From Biden’s democracy summits to the Winter Olympics, a ‘contra-polar’ world is in evidence

Amid the US-China schism, contemporary geopolitics is rife with contradictions. This picture is in stark contrast to the optimism that all boats would rise together in the wake of the Cold War

C. Uday Bhaskar

Published: 4:00am, 2 Dec 2021

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The contradictory manner in which the world’s major powers engage with each other could be described as the “contra-polar” nature of contemporary global relations. This is manifest in a set of unrelated dissonances in early December.

On December 9-10, US President Joe Biden is hosting the first of two Summits for Democracy. A total of 110 countries have been invited to the inaugural summit, which will be held virtually. That Taiwan has been added to the list led to a sharp protest from Beijing.

Predictably, China and Russia have not been invited, while India, the world’s largest democracy, is an invitee. Political leaders apart, the summit will also include civil society and private sector participation. The key themes for deliberation are defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.

In a rare joint articulation in a public forum, the ambassadors of China and Russia to the United States co-authored an opinion piece on the website of the conservative National Journal where they dubbed the democracy summit “an evident product of its Cold-War mentality”. Ambassadors Anatoly Antonov of Russia and Qin Gang of China added that the event would “stoke up ideological confrontation and a rift in the world, creating new dividing lines”.

There has been muted speculation that the US and its close allies may consider boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympics in February. Were this to happen, it would be a major setback to the US-China bilateral relationship. Beijing has indicated that it does not plan to invite Western politicians who threaten a diplomatic boycott of the games. As red lines are drawn, the jostling is evident.

However, not all democracies endorse the boycott option. A recent virtual meeting of the foreign ministers of Russia, India and China is illustrative. The November 26 joint communique stated: “The ministers expressed their support to China to host Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

Thus, while India will attend the democracy summit under US stewardship, it has sought to assuage Beijing’s anxiety with its own signal to China.

This did not prevent Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar from unambiguously expressing his views about the troubled India-China bilateral relationship. Speaking in Singapore on November 19, Jaishankar noted in relation to the border clashes in eastern Ladakh: “We are neighbours and going through a particularly bad patch [in] our relationship because they have taken a set of actions and violation of agreements for which they still don’t have a credible explanation and that indicates some rethink about where they want to take our relationship, but that’s for them to answer.”

To add to the web of seemingly contradictory politico-diplomatic positioning, Russian President Vladimir Putin will be in New Delhi on December 6 for a bilateral summit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – and the subtext here will be differently interpreted by both Beijing and Washington.

Indian Air Force Sukhoi Su-30 fighter aircraft fly over Mumbai to pay tribute to “frontline warriors” against the spread of the Covid-19 on May 5, 2020. Russia has long been a supplier to the Indian armed forces. Photo: AFP

While there is a degree of correspondence of interests between China and Russia when it comes to the US, Moscow is charting an independent course of action in the Russia-India-China triangle. The Moscow-Delhi “friendship” goes back to the Cold War decades. In the latter phase of US-Soviet bipolar contestation, it was communist China that aligned itself with capitalist America, while communist Moscow in turn brought democratic Delhi into its strategic ambit.

While the US-India relationship is robust, yet another indicator of the contra-polar nature of the current times is the Indian decision to acquire the S-400 missile defence system from Russia. The trigger for this acquisition is Delhi’s anxiety about Beijing’s growing missile capabilities, although it is aware that this step could invoke US sanctions.

India’s US-Russia balancing act makes for an uneasy Quad alliance

China’s simmering tension with Taiwan and Putin’s warning to Nato over Ukraine on November 30 point to increasing discord among the major powers over issues of territoriality. The high priority accorded to such matters is incongruous with the backdrop of far more critical global challenges that loom large.

Climate change is now a grim reality, but the poverty of the global political response was all too evident at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.

The Covid-19 pandemic is another sui generis global challenge. A report published in China CDC Weekly by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that if Beijing dropped its zero-tolerance policies in relation to travel and emulates more liberal protocols, the infection rate could rise to 630,000 cases daily.

This study predates the incidence of the Omicron variant, and the manner in which the global community is responding to this latest challenge is revealing.

In 1991, when the Cold War ended, there was widespread optimism that democracy and globalisation would lead to a happy outcome of shared prosperity where all boats would rise together. The current global turbulence and the contradictory nature of policy responses in the face of serious survival challenges suggest that the world is stumbling towards a more pessimistic exigency where all boats may leak together.

Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar is director of the Society for Policy Studies (SPS), an independent think tank based in New Delhi