The Great Power Anxiety

WHAT DOES IT TAKE to be a Great Power? A large economy, clearly. A strong military that can project power overseas. But above all, self-belief.

The US has all three. China has the first and the third, and will soon have the second. Russia only has the second. The British and French Empires had all three but lost all three.

What about India? Does it have what it takes to be a Great Power?

Paul Poast, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, says it does not. In a column for the US-based World Politics Review, Poast writes: “As far back as 2013, The Economist pondered whether India could become a Great Power. Such commentary has recently returned. Earlier this month, Martin Wolf of Financial Times opined that India was poised to become a superpower, going so far as placing an exact date—2047—on when it will achieve that status.”

Poast then proceeds to dismantle the idea of India’s rise as a Great Power. He concedes India’s “economy is poised to continue growing at a rapid clip, potentially moving from the world’s fifth-largest to third-largest in just the next few years.” But then Poast falls back on the argument employed by Western commentators that India is simply too poor to make the cut even by 2047, the centenary of Indian Independence.

Writes Poast: “India is unlikely to grow fast enough to become a high-income country by 2047, the year when Prime Minister Narendra Modi expects it to be fully ‘devel­oped’. Instead, it is and could well remain a relatively poor country, in terms of the average income level of its citizens.”

Not entirely convinced by his own thesis that low or mid­dle per capita income is detrimental to being a Great Power, Poast retracts a bit: “But when it comes to Great Power sta­tus, what matters is quantity, measured in sheer economic size, not necessarily quality, measured by per capita wealth.”

Poast turns to Qatar’s Al Jazeera, no friend of India, and its Defence Editor Alex Gatopoulos, to bolster his point on India’s military capability. Gatopoulos writes: “With a weak air force that is under-strength, an army still bogged down with strategic ideas formed in the last century, and a navy that looks good on paper but is being comprehensively outclassed by China’s navy, India is finally coming to terms with its own inadequacies.”

Not a word from Gatopoulos about India’s rapidly expanding indigenous defence capability, including fifth-generation stealth fighter jets and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles with a range of over 5,000km that can be launched from air, land, sea, undersea, and space, putting the whole of China within their range.

Western commentators have long dreaded India’s rise to Great Power status. Dealing with one Asian Great Power, China, is traumatic enough for Washington and London. Dealing in the future with another, India, makes the West fret about losing the global hegemony it has nurtured for centuries.

At a dinner party in Washington in 2011, Adam Szubin, who was then director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), got up suddenly to sing a song titled ‘Every Little Thing We Do Is Sanctions’ to the tune of ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’, a well-known song by The Police, a British rock band.

According to Federica Cocco and Jeff Stein of The Washington Post, Szubin, far from being embarrassed at confessing how the US uses sanctions to cripple other countries, confirmed in an email that he had indeed sung that song at the packed dinner, replacing ‘magic’ with ‘sanctions’.

To scratch its sanctions itch, Washington has slapped sanctions on dozens of nations, often without due cause. An incomplete list: Iran (1979), Syria (1979), Cuba (1962), Venezuela (2005), Yemen (2012), Russia (2014), China (2014), Myanmar (2003), Libya (1986), Sudan (1997), Belarus (2006), Lebanon (2007), Mali (2019), Ethiopia (2021), Nicaragua (2018), Somalia (2010), Congo (2006), Zimbabwe (2002), and India (1998).

The recurring nightmare in the chanceries of Washington, London, and Berlin is that the West’s influence over the world is waning. A powerful Asia with China and India developing closer investment ties is a prospect that alarms them.

India’s rise to Great Power status is—contrary to the West’s doctrinaire view, echoed by Poast—inevitable and, for the West, discomfiting. Inevitable because of India’s size, demog­raphy, economy, military and soft power—all ascendant.

Discomfiting to current and former Great Powers because India’s rise would have taken place without living on, or off, other people’s land.