Unusual trialogue

Recent years have seen a profusion of Track II meetings between former officials and scholars from Pakistan and India aimed at finding common ground on contentious issues in an effort to help the formal dialogue. Many of these informal discussions have had Western sponsorship.

A Track II round table organised earlier last month in Dubai by the Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies belonged to a different genre. The meeting had no ‘external’ participation. It assembled experts from the strategic community of China, India and Pakistan in a trilateral security dialogue to discuss nuclear and security issues, assess the challenges posed by developments in Iran and East Asia as well as take stock of global disarmament developments. The discussion was instructive in highlighting how the three countries conceptualise strategic stability in different ways and identify varying elements to achieve this. A common strategic vocabulary remains elusive.

Minimum credible deterrence’ meant different things to participants from the three countries. But there were also commonalities in several areas and agreement on establishing sustainable stability especially when the most profound power restructuring was unfolding in Asia since the end of the Second World War. This urged critical choices on all three nations.

That all three countries’ nuclear posture rested on a de-mated and de-alert – and thus a delayed response – status was seen by participants as a factor for deterrence stability and providing a degree of reassurance about nuclear safety. This posture avoided the ‘hair-trigger alertness’ of the Cold War but needed to be supplemented by commitment to resist nuclear arms racing. Chinese and Pakistani speakers voiced concerns about deployment of missile defence systems in Asia. A Chinese participant pointed out that if India joined the US-led Asia-Pacific missile defence system this would have significant influence on China’s nuclear modernisation plans.

The opportunity to listen to the views of Chinese scholars on the sidelines of the conference turned out to be equally instructive. A Chinese scholar I spoke to about the US ‘pivot’ or rebalancing to Asia-Pacific said Beijing was concerned about this and following a hedging policy. But there were indications of a more cooperative US approach at the start of President Obama’s second term. His choice of secretaries of state and defence signaled an intent to engage China.

I asked him what he thought of a recent article by another Chinese academic, in which he argued that China today lacked a foreign policy. He said he agreed with the proposition, as China was too domestically preoccupied to think coherently and consistently about foreign policy. China’s economic interests today dictated its external policy. There was no longer any values-based foreign policy.  The only exception to this, he said, were relations with Pakistan, which was regarded as a country that had always stood by China and remained vital for Beijing’s own balancing strategy in Asia.

Was the world moving towards a G-2 arrangement between China and the US? No, he said, the global landscape is still marked by a weakened G-One. US power had drained as a result of its economic problems and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it had not yet been replaced by any G-2 configuration, because China remained hesitant to assume global responsibility.

Did that mean that Western criticism was justified of China being eager to reap the benefits of its new global power status without undertaking any obligations? His answer was that Western countries wanted China to play by the international rules they had set themselves, a process that excluded China. Responsibility came with rights.  The concerns voiced by these scholars about China’s inability, at a time of intense domestic focus, to conduct a coherent foreign policy seems to mirror a view expressed by many in the US strategic community about America’s foreign policy.

In a recent article by David Rothkopf in ‘Foreign Policy’, the author critiques President Obama’s “light footprint diplomacy” for its dangerous potential to invite tomorrow’s problems. He depicts Obama’s international approach to be bereft of a strategy as well as lacking political will to take risks in many important parts of the world.

This has produced a telling absence of American leadership in the international arena, captured in the popular description, ‘leading from behind’. This seems to reinforce Ian Bremmer’s characterisation of the present era as a world without leadership — a G-Zero world – where there is no single power or alliance of powers able to take on the challenges of global leadership.

Dr Maleeha Lodhi served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US and United Kingdom.

Source: Express Tribune

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