By Monish Tourangbam and Indrani Talukdar
As leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gather for their annual summit in the Hague, Netherlands, the volatile war in West Asia, the Russia-Ukraine war and the American call for NATO partners to increase defence spending loom large.
Earlier at the G7 summit in Canada, U.S. President Donald J. Trump standing along with his G7 counterparts in Canada, told the press that the West and more particularly his predecessor Barack Obama and former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were not wise in pushing Russia out of G8, and making it the G7. He has largely blamed his western counterparts for making strategic mistakes that allowed the Russia-Ukraine war to break out, something that he believes would have never happened if he was the 46th president and not Joe Biden.
In fact, the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, many analysts contend, has led to some sort of geopolitical recession—a marked decline in trust, cooperation, and consensus in the international system. Additionally, structural tensions are inherent in U.S. threat perceptions of an assertive China showing both the intention and the ability to reshape the international system in its favour.
While Trump’s defence team prods countries to choose “whose side they are on”, its commerce team is burning midnight oil to strike a trade bargain with Beijing. On the other hand, Trump’s time in the White House, in his first and second term, has always introduced a faint ray of détente between Washington and Moscow that seems less ideologically rigid, unlike the one seen during the Biden presidency. However, much depends on what happens on the battlefield, beyond Trump’ own desire of becoming a peacemaker.
Moreover, Trump’s reciprocal tariff salvos on European allies and prodding to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members to increase their defence spending and pick up slack in regional security has grown into loud murmurs of major European powers seeking more autonomy in their engagement with the world. In his recent speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also prodded Indo-Pacific allies and partners to share more burden in “re-establishing deterrence” against China’s coercive activities.
However, allies and partners contributing more and increasing their defence spending, also come with their own quest for autonomy in foreign and national security decision-making. The recently concluded 46th Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) also emitted signals of autonomy or rather what they often refer to as “bamboo diplomacy” of hedging their bets and balancing in the growing U.S.-China competition in the region. Most of America’s allies and strategic partners in the transpacific and transatlantic theatres are also joined at the hip with the Chinese economy, giving them more reason to de-risk their ties from both the United States and China.
Among other things, the heart of the upheaval in the European security architecture is the divergent perspectives between Russia and the western allies is the issue of NATO’s expansion, if seen from Moscow but NATO’s enlargement if seen from Brussels and Washington. While the probable case of Ukraine’s NATO membership might be a matter of principle and institutional provision of open membership, it is geopolitical logic from the point of view of Moscow. Threat perceptions emerging from divergent perspectives of history and geography complicated any easy resolution of the long-drawn conflict. Foregoing more distant history, contemporary dynamics of U.S. role in post-Cold War Europe, witnessed for instance, in the use of NATO auspices to intervene in the Kosovo, and the colour revolutions have changed the politico-security landscape of Eastern Europe, and in turn, the fragile churning in U.S.-Russia dynamics in the midst of a NATO outliving its counterpart Warsaw pact that died with the end of the Cold War.
The case of U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry, on the other hand, is broader in its geographical scope, more comprehensive in the range of domains they compete in and at the same time has a complex history of amity and enmity behind it. At present, China’s rise as an economic power from the heyday of globalisation in the post-Cold War period to becoming the only real competitor to America’s economic dominance and its growing military modernization cutting across several domains and including new age technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing presents the most preeminent challenge to U.S. primacy in the international system.
Despite many differences, there is a bipartisan consensus within the United States that views China as the rising peer challenge or a “pacing challenge” as it is currently called. However, a few decades ago, in the mid-Cold War era, the U.S. found it geopolitically prudent to leverage the Soviet-China split to forge a U.S.-China strategic rapprochement to counter the Soviet Union. A few decades earlier than this when the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong won the Chinese civil war and established the People’s Republic of China, Washington did not recognise it and chose to rather acknowledge the Republic of China (Taiwan).
Today, the security of Taiwan is the critical threshold for the battle of deterrence between the U.S. and China in the Indo-Pacific. While Washington warns any invasion of Taiwan with dire consequences, Beijing retorts back, warning the U.S. not to play with fire. As geopolitics pushes countries to answer: whose side are you on, more and more countries seem to be taking the opposite road towards autonomy.
While India and the U.S. seem to be on a convergent strategic path vis-à-vis the threats from China in the Indo-Pacific region, Delhi has found it tougher to balance its interest between Washington and Moscow, a dilemma made more intense with the Russia-Ukraine war. On the other hand, India needs to make sure that the anti-U.S. strategic alliance between Russia and China does not turn anti-India, in the midst of growing strategic partnership between India and the U.S. But as geopolitical schisms grow wider impacting regional force postures, defence spending, use of dual use technologies and the highly disrupted global supply chains, is autonomy the answer to navigating the protection and promotion of national interests or will countries eventually encounter the limits of balancing and rather bandwagon?
At a time when it had become second nature for countries to pronounce the advent of a multipolar world order, multilateralism has become weaker, exposing the ramifications of unilateral tendencies and a great power competition minus strategic guardrails. Will this further expose the limits of autonomy as a foreign policy strategy or will it usher in a new era of multi-alignments to navigate an uncertain world order? Well, to repeat a cliché: Only time will tell.
Dr. Monish Tourangbam is a Senior Research Consultant at the Chintan Research Foundation (CRF), New Delhi.
Dr. Indrani Talukdar is a Fellow at the Chintan Research Foundation, New Delhi.
(The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights).