What is Grand Strategy?

Story by  ATV | Posted by  Aasha Khosa • 2 Years ago
Russian troops in Afghanistan
Russian troops in Afghanistan

 

 Deepak Vohra

I am fed to the gills with comments from armchair critics, of “India does not have a grand strategy!”

When I ask them what “grand strategy” means, they are unable to give a coherent response….

Grand strategy is the optimal use of a country’s military, diplomatic, economic, and soft power over a long period to achieve its objectives, foremost among which is international respect and acceptance, if not leadership.

Its constituent elements are flexible and combine and recombine in different formulations as the situation demands.

In the 1960s, I heard a lot of nonsense about Pakistan’s brilliant “strategy” in South Asia. What use was it if it led to Pakistan’s breakup?

The Pakistani “grand strategy” reemerged in the 1980s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, when it willingly became an American catspaw, unquestioningly doing its bidding.

Since the emergence of the Pakistani Taliban in 2002 (after Islamabad abjectly switched sides rather than risk being bombed into the stone age), Pakistan entered into several peace deals with them. But the Pakistani Taliban, like the Irish draugr, now wants its creator’s blood since there isn’t too much Russian blood around.

Pakistan’s newest “grand strategy”, according to that pucca English acolyte who masquerades as its Foreign Minister, is to change its old “grand strategy”!

Did not the former USSR have a fantastic “grand strategy” for world domination? Please read the admiration in the 1950s-1980s for the Soviet experiment.

What happened in 1991? The USSR broke up without so much as a by your leave.

The US had a “grand strategy” to rollback communism and save the world. It did not quite work out that way. Remember Vietnam? 

When the USSR walked into the Afghanistan “bear trap” in 1979, for whatever reasons, the American leadership (as National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it crudely) decided to sow shit in its backyard, and encouraged an Islamic fightback – as part of a “grand strategy.”

He knew it was an unwinnable war that would deplete the resources, morale and will of the invaders, as Vietnam had done to the Americans, and as Afghanistan had done to the British in the 19th century, and India to Alexander, the so-called “great” warrior, 2,300 years earlier.

“I wanted to hurt them,” said mujahideen-lover Charlie Wilson, the Texan Congressman with a reported fondness for women, whisky and maybe the occasional recreational drug, “I wanted them to count body bags going back to Moscow.”

The Mujahedeen were trained and given increasingly sophisticated weapons (including the man-carried surface to air Stinger missiles, used in 1999 to shoot down an Indian fighter in Kargil) so that instead of merely harassing the enemy, they could defeat the Soviets militarily. 

The US believed that the Mujahideen tap could be turned off at will, as they would be so grateful to America for helping get rid of the hated “Roosi.”

America forgot the Felix Schwarzenberg principle. When asked in the mid-19th century if Austria would be grateful for Russian help in thrashing the rebellious Magyars, the Austrian Prime Minister promised that Austria would astonish the world with its ingratitude.

Ten years after the bear collapsed, came 9/11. What happened to the loyalty of the Afghan “freedom fighters?” Suddenly, they were transformed into terrorists!

Had America’s “grand strategy” backfired?

An unrepentant Brzezinski asked cynically years later, “Which was more important for world history – the Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Union?”

When the twin towers collapsed in 2001, the global outpouring of sympathy for America was genuine. That day, we were all Americans, because America offers the freedom of choice and the choice of freedom.

Following its WW 2 devastation, Japan’s “grand strategy” for revival was based on a systematic program of subsidized investment in strategic industries - steel, machinery, electronics, chemicals, autos, shipbuilding, and aircraft that were dumped in western markets.

Japan resisted the efforts of the United States to get it to open its market more to foreign goods. 

Anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1980s was visible when US Congressmen smashed Japanese electronics items on the steps of the Capitol, and the Senate voted 92–0 to condemn “unfair” Japanese trade practices. 

The1985 Plaza Accord overvalued the Yen, and made Japanese exports expensive, leading to the Japanese asset price bubble of the late 1980s, which still impacts Japan.

What happened to its “grand strategy”?

Chinese Whispers was once a party game. A message would be relayed in hushed tones through a long line of people and emerge at the other end amusingly garbled, demonstrating how facts tend to get twisted over time and distance.

China’s “grand strategy” is to lead the world, but leadership has to be accepted by those being led.

In the 1950s-1970s, when the Cold War was raging, China earned tremendous goodwill by supporting “third world” liberation movements in Africa and Latin America.

When Communist China replaced Taiwan in the United Nations in the 1970s, few objected.

As China’s economic power grew it relied increasingly on chequebook diplomacy, and opened a series of Confucius Institutes to bolster its soft power.

It needed western technology and money, so the “foreign devil” became the “foreign friend” but now that he has been milked, he is back to being the devil.

For thirty years, it conned western liberal democracies into fondly believing that engagement with the West would moderate China’s behaviour and make it more peaceful.

American companies salivated over the huge profits from China.

China played along, filching and reverse engineering western technology, infiltrating its research institutes, and loudly proclaiming China’s “peaceful rise.”

Slowly, instead of becoming the marketplace of the world, it became the factory of the world.

By the middle of the last decade, it felt strong enough to bare its fangs and tell the West to f… off, and began flexing its military muscle in the Himalayas and the South China Sea. The “peaceful rise” mantra was abandoned.

A startled world sat up. 

Barack Obama who grandly proclaimed the US-China “defining partnership” of the 21st Century was shaken when in 2015 the Chinese military boasted that its power equaled the US, military, so he reminded the world that the USA was the most powerful nation on earth.

China continues its belligerence, attempting to intimidate its adversaries by its sheer size. Most recently, Malaysia has protested that Chinese warplanes overflew its airspace. 

China shrugged

Has the Chinese Grand Strategy succeeded? 

Tibet, Tiananmen, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong did not win China too many friends, but it was confident that the issues (remembered sporadically) would fade away.

In a slap to China’s “grand strategy”, all these issues have resurfaced.

Angry at China’s challenge to the established world order, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue established in 2007 (after the very successful rescue efforts of the Indian, American, Japanese and Australian navies during 2004 tsunami), was resuscitated in 2017 with a strong security element at its core.

A stunned China dismissed the idea as a nonstarter that would soon dissipate like foam on the sea.

It did not.

Aware that it could not match the Quad’s maritime fire power, China tried to open a new front in the Himalayas against India. It got a broken nose.

India hit back by banning several Chinese apps and prohibiting Chinese companies from participating in India’s 5G rollout.

The Quad became even stronger and global anger at China coalesced into opposition.

Victims of China’s Bilk and Rob Initiative (BRI) began to see that it was actually a loan for the land scam.

Many cancelled or renegotiated their projects, some refused to pay back the loans.

China is hoist with its own petard.

Is this “grand strategy”? To lose friends and well-wishers at the fastest rate in human history, faster than you can say “Jack Robinson”?

China has severe internal problems, and China’s leaders spent most of their time worrying about how to cope with them.

By 2020 China felt that its internal challenges (corruption, poverty, wealth and income inequality, an ageing population, a weak social safety net, and environmental degradation) would not go away soon, so it was time to divert attention, force its people on to another Long March of sacrifice, and assert its “manifest destiny” externally.

The authoritarian colossus unleashed its deadly bioweapon, the Wuhan Virus.

The word floundered. China sat back and relished the discomfiture, promising to rehabilitate a world that it had itself devastated!

India helped the world, and its reputation soared. China attacked in Galwan, to pull down India as it had done in 1962 when India’s global stature was high.

China’s nose and prestige were both badly dented.

Its sorry diplomats, so-called wolf-warriors, have come down to gutter level abuse and threats, competing with each other to be more obnoxious, shattering China’s reputation as a great civilization.

When Australia demanded an independent international investigation into the origin of the virus, China called it the white trash of Asia and chewing gum stuck to China’s boot.

As the global demand for China to come clean grows, with strong evidence that the virus was a US-backed military experiment in the Wuhan Institute of Virology gone horribly wrong, we may expect more lies and denials. 

China’s “grand strategy” for a world with Chinese characteristics has unravelled, its image is at its lowest point.

Furious over the pandemic, Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and European Union sanctioned Chinese officials over human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

In response, a senior Chinese diplomat shamelessly tweeted about the Canadian Prime Minister: “Boy, your greatest achievement is to have ruined the friendly relations between China and Canada, and have turned Canada into a running dog of the US.” 

In any other country, such derogatory language by one of its diplomats would have earned the fellow a reprimand and recall. In that haven of free speech, China, it earned him a promotion.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese number two in Islamabad launched a broadside, highlighting racial segregation in the USA.

“You are a racist disgrace. And shockingly ignorant too”, hit back a former US National Security Advisor and demanded that the terrible chap be sent back home. Guess what? He became the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

China is convinced that the US is an existential threat to its ambition to become a great global power, and is moving from “declining” to “decline faster” with “the wheel of history” turning faster toward American collapse.

This belief has become an immutable premise in China’s “grand strategy” toward the United States, a cardinal sin in “strategy” that demands flexibility and adaptability.

Like a belligerent drunk, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman tweets conspiracy theories about the foreign origin of the virus; spreads wild rumours and threatens to severely punish any nation that boycotts the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

From 2020, Virus Pong’s rabid nationalism (a knee-jerk reaction that lacks the calculated manoeuvres of careful strategy) has become the leitmotif of Chinese conduct.

China has poisoned itself with its own rhetoric. Dispassionate assessment has been supplanted by pique.

In 2020, it expelled foreign journalists and then banned the BBC.

In April 2021, Brussels sanctioned Chinese officials for repressing Uighurs in Xinjiang, but instead of a muted response, Beijing imposed countersanctions, jeopardizing its prized investment treaty with the EU.

So, what is Virus Pong’s revised “grand strategy” to survive the growing international opprobrium?

In June 2021, he urges Chinese officials to create a “trustworthy, lovable and respectable” image for China!

Born a Buddhist, did he suddenly remember Gautama’s observation that three things cannot be long hidden – the sun, the moon, and the truth?   

Wolf warriors, please go back to your lairs, your aggression has backfired.

Xi’s present “grand strategy” is the new five-year plan to reorient China’s economy inward, going it alone, relying on China’s enormous domestic market, reversing its dependence on an “unstable and uncertain world” and achieving technological self-sufficiency, since it cannot filch foreign hi-tech for ever.

India has challenged China, not through venom or chest-thumping, but quietly and most effectively.

If that is not a “grand strategy”, then what is?

(Deepak Vohra is a senior diplomat, special Advisor to Prime Minister on Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau and Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil)