Cold War 2.0 Illusion Versus Reality

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PROF MADHAV DAS NALAPAT was appointed India's first professor of geopolitics and the UNESCO peace chair by Manipal University in 1999-positions he still holds. He is an executive committee member of the Editors Guild of India, a member of the Indian School of Social and Economic Sciences and an associate member of the National Institute of Advanced Studies and the United Services Institution. Having previously edited Mathrubhumi and the Times of India, Prof. Nalapat currently works as the editorial director of ITV Media Network. He writes extensively in national and international publications and has authored nine books.

Prof. Nalapat has lectured in India, the US, the UK, Austria, China, Taiwan and other countries, and has originated several concepts, including that of the constrainment of China, Asian NATO, the idea of Southern Asia rather than only South Asia as India's hinterland and the concept of the proxy nuclear state.

Cold War 1.0 was fought principally between the US and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Soon after the collapse of the latter, Cold War 2.0 began. Just as with the earlier Cold War, this is also a battle of systems on an existential trajectory. This time around, the principal protagonists are the US and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Those who deny the reality of the new Cold War believe that Cold War 1.0 has reappeared, this time with the Russian Federation replacing the Soviet Union as the opponent. Such a view ignores the changes to the global order caused by the increasingly visible efforts of the PRC to replace the US as the prime mover influencing the trajectory of the twenty-first century.

Rather than a rear-view mirror perspective on the current geopolitics, what is needed is a forward-looking view of the overall relationship between not just the four Great Powers (China, the US, Russia and India) but also key players such as the European Union. From the 1980s. China has harnessed geopolitical currents to rise from a poverty-stricken behemoth to a superpower. India's inability or unwillingness to adopt the same practical approach has thus far constrained its rise.

The book details the cross-currents of Great Power dynamics in the twenty-first century, and why it is important for a future-focused rather than a past-obsessed approach towards each other by the two biggest democracies on the planet-India and the US. Each needs to reinforce the other to jointly overcome the multidimensional challenge posed by the Communist Party of China to the global future. Just as in the case of Cold War 1.0, the democracies need to prevail in Cold War 2.0 as well.

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Shivshankar Menon

As we enter the new and dangerous decade of the twenties, it is natural that we, in India, are faced with a series of challenges to our understanding of the international situation and to the methods that we use to arrive at that understanding. In this book, Professor Madhav Nalapat has given us an Indian view of one of the central features of our times, major power rivalry. Particularly that between China and the US, concentrating on how it affects India.

Among the central issues that he addresses are the nature of the international system, the central role of major power rivalry in the international system today, and whether the US and China are engaged in a Cold War 2.0. This work approaches these fundamental questions from a realist perspective, in terms of international relations (IR) theory, and argues that the US-China Cold War 2.0 is a defining feature of our time. Professor Nalapat examines the policies of China, the US, Russia, Japan, India and the European Union (EU) in considerable detail, and then considers the interplay between the powers and the various factors that he identifies as critical to their geopolitical policies. While alternative answers to the questions he poses are possible and have been expressed in India, the pressure of events, particularly Chinese behaviour on the India-China border since spring 2021, has led to many of Professor Nalapat's views rapidly becoming the mainstream of broad segments of Indian opinion.