An Interview with Evan Feigenbaum

December 24, 2009

By The Diplomat

We in the United States have a bad habit of thinking about India as a South Asian country rather than an Asian country because we have tended to think of the different parts of Asia as disconnected from each other. Historically and culturally, India has been very well integrated with East Asia. But what has happened is that in the modern era, in part as a result of the colonial legacy, and in part also because of the choices India made, it [became] disconnected from East Asia. So you had for instance the Cold War, which pulled the foreign policies of East Asian countries toward the United States, at a time when India was nonaligned in that picture. So part of what’s happening is that Indian diplomacy, and economic developments between India and East Asia, and especially Southeast Asia, are restoring some of the old political and economic connections that once existed.

But it’s going to be a slow process, partly because India is not integrated into those production chains. I do think it’s a priority for the Indian government, though. And I think a priority for Indian business. So you have, for example, an India-ASEAN free trade agreement, and also an India-South Korea free trade agreement that’s been ratified while the US-Korea free trade agreement is sitting.

I think over time India is going to become more integrated into this region. Part of this is strategic-because countries that are wary of China simply see another big Asian power that, even just in an existential sense, has the ability to contribute to a mutually favourable balance of power in Asia.

There’s an unusual situation now where we see an established power, Japan, with two rising powers, namely China and India. How optimistic are you these three can accommodate each other?

I think part of what’s happening is that you have powers looking for a balance of power regionally at a time when we’re [also] looking for a concert of powers globally. And by that I mean that the major powers, whether it’s China, Japan, India, the United States, Europe or others, are groping for, if not joint then at least complementary, policies on a host of questions at a global level. However at a regional level, Asian countries seem to have much more faith in much more classical conceptions of the balance of power.

But it produces, I think, interesting orientations in countries’ foreign policies. You take something like climate change, where China and India have positions that are closer to one another than either of their positions is to the United States and Japan-but [meanwhile] at a regional level, you clearly have the United States, Japan and India working together on issues and through informal mechanisms that have made China a little bit nervous.

The most interesting issue to me to watch is that, clearly, there’s a mismatch between the global architecture and the realities of capacity: We have a UN Security Council that is in many ways outdated. And the decision in Pittsburgh to supplant the G8 with the G20 reflects a recognition, I think, by the United States and Europe that it’s time to update global institutions to reflect the realities of who has weight in the world. And that means a bigger role for China and India.

But while some countries will win in this process, there’ll also be some that are going to lose, and that will more often than not be Europe. An example of this came when I served in the Bush administration: The International Energy Agency, which allows the major energy consumers to coordinate their [stockpile] policies, doesn’t include China and India. This is ridiculous-what kind of energy agency doesn’t include the two fastest growing energy consumers in the world? So, at the end of the Bush administration, the United States tried to involve China and India to a much greater degree, to update the institution. But [the administration] very quickly ran afoul of a number of, especially small, European countries, who were concerned about what the inclusion of China and India would mean for their weighted voting shares in this institution. So I think one interesting question, as China and India rise to global influence, is what implications this will have for the United States and Europe.