By Devendra Gautam
Is the period of Long Peace, marked by the absence of major wars between great powers since the end of World War II (1945), nearing its end, under the cumulative strain of regional wars and renewed great-power rivalry?
What’s on the horizon? Cold peace or hot wars?
What do the latest developments in Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine indicate? What do hurried preparations for India-China trade and movement of two peoples through the Lipulek Pass, which Nepal has been claiming to be part of her territory that extends from Kalapani to Limpiadhura citing the Treaty of Sugauli (1816) and other official documents like land tax payment receipts, indicate?
All this, despite the recognition of a border dispute in the area and commitments from New Delhi to settle all border disputes with Nepal through diplomacy. What do the developments indicate? Another long, cold and protracted era of the Great Himalayan Game?
By treating Lipulek as a bilateral trade point, our two neighbours are doing more than using a convenient mountain pass for trade and pilgrimage — they are operationally slicing off the actual northwest trijunction at Limpiadhura.
But then what do you make of some sealed lips of Nepal that never get tired of pledging to resolve such issues, outstanding or otherwise, through diplomacy? Have they bothered to make Nepal’s displeasures known to her neighbours? Have they dared seek clarifications from the parties concerned?
Welcome ye all to the march of our two neighbourhood giants towards a great Asian Century amid our mantra-like recital of principles and policies advocating the inviolability of national sovereignties and security of our giant neighbours.
All this is in keeping with the grand principles of good neighbourliness, of Panchasheel and the United Nations Charter, right?
Let’s move beyond our troubled borders even as the skies over Chhangru roar, amid a deafening silence at the corridors of power in a burnt-down Singhadurbar and the Bhadrakali Palace. Move we should, with an unshakable faith in the trademark Nepali valour, in the spirit of Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous 1962 remark: Hamare fauj bahadurike sath pichhe hat rahe hai!
According to several Nepali historical accounts, the Limpiadhura region is where the brave soldiers of Nehru sought refuge after their defeat in the 1962 war with China, only to bolster their presence in the vital vantage point overlooking Tibet in subsequent years, despite requests from Nepal to vacate her territory. Per these accounts, all other 18 Indo-Tibetan border police posts established along Nepal’s northern region were sent home in 1969.
Looking into 3,400-years-long recorded history, what factors/developments are giving rise to yet another crisis in a world where humans across generations have spent a large chunk of their lives fighting or fleeing to save their lives along with that of their near and dear ones?
What factors helped maintain the Long Peace? Nuclear deterrence, economic interdependence through trade, the spread of democracy, the United Nations’ role, increased human rights/education, stable borders and shifting cultural norms that value life, bipolarity and capitalist peace.
Let’s define some of the key factors whose meanings are less obvious.
Nuclear deterrence: The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs defines it as a principle in international relations where the retaliatory potential and destructive force of nuclear weapons prevents nations from launching a nuclear attack.
But is nuclear deterrence sufficient, effective, just or ethical? Humanity would do well to start pondering over this question, most preferably in the land of the Buddha and numerous other sages, with the end objective of denuclearisation.
Bipolarity: It is the global system with two nuclear-powered superpowers at the helm, like the United States and the then USSR during the Cold War (1945-89). While the US led the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the USSR led the Warsaw Pact, presiding over a tenuous global peace. With the disintegration of the USSR on December 26, 1991, the division of the world into two rival blocs ended, making way for a unipolar world the expansion of NATO into Russia’s neighbourhood with the inclusion of reunified Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia from 1990 till 2020, stalling the plan to bring Ukraine onboard and giving a clear enough indication of the limits of unipolarity. ###
Capitalist peace: This concept holds that free markets, trade and economic interdependence nurture peace between countries by increasing the costs of war, promoting mutual interests and incentivising cooperation over conflict, making capitalist countries less likely to fight each other. Key mechanisms for capitalist peace are the high opportunity cost of disrupting mutually profitable trade, trust built through contractual relations and reduced incentives for conquest when wealth comes from innovation and exchange, and not through the capture of territories.
Capitalist peace continues to hold between our giant neighbours while we keep footing a disproportionate bill, while dreaming of benefiting from their prosperity, conveniently forgetting that it is easier said than done.
Amid the rise of our giant neighbours along with Russia both militarily and economically and the start of what appears to be a slow decline of the United States as the sole superpower, Thucydides, considered the father of the school of political realism, seems increasingly relevant, even in this day and age.
Some wonks are already drawing parallels between today’s Strait of Hormuz crisis and the Suez Crisis of 1956, seeing echoes of the strategic overstretch that signalled Britain’s decline as the world’s pre-eminent power.
Granted that the US possesses the world’s largest military budget, unmatched alliance networks, reserve currency status and technological leadership in several sectors, but all empires preceding her were considered collapse-proof, weren’t they?
Indeed, the Thucydides’ Trap refers to the structural stress that arises when a rising power threatens to displace the established power, heightening the risk of major conflict.
How will a fragile and strategically-located country, which almost collapsed within 48 hours of a youths-led protest just about a year ago, be able to defend herself and protect her core interests as powers worth their names fight viciously for dominance in her neighbourhood and beyond? How will Nepal survive when the two neighbours start undermining her sovereign space for their mutual benefit as if the immediate neighbour’s highhandedness along the border and beyond were not enough?
Since the entry of the Brits into this subcontinent in the 19th century, we have been paying a mounting bill of shifting geopolitics and geostrategy through dismemberment and shrinking of the national sovereign space at an alarming rate.
But what’s been happening in Nepal is not an isolated case. Given such a scenario, will weak and famished cats of the Global South be able to survive by standing together against their far mightier species on the prowl in the region and beyond even as the peacemaker cat continues to mew, once in a while, from the banks of the Hudson, barely audibly?
Will the rise of the two giants and their march towards a great future force smaller countries like Nepal to seek an external security guarantor? Or will the Lipulek adventure end up becoming the Younghusband mission 2.0?
As lay individuals like this scribbler continue to wrack their brains over questions like these, the leaders of what we consider to be our political parties, government ministers, experts, bureaucrats and exceptionally competent generals of Bhadrakali, who know geopolitics like the back of their hands as their gems of wisdom available for free in YouTube and other forums suggest, should come together and devise a national strategy for survival by keeping the powers that matter at arm’s length while taking them into confidence.
A tough task? Indeed.
After all, statecraft is the art—and science—of the impossible. What say you, wonks?
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