As ‘isms’ and ideologies go, realism is often passed over. Is this because, like the girl next door, one does not generally look for panaceas, or love for that matter, quite so close at hand? But at least among American thinkers there have been two notable realists — Hans Joaquim Morgenthau who expounded the concept of ‘national interest’, and later, Samuel Huntington, who proposed the much discussed and debated theory of ‘clash of civilisations’. Both were vigorously criticised initially before being acknowledged for their prescience as political scientists.
In recent days, Professor John J Mearsheimer, who teaches political science at Chicago University, has kicked up a storm with his ‘offensive realism’ that has offended large sections of the intelligentsia. There was a hue and cry when Morgenthau first argued for the need to amorally pursue the ‘national interest’ and not value-base it on right and wrong. Soon enough, this idea came to permeate every facet of international relations, including the sovereign use of military force and diplomacy.
Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ theory for many people encapsulated the rise of the Islamic terrorist who justifies bombings and mass murder as jihad. Culturally too, the jihadi has no compunction about demonising anyone who doesn’t agree with him or her. Enemies to target include rival Islamic sects, so-called apostates, and non-Muslims in all their variety. There are also issues of perceived ‘decadence’. As for polytheists, it must be impossible for the madarsa-indoctrinated jihadi to regard such people as anything but infidels.
The ironic point is that a born-again Christian like former US President George W Bush, who saw his battle against militant Islamists in crusading terms, and his arch enemy, the Sunni warlord Osama bin Laden, had something in common after all. Osama bin Laden directed violence against America, the West, Israel, India and their friends, relentlessly framing his rhetoric and moral imperative in jihadi terms. The crusading former President, backed solidly by America’s Christian Right, and jihadi Osama bin Laden are stark illustrations of Huntington’s postulation.
Morgenthau, who died in 1979, and Huntington, who passed away in 2008, have made their mark as realists. So, it may well be time to listen very carefully to the most vilified realist of current times, the 63-year-old Prof John J Mearsheimer. He thinks former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is a magisterial waffler who misses the point of what makes international relations tick. This despite Mr Kissinger’s famous tilt towards China in the Nixon years that many say was a masterstroke that eventually led to the demise of the Soviet Empire.
Prof Mearsheimer does not dwell on the tremendous leg-up the US gave to China by endlessly buying Chinese goods for over 30 years of a most favoured nation relationship. Instead, he concentrates on the present day, and says it is all heading for an inevitable showdown between the US and China. When it comes, implies Prof Mearsheimer, it won’t be in the form of the stand-offs, shadow-boxing and covert attrition of the Cold War, but a gun battle on the main street, like the climax of an old Western film. He thinks China is building its military muscle and pushing its forward diplomacy because it is the world’s most active ‘offensive realist’ bent on hegemony.
We in India can feel China’s aggressive mood first hand, as it seeks to relentlessly encircle us via Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives and Pakistan, and threatens us directly at several points of our disputed long land border with it. Prof Mearsheimer, who is focussed on the US’s ‘national interest’, says China wants to take over the Eastern hemisphere, probably above and below the equator, land and sea, and would like to see America confined to its own backyard, probably meaning Canada, South America and Western/Eastern Europe and the seas around them.
Africa, though certainly west of China, is not to be given up easily by either of the rivals or their proxies because of its vast natural resources able to feed the engines of industry, as well as massive arable land to grow more food for the planet. India, a potential rival from South Asia aspiring weakly to world power status, with its muted forays into Africa, West Asia, Eastern Europe, its loose alliances with the West and a tighter one with Russia, is nevertheless very easily bullied.
But Prof Mearsheimer thinks the great powers attack non-nuclear countries to settle things militarily, but cannot afford to go after nuclear countries, whatever their record in promoting human rights, terrorism and other provocations may be.
India, ideologically, has never pursued the Morgenthauist ‘national interest’ line particularly, nor subscribed to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ theory, and certainly can’t reconcile Prof Mearsheimer’s ‘offensive realism’ with Gandhian notions of non-violence. We can, therefore, expect to be continually menaced into submissiveness but survive nevertheless because of our nuclear power status.
West Asia, with its anachronistic forms of Government and vast reserves of oil, seems to be the arena where all three realists and their ideas can play out their potential in short order. The current hot button is Iran, though the instability in places such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan are quite worrisome too.
China seems to be against the UN-backed unilateralism that helps the West. Ever the covert proliferator, it first enabled neighbouring North Korea to go semi-nuclear and then, via Pyongyang, helped Pakistan to do so openly. China wants to use nuclear diplomacy to reduce the power of the West by promoting proliferation via proxies, and there is not much the West can do about it.
If Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia is determined to follow suit. Israel is a covert nuclear power already. Many more will join the club if China has its way, making it more and more difficult to resort to the kind of militarism that proved recently possible in Libya and yet could in Iran. This is Prof Mearsheimer’s point precisely. Iran’s current belligerence might indeed be taking some strength from China’s open support. Pakistan, the only nuclear Islamic country, is standing by Iran in solidarity with that country.
China, with its nuclear arsenal capable of targeting every major city in the US and its burgeoning conventional military machine, seems determined to change the current global power equation. But this will have to play itself out. At a minimum, even if there are no fireworks, as Andrew Kapinevich, president of the Centre for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments in the US says, much of China’s environs and sphere of influence is being ‘Finlandised’, meaning nominally sovereign states that are forced to toe the Chinese line.
