Delhi gears to join China-Russia club - America sniffs Nato ‘counterweight’ India is preparing to join the influential Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) strategic grouping, currently led by China and Russia, just days ahead of the Prime Minister’s September visit to the US where his bonhomie with Moscow has already triggered unease. The SCO has informed New Delhi that it plans to approve documents making India a full member at a September 11-12 summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, senior officials have told The Telegraph. Iran, Pakistan and Mongolia will join India as new members of the grouping, now made up of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. America views the SCO as a potential post-Cold War counter-balance to Nato, and Beijing and Moscow have accused Washington of trying to split the grouping. Unlike Nato, the SCO has so far not engaged in military action beyond joint exercises. India and the three other nations on the cusp of joining are currently observer states at the SCO, and China had till now been ambivalent about offering full membership to India despite Russian backing for New Delhi. However, keen not to alienate the new Indian Prime Minister, China joined the other members to back the expansion move at a meeting of the grouping’s foreign ministers on July 31. Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj is expected to travel to Dushanbe for the September meeting where India’s membership will likely receive a formal stamp of approval. If the new members’ formal induction is completed at Dushanbe, Modi may travel in December to Astana, Kazakhstan, where the heads of government of all the SCO’s member states will meet, officials said. “China supports the SCO summit in Dushanbe to complete the legal preparation of the expansion of the SCO members, thus to open up new ways to absorb new members,” a senior Chinese diplomat quoted his country’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, as telling the July 31 meeting. India has been keen to join the SCO since it first became an observer in 2005. However, tensions within the grouping’s members on the countries to be allowed entry under any expansion had so far prevented the absorption of any new full member. Over the past two years, as Russia and the US have returned to near-Cold War brinkmanship, both have turned to India as a critical nation whose support could tilt the balance of opinion among the developing countries, which make up most of the world. The stalemate at the SCO — with China cautious about India’s entry, Russia uncertain about Pakistan’s, and all the members concerned about the implications of fully embracing Iran — suited the US well. But global fissures have only deepened over the past two years, frequently placing China, Russia and India together against the US — as in Syria and Ukraine, where New Delhi backed Moscow over Washington. China is also convinced that it has a potential friend in Narendra Modi despite his election speeches critical of Beijing. China had welcomed Modi with open arms three times when he was Gujarat chief minister — at a time Washington treated him as a pariah and refused him a visa. Chinese President Xi Jinping signalled his intent to pull India closer when he indicated to Modi that Beijing was willing to consider expanding the SCO. This was when the two met on the margins of the BRICS summit in Brazil last month. Xi is expected to visit India in September. India’s entry into a strategic grouping that will include three nations that America wants to distance from its allies — Russia, China and Iran — will almost certainly upset fence-sitters in the US establishment, already unsure of the fruits of courting India over the past decade. “New Delhi has given Russia’s aggression in Crimea implicit approval and strongly opposed sanctions on Moscow, calling Moscow’s interests in Crimea legitimate,” Steve Chabot, the Republican chairman of a key foreign affairs panel of the US House of Representatives, told senior members of the Obama administration last month. The administration officials were deposing before the panel ahead of secretary of state John Kerry’s visit to India for the India-US strategic dialogue last week. “Can the US trust India to be a reliable partner on significant geopolitical challenges if, for example, we can’t get India’s support on this growing crisis?” Chabot asked. “And has the Malaysian airliner shoot-down changed India’s attitude at all in this particular area?” Kerry and the US received the answer to where India would stand on sanctions against Russia during the strategic dialogue when Sushma bluntly said that India’s foreign policy was “not flexible”. Kerry accepted that he was disappointed but appeared resigned to India’s decision. “We would obviously welcome India joining in with us with respect to that (the sanctions),” Kerry said. “But it is up to them. It is India’s choice.” Charu Sudan Kasturi The Telegraph India --------------------------------------------------------------- Οι ριζοσπάστες παγκοσμιοποιητές, όπως και οι συντηρητικοί, είναι μυθοπλάστες που χρησιμοποιούν τα σύγχρονα μαζικά μέσα ενημέρωσης και τις επικοινωνίες και τα συνέδρια, για να δημιουργήσουν πολύπλοκες άμυνες γύρω από τις βασικές δομές της πολιτικής και πνευματικής κυριαρχίας... Η ανάγκη για περιφερειακή ενίσχυση είναι αληθινή όχι τόσο για τον κόσμο ως σύνολο αλλά για τα δύο τρίτα του που είναι φτωχά και διαιρεμένα. Το υπόλοιπο ένα τρίτο είναι καλά οργανωμένο και μπορεί οποιαδήποτε στιγμή να κινητοποιηθεί τόσο οικονομικά όσο και πολιτικά παρά τις συγκρούσεις ισχύος και τους ιστορικούς ανταγωνισμούς. Rajni Kothari Ο Kothari γράφει ότι αυτός και οι Ινδοί συνάδελφοι του «αποστρέφονται τα κενά λόγια των ευκατάστατων, οργισμένων ανθρώπων του βόρειου ημισφαιρίου, που μεταβαίνουν από ήπειρο σε ήπειρο σε μια προσπάθεια να μεταμορφώσουν ολόκληρο τον κόσμο - κάτι που αποτελεί την τελευταία παραλλαγή της αίσθησης της ευθύνης των λευκών». Hedley Bull --------------------------------------------------------------- .~`~. III SCO and Mackinder’s prophecy There will be a defining geopolitical event next month when India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia become full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). This will increase the population of SCO members to an estimated 3.05 billion. We should care about this because it is the intention of the SCO to do away with the US dollar for trade settlement. The nations joining in September are currently designated as Observer States and the only one left will be Afghanistan, which will presumably join when it can untie itself from NATO. Dialog Partners, defined as states which share the goals and principals of the SCO and wish to develop mutually beneficial relations, include Belarus Sri Lanka and Turkey. Turkey is of special interest because it has been a long-standing NATO member. It had hoped to join the EU but it became clear that this was never going to happen. Instead under the leadership of Recep Erdoğan Turkey is moving towards the SCO. Erdoğan was re-elected earlier this month by a comfortable majority and it will be interesting to see how quickly Turkeys new alignment evolves. Erdoğan must be aware that Asia is on the up while the EU declines (i - ii - iii - iv), in which case Turkey as a front-line state is better off joining the SCO. The SCOs influence extends beyond its boundaries, with China and Indias diasporas populating much of the rest of south-east Asia. SCO members, particularly China and India, are also the largest consumers of Middle Eastern energy. And because they write the biggest cheques they have primacy over the west, so the swing away from the petro-dollar towards Asia is in the making. China also has sub-Saharan Africa sewn up, securing vital minerals such as copper from Zambia. We must also consider why Russia is aggressively driving the pace of the SCOs development, and its not just to escape the wests economic sanctions as many observers think. Fundamentally the SCO is about resources and the production of goods: Russia controls Asias resources and China turns them into goods. One of the first persons to identify the geopolitical importance of Russias resources was Halford Mackinder in a paper for the Royal Geographical Society in 1904. He later developed it into his Heartland Theory. Mackinder argued that control of the Heartland, which stretched from the Volga to the Yangtze, would control the World-Island, which was his term for Europe, Asia and Africa. Over a century later, Mackinders theory resonates with the SCO. cosmoidioglossia.blogspot.gr/2013/07/ratzel-kjellen-mackinder-haushofer.html The underlying point is that North and South America, Britain, Japan and Australasia in the final analysis are less important than Mackinders World-Island. There was a time when British and then American primacy outweighed its importance, but this is no longer true. If Mackinders theory is right about the overriding importance of undeveloped resources, Russia with the backing of the SCOs members is positioned to become the most powerful nation on earth. The SCO is the greatest challenge yet mounted to American economic power, and Russia and China are clearly determined to ditch the dollar. We dont yet know what will replace it. However, the fact that the Central Bank of Russia and nearly all the other central banks and governments in the SCO have been increasing their gold reserves could be an important clue as to how the representatives of 3 billion Euro-Asians see the future of trans-Asian money. Alasdair Macleod GoldMoney ...despite the differences, the SCO’s importance cannot be understated. The region covers almost 60 percent of the total Eurasian landmass, with over 1.5 billion in population, including some of the world’s leading energy-rich nations. The Diplomat
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 19:05:57 +0000