(Extracted with permission from Everything All At Once: India and the Six Simultaneous Global Transitions by Rajiv Kumar and Ishan Joshi, published by Rupa Publications India. Paragraph breaks have been added for readers’ convenience).
Readers of a certain vintage would remember pouring over the day-late English county cricket scores published in Indian newspapers till the early 2000s. Today, cricket aficionados are hooked to the T20 Indian Premier League (IPL), which is one of the most lucrative sports franchises in the world. Country cricket is now a boutique play while the IPL is a magnet for capital investment.
Alternatively, think of the thirteenth-century Venetian merchant-adventurer Marco Polo who travelled audaciously along the Silk Road braving all manner of dangers. His writings are widely credited with providing the West with its first comprehensive look at the cultural, economic and political structures of China, India, Japan, and other Asian societies.
Cut to contemporary times. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a breathtakingly ambitious effort to remake the East–West connection, but on its own terms!
These are but two examples of the ongoing shift in the global balance of power from the transatlantic to the Asia-Pacific.
Indeed, when the Barack Obama administration announced the US’ ‘Pivot to Asia’ in November 2011, it was a formal recognition by the world’s most powerful nation of an emerging reality: That a reversion to mean was underway, with the global centre of gravity shifting back to the pre-colonial period powers, especially in Asia, from the Western powers.
Obama’s policy shift was informed by the rise of China over the previous two decades, and the realisation that the American preoccupation with the Middle East might no longer serve the US national interests. This geographical transition from the transatlantic to the Asia-Pacific has since gathered pace exponentially.
At the time, however, the pivot raised a contentious debate on what it meant for US foreign policy and grand strategy. Some experts worried that the pivot seriously weakened transatlantic relations, left the Middle East in disarray, and dangerously confronted China.
Others insisted that vital US national interests had shifted in the past decades, and the pivot was required to address the ‘Pacific Century and the threat of China’—that Asia was therefore where American military, economic and diplomatic resources should primarily focus.
The pivot is now a fait accompli. But as Robert D. Blackwill writes in the Lost Decade, ‘[while] the literature on the US Pivot to Asia is extensive, very few examinations consider the 2011 rebalance in the global context.’ It is not just the US which is impacted by the rise of Asia.
The defence policy, economic statecraft, diplomatic engagement, intelligence assets, and optimal distribution of national security resources of Asia-Pacific nations themselves and the major powers outside the region have also acquired criticality for the period ahead.
The significance of this steady process of a reversion to mean of the mid-eighteenth century for Asia cannot be understated.
In 1700, India accounted for 24.5 per cent of the world’s GDP and China for 22.3 per cent, while Europe’s share was 11.8 per cent (UK, France, Germany). By 1750, China’s share of the world’s manufacturing output had gone up sharply to 32.8 per cent, while India’s remained static at 24.5 per cent, and Europe’s grew to 23.2 per cent.
Together, China and India accounted for 57.3 per cent of the world manufacturing output in 1750, and if Asia is included as a whole, the total jumps to 70 per cent.
Two centuries later, by 1950, the ravages of imperial conquests aided and abetted by the technology spurt engendered by the Industrial Revolution in Europe had reduced post-colonial India’s share of global GDP to 4.2 per cent, with China faring only marginally better at 4.6 per cent. The US had emerged as the world’s most prosperous country by far, with a 27.3 per cent share of global GDP in 1950, followed by Europe at 15.6 per cent.
It is now clearly discernible that China, India and Asia as a whole are coming out of this 200-year blip—that is, 1750 to 1950. This upward trajectory is led by China’s exponential growth from 1990 to 2020, when the Chinese economy clocked a 10 per cent annual growth on average over a 30-year period.
And as Asia is on course to once again becoming the centre of gravity for the world after two and a half centuries of transatlantic dominance, the implications of the geographical transition are already showing signs of being far-ranging. In the geostrategic domain, the effects of the transition are being felt deeply not just in the region but well beyond it.
Suffice it to say that Asian countries and global powers are recognising that from both the economic and the security perspective, this transition may turn out to be as strategically consequential as the historical—and historic—transition from the Old World to the New World.
In this context, it should be pointed out that national security establishments all too often work on the a priori assumption that advanced technologies applied in the military-security domain have, to a large extent, neutralised the importance of geography.
Yet, as the literature on the subject clearly demonstrates, both technology and physical geography remain central to security challenges that will only become more severe as the competition between great powers of relative parity intensifies.
It is worth underlining that the capability of a state positioned within a certain geographic region to rapidly deploy and sustain significant forces within the region is intrinsically greater than that of a more technologically advanced power projecting itself across a continent or ocean.
(Rajiv Kumar is the Chairman of Pahle India Foundation and former Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog. Ishan Joshi is a Senior Fellow at the Pahle India Foundation. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)