West laid down human rights and democracy — its theatre of victory — as the universal rules of the new game. Asia proffered culture as the basis of prosperity, by which the performance of societies should be judged. China was the key swing state. Would it, like the former Soviet Union, be swept towards democracy by the forces

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unleashed by its escape from socialism, or would it move towards capitalism while retaining a Leninist form of governance? To the Chinese leadership, the choice was clear. Not only the regime’s need for selfprotection but the drama unfolding in the ex-Soviet Union — where the freedoms released by glasnost had subverted the rigour needed to make the economic restructuring of perestroika work and had contributed at least partially to an economic implosion instead — suggested the need for extreme caution in matters involving political change. China remained firmly a part of the Asian discourse that took on the Western one. The mismatch of premises in the Western and Asian arguments drew accusations of bad faith from each side. The West (and Asians who agreed with it) saw Asian values as a veneer for authoritarianism; many Asians saw the Western insistence on human rights as a kind of ideological non-tariff barrier to Asia’s continued economic rise that was being erected surreptitiously by an uncompetitive West. The debate — which exemplified Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power, or the ability to achieve foreign policy ends through attractive or convincing arguments rather than through coercion32 — was halted by the Asian Crisis of 1997–98. Whether the crisis disproved the Asian argument depends on how responsibility is apportioned among its causes: Asian factors such as cronyism, corruption, collusion, lack of accountability, and abuse of power; and global factors, particularly speculation but also structural problems that had visited Latin America and that would attack democratic Russia. The immediate aftermath of the crisis was dramatic. On 15 January 1998, hands folded “in true colonial style”, International Monetary Fund Director Michel Camdessus stood over Indonesian President Soeharto, who duly signed a new agreement with the IMF.33 That

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televised image of symbolic humbling turned into reality when, following anti-government protests in Indonesia, United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on 20 May called on Soeharto to resign and provide for “a democratic transition”. A few hours later, he stepped down. Later that year, Malaysia was rocked by a reformasi movement taking life from demands for reform in Indonesia. It was spearheaded by Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who led street protests unprecedented in decades before he was sacked from office, lost his position in the ruling United Malays National Organization, and was arrested finally on 20 September. However, the waves of unrest from Indonesia and Malaysia did not arrive in Singapore, where the effects of the crisis were contained by strong economic fundamentals and safeguards that had been built into the banking system. The wider downfall of Asia’s economic model inspired some observers to muse on the continent’s political future. Jose Pinera declared that the Asian Crisis might turn out to be “the fall of a second Berlin Wall, that of a supposedly Third Way” between “freemarket democratic capitalism and socialist statism”. The way out of the crisis was to abandon the Third Way and introduce more free markets, more civil liberties, and more democratic accountability.34 Some of that has happened in countries across the region, but it is unlikely that the last has been heard of in a debate over the agency of democracy in the well being of peoples, the wealth of nations, and the security of states.

INDIA If the democratic peace theory holds, India has a clear security rationale for bemoaning the lack of democracy in its neighbourhood. Its 1962 war with China occurred

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with a non-democracy, and led to Washington sending a military mission to India and supplying it with small arms and a defensive radar system. Cooperation took the form of joint military exercises, U.S. military assistance, and U.S. help in setting up India’s foreign intelligence service. President John F. Kennedy “saw the competition between India and China as a struggle between the world’s largest democracy and communism for the future of all of Asia”, and some voices in Washington argued that India should be encouraged to develop its own nuclear weapons programme.35 However, more than the absence of democracy in China, it is democracy’s inability to take root in noncommunist Pakistan even today that causes concern in India. Now, the joke — that almost every country has an army but that in Pakistan, the army has a country — might be unfair to Pakistan because, from an historical perspective, both the army and politicians have contributed to national problems. “They have both been united in common pursuit of strengthening their class and institutional interests. Indeed, their identities fluctuate and often merge imperceptibly”, Touqir Hussain argues. “The army relied on the politicians for its legitimacy, while, in turn, the politicians have relied on the army’s support to keep themselves in power and shield themselves from accountability. Both have pandered to the Islamists, who have provided the ideological underpinnings of a security-denominated nationalism in Pakistan that has guaranteed the military’s dominant political profile.” The consequent creation of political space by the military has helped “foster religious extremism in the country”.36 Singling out Pakistan’s military for blame therefore is being one-sided. Also, democratic India has its own

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share of problems. The noted historian Ayesha Jalal has written of how covert forms of authoritarianism rooted in the institutional structures of the post-colonial Indian state coexist with formal democracy.37 As for the religious bases of the democratic deficit in Pakistan, she agrees that nations that define themselves in religious terms do complicate the task of conferring equal rights on all their citizens, but points out that “self-professedly secular states have hardly been more successful in ensuring equitable treatment to all, irrespective of their religious, caste or sectarian affiliations”.38 However, while these critiques are incontestable, they do not detract from a fundamental difference between the two successor-states of British India: India, for all its diversity and conflict among classes, castes, and creeds, has never witnessed a military coup, whereas Pakistan has been under military rule for more than half its existence since independence. This is an important distinction because, in the words of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, in “Pakistan and India’s history, every war has occurred as a result of military dictatorship”.39 The two countries went to war in 1965, during the dictatorship of Field Marshal Ayub Khan; they fought again in 1971, during the dictatorship of General Yahya Khan; and they barely managed to avoid full-scale war over Kargil in 1999 during the ascendancy of General Pervez Musharraf (whose October 1999 coup was caused partially by his conflict with elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over Pakistan’s incursion into Kargil).40 This is not to say that every period of military dictatorship in Pakistan has coincided with a war with India — General Zia-ul Haq’s rule from 1977 to 1988 did not — but that the military’s reflexes in a crisis are notably different from

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a civilian government’s. Ms Bhutto argued that “I led the weakest of governments, but we never had an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Indian troops on our borders. Even though considered weak, I was able to veto a Kargil-type adventure by the military such as the one concocted by Gen. Musharraf.”41 Many Indian strategic commentators blame the United States for acquiescing with, if not encouraging, the military’s sway over Pakistan. Subhash Kapila argues that the subcontinent’s problem for the past sixty years has been that American policies in South Asia not only have been Pakistan-centric but have been markedly Pakistan Army-centric.42 As the world’s largest functional democracy, India subscribes fully to President Bush’s “declared vision of an aggressive policy to ensure democracy prevails and democratic regimes emerge in South Asia”. However, Washington has not lived up to its declared objectives. In the case of Pakistan, the United States has opened itself to charges of double standards. “When the United States makes noises calling for restoration of democracy in Nepal or Myanmar or elsewhere, it conveniently forgets that people worldwide would cite the Pakistani case as an example of its selective approach in espousing democracy.”43 Correct though Kapila is, India’s approach to democracy is open to similar charges. Its support for Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement — headed by incarcerated leader Aung San Syu Kii, who was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Justice in the mid-1990s44 — and its hosting of Myanmar political refugees had led to a period of frosty ties. These witnessed a dramatic breakthrough in the wake of several economic, border management, and wider security cooperation agreements between the two countries.45 Myanmar’s cooperation with India in

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combating cross-border insurgents operating in India’s north-eastern states makes Myanmar “a good neighbour”, as opposed to Pakistan, which is accused of waging a proxy war in Kashmir. India is spending an estimated US$103 million to develop Sittwe port — the former Akyab — and connect it to Vishakhpattanam in the Bay of Bengal. This sea-route would allow India to by-pass democracy-minded Bangladesh, where one of the two major political parties and several small Islamist groupings are hostile to India, and help counter Chinese influence in the region. Explaining India’s shift in policy towards Myanmar, one observer argued: “India had lost out to China, to some extent, during the period it sang the prodemocracy song and joined the international criticism, if not sanctions. Now it wants to make up for the lost time and space by posing as a security alternative to China.”46 While these strategic moves make perfect sense, they have taken a toll on the role that democracy avowedly plays in India’s relations with Myanmar, whose undemocratic regime critics uphold as Southeast Asia’s most egregious. New Delhi’s stance now is that it wants to see democracy in Myanmar, but it does not favour pressuring the junta while the world turns a blind eye to other dictatorships and undemocratic governments in the region. According to Indian Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh, New Delhi would like democracy to prevail, but it has to live with its neighbours. “We don’t choose our neighbours”, he told The Associated Press. He noted that India’s neighbour on its western border, Pakistan, was a dictatorship and said (in a reference to China) that “a third country on the northern frontier is also not democratic”. “So you can’t only talk about only one neighbour, which is Myanmar (,) and

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not have the same treatment accorded by the international community to others”, he said. Indian officials say that their position is no different from that of Myanmar’s neighbours in ASEAN, which have followed a policy of “constructive engagement” that eschews the economic and military pressure mounted by the West on Myanmar.47 The difficulty of using democracy consistently as a yardstick in international affairs, in the face of genuine strategic reasons for acting otherwise, are clear in India’s case as in America’s. Notwithstanding the compulsions of realpolitik, the two countries launched a Global Democracy Initiative to Promote Democracy and Development in 2005. “With their solid democratic traditions and institutions, they have agreed to assist other societies in transition seeking to become more open and democratic. They recognize democracy as a universal aspiration that transcends social, cultural and religious boundaries”, a joint statement read. Guided by the belief that “democracy is central to economic prosperity and development and to building peaceful societies”, they would offer assistance “when sought” to build institutions and develop human resources that make the workings of democracy credible. “An independent judiciary, a credible election commission, an active human rights commission, and effective and transparent auditing process are some of the critical elements of that democratic ideal.” The spread of parliamentary practices also made an important contribution to the process of democratic transition. The U.S. and India said that they would encourage and support the United Nations in its electoral assistance programmes, including through national capacity-building, constitution-drafting, and electoral expertise for democracies in transition. To that end, they would

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contribute US$10 million each to the Democracy Fund under the United Nations.48 The United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) is expected to catalyze democracy and human rights initiatives around the world and is intended to complement the UN’s existing engagement with democracy promotion.49 In 2005, India and the United States also reaffirmed the Community of Democracies Santiago Commitment to the spread of democracy. That meeting in Chile, of a coalition of democratic countries, discussed issues such as democratic governance, building and strengthening civil society, economic development issues, and threats to democracy. The seeds of the Santiago meeting had been laid in 1999, when ten countries — Chile, the Czech Republic, India, Mali, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States — initiated the formation of the Community to affirm their commitment to the fundamental principles of democracy and the promotion of global democracy. In 2000, the first ministerial meeting was held in Warsaw, where participating countries signed the Warsaw Declaration outlining the shared principles and commitments of the Community, including the promotion of the rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the second meeting in Seoul in November 2002, the group agreed on a plan of action that promoted, among other principles, regional cooperation as a means of protecting and promoting democracy, and the need to address threats to democracy, including terrorism.50 Among the countries invited to participate in the Santiago conference were India and the United States; Pakistan and China were not; and Singapore was invited as an observer, grouped with countries such as Iraq. The Convening Group of the Community of

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Democracies, which issued the list of invitations to the Ministerial Meeting, relied on a “Criteria for Participation” paper that delineated the democratic standards to which countries must adhere in order to be invited as participants. According to the Criteria Paper, governments that did not meet the criteria might be invited as Observers if they were in a transition to democracy and were taking concrete steps towards meeting the standards for participation.51 At the Santiago parley, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice noted that the Community of Democracies was one of a growing number of international organizations that “make democracy an actual condition for membership”. In the Western Hemisphere, the Organization of American States had adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter. In the Southern Cone, Mercosur was helping to bolster democracy. In Europe, only democracies could belong to the European Community. Democratic principles had been always the “cornerstone” of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “The democratic character of states must become the cornerstone of a new, principled multilateralism”, Rice observed. “The real division in our world is between those states that are committed to freedom and those who are not.” In that context, international organizations such as the Community of Democracies could help to “create a balance of power that favors freedom”.52 NOTES 1 “Democracy’s Third Wave”, . 2 Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy for the Long Haul”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 7, no. 2 (April 1996): 3–13. 3 “President Bush discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East”, Remarks at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment

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for Democracy, United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington D.C., 6 November 2003 . For one of Noam Chomsky’s latest public interventions on American foreign policy, see his “The Bogus War on Terror”, Transcript of a speech given at the Annual Amnesty International Lecture, hosted by Trinity College, Dublin, in January 2006, Alternative Press Review, vol. 10, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 37–44. Thomas Carothers, “Responding to the Democracy Promotion Backlash”, Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing, 8 June 2006, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, . G. John Ikenberry, “Why Export Democracy?: The ‘Hidden Grand Strategy’ of American Foreign Policy”, The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2, Spring 1999, . Cited in Mark Danner, “Iraq: The War of Imagination”, New York Review of Books, 21 December 2006, posted with permission on TomDispatch.com, . Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, Summer 1989 . Rebuilding America’s Defenses, op. cit., pp. 2–3. . Justin Vaisse, “The Rise and Fall of the Bush Doctrine: The Impact on Transatlantic Relations”, Institute of European Studies, Paper 060408 (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), . Ibid. Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsay, and James B. Steinberg, “The Bush National Security Strategy: An Evaluation”, The Brookings Institution, Policy Brief no. 109, October 2002 . “President Bush discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East”, op. cit., .

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15 See Lee Kuan Yew, Speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, New York, 11 October 2006, op. cit. 16 Mark Danner, “The Struggles of Democracy and Empire”, New York Times, 8 October 2002 . 17 Cited in Mark Danner, “Iraq: The War of Imagination”, op. cit. 18 Mark Danner, “Iraq: The War of the Imagination”, op. cit. 19 Lee Kuan Yew, Speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, New York, 11 October 2006, op. cit. 20 Mark Danner, “Iraq: The War of the Imagination”, op. cit. 21 The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward — A New Approach (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 43. 22 . 23 . 24 Justin Vaisse, “The Rise and Fall of the Bush Doctrine: The Impact on Transatlantic Relations”, op. cit. 25 See the critique by James P. Pinkerton, “Superpower Showdown”, The American Conservative, 7 November 2005 . 26 Thomas Carothers, “Responding to the Democracy Promotion Backlash”, op. cit. It would hardly be a new dilemma. Algeria, where Western support was instrumental in the military preventing Islamists from taking power after winning elections and led to a terrible civil war, remains a telling example of the problem of dealing with non-democratic parties that seek power through elections. 27 This section is drawn from Latif, Between Rising Powers, op. cit. 28 For an analysis of the dispute, see Asad Latif, The Flogging of Singapore: The Michael Fay Affair (Singapore: Times Books International, 1994). For a contrary view, see Gopal Baratham, The Caning of Michael Fay: The Inside Story by a Singaporean (Singapore: KRP Publications, 1994). 29 Ulrike Rebele, “Freedom of Expression and Asian Values in Singapore”, Asiarights, issue 5, 2005 . 30 Herman Josef F. Kraft, “Human Rights, ASEAN and Constructivism: Revisiting the ‘Asian Values’ Discourse”, The Philippine Political Science Journal, vol. 22, no. 45 (2001): 33–54, .

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31 Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Asian Values”, New Republic, 14–21 July 1997 . 32 Alan Chong, “Singaporean Foreign Policy and the Asian Values Debate, 1992–2000: Reflections on an Experiment in Soft Power”, The Pacific Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (March 2004): 95–133. 33 Gerry Van Klinken, “From Go-Go to Yo-Yo”, Inside Indonesia 54, April–June 1998 . 34 Jose Pinera, “The ‘Third Way’ Keeps Countries in the Third World”, Cato Institute and the International Center for Pension Reform, . 35 Stephen P. Cohen, “India Rising”, The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2000 . 36 Touqir Hussain, “U.S.-Pakistan Engagement: The War on Terrorism and Beyond”, Special Report 145 (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, August 2005), . 37 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 38 Interview with Ayesha Jalal, Magazine for Development and Cooperation 3, 2004, reproduced in Qantara.de: Dialogue with the Islamic World, . 39 Nathan Gardels, “Civilian Democracy is Best Way to Fight Terror and Avoid War”, Interview with Benazir Bhutto, New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4, Fall 2002, . 40 Keith Jones, “Pakistan’s Military Regime Rallies to US War Coalition”, World Socialist Web Site, 25 September 2001 . 41 Nathan Gardels, “Civilian Democracy is Best Way to Fight Terror and Avoid War”, op. cit. 42 Subhash Kapila, “Pakistan: The United States Myth of Pakistan’s Melt-Down After Musharraf”, South Asia Analysis Group, Paper no. 1975, 3 October 2006 . 43 Subhash Kapila, “ ‘United States’ ‘Democracy Thrust’ in South Asia is Selective”, 30 October 2005, Boloji.com, .

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44 “India’s Myanmar Policy: Inconsistency Reaps a Disquieting Harvest”, Boloji.com, . 45 Tony Allison, “Myanmar shows India the road to Southeast Asia”, Asia Times Online, 21 February 2001 . 46 Mahendra Ved, “India Myanmar Relations”, Daily Excelsior, Bharat Rakshak, posted 22 July 2006 . 47 India Daily, . 48 “United States Joins with India to Support Emerging Democracies”, 18 July 2005, USInfo.State.Gov, . 49 Volker Lehmann, “United Nations Democracy Fund”, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Dialogue on Globalization, Fact Sheet, FES New York, May 2006, p. 1, . 50 Embassy of the United States of America in South Africa, Public Affairs Office, Media Release, 14 April 2005 . 51 Council for a Community of Democracies, “Convening Group Issues Invitations to Ministerial Meeting of the Community of Democracies”, . 52 Secretary Condoleeza Rice, Remarks at the Community of Democracies Opening Plenary, Santiago, 28 April 2005, U.S. Department of State, .

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171 C H A P T E R VI

CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTS

What emerges from this study is that • there is unanimity of interests among the United States, Singapore, and India over meeting the existential threat of terrorism; • there is no such unanimity over the issue of the rise of China, which the United States views as a potential competitor, India as a rival, and Singapore as an essential player in an emerging Asian balance of power; • there is disagreement over the issue of the spread of democracy, which is an integral part of American grand strategy, is of possible but peripheral interest to India, and is not a policy goal at all for Singapore. Hence, a political and strategic triangle will emerge among America, Singapore, and India to the extent that the United States, the dominant global player, is

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able to prioritize its interests in Asia so as to continue to lead the War on Terror; continue to act as the offshore balancer in an Asia marked by China’s rise; and harness its efforts for democratic peace to the pursuit of these goals, instead of making democratic peace the objective of those goals. As for the first point, the challenge facing the War on Terror would appear to lie in unpacking the notion and lightening the load that it carries by dropping from its agency expensive assumptions made about regime change and democracy-building. The Muslim (and non-Muslim) anger that the United States has attracted is caused, not so much by the prosecution of the war as by the incorporation into it of the drive for regime change in Baghdad and the installation of a democratic regime. These are two separate goals that serve merely to complicate the war. If the war has to succeed, it must remain focused on preventing the ability of religious insurrectionists from subverting the global order. Anything less would mean defeat in the war; striving for anything more would be to fight another war that, right or wrong, is another thing. China is a useful partner in this limited sense of the War on Terror. No matter how revisionist China might appear to some in the United States, it is a deeply status quo power where terrorism is concerned. No matter how delighted the Chinese Government might be by the idea of the United States getting bogged down in Iraq, and thereby losing some of its room for manoeuvre in the rest of Asia, China cannot gain fundamentally from violently revisionist groups taking power in the Middle East and Central Asia, China’s immediate neighbourhood. Indeed, between countenancing American defeat in the War on Terror, which weakens America’s credibility in the rest of Asia, and having to

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deal with an America rejuvenated by its victory against terror, China will choose the latter course. Of course, Beijing will hope that the United States sheds some fat in the Middle East, but that is not the same thing as its wanting Washington to do a Saigon 1975 in Baghdad. A precipitate American withdrawal from Iraq would leave the geopolitics of the Middle East to be shaped by the revisionist agenda of powers such as Iran, Syria, and Turkey; emboldened Al-Qaeda terrorists; “national liberation” and insurgent movements such as Hamas and Hizbollah; threatened Sunni monarchies and moderate states; and a nuclear Israel that will not hesitate to act if it considers its survival to be under threat. Since a reordered Middle East would impinge on the quest for energy that China needs for its development, oil, if nothing else, makes China at least a sleeping partner in the America-led enterprise against terror. On the third point, democratic peace is not an illusion. The felling of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union attests to the expanding reality of democratic zones of peace that Western advances, centred in America, have created. However, as the foregoing discussion suggests, democratic peace theory is difficult to conceptualize and even more difficult to apply in practice. Democratic peace can be at best a secondary goal of foreign policy, not the primary one. The Second and Cold wars were fought, not over democracy per se but over the need to prevent undemocratic powers from threatening the material and military interests of the Allies/America. The key variable is not the nature of a polity but the threat that it does or does not pose. The secondary nature of the democratic peace is proved also by American, and Western, opposition to Islamist parties

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gaining power through democratic elections in Algeria or Palestine because these parties would threaten the Western stake in the preservation of a modern, secular global order. China’s interest in the preservation of that order gives it some claim to be spared the operation of a democratic peace theory that is not applied equally to all situations. It is not impossible to believe that China’s “peaceful evolution” into a Western-style democracy will occur at the intersection of the interests of what now are disparate groups: the desperation of peasants driven to occasional revolt; the floating destinies of migrants workers; and the Internet-driven aspirations of its educated citizens, some of them educated in the company of the best and brightest in the West. Yet, this is a real but not a present possibility. Meanwhile, there is the other China — of eager Chinese thriving in multinational corporations, of vibrant nongovernmental organizations, and of dissident patriots — where fear of chaos outweighs impatience with reform and counsels caution so that China can determine its political destiny at its own pace. On the second point, since terrorism continues to be a threat to the interests of the United States, Singapore, and India, and since the American pursuit of democratic peace is neither sufficient to cement U.S.India relations nor is a source of disagreement so serious as to derail America’s relations with Singapore, it is China that will be the swing factor in relations among the three countries. John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism calls for the containment of China, the sooner the better. He criticizes American policy for seeking to engage China and not to contain it in the “liberal belief” that a democratic and prosperous China would become a status quo power. A wealthy China would not be content with its present international position but would

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turn into an “aggressive state determined to achieve regional hegemony”.1 He warns that if an economically ascendant China were to become a “giant Hong Kong”, it probably would have four times as much latent power as the United States, permitting it to gain a decisive military advantage over the United States in Northeast Asia and become a peer competitor.2 China then could be expected to develop “its own version of the Monroe Doctrine, directed at the United States”. Just as Washington kept “distant great powers” out of the Western Hemisphere, Beijing would make it clear that “American interference in Asia is unacceptable”.3 Hence, Washington has a “profound interest in seeing Chinese economic growth slow considerably in the years ahead”.4 Mearsheimer ’s warnings constitute a natural application of the doctrine of offensive realism, which is nothing if it is not pre-emptive, but what would his containment strategy entail? “In economic terms, China is not just China” but has become the centre of a “remarkable, unprecedented integration of East Asia’s economy”, Jeffrey Bader notes. From 1993 to 2003, twoway trade between China and Japan grew more than 250 per cent; with Taiwan over 300 per cent; with Korea 670 per cent; with Malaysia 1,025 per cent; with Singapore 350 per cent; with the Philippines 1,800 per cent; with Thailand 835 per cent; and with India 1,025 per cent. All of these countries have a stake in China’s continued prosperity. Hence, “any trade actions the U.S. might take will not only strike China. They will cause immediate ripples, or worse, throughout the region among countries whose economies are now intertwined with China’s”. He places the “hypothesizing” about the development of a “Sinocentric Asia”, where China will “exercise a kind of Chinese Monroe Doctrine

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and drive the U.S. to the periphery”, in the context of this remarkable economic integration of East Asia. Politically, however, he points out that China is not seeking to create “a series of pliant satellite states in its own image”, à la the Soviet Union and, pertinently, it has not sought to damage American alliances in the region. In any case, regional countries such as Singapore, India, and South Korea “well understand that the U.S. presence is a valuable counterbalance to the growing Chinese presence”.5 The United States provides a fallback position for Asian nations should China fulfil the Mearsheimean prophecy. Slowing China’s further rise at this point — when it is behaving as a responsible great power in Asia, not least by contributing to Asian multilateral institutions, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum, which it once was suspicious of — would be to engage in pre-emptive strategies whose consequences could be extremely deleterious for Asia. Against this background, India’s interests are served by a balanced China, not a contained China, particularly a China contained by India’s participation in a hostile encirclement of even its pugnacious neighbour. This is because any such participation would leave India, even though it is a challenger to China, open to two opposite vulnerabilities. The first vulnerability would be a China so weakened by containment and the loss of Taiwan that Japan would rise, almost by default, to stake its claim on a destabilized distribution of Asian power in which India still would remain a challenger, this time to Japan. The second vulnerability would come from a failure of containment so abject as to leave a vengeful China wanting to settle scores with India, a power much easier to deal with than Japan, not least because India has a neighbour in Pakistan and Japan has no Pakistan (although a unified Korea might move in that

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direction). India’s interests may well lie in a born-again Nehruvian worldview, in which its “non-aligned” ties with the United States replicate its relations with the erstwhile Soviet Union, leaving China to decide where it wants to fit into evolving Asian realities. In conclusion, the argument can be made that relations among Singapore, the United States, and India constitute three sides in search of a triangle. As we have seen, the interests of the three countries are in congruence only partially over the implications of the rise of China, with India moving close to the sharper edges of the American view, from which Singapore’s stance varies. Strengthening the agency of democratic peace is the weakest link, with America’s and India’s approaches not really converging but both diverging pointedly from Singapore’s view. However, what is no less important than these differences is that they do not outweigh their common, existential interest in the preservation of a modern, secular global order, an objective in which China’s interests coincide with those of the United States, Singapore, and India. Whether the three sides will find a triangle down the road depends on America’s staying power in Asia. In an important article written for a volume published by the National Bureau of Asian Research,6 Stephen Cohen revisits Paul Kennedy’s questions about the United States’ ability to afford the costs of being a global superpower. The first question was whether it could preserve a reasonable balance between what it believed it should spend on defence, and the economic ability to pay for its defence commitments. The second question was whether the United States could prevent the technological and economic basis of its power from being eroded by shifting patterns of global production.7 Writing almost two decades later, Cohen responds with

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a cautious affirmative to both questions, predicating his response on the caveats that without the resumption of a draft to increase the size of its armed forces, the United States cannot project military power to every hot spot; and that an “overextended economy” fuelled for many years by deficit spending and inadequate savings makes the United States vulnerable to eventual interference with its international goals.8 In that context, he is concerned over the degree and duration of Washington’s foreign debt to finance its current account and budget deficits; the creation of a “precarious interdependence” between the “super-debtor” and several Asian countries that have become “supercreditors” because of their over-reliance on exports to the American market and under-reliance on internal growth; the predatory habits of speculators everywhere; and the danger — “neither inevitable nor imminent”, yet credible — of an economic crisis precipitated by a rapid depreciation of the U.S. dollar.9 Irreproachably, he counsels the United States to return to sound fundamentals, with an economy that is fiscally more prudent and that demonstrates a resemblance to the international average for personal savings,10 and calls on America and Asian governments to take the global balance of payments disequilibrium more seriously.11 However, his larger conclusion is valuable to this study of America’s relations with its two partners in Southeast Asia and South Asia. He argues that there is no hard evidence for the fear that the United States has “suffered diminished hard or soft power in East and Southeast Asia” because of its dependence on capital inflows from the region. Instead, there is “steady if not rising dependence” by much of Asia on U.S. military power. Given North Korea’s periodic missile-rattling, Japan and South Korea are hardly encouraged to use

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their rising dollar holdings to demand that the United States lower its Asian profile; concerned with China’s rising influence, India and Vietnam are looking for closer political and economic ties with the United States. In Cohen’s view, China is the Asian country that would be happiest to exploit U.S. vulnerability, but whatever “ambitions” Beijing has are circumscribed by its own vulnerabilities.12 No “imperial overstretch” is visible.13 Cohen’s article does not make a case for American political and military retrenchment from Pacific Asia as a solution to indebtedness. Instead, as John Ikenberry argues in America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power, America’s security commitment, conveyed through its alliance system, “reduces regional security dilemmas”.14 Refining Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power, Walter Russell Mead underlines the desirability of an American system based on a combination of sharp (military), sticky (economic), and sweet (cultural) power.15 Reverses in Iraq notwithstanding, America’s position as Asia’s irreplaceable offshore balancer gives it the reputation and the credibility to work with its security partners, Singapore and India, to preserve and enhance an Asian security order that is conducive to the fundamental interests of the three countries. NOTES 1 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, op. cit., p. 402. 2 Ibid., p. 401. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 402. 5 Jeffrey A. Bader, “China’s Emergence and its Implications for the United States”, Presentation to the Brookings Council, 14 February 2006, The Brookings Institution, . Stephen D. Cohen, “The Superpower as Super-Debtor: Implications of Economic Disequilibria for U.S.-Asian Relations”, in Strategic Asia 2006–07: Trade, Interdependence, and Security, edited by Ashley J. Tellis and Michael Wills (Seattle and Washington, D.C.: The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2006), pp. 29–63. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 514–15. Cohen, “The Superpower as Super-Debtor: Implications of Economic Disequilibria for U.S.-Asian Relations”, op. cit., p. 54. Ibid., “Executive Summary”, p. 28. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., “Executive Summary”, p. 28. Ibid., pp. 55–56. Ibid., p. 53. G. John Ikenberry, “Introduction”, in America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power, edited by G. John Ikenberry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 24. Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), p. 25.

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Index

199

INDEX

A Abrams, Elliot, 7 ABM Treaty, 91 abrogation of, 107 Abu Bakr Bashir, 80 Abu Sayyaf, 82 Acharya, Amitav, 29–30 Adelman, Kenneth, 8–9 Aden-to-Singapore policy, 53 Advani, L.K., 88 Afghanistan, 11, 69 new generation of mujahidin fighters, 81 Akhund, Mohammed Hasan, 66 Al-Jazeera, 80 Al-Qaeda, 23, 68 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab death of, 69 Alaska, 90 Albright, Madeleine, 159

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

199

Allied Occupation root of democracy in certain states, 145 America, see United States (U.S.) American Civil War, 14 exclusion in definition of democracy, 16 American Indian tribes, 14 American Revolution, 31 Andaman Island, 51 Anglo-American Crisis, 19 Anglo-American War of 1812, 16 Anti-Secession Law, 104 Anwar Ibrahim, 159 Arabian Sea, 54 Arafat, Yasser, 146 ASEAN Regional Forum, 5, 176 ASEAN Plus Three (APT) group, 123

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

200

Index

Asian tigers, 35 ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, 123 Asian Crisis, 116 Asian Economic Crisis, 80 Asian Values debate, 155 Aspen Institute, 3 Aspen Strategy, 3 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 5 U.S. foreign direct investment in, 27 U.S. exports to, 26 Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, 109 Aung San Syu Kii, 162 Australian Embassy bombing of, 81 Ayoob, Mohammed, 55 B Babri Mosque demolition of, 96 balance of power, 57 peace through, 142 Bali bombing, 81 Bay of Bengal, 52 Bangladesh-China Friendship Centre, 122 Beers, Charlotte, 68 Bensheikh, Soheib, 66 Berlin Airlift, 145 Berlin Wall fall of, 99 Bhutto, Benazir, 161 Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali, 86 bin Laden, Osama, see Osama bin Laden bipolar systems, 1

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

200

Boer War, 16 Bolton, John, 7 Bonapartism, 20 Bretton Woods, 111 Bush Administration, 31, 107 justification of Iraq war, 139 Bush Doctrine, 140 Bush, George W., 5 Bush, George H.W., 3 C Cambodia invasion by Vietnam, 50, 76, 99 Camdessus, Michel, 158 Carr, E.H., 2 Carothers, Thomas, 138, 151 Centre for Asian Democracy, 31 Chabahar port, 53 Chalabi, Ahmad, 147 Chan Heng Chee, 49, 156 Chandrasekaran, Rajiv, 71 Chechnya, 25 Chellaney, Brahma, 117–18 Chemical Weapons Convention, 12 Cheney, Dick, 7 Chertoff, Michael, 67 China, 72 Anti-Secession Law, 104 cooperation with Pakistan, 55 development of own Monroe Doctrine, 175 discontinuation of support for guerilla insurgencies, 112 Kunming Initiative, 124 long-term political goals, 101 military modernization programme, 100

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

Index national oil companies, 124 nuclear tests, 118 relations with India, 117–29 relations with Pakistan, 120 relations with Singapore, 108–16 relations with U.S., 98–108 reunification with Taiwan, 109 reversal of China’s economic isolation, 109 rising power, 107 no unanimity in views from U.S., Singapore, and China, 171 rules of international conduct, 106 “string-of-pearls” strategy, 54 Syrian oilfields, 125 U.S. economic stakes in, 103 U.S. foreign direct investment in, 27 China National Petroleum Corporation, 125 China-India relations, parameters, 127 Chinese Communist Party, 105 Christensen, Thomas J., 104 Christian civilians attacks on, 82 Clark airfield, 44 Clausewitzian calculus of interests, 11 Clinton Administration, 7 Clinton, Bill, 21–22 visit to India, 54 coalition of the willing, 47 Cohen, Stephen, 177 Cold War, 19, 30 end of, 1, 31

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

201

201

collective security peace through, 142 colonial wars, 15 colour revolutions, 139 COMLOG WESTPAC, 46 communal fighting Indonesia, 82 communism, 74 Community of Democracies Santiago Commitment, 165–66 Comprehensive Convention Against International Terrorism India-sponsored, 89 Conetta, Carl, 72–73 Confederate States of America American Civil War era, 18 Container Security Initiative, 48 Cooper, Robert, 11 voluntary imperialism, 12 counter-terrorism establishing international standards for, 74 Correlates of War dataset, 15 Correlates of War project, 16 cyber terrorism, 90 Cyprus Greek-Turkish dispute over, 17 D Daalder, Ivo, 143 Datta-Ray, Sunanda, 33 Daulah Islamiyah, Jemaah Islamiyah’s objective, 78 Defense Planning Guidance, 4 defensive foreign policy natural tendency of smaller nations, 8

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

202

Index

democracy, 137–66 definition by James Lee Ray, 16 India, 159–66 no unanimous views by U.S., India, and Singapore, 171 Singapore, 152–59 United States, 137–52 democracy promoters motivations of, 139 democratic enlargement, 21 democratic peace, 173 U.S. pursuit of, 174 Deng Xiaoping, 109, 153 Desert Storm operations, 76 Devare, Sudhir, 122 diplomatic unilateralism, 9, 22 Director of National Intelligence, 70 Doyle, Michael, 17 E East Asia, 36 industrialization, 113 East Asian Summit (EAS), 123 Egypt Muslim Brotherhood, 152 empire definition of, 10 European feudalism, 29 European Union, 11 F Farber, Henry, 19 Fashoda Crisis of 1898, 19 Farsih A. Noor, 80 Feith, Douglas, 7 foreign direct investment ASEAN, in, 27

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

202

Fortress Andaman, 51 Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunnah wal Jammah, 81 fourth-generation warfare, 74 Framework Agreement for a Strategic Cooperation Partnership, 48 French Revolutionary Wars, 3 French Revolution, 31 Friedberg, Aaron, 28, 108 Friedman, Thomas, 13 Front Pembela Islam, 82 front-line military outpost, 47 Frum, David, 9 Fukuyama, Francis, 9, 13, 141 G galactic polity, 29 Ganesan, N., 45 Ganguly, Sumit, 91 Garver, John, 121 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 111 George H.W. Bush Administration neoconservatism, 7 George W. Bush Administration neoconservatives in, 9 policy-making roles, 5 rejection of notion of China as strategic partner, 55–56 views on China, 100 Global Democracy Initiative to Promote Democracy and Development (2005), 164 Goh Chok Tong, 78–79 guiding Singapore’s engagement with India, 49

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

Index Goh, Evelyn, 45 Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, 13 Gowa, Joanne, 19 Great Britain before 1832 Reform Act, 18 East of Suez policy, 53 Greens Peace theory, 38 Guidelines for U.S.-Japan Defence Cooperation, 5 Gulf of Mannar, 52 Gulf War, 3 Gupta, Amit, 128, 135–36 Gwadar, 54 H Haiti, 22 Hamas, 152 Herbold, Patricia L., 27 Hezbollah Iranian support for, 146 hierarchical system definition of empire, 10 hierarchy of states Sino-centric system, 28 Hoodbhoy, Pervez, 86 human rights Singapore’s differences with U.S., 154 West’s insistence on, 158 Huntington, Samuel, 137 Hussain, Touqir, 160 I Ikenberry, John, 140, 179 illiberal democracy, 20 India, 84–93 Agni III, 118 critical of U.S. role, 85 Look East policy, 50

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

203

203

Maritime Doctrine, 51 military installation Karwar, 52 naval bases, 52 nuclear weapon tests, 86 Oil and Natural Gas Company, 125 opposition to new international interventionary agenda, 31 Palk Strait, 53 Pokhran I, 118 Pakistan, relations with, 160 political rapprochement, 54 Project Seabird, 52 proxy war, 89 relations with China, 117–29 Sethusamudram canal, 53 war with China, 159–60 India-America relations, 54–60 India-ASEAN Summit (2002), 50 Indian Ocean, 26 Indian Ocean Region (IOR), 51 Indian parliament terrorist attack, 87 Indic mandala system, 29 Indo-US alliance, 32 Indo-U.S. relations, 128–29 Indonesia under Soeharto, 79 Inter-American Democratic Charter, 166 International Criminal Court, 12 international affairs, American thinking on, 2 International Monetary Fund, 12

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

204

Index

International Security, 17 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), 128 International Crisis Group, 80 International Monetary Fund Agreement, 111 Iran, 70 support for Hezbollah, 146 Iraq de-Bathification, 147 ethnic and religious fault lines, 145 free elections, 145 invasion of Kuwait, 3, 100 invasion, effect on Muslim public opinion, 68 overthrow of dictatorship, 9 U.S. intervention in, 82 U.S. invasion of, 32, 91 U.S. withdrawal from, possibility of, 173 irregular conflict, 60 Iraq Study Group Report, 149 Iraq War, 22 Islam consistency with democratic peace, 144 radical, 28 Islamic Defenders’ Front, 82 Islamic law spread of, 23 Islamic militancy, 78 Islamic rules warfare, 26 Israel, 80 attack on U.S. vessel Liberty, 16 conflict with Palestine, 25 invasion of Lebanon, 16 security, ensuring, 9

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

204

J Jalal, Ayesha, 161 Jane’s Intelligence Review, 84 Japan brutal rule during World War II, 75 Japan-U.S. Joint Declaration on Security, 105 Jemaah Islamiyah, 47–48 arrest of operatives of, 76 funding from Al-Qaeda, 80 headquarters in Indonesia, 79 planned attacks in Singapore, 77 support from pesantrens, 81 jihad against U.S., 23 Joffe, Josef, 22 Joint Security Declaration (1996), 5 Jowitt, Ken, 10 Judeo-Christian heritage, 25 K Kang, David C., 28 Kapila, Subhash, 129, 162 Kargil War, 14, 86 Kashmir, 25, 90 resurgence of militancy, 84 Kastner, Scott L., 102 Kausikan, Bilahari, 156 Kazakhstan, Shanghai Cooperation Organization member of, 72 Kennan, George, 139 Kennedy, Paul question of U.S. ability to afford cost of being a global superpower, 177

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

Index

205

Khalid Shaykh Muhammad capture of, 69 Khan, Ayub, 161 Khan, Yahya, 120, 161 Khong Yuen Foong, 45, 115 Kissinger, Henry, 53 secret trips to China, 99 Koh, Tommy, 156 Koo Chen-fu, 109 Korean War, 34 Krauthammer, Charles, 139 Kristol, Irving, 8 Kshatriyas Indian warriors, 30 Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia, 81 Kunming Initiative, 124 Kuwait, Iraqi invasion of, 3

Leifer, Michael, 75 liberal democracy universalization of, 141 Liberal Peace, 13, 20 arguments, 21 liberals, 20 Liberia, 11 Lindsay, James, 143 Lippmann, Walter, 139 Long War achievement of expanded goals, 75 definition, 59 elaboration in the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, 74 Look East policy India, of, 50

L Laskar Jihad, 81 Laskar Pembela Islam, 82 Laskhar-e-Taiba (LeT), 85 law definition of, 14 Layne, Christopher, 19 Lebanon Israeli attack, 16 Lee Hsien Loong visit to the United States, 48 Lee Kuan Yew, 34, 76, 82, 108, 156 architect of Singapore’s China policy, 109 recipient of Architect of the New Century Award, 113 support for U.S. invasion of Iraq, 82 view of Cold War, 84 view of Nixon, 114

M Machiavellian calculus of interests, 11 Mahbubani, Kishore, 33, 156 Malacca Straits, see Straits of Malacca Mandate of Heaven, 30 Manila bombing by Jemaah Islamiyah, 81 Mansfeld, Edward, 20 Mansingh, Surjit, 121 Mao Zedong, 110 Maritime Doctrine, India, of, 51 market democracies, 14 Marxism, 21 Marxism-Leninism mutation into bureaucratic totalitarianism, 6 McMahon Line legality of, 117

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

205

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

206

Index

Mead, Walter Russell, 107, 179 Mearsheimer, John, 1 Cold War, 2 offensive realism, 28, 174 Megaports Initiative, 48 Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, 58 Mekong-Ganga Cooperation (MGC), 124 meritocracy Singapore, 75 Mian, Zia, 86 Middle East transformation into zone of democratic peace, 143 view by Joffe, 22 Middle Kingdom, 30 military pre-emption, 9 Mindanao, 25 Mishra, Brajesh, 93 Morgenthau, Hans, 2 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), 81 Mozambique, 51 Mukherjee, Pranab, 88 multinational coalition War on Terror, 143 multipolar systems, 1 balanced, 2 multiracialism Singapore, 75 Musharraf, Pervez, 92, 161 Muslim societies, 24 Mutually-Assured Destruction, 24 N Napoleonic Wars, 3 Narayanan, K.R. visit to China, 54–55 National Bureau of Asian Research, 177

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

206

National Commission on Terrorism, 84 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States final report, 68 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 100 national self-determination, 138 Native Americans, 14–15 neoconservatism, 10 neoconservative empire existence of, 6–12 neoconservatives, 7 New Framework for the U.S.Indian Defence Relationship, 58 new liberal imperialism, 32 New National Security Strategy, 3 Next Steps in Strategic Partnership agreement, 57 Nixon, Richard Beyond Peace, 113 pragmatic strategist, as a, 114 trip to China, 99 Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, 113 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 3 air attack on Yugoslavia, 14 bombing of Chinese Embassy in Belgrade (1999), 101 North Korea attack on South Korea, 3 Northedge, F.S., 130 nuclear arms control, 55 nuclear proliferation prevention, 54 Nye, Joseph, 12, 158, 179

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

Index O offensive realism, 2, 28, 174 Office of Strategic Influence, 67–68 Oil and Natural Gas Company, 125 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 72 Oren, Ido, 20 Organization of American States, 166 adoption of Inter-American Democratic Charter, 166 Osama bin Laden, 25, 141 Otttawa Convention, 12 Owen, John M., 18 P Pacific union liberal zone of peace, 17 Pakistan, 18 differences with India, 161 Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 85 Line of Control, 86 support for Kashmiri fighters, 84 Palestine conflict with Israel, 25 Hamas victory, 152 Palk Strait, 52-53 Papayoanou, Paul A., 102 Patani, 25 Patriot Act (2001), 67 Patten, Christopher, 111 Pax Americana, 1–43 Pax Islamica, 23–28 Peace of Westphalia, 12 Pearl Harbour, 23 Peloponnesian War, 8 Pentagon twenty-year strategy, 59

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

207

207

Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, 7 Perle, Richard, 7, 9 Persia, 23 Persian Gulf, 26 Pesantren al-Mukmin, 81 pesantrens support for Jemaah Islamiyah, 81 Petro-Canada, 125 Pinera, Jose, 159 Pondok Ngruki, 81 Plaza Accord, 35 Policy of strategic ambiguity, 105 Politics Among Nations, 2 Post-Cold War comparison with end of Thirty Years’ War, 11 Post-Non-Aligned order, 30 Post-World War II, 34 Pre-emptive war, 22 Project for the New American Century (PNAC), 5 Project Seabird, 52 Proliferation Security Initiative global, 48–49 Q Quadrennial Defense Review Report (QDR), 100 the Long War, 59 overlapping military campaigns, 60 R Raja Mohan, C., 30, 32, 54 Rajamony, Venu, 118 Raman, B., 85 Rand Corporation, 71 Rao, P.V. Narasimha, 50

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

208

Index

Ray, James Lee, 16 Reagan, Ronald, 144 realists, 12, 20 Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century report by PNAC, 6 Revolution in Military Affairs utilization of, 6 Rice, Condoleeza, 58, 103, 151, 166 Rosato, Sebastian, 15 Ruhr Crisis, 19 Rumsfeld, Donald, 58, 149 Russet, Bruce, 17 Russia Shanghai Cooperation Organization, member of, 72 S Saddam Hussein, 25 Sunni control of Iraq, 146 Said, Edward, 138 San Francisco Peace Treaty, 34 San Francisco System, 33 Saran, Shyam, 121 Second Gulf War, 25, 129 Second World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna), 156 Sen, Amartya, 157 Sethusamudram canal, 53 Shanghai Communiqué, 104 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), 72, 122 Sharif, Nawaz, 161

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

208

Sikkim recognition of, 121 Singapore, 33–36, 75–84 assistance to U.S. in Iraq, 82 China, relations with, 153– 54 critic of Christopher Patten, 154 demography, 75 ejection from Malaysia, 75 Free Trade Agreement with U.S., 26–27 front-line outpost in escalating military confrontation, 47 human rights, 154 Jemaah Islamiyah’s plans, 77 Major Security Cooperation Partner, as a, 48 member of the coalition of the willing, 47 meritocracy, 75 multiracialism, 75 One-China policy, 108–09 People’s Action Party (PAP), 153 religious guidance for detainees, 78 support for engagement with China, 112 trade, dependency on, 77 White Paper on Jemaah Islamiyah arrests, 61 Singapore-India relations, 49–54 Singapore-U.S. relations, 44–49 Sino-American compact, 128 Singh, Bilveer, 45 Singh, Rao Inderjit, 163 Sinic tributary system, 29

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

Index Sino-American discord Taiwan, 55 Sino-American rapprochement, 99 Sino-Indian rift, 117 Sino-Indian trade growth of, 122 Sinocentric Asia, 175 Snyder, Jack, 20 Soeharto downfall of, 80 Somalia, 11 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), 122 impasse at, 123 South China Sea strategy connection to Persian Gulf, 54 South Korea attack by North Korea, 3 Southeast Asia U.S. bases in, 6 Southeast Europe U.S. bases in, 6 Soviet Union collapse of, 30, 35 Spain spread of Islam, 23 Spanish-American War of 1898, 16 Special Operations Forces, 74 Spiro, David, 19 Sridharan, Kripa, 50 Stalin, Joseph bureaucratic totalitarianism, 6 Steinberg, James, 143 Straits of Malacca, 49 Indian missile boats, patrol by, 51

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

209

209

U.S. Navy vessles, patrol by, 51, 90 strategic triangle potential formation of, 171 Strategy for a New World Order, 3 Subic naval bay, 44 Subrahmanyam, K., 123 Suzhou International Park (SIP), 116 Syria, 70 T Taiwan, 151 Sino-American discord over, 55 Straits Exchange Foundation, 109 Taiwan issue settlement by Taipei and Beijing, 105 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), 104 Taiwan Strait missile crisis, 106 Tajikistan Shanghai Cooperation Organization, member of, 72 Taliban regime, 69 Tambiah, Stanley, 29 terrorism, 12, 24, 65–93 material causes, 25 threat of unanimity of interests among U.S., India, and Singapore, 171 terrorist networks dispersal of, 70

11/21/08, 1:18 PM

210

Index

The End of History, 10, 13 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 4, 56, 100, 142, 149 three-fold purpose, 142 The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, 69, 73–74 nature of Long War, 74 The Paradox of American Power, 12 The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 1 The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 2 Theatre Missile Defence, 107 Theory of International Politics, 2 Thucydides, 8 Tiananmen Square, 99, 110 Twin Towers of Democracy U.S. and India, 88 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, 12 Treaty of Rome, 12 Trent Affair, 19 U unipolar empire, 142 United Malays National Organization (UMNO), 159 United Nations, 12 Democracy Fund, 165 electoral assistance programmes, 164 United States access to Singapore’s military facilities, 46 Air Force long-range strike force, 60 announcement of a

08 3Sides_Triangle Index

210

Framework Agreement for a Strategic Cooperation Partnership, 48 Cold War policies, 7 covert neo-containment strategy, 107 democracy, universalizing of, 138 Department of Homeland Security, 70 direct threats to interests of, 26 economy, over extension of, 178 free trade agreement with Singapore, 26–27 free trade negotiations, 27 funding of National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, 71 military superiority, 8 Muslim anger against, 172 Muslims in, 67 National Counterterrorism Centre, 70 Office of Director of National Intelligence, 70 One-China policy, 104 post-Cold War role, 3 provision of nuclear power assistance to India, 58 relations with China, 98–108 support of vicious regimes, 138 Taiwan policy, 104 ties with despotic governments, 69

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Index unprecedented campaign to combat terrorism, 69 utilization of nuclear strategic superiority, 6 United States Department of Defence, 5 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 165 U.S. anti-terrorism campaigns, 28 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 85 U.S. military building on lessons learnt, 59 U.S. Seventh Fleet, 46 U.S. State Department report Patterns of Global Terrorism, 84 U.S.-China relations, 106, 174 U.S.-India cooperation, 127 U.S.-India Joint Statement India-America relations, 58 U.S.-India Joint Working Group on Counterterrorism, 90 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, 102 USS Kitty Hawk berthing at Changi Naval Base, 46 Uzbekistan Shanghai Cooperation Organization, member of, 72 V Vaisse, Justin, 150 Vaisyas Indian merchants, 30

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211

Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 57, 121 Van Leur, Jacob, 30 Venezuela, 19 Vietnam invasion of Cambodia, 50, 76, 99 U.S. withdrawal from, 34 Vietnam War, 76 violent political utopia, 26 voluntary imperialism, 12 W Waltz, Kenneth, 2, 22 Wang Daohan, 109 Wang Jisi, 102 Wang-Koo talks, 109 War on Terror, 23, 26, 66 challenges, 172 India, 89 realignment of security postures created by, 93 warfare Islamic rules of, 26 Warsaw Declaration, 165 Weapons of Mass Destruction, 12 terrorists’ intention of acquiring, 70 western liberal democracy universalization of, 141 Westphalian system, 30 Wirsing, Robert G., 119 Wolfowitz, Paul, 7, 146 World Bank, 12 World Conference on Human Rights, 156 World Economic Forum (2004) Mozambique, 51 World War II detention of American

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212

Index

citizens of Japanese ancestry, 67 Finland’s alignment with Axis powers, 16 Y Yeo, George, 35, 44

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comment on SingaporeIndia relations, 49 Yugoslavia, 14 Z Zhou Enlai, 120 Zoellick, Robert, 103

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Asad-ul Iqbal Latif is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Singapore. His areas of research include Singapore’s political and strategic relations with China, India and the United States. His book, Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India, was published in 2007; another book, India in the Making of Singapore, was published in 2008. Asad graduated with Honours in English from Presidency College, Calcutta, and received his Master of Letters degree in History at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, where he was a Raffles (Chevening) and S. Rajaratnam Scholar. He was a member of the President’s Committee of the Cambridge Union Society, the university debating club, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Asad was a Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii in Spring 2001 and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs in 2006–07. A journalist for twenty-five years before joining ISEAS in 2005, he worked at The Statesman in Calcutta, Asiaweek in Hong Kong, and the Business Times and the Straits Times in Singapore.

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