Everyone is a revisionist in Asia today

Menon treads a delicate path around Modi’s increasing illiberalism.

But he cautions there will be no “permanent equilibrium” at journey’s end, no single Asian order as the regional balance of power shifts so rapidly.

The upshot is that stability is not acceptable because “everyone is a revisionist today”.

It is there in Trump’s mantra of “making America great again” and Biden’s “build back better” as much as it does for Xi’s ambition for the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and Putin’s revanchism.

Menon agrees when I suggest the striking feature of today’s world is the reappearance of nationalist grievance. I ask him how countries can prepare intelligently for a world in which authoritarian populist leaders in Asia and Europe, and unpredictable or unsteady leaders in the US, hold power.

He says their presence makes the very business of diplomacy – the business of give-and-take, the art of negotiation and compromise – much harder. The only argument that can work, he says, is an appeal to their self-interest: that “power demands a reasonable set of policies”.

And the evidence? “We all survived Trump one”, he notes, because the US system was “designed by people that don’t trust government”. And any government system founded on a respect for diversity “will be better than a centralised, homogenised, bureaucratised one”.

On China, Menon refutes the idea its leaders have run out of ideas to deal with its economic slowdown.

But the question in the Chinese case is ‘whether it has achieved critical mass on its problems ... for even if Chinese leaders manage to deflate the property bubble successfully, the manner of the deflation will lead to other problems.

What do you do about household consumption when most people’s savings are tied up in property? If you deflate value, then you are deflating savings, and 70 per cent of household savings are in there”. This is where the worry is for China is trying to address its internal problems against the backdrop of sluggish growth worldwide.

The “tools you thought you had, might not fit”, Menon says.

All this defines a central theme for Menon, that “politics is now in command of economics”, other exhibits being western sanctions on Russia and American restrictions on chips and semiconductors trade and transfer to China. This means “business must transition from just-in-time to just-in-case as resilience and security enter what used to be a purely business calculus of price and market”.

Given this world caught between orders, how does Menon see Asia’s future? His warnings are ominous.

Asia is “the most heavily militarised and nuclearised part of the world today’, he said in his Owen Harries Lecture. “The kindling for conflict has been collected, and the sparks to light it are available in the disputes and security dilemmas that exist across maritime Asia”, in the East and South China Seas, Taiwan, the India-China border and the Middle East.

With no “working Asian security architecture” in place to manage flare-ups or a war, the situation looks more fragile.

Nuclear weapons ambitions in North Korea and Iran are giving rise to dangerous tendencies, namely that “other countries might believe the propaganda that Russia’s nuclear weapons threats deterred the US and NATO from intervening directly in Ukraine, and others may draw the wrong conclusions about their ambitions to take territory they believe is theirs”.

So far as US/China competition is concerned, Menon worries both sides have “made it an article of faith in each capital that the other is determined to undermine and contain them”. This might now have gone beyond the point of no return, he adds, and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Against this backdrop, Menon dismisses Ukraine as a “local, geopolitical issue, a fight among Europeans for the European order”. Whatever the result, Europe will be “preoccupied with its own order for some time to come”.

Menon treads a delicate path around Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s increasing illiberalism. This will be solved internally, he says, not by western lecturing. In an earlier book, he criticised Modi for prioritising the flaunting of Indian ambition before advancing the welfare of its people.

Menon is not oblivious to the criticisms of India’s stance on Ukraine, but he does emphasise that the primary purpose of Indian foreign policy, even as it drifts further into the American embrace than some thought ever possible, remains dealing with the “poor, hungry and illiterate” of India.