The “great game” is what nineteenth century British strategists called the contest in Central Asia between Britain and Russia; it usually came down to competition for the shifting allegiances of various warlords and tribes in Afghanistan.
That ‘game’ is still being played with a new set of players, but a new and potentially much more explosive great game is taking shape in Asia today.
This is the competition between India and China as Asia’s two emerging superpowers flex their muscles and size each other up.
Lately, the focus of the contest has been Arunachal Pradesh, a state in north eastern India much of whose territory is claimed by China. Historically and culturally the region has been linked to Tibet; Indian and Chinese troops fought over the state in 1962.
The dispute has been heating up recently. India followed up a controversial visit by its Prime Minister last month with a visit by the Dalai Lama in early November. Both the Indian Prime Minister and the Dalai Lama have a perfect right to visit the state, but China doesn’t like what it sees.
The old Great Game was a favorite hobbyhorse of armchair strategists and amateur geopoliticians. The new one is going to attract them as well and no doubt some Americans are rubbing their hands in glee as the two rising Asian giants eye one another warily and mutter threats under their breath.
In my view, American interests are not served by tension between the two powers. We are not trying to contain China — or India either, for that matter. We are promoting China’s integration into the global economic and political order — and we are doing exactly the same thing with India. The fact that Asia includes two rising nuclear superpowers with populations of over one billion each instead of just one is a very good thing from the American point of view. But it’s not in our interest for the two to quarrel. We want both great powers bound together, and bound to us and bound to Japan and their neighbors, by ties of friendship, trade and peace. Just as the American presence in Europe created conditions for peace between old rivals like Germany and France, the American presence in Asia should ultimately result in stable relations between countries like China, Japan, India, a peacefully united Korea and Vietnam — not to mention their neighbors.
That’s easier said than done. There are touchy nationalists in all of these countries, and the rapid pace of economic development across the region unleashes destabilizing political and social instability even as it opens new opportunities for hundreds of millions of people to escape abject poverty. Asians and Americans are going to have our hands full as we try to ensure and enhance Asia’s peaceful rise.
Meanwhile, Flannery O’Connor’s title is the best slogan for American foreign policy in Asia: Everything That Rises Must Converge. Our job in the twenty-first century is to try to make that happen in Asia and elsewhere. It isn’t easy, but there aren’t any better alternatives.