Barnett - ¦"Venture Capitalists Book a Passage to India," by Eric Bellman, Wall Street Journal, 14 October 2004, p. C1.
Mongolia is often historically associated with the Bronze Age, because that's about the last time anybody really engaged in any serious mining there. Now, thanks to ravenous and growing China, mining returns to Mongolia for the first time in centuries. $60b worth of copper and gold prompts China to build a highway and power line to Mongolia, an out of the way Gap-like state of 2.7 million stuck between New Core pillars Russia and China.
Mongolians are wary of having China invest so heavily in their isolated country, because they know full well that such connectivity will change them, but it's also predicted to triple their GDP while triggering a host of foreign direct investment from other sources. So unless being Mongolian requires you to be poor and isolated, Mongolians are set to join the Core progressively over time thanks to China's being sucked into it over the past two decades, thanks to all that FDI, which only flows into relatively secure environments, which Asia definitely is thanks in no small part to our continuous military presence there.
Again, the military-market nexus at work.
Meanwhile, all those NRIs, or Non-Resident Indians who left the motherland to help grow Silicon Valley in the U.S. all those years are now finally beginning to bring that money home in terms of investments. Guess what? That flow of money is self-reinforcing, triggering still more flows. India right now is where China was about 10 years ago—on the cusp of a major, sustained flow of FDI that will transform the place.
Clearest sign of this? The Kevin Bacon of global FDI, Singapore, is redirecting its flows toward India significantly. Temasek, the "well-heeled investment arm of the conservative Singaporean government—has plunged into India." When I say Singapore is the Kevin Bacon of FDI, I mean it is the connector who represents the shortest route between any source of global FDI and any emerging target in the New Core countries of developing Asia.
Is there any surprise that India's military relationship with the United States has improved dramatically alongside these growing investment flows? No. This is a prime example of the four flows balancing each other. Money wants security. Security attracts money. The military-market nexus creates friends that otherwise would not be.
I've been calling for a stronger mil-mil relationship with India for years. I was often told that I was awfully naïve and far too optimistic on the subject—except, of course, when I visited India and Wall Street.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett |
