The New Trinity

On the face of it, the trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers of China, Russia and India, held in New Delhi on February 14, produced little beyond a bland communiqué. Beneath the surface, there is a foreboding that we might be entering a new era in Great Power politics, which will create new alignments and risks.

This trilateral cooperation is still very much in its nascent stages. The three agreed that, "as countries with growing international influence they can make a contribution to global peace, security and stability." How they would accomplish this is not entirely clear.

However, the mutual relationships among these countries have been improving. They have common concerns on issues like energy. But it is premature to conclude that their strategic interests can easily align.

The three went out of their way to reiterate that their coming together was not directed against any other country. But in the context of a call for the "democratization" of international relations, this denial could invite the response "thou dost protest too much."

The larger context suggests more might be at stake and a profound shift may be underway in international politics.

President Vladimir Putin’s outspoken criticism of the US at the Munich security conference may have been deflected by US Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ remark that "one Cold War was enough." But that cannot disguise the fact that Russia, although a diminished power, still chafes at being encircled by an expanded NATO and EU, and would like to regain some sense of itself as a significant player. China’s inexorable rise and increasing influence around the world is inevitable; and the anti-satellite test only raised more concerns about the character of Chinese power.

Some questions emerge. What response will Chinese power invite from the US? Perhaps there was nothing more than coincidence in the fact that President George Bush authorized the creation of USAFRICOM, a unified combatant command for Africa, just as President Hu Jintao was traversing Africa. There is a palpable sign of relief that crisis in North Korea has, for the moment, passed. But in a curious way this crisis has enhanced Beijing’s authority. It has lent credence to those who believe that the US precipitated the crisis in the first place, and that Beijing’s active participation now holds the key to security and stability. With the prospect of crisis in the Middle East intensifying, what will this jockeying among great powers amount to? The trilateral group in Delhi agreed to discuss more "global issues." What does this add up to?

For the last decade or so, international politics has been characterized by three trends: Emerging powers like China and India were not keen on upsetting the current world order. Quite the contrary, they were happy to get a free ride on it, while the US took the lead on global issues. Second, the world was seen as unipolar. Third, the period was an unusually benign moment in international relations. Relations between the major powers were not a zero sum game. There was some optimism that a globalizing world would make traditional balance-of-power politics, at best, be a sideshow, made more stable by the sinews of economic interdependence. Will these trends continue in the future?

In a way, countries like China, India and Russia should now take on more global responsibilities. But they will probably hesitate for four reasons: First, although they want a seat at the big table, they are unsure of the kind of world order they want. Their position on major deadlocks like the legitimacy of nuclear weapons, global warming and UN reform is still evolving. It is still very much driven by separate desires to maximize their own short-term advantage rather than create a rule-bound international order. Second, while China had some leverage in a crisis situation like North Korea, it is not clear anyone can have an analogous influence over the next likely crisis: Iran. And third, they can still continue to ride free. One suspects that leaders in Asia or Russia are not losing sleep over Iran the way the US is, with troops stationed in neighboring Iraq. Therefore it is not immediately clear what role they can play in evolving a stable world order.

And if, as Putin’s speech suggested, international relations again becomes a zero sum game, it will become one along different vectors. Ironically, the fact that Russia, China and India can get together this way is precisely because they can pretend that they do not have to choose among one another or weigh their relationship against a relationship with the US. Their interests simply do not align easily. But once these countries are in a position of having to make tough choices, this kind of trilateral summit will become more difficult.

Therefore the prospects of a China-India-Russia initiative to create a new world order look slim. But these prospects could alter dramatically depending on whether the three powers can internalize some lessons of power politics from the previous century. The war in Iraq has served as a reminder, if any were needed, that from the vantage point of any particular conflict, the world is not exactly unipolar. Unipolarity is too abstract a measure of power and has been rendered irrelevant by the fact that even relatively small powers can play a decisive role in international conflicts. Iran’s capacity to alter the balance of power in the Middle East is now palpable, and there is almost no location in the world where one power can simply have its writ run unchallenged.

There is no route, therefore, to international stability, other than through consensus building. This gives a lot of room for play for different kinds of powers to exercise their influence.

The dangers to the stability of the world order will, among others, come from two sources: The first will be if the US continues to overestimate its capacity for bringing about change in the world and construct the lines of conflict – as in the Middle East – in black and white terms. Second, all the great powers in the world must resist the temptation of "balance-of-power politics." That type of politics is inherently dangerous because it is self-fulfilling. Each move by one power invites a countervailing move in a vicious cycle of escalation. One measure of the success of greater China-Russia-India coordination will be the extent to which this coordination can help mitigate these dangers. The prospect of the US being seriously solicitous of any views the emerging powers might have remains dim, but a joint message might help.

The three nations would also enhance their credibility if they send the right signal to any state that acts provocatively in the international system. Most importantly, they would have to live up to the claim that they will act in a manner unlike that of the great powers of the past: The three will not see multilateral institutions as a vehicle for the projection of their own power. Will they be able to walk their talk? Their past behavior does not give grounds for optimism. But if the aspirations of these trilateral talks fail to create a new kind of world order, the world will indeed become hotter, literally and politically.