Western foreign policy increasingly has to take the Asian nations into account. As one astute observer recently put it, "The center of geostrategic gravity has shifted eastwards." So an important question lies before us: Is another Eastern axis power going to emerge on the world scene and dominate all of Asia just as Japan did during the Second World War?
by John Ross Schroeder
China is no longer an isolated power, and India has recently emerged as a world economic force to be reckoned with. Some financial experts believe that China could overtake America economically in another 25 years and India will be number three, just behind the United States .
How will the West react? Noted Financial Times writer Philip Stephens recently gave this assessment: "The questions that will vex Mr. Blair's successors [in Britain] will be about if and how China, India and other rising powers can be peacefully accommodated in a new international order; or whether we will see the return in Asia and elsewhere of the balance of power politics once familiar in Europe" (emphasis added throughout).
Diplomatic relations with these Eastern nations will gradually move from the margins of Western foreign policy to the center. There will be no other viable choice.
Two rising economic giants
Certainly both China and India will be having increasingly greater impact on the global economic order. Consider this important fact that we cannot ignore: In excess of a third of the world's population resides in these two Asian countries. Both are growing at substantially faster rates than any nations in the Western world.
Surprisingly, this growth is not exactly new in nature. According to Martin Sorrell, cochairman of the India Economic Summit, "If we go back to 1825, we would find that India and China represented the same proportion of worldwide GDP that they are forecast to represent in 2025. And this is a 200 year economic cycle that we are seeing" (World Economic Forum).
