Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria has made a strong case for India to align itself with the US, even at the expense of its current relations with Russia and China.
Speaking at the ABP Network Ideas of India Summit 2022 in Mumbai on Saturday, Zakaria said: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine in some ways is a more important event than 9/11 because it has the capacity to remake the global order in a way that 9/11 did not. 9/11 at the end of the day was a band of terrorists who were able to disrupt the normal life of citizens around the world in a way that forced governments to react.
“But what we have going on now is the world’s most powerful nuclear state with a veto in the security council, that spans 10 time zones, that is frontally assaulting one of the core tenets of the international system that was set up after 1945. And the question becomes: If that challenge succeeds in some sense, what does the world begin to look like in that circumstance and what will the consequences be given that other great powers will react or are already reacting to that reality.”
The CNN anchor said the world after 1989 to 1991— when the iron curtain lifted — was marked by three trends, namely globalisation, the information revolution, and peace between great powers. During this period, the main economic competitors of the US were dependent on it for security. The last decade, he added, has seen the “unravelling of that Pax Americana”.
He explained: “If the (second) Iraq war shows that American military was not invincible, the global financial crisis showed that the American economic model was not invincible….”
Zakaria said he foresaw Russia becoming dependent on China as a result of it being isolated from the economic system of western powers, and that the world would see a de-globalisation, inflation, slower growth and smaller economies. Despite this, he said he wanted India to pick the West over the Chinese-led system due to similarities in the system of government and cultural hallmarks of relative openness that India and western countries shared.
He said: “India has not thought strategically about its place in the world for 20 to 30 years… To say that you are multi-aligned is to say that you are not willing to make any choices… it means that you actually do not have a strategy.”
In conversation with journalist Vir Sanghvi, Zakaria added: “India, both from its head and its heart, should be asking itself: How can we buy insurance against China… and how can we align ourselves culturally, economically and politically with the world that clearly we have so much more in common with than other parts of the world.”
He described “others parts of the world” as countries that supported Russia in the UN Security Council over Ukraine “Manmohan Singh began the process,” said Zakaria, adding, “When I would talk about this with him, he was deeply frustrated at how difficult it was to make this transition. It never really got past him personally because the Delhi bureaucracy at every level — political and professional — is deeply resistant to these ideas of change.”
“The non-Chinese, non-US zone doesn’t exist. What is it going to be? The rupee as the third reserve currency of the world… It would be clarifying for India to understand that. You either go with China’s alternative or you go with the zone of the West,” he said.
Asked whether he would work in India, Zakaria digressed into the challenges faced by the country. He said: “Every time you think there is a new dispensation that will go on forever, the great thing of a democracy is that it changes… Whether you get one or two reforms right or wrong, whether you get GST right or wrong, a hundred years from now no one is going to remember that stuff in the history books, but they will remember if they preserve or destroy Indian democracy.”
