By Oliver Stuenkel
In Samudra Manthan, C. Raja Mohan predicts that Sino-Indo rivalry will extend to the maritime domain. That’s questionable.
C. Raja Mohan, Samudra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012).
The bilateral relationship between India and China remains a fringe topic among academics of international relations around the world. And yet, Sino-Indian ties will shape the 21st century like few others over the coming decades. In fact, the triangular relationship between the United States, China and India, soon to be the three largest economies in the world, will be as important as U.S.-Soviet ties during the Cold War. Increased tension and the prospect of conflict between New Delhi and Beijing could seriously affect the global economy – strong cooperation between the two, on the other hand, could pose a real challenge to U.S. global supremacy.
In this context, Raja Mohan’s Samudra Mathan is a welcome contribution. Mohan, one of India’s leading foreign policy analysts and one of the few scholars based in the Global South with a global reach, contends that the growth of India’s and China’s naval capabilities will expand the security dilemma between the two countries. It will no longer be limited to the lands of inner Asia, but will now extend to the waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The author thus agrees with Robert Kaplan, who argued in a recent book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, that the Indian Ocean will turn into the new center of power in global politics, and the stage for the “new Great Game” where global power dynamics will be revealed.
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