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How South Asian States Navigate Rivalries Between the U.S., China, and India

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Hello and welcome to the show. I’m Eric Olander. Today, the fallout from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos is still reverberating.

If you recall, he declared that the old U.S.-led international order is dead and called for middle-power states to work together to form a new coalition.

Not surprisingly, his remarks were not well-received in the United States, but they sparked a lot of conversation in wealthier middle-power countries like:

• Germany
• Australia
• South Korea
• France
• and others.

We’re reading a lot about that right now in international media coverage.

But we haven’t heard much at all about what all this means in smaller, lesser-developed countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The dynamics are very different and oftentimes because they are much more vulnerable due to their size. Oftentimes, it’s poverty or weak governance that are factors that play into all of this.

So we’re going to focus on a fascinating report that came out last October focusing on how small states in South Asia are navigating this new multipolar world that we’re in.

What’s interesting is that the dynamics of what’s happening over here in Asia are very similar in many ways to the challenges that smaller countries and other developing regions are also confronting. There’s an opportunity here to apply learnings from one region to another. But of course, not in all cases, and there are a lot of differences.

The report I mentioned looks beyond just the U.S.-China competition, but also includes India in the mix as well. And that’s something important in certain parts of the world.

I’m thrilled to have two of the lead authors of the report join me today for our discussion.

• Sagar Prasai is an independent advisor for international development agencies and joins us today from Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Mandakini Suri is an independent consultant who spent more than 20 years doing development work for government, NGOs, and think tanks.

Zagar and Mandakini, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

Thank you for having us.

It’s great to have you today, and what a great time to have this. When you wrote the report back in October, you could never have foreseen where we are today.

Before we get started looking into the report, I’d like to get both of your perspectives, both from India and from Nepal, on the Carney speech. Whether you think the message he signaled is as important where you are as it’s being discussed in Europe and parts of industrial Asia.

Sagar, let’s start with you, and then Mandakini, I’d like to get your take on that.

Yeah, so it’s like that moment when somebody suddenly screams from the sides, you know, the emperor has no clothes, right?

And so, in that sense, the existence of the U.S. hegemony was well understood at all levels, at political levels, at sort of in financial domain and otherwise.

And the average Nepali cannot buy or sell anything without first changing their currency into dollars. And so, the presence of the dollar is quite overwhelming everywhere.

But for the immediate stakeholders, which is the foreign policy establishment in Nepal and those who keep track of the issues like these, it was like, well, we all knew. It’s just that there is an open admission.

And in that sense, even in that speech, the precursor was that, well, we all knew, but, you know, at the same time, we never quite mentioned it or openly confronted the U.S. in this fashion.

And so, there was some, let’s just say, a quiet celebration that the truth is out, right, from that angle.

But for countries like Nepal, you know, which is right in the middle of India and China, it’s got only two neighbors, China to the north and India to the south. Both are emerging giants, disproportionately larger than what Nepal is.

And so, therefore, it lived in a different geopolitical setting where the U.S. mattered, of course, because it overwhelmingly matters everywhere, and to a certain extent, particularly as a sort of developing partners, and Europeans also mattered.

But beyond that, Nepal has always a predominant concern about what happens in China and India rather than elsewhere.

Mandakini, the India reaction has been very interesting in part because India has seen this dynamic play out before as well. India, during the Cold War, very skillfully played both sides.

And so, I’m wondering if the reaction in New Delhi was similar to what Zagar was hearing in Nepal.

Well, I think for one thing, I’m not sure that it actually made the frontline news. I think it was buried somewhere in the newspaper. And, of course, I heard about it and was very curious to hear what he had said. And when I heard it back, I was actually a little underwhelmed. Underwhelmed in the sense that what he was saying was not really new.

I think countries, developing countries, middle-income countries, countries which are kind of small island countries, have been talking about the structural inequalities that they have been seeing in these international processes, whether it’s the WTO, the World Trade Organization, or on trade, or financing for decades. And I’ve been calling it out quite vociferously.

And I think India has been one of those countries, South Africa, Brazil. You know, the Prime Minister of Barbados, if nobody heard, is absolutely fabulous. I mean, I think she calls out…

Hypocrisy, she calls out quite a bit. She calls out the hypocrisy.

I think what was interesting was the fact that, as Sagar said, for the first time, you had a Western democratic leader actually calling it out and saying that,

“Oh, you know, the post-World War institutional structures, this rules-based international order that has been shoved down the throats of many countries is unfair in many ways.”

And that larger, more powerful, more financially powerful countries for years have been pursuing their own foreign policy or diplomatic economic imperatives with a lot of impunity. And it’s been the kind of hush-hush secret that everybody has kind of gone along with.

So I think it was a bit of… Yeah, I think that the reaction, I think, just not only from India, but many countries in the global South was,

• “Well, yeah, we told you so.”
• “You just weren’t paying attention until it’s come to bite you and affect you, our country.”

So I think, for example, just to give an example, with the rise of China, as Sagar mentioned, the concerns about China’s expanding footprint across the world has been…

It was such big news for the last decade. It led to the Indo-Pacific becoming a new geographic construct. The Quad alignment between India, USA, Japan, and Australia came as a result of that. All a bit focused around very much controlling China’s strategic rise. And in fact, even Canada came up with an Indo-Pacific strategy for China. And now you have Mark Carney saying, okay, you know, we’re willing to talk to China.

So, I think India very much on…

It took over to your point around the Cold War, which is, you know, when you had the US-Russia, the tensions rising, particularly of the last couple of years. Trump wanted India to stop buying Russian oil. He still wants us to stop buying Russian oil. And I think India has been more muted about it now. But the foreign policy position was like,

“Look, we’re going to exercise our strategic autonomy and buy oil from where we can, because we’ve got, you know, our economy needs to grow.”

And India has actually done a lot to respond to Trump’s demands as well. But yet now we have some of the highest tariffs being imposed of all the countries in South Asia. So I think calling out that kind of double standard is something that countries have experienced for a long time. But now that it’s coming to bite the West, I think there is more open acknowledgement target.

Yeah. And he even acknowledged that they knew that this was a flawed system, but went along with it.

Just very quickly before we get on, I mean, you were being very polite that it was saying it’s from a wealthy or G7 country. Is the fact that this is coming from a white man different?

Yes. Because we don’t, I mean, the whiteness matters here.

Oh, it does. I was trying, I was wondering, should I say it or not? But yeah, it does matter.

No, no, no. Let’s kind of be, take, you know, be as direct as you can.

I mean, 100% it matters. I think, you know, the fact that a white person who is, you know, the leader of a G7 country saying,

“Oh, you know, it’s unfair and it’s unfair to Canadian people.”

You’re like, well, what about the millions of people south of the equator who have been saying it’s been unfair for generations?

So I think there is definitely a factor. And I suspect it would not have made such mainstream headline news had it not been a white leader who had said it, a white male leader. I mean, if Modi said it or if Modi or she said it, people would have been like, yeah. And they have. Modi, she, the prime minister, Barbados, the BRICS countries, all of them.

If you Google it, ChatGPT, you will find statements from them going back decades, which would have said something to the effect that the existing world order is not fair.

You know, there’s a similar phenomenon going on in the United States where white people are shocked, shocked that the police are abusive and that even video recordings of police brutality… Against white protesters in places like Minneapolis and killings now of white people and brown and black people, many have been saying this for decades, for centuries actually, that the police have been impartial. So again, this is a reckoning happening both inside and outside the U.S.

As much as I’d like to continue that line of our conversation, I want to get back to the report that you guys worked on last year. Now, it focused on three countries in particular: Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. You also had some insights included in it from Bhutan and Maldives as well.

Sagar, let’s talk a little bit about the understanding that a lot of countries have where we hear the top line, which is they don’t want to take sides between the various powers. And as you pointed out, in Nepal, we cannot make this only about the U.S. and China. Obviously, India plays a very important role.

You also wrote in the report that they don’t follow the textbook strategies for hedging because there’s the impact of domestic politics, there’s regime survival, all sorts of other factors. Let’s start at the high level about how these three countries in particular are managing these rivalries and what we should take away from it.

What we are essentially bringing out in that paper is that, look, countries are—it’s difficult to say countries are rational actors because countries are only as rational as their ruling establishments are rational, right? And it’s like what you see in the U.S. right now.

Like you can’t call the U.S. behaving rationally or irrationally. It’s more like Trump and his coterie behaving rationally and irrationally. So that happens in smaller states too.

You’ve got the ruling elites who have a particular interest. They would want to extend the legitimacy to rule as much as possible. And in that process, if China is a resource, if China’s influence is useful, then they would be more than happy to take it.

You see this in countries like Maldives, where Maldives has periodically, election after election, either become very close to India or very close to China. Other states have sort of, in some ways, tried to balance it.

But what we are arguing is this balancing act is really, really difficult because it’s never—the foreign policy positions are never derived from a broad, national, consensus-based interest determination.

These things happen at the will of the ruling elites, and it can go in any direction. That makes it all the more risky.

Mandakini, Sagar gave us a really nice kind of setup for this. One of the things that we’ve seen is that in Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bangladesh, and certainly Nepal, there’s been this flirtation with the major powers in the region to varying levels of success.

But again, talk to us about this question of the interests that Sagar brought up. Sometimes the ruling elites’ interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the population or the foreign policy. And as such, they don’t necessarily behave rationally.

So if we want to look at how these countries are managing these rivalries, give us a little bit of your insights of what you found on the research.

Well, I think it’s useful to think of it in sort of like an analogy, right?

• Geographically, South Asia is one geographic unit, but the Himalayas is a natural boundary, and of course, you have the oceans.
• Historically, there have been very civilizational legacies – the Ashokas, through history, the Mughals, et cetera, and then the British who kind of knit it into one administrative unit.
• But that administrative unit fractured during partition, and you had the creation of these different nation states.

I think we often forget how strongly that legacy of partition—both in terms of the division of land, people, and resources—has truly affected the way in which states in the region actually see each other and are able to engage with one another.

So it’s kind of like when you divide land amongst your, if you were to divide land amongst, you know, your five brothers of five men and women. And it’s been fundamentally unequal in some instances. Some geography was traded, some people got left to Bahrain on one side.

Those wounds, I don’t think, have ever really knitted.

So India has, and the region has a baggage which it carries, which I think very often plays very emotionally into foreign policy decision-making.

And very often, by the political parties in different countries, in particular moments of either political upheaval or economic hardship, it plays into decisions that they might take with respect to:

- Choosing a particular infrastructure project from India versus China
- Taking a particular line of credit or a particular loan

So what I’m trying to say is that engagement with India always comes with a certain degree of historical baggage, one of which also is this idea of it being a regional hegemon and behaving like a big brother. It’s something that India has been accused of for decades, and I think justifiably so.

But at the same time, it’s kind of like that big brother who you hate, but you love to hate. And we all know we love to hate him. But in a time of crisis, you know that big brother is the one that’s going to come.

So in the instance that during the COVID pandemic, when the whole world locked down, it was India that actually manufactured vaccines and was the first to provide them to a lot of countries in its neighborhood. But to be fair, until India shut down its own vaccine manufacturing, the rest of Asia could not get drugs from India. So there are limits to that. And that exposes the risks, though.

So we in Vietnam were counting on India to provide vaccines to us. Now, the West hoarded all the vaccines for themselves. But when India made a decision in its own interest, at the expense of everybody else, it exposed the asymmetries in these relationships.

Can you speak a little bit to the imbalances that exist in these great power rivalries?

When you’re sitting in Nepal and you’re relying on India, you’re up to the whims of what happens in New Delhi, and that’s it. Like the vaccine during COVID. I mean, I think it’s not just the vaccines, right?

• Sagar will speak about the 2015 blockade of the border between India and Nepal, which had serious implications on Nepal’s economy and fuel access.
• Then it’s actually very often, like I said, India’s high-handedness in moments of crisis for other countries very often has also pushed them to seek alternative options as they should.

And I think would be a rational policy choice for any government in that moment to diversify options.

But I think what the paper is also showing is that those decisions sometimes are genuinely reflective of what the country needs at that point of moment. Sometimes it’s to do with just servicing the interests of the ruling political elite, for example, right?

So that hedging sometimes works and sometimes it doesn’t. That balancing works sometimes, but it doesn’t.

The lesson I think for countries like India is that, you know, also the geography and South Asia has changed in the sense that, very often you’re looking at a population of 2 billion people. The median age in India is 20, not India, in the region is 27. That means that’s a young, very young population, all of whom are looking for jobs, all of whom have social media, and they’re seeing a lifestyle which they all aspire to.

So there’s a lot of pressure on local governments, on countries in the region to provide for their young voting elites and middle class a lifestyle that they aspire to. And the question is:

• Where is that going to come from?
• Where will the jobs come from?
• Where will the market come from?
• Where will the goods be sold?

And India, unfortunately, has done a terrible job of opening up its markets to its neighbors. And so they will look for markets elsewhere. They will look to send their labor elsewhere because India, I mean, the region is famously called one of the least integrated regions in the world, right?

• Trade is very hard.
• Transit is really hard.
• Making a phone call is very hard.
• Getting visas is really hard.

So unlike ASEAN, which is quite a well, you know, really well-functioning, to some extent, regional unit and political bloc, mobility is really hard in South Asia. You know, people can’t even visit relatives across the border.

And what you’re saying, I think, will resonate with a lot of people in Africa where mobility is also an issue and also a very young population that is looking to upgrade their lifestyles and certainly against what they see in TikTok, but also just in absolute terms as well.

Sagar, this question of the great powers, the U.S., China, and India, and how they’re being perceived. When we were in Indonesia a couple of weeks ago, we met with some senior stakeholders and they explained the relationship that they have with China as one where Indonesians don’t look at China as an ally or a threat, but an opportunity. And what they said was,

“This is basically a conditional relationship. The moment it ceases to be an opportunity, they will look somewhere else for opportunities.”

How do you think the smaller powers in South Asia, especially in places like Nepal, look at the major powers, all three of the major powers, in that same way as Indonesia? Or do they see it differently?

It is more or less the same as Indonesia. China is an emergent actor here. And then it comes with all these goodies. It’s an opportunity, right? But what the Chinese trajectory is of a kind that will probably not stop being an opportunity for some time to come, right? And that’s largely because how well it has established itself in the technology front, right? Like you, in the whole world as some anticipation that AI, for instance, would be part of their economic engine or a sort of a new window for innovation in all economies.

But look at how AI is developing, right? If in the entire world, there is this particular space in the US, in Silicon Valley, where seven companies have invested more than a trillion dollars in that technology. And for that technology to become ever affordable or for any other country to sort of think of coming up with their own AI ecosystems is completely impossible from cost-wise, talent-wise, and so on and so forth.

So while there is almost a preoccupation among the seven giants as to who beats who, China is quietly putting ecosystems, the entire AI ecosystems, that’s the hardware and the model and, you know, lock, stock, and barrel ready to be sold at much lower prices to any buyer in the global south, right?

So that’s what they did with the cell phone industry. That’s what they’ve done with the EV. So if you just look at these two products with which we already have prior experience, which is EV and cell phones, now think about if at a much lower cost, companies, governments, militaries across the world can buy Chinese-produced almost break the seal, open the package and start running kind of AI modules, right?

• At absolutely low cost.
• At low power and low cost.

So there are opportunities like that, right? And even in terms of financing, right? So it’s easy to say we can live without the U.S. But the reality is, U.S.’s current annual budget is 1.5 times larger than the Indian economy, right? So you can’t escape the influence that comes from that kind of money, right?

From that angle, and then for most South Asian countries, India’s market is as in, why is the EU in India today? And Canada as well was there as well. Canada as well. So they’re in India. And that fact is not unnoticed by India’s neighbors. Like, what about us, the little guys here, right?

So from all of those considerations, I don’t think China is, at least not foreseeably, going to weaken in terms of what goodies it has to offer. And from that angle, the balancing, edging, sort of thinking about what lies ahead in future will continue to make geopolitical calculations difficult.

Mandakini, the points that Sagar raised on AI and the goodies relate to oftentimes infrastructure. And infrastructure becomes a very important part of the dynamics of great power management in these parts of the world.

The U.S. has sought to become a bigger player with its various initiatives that it’s brought out over the years with the DFC and others to counter the Belt and Road. India is a big infrastructure builder in the small states that you guys covered in your report. And of course, China with its Belt and Road initiative, particularly in places like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Talk to us about the importance of infrastructure as a vector of the great power competition in this part of the world.

I think infrastructure is a really big one. And of course, India cannot hope to compete with China in terms of the scale and the number of projects with the BRI, the Belt and Road Initiative. Of course, India is very concerned about things like CPEC, you know, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, because that has a certain, you know, and the border roads construction happening around India’s northwest and western eastern frontier.

But I think when it comes to the small states that we looked at, obviously, whether if you’re a small island state like the Maldives, which is basically a bunch of island atolls, which are very inaccessible, I mean, inaccessible either by flight or by boat, right? So, infrastructure for them is a real need.

And I think it’s interesting to see how the Maldives has been very effective in kind of extracting infrastructure contracts or getting infrastructure investment from both China and India, and also by successive governments.

So a few years ago, the government of, I think it was Mohamed Yameen, had investment that he brought in from China. And then subsequently, the following prime minister brought in, president brought in investment from India.

So I think also you have this flip-flop very often between competing opposition political parties where, you know, one is openly pro-China, while they’re in government, they’ll bring in Chinese investment, that the person in opposition will be like,

“No, no, China out, India in.” And when they come into power, they bring India in.

And of course, a recent president of the Maldives came into power on a very anti-Indian stance. He wanted India’s defense support to the Maldives. We had some troops stationed there for them to leave. He came into power, the troops left, and then the following year, he came to India seeking investment.

So also a lot of these decisions are politically expedient and demonstrate certain optics to your domestic constituency, which is also important. So verity is very important to small states. The optics of being seen as being neutral, non-aligned, not pro-one party or one power or the other is actually strategically very important to them.

So I think to the point around infrastructure, I just want to make one point, which is, I think it goes without saying that, if you go to Sri Lanka, for example, China has built the most amazing fall-in highways.

• The feedback from the ground is China comes in with its own engineers, its own equipment, but they deliver the goods in record time very efficiently.
• And it’s built to last, whereas sometimes India’s own track record of delivering these large infrastructure projects is not as good on the ground because of bureaucratic inefficiencies or maybe some issues in terms of contracting, etc.

So I think India needs to do better if it hopes to compete with China. But it is in many ways it can’t because of the scale, the sheer proficiency with which China has been building roads and infrastructure around the world. Africa is a good example: I had a friend who was posted in Sierra Leone, six-lane highway in like a couple of months. It’s very impressive.

I’d like to close our discussion looking forward a little bit. You wrote this report back in October of last year. And again, the world has changed dramatically since October. We see a breakdown of the international system and also of the institutions themselves. The United States has all but quit the United Nations. The United Nations is doing significant layoffs now of its staff.

What does it mean for these kinds of countries when the institutions and the systems that have been in place for 70, 80 years are not there anymore? It’s obviously a risk, but is it also an opportunity?

So for the small states, it’s a risk. It’s a risk because the number one issue comes from the fact that small states as such couldn’t or never did have much of a voice in actually making these rules in the rules-based order. But anything that promises to treat everybody equally is always good when you are a geopolitically weak actor.

And so there is a natural leaning towards a rules-based system in small states. And that being shaken is a serious problem. Because now the middle powers jostle. In the sense that when the Canadian prime minister spoke about it, it sounded good. But then there is internal competition between the middle powers.

• In the 1990s, both China and India were considered middle powers.
• China is in a different place today. That’s a different story.
• The India-China competition was felt by these smaller states, even them.
• And now you have Europe coming in and so on and so forth.

So there’ll be a lot of jostling. And then the smaller states have a more heightened risk of being squished in one direction or the other.

The third thing about the upheavals that we’ve seen is this whole jeopardy on development financing stream. America withdrew lock, stock, and barrel. Europe, because of its own war in the backyard and failing economies and now that it has an issue with tariffs with the U.S., its biggest trading partner, the European outlook economically isn’t good.

So whatever they were able to do through EU or at a bilateral level, particularly U.K., Germany, France—France in Africa, others elsewhere—that development financing stream is also in some ways being compromised. And then now the latest news is Japan is being shaky. Japanese bonds being as cheap as they were, borrowing from Japan was a great advantage for very many developing countries in Asia where Japan has some degree of focus:

- India has borrowed heavily.
- Sri Lanka has borrowed heavily.
- Nepal has borrowed heavily.
- Bangladesh has borrowed heavily.

That’s because the interest rates were so low. Now the Japanese interest rates are growing very rapidly high.

Because of all of these changes, it’s like just because the dominoes started falling from the U.S., it has sort of taken the whole world in a sweep. And so all of those development prospects, financing and so on and so forth has become a problem for smaller states. Mandakini, what do you think?

I think it’s, you know, it’s sort of like you may, we all may have known that the rules of the game were not fair, but at least we knew what the rules were. I think now when you’ve thrown the rules out of the window, it is a situation of, it’s an unknown situation of just not knowing what will happen, what you’re going to wake up to and read in the papers tomorrow, right?

I mean, for a large country like India, yes, certainly it’s a concern. You never know whether the tariffs will go up or down tomorrow, what Trump will tweet about overnight.

And I think for small states, the existential anxiety will probably be even more. And I think one underestimates the power of a single vote in the UN, right? So even a small island state, like a small like Nauru or Kiribati or one small little island in the Caribbean, that vote really mattered in the UN.

So if the devaluation of that UN vote, I think is significant. Equally, the fact that, you know, the UN has been passing all these resolutions on whether it’s Ukraine or on Gaza, and none of them have been backed. You know, if a country like Ukraine or, you know, a large political, a big political conflict like Gaza, no one is going to come, essentially, the message is:

“No one is coming to our rescue,” right? And no one is listening.

And I think that’s very disconcerting.

I think in terms of an opportunity, you know, with this whole Don Roe or Monroe doctrine of America wanting to kind of withdraw and create its own sphere of influence in the West, that means it’s going to create a vacuum, right? Now, who is going to fill that vacuum?

• Russia
• China
• India, to some extent

It’s a player, but not in the same way. It doesn’t have that kind of military capability. But I would suspect that there’s a lot of head scratching and thinking going on in countries in South Asia, whether they are small or big about, you know:

• Who are our friends and who are our allies?
• What kind of new alignments do we need to be thinking about?

I think we’ll see the rise of more minilaterals or trilaterals, you know, triumph groups of two or three countries trying to come together. But as Sagar said, you know, economics matters, and they will be looking at how do they shore up their economy so that you don’t see the kind of domestic political upheaval you’ve seen in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, right?

So it’s going to be a very tough balancing act and also maintaining your own strategic integrity as a country, you know?

Yeah. And we also didn’t touch on it, but there’s going to be bottom-up pressure as well from Gen Z where if a cigar, I mean, we can talk about that at some other future time, but, you know, Nepal was ground zero for one of the most violent uprisings of Gen Z that expressed their frustration.

So these governments are going to be facing:

• Top-down pressure from the major powers
• Bottom-up pressure from their own huge population of young people who want a better life.

And we saw these same pressures in Nairobi and in Jakarta and in other parts of the world as well.

Absolutely fascinating to start thinking about this because we’re in a whole new world now. And it is, as you pointed out, maybe this is something that, you know, many of these countries expected because they’ve seen the hypocrisies for so long, but actually talking about them now is so important given that it’s being discussed in Berlin and London and Brussels and Washington, but it’s not necessarily being discussed as much elsewhere.

So we’re happy that you both were able to join us.

Mandakini Suri and Sagar Prasai are both independent development consultants who’ve been in this business for a very, very long time. They did some fascinating research on how small powers in South Asia are dealing with this new world that we’re in.

Now, again, they wrote it last year. The new world is even more new this year. And so we’re happy that you were able to join us.

Thank you both for taking your time today to share some of your insights. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.
Thank you, Eric.
Thanks, Eric.

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