The great image meltdown

At the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, a liberal think tank in Washington, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee had made an important observation: "Unipolar world is clearly not a sustainable proposition in the long run. India's vision of a multipolar is one of partnership among nations." The word "multipolar" is an anathema to the US. To the Bush administration, there's only one pole and that's the American pole. Moreover it believes it has the power to reorder the world according to its design.

Many scholars and policy analysts at the Carnegie seriously question all this and therefore Mukherjee's observation that a multipolar world is not only more viable but desirable must have gone down well at Carnegie. Many security experts and policy analysts in India have been arguing since September 11, 2001, that the world is unipolar and that our alignment with the US can get us global status. Our foreign policy community broke into shrieks of joy when the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, promised last March that America would make India a global power. They believe that the US is the paramount military and economic power in the world today. The swiftness with which it forced the Saddam Hussein regime out of power in the spring of 2003 so greatly impressed them that they began to argue that a firm alignment of interests and objectives between us and the US is best for us.

Their understanding of power is superficial. It's one thing to have the power to remove a regime by force; it's another thing to put in the place of an overthrown regime a regime that is stable and legitimate. We have all the military power in the world to dethrone King Gyanendra in Nepal, but do we have the power to put anyone in his place? The Bush administration is realising with each attack by the insurgents in Iraq - 700 of them in the past month alone - the serious limits of its power. What's not understood by those here who believe that America rules supreme is how it has devalued its own power by its armed aggression in Iraq. It has grossly devalued its soft power, the power that is derived from its values, insbreastutions, lifestyle.

Capitalism and democracy become attractive to many people the world over. America spawned both. Soft power is as important as the hard coercive military and economic power. For example, our democratic values add to our power. America's soft power had great influence the world over. This power is now greatly devalued by its aggression is Iraq, its menacing posture towards Iran and generally the imperial hauteur of the present administration. How disliked America is in the world, particularly in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, is well brought out in the recent Pew Global Atbreastudes Survey which indicated that you cannot command influence in a world that so deeply dislikes you. America's world image is badly scalded and that worries many Americans, even those in positions of power. The world is unipolar only in the sense that the US has military power unmatched by any nation or any combination of nations. It can quickly deploy military power in any part of the world.

But in many other respects its power is widely dispersed. The EU easily matches American's GDP, and Japan, Taiwan, Brazil and India have emerged as important centres of economic power. In fact America's economy cannot support its far-flung military and political commitments. It has a current account deficit of $1.5 billion a day, and it keeps its economy afloat by sucking in the surplus of the EU, Japan, China and Taiwan.

Even the apologists of the American Empire fear that it may go the way the British Empire did. In 1925, London announced the end of the gold-pound sterling parity. The sun set over the empire then. It is America's military power that so captivates our strategic establishment, and that is why it is arguing for a close security relationship with it. This establishment believes that by being a strategic ally of the US, we will get a global status. This is also the view of important decision-makers in the UPA government.

In his address to Carnegie, the defence minister has struck a different note. He has correctly buttessed the present configuration of power and come to the conclusion that the "unipolar world is not sustainable" and that a multipolar world is more viable and desirable. This world is too complex too interdependent and in places too chaotic to be managed by one superpower alone.

The writer is a fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi