Ep. 130: Should we expect just a war, or annihilation: “Thucydides Trap” or “The End of Everything”?
The next war may well lead to the end of everything for Indian civilization. It may not be just a war, but obliteration.
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-as-chinese-led-world-order-challenges-american-hegemony-india-should-be-concerned-about-future-13776139.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
We have been hearing about the ‘Thucydides Trap’, a phrase coined by a professor, Graham Allison, attached to Harvard University. Paraphrasing, the idea is that historically speaking, whenever there are two rival powers, and one is rising and the other is plateauing, they will go to war. Or at least they are statistically likely to do so. This should not be amazing, as it stands to reason that the power that's waning doesn't like the idea of its eclipse, and the power that's waxing may be led to believe in its own invincibility as the result of hubris.
Allison presented his research, if I remember right, in 16 case studies ranging way back to the Greek city-states (indeed Thucydides was talking about a rising Athens and a resentful incumbent Sparta). He offers a warning today when the powers in question are the US and China.
At a time when the US-led order appears to be in decline, and China is rampaging, there is an air of inevitability about physical conflict. The US, declining from being the sole hyperpower, has been de-industrialized, and has to depend on the reserve currency status of the dollar to maintain itself at the top of the pyramid. The spectacle of the US taking on debt at some astonishing rate - a trillion dollars every few months - is not edifying.
Nor are the optics of the US taking steps to expropriate Russia's holdings in American debt. This does not engender trust in the US system. Indeed, the Chinese just liquidated $53 billion worth of their holdings in US Treasury securities: although admittedly that's peanuts compared to the trillions they hold, it does send a message, and others are watching, too.
Now there are allegations that Allison is "the Harvard man who became Xi Jin Ping's favorite academic": that he is (unwittingly) serving as an enabler for China's geopolitical ambitions. There’s an interesting precedent: Henry Kissinger was China’s favorite Harvard man in the old days. And we know how that turned out: ping-pong diplomacy, Nixon in China, the de-industrialization of the US, and the delusion and self-gaslighting that a prosperous China would turn out to be just like the US, only Asian.
Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is that it is a pretty good complement to China's 'salami-slicing' tactics of stealth warfare, i.e. doing offensive things that are just under the threshold of actual war. As in the old tale of the frog being boiled, before you know it, they have actually accomplished their strategic objectives.
Indians should be painfully aware of this: Claude Arpi pointed out in The Fate of Tibet: When Big Insects Eat Small Insects that Nehru's government actually supplied rice to China troops building roads that enabled them to subjugate Tibet and go to war with India!
That definition of 'just under the threshold of actual war' keeps getting upped if you can convince the Americans that the Chinese will in fact go to war. That is, no US administration would want to provoke the Chinese (gone are the days of the Gulf of Tonkin incident which the US provoked and used as an excuse to enter the Vietnam War) because it may not be clear who will win. Thus, the guarantee of Chinese bellicosity provided by Allison's thesis means that Americans will keep on allowing more and more Chinese provocations to go unanswered.
Image courtesy Hachette Books Group
Not everybody needs to believe in this course of strategic action. There's a provocative new book by Stanford military historian and scholar of Graeco-Roman times, Victor Davis Hanson, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation, where he asks the question (I paraphrase) whether some wars are for defeating the enemy, and other wars are for wiping out the enemy.
There's a quantum difference. Hanson uses four case studies to illustrate the latter: Macedonia vs. Thebes in ancient Greece (city destroyed), Rome vs. Carthage in Roman times (city destroyed), Turks vs. Greeks in the capture of Constantinople (now Istanbul), and Spaniards vs. Aztecs in the destruction of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City).
Let us note though that in each case, the defeated party is a city-state that had long become accustomed to being impregnable behind its massive defensive walls. Similarly, in each case there was also a young leader whom everybody underestimated, but who turned out to be a ruthless military genius. The argument may not translate exactly to large, continent-sized nations, but it’s worth considering the extrapolation.
In each of these case studies, the defeat resulted in the total eclipse of the vanquished entity, with its civilization eradicated.
I didn't actually read the book, but listened to a fascinating hour-long interview by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where Hanson is a Fellow, and it was a sobering experience.
I don't know much about Greco-Roman times, but apparently there were serious grudges in place, as well as complacency on the part of the loser. It seems Alexander the Macedonian was a master tactician who was underestimated by Thebes, which had a long history of fighting and winning wars with other powers in that general area. So they were sure that things would be the same this time too. Except they were indeed different this time.
Thebes's civilization was violently overthrown, and something was done along the lines of the West Asian idiom: "we will raze your house to the ground, and then sow it with salt so that nothing will ever grow there ever again".
More or less the same story with the Phoenician city of Carthage, the dominant power in the Mediterranean. It was the antithesis to a rising Rome (remember Hannibal crossing the Alps with his war elephants?). But when Rome finally came for Carthage, now just a suburb of Tunis, there was utter defeat and destruction. Enslavement for women and children, massacres for men, total erasure of the city and its culture.
It is not entirely clear why there was such revulsion and animosity in these cases. But in the next two case studies, the answer is clear: it is Abrahamics vs. others. The Turkish conquest of Greek Constantinople, and the Spanish conquest of Aztec Tenochtitlan were both based on the Otherization of non-Abrahamic cultures, and the total contempt thereof.
The point is relevant in today's geopolitics, and especially for India. Hanson focuses on the West, but he could have added several case studies from Asia: for instance, the extinction of Nalanda in 1182 CE by Bakhtiar Khilji, and the total destruction of Vijayanagar by Bahmini Sultans in 1545 CE. Or the complete razing of the Cham capital of Vijaya in 1471 CE by the Dai Viet kingdom.
What does all this mean for white countries, and more interestingly, what does it mean for India?
My conjecture is that China sees its conflict with white countries the way the winning generals did: Alexander, Scipio Aemilianus, Mehmet, Cortes. They despise the ‘enemy’, see the enemy as an affront to their claims of being the Middle Kingdom and thus the center of the Universe, and they have a huge chip in their shoulder about the 'Century of Humiliation' heaped upon them by white people. They are building up their strength, in particular their navy, as the WSJ points out in China’s Sea Power Leaves US Adrift.
But they know they cannot destroy the West comprehensively, and therefore they will arrive at a via media of accommodation. Not so when it comes to India. China intends to be Asia’s (only) hegemon, and India is standing in the way. My conjecture is that this leads to Hanson’s path rather than to Allison’s. My good friend Prof R Vaidyanathan will doubtless disagree, but I don’t see a modus vivendi. India needs to cultivate shatrubodham.
Hanson again: “The gullibility, and indeed ignorance, of contemporary leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness and capability of their enemies are not surprising given unchanging human nature”. George Fernandes is the only Indian leader who bluntly articulated that China is the forever enemy (especially now that the buffer state, Tibet, has been swallowed. Ask the Tibetans and the Uighurs, they can tell you how pleasant imperial Chinese occupation is.)
Just because India has survived for a long time doesn’t mean it always will. There are no messiahs to save India, Indians themselves have to take on the burden of defending it and thinking strategically.
In India's case, successive waves of foreign invaders sought civilizational destruction. That was not true when our ancestors fought each other. When you look at internecine conflicts, every rising power ended up in conflict with the incumbent. Taking South India alone, Pallavas, Chalukyas, Hoysalas, Pandyas, Cholas, Cheras: always fighting over something or the other.
Sometimes over, well, amazingly small things. For instance, the first foray into battle for the great Raja Raja Chola was over, drum roll!... scholarships for students. There was the Kanthalloor Shala university in Thiruvananthapuram (“the Nalanda of the South”), and it was under the control of either the Ay or the Chera kings (I am not quite sure which). The Shala taught all the 64 arts, including military arts, to its limited number of students who were all on scholarship.
In the 980 CE time frame, Raja Raja's father wanted to give a boon to his ally, a ruler in Sri Lanka. The latter asked for scholarships to Kanthalloor Shala for two of his sons. The only problem was that the Shala was owned by a king hostile to the Cholas. A bit of a humiliation for the Chola king. Oh, no problem, he sent his son on a naval expedition to capture (and burn down?) the Shala. But notice that that was the end of it, no destruction of civilization.
Then there is the famous story of the Ganapati of Badami, immortalized in the hymn, "Vatapi Ganapatim Bhaje". The Chalukya king of Badami/Vatapi was defeated in battle, but his tutelary deity, Ganesha, was taken with great honor to the victorious Pallava kingdom and enshrined there in 642 CE. No civilizational destruction there.
Or, in more general terms, among Dharmics in Greater India either.
My belief is that this was the norm of 'righteous warfare' and chivalry in India. Yes, you do go to war (Neelakanta Shastri's trusty A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar is full of wars). But your motives are to cut the other guy down to size, maybe a little loot, rapine and pillage, but not his extinction. In fact, warfare was generally confined to the warrior types, and it didn't really affect the peasantry, who carried on with their usual struggles with the soil and rain and pests and MSP.
But then things changed when Turkics began to invade India. The early explosion of Islam out of Arabia was resisted and repulsed in the Sind by the Hindu Shahi kings, but the defenders were worn down, and eventually Turkics and Uzbeks such as Ghazni, Ghori and later the Gurkaniya Timurids appeared, each of whom, inspired by religious fervor, slaughtered enormous numbers of 'unbelievers', enslaved more, looted all the wealth they could find, and violently suppressed Hindus and Hinduism.
Hanson’s poignant account of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE, which in effect meant the erasure of the Orthodox Greek Byzantine civilization (the eastern branch of the Christian faith) applies to the Turkic invasion of India as well. Imagine, the greatest university in the world: Obliterated. Entire cities: Razed to the ground. Populations: Decimated.
Hindus simply didn't, and even now don’t, comprehend the 'end of everything' catastrophe that they faced. Unlike Hanson who is blunt and realistic, India's allegedly 'eminent historians' such as Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib manufactured a narrative that the objective of the invaders was merely loot. I liked Utpal Kumar’s savage takedown of this model of politics masquerading as history.
Notwithstanding the fact that the sacred duty of exterminating indigenous civilization is written up at great length by the invaders and their historians, who also exult in their successful acts of doing so, the Romila/Ifran version of cooked-up history has became ‘The Truth’ as it were, by repeated assertion (and let’s not forget DD Kosambi's Marxist-class-warfare fantasy).
No, the loot was the icing on the cake, civilizational genocide was the primary goal. Yes, the end of everything. This continued with the European Christian invasion as well, though it is evident that their priorities were the other way: loot first, Christianization second, settlement third, which is what they did in some order wherever they went: e.g. North America, Australia, etc. In India they couldn't quite get the settlement part done mostly thanks to India's diseases that defeated the white man. Plus their empire was beginning to fall apart by then, one bit at a time.
The genocidal intent was there, though. This is declared loudly every few days even now by some Islamist; and we have seen it in action in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh where they are in the process of wiping out Hindus, or have already done so. In the case of the Christians, it is instructive to hear what Victor Davis Hanson has to say about Hernan Cortez and the Aztecs in 1521 CE:
“Although they had become familiar with Aztec civilization over the prior two years, the Spanish almost immediately sought to obliterate its religion, race, and culture. In their view, they had more than enough reasons to destroy the Aztec Empire”.
That’s it: wipe it out, just like that. Hanson offers these reasons why the Spaniards were so vengeful against the Aztecs:
Human sacrifice
Cannibalism
Ritual Sodomy
Religious fervor to convert, especially after the Reconquista
There were similar reasons produced in the case of Hindus and India, too:
Human sacrifice (the breathless propaganda about sati and people throwing themselves/being thrown under the wheels of the chariot of Lord Jagannath of Puri, whence the word juggernaut)
Ok, it’s pretty hard to accuse vegetarians of cannibalism, so not that one
By some oversight, sodomy does not seem to have figured in the discourse
There were plenty of attempts to ‘save’ Hindus by converting them. The goals of the imperial state and the church were in synchrony according to Suhash Chakravartyi’s brilliant The Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions)
They also had a ruthless buccaneer in Robert Clive, just like Cortes.
Cortes took Montezuma’s grandson to Spain; just like the Brits took Ranjit Singh’s son Duleep Singh to Britain and made him a Christian.
The majestic Aztec pyramid in the center of Tenochtitlan was replaced by a huge cathedral. Sound familiar? Anybody heard of the Mylapore Shiva Temple? Or Mathura Krishna Janmasthan? Or the Babri structure? Or the Vel Ilang Kanni Amman temple, now Velankanni church?
And yes, the Christians tried pretty hard to obliterate the Hindu religion, the Indian race, and culture. Remember the many famines, especially the great El Nino famine of the 1880s, as in Mike Davis’ powerful Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the making of the Third World. Perhaps an early attempt at population control, a predecessor to the Coronavirus.
So that brings us back to China and its intentions regarding the ‘West’ and India. I am not optimistic. I read somewhere about a temple in India which has three figures: a Muslim, a white man, and a Chinese depicted as invaders. If the Chinese do figure out a way to conquer India, it will probably be an extinction-level event, a cataclysm.
The Quad is meaningless for India’s strategic interests, which basically means keeping China at bay. Brahma Chellaney, in a withering analysis, asks: Is the Quad becoming a Potemkin grouping? (ouch!). India is on its own, has been, and will continue to be so.
As for white countries, I don’t know. Maybe China will not wipe them out, but figure out some way of making use of them. I suspect it will be neither ‘Thucydides Trap’ nor ‘The End of Everything’. We need a third paradigm: one of servitude disguised as something else. Perhaps the Raghuram Rajan meme of a ‘services economy’: the West may end up being a provider of tourism, entertainment, technology and other services to imperial China. And a wife farm.
2700 words, May 24, 2024