10 September 2020, NIICE Commentary 5958
Abhigyan Guha
Signaling a paradigmatic shift in the structural architecture and constellation of powers in the international system, the COVID-19 Pandemic has altered leadership footprints in the present Liberal International Order that is predicated on the attributive elements of National Sovereignty, Economic Liberalism and Rule-based Multilateralism. Accompanied with the Hegemonic assertiveness of China with its demonstration of strategic and economic capabilities and the USA’s unilateral withdrawal demonstrated its unwillingness to project itself as the Global Policeman and architect of global trade, a ‘G-zero’ de facto world system has crystallized in an environment of leadership vacuum. In a dystopian atmosphere of trust deficit, erosion of multilateral institutional arrangements, ascendancy of Illiberal Populism, rise of Protectionist policymaking instincts and Authoritarian political values, the fulcrum of the Post-1945 Liberal International Order is undergoing a plethora of cyclical and structural transformations, germinating an existential crisis for the architectonic systems of international cooperation, collaboration and solidarity.
With the current COVID-19 pandemic, the world has been confronted with negative catalysts like economic slowdown, unresolved social tensions, debilitation of social contract, secular decline of dynamic designs of democratic political systems, rise of Xenophobic Ultranationalist political formations, increasing securitization and mobilization on closures of borders. This has further exacerbated pre-existing geopolitical tensions by deepening a series of cleavages and accentuating hostility on a global scale.
Against the backdrop of comprehensive degradation, India is not an exception and has been plagued with multifaceted and multidimensional challenges ranging from its economic breakdown in a Keynesian tailspin fashion, skyrocketing unemployment, migrant labor crisis, widening economic inequality, political mudslinging in a climate of polarized pluralism that has far-reaching ramifications for every sphere of collective life, extending to the security and strategic frontiers.
The Pandemic has accelerated ongoing Geopolitical trends in the international arena, from sharpening trade, economic and technological decoupling in the pre-existing geopolitical spat between USA and China, to exposing the retreat of globalization, rise of economic nationalism embedded in an Autarkic nostalgia and highlighting the fledgling institutional arrangements for regional cooperation, especially in the form of SAARC in South Asia, that has proved detrimental for regional stability in the Indo-Pacific region.
To make things worse, the recent robust pushy foreign policy decisions of India has bred gratuitous provocation and soured its bilateral relations with its immediate neighbors: From straining its enduring bonhomie with Nepal, the lack of generosity expressed with Sri Lanka, behaving impertinently with Bangladesh to the culmination of hostility with China and Pakistan while reasserting its territorial claims aggressively. Further, the inward-looking reactionary inconsequentialist attitude of India’s foreign-policy making infrastructure, with blatant disregard for deliberations has led to a serious tactical, strategic and diplomatic miscalculations with no enough bandwidth in the decision-making establishment.
The immense economic burden will automatically play out in India’s national security parameters, and the ability to play national security cards and to make its defense expenditure stay up to date with recent significant capabilities will be affected. Faced with repeated intelligence failures, cross-border tensions in the form of Chinese and Pakistani intrusions, volatile atmosphere along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the Pandemic has overtly exposed the lack of military preparedness of the Indian army, especially when it was forced to cancel Ladakh military exercises with China. With China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) guaranteeing economic leverage vis-à-vis infrastructure and connectivity building networks and supply chain integration in the South Asian region, the hegemonic rise of China has commanded political deference as a byproduct from India’s immediate neighbors and has diluted the underlying importance of the SAARC project in fostering inter and intra-regional diplomatic cooperation.
A state of constant flux sans structural predictability in the Asia-Pacific region, with a Chinese center of gravity in the recent past, has witnessed putative order-building tendencies in the form of Chinese assertiveness that has been undeterred even by a devastating pandemic. With the Chinese aggressive behavior creating new power equations in the Asia-Pacific, as exhibited in the Korean Peninsula, naval intrusions into Indonesian EEZ, South China Sea or the East Asian Crisis, the COVID-19 Pandemic is bound to alter the security dynamics of regional stability in the South Asian region and accelerate these developments in the strategic realm.
With a crippling SAARC initiative, at the heart of which lies contentious Indo-Pak bilateral relationship, regional integration remains a utopian ideal due to practical constraints and grave geostrategic challenges. South Asia is an integer and is meant to be ideally integrated by virtue of its historical, geographic, cultural, linguistic ties and civilizational commonalities, but the lack of focus of prioritizing on connectivity, totally beset with contradictions, have been further complicated by a disease of mass destruction.
India’s acute governmental mismanagement, deepening cross-cutting ties and cleavages driven by prejudice, hostility and despair in the time of Corona has pushed India away from cross-border cooperation and robust diplomatic practices at the international theater, as an inhospitable climate of insularity and dissonance has erected barriers, shut down doors of collaboration and friendship and signaled the death of diplomatic engagement. The Pandemic has also exposed the lack of emergency preparedness and the troublesome condition of India’s public health infrastructure, as reflected in one of the lowest medical testing rates and alarmingly low investment in medical research, development and infrastructural advancement.
In order to contain Chinese supremacy in its neighborhood, as illustrated in the hugely significant power differentials between India and China, India must display willingness and pursue a change of attitude in improving its systemic facilities, resources, capabilities and infrastructure, to play the deterrence game with China, instead of going for a 1:1 capability mix. By avoiding cognitive bias driven platitudes in foreign-policy decision-making, investing substantially on public health, human and health security, shedding its past aversions to alliances, re-thinking, re-evaluating its strategic autonomy, developing multiple alignments and pursuing a dynamic Multi-track Diplomacy, India can at least aspire to inject a ray of hope by adopting a more imaginative Teleological approach in international relations.
To sum up, the constitutive normative principles of the de facto world order are in a state of irregularity, with an overarching trend of statism, nativism, illiberal populism, ultranationalist xenophobia, economic protectionism, competitive authoritarianism undermining the forces of free trade driven globalization and restricting the political imagination of global actors to the monopolized ontological domination of nation-states. The pandemic has exposed the fragility of medical establishment and health infrastructure, accentuated divisions and dissensions in a vast array of dimensions ranging from economy to politics, as a kind of perverse revenge of nature against the gross anthropocentric abuses made by mankind. The test for political legitimacy, democratic stability, governance and accountability and global leadership has come to the forefront with the pandemic. Hence, this situation urges the need for re-energizing the existing nature of institutions, practices, values and participation in a dynamic fashion. This can be achieved through the diversification of supply chains, by keeping the structures and agencies of global governance afloat and functioning to the greatest extent possible in fidelity with rule of law, multilateralism and international cooperation. Therefore, the radical alteration of the status quo into a degenerated bloody path can be avoided with the possibility for strategic equilibrium, during the time of a debilitating pandemic and a Cold War 2.0 between the US and China.
