The \'not yet great\' powers at a time of power vacuum

China, India, Japan, and Russia have made a lot of post-World War II noise, though not in that same order, and for quite different reasons, sometimes in partnerships, at others through rivalries. As previously noted in this series, if we hold our breath (that is, assume policy considerations away), perhaps we can get a sense of the instincts driving these countries in the 21st Century. How they relate to Bangladesh can then be left to more than just imaginations.
Perhaps an appropriate start would be by disaggregating the wherewithal at their disposal today (keeping in mind that instincts know no such boundaries). Turning to the economic wherewithal, Japan, China, and India have grabbed people's attention, in that post-World War II order, as probable great powers: Japan's economy rose to become the world's second largest by the 1970s, only to face a permanent recession since 1989 (the industrialised world's longest), sinking its chances; China's rise to that same spot after its monumental reforms from 1979 still bewilders analysts, even as the country faces increasingly uncompetitive exports; while similar reforms in India from 1990 leaves it "knocking on heaven's door," as it were, even as transformational problems, particularly with labour and a protectionist mindset constraining reforms, can often be heard knocking louder than transformational opportunities.
Russia could briefly flex its economic muscles at the start of this century, and largely owing to its energy exports (credit for which goes more to Boris Yeltsin than Vladimir Putin), but its mainstay has been, as it was since it was first exposed at the time of Peter the Great (when even Sweden sporadically defeated Russia in various 1708 battles, before losing the war  to Peter the Great's army in Poltava in 1709): military prowess, backed by a large enough population and hinterland until the age of missiles (one reason why about half of the 25 million military and one-third of the 30-odd million civilian World War II fatalities were from the Soviet Union), and thereafter with more missiles than any other country could match, except the United States (one reason why its "Soviet" experiment collapsed financially by the early 1990s).
Whether it is economic or political, how we deduce where each country may be in the immediate future may be better explained by instincts than policy-juggling, though how each free rides the other should not be ignored. Alphabetically, China comes first. How it is connecting with, and reviving in full glory its ancient Asia Minor "Silk Road" and Indian Ocean "String of Pearls," says a lot about China's instinctive drives, and particularly something that pure communism (from 1949 to 1979) could not. Its own "peasant" revolutionaries clashed with the Soviet "proletarian" revolutionaries increasingly after 1953 (after Josef Stalin died), even though Ussuri River border clashes came right out of a "realpolitik" handbook at the same time. Between 1979 and today, China has built so many trade partners, opened more markets than ever before, dominated the futures markets of almost every critically needed commodities for long enough to safeguard against any slackening (as right now), that even the diffusion and strengthening of its peasant revolution could not manage, under a communist banner, across the entire global stage. It is now well placed to revive those ancient routes: with all its trillions of dollars of trade surpluses, it can help less-developed countries build infrastructures (and future friendship in case of war elsewhere) to strengthen those routes, in turn, creating a global leadership infrastructure, something no other "great power" can do today.
The "domination" instinct behind this development, subtle though it is in expression, connects well with Confucian respect for the elderly. "Looking upwards" to the oldest in Confucian thinking has been converted economically, so that other countries look up to China for leadership, right now for hand-outs (which is what China's peasant communism could not elicit even on the ideological front), perhaps later by command.
That this would upset the global neighbourhood was as conscious an outcome for Chinese leaders as it was for those neighbours. Japan relished the Chinese turn to a market economy, yet, though they became a prime partner of each other (in trade, investments, and tourism), China's continued economic growth and Japan's continued economic stagnation changed the ball game: they spilled over into rival claims over oceanic islands, prompting Japan to revive its own imperial instincts, not just from the moment Commodore Perry landed in Tokyo during 1853-4, but from far earlier domestically (one reason why it can claim "nihonrinjon," that is a pure and undiluted race and nationality, in turn breeding a superiority complex). Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has vigorously sought to reconfigure Japanese policy priorities based on these: economic partnerships across Southeast Asian countries, with a South Asian jackpot in India as its eastern outpost; and building its own "String of Pearls," especially to dilute Chinese influences across Africa and Australia. These were unthinkable when Japan was the second largest global economy and India still clung to the socialist camp (until the early 1990s).
India is now treading a similar pathway as Japan: expanding economic ties, even to China (with over a billion possible consumers, no country wants to pass on milking China in its "cash-cow" phase), but also beefing up its own military, all the more so under Narendra Modi and beyond Japan to the United States (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, for example, which includes Australia also). Of course, teaming up with the United States has been a prime target in both Japan and India, but unlike Japan, which has no post-World War II option but to turn in that direction, the once socialist fellow-traveller of the Soviet Union, India might not be concealing how its market turnaround is also exposing its own imperialist instinct, which goes farther back from the Mughal era to the Mauryan Empire in the two-three centuries before the Christian era began.
China, the other country with that same legitimate claim, has both Pakistan to divert India's attention, but also a Russia gone astray since the time of Mikhail Gorbachev, who first signalled the end of the Soviet experiment, and an abandoned Indian-ally. Through the 2001 Shanghai Cooperative Organisation, China not only co-opted Russia (Putin can talk big in the post-petroleum era precisely because of this alliance), but also moved the ancient Silk Road, which partly transcends Eurasia (there is a sea counterpart hugging the coasts from China to the Mediterranean), from a pipe-21st-Century-dream into a half-baked reality.
In short, we find a little bit of that same instinct in each of these countries, the one Machiavelli popularised globally, but far before him, articulated by Kautilya in India and Sun-Tzu in China; and practised by post-Peter the Great Russia and post-Perry Japan: self-help/egotism, with the suffix of becoming Machiavelli's Leviathan.
None of these countries have a choice but to behave this way in the early 21st Century. For one thing, there is a power vacuum, with the world's sole superpower, the United States, shifting significantly away from battlefields (Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign emphasised this, as too Donald Trump today; and a vast majority of citizens have other priorities where their dollars could be redirected from the military). For another: political military opportunities now conjoin greater economic resources, either individually by each of these countries, or through partnerships, as the salient wherewithal. As a final straw, the international community is itself in a winner-takes-all juncture, so, to fail, would embarrass these countries the most: losing Soviet stature was painful enough for Russia to face another detrimental rendezvous with destiny; and both China and India have too many people to not avoid that "revolution of rising expectations" unless an at least somewhat successful game-changing plan is immediately adopted.
These have enormous global ramifications. What they mean for Bangladesh has been alluded to previously in the "Scopus" column, but the next two articles of this series, assembles them under both old and new light, succinctly in a single package.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the newly-built Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.
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