The Edge of the Precipice

The third decade of the 21^st century is witness to significant power shifts and profound disruptions due to economic and technological developments, pandemics, regional conflicts, domestic polarization, social upheaval, and culture wars. History is in fast-forward mode. The simultaneous escalation of many long-dormant conflicts in the Middle East, Europe and Asia is not coincidental but rather part of the great power competition to shape the world order.

Today’s world bears a striking resemblance to the turbulent periods preceding the two world wars. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s war against Hamas, Turkey’s offensive in Syria, and China’s expansionist moves against India and in the South China Sea are stark examples. A Japanese observer, Takako Hikotani, believes that ‘Asia has entered a “pre-war era.”’ Only the players have changed; the fundamental insecurities, impulses, and ambitions remain the same. The “new” great game is as much about territory to gain access to resources, markets and bases as it is about new, emerging technologies.

We see the rise of regional hegemons seeking to carve out larger spheres of influence. China and Russia, in the east and west, are flexing their muscles, while Iran leverages its proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—to assert regional dominance in the Middle East. The Houthis’ strategic decision to refrain from targeting Chinese and Russian vessels in the Red Sea illustrates their role as proxies in the great power competition. Similarly, Turkey under Erdogan exhibits imperial ambitions reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire. These revisionist powers, led by ultra-nationalist leaders nursing historical grievances, seek to dismantle the US-led order that they perceive as constraining their imperial ambitions. Distrust, fear and negativity permeate major power relations.

The Return of History: Rival alliance networks

The sense of a growing crisis is intensified by the crystallization of rival blocs, with the US and its allies on one side, and Russia and China’s network of allies (North Korea, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Iran) on the other. Moscow and Beijing perceive the US as encircling them with hostile military alliances—NATO in Europe and bilateral alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia in the Pacific. Since the Ukraine invasion, China and Russia have become as firmly aligned as they were during the Korean War in the 1950s. Russia is now “China’s Canada” with nuclear weapons and veto in the UN Security Council.

China is leveraging Russia as a disruptive force to dismantle the post-World War II world order, aiming to replace it with a new Sinocentric order based on money, might and global supremacy. China has turned out to be the biggest beneficiary of ‘wars of distraction’ in Europe and the Middle East, as these serve to divert and sap US resources and attention away from the main game in the Pacific. As great power competition intensifies, regime change is the name of the game to establish pliant client states around the periphery of rival powers. Neither Washington nor Beijing gives two hoots about regime type as long as they can secure access to forward operating bases to counter their perceived enemies and rivals. The intense jockeying for influence and forward presence among major maritime powers seeking control of ports, logistical facilities and other pieces of critical infrastructure along the vital sea lanes is creating new friction points. The formation of such opposing coalitions is a feature common to both the pre-World War II and Cold War periods.

The Return of Bipolarity

Despite the hype about multipolarity, bipolarity is the reality. For the foreseeable future, no country ranking third—Germany, Japan, India or Russia—is a rough peer of the United States or China. The US economy is about $27 trillion, and China’s $19 trillion. Militarily, the US and Chinese defence budgets ($800 and $350 billion respectively) roughly match each other, taking purchasing power differences into account. Economically and militarily, it remains a bipolar world. Even if India surpasses Japan as the world’s third-largest economy, it will have the lowest per capita income ever recorded in history for a third-largest economy. China is an industrial powerhouse—from shipbuilding to critical minerals to microelectronics, the largest exporter, the top trading partner of 125 countries, home to vital rare-earths essential for energy transition and a key linchpin in global supply chains.

In contrast, the US is now grappling with simultaneous security challenges from a coalition of loosely aligned revisionist powers and their proxies in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, drawing Washington into multiple conflict zones even as internal divisions and polarisation, staggering national debt, and a weakened defence-industrial base stretch America’s resources thin. Chinese strategic analyst Yao Yang believes that since ‘America’s industrial base has already been hallowed out [thanks to globalisation], it cannot possibly compete with China.’[1] This confidence stems from the fact that Chinese manufacturing capacity now exceeds those of the US and Western Europe put together.

Time will tell if President Trump’s administration would succeed in rejuvenating America’s industrial might. The weaponization of everything—market access, trade, technology, rare earths, and currency—does not bode well for the global economy. The US-China trade war has morphed into a global trade war. While China’s economy may or may not surpass that of the US, Beijing’s ability to mobilize resources, capital, technology and military to achieve set goals remains unmatched and unrivalled.

No great power goes quietly, and no great power arrives quietly. Chairman Xi Jinping periodically exhorts his military and people to prepare for war while Beijing is decoupling from the West, stockpiling food, fuel, gold, raw materials, and reducing its US government bonds as a hedge against sanctions. China’s military spending exceeds the defence budgets of all of America’s treaty allies combined. Advances in hypersonic, unmanned, automated weapons have the potential to lower the threshold for the preemptive use of force, leading to more frequent conflicts. No country has spent so much for so long in arming itself against its adversaries without eventually going to war.

The Growing Risk of a Major War

Dissatisfied, revisionist powers are prone to taking risks. War preparation has become the organising principle of Russia’s and China’s economic and foreign policies. The Korean Peninsula remains a tinderbox. Chinese intrusions into Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines’ territorial sea and airspace continue unabated as incursions against Vietnam, India, the Philippines and Bhutan’s borders. For the first time since World War II, Japan is set to deploy troops in Southeast Asia to support joint patrols by the US, Filipino and Japanese navies in the South China Sea.

Geopolitics imposes tough choices, with India’s best friend Russia in bed with its worst enemy China, and another major arms supplier, Israel, is embroiled in conflict. Despite recent moves to end China’s military standoff with India that has seen 100,000 troops remain deployed in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation in the Himalayas since June 2020, salami slicing and fistfights could escalate into a major conflagration. China’s fortification of forward bases, deployment of men and materiel, construction of new roads and bridges and aggressive posture are all meant to ensure that India does not stir up trouble on the western front while the Chinese military is occupied in the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea.

Nor would China tolerate the rise of a peer competitor on the Asian mainland at a time when it believes Chinese hegemony is within reach. Not just China, neither India’s other immediate neighbours nor the West want to see another China-like economic competitor emerge in the world as it is not in their interests. That makes the probability of intra- and inter-state conflicts high in the future.

Security in Eurasia is indivisible. The interconnected nature of Eurasia’s regional conflicts means that crises in one part of the world invariably and inevitably shape and trigger crises in other parts. All it would take to turn the conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia into a larger great power conflict is a spark in the heavily militarised and contested Pacific. Historically, major wars often begin as a series of disconnected small conflicts in various regions that eventually merge into a single large war due to the involvement and/or support of major powers. As Hal Brands observed in Foreign Affairs recently: ‘World War II too started as a series of loosely connected struggles for dominance in key regions from Europe to the Asia-Pacific, which eventually climaxed and coalesced and converged into a global war by 1941.’[2]

Asia as a Tripwire

The tripwire is in Asia where Beijing has been engaged in military operations short of war (MOSOW) or ‘gray zone’ warfare to alter facts on the ground, in the air, and at sea, compelling others to accept the new status quo. Beijing has also established a network of military and naval bases across the Pacific and the Indian oceans. Without fighting a war, Beijing has acquired sea denial capability in the South China Sea. Control over Taiwan is key to establishing a Eurasian Co-prosperity Sphere, also known as the Community of Common Destiny.

A war over Taiwan would be catastrophic for the world economy, enabling China to strangle Japan’s and South Korea’s economic lifelines, forcing both to accept subordinate tributary status within a China-led Eurasian Co-Prosperity Sphere. At worse, it would lead to the nuclearisation of Japan and South Korea. Neither Tokyo nor Seoul would remain bystander in any Taiwan contingency involving their ally, the United States. The US FONOPS (freedom of navigation operations) have neither stopped the militarisation of artificial islands nor the almost daily skirmishes between the Chinese and the Filipino or Vietnamese navies.

Having consolidated its hold over the SCS by militarising artificial islands, China’s navy has now set its sights on the Indian Ocean. About 10-15 Chinese naval vessels are routinely deployed in the Indian Ocean. As the US Navy contemplates resurrecting its First Fleet and Beijing readies an Indian Ocean fleet to secure its interests, the northern Indian Ocean would become as contested and conflict-prone as the South China Sea in the decades ahead.

The so-called anti-access/area denial (A2AD) strategy is already being practiced in both the Red Sea and the South China Sea. The fall of Taiwan would result in the deployment of about half of the Chinese naval fleet in the Indian Ocean, turning it into China’s ‘Western Ocean.’ China’s naval strategy is transitioning from a two-ocean to a three-ocean strategy, now including the Arctic along with the Indian and Pacific oceans. China wants to become a resident power in the Indian Ocean and beyond, just like Britain, France and the US. To prevent the South Chinaisation of the Indian Ocean, India has embarked upon major naval expansion, and is working closely in concert with the American, French and Australian navies.

India’s neighbourhood is home to fragile and failing states, stretching from Afghanistan to Myanmar and including Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The region is rife with instability, marked by internal unrest and growing external interventions by China and the United States. These interventions have resulted in economic distress and regime changes that exacerbate the turmoil. Small fires of instability around its periphery could drag India into a major conflagration.

Conclusion

Like it or not, we are now in Cold War 2.0. The vast Indo-Pacific region, from the western Pacific to the western Indian Ocean, is its ground zero. Map making is not over. The world is on the edge of a gathering storm of military crises. History shows that regional crises often simmer slowly before erupting suddenly into wars. A world in which a loosely aligned coalition of dissatisfied powers are a growing menace simultaneously in multiple theatres is a dangerous world. The decline of old and the rise of new powers is often accompanied by lawlessness, disorder and chaos around the world. Short of a major war, control over emerging technologies, energy resources, critical minerals, and key transportation hubs along maritime chokepoints will define geopolitical leverage.

[1] T. des G. Geddes, “PKU Prof. Yao Yang on Sino-US Relations and China’s Role as a Global Power,” Sinfication.com, April 29, 2024 https://www.sinification.com/p/pku-prof-yao-yang-on-sino-us-relations

[2] Hal Brands, “The Next Global War: How Today’s Regional Conflicts Resemble the Ones That Produced World War II,” Foreign Affairs, January 26, 2024 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/next-global-war

geopoliticsRussia-Ukraine conflictVladimir PutinXi Jinping