Need to have an alliance of democracies to fight China

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s call for an “alliance of democracies” to counter China is important on many counts, the most important being the superpower’s keenness to partner with democracies, India in particular. It is time New Delhi seized the opportunity and adopted a proactive attitude towards the idea.

About half a century ago, former US president Richard Nixon flew to China and met Mao Zedong. This was realpolitik, ends-justify-means politics—championed by Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger. The US wanted to neutralize China in its (the US’) confrontation with the erstwhile Soviet Union during the cold war. And China wanted to be rehabilitated into the comity of nations. It got more than that; it even became a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council with veto power, much to the chagrin of the world.

It is good that decades later those who matter in Washington are realizing the folly of having helped China grow into a monster, a mature fascist state that torments its minorities, supports rogue nations like Pakistan, proliferates nuclear and missile technologies, breaks every international rule, and spreads diseases like Covid-19. It is not just Pompeo who is critical of China. US Defence Secretary Mark Esper, Attorney General Bill Barr, and FBI director Christopher Wray have also slammed Beijing over a number of issues in recent weeks.

Speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, on Thursday, Pompeo said, “The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.” Significantly, the invited audience included exiled Chinese dissidents. “The old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done,” he said. “We must not continue it. We must not return to it.”

The US Secretary of State believes that the need of the hour is “a new grouping of like-minded nations—a new alliance of democracies.” An alliance or coalition of democracies is an idea whose time has come.

For the multilateral institutions like those of the United Nations have been taken over by China, as evident from the complicity of the World Health Organization in the spread of the coronavirus. It is a well-known fact that WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is a lackey of China’s. The fact that he still holds that office—and continues to lecture us how to shield ourselves from the virus he helped China spread—is a scandal enough.

He should never have become the WHO chief, given his disastrous record as a minister in his country, Ethiopia; but he did become because of Beijing’s support. He should never have been allowed to continue in his job after it became crystal clear that he played an instrumental role in selling China’s version on the coronavirus to other nations; but he was allowed to, again because of Beijing’s support.

This has happened because most multilateral institutions, as also other international opinion making bodies, are dominated by Left-liberals who are more interested in flaying Israel, America, India, and other democracies for imaginary sins (mistreatment of Palestinians, racism, caste, <em>et al</em>) than taking on China and other dictatorships for the real crimes they commit.

You know what? As Ateet Sharma wrote on this website (<a href="https://indianarrative.com/world/as-weird-as-it-gets-china-picking-un-human-rights-investigators-7239.html">https://indianarrative.com/world/as-weird-as-it-gets-china-picking-un-human-rights-investigators-7239.html</a>), “Quietly and shrewdly, China has climbed to the top of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) panel; it is now calling the shots, including picking the world body’s human rights investigators.”

He further wrote that China “continues to influence the selection of UN human rights mandate-holders known as special procedures who investigate, monitor, and publicly report on either specific country situations, or on thematic issues in all parts of the world, such as freedom of speech and religion.”

It is like putting a school under the charge of a bunch of pedophiles.

This must stop. The UN, which has been corrupted beyond redemption, should be done away with; it should be replaced with another body—a coalition of democracies.

India and other democracies should join hands to form an alliance or coalition so that the world’s biggest and most dangerous state, China, could be tackled effectively. The sooner the alliance comes into being, the better..