Universal human rights

Our relationship to many not-so-democratic states in the world is not the best because so many people in our Western countries demand that our politicians press for human rights in those states. The basis for this is the claim that human rights are universal.

Well, there's good reason behind this assertion, but it's worth to be discussed if the current approach is a good one even if they are universally applicable.

Let's recall what human rights are. They are the basics that we used to transform our feudal (aristocrats, clerics, commoners) societies into egalitarian ones. The process of transformation took up to two centuries for the European countries - and the enlightenment was invented there!

Transforming societies is no easy enterprise - it takes a generation at least, sometimes two or more. The old rule set needs to be replaced by new ones, and whenever that happens you have some turmoil and ineffectiveness during the transformation as new rules don't harmonize with persisting old rules.

Asking a country to adopt human rights equals the demand to transform their society, as old society rule sets cannot function anymore with human rights. Think about the prevention of sexually motivated violence, for example. Our approach is to threaten everyone with high jail sentences as we have effective criminal investigation, court and jail systems. This allows us to grant human rights and not to force women to hide their beauty.

Other cultures have a different approach - they weren't able to afford court and police systems like that in the past and knew about the severe social troubles for raped women due to all the other rules in their societies. The answer is simple; women have restricted rights - they need to minimize exposure by not leaving home without male escort and have to hide their beauty. Such a rule set works fine and prevents a lot of sexually motivated violence - without expensive police, court and prison systems. The price is instead freedom, a price much lower than to feed and equip all those policemen, judges and lawyers if you're in a society that has already troubles to sustain itself without many people in these unproductive jobs.

Well, what happens if human rights are pressed into this society? The old rule set doesn't function anymore, but the costs of the more modern rule set cannot be afforded. The state is overburdened - as can be observed in many Third World countries.

We should recognize the challenges that some human rights create and not consider human rights as something free, something that has no disadvantages except probably for those who are already in power. There's a reason why dozens of states world-wide resist our demands for more human rights.

It's a fact that pressing other countries is less in our own national interest than being befriended with them. So we shouldn't press other countries to adopt our values until they're prepared to master the challenge.

To insist that all nations adopt human right immediately is not in our national interest, and often even not so in theirs.


S O

The press as threat

Most nations have their own press disaster, a newspaper or TV channel that doesn't deserve respect for its quality in reporting.
The German example is a newspaper which is sold in - thank god - steeply declining quantities.

This newspaper is owned by a publishing house that's known for its questionable quality output for decades. This specific publishing house has entered the market for postal services, apparently thinking that the logistical experience by newspaper deliveries was enough qualification for the business.
Well, the enterprise for the postal service market does not fare very well. It's known for unacceptably low pay and it's not in a good shape.

So far no threat to our freedom or sovereignty. But we have a discussion in Germany; the labour union of the classic postal service wants our secretary of economy to turn their collective labour agreement into one for the whole market, including said enterprise. That's possible in German law if the agreement already covers more than half of the sector.

Well, this agreement includes a minimum wage that would quickly kill the publishing house-owned enterprise - and here comes the trouble.

Said newspaper launched one of its terrible campaigns - against the minimum wage. The postal service enterprise somehow managed to have its workers protesting against the higher wages - and only one newspaper reported this nonsense.

There's much more about it, but the essence is that a part of our media landscape manipulates public opinion by extremely poor and biased reporting, much more biased than the usual newspaper bias. It has become obvious for everyone that the press is not only strengthening our democracy - it can also be a threat to democracy (and thereby to freedom), exerting unacceptable and unjustified pressure on politicians (many examples) to pursue an agenda.
Elements of the press can be a lobbyist group in themselves.

I see good arguments for strict press regulations that decentralize ownership of newspapers, TV stations and Internet portals. Italy, USA, Australia, Russia and Germany provided enough bad examples in the past 15 years alone.

edit: The campaign was not successful. The underpaid workers of the postal service get their new minimum wage and the publishing house is about to sell the company.


Sven Ortmann

The doctrine of primacy

Just a couple of years ago many people believed that the military primacy of the U.S. would make it possible to defeat most nations of earth at once. Today it's clear that even the occupation of a rather minor country is too much without a conscription.

The assumption of military omnipotence was characteristic for the attitude around 2000. It was certainly true that in some types of terrain the U.S. forces could smash many enemy army divisions. It is also true that personnel exhaustion, supply consumption, terrain restrictions, opposing numbers and clever counters to U.S. strengths impose limits on this ability that were not visible in the short campaigns of the past 30 years.

But who cares if the U.S. is able to smash other armies, probably several at once? Is it really useful? And if it is useful - does it justify the costs? Loss of productivity by manpower demand, fiscal costs, social costs ... the U.S. military is the most expensive force in the world. What does this strength offer as advantage to compensate for this?

The present strength and costs were created by the assumption that these forces need to be able to defeat several mid-sized powers at once. But not only defeat - no, resounding success was expected. It wouldn't have been satisfying to defeat those powers (people usually thought of Iraq and North Korea) - the expected superiority must have been excessive or people wouldn't be satisfied with the preparations.
No weakness that could be abolished with money was acceptable, superiority had to be complete.

The primacy idea and its traps and limits was explored in a very impressive way by Carl Conetta of the PDA (Project on Defense Alternatives). He describes the quest for primacy as a zeitgeist in which the current U.S. politicians and thinkers seem to be stuck.

At any rate, when evaluating primacy, the most important comparison is not between us and other international actors, but between means and ends - that is, between our power and what we propose to do with it. The options range from simple defense and deterrence at one end to schemes of coercive national transformation on the other. If our Iraq experience teaches anything, it is that humility is in order. But this lesson is not likely to register in our policy discourse - not so long as it remains a prisoner to primacy.

Carl Conetta

The rather excessive costs and expectations of the U.S. forces as well as the willingness to use force in the whole NATO never pleased me. The Western world should prepare for the future with more preventive and constructive means.

Sven Ortmann

Warmongers

Invading another country for no good reason is widely recognized as being a bad, bad thing. Those responsible for it are usually considered as really bad persons - just think about what we thought about Saddam Hussein once he had invaded Kuwait.

It's interesting to recall why it's like that. Wars imply waste of resources, death and suffering. It also leads quite often to unfair peace treaties and of course there's general assumption that the aggressor is superior to the victim. Nobody likes to become a victim of a stronger power, so we generally tend to dislike the aggressor for this reason as well.

Many of these war disadvantages also apply to wars that were started with good intentions and it's obvious that also the wars begun by Western powers in the past couple of years caused a lot of death and suffering - and often rather unfortunate and unfair conditions after the hostilities.

It's about time to no longer limit the contempt for warmongers to dictators who want to annex other countries. Our very own warmongers deserve the same treatment. The very minimum is to deny them every influence on our policy, direct and indirect. It's time to counter their warmongering which is usually preceded by scaremongering to scare us into stupid wars.
let's stop them ASAP, their scaremongering only works because there's no decent lobby that counter them.

Scaremongers usually invent a lie and repeat it a couple thousand times till many people believe them without ever having seen an evidence. Some even belief strongly that evidence exist, although there is none. The scaremongering also works because of networking and because of the inclination of mass media corporations to pick up such sensational stories that address very basic instincts like fear.

Once enough people are scared it becomes simple for warmongers to execute the most irrational and stupid policies that let us run into costly nonsense adventures that kill and maim our troops as well as innocent enemy troops and civilians. Wars benefit only some war-related corporation CEOs, employees and shareholders. Wars and stupid interventions/military adventures cost us a huge share of our economic output - resources that we should better use for rational preparations for the future like education, preventive health care, improved relations to other countries, alternative energy and raw material supply and efficiency improvements.

Scaremongers are enemies of democracy and therefore enemies of freedom. They manipulate the people to enable policies which are hurting these people instead of helping them. They are traitors and deserve to be treated as such.

Warmongers are enemies of their people. They deserve the most severe punishments that our civilization is willing to use for the most severe crimes.

Warmongers are worse than serial killers by several orders of magnitude.
You know who's a warmonger in your country. Think about these persons again.

And especially don't be scared by scaremongers about Iran, or even agree to a war of aggression incited by warmongers against Iran. It's their newest pet project.


Sven Ortmann

Societies' ingrained commemoration of war

Different societies have different histories, and different lessons learned from history.
Germany is a very special case of this, as its present state and society were created to prevent a repetition of past mistakes, especially war of aggression and fascism.

Europe has been ravaged by war for millennia, and especially the war-torn countries of continental Europe have learned many lessons about the terrible effects of war.
Germany, for example, has been depopulated by the thirty years war in the 17th century and had its cities destroyed by World War II.
Germany became a major power quite late due to late unification and difficult geo-strategic position in the center of Europe. The following attempts to gain advantages concerning territory and natural resources by war were complete failures and ended as defeats in two devastating world wars. The attempts to gain prosperity by own economic activity before and after the two world wars (1871-1914, 1949-today) were great successes. Germany had learned the lesson that you don't need much territory and you don't need to have rich natural resources to be successful and influential.
High efficiency agriculture can substitute for territory and trading is a much more efficient means to raw material supply security than wars are.

But this seems to be less the case for the late colonial powers UK and France and for those states who never really tried the wrong recipes themselves like Poland, for example.
The USA had only one devastating war at home, and only in a small part of itself. The expenses and losses of the World Wars were either small (World War I) or remembered as heroic history of a "Golden Generation" (World War II).
It has - and this is not easily understandable - a quite aggressive stance to raw material security, using a military power to exert influence and even to wage war for raw materials in the Middle East.

This and the fading memories of the past create a - let's call it "Zeitgeist" in Europe - it misguides people.
The old lessons learned are pushed aside by the promises of smaller military actions than conventional war to give economic advantages, comfort and prestige at low costs.

Well, the costs are not low. Even if you invade a country with less than 100 KIA (killed in action) soldiers, you still end up paying billions of US-$ or € for the adventure.
A comparison of the economic advantages and disadvantages of the U.S. adventures in the Middle East would be devastating.
It would have been cheaper to get away from the oil addiction, probably even without the costs of the extremely expensive Iraq occupation.

Others are much smarter than Europeans and Americans.
The Chinese buy plantations in the Third World to secure their renewable resources supply. They become friends of dictatorships world wide with a strict business-only approach to investments and contracts for mineral an hydrocarbon resources.
The Chinese secure their raw material supply by being smart and applying the lessons learned with European blood instead of alienating resources-rich countries and wasting their own nations' energies and financial power in military expeditions.

Our approach to address our future global needs is wrong.

We should strengthen our relationships with weak nations instead of playing Great Power games and wasting our attention and resources on military adventures.

S O

Tactical visibility

Discussions in the past years on military technology were often about new sensor technologies to find and identify enemies and about new communications technologies to relay this information to someone who can engage the target effectively.

Well, this is an utterly offensive approach that has its merits, but also its limits. The best-case scenarios never worked out in practice - not the least because the enemy adapts, as always.

This fits into the general trend in warfare since the mid-19th century's Minie rifle:
The enemy will likely kill you if he can see you.

Firepower in terms of accuracy, range and also rate of fire has been improved steadily since smooth bore weapons became outdated in the 19th century.
Dispersion and camouflage and since World War 1 (again) armour were successful means to negate much of the enemy's firepower.
The lack of troop numbers would force us to embrace the concept of dispersion in today's conflicts even if there was no the firepower argument, and armour has spread even to personal bullet-resistant armour for non-infantry soldiers.
But dispersion only reduces excessive casualties and has severe drawbacks such like locally reduced capabilities.
Armour has its drawbacks as well, like heavy weight and movement restrictions. Neither tanks nor soldiers can be fully armoured to withstand all typical attacks. Tanks have their weak spots, and body armour protects only the torso (partially) against rifle fire and the head against fragments. Wounds in the extremities reduce the fighting power of the infantry a lot and being hit at an unprotected spot is quite likely.

But let's have a look at the third element - camouflage. Its purpose is to enable troops and equipment to not recognized by the enemy. It's a primarily non-technological means to survive firepower and therefore not in the spotlight, just like dispersion.
The ability to fight without being seen is a distinct strength of indirect fires as indirect fire support troops attempt to stay out of line-of-sight, but also infantry can use the principle to its benefit (and does to some extent).
Not being seen is more than just camouflage. It's about deception, careful movement, manipulation of night sight, obstruction, ability to sense while being unseen - and it's a mindset.
A mindset that tells all infantrymen and even more so scouts that they need to remain unseen as much as possible.
Imagine how this vital mindset is ruined by vehicle patrol, diplomatic, symbolic, construction, checkpoint, garrison and escort duties during counter-insurgency and peace-keeping missions. A generation of NATO soldiers becomes accustomed to the idea that the enemy sees you all the time while they themselves can see but not identify him. This creates a completely different mindset than the one necessary for inter-state wars (those wars which are sometimes really about defending ourselves). The result is an over-emphasis on armour (keyword: MRAP) that leads to excessive costs and logistical problems as well as tactical and movement restrictions.

In a discussion some time ago I was amazed how someone considered supporting fires as the only viable solution to the tactical problem of an infantry or recon squad being pinned down by the fire of a single MG.
This scenario reminded me immediately of a device of World War I, a device that allowed a sniper to aim and shoot with his rifle without exposing himself. Stuff like this has been attempted with modern camera and monitor technology, but in fact it doesn't require much more than a simple mirror and mechanics system. It would enable a squad marksman to shoot effectively while being pinned down. Add some obstruction by smoke and you can defeat a 1,000 US-$ MG without the need to call a 50 million US-$ fighter-bomber or (admittedly much cheaper) tank/artillery/mortar fire for help.

Staying pinned down and wait for superior firepower to arrive is sometimes the best choice when you're fighting low quality enemies like Central Asian irregulars, as it promises a happy ending without casualties. But it's no useful mindset for a large-scale war against medium or high quality enemies (which would outflank you or use indirect fire weapons to counter the cover) and very different ratios between ground troops in combat, available fire support and available bandwidths (resulting in much less available supporting fires).

Well, the tricky thing about being unseen in combat is to see the enemy at the same time. That's tricky because the latter often requires a line of sight. Mirrors and camouflage help to combine these conditions, as do the much more expensive remote sensor and robotics systems.
A real infantry combat revolution comparable to the Minie bullet is about to happen with the wide-spread use of infra-red sights by infantrymen. An extreme infantry fighting power inequality will arise once at least all infantry leaders, scouts, machinegunners and designated marksmen are equipped with such sights. The army which can equip its troops like this can use obstruction by smoke to break the line of sight for the enemy while retaining its own ability to see the enemy as IR sights can see through some smokes.
It's still possible to camouflage against IR observation, but very difficult and sometimes even outright impractical.
This (expensive) technological advance could help us getting back to a "I see you, but you cannot see me" mindset.

It's really necessary to preserve mindsets suitable for large-scale wars, and to restore skills and mindsets lost in the recent needless overseas adventures to stay up to the task of protecting our sovereignty.

Sven Ortmann

War within Europe

The exhausting effect of World War Two and the unifying effect of common enemies turned both Eastern and Western Europe into quite peaceful regions during the Cold War. Europe saw conflicts and even a civil war in this time, but no inter-state war.
People became used to living in peace with each other apparently, as we saw no inter-state wars in former Warsaw Pact or NATO countries since then as well. The Yugoslavian Wars of 1991-1999 were a very unpleasant variation of the norm, as well as tensions between Greece and Turkey.

So what might lead to intra-European wars in the future?

The old idea of conquest don't seem to be as strong as a few generations ago. Most people realize that land mass does not equal wealth or power, even own natural riches are dispensable. Germany, Italy and Japan began to flourish once they gave up expansionism.

Conflicts of religion are hardly imaginable. The Balkans had their semi-religious conflicts in the Yugoslavian War, and the borderline between Christian and Muslim regions is mostly on Europe's edges.
Minority insurgencies based on religion (like German Muslim Turks vs. German state and so on) are quite unlikely as the immigrants dominate no territories and it's excessively difficult to even launch an insurgency if your supporters are a minority everywhere. They cannot claim any territory for the same and historical reasons.

Wars over natural resources are unlikely as well. Europe has much less natural resources than it uses, which makes its own resources an asset of minor importance. Water is only short in South and Southwest Europe and even then it's much simpler to fix the water transport system than to wage war.

Wars over trade opportunities (like control over pipelines or harbours) offer little good reasons for war as well.

War over influence/power. That's the Russia card. A direct confrontation between nuclear powers about something secondary like prestige or influence seems not advisable. It might happen that the West-East conflict causes wars in or between smaller influenced nations in East Europe (Moldavia, possible Ukraine civil war) or Russia's southern periphery (Caucasus), though.
Another possibility is that the Western world divides into two alliances, with some European nations allying with non-European nations (like UK with USA and so on).

Finally there's war over ethnics.
It' likely good thing that Hungary is only a small power as Hungarian enclaves exist in many of its neighbouring countries. The ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia has apparently been thorough and might prevent future wars. Conflicts may arise around the Albanians which live in Kosovo and Macedonia and not only in Albania itself.
One of the safest way to cause a war is to put several nationalities into one state, rule the state with marginal or no democracy and wait till it collapses.
This happened in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Soviet Union, Austria-Hungary and a couple of other states which had well-developed nationalities (instead of just tribes like African mixed states) on their territory.
Can anybody explain to me why so many politicians want to enlarge and empower the European Union while accepting that it offers less democracy (especially ridiculously indirect-indirect-indirect democracy that assures that the voters have no significant power any more)?

The current development of the EU to a state with marginal democracy is laying the foundations for an intra-European war of secession by 2030-2060. The potential of this is in my opinion greater than that of many other imaginable intra-European conflicts.

S O

German overseas military operations - serious?

The German army and navy have significant overseas operations, patrolling in the coastlines of Lebanon and Somalia and peace keepers in Kosovo and Afghanistan, for example. The peacekeeping force in Afghanistan is even in a war-like situation.

It's an open secret that the past German governments have used troops commitments as a means to build up political capital because they want to get a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council.

Untimely withdrawal of forces would cost political capital and this is likely why the politicians keep renewing those missions ... again and again ... for years ... eight years now for KFOR (Kosovo).

The interest in actually solving or defusing the conflicts seems to be rather limited. Diplomatic activity for this seems to be very limited, probably kept secret. Multinational institutions like NATO, EU and U.N. are held responsible for this work.

This is not the only hint that makes some people wonder how serious those commitments really are.
Troops are held away from combat as much as possible. Either geographically (as in Afghanistan) or by the choice of troop types (recon planes, patrol ships, advisers).

Finally, there's something that exposes a peace-like mindset and accordingly the lack of seriousness: Hostages in Afghanistan.
Our media reports captured soldiers of any nationality in Afghanistan as "hostages", not as "prisoners" or "prisoners of war". Well, that's the media.
But our politicians do obviously pay for the freedom of civilian hostages in Afghanistan, thereby encouraging thugs to take more hostages (many nations seem to do that).
This does not fit to any serious commitment of creating a lawful, peaceful Afghanistan.

German rulers sold their troops to England as mercenaries for the American war of independence in the 18th century. Today our politician sell our modern troops for imaginary political capital in their quest for a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council.
Finally, there's also the motivation of our past three secretaries of defense that's called "prestige".

The German top politicians aren't serious about peacekeeping or defusing conflicts - they just want to contribute as much as the German public will tolerate.
 

S O

National security and economy

I have already written about the sustainability of military power a while ago.

The sustainability is a very important criterion for long-term national security planning.
Economic power balances will shift over time, and just like the industrialization in the late 19th century turned Germany into a Great Power and the industrialization in the 1920's and 1930's turned Russia/Soviet Union into a much more potent power than grasped by contemporary analysts in the west.
We'll also see shifts in the next decades. China and India are obviously on the rise (but they'll have at least one economic crisis as well), while Europe and North America are on the decline (not measured in money, but measured in industrial capacity).

We have seen episodes in military history during which economic power in terms of money alone was sufficient for dominant military power. That was mostly related to mercenary armies and all such examples took place before the middle of the 19th century.
Since that time we've seen how the ability to produce the equipment and consumables for warfare in a war economy was the primary variable for military power.

Now look at the situation of our present western economies: We have lots of money and secured raw material supply, but huge chunks of our industrial capacities moved into non-allied countries of the world.

This won't be a problem for national defense affairs as long as we stay out of total wars and limit confrontations to small wars, preferably beating on economically and militarily ridiculously inferior nations like Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia and so on. As long as we do this, we'll only struggle with so-called asymmetric warfare challenges that do not threaten our sovereignty, and barely our interests.
But once we return to what we were best in during the 20th century - conventional warfare among industrialized nations - we'll recognize painfully that we gave away much of our war-relevant economic strength.

This is probably the point at which most readers think about how inferior possible challengers are in training, doctrine, expertise and the like. The present is always deceiving if you try to look 20 or more years ahead.

Think about the proud Royal Navy of August, 1889, showing its powerful fleet in front of Queen Victoria and German Emperor Wilhelm II at Spithead. The German navy was a mere coastal defense organization with marginal cruiser forces at that time, lesser in power than every one of the many RN fleets world-wide.
15 years later a technological revolution (Dreadnought all big gun battleship) - embraced by the Royal Navy as well as by many other navies - made the entire Royal Navy battlefleet (and all others) obsolete.
20 years later the Royal navy struggled in an attempt to keep its superiority over the German navy.
25 years later both navies were in war with each other.
27 year later the RN prevailed during the Battle of Jutland (at greater loss of personnel and material) despite its technological flaws (several secondary explosions in battle cruisers) . It did so because the economic superiority of the Entente alliance had enabled the RN to continue building the newest, most powerful battleships (super dreadnoughts; "R" and "Queen Elizabeth" classes with 15" guns) while the German navy had fewer of these in production, at lesser priority. But there were the submarines, and the RN was almost defeated by this mostly unanticipated factor...

The UK's advantage in that conflict was that it still controlled the maritime access to world raw material markets. NATO countries are in the same lucky position today.

But no one in the UK would have suspected that within less than a generation the proud Royal Navy would be in such a dire situation against a navy that was at that time still a minor force. But the foundations were already laid by 1889, as Germany's economy was growing rapidly (being an industrialization late-comer) especially in the steel industry sector.

By the way - did you also read about armour-quality steel shortages due to the little conflict in Iraq? The few thousand armoured cars needed for that conflict apparently stretched the U.S. armour steel production capacity to its limits.

Don't take it as written in stone that NATO nations will have superior war economies for major wars in the future.

S O

India's cultural power

I have for my pleasure a client of Metacafe, a service comparable to YouTube. The search function on their website is the worst ever and the service has some other drawbacks, but the client downloads videos and other content in the background when my computer runs and some of it is indeed worth a look or just outright funny.
One of the categories that are downloaded is the image category, and there's been a huge trend in the past months at least; Bollywood celebrities.
The Indians (those in South Asia...) have a very different taste concerning women beauty (round face, larger eyes, thicker lips), while their male celebrities remind me a bit of young George Clooney, a bit darkened.
Anyway; having noticed this I looked a bit around in the Internet and real world and it seems as if India's population is becoming more extrovert about its culture.

Cultural power is easily misunderstood or ignored, but cultural influence is in fact a great power.
Let's use Germany as an example. Once the every family had a house or flat for itself again years after 1945, (Western) Germany proceeded to gain some wealth. But it lacked a model to use the wealth and adopted the US American model. Well, not completely, but in large part. The influence was obvious - it's quite impossible to feel more connected or allied to a nation that's very foreign to you than to one that's culturally very close (and not offensive against your nation).

China might expand in terms of industrial production like no other country, but India seems to expand its cultural influence like no other country. China isn't doing any progress in this field because Hong Kong Chinese already seem to have spread most of Chinese culture that's attractive to foreign nations in the past decades.

What might be the result of growing Indian cultural power? It'll certainly progress in economic and military power as well, so there's a potent mixture.

Indians are still present in some African nations (former English colonies), but I'm not aware if they have trader networks there like the Lebanese and Chinese. So it might be that India's influence in Africa won't match the one of China.

It's living in conflict with its Western neighbour Pakistan (which is kind of allied with China anyway) while its Eastern neighbour Myanmar doesn't seem to be very important in the long term. South East Asia otherwise is rather in the Chinese influence zone.

Indian emigrants might influence Australia a lot in the future, but that applies to China as well.

Indian cultural/political/economic ties with Europe and North America might be most interesting. India has a lot of inhabitants that look almost like Caucasians, which might simplify a convergence.
Indian emigrants in the USA, UK and Canada could help to exercise cultural influence.

By the way; the U.S. model of culture has definitely reached its peak long ago - it's not safe to assume that the U.S. American cultural influence in the world will remain as strong as today forever.

Maybe the most relevant consequence of India's rise is that an industry-depleted USA might lose its influence in Europe in the next decades while India and Europe converge? This could be very relevant, as a triple alliance Russia-PR China-India seems not to be feasible due to Indian-Chinese conflicts and rivalry.

India might drift into the "Western" camp and have much closer ties to Europe than we can imagine today.

S O