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With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza stretching its military resources thin, a direct confrontation with China is the last thing the US needs. But America’s refusal to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism, not least in the South China Sea, may well make a clash more likely – and more destructive.
HANOI – For over a decade now, China has been working stealthily to alter the territorial and maritime status quo in the Indo-Pacific – an effort that has increasingly stoked tensions with regional neighbors like Australia, India, Japan, Taiwan, and several Southeast Asian countries, as well as the United States. And with US attention and resources focused on conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, China has lately become even more aggressive in its expansionism. Chinese regional hegemony is closer than ever.
Almost daily, China finds a new way to bully Taiwan, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly pledged to “reunify” with the mainland (though that objective has no basis in international law or history). As China takes steps like encroaching on Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island with warships, it raises the risk of a war that would transform global geopolitics.
There are war clouds also gathering over the Himalayas, where a military standoff triggered by China’s repeated furtive encroachments on India’s borderlands has dragged on for nearly four years. And in the East China Sea, China’s intrusions into the territorial waters and airspace of the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China claims as its own, are fueling Japan’s drive toward rearmament.
But the biggest risks of escalation may well lie in the South China Sea, where China’s aggressive efforts to entrench its dominance have regularly led to dangerous near-confrontations, including with US warships and aircraft. For years, China has been working relentlessly to cement its dominance over the South China Sea and exploit that region’s vast resources and strategic position as a critical corridor through which one-third of global shipping passes.
To this end, China has constructed artificial islands atop remote reefs and atolls and transformed them into forward military bases. Though these activities constitute a blatant violation of international law, including a 2016 ruling by an arbitral tribunal at The Hague that invalidated Chinese claims in the South China Sea, there has been little pushback from three successive US administrations. As a result, China has managed to expand its maritime borders unilaterally without firing a single shot.
Now, China’s navy and air force routinely patrol its neighbors’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and its coast guard – the world’s largest and most militarized – has conducted “intrusive patrols” of others’ offshore oil and gas fields. Chinese coast-guard vessels, including megaships, wantonly employ “non-lethal” weapons like high-pressure water cannons and long-range acoustic devices.
Moreover, China has been sending its navy and coast guard to shadow, hound, and harass vessels belonging to the US, as well as to smaller neighbors, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, with territorial claims in the area. Even fishing boats have been targeted and destroyed. With Chinese ships now being deliberately designed for “ramming” and “shouldering” other vessels, it seems clear that China will become more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims – and the associated fishing and energy-exploration rights – in the South China Sea.
China’s militarization of the South China Sea poses the greatest threat to the Philippines and Vietnam. But whereas Vietnam pursues an independent foreign policy, which its prime minister calls a historical imperative, the Philippines is a longstanding US ally, with a mutual defense treaty in place since 1951.
And yet, when it comes to China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, the US has largely left the Philippines to fend for itself. In 2012, when China occupied the Scarborough Shoal, a traditional Philippine fishing ground located within the country’s EEZ, US President Barack Obama’s administration stayed silent. Since then, China has steadily eroded the Philippines’ control of other areas within its EEZ, but the US has offered its ally little beyond statements of support.
This is unlikely to change any time soon. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza stretching American military resources thin, a direct confrontation with China is the last thing the US needs. But refusing to stand up to China may well make a clash more likely – and more destructive.
Already, the US has allowed China to gain such a strong footing in the South China Sea that restoring the status quo of just a decade ago would be all but impossible without a full-scale war. And, as the recent increase in provocations in the South China Sea indicate, Xi is bolder than ever, despite the rising risk of escalation, accidental or otherwise. In the meantime, America’s failure to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism is undermining its own security and trade interests.
US President Joe Bideninsists that the US wants “competition with China, not conflict.” But China wants strategic dominance – beginning with the South China Sea – and it is willing to risk conflict to get it. The South China Sea has become a test of American resolve, which Xi is expecting Biden to fail. The world, especially the countries on the front lines of Chinese expansionism, can only hope that Xi is wrong, and that the US finds ways to rein in China without armed conflict.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
The military standoff along the long Himalayan frontier between China and India may not be grabbing international headlines these days given the open warfare raging elsewhere in the world, but the threat of the confrontation returning to armed conflict cannot be discounted.
Last week, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar called the Chinese border situation “very tense and dangerous.” Both sides have been significantly ramping up deployments of troops and weapons, girding for the possibility of war.
Soon to enter its fifth year, the current standoff was triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments into India’s northernmost territory of Ladakh in April 2020, just before thawing ice would normally reopen Himalayan access routes after the brutal winter.
Ahead of this year’s spring thaw and possible new Chinese provocations, India moved an additional 10,000 troops to the frontier. “The possibility that we may face a similar situation that we faced in 2020 is keeping us active all the time,” Indian Defense Secretary Giridhar Aramane said last month.
China has also been expanding its troop presence and frenetically building warfare-related infrastructure along the inhospitable frontier. This has includedboring tunnels and shafts in mountainsides to set up command positions, reinforced troop shelters and weapons-storage facilities.
In addition, it has planted settlers in new militarized border villages that are becoming the equivalent of the artificial islands it created in the South China Sea to serve as forward military bases.
About 100,000 troops remain locked in a faceoff along the border’s westernmost Ladakh sector. Another key sector is the vulnerable area where the borders of Tibet, Bhutan and India’s Sikkim state meet, a 22-kilometer-wide corridor known as “the chicken neck” due to the crooked way it connects India’s northeast to the country’s heartland.
There are also troop faceoffs in the eastern Himalayas along Tibet’s long border with India’s Arunachal Pradesh state. This has long been a heavily militarized area, largely because China claims the Indian state is part of Tibet, although the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, says this has no historical basis.
Talks to de-escalate tensions along the frontier have made little progress. In January, Indian Army chief Gen. Manoj Pande said the standoff would continue until China rolled back from its Ladakh encroachments, calling restoration of the previous frontier line “our first aim to achieve.”
Despite taking some flak at home for losing border areas to Chinese encroachment, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to seek a negotiated end to the crisis.
While his government has banned numerous Chinese apps, blocked investments by certain Chinese companies and launched enforcement actions against others over alleged tax and foreign exchange violations, it has not imposed broad sanctions against its northern neighbor.
Consequently, despite the border confrontation, China’s annual trade surplus with India has continued to rise; it is now larger than India’s annual defense spending.
Modi discussed the crisis in brief with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of multilateral summits in November 2022 and August 2023. Jaishankar reiterated earlier this month that New Delhi remains “committed to finding a fair, reasonable” agreement.
Now Xi is faced with the challenge of resolving the Himalayan military crisis without losing face.
For four years, tens of thousands of Chinese troops have remained deployed in extremely harsh conditions along the Himalayan frontier. If Xi somehow came to an agreement with Modi about undoing China’s territorial encroachments, he would face questions about why he embarked on the aggression in the first place.
The longer the standoff persists, though, the greater the risk that Beijing turns India into an enduring enemy, a development that would weigh down China’s global and regional ambitions.
Xi has already been confronted by his failure to anticipate India’s robust military and strategic response, with the standoff driving New Delhi closer to Washington. It also set in motion a major military buildup and modernization drive, as illustrated by a flight test last week to demonstrate that India now can put multiple independently targetable nuclear warheads on a single intercontinental ballistic missile.
Since the standoff began, India has tested several other leading-edge missile systems, including a hypersonic cruise missile, a hybrid missile-torpedo for use against submarines and aircraft carriers, an anti-radiation missile for destroying radar-equipped air defense systems and a new generation, intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads.
India has also been importing major weapon systems from the U.S. as well as France and other sources. In November, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told his U.S. counterpart that their two governments are “in agreement on strategic issues, including countering China’s aggression.” India’s growing alignment with the U.S. undoubtedly worries Xi.
Without the elements of stealth, deception and surprise that characterized China’s 2020 encroachments, the People’s Liberation Army would be hard put to get the better of India’s armed forces in a Himalayan war. While the PLA relies heavily on conscripts, India has an all-volunteer force that is considered the world’s most experienced in mountain warfare.
As two of the world’s most ancient civilizations, China and India need to find ways to peacefully coexist as neighbors and to cooperate on shared objectives. But it is far from certain that reconciliation between the two most populous nations will be possible while Xi and the Chinese Communist Party remain in power.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
When Beijing says “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China” and calls this “an indisputable legal and historical fact,” it promotes a claim that has absolutely no basis in international law or history.
But by aggressively stating that claim time and again over the years, it has made many in the world believe that fiction, especially when the dominant Western media outlets are reluctant to challenge the Chinese narrative.
Indeed, some international publications now use the phrase “reunify” without quotation marks while referring to Beijing’s Taiwan goal.
The truth is that Taiwan, for most of its history, had no relationship with China and has remained fully outside Chinese control for the last 129 years since 1895 when, following defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, China’s Manchu-run Qing government signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ceded Taiwan to Japan.
In international law, a territorial claim must be based on lasting and peaceful exercise of sovereignty over the entire territory concerned.
But Taiwan has never been an integral part of China in history. And the only outside power that secured control over all of Taiwan was Japan.
While Taiwan remained under Japanese colonial rule until 1945, Japan officially renounced its sovereignty over it only in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, but without the transferee being identified.
The communist-led People’s Republic of China, having exercised no territorial sovereignty over Taiwan, lacks the legal standing to lay claim to the island democracy.
In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921, long regarded Taiwan as a foreign territory and articulated for the first time its goal of “liberating” the island just months before it seized power in Beijing in 1949.
Beijing, likewise, dubiously claims that the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands have always been part of China. There is unquestionably no concrete evidence that China ever had effective control over those islands.
In fact, China began claiming the Senkakus only after a United Nations agency’s report in 1969 referred to the possible existence of oil reserves in the East China Sea.
It was not until the early 1970s that Chinese documents began applying the name “Diaoyu” (釣魚) to the Senkakus and claiming they were part of China.
Sinicizing the names of the territories it claims is a standard tactic of the CCP, which it is also applying to the Himalayan borderlands of India, Bhutan and Nepal.
This tactic is designed to lend credence to its assertion that the areas it covets have always been part of China.
For example, in three separate batches between 2017 and 2023, Beijing renamed a number of places in India’s sprawling Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is almost three times larger than Taiwan.
When India protested, Beijing doubled down, contending that Arunachal Pradesh is its own “territory” and Sinicizing names of places there is “China’s sovereign right.”
Such aggressive tactics, including claiming that a region controlled by another country has been part of China since ancient times, help over time to gain wide international recognition that the territory concerned is disputed.
This then encourages China to disturb the territorial status quo through stealthy maneuvers or encroachments.
China’s nearly four-year-long Himalayan military standoff with India has its origins in the April 2020 furtive Chinese encroachments on key borderlands in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh, which is located 2,000 kilometers from Arunachal Pradesh.
India, challenging Chinese power and capability, has more than matched China’s Himalayan military deployments and made clear that the standoff would continue until Beijing agrees to restore status quo ante.
More broadly, China, under President Xi Jinping (習近平), has been pushing expansive territorial claims in Asia on the basis of an ingenious principle — “what is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable.”
It is telling that these territorial claims, from the East and South China Seas to the Taiwan Strait and the Himalayas, are based not on international law but on revisionist history. China’s weak legal case was highlighted by the 2016 Hague ruling, when an international arbitral tribunal invalidated Chinese claims in the South China Sea.
Yet, such is Beijing’s unmitigated scorn for international law that, in defiance of the Hague ruling, it has accelerated its expansionism in the South China Sea, turning its seven human-made islands into forward military bases and gradually securing greater and greater control of this critical corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
China’s “nine-dash line” encompassing much of the South China Sea exemplifies how it uses alleged history to pursue aggressive expansionism.
But Beijing’s manipulation of history extends beyond advancing extravagant territorial claims.
It also uses history to instill among the Chinese an abiding sense of grievance over the 110 years of national humiliation that China suffered up to the communist takeover in Beijing.
While Beijing misses no opportunity to shame Japan with the history card, its selective historical memory is highlighted by Chinese school textbooks, which black out the Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet in the early 1950s and the wars it unleashed against India (1962) and Vietnam (1979).
In fact, as the mythical Middle Kingdom, China claims to be the mother of all civilizations, weaving legend with history to claim a dual historical entitlement — to recover “lost” lands and become a world power second to none. This helps to rationalize its muscular foreign policy, which seeks to make real the legend that drives the CCP’s revisionist history — China’s centrality in the world.
In the name of “reunification,” Xi seems determined to annex Taiwan, just as Mao Zedong (毛澤東) occupied the then-autonomous and resource-rich Tibet.
Chinese aggression against Taiwan would constitute the biggest threat to world peace in a generation.
It has thus become imperative to contest Beijing’s strange fairy tale that Taiwan was part of China since time immemorial.
Taiwan has all the attributes of a robust independent state, and most Taiwanese want it to stay that way.
After all, why would the Taiwanese be willing to give up their freedoms and be absorbed by the world’s largest autocracy, which is also a technology-driven Orwellian surveillance state?
People in Taiwan, in fact, have developed an identity that is distinct from that of Chinese citizens.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
Few would doubt that India’s international profile and geopolitical weight have been rising, making it a key ‘swing’ state in the current transition from the US-led, post-World War II order to a new global order. Despite growing international turbulence, as underlined by crises, conflicts, wars and new threats, Indian foreign policy displays dynamism and confidence.
This is apparent from the close strategic partnerships India has built or reinforced with rival major powers, including the US and Russia. In fact, India is being courted by all the great powers.
Because India confronts what might be called the “tyranny of geography” in its own region—that is, serious external threats from virtually all directions—it must pursue extra-regional options to advance its economic and security interests. India, the region’s geographical hub, may be the world’s largest democracy but authoritarian structures have not been fully dismantled in neighbouring countries.
An unstable neighbourhood, to be sure, heightens the danger of spill-over effects for India, which would threaten its internal security. For example, the ethnic violence in Manipur state has been accentuated by the illegal influx of thousands of ethnic Chin from violence-torn Myanmar, which risks turning into a failed state because of crippling US-led sanctions and escalating armed attacks by insurgents attempting to overthrow the military junta.
Against this backdrop, India has little choice but to reach out beyond its immediate neighbourhood to help surmount the “tyranny of geography”. This explains the priority it attaches to expanding diplomatic and economic relations with other regions.
In the Middle East, for example, India’s expanding footprint owes a lot to the close relations Prime Minister Narendra Modi has forged with Israel and important Arab states. Modi, although accused by his critics of promoting Hindu nationalism, has built a strong personal rapport with the rulers of the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, which are the citadels of Wahhabi Islam, the source of modern Islamic fundamentalism.
Modi, who on his seventh visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently inaugurated the first stone-built Hindu temple in the entire Middle East, refers to the Emirati president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, as his “brother”. The UAE, the most liberal and forward-looking of the Gulf states, has rapidly emerged as one of the largest investors in, and a close trade and security partner of, India.
India, the world’s third-biggest importer of oil, sources 65 per cent of its crude imports from the Gulf states, which are also supplying fast-increasing quantities of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the country. The nearly 9 million Indian expats in the Gulf region, including the world’s largest Indian diaspora of 3.4 million in the UAE, account for about 30 per cent of the $90 billion global remittance flowing to India yearly. Known to be disciplined, dedicated, hard-working and peaceable, the Indian expats in the Middle East are one of India’s most distinct soft power assets.
With size comes geopolitical, economic and cultural power. And with power comes respect. With its cherished foreign-policy autonomy and willingness to break with conventional methods and shibboleths, India is well placed to serve as a go-between in the Ukraine war and as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Consider another region, East Asia, where India has bolstered trade and strategic ties with historic rivals Japan and South Korea. India has virtual free trade agreements (FTA) with these two countries, which today are seeking to overcome the historical baggage that still weighs down their bilateral relationship. India-Japan military exercises now extend to all three domains—air, maritime and land—and cover strategic, operational and tactical levels.
The neighbourhood constraints make it imperative for India to build stronger ties not just with the other major powers but also with important countries located in different regions.
KEY FACTORS
Several factors are central to a country’s international position, including its political and economic trajectory. Without political stability at home, economic growth will likely suffer.
Despite the plethora of political parties in India that largely team up in coalitions, especially before elections, the country has been fortunate to have enjoyed political stability under three successive prime ministers—Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh (more so in his first term than his scandals-filled second tenure), and Narendra Modi.
Contrast that with the unending political crisis in military-dominated, China-indebted Pakistan, with that nation now confronting the worst economic crisis in its history. Indeed, the phrase “international basket case” might better apply to Pakistan today than it did to Bangladesh in 1971 when it won independence despite the Pakistani military’s genocide, in which three million people were killed, 200,000 women were confined in rape camps, and 10 million more people were forced to flee to India.
Under Sheikh Hasina, who has led a secular government since 2009 that Bangladeshi Islamists detest, Bangladesh has had political stability and rapid economic growth. Bangladesh’s impressive-growth trajectory stands in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil in Pakistan, which is still teetering on the brink of default.
Against this background, India’s continued rise hinges on sustained political stability at home. A stable, forward-thinking government can frame and pursue long-term strategic goals, including further accelerating economic growth, advancing development of critical and emerging technologies (including semiconductors, which have grown into a key international geopolitical battleground), underpinning military prowess with an expanded weapons-manufacturing base at home, strengthening nuclear-weapon, missile and drone capabilities, and bolstering internal security and social cohesion.
The 1998 nuclear weapons’ tests proved to be a watershed moment for India, raising its international profile and setting in motion the process for the US to gradually lift most of its technology sanctions against New Delhi. For more than a quarter of a century, the US had kept the world’s largest democracy under sanctions, while it actively aided communist China’s rise and armed Pakistan against India. And, as the <New York Times> reported in 1998, the US and China covertly helped Pakistan to build its nuclear bomb.
It was fortunate for India’s security and upward trajectory that the nuclear weapons’ tests were carried out six weeks after Vajpayee took office. Had Vajpayee waited six months, there probably would have been no such tests, given how the heady allure of power and its corrupting effects can easily weaken political resolve.
The five underground nuclear tests in 1998 exposed the utter failure of US policy to keep India from going overtly nuclear by employing technology sanctions and diplomatic pressure. Predicting test yields accurately holds the key to manufacturing sophisticated nuclear weapons. And, as underscored by post-shot radiochemical analyses, the yields from the five tests were in line with what the Indian scientists had aimed for.
Left to lick its wounds, the US began quietly reversing its policy towards India through diplomatic outreach, including closed-door talks. In mid-1999, Bill Clinton became the first American president to openly side with India against Pakistan in wartime when he successfully pressured then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to pull back his forces from the areas that they had furtively encroached upon in Ladakh’s Kargil region. And about eight months later, Clinton heralded a new beginning in Washington’s relationship with New Delhi by paying a five-day visit to India, the first by a US president in almost a quarter-century.
Since then, America’s embrace of India has persisted (and strengthened) under four succeeding presidents—George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.
India’s rapid economic growth, with the Indian economy now the fastest growing among major countries, has reinforced bipartisan support in Washington for a closer partnership with New Delhi. US exports to India have boomed. Indeed, the US has become an important source of even crude oil and petroleum products for India, which is the world’s third-largest oil consumer after America and China.
UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Abu Dhabi, February 13, 2024 (Photo: PIB)
Meanwhile, the profound development that helped transform India’s global position—its going overtly nuclear—now figures little in the Indian or American discourse.
Yet India now faces an ongoing build-up of nuclear and missile forces in its neighbourhood, especially by China. The unprecedented speed and scale of the Chinese nuclear build-up appears to be linked to President Xi Jinping’s international expansionism as China seeks global primacy by 2049, the centenary of communist rule.
Modi refers to the Emirati President, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, as his ‘brother’. The UAE, the most liberal and forward-looking of the Gulf states, has rapidly emerged as one of the largest investors in, and a close trade and security partner of, India
The huge nuclear-weapons build-up is set to lengthen China’s shadow over Asia while heightening military tensions with its main Asian rivals—India and Japan. India, alas, has remained smugly content with the outcome of its 1998 tests, instead of seeking to enhance the credibility of its nuclear deterrent through a stockpile-stewardship programme that includes subcritical and other hydronuclear experiments. Today, India needs to pay close attention to Xi’s nuclear frenzy.
India’s global standing, in more recent years, has also benefited from two other factors, both China-related.
The first is the West’s belated recognition of Xi’s imperialist ambitions, which have spawned China’s aggressive expansionism almost since he came to power in 2012. Xi seems to believe that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to modify the international order in its favour before it confronts a deepening demographic crisis, stalled economic growth, and an unfavourable global environment. Accordingly, Xi has shown an increasing appetite for taking major risks.
President Biden, in his 48-page national security strategy released in October 2022, made clear that over the long term the US was more worried about China’s moves to “layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy” than it was about a sanctions-battered Russia, whose strategic ambitions are regionally confined. China “is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective,” the strategy report said.
It has become clear to many Americans that China is not a friend or a partner but rather an adversary bent on global dominance by supplanting the US. Multiple opinion surveys have shown that the number of Americans who view China as their country’s “greatest enemy” or “greatest threat” has more than doubled since 2020, increasing to over half of US adults. As an adversary in American eyes, Russia is now a distant second to China.
History will record 2020 as a watershed year for Beijing when international attitudes visibly changed and many economies learned hard lessons about China-dependent supply chains. The tide began to turn when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hid crucial information from the world about the Wuhan-originating Covid-19, even as it attempted to capitalise on the pandemic, first by hoarding medical products (a market China dominates) and then by stepping up aggressive expansionism. The April 2020 Chinese encroachments on key borderlands in Ladakh occurred while India was enforcing perhaps the world’s strictest pandemic-related national lockdown.
Today, Western companies’ growing interest in shifting production away from China so as to reduce risk through diversification opens opportunities for India to address its manufacturing deficit. The US, after all, confronts a troubling reality: Its biggest source of imported goods has emerged as its biggest strategic adversary.
More fundamentally, until the US began regarding China as a threat to its core interests and looking at India as a potential counter-balancer to Beijing, Americans tended to think about India as if it were linked by a hyphen to Pakistan.
The US now recognises the larger geopolitical importance of India, which has long been locked in a strategic rivalry with China. India may never formally align itself with Western powers but it will remain an independent, rising power whose strategic interests mesh more with the West.
The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force’s DF-41 ICBM launchers at a parade in Beijing (Photo: AP)
The second factor is the end of China’s US-assisted, four-decade-long economic boom. Economic growth has stalled to the point where China is being called a “drag” on world output by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others. In fact, China’s long-term economic prospects are dimming, with the country experiencing demographic decline and high youth unemployment. The property market that long fuelled its growth is now mired in a prolonged downturn.
Economists have compared China’s demographic crisis, which has resulted in its labour force already peaking, to the one that brought Japan’s economic boom to a standstill in the 1990s.
India, by contrast, has demographics on its side. With a median age of 28.4, India is one of the world’s youngest countries, with the promise of reaping a significant demographic dividend.
India faces an ongoing build-up of nuclear and missile forces by China. The speed and scale of the Chinese nuclear build-up appears to be linked to Xi Jinping’s international expansionism as China seeks global primacy by 2049
The Modi government, to help turn India into a global manufacturing hub, has invested enormously in infrastructure, while cutting red tape, relaxing rules and opening the way for more foreign direct investment. Leveraging India’s geopolitical clout, the government is inviting multinationals, which are looking to diversify manufacturing and supply chains, to set up their manufacturing base in India.
The push to turn India into a global manufacturing hub has included luring international chipmakers to the country with generous state subsidies. India is to bear half the cost of any semiconductor projects it approves.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (Photo: AFP)
This push also extends to local manufacturing of military equipment and munitions, given that India’s heavy dependence on imports for defence requirements constrains both the country’s economic potential and its strategic autonomy. For example, drawing on the lessons of the Ukraine war about the critical importance of munitions, two private-sector defence facilities built at a cost of $362 million outside Kanpur have just started producing small, medium and large calibre ammunition for the armed forces.
LEARNING ON THE JOB Indian foreign policy, with pragmatism as its hallmark, may be geared towards reinventing India as a more competitive, confident and secure country claiming its rightful place in the world. Indeed, a non-doctrinaire foreign-policy approach powered by ideas, not ideology, has long defined Indian diplomacy.
However, this does not mean that India has had a distinct foreign-policy doctrine or vision. The fundamental weakness under successive prime ministers has been the excessive personalisation of foreign policy.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, Napoleon’s famous foreign minister, prescribed a basic rule for foreign policy: “by no means show too much zeal”. In India’s case, oozing zealousness and gushy expectations have undermined realism recurrently. In this century alone, zeal has been to Indian prime ministers—from Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh to Modi—what grand strategy is to great powers.
Ill-served by obsequious bureaucrats, Indian leaders have rushed to believe what they wanted to believe. Consequently, India has repeatedly and jarringly cried betrayal, not by friends but by adversaries in whom it chose to repose trust. Instead of acknowledging their own naïveté, Indian leaders, when taken for a ride, have cast the entire blame on the opponents’ duplicity.
A key reason why India, to its chagrin, has repeatedly found history repeating itself is that virtually every prime minister, although unschooled in national security at the time of assuming office, has sought to reinvent the foreign-policy wheel, rather than learning from the blunders of the preceding prime ministers. To make matters worse, intellectuals and the media usually shrink from closely scrutinising foreign policy moves.
Consider Vajpayee’s record: In just five years, between 1999 and 2004, several major policy U-turns were executed. Under Vajpayee—who formally surrendered India’s Tibet card during a 2003 Beijing visit—personal rather than professional characteristics came to define India’s foreign policy.
Vajpayee’s roller-coaster policy on Pakistan exposed India’s glaring inadequacy to set and unwaveringly pursue clear goals. His Pakistan policy traversed multiple U-turns—from his bus ride to Lahore, the war in Kargil, the hijacking to Kandahar of an Indian jetliner, and the summit in Agra to the Pakistan-scripted attack on the Indian Parliament. It then culminated in his second trip to Pakistan as prime minister. It was Vajpayee’s 2001 Agra summit invitation that helped dictator Pervez Musharraf to come out of the international doghouse for staging a military coup.
The Modi government, to help turn India into a global manufacturing hub, has invested enormously in infrastructure, while cutting red tape, relaxing rules and opening the way for more foreign direct investment
In an operation with no parallel in modern world history, the Indian Army, under <Operation Parakram>, was kept in a war-ready position against Pakistan through forward deployments for 10 months, avowedly to force Pakistan to dismantle its state-built terrorist infrastructure. Yet, without accomplishing any objective, Vajpayee called off the costly, self-debilitating operation, which the then Navy chief later labelled the “most punishing mistake”. Worse still, Vajpayee during his 2004 Islamabad visit hailed as a big gain Pakistan’s commitment on paper to not let its territory be used for cross-border terrorism—the very empty assurance General Musharraf had given before Vajpayee initiated <Operation Parakram>.
Vajpayee’s swinging policy pendulum emboldened his successor, Manmohan Singh—a foreign-policy greenhorn—to pursue a blinkered approach that blended his unvarnished naivety with open appeasement, thereby inviting greater acts of aggression against India. Mistaking tactics for strategy, Singh treated the process of engagement with the country’s regional adversaries as an end in itself, losing sight of the purpose—putting an end to acts of aggression.
Singh’s fixation on quasi-failed Pakistan paralleled Vajpayee’s quest to make peace with that implacable enemy. Singh, however, took appeasement to unmatched levels.
For example, at Havana in 2006, he equated the state sponsor of terrorism (Pakistan) with the victim of its terrorism (India), agreeing infamously to set up a joint anti-terror mechanism. Then, three years later at Sharm El-Sheikh, Singh permitted Pakistan to include Balochistan in the bilateral agenda. This blunder—which immediately became grist for the Pakistani propaganda mill—allowed Pakistan to try and externalise the Baloch problem by turning its terrorism target, India, into the principal accused, by claiming that India was behind the separatist insurrection in Balochistan.
Even the savagery of intruding Pakistani troops, who chopped two Indian soldiers and took away one severed head as a ‘trophy’, failed to stop Singh from returning to business-as-usual with Pakistan. The result was that Singh’s policy of engagement with Pakistan yielded increasingly daring and brutal acts of cross-border terrorism.
Then came Modi at the helm. In seeking to befriend the country’s regional adversaries, did Modi draw any lessons from India’s bitter (and costly) experiences under the leadership of Manmohan Singh and Vajpayee? Absolutely not.
Like his predecessors, while learning on the job at the expense of the nation, Modi indeed set out to reinvent the foreign-policy wheel.
For example, Modi’s unannounced visit to Lahore in late 2015, as part of his personal outreach to then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, resulted in the Pakistani military’s orchestration of a series of terrorist attacks on Indian military bases and camps in Jammu & Kashmir and Punjab. Today, the India-Pakistan relationship is virtually frozen.
Furthermore, Modi did not see the Chinese incursions into Ladakh coming because his vision seemed to have been clouded by the hope that, by appeasing China and its leader, Xi Jinping, he could reset the bilateral relationship and weaken China’s ties with Pakistan.
Modi met Xi 18 times over five years, with the hype over the meetings helping to lull India into a false sense of complacency. In the run-up to the April 2020 Chinese encroachments, India ignored various warning signs, including China’s unusual combat exercises in wintertime with new types of tanks and howitzers designed for high-altitude warfare, as well as its frenzied construction of new military installations along the Himalayan frontier.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Munich Security Conference, February 17, 2024 (Photo: Getty Images)
Although deception, concealment and surprise have often accompanied Chinese aggression in Asia, the Modi government ignored the lesson from its own bitter experience over the Doklam Plateau in 2017. After the India-China troop standoff at Doklam ended with the August 2017 disengagement accord, China built permanent military structures and seized control of most of the Bhutan-claimed Doklam in ways that had echoes of its expansionism in the South China Sea. It then sought to apply the same model of expansionism against India, which is what led to its Ladakh land grabs.
The result is that India now confronts the worst border crisis with China since the 1962 war, with the major military standoff between the two Asian giants about to enter the fourth year. The standoff is imposing major costs on India and China while raising the spectre of armed conflict.
India’s rapid economic growth, with the Indian economy now the fastest growing among major countries, has reinforced bipartisan support in Washington for a closer partnership with New Delhi. US exports to India have boomed
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar recently contended that the Modi government follows Sardar Patel’s “realism”, not Jawaharlal Nehru’s “romanticism”. But Modi’s “realism” has come the hard way—after his own “romanticism” backfired.
This background underscores why India needs to shift from excessive personalisation of policy to institutionalised policy-making. Such a shift will ensure a more clearheaded and goal-oriented foreign policy that is focused on an assertive promotion of national interests and on long-term objectives.
INDIA’S SIZE MATTERS
India’s geopolitical importance is likely to only grow, despite Modi’s critics at home and abroad claiming democratic backsliding under his leadership. India is a raucous democracy that confronts intensifying partisanship and polarisation. In this hyper-partisan setting, Modi has become a lightning rod for critics that accuse him of being a strongman pursuing divisive policies and favouring populism over constitutionalism. Such criticisms mirror the attacks on Donald Trump when he was in the White House.
But while opinion surveys show that most Indians hold their democracy in high regard, more than two-thirds of Americans think their country’s democracy is broken, despite Biden being in the White House. Indeed, a study by an international think-tank has designated the US as a “backsliding” democracy.
The plain fact is that India, a country the size of a continent, will remain an important factor in the global balance of power.
Who can ignore India’s massive population (now the world’s largest), its nuclear weapons and growing military might, its expanding and relatively young labour force (even as those in most industrialised countries are ageing and, in some cases, shrinking), its tradition of a strong elite education, its culture of entrepreneurialism, and its ties to the big and influential Indian diaspora that extends from Southeast Asia and the Middle East to North America?
With size comes geopolitical, economic and cultural power. And with power comes respect.
The upward trajectory of the world’s largest democracy will continue, unless it slips into serious political instability that leads to internal disarray.
India has long been a powerful voice for the Global South. But, in an increasingly divided world, India can be the bridge-builder between the East and the West, and between the North and the South. With its cherished foreign-policy autonomy and willingness to break with conventional methods and shibboleths, India is well placed to serve as a go-between in the Ukraine war and as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
China’s economic and geopolitical rise since the 1990s helped reshape the world. Now India, if it can get its act together, has an opening to change the world again with its own economic and geopolitical rise.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books.
Quad leaders meet on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May 2023: Another summit is unlikely to happen until early 2025. (Pool via Reuters)
When U.S. President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he ardently embraced the Quad initiative that had been revived by his predecessor, Donald Trump, elevating discussions in the four-nation grouping with Australia, India and Japan to the level of summits of national leaders instead of just meetings of foreign ministers.
Biden first brought his counterparts together in March 2021 online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House then hosted the first in-person Quad summit six months later.
Yet after a flurry of similar meetings, including an informal gathering in Hiroshima, Japan last May on the sidelines of a Group of Seven summit at which the four leaders committed to jointly “meet the challenges” facing the Indo-Pacific region, there is no tangible plan in place now for another summit.
Indeed, U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti has suggested that the next summit will likely have to wait until after November’s presidential election.
This in effect probably rules out any fresh summit before early 2025 even as regional security challenges mount, with China applying increasing coercive pressure on Taiwan in the wake of the presidential election victory of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lai Ching-te and further tensions building along China’s frontiers with India and Bhutan, and with the Philippines in the South China Sea.
If that was not discouraging enough, it must be noted also that little concrete progress has been made in the six Quad working groups established over the last three years, covering critical and emerging technologies, climate change, cybersecurity, infrastructure, space and COVID-19 vaccines.
To be sure, an overly ambitious agenda, as underscored by the working groups’ focus on diverse global issues, has constrained the Quad’s ability to produce tangible results.
The Quad, as a grouping of just four democracies, is in little position to manage universal challenges. Yet this is the course Biden has taken the Quad on, with the result that the group’s Indo-Pacific security objectives have sometimes taken a back seat to discussion of global challenges.
The Quad’s core agenda, as affirmed by the U.S. in 2019, is supposed to center on realizing members’ vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region. This should mean effectively acting as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensuring a stable balance of power in a region that brings together the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
But Biden’s policy of engagement with China may explain why, despite a changing geostrategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, the Quad now lacks clear strategic direction and resolve.
With the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East claiming America’s attention and resources, and draining stocks of critical munitions and air defense systems, the last thing Biden wants is conflict or even greater tensions with China.
This likely explains his moves to ease Chinese concerns.
“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden declared while visiting Hanoi last September. “We’re not trying to hurt China.”
The goal, he said, is “getting the relationship right” between the world’s two leading powers. Biden earlier assured Chinese President Xi Jinping that the U.S. would not seek to change China’s political system nor direct alliances against it.
After sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing for discussions, Biden made a promise to “responsibly manage the relationship” during talks with Xi in San Francisco on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.
The stepped-up effort to steady the fraught Sino-U.S. relationship thus may have contributed to U.S. soft-pedaling of the Quad. Indeed, the four Quad leaders pointedly did not convene when they were all together at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi last September as they did in Hiroshima four months before.
The question then is whether Biden’s policy of coexistence and cooperation with China is paying dividends.
It would not seem so. Xi, seeing America distracted with Europe and the Middle East, has upped the ante by stepping up coercion of Taiwan. There have also been more frequent Chinese provocations and maritime incidents in the South China Sea, including with U.S. aircraft and ships.
Xi may even see a window of opportunity for more dramatic action over Taiwan. At the same time, the new U.S. cold war with Russia has pushed Moscow closer to Beijing and turned China into its banker and most important trade partner, risking the creation of a pan-Eurasian axis that could further overstretch America and accelerate its relative decline.
While Xi is still willing to talk to the U.S., his actions suggest that, despite a slowing economy, he believes China, with a ramped-up nuclear arsenal, is in a position of strategic strength that it must leverage.
Against this backdrop, it would be a mistake to relegate the Quad to the periphery or turn it into a mere showpiece.
If anything, it is time to refocus the Quad’s attention on the strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, as it remains critical to the global balance of power and world peace. This means reaffirming the Quad’s strategic mission of preserving the present regional order. Without that, the goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific could become illusory.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
President Joe Biden meets Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at Alsalam Royal Palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on July 15, 2022. (Photo by Royal Court of Saudi Arabia/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
President Joe Biden has made democracy promotion a key element of his foreign policy, declaring from the outset that the United States would stand up for human rights and freedoms wherever they are under attack. Biden faced his first test shortly after he entered the White House, when a coup brought the military back to power in Myanmar. Biden promptly reimposed heavy sanctions on that country.
But as Biden nears the end of his term, his record on promoting or defending human rights and democracy globally is patchy at best. Still, in his reelection campaign, he has retained protecting the forces of human dignity and freedom as a core theme.
Unfortunately for Biden, nothing has been more damaging to that theme than his political and military support for Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, including his repeated refusal to push for a cease-fire. Such strong backing, while allowing the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in Israel’s history to expand its military assault across Gaza, is bleeding support from Biden’s base at home. More significantly, it has left the U.S. as diplomatically isolated as Russia was when it first invaded Ukraine.
Long before Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist atrocities led Israel to unleash war, Biden had been using promotion of democratic rights selectively — to target America’s adversaries and weak, strategically unimportant states, while condoning authoritarian practices in countries that matter to American interests. The pursuit of moral legitimacy in support of democracy promotion, meanwhile, has contributed to making sanctions the tool of choice for U.S. policymakers, despite being a blunt instrument to bring about political change.
Biden, for example, has been silent on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s lurch toward authoritarianism, because acknowledging that reality would run counter to the American president’s narrative that the war in Ukraine symbolizes a “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”
The truth is that Zelensky has effectively choked Ukraine’s nascent democracy by banning opposition parties, jailing political opponents, shutting independent media outlets and deferring elections indefinitely under martial law. Zelensky has essentially followed in the footsteps of his nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Consider another example: While ratcheting up sanctions on military-ruled Myanmar — now reeling under a deepening humanitarian crisis — the Biden administration is mollycoddling Pakistan’s domineering military, which has long blocked a genuine democratic transition in the country. With the U.S. implicitly endorsing the Pakistani military’s viselike grip on national politics, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin in December hosted Pakistan’s army chief at the Pentagon, while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken invited the visiting general to his office.
Meanwhile, confounding those who believe in Biden’s rhetoric, the president, in practice, does not hew to his own narrative of a “global battle between democracy and autocracy,” thereby implicitly conceding that such a simplistic or rigid approach would crimp the wider pursuit of U.S. diplomatic interests. This is apparent from Biden’s strategic outreach to autocracies at a time when America’s sharpening competition with China is increasingly shaping its diplomacy.
One example stands out in particular. On the campaign trail in 2019, Joe Biden vowed to punish Saudi Arabia for its murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi crimes in Yemen, saying he intended to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” He also asserted that there is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
Yet, even at the risk of exposing the hollowness of his moralizing, Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia in July 2022 in order to mend frayed ties with the kingdom. And, despite the backlash he faced at home for fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during that visit, Biden gave the de facto Saudi leader a hearty handshake during the G-20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023.
In fact, after the summit, Biden directly flew from India, the world’s largest democracy, to Vietnam, one of the more authoritarian countries in the world, to upgrade strategic ties, despite Vietnam’s widening crackdown on dissent and peaceful protests.
To be sure, Biden’s outreach to non-democracies is advancing American interests. His embrace of the Saudi Crown Prince helped produce a multinational agreement in New Delhi on an ambitious, U.S.-promoted rail and shipping corridor that would extend from India to Europe via the Middle East. In Vietnam, Biden signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” a status that the U.S. had long wanted.
Few would question Biden’s effort to pursue a more balanced and pragmatic approach to the overseas promotion of democratic rights, given that more than two-thirds of Americans think that U.S. democracy itself is broken. Building new or closer partnerships with other states, even if they are non-democracies, has become imperative for the U.S. to help counter China’s global influence game. So it is scarcely a surprise that America today maintains close cooperation with a wide array of undemocratic or democratically-backsliding governments.
The problem lies in the Biden administration’s open use of human rights promotion as a geopolitical tool to bring pressure on the countries it targets, including through U.S. government-funded organizations. On occasion, human rights concerns are raised as leverage even against a friendly state like India. This approach blunts the effects of rights promotion by undermining American credibility.
Blending promotion of democratic rights with the application of sanctions, meanwhile, often only reinforces the authoritarian conduct of the targeted regimes. Examples extend from Myanmar, Iran and Syria to Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.
Worse still, sanctions against non-democracies almost invariably advance the commercial and strategic interests of America’s main rival, China. This means that the U.S. continues to aid China’s accumulation of economic and military power, while letting Beijing escape scot-free over abuses such as Muslim gulag in Xinjiang, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi era.
Simply put, the geopolitics of human rights and democracy promotion contribute to America’s strategic overreach, which, in turn, accelerates the relative decline of U.S. wealth and power.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
When US President Joe Biden was asked last September whether American forces would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, he replied in the affirmative, but included a caveat: “if, in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.” But an “unprecedented attack” is precisely what Chinese President Xi Jinping is likely to avoid.
The more US President Joe Biden’s administration has sought to ease tensions with China through high-level dialogue, the more brazenly Chinese President Xi Jinping has applied coercive pressure to Taiwan. Never was this pattern more obvious than late last month, when China sent 33 warplanes and seven combat ships toward Taiwan, just as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan were holding talks in Bangkok. Fears that Xi will soon launch an even more overt push for “reunification” with Taiwan are rising.
Taiwan was never part of the People’s Republic of China. It is a self-governing island that, for most of its history, had no relationship with China and has remained fully outside Chinese control for the last 129 years. Even so, Xi has made no secret of his intention to enforce China’s claim to the island. In fact, Xi has called “reunification” with Taiwan his “historic mission.”
Xi reportedly reaffirmed his intentions to Biden at their recent summit in San Francisco, noting that the only matter left to be decided is when to take over the island. And there are good reasons to believe that the time might be near. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza claiming America’s attention and resources, and the world undergoing a broader geopolitical reconfiguration, Xi might see a window of opportunity. And Taiwanese voters’ delivery of a third consecutive presidential term to the pro-sovereignty Democratic Progressive Party has likely bolstered Xi’s motivation to assert control over the island.
Already, Xi has been stepping up intrusions into Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island with warships. China has also fired missiles into the waters around the island and carried out large-scale war gamessimulating attacks on it. According to a recent survey by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, two-thirds of US experts now believe that a Taiwan Strait crisis is likely this year. In November, the bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned that China is preparing to wage war over Taiwan – and position itself to launch cyberattacks against the United States that would “wreak havoc” during such a conflict.
One might expect the Biden administration to respond to such developments by strengthening deterrence, by both bolstering Taiwan’s defenses and stating unambiguously that the US has the strategic intent and political will to defend the island against a Chinese attack. Yet there is a $14 billion backlog in US military sales to Taiwan, with weapons deals announced as long ago as 2017 still unfulfilled. And Biden has repeatedly declared that the US is “not looking for conflict” with China.
Although Biden’s policy of engagement with China – including two face-to-face meetings and five virtual talks or phone calls with Xi since 2021 – has so far yielded no dividends, his administration apparently is unwilling to change course. The result is a paradox: the stronger established power, in attempting to preserve the status quo, is seeking to appease the revisionist power, which continues to expand its frontiers. In the South China Sea, China has turned its contrived historical claims into reality without incurring any international costs.
The ineffectiveness of US-led sanctions against Russia has probably emboldened Xi yet further. If unprecedented Western sanctions cannot bring down Russia’s economy, they certainly cannot destroy China’s, especially given Chinese countermeasures. Even if the West could crush China economically, doing so would amount to shooting itself in the foot. China’s central position in the global economy may well explain why the country has faced no meaningful Western sanctions for maintaining its Xinjiang gulag, where it is holding more than one million Muslim detainees, or for snuffing out Hong Kong’s autonomy.
To be sure, when Biden was asked last September whether US forces would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, he replied in the affirmative. But he added a caveat: “if, in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.” And an “unprecedented attack” is precisely what Xi is likely to avoid. Not only does China probably lack the amphibious-assault capability to seize all of Taiwan; a full-scale attack, akin to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, would also be out of character for the country, which has typically preferred quieter, more gradual aggression anchored in stealth, deception, and surprise.
Just as China has made great strides in the South China Sea and the Himalayas with this strategy of incremental expansionism, it will probably use hybrid warfare to squeeze Taiwan. The Chinese military has already simulated the imposition of a quarantine or blockade on the island. China could also announce the “lawful” closure of the Taiwan Strait to foreign vessels or periodically block shipping routes to choke the Taiwanese economy.
As former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has warned, such measures could, over time, “bring Taiwan to its knees and create huge incentives for Taiwan to have a very different attitude toward China.” But the measures are also subtle enough that they are unlikely to elicit a concerted US-led response until it is too late.
A majority of Taiwanese believe that, in the face of a Chinese invasion, the US would abandon them, just as it did in 1979, when it terminated bilateral diplomatic relations and a mutual defense treaty with the island, in order to restore ties with China. If the US were to forsake Taiwan again, the international credibility of US security assurances would lie in tatters, effectively ending America’s global preeminence.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
The contrast between the elections held earlier this month in the mountain kingdom of Bhutan and that held in populous Bangladesh — the former peaceful and the latter marred by violence and an opposition boycott — underscore the challenges involved with consolidating democratic transitions in South Asia, a region with long autocratic traditions.
India, the region’s geographical hub, is considered the world’s largest democracy. But authoritarian structures have not been fully dismantled in neighboring countries ranging from Nepal to the Maldives.
The region, in fact, illustrates that elections alone cannot ensure genuine democratic transitions. Even if competitive, elections do not guarantee genuine democratic empowerment at the grassroots level or adherence to constitutional rules by those wielding power.
Pakistan and Myanmar, for example, are to hold parliamentary elections this year that are unlikely to weaken the viselike grip of their militaries on domestic politics.
Myanmar’s generals derailed their nation’s democratic transition in February 2021 by ousting Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, leading the U.S. and its allies to impose wide-ranging sanctions.
Military ruler Min Aung Hlaing said earlier this month that “free and fair multiparty democratic elections” will be held once the current state of emergency is lifted, with “state responsibilities” then to pass to the duly elected government.
Few, however, put much credence in talk of the army going back to its barracks. Directly or indirectly, the military has called the shots in Myanmar since the country’s independence in 1948.
More ominously, escalating armed attacks by insurgents and pro-democracy groups attempting to overthrow the military junta, coupled with crippling U.S.-led sanctions, are threatening to turn Myanmar into a failed state.
The U.N. warned last month that Myanmar is slipping into a deepening humanitarian crisis, with more than 2 million people internally displaced and one-third of the country’s 54 million population requiring humanitarian aid.
The military has also been the most powerful political player traditionally in Pakistan. The generals there today wield power indirectly through a caretaker civilian-led government that remains in office even after failing to meet a constitutional mandate to hold elections within 90 days of the dissolution last August of the National Assembly.
The election is now scheduled for Feb. 8 but could be further postponed. The military-friendly Senate passed a resolution on Jan. 6 calling for a delay due to “prevailing security conditions” and harsh seasonal weather in certain parts of the country.
The head of Pakistan’s army has long acted as the country’s effective ruler. The military, intelligence agencies and the nuclear establishment have never been answerable to civilian-led governments.
When decisive power rests with generals, democratization can scarcely gain traction. In contrast, Bhutan and Nepal have each been transitioning from traditional monarchy to parliamentary government.
Bhutan’s recent fourth national election has brought an opposition party to power amid an economic crisis. A benevolent king has helped facilitate the country’s democratic transition.
Nepal’s tenuous democracy, however, has come under the shadow of former communist guerrillas who waged war against the state, notably Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal as well as opposition leader K.P. Sharma Oli.
Ahead of parliamentary elections to be held Jan. 25, the communists’ ascendance has raised questions about whether their ideology is compatible with democracy. After all, communism has traditionally eroded individual rights and freedoms that democracies enshrine. While democracy is pluralistic, communism in practice has tended to be monopolistic, as in neighboring China.
Democracy is struggling in Bangladesh, too, in part due to the growth of radical Islamist forces. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has led a secular government that has given Bangladesh political stability and rapid economic growth, on Jan. 7 secured a fourth straight term in office, with her party winning nearly three-quarters of the parliamentary seats as the main opposition party sat out the vote.
Excluding Singapore, the Maldives and other small nations, Bangladesh is the world’s most densely populated country. Given its porous borders, its continued stability is pivotal to regional security.
The Maldives offers a lesson on how democratic progress can be easily reversed if the entrenched forces of the old order are not cut down to size and the rule of law firmly established.
After an election in 2008 swept away decades of autocratic rule, it took barely four years for authoritarianism to rear its ugly head again. President Mohamed Nasheed was forced to resign at gunpoint, as Islamists stormed the national museum and smashed priceless Buddhist and Hindu statues, erasing evidence of the country’s pre-Islamic past.
Since then, Islamic radicals have significantly expanded their grassroots base in the strategically important Indian Ocean archipelago, resulting in Mohamed Muizzu winning election to the presidency two months ago. Despite a population of barely 550,000, the tropical islands are home to cells of Islamic State and al-Qaida.
Around South Asia, past authoritarian regimes in effect promoted extremist forces by establishing opportunistic political alliances with them. The combination of dire economic conditions and a powerful national protest movement can often help topple such a regime.
In Sri Lanka, an economic meltdown in 2022 led to mass protests and chaos that caused the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic government to fall apart. With the support of their party, Ranil Wickremesinghe has since served as president, but the country is due to hold fresh presidential and parliamentary polls later this year.
India will also be going to the polls in the coming months to elect a new parliament in the world’s largest election exercise, stretching over several weeks.
India is a raucous democracy that confronts intensifying partisanship and polarization. In its hyperpartisan environment, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become a lightning rod for allegations that he is acting as a strongman pursuing divisive policies, and that he favors populism over constitutionalism. These complaints mirror criticisms of Donald Trump when he was in the White House, but Modi and his party are likely to fare better in their reelection campaign.
But the sputtering democratic transitions around India, and the specter of spillover effects from an unstable neighborhood, pose important challenges for New Delhi. They also impede regional cooperation and free trade. Whether or not elections are held, democratic development still has a distance to go in most South Asian states.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
The crises, conflicts and wars that are currently raging underscore that we are living in fraught times. Indeed, 2024 could bring greater turbulence that intensely impacts the geopolitical landscape.
The wars that Ukraine and Israel are fighting should not obscure Taiwan’s vulnerability to a Chinese attack. The two wars actually increase the risk of a third. If Chinese President Xi Jinping perceives that China has a window of opportunity to act during the US presidency of Joe Biden, he will likely move on Taiwan.
Between the new war in the Middle East, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s aggressive expansionism from the Himalayas to the South and East China Seas, the global order since the end of World War II appears not only finished; we are seeing the advent of a world without order.
Few, however, are going to mourn the demise of the “rules-based international order”, other than the Western power elites. This order was neither centred on rules nor was it truly international. It was a power-based order that was established by the US with the help of its Western allies. Those states that dared to defy the order were punished by the West, including by slapping sanctions on them and staging regime-change military interventions, as happened in Iraq and Libya.
The US not only largely made the rules on which that order was based; it also seemed to believe itself exempt from key rules and norms, such as those prohibiting interference in other countries’ internal affairs. Its interference extended to military invasions. The “rules-based” order, if anything, underscored that international law is powerful against the powerless, but powerless against the powerful.
The withering away of the “rules-based” order, however, is bringing greater instability in international relations, with 2024 likely to highlight growing global dangers and a changing geopolitical landscape, including a return to great-power rivalries. Amid greater international divisiveness, the North-South and East-West divides are set to widen.
The possibility of sustained conflicts between the long-dominant West and China, Russia and the Islamic world cannot be discounted. The competition between the US and China is already shaping up as the main geopolitical axis of the new era. And new alliances and coalitions are increasingly challenging the West’s hold on international institutions, including the financial architecture.
KEY ELECTIONS THAT COULD RESHAPE OUR WORLD
The outcome of a series of major elections in 2024 would likely reverberate across the world. Countries that are home to more than half the global population will hold elections in 2024. They include eight of the 10 most populous countries in the world—Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, and the US. Key democracies in the Global South—from South Africa and Mexico to India and Indonesia—will go to polls in 2024.
Taiwan’s vote on January 13 will have an important bearing on cross-strait relations. China-Taiwan relations are already very tense because Beijing has regularised coercive pressure on Taipei. Taiwan, with almost as many people as much-larger Australia, is a technological powerhouse that plays a central role in the international semiconductor business. A Chinese annexation of Taiwan will not only make China a more formidable economic power but also threaten global peace and accelerate the global chip shortage. China could ratchet up pressure on Taiwan if the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Lai Ching-te wins. Lai is committed to defending Taiwan’s sovereignty.
Some of the 2024 elections are unlikely to spring a surprise. In Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League party is expected to retain power in the January 7 national election, especially as the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is boycotting the polls. Leading a secular government since 2009 that Bangladesh’s Islamists detest, Hasina has given the country political stability and rapid economic growth, although the global economic fallout from the Ukraine war is now weighing on the country’s finances.
The US rightly wants Bangladesh’s election to be free and fair. But ramped-up US pressure on Hasina’s government has had the effect of emboldening opposition activists and Islamists, as the largescale political violence in Dhaka on October 28 showed. Even the residence of the country’s chief justice came under attack. The violence flared when BNP and the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, staged “grand rallies” in the capital to demand that Hasina cede power to a caretaker administration to manage the polls.
The Biden administration has made Bangladesh a focus of its democracy promotion efforts by dangling the threat of visa sanctions against officials who undermine free elections. Yet, at the same time, Washington has condoned the military’s indirect rule in Pakistan, where mass arrests, disappearances and torture have become political weapons. Indeed, Washington has done little to ensure that Pakistan’s forthcoming elections in February would be free and fair.
While continuing to reward Pakistan by prioritising short-term geopolitical considerations, the Biden administration has been criticising democratic backsliding in Bangladesh. In 2021, citing “widespread allegations” of human-rights abuse in the Bangladeshi war on drugs, Washington slapped sanctions on Bangladesh’s elite Rapid Action Battalion and six of its current and former leaders. Bangladesh was excluded from Biden’s Summits for Democracy but military-dominated Pakistan was invited.
Whatever the outcome of Pakistan’s February 8 election, one reality will not change: The country’s domineering military will remain the ultimate hand wielding political power behind a civilian-led government. Pakistan essentially is a one-party state: The only party that has ruled the country directly or indirectly since the first coup in 1958 is the military.
The February 14 general elections in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, are set to help tighten the hold of dynasties on politics. With his term coming to an end, President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has chosen dynasty over party loyalty: He is supporting not his own party’s presidential candidate but Minister of Defense Prabowo Subianto, his rival in the previous two presidential elections who was linked to the 1967-98 Suharto dictatorship. Indonesia’s Constitution Court, headed by Widodo’s brother-in-law, ruled controversially that Widodo’s son was eligible to run as Prabowo’s running mate, despite not meeting the minimum age requirement of 40 for presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
Turning to Russia, its March 17 presidential election will further cement Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. Under President Putin, Russia is a resurgent power that has been able to ride out unparalleled Western sanctions against it. With the US and its allies deeply involved in the war in Ukraine, even if indirectly, Russia has remade its economy to focus on defence production.
Given his high approval ratings at home, Putin is likely to easily win a fresh term in office, allowing him to pass Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as the longest-serving Russian ruler since Catherine the Great. But, given the West’s gradually escalating proxy war with Russia, the risks of a direct NATO-Russia conflict are growing.
Several countries in Africa with a combined population of more than 340 million, from South Africa and Mozambique to Ghana and Algeria, are scheduled to hold elections in 2024. The general election in South Africa, due between May and August, could possibly spring a surprise, given the corruption scandals and divisions roiling the ruling African National Congress (ANC). ANC risks losing its parliamentary majority for the first time since it took power in 1994. But the fact that the opposition is weak and split could help bail out ANC.
Turning to Europe, there will be multiple parliamentary or presidential elections in 2024 across the continent—from Finland and Belgium to Belarus and Lithuania. The right seems poised to make major gains in several of these elections, especially in Portugal and Austria. An important shift to the right is also likely to emerge from the European Parliament elections from June 6 to 9, which will be the first polls since Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU).
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s term ends in March, yet he has said that it would be “irresponsible” to hold elections while the war is raging. Zelensky (the West’s poster boy for democracy) has banned opposition parties, jailed political opponents, shut down independent media outlets, and clamped down on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church because it is canonically linked to the Moscow Patriarchate. He governs by martial law.
Yet Zelensky is more vulnerable than ever. After the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia, the long-simmering rift between him and the country’s military leadership has become public, with Zelensky criticising the overall commander of Ukrainian forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, for aptly describing the war as deadlocked. By undermining his political legitimacy through refusal to hold elections, Zelensky is inviting the risk of being ousted by the military. For Zelensky, 2023 was a tough year but 2024 is likely to be even tougher.
Looking at Latin America, Mexico is set to elect its first woman president, with both major political sides fielding women candidates for the June elections. In Venezuela, which is locked in a bitter border feud with Guyana over oil rights, President Nicolás Maduro will seek a fresh term after the US broadly eased sanctions on the country on the back of assurances that the 2024 election would be competitive.
But no 2024 election will have a greater impact on the world than the one in the US on November 5, when voters elect the country’s next president, as well as the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Biden’s poll numbers are already dismal, even as questions swirl over his mental acuity and physical health. A second term for Biden seems increasingly unlikely. If the weak poll numbers prompt the 81-year-old Biden to drop out of the race, it would not only spark a messy intra-Democratic Party battle over the replacement nominee, but also throw the election into unfamiliar territory.
Biden, like his predecessors, has aggressively promoted democracy in countries that are strategically inconsequential to Washington, such as Myanmar and Bangladesh, while building closer strategic ties with important autocracies, from Saudi Arabia to Vietnam. Such selective promotion of democracy, paradoxically, has come even as more than two-thirds of Americans think US democracy is broken. Indeed, America has been designated by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) as a “backsliding” democracy.
India’s General Election, for its part, will be critical for the continued upward trajectory of the world’s largest democracy, including its accelerated economic growth, rising international profile and growing clout. India’s economy, the world’s fifth largest, is today the fastest growing among major countries. India has emerged as a powerful voice for the Global South. But without political stability, India cannot hope to sustain its political and economic rise.
More broadly, the elections of 2024 will be spread across all the continents. The outcome of these elections could have a profound impact on our world.
WILL 2024 BE A GLOBE-CHANGING YEAR?
The two raging wars in Ukraine and Gaza, by pitting rival coalitions against each other, have essentially shaped up as great-power conflicts. On one side are the US and its allies that are supporting both Ukraine and Israel, and on the other side are China, Russia, Iran and their partner states.
The two wars actually increase the risk of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. To help contain that danger, Biden is seeking to mend fences with China, as was underlined by his November bilateral summit with Xi in California on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum meeting. Biden’s conciliatory moves have included sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing and emphasising that the US-led effort is to “de-risk” the relationship with China but not to “decouple” from it.
But with America’s attention focused on Europe and the Middle East, Xi must be observing how Biden’s transfers of artillery munitions, smart bombs, missiles and other weapons to Ukraine and Israel are depleting American stockpiles. Xi would prefer the Ukraine and Israel wars to last as long as possible so that US military stocks are furthered drained and China is better positioned to forcibly incorporate Taiwan.
Make no mistake: Taiwan is on the frontline of international defence against expansionist authoritarianism. The defence of Taiwan must assume greater significance for international security, given that three successive US administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, whose geopolitical map Beijing has fundamentally altered. Having already swallowed Hong Kong, China may be itching to move on Taiwan, whose incorporation Xi has called a “historic mission”. By rehearsing amphibious and air attacks, China has displayed a willingness to seize Taiwan by force.
Deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan ought to assume greater priority in US policy. Taiwan cannot be allowed to become the next Ukraine or Hong Kong. Taiwan’s subjugation would significantly advance China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia and upend the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region, not least by enabling China to break out of the so-called first island chain.
A US that fails to prevent Taiwan’s subjugation would be widely seen as unable or unwilling to defend any other ally, including Japan, which hosts more American troops than any other foreign nation. Such failure, in turn, would likely unravel American alliances in Asia.
Still, Biden places greater emphasis on placating Beijing than on strengthening deterrence, including by taking the possibility of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan seriously. The US needs to urgently bolster Taiwan’s defences by stepping up arms sales and military training. But with Biden continuing to prioritise weapons deliveries to Ukraine, US arms transfers to Taipei are lagging years behind orders.
One illusion in Washington is that the risks of Chinese aggression against Taiwan can be mitigated through regular US-China dialogue, including military-to-military contact. Such thinking misses the fact that China’s strategy centres on stealth, deception and surprise. These three elements have characterised China’s expansionism from the South China Sea to the Himalayas.
Success in the South China Sea, in fact, has made Xi more determined to annex Taiwan on his watch, especially as China erodes America’s military edge in the Indo-Pacific. Worse still, America’s entanglement in the Ukraine war is making Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.
Xi could impose war on Taiwan in 2024, knowing that the next American president would be tougher than Biden, who already seems a lame duck president. Biden’s declining health, in fact, symbolises America’s own declining power and influence.
More fundamentally, what is clear is that the world is on the cusp of major geopolitical change, which could also reshape the global financial order as well as investment and energy-trade patterns. Trade and investment flows are already changing in ways that suggest the global economy may split into two major blocs. Growing trade restrictions are one indicator of a de-globalisation trend. Economic fragmentation will hold profound implications for the world economy.
Lest we forget, the US has yet to absorb the lessons of how it undermined its own long-term interests by aiding China’s economic rise over more than four decades. Today, China not only fields the world’s largest navy and coast guard but also is challenging the Western domination of financial and economic organisations. As part of its push for an alternative Sino-led order, China is quietly decoupling large sections of its economy from the West. It now trades more with the Global South than the West.
In modern history, wars, not peace, have helped shape the international order and international institutions. The present US-led global order, including the monetary order as symbolised by the Bretton Woods institutions, emerged from World War II. The United Nations (UN), too, come out from that war. This explains why meaningfully reforming the UN in peacetime has proved problematic.
The UN today appears in irreversible decline, with its role in international affairs marginalised. The hardening gridlock at the UN Security Council, paradoxically, is increasing the role of the structurally weak UN General Assembly, which can make only recommendations as it lacks the power to pass legally binding resolutions on international issues. For example, with the Security Council deadlocked, the General Assembly adopted a resolution on the Gaza war that called for a “humanitarian truce” and an end to Israel’s siege.
The geopolitical churning is happening at a time when the world is at a crossroads, with its future direction uncertain. The challenges we face range from the lack of global leadership and widening inequality and growing authoritarianism across much of the world to the use and misuse of artificial intelligence and the global impacts of environmental degradation and climate change.
More ominously, too often those that cite international law are the ones breaching international law or rules, including the norms against territorial conquest, targeted assassination of foreign officials, and non-intervention and non-interference in other nations’ domestic affairs. The oft-mentioned imperative to uphold a “rules-based order” refers to the rules that even the rule-makers don’t observe when they come in the way of their perceived interests.
Meanwhile, America’s own close allies may be underscoring its waning power and influence. For example, in spite of America being their largest military, political and economic backer, Israel and Ukraine have spurned US advice. US officials have blamed Ukraine’s wide dispersal of forces for its stalled counteroffensive, which has resulted in a deadlocked war with Russia.
Israel rebuffed American counsel to scale back its counterattack and limit the mounting civilian death toll and devastation in Gaza, where the situation—in the words of Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—resembles “hell on Earth”. In its bid to destroy Hamas, Israel has already destroyed vast swathes of the Gaza Strip. By failing to restrain Israel, the US and its Western allies, in the eyes of much of the world’s population, have exposed the hollowness of their commitment to upholding basic human rights.
There may be no direct link between the Ukraine and Gaza wars, yet each is impinging on the other. For example, after the start of hostilities in the Middle East, scepticism about Ukraine aid has increased in the West, with Zelensky acknowledging that the new “conflict takes away the focus” from his country’s war. This is apparent from the stalemate in the US Congress over Biden’s request for $64 billion more in support for Ukraine. Even an EU decision on a $54 billion, multi-year financial assistance package for Ukraine has been delayed. As for the war in Gaza, the longer it continues, the greater will be the risk of a wider Middle East war, which would carry major global impacts just like the war in Ukraine has done.
Even without a wider war, a protracted conflict in Gaza could set in motion a geopolitical reordering in the Greater Middle East, where, with the exceptions of Iran, Egypt, and Turkey, every major power is a modern construct created largely by the British and the French. Israel’s war, for example, is already increasing the geopolitical role of gas-rich Qatar, a regional gadfly that has become an international rogue elephant by funding violent jihadists, including Hamas. Today, Qatar has become central to Israel-Hamas negotiations, including over the hostages.
Other developments, too, portend major shifts in the international order, including the West’s weakening power, Russia’s increasingly militarised economy, China’s stalling growth, and the growing weight of the Global South, where most of the world’s fastest-growing economies are located. Geopolitical risk has never been higher.
In this light, 2024 could be a pivotal year in charting the future direction of our world. The present turbulent times could bring about profound geopolitical reconfiguration, especially as the erosion in America’s leadership role accelerates. The growing weaponisation of trade and the use of sanctions, meanwhile, are undermining the multilateral system.
A new global order, however, is unlikely to emerge anytime soon. What the world is likely to witness is greater instability, including “might makes right” policies.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and First Lady Jill Biden wave during an arrival ceremony at the White House on June 22, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Sikh militancy may be practically dead in India, but it’s gaining traction among sections of the Sikh diaspora in America and in Canada. With California and British Columbia serving as their operational base, Sikh radicals glorify political violence, including honoring convicted or slain terrorists as “martyrs,” as they campaign for an independent Sikh homeland of “Khalistan.”
Sikh extremists have in recent months erected billboards advocating the killing of Indian diplomats (identified with photos), threatened attacks on the Indian Parliament and New Delhi Airport, staged a parade float on which the 1984 assassination of then–Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was reenacted, and mounted attacks on Indian diplomatic missions in Canada and California.
Cash rewards have been offered for providing home addresses of Canada- and U.S.-based Indian diplomats, who have been labeled “killers.” The militants have also held referenda in Canada on the secession of India’s Sikh-majority Punjab state.
Bands of Sikh radicals staged two separate attacks on the Indian consulate in San Francisco last March and July. The FBI says it is still probing the attacks, which included arson, but it has made no arrests so far. India’s National Investigation Agency, meanwhile, has released pictures of 10 militants it has linked to the first attack on the consulate.
Largely because the anti-India Sikh militants pose no direct threat to American or Canadian security, local law enforcement authorities have treated them leniently. But this approach is only emboldening the extremists, as underscored by the December 22 vandalism in Newark, California, of a Hindu temple, whose walls were defaced with pro-Khalistan graffiti.
Against this background, recent U.S. allegations about an Indian murder-for-hire plot that have buffeted Washington and Ottawa’s relations with India obscure the deep roots of a problem that burst into shocking view in 1985 when Canadian Sikh bombers targeted two separate Air India flights, killing 331 people.
While one bombing misfired, taking the lives of two baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, the other killed all 329 people, mostly of Indian origin, on a flight from Toronto. It was the deadliest act of aviation terrorism until 9/11. Twoseparate Canadian inquiries found that the bombings were carried out by Canada-based Sikh extremists led by Talwinder Parmar, whose extradition to India on terrorism-related charges Prime Minister Gandhi had earlier sought unsuccessfully.
Eight months before the twin Air India bombings, Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh sentries at her New Delhi residence, almost five months after Indian forces stormed the Sikhs’ Golden Temple to flush out armed militants. But before her assassination, she accused the CIA of seeking to destabilize India by aiding Sikh militancy. In that Cold War era, the U.S. was allied with Pakistan’s military regime, while nonaligned India was viewed in Washington as tilted toward the Soviet bloc.
The dramatic improvement in U.S.-India ties in the 21st century was underlined by President Joe Biden in June when he called the partnership with New Delhi “among the most consequential in the world, that is stronger, closer and more dynamic than any time in history.”
Yet the issue of Sikh militancy is again bedeviling U.S.-India relations today.
Unlike in the 1980s, when they waged a bloody insurgency in Punjab that was eventually crushed, Sikh militants now draw little support in India and are largely based in the Anglosphere, principally the U.S., Canada and Britain. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Sikhs in India are nearly universally opposed to secessionism, with 95 percent saying they are “very proud to be Indian.”
Simply put, Khalistan is almost entirely a demand in the Sikh diaspora. The separatists constitute a small minority of the Sikh diaspora, but wage a strident campaign that seeks to sanctify violence.
In September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada — home to the world’s largest Sikh diaspora, numbering 770,000 — said in Parliament that were “credible allegations” about the Indian government’s “potential link” to the June killing on Canadian soil of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh separatist who had been designated a terrorist by India. Trudeau’s bombshell accusation has strained Canada’s traditionally friendly ties with India, which categorically denied any involvement and forced out 41 Canadian diplomats on grounds that there must be parity in the two countries’ diplomatic staff strength. New Delhi also called Canada “a safe haven for terrorists.”
Then, in November, a potential rift opened in the U.S.-India relationship following an indictment that alleged an unnamed Indian official’s involvement in a failed plot to murder a New York–based Sikh separatist wanted in India on terrorism charges. The larger plot, according to the indictment in Manhattan, was linked to the June killing in Canada. The indictment alleged a murder-for-hire scheme that was remarkably amateurish: an Indian operative, at the Indian official’s direction, tried to arrange the killing on U.S. soil, but the hitman he hired long distance from India turned out to be an undercover law enforcement officer.
Despite the indictment, the White House declared that “we’re going to continue to work to improve and strengthen that strategic partnership with India.” India has set up a high-level committee to probe the alleged plot. But in an interview, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticized the lack of action against Anglosphere-based Khalistan militants who, “under the guise of freedom of expression, have engaged in intimidation and incited violence.”
The episode may just be a wrinkle in the U.S.-India relationship, yet the fact remains that the growing anti-India militant activities of Sikh separatists in America and Canada are starting to cast a shadow over Washington and Ottawa’s ties with New Delhi. They are also reopening old Indian wounds, not least those created by the Air India bombings.
The New York target of the alleged Indian murder plot, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, warned Air India passengers in November that their lives were at risk while threatening not to let the flag carrier operate anywhere in the world. Pannun had previously threatened to also disrupt Indian railways and thermal power plants, according to India’s National Investigation Agency.
How would the U.S. react if an India-based militant designated by Washington as a terrorist were to make such terrorist threats without India seeking to prosecute him? Ominously, mass-murderers, including the mastermind of the Air India bombings, have become the poster boys for Khalistan radicals operating out of North America.
If the U.S. wishes to deepen strategic ties with India — a country central to a stable balance of power in Asia — it must not ignore New Delhi’s growing concerns over the activities of American Sikh militants. By locking horns with China through a border military standoff for over 43 months, India is openly challenging Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done in this century. India is indispensable to America’s Asia strategy.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
Strategy of aiding China’s rise has come back to bite Washington and its allies
Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, with Henry Kissinger in Beijing in 2018: A lingering Kissingerian mindset still crimps U.S. policy toward an increasingly muscular China. (Pool via Reuters)
Henry Kissinger’s biggest diplomatic achievement — orchestrating America’s opening to China — led to a 45-year U.S. policy of aiding Beijing’s economic rise which, in turn, created the greatest strategic adversary Washington has ever faced.
The costs of this approach included empowering a more aggressive and expansionist China and perpetuating Communist Party rule.
When strongman Deng Xiaoping brutally crushed a student-led, pro-democracy movement in Beijing in 1989 through the military assault that came to be known as the Tiananmen Square massacre, Kissinger opposed imposing sanctions on China.
“China remains too important to U.S. national security to risk the relationship on emotions of the moment,” the former secretary of state wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “The U.S. needs China as a possible counterweight to Soviet aspirations in Asia, and needs China to remain relevant in Japanese eyes as a key shaper of Asian events.” He added a prediction: “China will exercise a moderating influence in Asia and not challenge America in other areas of the world.”
By that point, Kissinger had accumulated not just influence with the Chinese leadership but also personal financial interests.
Shortly before the fateful events of June 4, 1989, he had established a $75 million investment fund together with Chinese state-owned group CITIC. In addition, his private advisory company, Kissinger Associates, had already then been working in China on behalf of American businesses for seven years.
More fundamentally, the flawed policy initiated by Kissinger led the U.S. to continue strengthening China even after the Cold War had ended with the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991. By the time the U.S. began reversing course during the presidency of Donald Trump, its relative decline had already set in.
Kissinger’s foreign policy was based on the rampant exercise of American power but was devoid of concern for human lives. Across large sections of Asia, Kissinger’s legacy still rankles because of disastrous decisions that resulted in the deaths of countless numbers of people and destruction across vast regions.
As national security adviser to then-President Richard Nixon, Kissinger extended the Vietnam War by derailing a planned peace conference and ordered the carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos. The U.S. dropped more than7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, twice the amount dropped around Europe and Asia during World War II.
Under the following administration of President Gerald Ford, Kissinger aided Indonesia’s bloody invasion and occupation of East Timor as secretary of state.
The corrosive legacy of this modern Machiavelli has long weighed on U.S. policy in Asia. Nowhere is this truer than in America’s relations with India, the world’s largest democracy.
Developments during 1971 had a profound impact on the bilateral relationship and India’s strategic calculus. That year, the Pakistani military brutally resisted Bangladeshi efforts to seek independence, slaughtering up to 3 million people, holding 200,000 women in rape camps and forcing 10 million to flee to India.
Kissinger and Nixon were more than complicit in the Pakistani military’s rampage. They provided political cover for then-military dictator Gen. Yahya Khan to continue the massacres. With the help of Khan’s regime, Kissinger then made a secret trip from Pakistan to China in July 1971, paving the way for a Sino-U.S. rapprochement.
The opening to China thus came at a fatal cost to untold numbers of Bengalis while others were forced to flee to India. But that was not all. To try to prevent Bangladesh from breaking away from Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger even urged China to take military action against India.
In December 1971, after the massive refugee influx led India to intervene in the final stage of the nine-month independence conflict, the U.S. deployed a nuclear-capable naval task force led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise off the southern tip of India in a show of force.
Anticipating Sino-U.S. collusion, India’s then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had concluded a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union barely four months before Indian forces midwifed the birth of Bangladesh. The friendship treaty signed with Moscow in August 1971 helped deter China from military action against India.
The developments of that year cast a long shadow over U.S.-India ties. The U.S. tilt toward Pakistan and its opening to China not only spawned Indo-Soviet strategic cooperation, but America’s gunboat diplomacy also spurred India into conducting its first underground nuclear test just two and a half years later. This, in turn, led the U.S. and China to help Pakistan build its own nuclear bomb.
For the following quarter century, India remained under U.S.-led technology sanctions, as America cozied up to China and Pakistan, New Delhi’s regional adversaries.
The U.S.-India relationship has been dramatically transformed in this century. But Kissinger’s legacy has not been fully purged from the relationship.
In India’s neighborhood, U.S. strategic objectives continue to diverge from core Indian interests, especially in regard to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and counterterrorism.
The U.S. maintains close ties with Pakistan’s domineering military, condoning its current indirect rule over the country. Under a $450 million deal, it is modernizing the cash-strapped country’s fleet of Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter jets, which will make the aircraft more lethal to India.
There may be a greater convergence now of U.S. and Indian interests on China. Yet Kissinger’s China fantasies, to some extent, persist in U.S. policy, complicating the pursuit of a clear-eyed strategy to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping from moving against Taiwan.
For over 42 months, Indian and Chinese troops have been locked in a standoff along the two countries’ Himalayan frontier, but U.S. President Joe Biden has yet to utter a word about the confrontation, despite fatal clashes. This is a reminder that a lingering Kissingerian mindset still crimps U.S. policy toward an increasingly muscular China.
With the Kissinger-initiated rapprochement with Beijing having paved the way for China’s rise to dominance over parts of Asia, only India and Japan are today in a position to forestall Beijing’s hegemony across the continent. It did not have to be this way.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
It was America’s abandonment of a failed sanctions policy in favor of calibrated engagement that helped bring about the formal end of Myanmar’s military dictatorship in 2015. Today, US President Joe Biden’s administration must adopt a similar strategy – or risk allowing Myanmar to become a failed state.
As the Israel-Hamas war rages, the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza is grabbing headlines – as well it should. But another armed conflict, in Myanmar, is also causing mass suffering, with more than two million people internally displaced and over a million more streaming into neighboring Bangladesh, India, and Thailand. And it is attracting far less international attention.
This is not to say that outside forces are not engaged in the conflict in Myanmar. On the contrary, the United States seems to view supporting the rebel and pro-democracy groups attempting to overthrow the military junta – which returned to power in a February 2021 coup – as a kind of moral test. But its approach is doing Myanmar little good.
After the military overthrew Myanmar’s nascent civilian government – to which it had begun ceding power barely six years earlier – US President Joe Biden’s administration re-imposed wide-ranging sanctions, which it has since ratcheted up. But, so far, the sanctions have left Myanmar’s military elites relatively unscathed, even as they have unraveled the economic progress made over the last decade and inflicted misery on ordinary citizens.
The Biden administration has also deepened engagement with the so-called National Unity Government that was formed as an alternative to the junta. Though the US, like the rest of the world, has refrained from formally recognizing the shadow government, this has not stopped the Biden administration from providing “non-lethal aid” to its notional army, the People’s Defense Force, as well as to ethnic insurgent organizations and pro-democracy groups, under the BURMA Act. And the US has a history of interpreting “non-lethal” rather loosely. Non-lethal support for Syrian rebels, for example, included enhancing their operational capabilities on the battlefield.
The groups the Biden administration supports in Myanmar do not share a common cause, let alone a single political strategy. The shadow government has failed to win the support of all major ethnic groups, and its armed wing lacks a unified military command. The ethnic insurgent groups – some of which have records of brutality – are often more interested in securing autonomy for their communities than in building an inclusive federal democratic system, and some are willing to collaborate with the junta to get it. Complicating matters further, these groups’ territorial claims sometimes overlap.
It is impossible to say for certain whether growing US aid flows have fueled more violence in Myanmar. But there is no doubt that rebel attacks have lately intensified, with serious consequences not only for civilians, who often are caught in the crossfire, but also for neighboring states. Just last month, a major offensive – which enabled the rebels to gain control of several border towns and dozens of military outposts – drove at least 72 government soldiers to flee to India in just one week. The junta responded by intensifying its own lethal force, including punitive air strikes and artillery barrages.
Meanwhile, more than 32,000 ethnic Chin from Myanmar have taken refuge in India’s Chin-majority Mizoram state, where they live mostly in refugee camps. Thousands more have fled to another Indian border state, Manipur, fueling an increasingly violent conflict between the local population’s two main ethnic groups.
US aid to armed groups around the world has often fueled disorder and suffering, undercutting the quest for democracy. Judging by Myanmar’s deteriorating humanitarian situation, it seems that this may well be happening again. And Myanmar’s neighbors are being affected in much the same way the US would be affected if faraway powers sought to punish Mexico and aid rebel groups there. Yet, far from letting the neighboring countries take the lead in setting policy toward Myanmar, the Biden administration has insisted they toe the US line.
America’s uncompromisingly punitive approach to Myanmar’s military junta has hopelessly divided the ten-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations, preventing it from playing a constructive role in the conflict. Paradoxically, the US has sought to co-opt ASEAN to promote democracy in Myanmar, even though the majority of the group’s members remain under authoritarian rule.
India, the world’s most populous democracy, is increasingly concerned that the US approach is pushing resource-rich Myanmar into China’s arms. India not only shares long land and sea borders with Myanmar, but also views the country as a strategic corridor to Southeast Asia. Given the cross-border movement of people and guerrillas – some trained and armed by China – close counterinsurgency cooperation with Myanmar is vital for India’s security.
Biden’s misguided Myanmar policy seems to align with his public rhetoric about a “global battle between democracy and autocracy.” But elsewhere, his administration has adopted a more pragmatic foreign-policy approach, deepening strategic relations with non-democracies in order to counter China’s growing influence. For example, during the G20 summit in New Delhi this past September, Biden sought to mend ties with Saudi Arabia. He then visited Vietnam, calling it a “critical Indo-Pacific partner.”
Such realism should be welcomed: if the promotion of democracy and human rights overrode all other considerations, US diplomacy would have very few partners outside the West. But this approach needs to be extended to Myanmar. The US would stand a better chance of helping to end direct military rule there by opening up lines of communication with the junta and offering it incentives to reverse course.
It was the abandonment of a failed sanctions policy in favor of calibrated US engagement that helped bring about the formal end of Myanmar’s military dictatorship in 2015. If Myanmar is to avoid becoming a failed state, the Biden administration must adopt a similar strategy today.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
Israel, which withdrew from Gaza in 2005, has come full circle with its invasion of that territory in response to the atrocities perpetrated by the Hamas militants.
But, just as the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to oust from power a terrorist militia whose rise it had facilitated via its Pakistani intelligence connections for Afghanistan’s stability sake, Israel is tasting the bitter fruits of a divide-and-rule policy that helped midwife the birth of the Hamas “Frankenstein monster” that it is now seeking to subdue.
Treating the Hamas slaughter of innocent civilians as a kind of Pearl Harbor moment, Israel has vowed to “wipe out” the Gaza-based militia group through a military offensive that is one of the most intense of the 21st century, according to the New York Times. The terrorism-glorifying ideology of Hamas, however, cannot be crushed by military means alone, raising the question whether Israeli forces could get bogged down in Gaza the way America’s Afghanistan invasion turned into a costly quagmire.
The international focus on the war in Gaza has helped obscure the fact that Israel in the 1980s aided the rise of the Islamist Hamas as a rival to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel’s policy was clearly influenced by the U.S. training and arming of mujahideen (or Islamic holy warriors) in Pakistan from multiple countries to wage jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
The multibillion-dollar American program from 1980 to create anti-Soviet jihadis represented what still remains the largest covert operation in the Central Intelligence Agency’s history. In 1985, at a White House ceremony attended by several mujahideen, then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan gestured toward his guests and declared, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.”
Out of the mujahideen evolved the Taliban and al-Qaida. As then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton openly admitted in 2010, “We trained them, we equipped them, we funded them, including somebody named Osama bin Laden … And it didn’t work out so well for us.”
Hamas, for its part, is alleged to have emerged out of the Israeli-financed Islamist movement in Gaza, with Israel’s then-military governor in that territory, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, disclosing in 1981 that he had been given a budget for funding Palestinian Islamists to counter the rising power of Palestinian secularists. Hamas, a spin-off of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, was formally established with Israel’s support soon after the first Intifada flared in 1987 as an uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
Israel’s objective was twofold: to split the nationalist Palestinian movement led by Arafat and, more fundamentally, to thwart the implementation of the two-state solution for resolving the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By aiding the rise of an Islamist group whose charter rejected recognizing the Israeli state, Israel sought to undermine the idea of a two-state solution, including curbing Western support for an independent Palestinian homeland.
Israel’s spy agency Mossad played a role in this divide-and-rule game in the occupied territories. In a 1994 book, “The Other Side of Deception,” Mossad whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky contended that aiding Hamas meshed with “Mossad’s general plan” for an Arab world “run by fundamentalists” that would reject “any negotiations with the West,” thereby leaving Israel as “the only democratic, rational country in the region.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official involved in Gaza for over two decades, told a newspaper interviewer in 2009 that, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
To be sure, some others, including the U.S. intelligence establishment, have not endorsed the Israeli connection to the rise of Hamas, portraying it simply as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
About seven years before U.S. special forces killed bin Laden in a helicopter assault on his hideout near Pakistan’s capital, an Israeli missile strike in 2004 assassinated Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic and partially blind cleric. By drawing specious distinctions between “good” and “bad” terrorists, Israel and the U.S., however, continued to maintain ties with jihadis.
While Barack Obama was in the White House, the U.S. and its allies toppled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, creating a still-lawless jihadi citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep. They then moved to overthrow another secular dictator, Syria’s Bashar Assad, fueling a civil war that helped enabled the rise of the Islamic State, a brutal and medieval militia, some of whose foot soldiers were CIA-trained. And apparently shocked by the brutality of some of those U.S.-backed militants, and amid questions over the effectiveness of the policy, then-American President Donald Trump in 2017 is reported to have decided to shut down the covert Syrian regime-change program.
Israel, by contrast, persisted with its covert nexus with Hamas. With the consent of Israel, Qatar, a longtime sponsor of jihadi groups, funneled $1.8 billion to Hamas just between 2012 and 2021, according to the Haaretz newspaper.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for much of the past decade and a half, told a meeting of his Likud Party’s Knesset members in 2019 that, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” adding, “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Israel, like the U.S., may have been guided by the proverb, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But, as history attests, “the enemy of my enemy,” far from being a friend, has often openly turned into a foe.
America’s longest war ended with the Taliban’s return to power. The reconstitution of a medieval, ultraconservative, jihad-extolling emirate in Afghanistan has no direct bearing on a distant America. But Israel’s war against the monster it helped spawn will greatly shape Israeli security.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
American fantasies about China helped create the biggest strategic adversary the US has ever faced. For over 45 years, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, successive American presidents aided China’s economic rise as a matter of policy. Even as Beijing cheated on trade rules, stole technology, and flexed its military muscle, including against Taiwan, the US looked the other way, in the naive hope that a more prosperous China would liberalize economically and politically.
Despite the fundamental shift in America’s China policy introduced by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, US fantasies, to some extent, still persist, complicating the pursuit of a cleareyed strategy to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) from moving against Taiwan.
Consider, for example, President Joe Biden’s greater emphasis on placating Beijing than on strengthening deterrence, including by taking the possibility of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan seriously. The US needs to urgently help bolster Taiwan’s defenses by stepping up arms sales and military training. But with Biden continuing to prioritize weapons deliveries to Ukraine despite its failed counteroffensive against Russian forces, US arms transfers to Taipei are lagging years behind orders.
This year has stood out for Biden’s conciliatory moves toward China — from sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing and holding a summit meeting with Xi in California to emphasizing that the US-led effort is to “de-risk” the relationship with China but not to “decouple” from it.
While keeping the door to diplomacy with Russia shut, Biden has beseeched China to stabilize bilateral ties. By presenting the US, the stronger power, as more zealous than China to improve relations, Biden could embolden Xi’s risk-taking.
In dealing with China, Biden has a weaker hand that he would like. The deepening US involvement in the Ukraine and Israel wars is sapping America’s diplomatic and military resources. This could tempt Xi to move on Taiwan, especially because he knows the US would struggle to deal with a third war simultaneously. In fact, the longer the Ukraine and Gaza wars rage, the greater would be the likelihood of Beijing launching aggression against Taiwan.
Yet, while letting hope drive his overtures to China, Biden has not only doubled down on his Ukraine strategy but also is raising the specter of “American troops fighting Russian troops” if the US Congress does not approve US$61 billion in additional assistance for Kyiv. A US mired in a protracted Ukraine war would open greater opportunity for Beijing to move on Taiwan.
Despite the China-policy debate in the US reflecting more realism in recent years, illusions continue to guide Biden’s approach. One illusion is to believe, as Biden apparently does, that China would cooperate with the US on major global issues. Another illusion is that risks of aggression against Taiwan or miscommunication can be mitigated through regular dialogue, including military-to-military contact.
Such thinking misses the fact that China’s strategy centers on stealth, deception and surprise. These three elements have characterized China’s expansionism from the South China Sea to the Himalayas. Xi’s unpredictability demands greater US attention to shoring up deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Unfortunately, the China fantasies extend to some American scholars. For example, three China specialists argued in a recent essay that averting Chinese aggression against Taiwan demands that the US “reassure, not just threaten, China.” Their thesis effectively calls for rewarding China for steadily regularizing its coercion of Taiwan.
This is redolent of how the US looked the other way as China created and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. Indeed, at the height of Xi’s island-building drive, Obama argued in his final year in the White House that “we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.” Such appeasement helped turn China’s contrived historical claims to the South China Sea into reality without Beijing incurring any international costs.
Success in the South China Sea has made Xi more determined to annex Taiwan on his watch, especially as China erodes America’s military’s edge in the Indo-Pacific. Worse still, America’s entanglement in the Ukraine war has made Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression. Ukraine has secured key war materiel that could have gone to Taipei.
Yet, some Americans still argue that the US must first defeat Russia in Ukraine before pivoting to deter China. It is as if Xi would wait on Taiwan until the US has humiliated Russia on the battlefield and turned its attention to containing China!
Taiwan’s continued autonomous status is central to America’s safeguarding of its global preeminence. Yet, at a time when more than two-thirds of American voters worry about the 81-year-old Biden’s mental and physical health, the lack of US strategic clarity on how to deter or respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan is striking.
If Xi perceives that China has a window of opportunity to act during the Biden presidency, he will likely move on Taiwan. If that were to happen, China would likely emerge as a pressing military threat to the US itself.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
Recent trends and developments – from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to the US-China competition – may well herald a fundamental global geopolitical reckoning. The specter of a sustained clash between the West and its rivals – especially China, Russia, and the Islamic world – looms large.
The crises, conflicts, and wars that are currently raging highlight just how profoundly the geopolitical landscape has changed in recent years, as great-power rivalries have again become central to international relations. With the wars in Gaza and Ukraine exacerbating global divisions, an even more profound geopolitical reconfiguration – including a shift to a new world order – may well be in the works.
These two wars heighten the risk of a third, over Taiwan. No one – least of all Chinese President Xi Jinping – can watch the United States transfer huge amounts of American artillery munitions, smart bombs, missiles, and other weaponry to Ukraine and Israel without recognizing that American stockpiles are being depleted. For Xi, who has called Taiwan’s incorporation into the People’s Republic a “historic mission,” the longer these wars continue, the better.
US President Joe Biden understands the stakes and is now seeking to defuse tensions with China. Notably, after sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing, Biden’s planned summit talks with Xi on the sidelines at the November 15-17 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in San Francisco is set to steal the spotlight. And he and his G7 partners have stressed that they are seeking to “de-risk” their relationship with China, not “decouple” from the world’s second-largest economy.
Whatever one calls it, this process is set to reshape the global financial order, as well as investment and trade patterns. Already, trade and investment flows are changing in ways that suggest that the global economy may be split into two blocs; for example, China now trades more with the Global South than with the West. Despite the high costs of economic fragmentation, China, seeking to reduce its vulnerability to future pressure, has been quietly decoupling large sections of its economy from the West.
In no small part, the US has itself to blame for the current situation. By actively facilitating China’s economic rise for four decades, it helped to create the greatest rival it has ever faced. Today, China boasts the world’s largest navy and coast guard, and is overtly challenging Western dominance over the global financial system and in international institutions. In fact, China is working hard to build an alternative world order, with itself at the center.
Though the current system is often referred to in neutral-sounding terms such as the “rules-based global order,” it is undoubtedly centered on the US. Not only did the US largely make the rules on which that order is based; it also seems to believe itself exempt from key rules and norms, such as those prohibiting interference in other countries’ internal affairs. International law is powerful against the powerless, but powerless against the powerful.
When it comes to creating an alternative world order, the current conflict-ridden global environment may well work in China’s favor. After all, it was war that gave rise to the US-led global order, including the institutions that underpin it, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations. Even reforming these institutions meaningfully has proved very difficult during peacetime.
This is certainly true for the UN, which appears to be in irreversible decline and increasingly marginalized in international affairs. The hardening gridlock at the UN Security Council has caused more responsibility to be shifted to the UN General Assembly, which was forced, notably, to adopt a resolution on the war in Gaza calling for a “humanitarian truce” and an end to Israel’s siege. But the General Assembly is fundamentally weak, and, in contrast to the Security Council, its resolutions are not legally binding.
As US-led institutions deteriorate, so, too, does America’s authority beyond its borders. Even Israel and Ukraine – which depend on the US as their largest military, political, and economic backer – have at times spurned US advice. Israel rebuffed America’s counsel to scale back its military attacks and do more to minimize civilian casualties in an already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. US officials have blamed Ukraine’s wide dispersal of forces for its stalled counteroffensive.
Beyond the global reordering that the Sino-American rivalry appears to be causing, important regional shifts are possible. A protracted conflict in Gaza could set in motion a geopolitical reorganization in the Greater Middle East, where nearly every major power – except Egypt, Iran, and Turkey – is a twentieth-century construct created by the West (especially the British and the French). Already, Israel’s war is strengthening the geopolitical role of gas-rich Qatar, a regional gadfly that has become an international rogue elephant by funding violent jihadists, including Hamas.
If the conflict spreads beyond Gaza, the geopolitical implications would be even farther-reaching. Whatever comes next, Ukraine may well be among the biggest losers. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged, the war in Gaza already “takes away the focus” from his country’s fight against Russia at a time when Ukraine can ill afford a slowdown in Western aid.
Yet more forces and trends – including Russia’s increasingly militarized economy, China’s stalling growth, and the growing economic weight of the Global South – are making fundamental changes to the international order more likely. Meanwhile, the world is grappling with widening inequality, rising authoritarianism, the rapid development of transformative technologies like artificial intelligence, environmental degradation, and climate change.
Though the details are impossible to know, a fundamental global geopolitical rebalancing now appears all but inevitable. The specter of a sustained clash between the West and its rivals – especially China, Russia, and the Islamic world – looms large.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR, The Hill
The global horror at Hamas’s barbarism against children, women and the elderly, followed by the harrowing images of death and destruction from the Israeli military’s pummeling of Gaza, have obscured an ugly truth: Israel aided the birth of the Frankenstein monster it is now seeking to crush.
In the 1980s, influenced by the CIA’s training and arming of mujahideen (Islamic holy warriors) in Pakistan from multiple countries to fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Israel aided the rise of the Islamist Hamas as a rival to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah.
The first Intifada that flared in 1987 as a spontaneous protest movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands was a wake-up call for Israel. To divide and undermine the nationalist Palestinian movement led by Arafat, Israel lent support to the anti-PLO Hamas, which was formed in the early days of the Intifada under the leadership of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic and partially blind cleric.
Israel’s fundamental objective was to thwart the implementation of the two-state solution for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By aiding the rise of an Islamist terrorist group whose charter rejected recognizing the Israeli state, Israel sought to undermine the idea of a two-state solution, including curbing Western support for an independent Palestinian homeland.
Hamas actually emerged out of the Israeli-financed Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s military governor of Gaza, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, disclosed in 1981 that he had been given a budget for funding the Palestinian Islamist movement to help counter the support and power of Palestinian secularists.
U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer said in late 2001 that, “Israel perceived it to be better to have people [Palestinians] turning toward religion rather than toward a nationalistic cause,” resulting in the growth of the Islamist movement in the Palestinian territories “with the tacit support of Israel.” And a former American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, argued that, “Israel started Hamas,” adding, “It was a project of Shin Bet [the Israeli domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO.”
Arafat, for his part, called Hamas “a creature of Israel,” telling the Italian newsmagazine L’Espresso in late 2001 that “Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing and training from Israel.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who was involved in Gaza for more than two decades, echoed Arafat’s words in 2009, saying, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
Israel’s spy agency Mossad was long involved in a divide-and-rule strategy in the occupied territories. In a 1994 book, “The Other Side of Deception,” a Mossad whistleblower explained the rationale behind aiding Hamas: “An Arab world run by fundamentalists would not be a party to any negotiations with the West, thus leaving Israel again as the only democratic, rational country in the region.”
About seven years before the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. special forces in Pakistan, Israel assassinated Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin via missile strike in 2004. But by then Hamas — the first Islamic group to embrace the use of suicide bombers — had become an uncontrollable terrorist monster.
Israel’s tacit ties with Islamists paralleled America’s use of jihadists against the Soviet Union. The CIA-trained mujahideen became Al Qaeda and the Taliban. As then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in 2010, “We trained them, we equipped them, we funded them, including somebody named Osama bin Laden … And it didn’t work out so well for us.”
America’s troubling ties with Islamist rulers, groups and warriors were cemented when President Ronald Reagan’s administration employed Islam as an ideological tool to spur jihad against the Soviet forces that invaded Afghanistan. In 1985, at a White House ceremony attended by several mujahideen from Afghanistan, Reagan declared, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.”
Israel, like the U.S., may have been guided by the proverb, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But, as history attests, “the enemy of my enemy,” far from being a friend, often openly turns into a foe.
Yet Israel and the U.S. have both been reluctant to draw appropriate lessons from the Western roots of international jihadist terrorism. Under President Obama, America and its allies toppled Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, creating a still-lawless jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep. They then moved to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, fueling a civil war that enabled the rise of the Islamic State (or ISIS), many of whose foot soldiers were CIA-trained, anti-Assad jihadists.
Israel likewise maintained its covert nexus with Hamas even after the 1993 Oslo I Accords and its 2005 military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. In fact, Qatar, a longtime sponsor of jihadist groups, funneled $1.8 billion to Hamas just between 2012 and 2021 with the consent of Israel, which thought that a regular flow of funding would discourage Hamas from challenging the status quo.
Former President Jimmy Carter said in a 2013 CNN interview that he met with Hamas leaders several times and they appeared willing to accept the existence of Israel, but that Netanyahu’s determination to impose a “one-state solution” precluded any meaningful negotiations.
Netanyahu reportedly told a Likud party’s meeting in 2019, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” adding, “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Israel’s current military operations cannot crush Palestinian aspirations for statehood. But Hamas’s capability can be sufficiently degraded in the current war so that it no longer poses a potent threat to Israel.
The bigger challenge comes from the terrorism-glorifying ideology of Hamas and other Islamists. Western and Israeli funding of Islamists since the 1980s, including the help of oil sheikhdoms, has fomented militant Islamic fundamentalism that, paradoxically, targets the West and Israel as its enemies.
After the Gaza war ends, the West and Israel need to join hands to discredit the ideology of radical Islam through a long and sustained campaign of persuasion, not bombs and bullets.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
The latest round of talks between China and Bhutan over their unsettled border concluded last week with an agreement about the responsibilities and functions of a new joint technical team set up to demarcate the frontier.
The team was formed as the result of an agreement the two governments reached in August. That in turn followed a 2021 memorandum of understanding to expedite the border talks, which have been going on since 1984.
Despite these recent outward signs of accord, however, China and Bhutan in fact remain far apart and a resolution to the border talks is not imminent.
For China, the talks are a way to deflect attention from its incremental encroachments into Bhutanese territory, one pasture and one valley at a time. Beijing has linked fundamental resolution of its border claims to the establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations and securing permission to open an embassy in Thimphu.
That is a sensitive point. Under a 1949 treaty of friendship, Bhutan pledged “to be guided by the advice of the government of India in regard to its external relations.” In a revised 2007 treaty, this promise was reframed as a commitment by both countries to “cooperate closely with each other on the issues relating to their national interests.”
India, however, remains the de facto security guarantor of Bhutan, which is a diplomatic minnow. It has no official diplomatic relations with any of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and only India, Bangladesh and Kuwait have embassies in the Bhutanese capital.
To be sure, China has also dragged out the border settlement talks it launched with India in 1981. Seeking to replicate in the Himalayas its expansionism in the South China Sea, Beijing has made stealth encroachments on Indian borderlands. China’s ongoing military standoff with India at multiple points along their frontier was triggered by Chinese incursions into the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh in April 2020.
In Bhutan, Beijing is seeking to carve out a strategic footprint in the way it has done in nearby Nepal, which also has close ties to India. China’s influence has been on the rise in recent years in Nepal, as it has poured money into loans and infrastructure projects despite concerns from observers about the sustainability of the debt Kathmandu is taking on.
It was Mao Zedong’s 1951 annexation of Tibet, whose religion and culture have shaped Bhutanese society, that made China the neighbor of Bhutan as well as of Nepal and India.
Mao considered Tibet to be the palm of China’s right hand. In turn, he saw the “fingers” of that hand, “to be liberated” in due course, as Bhutan, Nepal, and what are now the Indian territories of Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Chinese incursions into the borderlands of the five fingers in recent years suggest that President Xi Jinping may be seeking to complete Mao’s expansionist vision.
Beijing has previously signaled a willingness to withdraw from areas it has occupied in northern Bhutan, including the sacred, monastery-rich valley of Beyul Khenpajong, if Thimphu were to give up some of its western borderlands. Since 2017, China has been encroaching on Bhutan’s western regions as well, including the Doklam Plateau, a Sino-Indian strategic flashpoint, despite a 1998 commitment “not to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border.”
By building military roads through Bhutanese territory and planting settlers on encroached land, China has effectively opened a new front on India’s most vulnerable point, the Siliguri Corridor that connects the country’s remote northeast to its heartland. The corridor, sandwiched between Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, is barely 22 kilometers wide at its narrowest point.
The settlements, roads and military facilities China has constructed on occupied land suggest that the encroachments may not be rolled back, even if Beijing eventually reached a border settlement with Bhutan.
If anything, Beijing has continued to up the ante against Bhutan. In 2020, it laid claim to the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, home to some of the world’s most-endangered mammals, in the east of Bhutan. The fact that this sanctuary can be accessed only through the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh suggests that the move was directed against both Bhutan and India. Chinese maps already show Arunachal Pradesh — more than twice the size of Bhutan — as part of China.
Against this backdrop, it is scarcely a surprise that a Sino-Bhutanese border settlement is still not on the cards. Indeed, Bhutanese Prime Minister Lotay Tshering said in March that demarcation of the frontiers of Bhutan, China and India where they converge at the Doklam Plateau can be done only trilaterally.
“It is not up to Bhutan alone to solve the problem,” he told an interviewer. “We are three.”
Bhutan remains treaty-bound to respect Indian interests. India remains opposed to the cession of Bhutanese territory to China, particularly around the Doklam Plateau. So while Bhutan and China may reach more incremental agreements on how to take forward their talks, the end still appears nowhere in sight.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
When on October 7 more than 1,000 Hamas militants entered Israel and carried out terrorist atrocities against largely civilians and took more than 200 hostages back to the Gaza Strip, they not only exposed perhaps the worst security and intelligence failure in the country’s 75-year history but also set in motion developments beyond their own control.
In stark contrast to the restraint India exercised in response to the 2008 horrific Mumbai terrorist attacks that were devised by the Pakistani military intelligence, Israel has treated the Hamas slaughter as a kind of Pearl Harbor moment. While India under then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chose to impose no costs on Pakistan, thereby emboldening the Pakistani military establishment to stage further major cross-border terrorist attacks, Israel wasted no time in planning and launching a massive military operation to “wipe out” Hamas and thereby help deter others in the neighbourhood from launching daring terror strikes against Israeli targets.
Today, as Israel pummels Gaza, its military offensive is deepening a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip while raising the prospects of a geopolitical reordering in the Middle East. Yet, despite satellite imagery indicating that a quarter of all buildings in northern Gaza have already been wrecked by Israeli strikes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected global appeals for a ceasefire, including from allies like France and Australia, describing them as calls for Israel to “surrender to terrorism”.
Israel has gone to war with Hamas several times before, including in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021. The scale of the present war is unprecedented, as underlined by Israel’s mobilisation of 360,000 reservists and the evacuation of 250,000 Israelis from their homes. With Israeli airstrikes flattening entire neighbourhoods in Gaza and killing thousands, the global horror at the barbarism of Hamas’ actions against children, women and the elderly is in danger of giving way to international revulsion over the growing human toll of the Israeli bombing campaign, which has become one of the most intense of the 21st century.
Hamas, though, has long used human shields in conflicts with Israel, and its armed militants remain embedded among Gazan civilians.
More ominously, with the Israeli military currently engaged in low-level fighting on three additional fronts—Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank—the risks of a widening war cannot be discounted. It is to avert a wider conflict that US President Joe Biden has deployed additional American naval and air assets in the Middle East. A wider war would undermine US interests, including by increasing the strategic space for China and Russia.
Biden’s new military deployments in the Middle East are in keeping with the interventionist foreign policy that he has pursued since taking office. Biden’s first military action (in Syria) came barely five weeks after he entered the White House.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden in Tel Aviv, October 18, 2023 (Photo: Reuters)
Most members of Biden’s national security team are considered “liberal interventionists”, or hawks on the left who cheered America’s past wars and who have helped deepen US involvement in the current war in Ukraine. It was the liberal interventionists who, under President Barack Obama, engineered the disastrous US-led interventions in Libya and Syria. Today, the ruling alliance of liberal interventionists and neoconservatives (neocons) in Washington is pushing Russia into an alliance with China.
It did not take long for the neocons and liberal interventionists in Washington to define the Hamas atrocities against Israel as an attack on American interests and call for a larger war to take on Iran. On Biden’s orders, the US military on October 26 carried out strikes on purported “Iranian proxies” in Syria. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin described them as “precision self-defence strikes” against two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its affiliates.
Biden’s new military deployments in the Middle East are in keeping with the interventionist foreign policy that he has pursued since taking office. It did not take long for the neocons and liberal interventionists in Washington to define the Hamas atrocities against Israel as an attack on American interests and call for a larger war to take on Iran
Meanwhile, unlike many wartime leaders, the increasingly unpopular Netanyahu is struggling to rally Israelis to his side, given the scant public trust in his leadership. Netanyahu’s effort to pin the blame for the Hamas surprise attack on the heads of Israeli military intelligence and Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence service, triggered a political backlash, forcing him to delete his post on X. “Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of war intentions on the part of Hamas”, his post had read. “On the contrary, the assessment of the entire security echelon, including the head of military intelligence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred and was seeking an arrangement”.
To be sure, the Hamas attack took even the US by surprise. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, in an essay published in the Foreign Affairs journal just before the October 7 attack, boasted that “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence”. After the Hamas atrocities, the journal allowed Sullivan to remove such lines from the online version of the essay.
Whatever the outcome of the Gaza war, the political career of Netanyahu, who has been in power for 14 of the past 16 years, seems doomed. Biden’s re-election prospects also have dimmed.
Biden’s approval rating, even before the conflict flared in the Middle East, had sunk to the lowest level since he took office. But Biden’s “unwavering support” for Netanyahu’s Gaza war has split the Democratic Party at home, antagonised America’s allies and partners in the Islamic world and, by alienating many young Americans and progressives, seriously set back his re-election chances. If he faces voters with the US still involved in two separate wars, he would likely lose.
THE ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT
Almost everything about the Israel-Palestine conflict is contentious, including its roots. Some experts trace the origins of the conflict to Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration during World War I in support of the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a minority Jewish population. Named after the then British foreign secretary, the declaration fostered Jewish-Palestinian enmity. Other experts, however, trace the roots of the conflict to the late 19th century, when the rise of Zionism encouraged Jewish migration to the Holy Land.
Aftermath of an Israeli airstrike that hit the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, October 24, 2023 (Photo: Getty Images)
The Israel-Palestine problem, like continuing conflicts elsewhere, including in the Indian subcontinent and Africa, is the direct legacy of British colonialism. The “divide and rule” policies of the world’s biggest colonial power, Britain, extended even to its exit strategy. For example, Britain ensured that not only would a united, strong India not be possible but also that an independent India would be perpetually weighed down by serious challenges.
Hundreds of millions in the world still suffer from the lingering consequences of British colonialism. As then-South African President Thabo Mbeki put it in 2005, colonialism left a “common and terrible legacy of countries deeply divided on the basis of race, colour, culture and religion.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged in 2011 that the legacy of British colonialism was responsible for many of the world’s enduring problems. “As with so many of the problems of the world, we are responsible for their creation in the first place,” Cameron said in Pakistan, a British-created state that still defines itself by what it is against—India—rather than by what it is for.
There may be no direct link between the two raging wars, yet each could impinge on the other. After the start of hostilities in the Middle East, ‘Ukraine fatigue’ in the West has become more apparent. Just as the Ukraine war led to soaring international food and fuel prices and hyper-inflation, the Gaza war, if it widens, could disrupt oil supplies
British colonialists liked redrawing political frontiers, as they did in the Middle East after World War I. Indeed, it was British colonialism that laid the foundation of the State of Israel in the period between December 1917 (when the British army occupied Jerusalem) and May 14, 1948, the date on which David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the birth of Israel with US support. In that period, while mollifying Palestinian élites by offering the prospect of an independent Palestine, Britain quietly encouraged Jewish migration to Palestine and subsidised Jewish settlements and defences against native Palestinians.
Ever since the establishment of the State of Israel, Israelis and Palestinians have been at war. Israel’s creation sparked the first Israeli-Arab War, which ended in 1949 with 750,000 Palestinians displaced and the sub-region divided into three entities: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip.
The biggest turning point came in June 1967 when Israel pre-emptively attacked Egypt and Syria and dramatically changed the political and water map of its sub-region. In just a six-day war, Israeli forces captured vast swaths of territory, seizing the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt; the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria. As a result, Israel more than tripled the size of the area under its control—from 21,000 square kilometres to 67,000 square kilometres.
The Six-Day War, as it is known, still stands out for the successful Israeli grab of the sub-region’s water resources. By seizing control of the water-rich Golan Heights and the aquifer-controlling West Bank, Israel reaped tremendous water spoils: the war left it in control of sizeable groundwater resources and all of the Jordan River’s headwaters.
The clash of the two coalitions increases the significance of the Global South as a ‘swing’ factor in geopolitics. The weight of the Global South is growing while the power of the West is weakening. The Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region is a key front in the struggle between the two coalitions for influence in the Global South
Groundwater is a larger source of supply than surface water in this sub-region. And the West Bank sits on substantial groundwater in the form of a multi-aquifer system, with the groundwater outflow to Israel estimated at a sizeable 325 million cubic metres a year. In 1981, Israel formally annexed the strategic Golan Heights, which not only serves as the headwaters of the Jordan River but also controls Israel’s major water sources, including those that feed its main freshwater lake, Tiberias (also known as Lake Kinneret, or the Sea of Galilee).
Simply put, Palestinians have been living under Israeli occupation since 1967, with Israel usurping Palestinian natural resources and tightly regulating any expansion of the water infrastructure in Palestinian areas.
Israel has made peace with some of its Arab neighbours, including Egypt, with which it signed the 1978-79 Camp David Accords and returned the Sinai Peninsula. Israel also signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994 but without returning the West Bank and East Jerusalem. After Egypt and Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain agreed in 2020 under the US-brokered Abraham Accords to become the third and fourth Arab countries to normalise relations with Israel.
Israel’s conflict with Palestinians, however, has persisted, despite the 1993 Oslo I Accords and the 1995 Oslo II Accords. The Fatah party led by Mahmoud Abbas controls the Palestinian Authority from the West Bank, while Hamas, until Israel recently declared war on it, was de facto governing the Gaza Strip after winning parliamentary elections in 2006.
Over the years, Palestinian frustration and anger have triggered a recurring cycle of violent protests and Israeli crackdown. In 1987, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip rose up against the Israeli occupation in what is known as the first Intifada, which lasted until 1993. Then in 2000, after then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa mosque—the third holiest site in Islam—the second Intifada began, lasting until 2005. During the height of that uprising in 2002, Israel began constructing a concrete, 712-kilometre barrier wall around the West Bank that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 2004 was violative of international law. Israel, however, ignored the ICJ’s call for dismantling the wall.
Israeli police on the Temple Mount after incidents of violence near the Al-Aqsa mosque, May 10, 2021 (Photo: Getty Images)
More fundamentally, Israel has gradually consolidated its regional pre-eminence, with the outcome of past wars precluding any real challenger. Its peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt have helped reinforce the message to others in the Arab world that it is too powerful to be taken on militarily, thus leaving only diplomatic options. Before the latest war began, even Saudi Arabia was discussing with the US a deal that would normalise its relations with Israel.
Today, Israel, despite a small population of 9.4 million, surpasses the combined military strength of its Arab neighbours—Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. It has one of the world’s most powerful militaries, with vast air power. And Israel enjoys a nuclear-weapons monopoly in the Middle East that only Iran is seeking to clandestinely challenge. Another key fact is that Israel’s $564 billion economy is larger than that of all of its immediate neighbours combined.
Hamas emerged out of an Israeli-financed Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip. Arafat called Hamas ‘a creature of Israel’. Israel, like the US, may have been guided by the proverb ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. This is not an Arab but a Sanskrit proverb. But, as history attests, ‘the enemy of my enemy’, far from being a friend, has often openly turned into a foe sooner or later
HOW THE CHICKENS CAME HOME TO ROOST
The outrage over the atrocities against Israeli civilians by Hamas has helped obscure Israel’s role in the rise of that terrorist militia. In the 1980s when the CIA trained and armed “mujahideen” (or Islamic holy warriors) in Pakistan from multiple countries to wage jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, thereby spawning Al Qaeda and international terrorists like Osama bin Laden, Israel aided the rise of the Islamist Hamas as a rival to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah.
The first Intifada that flared in 1987 as a spontaneous protest movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands shook Israel. To divide and undermine the nationalist Palestinian movement led by Arafat, Israel lent support to the anti-PLO Hamas that was formed under the leadership of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic and partially blind cleric, in the early days of the Intifada uprising.
The fundamental Israeli objective was to thwart the implementation of a two-state solution centred on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. By aiding the rise of a terrorist group whose charter rejected recognising the Israeli state, Israel sought to undermine the idea of a two-state solution, including curbing Western support for a Palestinian homeland.
In fact, Hamas emerged out of an Israeli-financed Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev disclosed that, as Israel’s military governor in Gaza during 1981-86, he routed Israeli government funds to the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the dominant Palestinian secularists.
US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer said in late 2001 that, “Israel perceived it to be better to have people [Palestinians] turning toward religion rather than toward a nationalistic cause,” resulting in the growth of the Islamist movement in the Palestinian territories “with the tacit support of Israel”. And a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, said, “Israel started Hamas,” adding, “It was a project of Shin Bet [the Israeli domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO”.
Ever since the establishment of the State of Israel, Israelis and Palestinians have been at war. Israel’s creation sparked the first Israeli-Arab War, which ended in 1949 with 750,000 Palestinians displaced and the sub-region divided into three entities: the State of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
Arafat, for his part, called Hamas “a creature of Israel”, telling the Italian newspaper L’Espresso in late 2001 that “Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing and training from Israel”. A former Israeli religious affairs official who was involved in Gaza for more than two decades, Avner Cohen, echoed Arafat’s words in 2009, saying, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”.
The spy agency, Mossad, was also involved in Israel’s divide-and-rule game in the occupied territories. In a 1994 book, The Other Side of Deception, Mossad whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky explained the rationale for aiding Hamas: “Supporting the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism sat well with the Mossad’s general plan for the region. An Arab world run by fundamentalists would not be a party to any negotiations with the West, thus leaving Israel again as the only democratic, rational country in the region”.
About seven years before the killing of bin Laden by US special forces in a helicopter assault on his hideout near Islamabad, Israel assassinated Hamas founder Yassin by a missile strike in 2004. But by then Hamas had emerged as a major terrorist menace after becoming the first Islamic group to embrace the use of suicide bombers.
The plain fact is that Israel’s tacit ties with Islamists paralleled America’s use of jihadists against communism and Soviet influence. As then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in 2010, “We trained them, we equipped them, we funded them, including somebody named Osama bin Laden… And it didn’t work out so well for us”.
Defence Minister Moshe Dayan (centre), Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin and General Uzi Narkiss (left) in the Old City of Jerusalem after its capture by Israeli forces in the Six-Day War of 1967 (Photo: Getty Images)
America’s troubling ties with Islamist rulers and groups were cemented when President Ronald Reagan’s administration employed Islam as an ideological tool to spur jihad against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. In 1985, at a White House ceremony attended by several mujahideen from Afghanistan, Reagan gestured toward his guests and declared, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.”
The Six-Day War still stands out for the successful Israeli grab of the sub-region’s water resources. By seizing control of the water-rich Golan Heights and the aquifer-controlling West Bank, Israel reaped tremendous water spoils. Palestinians have been living under Israeli occupation since 1967
Israel, like the US, may have been guided by the proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. This is not an Arab but a Sanskrit proverb that gained currency some 1,000 years before Prophet Muhammad. But, as history attests, “the enemy of my enemy”, far from being a friend, has often openly turned into a foe sooner or later.
Yet, Israel and the US have both declined to draw appropriate lessons from the Western roots of international jihadist terrorism. While Obama was in office, the US and its allies toppled Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, effectively creating a jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep. They then moved to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, fuelling a civil war that enabled the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), many of whose foot soldiers were CIA-trained, anti-Assad jihadists.
Israel likewise persisted with its dalliance with Hamas even after the 1993 Oslo Accords and its military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. In fact, Qatar, a long-time sponsor of violent jihadists, funnelled some $1.8 billion to Hamas between 2012 and 2023 with the consent of Israel, which naïvely believed that such regular flow of funding would discourage Hamas from challenging the status quo.
Violence in Nablus during the First Intifada, January 29, 1988 (Photo: AFP)
Former US President Jimmy Carter told an interviewer in 2013 that he met Hamas leaders several times and they appeared willing to accept the existence of Israel but that Netanyahu’s determination to impose a “one-state solution” precluded any meaningful negotiations.
Netanyahu, for his part, reportedly told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in 2019 that “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” adding, “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank”.
The Hamas surprise attack on Israel holds lessons for other countries on the frontlines against international terrorism, including India. The first lesson is to never rest on one’s oars as terrorists will innovate by crafting new means for launching surprise attacks. Another lesson is to impose sustained costs on state sponsors of terror. Israel, unfortunately, allowed Qatar to keep funding Hamas
By doing whatever it could to undermine the Palestinian Authority, Israel continued to empower Hamas until the chickens came home to roost recently.
Israel’s current military operations cannot crush Palestinians’ aspirations for statehood or destroy Hamas’ terrorism-glorifying ideology. Hamas’ capability, however, can be sufficiently degraded in the current war so that it no longer poses a potent threat to Israel.
A GEOPOLITICAL REORDERING?
The present confluence of international crises, conflicts and wars poses a growing global danger and highlights geopolitical churning at a time when the world is at a crossroads, with the United Nations (UN) in irreversible decline. The war in Gaza, like the war in Ukraine, is making the world more divided, including accentuating the North-South and East-West divides.
This trend portends greater international divisiveness in the coming years. The hardening gridlock at the UN Security Council, ironically, may increase the role of the traditionally weak UN General Assembly, which on October 27 adopted a resolution calling for a “humanitarian truce” and an end to Israel’s Gaza siege, which has largely prevented food, medicine, fuel and other essential goods from entering that enclave. While the US and Israel voted against it, the resolution was adopted with the support of 120 countries, including some of Israel’s Western allies like France and Spain.
In modern history, wars, not peace, have shaped the international order and international institutions. The present US-led global order, including the monetary order as symbolised by the Bretton Woods institutions, emerged from World War II. And so did the UN. This explains why meaningfully reforming the UN in peacetime has proved virtually impossible.
US President Bill Clinton with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the White House after the signing of the Oslo Accords, September 13, 1993 (Photo: AFP)
The present wars in the Middle East and Europe could lead to major shifts in the international order, especially if Israel’s war drags on or triggers a wider conflict.
There may be no direct link between the two raging wars, yet each could impinge on the other. For example, after the start of hostilities in the Middle East, ‘Ukraine fatigue’ in the West has become more apparent, signalling that Western support for Kyiv seems set to erode. Just as the Ukraine war led to soaring international food and fuel prices and hyper-inflation, the Gaza war, if it widens, could disrupt oil supplies.
What is clear is that the world is on the cusp of major geopolitical change. Such change could also potentially reshape the global financial order and trade patterns.
After all, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza essentially are great-power conflicts, pitting two major coalitions against each other. On one side are the US and its allies that are supporting both Israel and Ukraine. And on the other side are China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The deployment in Israel of US military officers with vast experience in urban combat, including a Marine Corps general, shows how deeply the Biden administration is involved in Israel’s Gaza war.
The clash of the two coalitions increases the significance of the Global South as a ‘swing’ factor in the global geopolitical competition. Countries in the Global South reject a return to the with-us or against-us approach of the Cold War era. For example, they have generally declined to participate in Western sanctions or otherwise isolate Russia.
The weight of the Global South is growing at a time when the power of the West is weakening. The world’s fastest-growing economies are largely in the Global South, which has long been frustrated by the sidelining of its interests in global discussions. The Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region is a key front in the struggle between the two coalitions for influence in the Global South. But America’s support for Israel’s Gaza war has set back US diplomatic interests in the largely Islamic MENA.
Israel has made peace with some of its Arab neighbours, including Egypt, with which it signed the 1978-79 Camp David Accords. Israel also signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. The UAE and Bahrain agreed in 2020 under the Abraham Accords to normalise relations with Israel. Israel’s conflict with Palestinians, however, has persisted, despite the 1993 Oslo I Accords and the 1995 Oslo II Accords
Israel’s war would likely have a significant impact in MENA, a region long blighted by Western military interventions. With the exceptions of Iran, Egypt and Turkey, every major power in the Greater Middle East is a modern construct created largely by the British and the French. Today, failed states like Libya and Yemen epitomise the enduring costs of foreign military interventions.
Make no mistake: The outcome of what Israel calls a “self-defence war” is likely to shape its own future. Without prudent and limited military objectives achievable without continuing mass civilian casualties in Gaza, Israel risks worsening its regional security environment. Directly occupying densely populated Gaza would impose major military and economic costs on Israel at a time when its armed forces are already overstretched and its economic growth is taking a beating.
More broadly, the Hamas surprise attack on Israel holds lessons for other countries on the frontlines against international terrorism, including India. The first lesson is to never rest on one’s oars as terrorists will innovate by crafting new means for launching surprise attacks. Too often, counterterrorism strategies seek to prevent a repeat of past types of attacks without looking ahead at innovative new techniques that may be applied by terrorists. Another lesson is to impose sustained costs on state sponsors of terror. Israel, unfortunately, allowed Qatar to keep funding Hamas.
Meanwhile, with the US now involved in two separate wars and its stocks of munitions already running critically low, Biden is working to mend ties with China, in the hope of averting a third war—over Taiwan. After sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing since May, the White House effectively suspended the 2022 US controls on exports of semiconductors and chip-making equipment to Beijing by granting South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix in October an indefinite waiver to export such technology to China.
Even before the Gaza war began, the US sought to partly address its dwindling reserves of munitions by shipping cluster bombs to Ukraine, as Biden acknowledged in a CNN interview. But now US munitions transfers to Israel are further depleting American stockpiles, even as a war over Taiwan can scarcely be ruled out. So, seeking desperately to stabilise Sino-US relations, Biden will hold a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders meeting, which will be held in San Francisco during November 12-18.
Before moving against Taiwan, Xi would like the Israel and Ukraine wars to last as long as possible so that US military stocks are furthered drained. If and when he moves on Taiwan, he could goad China’s ally, North Korea, to open another front. A two-war scenario in Asia, with simultaneous conflicts in the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula, would be a geopolitical and military nightmare for the US.
Israel’s war, meanwhile, is increasing the salience of Qatar, the gas-rich speck of a country that has transformed itself from a regional gadfly into an international rogue elephant by funding violent jihadists across the MENA region—from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas. Qatar hosts two major American military bases. And the US last year rewarded Qatar by designating it as its ‘Major Non-NATO Ally’ (MNNA), a status enjoyed by 17 other countries, including Pakistan but not India. Qatar played a key role in the US-Taliban accord that eventually returned that terrorist militia to power in Afghanistan.
Today, Qatar is leveraging its ties with Hamas to serve as a go-between for Israeli-Hamas negotiations, including over the hostages. As an Israeli official put it on October 25, “Qatar is becoming an essential party and stakeholder in the facilitation of humanitarian solutions. Qatar’s diplomatic efforts are crucial at this time.”
The US and Israel may have cosy ties with Qatar but that has not stopped Qatar from jailing eight Indian former navy men for allegedly spying on the Qatari submarine programme for Israel. After a secret trial, the eight were recently awarded the death penalty. The reported charges against the eight seem bizarre as Qatar’s naval expansion is taking shape in foreign shipyards, mainly in Italy and Turkey. Without being tamed, this rogue elephant could become a bigger threat to regional and international security.
Israel’s war, meanwhile, has sparked a debate over a key question: “Is it a war crime to kill civilians?” Experts are citing the laws of war, which consist of four 1949 Geneva Conventions, their two Additional Protocols of 1977, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, as well as various weapons conventions. Lost in the debate is a harsh truth: International law is powerful against the powerless but powerless against the powerful.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books on water: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
Taiwan is on the front line of international defense against expansionist authoritarianism. Yet, US President Joe Biden’s proposed new aid package includes US$61.4 billion for the war in Ukraine, US$14.3 billion to help Israel fight its war against Hamas, and just US$2 billion for security assistance for allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region.
The wars Ukraine and Israel are fighting should not obscure Taiwan’s vulnerability to a Chinese attack.
Indeed, the defense of Taiwan must assume greater significance for international security, given that three successive US administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, whose geopolitical map Beijing has fundamentally altered. Having already swallowed Hong Kong, China may be itching to move on Taiwan, whose incorporation Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has called a “historic mission.” By rehearsing amphibious and air attacks, China has displayed a willingness to seize Taiwan by force.
With the US attention now focused on the wars that Ukraine and Israel are fighting, Xi could be tempted to move against Taiwan at an opportune time. Xi must be observing how Biden’s transfers of critical munitions to Israel are depleting US stockpiles, which were already running low because the US sent Ukraine more than two million artillery shells and other ammunition. Xi could choose to wait until US arsenals deplete further.
In a Taiwan war scenario, the US would likely come to Taipei’s defense not singlehandedly but as part of a coalition, by seeking to rope in its two main allies in East Asia, Japan and South Korea. From Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to Ukraine, the US has led “coalitions of the willing” in wars.
In fact, any Chinese operation to cut off access to Taiwan would likely intrude into Japanese airspace and likely pull Japan into the conflict. This was apparent when five Chinese missiles landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone last year during China’s live-fire military drills around Taiwan that effectively simulated an air and sea blockade.
South Korea, however, may find it difficult to directly assist US-led operations to help Taiwan repulse a Chinese attack. This writer’s recent discussions in Seoul indicated that, given its overriding priority to deter a North Korean attack, South Korea would likely be reluctant to get drawn into a Taiwan Strait conflict for fear that that this could create an opening for North Korea to launch aggression — or at least military provocations — against it.
South Korea’s military strength, in any case, centers on its ground forces, not on naval and air forces that would be central to Taiwan’s defense against a Chinese attack.
In fact, a South Korea that directly aided Taiwan’s defense against a Chinese attack would likely face serious punishment from China, which could even push North Korea to open a front against South Korea.
To make matters worse, Russia also appears to be fashioning a North Korea card against South Korea. South Korea’s indirect supply of critical munitions to Ukraine via the US was a likely factor in Russia’s hosting of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last month. Russian President Vladimir Putin had warned that Seoul would face consequences if it supplied weapons to Ukraine.
Since late last year, South Korea has shipped at least hundreds of thousands of artillery shells to the US, thereby allowing America to continue supplying such munitions to Ukraine for use in fighting Russia. More broadly, the war in Ukraine has helped turn South Korea into a major arms exporter, including of tanks, missiles, howitzers, armored vehicles and warplanes.
Against this backdrop, Russia now seems willing to play the North Korea card against South Korea, including by dangling the threat of transferring sensitive technologies to Pyongyang. North Korea, whose second attempt to launch a spy satellite into orbit failed in August, is seeking access to Russian technologies in return for possibly aiding Russia’s war effort in Ukraine by supplying artillery shells and rockets.
In relation to China, the risk for Seoul would be that, even if it refrained from coming to Taiwan’s aid in a war scenario, Beijing would view South Korea as providing indirect assistance to US-led operations, including logistic and weapons support. Beijing thus could possibly egg on North Korea to rein in South Korea.
A two-war scenario in Asia, with simultaneous conflicts in the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula, would be a geopolitical and military nightmare for the US, which is currently struggling to meet its weapons commitments to Ukraine and Israel in the wars they face.
In this light, deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan ought to assume greater priority in US policy. Taiwan cannot be allowed to become the next Ukraine or Hong Kong.
Taiwan’s subjugation would significantly advance China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia and upend the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, not least by enabling China to break out of the so-called first island chain.
America’s role is central to Taiwan’s autonomous future. A US that fails to prevent Taiwan’s subjugation would be widely seen as unable or unwilling to defend any other ally, including Japan, which hosts more American troops than any other foreign nation. This, in turn, could unravel US alliances in Asia.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent claim that India’s government might be linked to the fatal shooting of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil has sent bilateral relations into a tailspin. Even if the current diplomatic ruckus eases, Canada’s refusal to rein in violent Sikh separatism will continue to fuel bilateral tension with India.
Rarely have two major democracies descended into as ugly a diplomatic spat as the one now unfolding between Canada and India. With the traditionally friendly relationship already at its lowest point ever, both sides are now engaging in quiet diplomacy to arrest the downward spiral, using the United States, a Canadian ally and Indian partner, as the intermediary. But even if the current diplomatic ruckus eases, Canada’s tolerance of Sikh separatist activity on its territory will continue to bedevil bilateral ties.
The current dispute began when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sensationally claimed that there were “credible allegations” about a “potential link” between India’s government and the fatal shooting in June of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist and Canadian citizen, on Canadian soil. India’s government fired back by demanding that Canada reduce its diplomatic staff in India, suspending new visas for Canadians, and accusing Canada of making “absurd” accusations to divert attention from its status as “a safe haven for terrorists.”
Nijjar was hardly the only Sikh separatist living in Canada. In fact, the country has emerged as the global hub of the militant movement for “Khalistan,” or an independent Sikh homeland. The separatists constitute a small minority of the Sikh diaspora, concentrated in the Anglosphere, especially Canada. Sikhs living in India – who overwhelmingly report that they are proud to be Indian – do not support the separatist cause.
With British Columbia as their operational base, the separatists are waging a strident campaign glorifying political violence. For example, they have erected billboards advocating the killing of Indian diplomats (with photos), honored jailed or killed terrorists as “martyrs,” built a parade float on which the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was re-enacted, and staged attacks on Indian diplomatic missions in Canada. They have also held referenda on independence for Khalistan in Canada.
But, much to India’s frustration, Canada has been reluctant to take strong action to rein in Sikh separatism. Trudeau’s first official visit to India in 2018 turned into a disaster after it was revealed that a convicted Sikh terrorist who had spent years in a Canadian prison following the attempted assassination of a visiting Indian state cabinet minister had made it onto the Canadian guest list. At last month’s G20 summit in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave Trudeau a dressing-down for being soft on violent extremists.
It was against this tense backdrop that Trudeau made his allegations about Nijjar’s murder. When countries have linked foreign agents to a domestic death – for example, in 2010, when the Dubai police chief accused Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, of killing a Hamas commander in a local luxury hotel – they have typically presented video, audio, or forensic evidence. And they have mostly avoided blaming the government that the foreign agents represent.
Trudeau, by contrast, cast blame directly on the Indian government without presenting a scintilla of evidence. He says the allegations are based on credible intelligence, apparently from a “Five Eyes” partner country (Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or the United States), but refuses to declassify the information or share it with Indian authorities.
Trudeau apparently has not provided “any facts” even to Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, a member of the Privy Council. And, according to the premier of British Columbia, the province where the killing occurred, the intelligence briefing he received on the matter included only information “available to the public doing an internet search.”
Meanwhile, Canadian investigators have not made a single arrest in the case. This has left many wondering to what extent Canada’s powerful but unaccountable intelligence establishment controls its foreign policy.
In any case, there is no doubt that Sikh radicals wield real political influence in Canada, including as funders. Trudeau keeps his minority government afloat with the help of Jagmeet Singh, the New Democratic Party’s Sikh leader and a Khalistan sympathizer. According to a former foreign policy adviser to Trudeau’s government, action was not taken to choke off financing for the Khalistani militants because “Trudeau did not want to lose the Sikh vote” to Singh.
Canada must wake up to the threat posed by its Sikh militants. Rising drug-trade profitability and easy gun availability in British Columbia have contributed to internecine infighting among Khalistan radicals in the province. The volatile combination of Sikh militancy, the drug trade, and gangland killings has serious implications for Canadian security, but it is not only Canadians who are in danger.
Under Trudeau’s father, then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s reluctance to rein in or extradite Sikh extremists wanted in India for terrorism led to the 1985 twin bombings targeting Air India flights. One attack killed all 329 passengers, most of whom were of Indian origin, on a flight from Toronto; the other misfired, killing two baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. With Khalistani militants continuing to idolize Talwinder Singh Parmar – the terrorist that twoseparate Canadian inquiries identified as the mastermind behind the bombings – history is in danger of repeating itself.
By reopening old wounds, not least those created by the Air India attacks, Trudeau’s accusations have created a rare national consensus in fractious and highly polarized India, with many calling for the government to put sustained pressure on Canada to start cleaning up its act. But more bitterness and recriminations will not restore the bilateral relationship. For that, both sides must use effective, cooperative diplomacy to address each other’s concerns.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
For nearly four decades since the deadly Air India flight bombing, New Delhi has put up with the Anglosphere countries’ sheltering of violence-espousing extremists from India. Now a critical moment has been reached when India needs to demonstrate the political will to keep these countries under sustained pressure so that they begin cleaning up their act at home.
The Khalistan movement may be practically dead in India but it is alive and kicking in sections of the Sikh diaspora living in the five Anglosphere countries, thanks to those nations tolerating the operations of extremist Sikh groups that are promoting or glorifying terrorism against the Indian state and its diplomats and citizens. These English-speaking countries, which are tied together by the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership, receive the bulk of Indian students studying abroad and also are home to large Indian immigrant communities.
Notwithstanding the absence of any real support for Khalistan in India and the rejection of religious secessionism by the majority of overseas Sikhs, violence-espousing separatism has grown among Sikh radicals sheltered by the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and, to a smaller extent, New Zealand. Worse still, these foreign-based militants are aiding, financing or orchestrating violence in Punjab and elsewhere in India. In cases where such extremists entered India to stage terror attacks, a number of them were arrested or killed by police in shootouts.
Abroad, the modus operandi of Khalistanis is to take control of cash-rich gurudwaras, using them as a base both for stoking militancy among other Sikhs and for funding terrorist activities by diverting proceeds from narcotics trafficking and worshippers’ donations. To win political protection, such foreign-based militants also contribute, at times generously, to political parties’ electoral campaigns, especially to help preferred candidates win. Canada is a prime example of that.
Control of gurudwaras, no less importantly, gives such militants cover as supposed religious figures. For example, the slain Canadian terrorist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who had an Interpol red corner notice against him since 2014 in connection with multiple terrorism cases in India, has been described in the Canadian media as “president” of a gurudwara and “a Sikh preacher”. Such labels help obscure the fact that Nijjar was a terrorist fugitive from India when he entered Canada on a fake passport under the name Ravi Sharma, before he eventually become the Canada-based head of the Khalistan Tiger Force.
The foreign-based Khalistanis also draw recruits from Punjab by financing their emigration or non-immigrant relocation to an Anglosphere country. Malleable youths in Punjab are sponsored for non-immigrant visas, including for work in gurudwaras. Once abroad, the youths, after indoctrination and financial help, serve as “foot soldiers” of the local Khalistan brigade.
Making things murkier is increasing evidence of an unholy nexus between some Anglosphere security or intelligence agencies and prominent Khalistanis. Key extremists are not just being shielded by such agencies; some also serve as intelligence assets, including possibly Gurpatwant Singh Pannu, an American-Canadian dual citizen who recently made headlines by ordering Hindu Canadians, on pain of punishment, to flee from Canada. It is telling that Pannu, like some other Anglosphere-based Khalistani terrorists wanted in India, continues to operate with impunity.
After Nijjar’s killing in June, Khalistanis in the US, especially those residing in California (where many Sikh radicals are based), received warnings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about potential threats to their lives. According to one report, FBI agents individually contacted such radicals to warn that their lives could be at risk.
It is such shielding of the militants, without reining in their growing violence-endorsing extremism, that resulted in twin attacks on the Indian consulate in San Francisco this year. The first occurred in March just hours after Khalistani militants stormed the Indian high commission in London and pulled down the Indian flag. And the second attack came less than four months later, with the Khalistani arsonists quickly posting online a video of the blazing fire they set inside the consulate compound.
Yet, having failed again to protect the consulate, the US merely condemned the attack. And, despite the fire the militants set inside the compound, it qualified the attack as “reported vandalism” and “attempted arson”.
How would the US have reacted had some militants staged twin attacks on one of its consulates in India, setting ablaze some structures, and India did little more than condemn the attack, including seeking to downplay it by calling it reported vandalism and attempted arson? Or how would Canada react if India sheltered gun-toting Quebecois who pursued violent anti-Canadian separatism from Indian soil?
The US inaction, for example, has led India’s anti-terror agency to issue a reward for information over the attacks on the San Francisco consulate. And the Indian government has been constrained to issue a travel advisory warning Indians of the “growing anti-India activities and politically condoned hate crimes and political violence in Canada”.
Meanwhile, Britain, despite an Indian-origin prime minister at the helm, remains a hotbed of anti-India Sikh and Islamist militancy. In fact, as if seeking to emulate its colonial-era “divide-and-rule” policy in India and elsewhere, Britain has long hosted Sikh and Kashmiri secessionists from India, doing little to contain their violent separatism.
Today, Britain has become a safe refuge for Indian financial fraudsters and those accused of terrorism and other crimes in India. London’s failure to protect Indian diplomatic missions and diplomats from militant assaults has led to copycat attacks elsewhere in the Anglosphere, including in San Francisco. The attack on the Indian high commission in London in March was not the first storming: On India’s Independence Day in 2019, for example, extremists from India and Pakistan attacked the high commission, smashing windows and causing other damage.
Oddly, in shielding leading Khalistanis, Western intelligence services are implicitly aiding Pakistan’s efforts to destabilize India. Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has actively aided the Khalistan movement, including facilitating military training. For example, the ISI-trained Nijjar went on to establish a training camp for new recruits near Mission, which is about one hour east of Vancouver by car. At this camp, new recruits were trained to use AK-47s and other weapons.
India’s concerns about the operations of Sikh and Kashmiri terrorists from the Anglosphere countries actually go back to the 1980s, when an Indian diplomat was murdered in Birmingham in Britain and a bomb downed an Air India flight from Toronto, killing all 329 people on board. Organized by Khalistani extremists operating out of Canada’s British Columbia province, the Air India bombing, until 9/11, was the worst act of terrorism in the sky.
Today, by continuing to shield dangerous Khalistani terrorists or extremists, the Anglosphere countries are imperilling Indian interests and security. It is as if some Western governments wish to employ the Khalistan card as political leverage against India. Allowing provocations from the Khalistani diaspora in the Anglosphere to go unchecked could even impinge on the interests of Sikhs in India by affecting the traditionally harmonious Hindu-Sikh relations and close bonds.
Canada is ground zero for Khalistan militancy
Canada is both a refuge and a haven — a refuge for migrants from many countries, and a haven for activists, militants and even international terrorist fugitives, including from major democracies like India.
On India, Canada has come full circle: From the early 1980s, it ignored India’s protests over the growing operations of violent Khalistanis from Canadian soil, including the evidence it received from New Delhi, thereby emboldening the extremists to carry out the 1985 Air India flight bombing and a couple of other attacks. In more recent years, by disregarding the detailed intelligence dossiers New Delhi has presented about how Canadian Khalistanis are fomenting terrorism in India, Ottawa brought bilateral ties under increasing strain, before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dealt a grievous blow to the Indo-Canadian relationship by hurling a bombshell accusation at New Delhi.
Trudeau’s wilful tolerance of violent Khalistanis has followed similar indulgence of Sikh terrorists by his late father. In 1982, then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau turned down the request of the Indian government headed by Indira Gandhi to extradite Babbar Khalsa chief Talwinder Parmar. Permitted to stay ensconced in Canada, Parmar went on to become the mastermind of the Air India flight bombing.
Two separate Canadian probes identified Parmar as the chief terrorist behind the bombing of Air India Flight 182. The main probe, a commission of inquiry led by former Supreme Court justice John Major, submitted its report in 2010—25 years after the bombing. The commission of inquiry was set up belatedly—only after a probe led by Bob Rae, an independent adviser to the minister for public safety, submitted its report in 2005. Ottawa extended little cooperation to New Delhi in investigating a bombing whose victims were largely Indian-origin Canadians and Indian nationals. In fact, in the period after the bombing, damning evidence about Canada’s sins of commission and omission was destroyed.
Despite the findings of the two inquiries, Justin Trudeau’s partner in keeping his minority government afloat, New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, told CBC Television in 2017 that he doubted that Parmar was the true architect of the Air India bombing. He also refused to denounce Canadian Sikhs who glorify Parmar as a martyr. Jagmeet Singh—“a committed Khalistani,” in the recent words of another prominent Canadian Sikh politician, Ujjal Dosanjh—was denied an Indian visa in 2013 over his “anti-India” activities.
Meanwhile, the growing nexus between Sikh militants and criminal and drug networks has contributed to increasing gangland killings in British Columbia. Indeed, Nijjar’s murder came amid sharpening inter-gang rivalries among Khalistanis, largely driven by mounting profitability from the drug trade and easy availability of guns.
Against this backdrop, Canada today serves as ground zero for Khalistan militancy, with British Columbia the global headquarters of Sikh extremists promoting or glorifying terrorism. In per-capita terms, there seem to be far more Khalistanis in Canada than any other country, including India, Britain or the US.
Ominously, money and muscle have helped the Khalistan movement to rapidly enlarge its footprint among Sikhs in Canada, currently estimated to number about 7.7 lakhs. Indeed, such is the growing sway of Khalistanis that they already dominate Sikh politics in Canada, drowning out the voices of moderate Sikhs that do not support secessionism. The majority of Canadian Sikhs, however, remain peaceful and uninterested in violent religious separatism.
But, with Canadian authorities looking the other way, the Khalistani extremists have incited hate and violence, held a Khalistan-linked referendum, and glorified then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1984 assassination through a parade float in Brampton, Ontario, that sought to immortalize her assassins. The Khalistanis have also issued death threats and announced cash rewards for attacks. Their targets include Indian diplomats, not just in Canada but also elsewhere, including the current Indian ambassador to the US, who is a Sikh.
Still, internecine infighting among rival factions continues to plague the Khalistan movement in Canada. The toxic intersection of violent separatism, drug trade and gun culture holds significant implications for Canada’s own long-term security. Yet Ottawa remains reluctant to crack down on this nexus.
Trudeau’s political blunders, including cultivating the vote of radical Sikhs and turning a blind eye to the hate and violence they incite, have now extended to personally meeting with and honouring a Nazi war criminal, before arranging for this Canada-based Nazi veteran from Ukraine to receive a standing ovation in the Canadian Parliament in the presence of a cheering Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The tribute to the Nazi veteran, without vetting his background, and the Trudeau-initiated diplomatic spat with India are both helping to shine a spotlight on Canada’s unenviable status as a safe haven for terrorists, war criminals and other extremists from multiple countries. Canada has long been home to international fugitives, with Pierre Trudeau once famously saying that he chose not to prosecute Nazi war criminals in Canada lest it inflame European expat communities.
Meanwhile, on Justin Trudeau’s watch, there has been a steady diminishment of Canada’s place in the world, thanks to his missteps and blunders.
For example, Justin Trudeau inadvertently highlighted his cosy ties to Khalistanis by including a convicted Sikh terrorist, Jaspal Atwal, on his 2018 trip to India. The visit was marred by revelations that Atwal, who went to prison after being convicted in 1986 of the attempted assassination of an Indian state cabinet minister visiting Vancouver Island, was formally invited to a reception in honour of Trudeau at Canada House, the official residence of the country’s high commissioner in New Delhi. During the earlier Mumbai leg of the visit, Atwal was photographed posing with Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, as well as Canadian cabinet ministers and MPs.
In fact, during Trudeau’s disastrous 2018 trip to India, the then chief minister of Punjab, Amarinder Singh, made a point of handing the Canadian PM in Amritsar a list of terrorism-promoting Khalistani operatives based in Canada. Nijjar was one of the names on the list. Earlier, while voicing concern that Sikh extremists were “infiltrating” Trudeau’s cabinet, Amarinder Singh famously snubbed Trudeau’s then defence minister, Harjitt Sajjan, when Sajjan visited India in 2017.
Take another disquieting example: Canada has given refuge to a key assassin of Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has repeatedly urged Trudeau over several years to extradite Nur Chowdhury, who is thought to have personally fired the bullets that killed her father. Chowdhury was convicted in absentia. But Trudeau continues to drag his feet over the issue.
The latest blunder in Ottawa in honouring a Nazi war criminal further dents Canada’s international image—and Trudeau’s standing at home.
Canada must start cleaning up its act at home, or else its growing reputation as a sanctuary for international fugitives would become indelibly etched in the collective consciousness of the world. India has already officially labelled Canada as “a safe haven for terrorists, for extremists, and for organized crime”, as the Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson put it.
Trudeau bites off more than he can chew
Let us be clear: Trudeau’s September 18 statement in the House of Commons was not about Canadian security agencies finding evidence of India’s role in Nijjar’s killing but, as he put it, “credible allegations” of a “potential” India “link” to the murder. Months after Nijjar’s killing, Canadian police have not been able to arrest a single suspect in connection with the shooting.
With no arrests, let alone any evidence, Trudeau aired just allegations, knowing that such a step would seriously damage Canada’s relations with the world’s fastest-growing major economy. The phrase “credible allegations”, in fact, is an oxymoron. There is credible evidence, but any allegation is simply an allegation.
When India sought to share intelligence with Canada after 2014 on the violent Sikh separatists operating from Canadian soil, Ottawa refused to take it, contending that “intelligence is not evidence”. That contention is correct: Intelligence is not evidence but mere information whose authenticity and evidentiary value must be established.
Yet, in an ironical twist, Canada’s prime minister has now levelled serious allegations against India on the basis of intelligence that Ottawa will not even share with India. As the Indian external affairs ministry has categorically stated, “No specific information has been shared by Canada on this case, either then or before or after”.
Look at another jarring paradox: Since taking office some eight years ago, Trudeau has refused to cooperate with New Delhi to help address longstanding Indian concerns over the growing Canadian Sikh extremism directed against India. But Trudeau now, with US backing, insists that India cooperate with Canada in probing the Canadian government’s allegations, without Ottawa declassifying the claimed intelligence about the India link to the killing or confidentially sharing the intelligence with New Delhi.
If Trudeau had any convincing intelligence linking India to the killing, he would by now have declassified it, instead of repeatedly airing mere suspicions. The absence of hard evidence, in fact, has led the Trudeau government to plant stories in the Canadian media about intercepts of communications between Indian diplomats after Nijjar’s murder. The intercepts might be about celebratory chatter over a dreaded terrorist’s death, but such conversations can hardly attest to an Indian government role in the killing.
Indeed, with Trudeau having already rushed to a conclusion before Canadian security agencies have managed to collect evidence, we may never know the truth about Nijjar’s killing. One critical eyewitness to the murder, Malkit Singh, who was Nijjar’s gurudwara aide, has suggested that the killers were Sikhs. “He described them as wearing ‘a Sikh get-up’, with hoodies pulled over small pughs [pagris] on their heads and masks over their ‘bearded faces’,” according to a Washington Post report.
Contrast Trudeau’s evidence-free allegations against India with the video, audio or forensic evidence other countries have presented in the past while linking foreign agents to a killing on their soil. And also contrast Trudeau’s direct linking of the Indian government to the killing with the restraint other countries have often exercised, casting the blame on foreign agents for a murder but not the governments they represent so as not to preclude the involvement of rogue elements.
For example, when 11 Israeli agents assassinated Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room in 2010, the United Arab Emirates painstakingly collected a trove of investigative evidence before publicly releasing compelling surveillance footage and photographs of the agents—but without accusing the Israeli government or Mossad of involvement.
The US government’s reaction to Trudeau’s allegations against New Delhi was initially muted to help protect America’s relationship with India. But after the American and Canadian media reported that Canada had received no support from its Western allies in its diplomatic spat with India, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken chipped in. But their grating words for New Delhi could only have ruffled Indian feathers.
Sullivan, for example, stated that was no “special exemption” for any country in the matter of extra-territorial killings and that there has to be accountability, which is why the US, he said, was in touch with India at “high levels”. But why would India, to defend its interests, seek any “special exemption” from the Big Daddy of extra-territorial assassinations? While India has never before been accused of assassinating anyone on Western soil, the US is the longstanding world record holder in extra-territorial assassinations.
Here is the reality check: America’s siding with Canada shows that its relationship with any of its Five Eye allies will always take precedence over its ties with India. After all, the Five Eye countries are America’s closest allies and bound together by treaty arrangements, while India is just a strategic partner.
But the fact that the intelligence Washington shared with Ottawa, however sketchy, helped embolden Trudeau to pick a geopolitical fight with India could have a bearing on the direction of U.S.-India ties, not least by reinforcing India’s imperative for preserving its strategic autonomy. The task of building mutual trust becomes harder.
Less clear is what Ottawa and, implicitly, Washington have sought to achieve against India through allegations arising from the murky world of espionage, where the line between information and disinformation gets easily blurred for geopolitical ends. Can vague, unsubstantiated allegations about a “potential” India link to a terrorist killing serve any purpose, other than to make New Delhi rethink its nascent foreign-policy tilt toward the West?
More fundamentally, Trudeau’s gambit, instead of putting India in the international dock, appears to have boomeranged. At home, Trudeau has faced increasing pressure to come clean and present hard evidence to back his allegations against India.
Furthermore, his allegations, instead of creating international solidarity against India, are only helping to focus global attention on what prominent Canadians have long expressed concern about—Canada’s role as a safe haven for terrorists, war criminals and other extremists. India’s longstanding concern over Ottawa’s reluctance to rein in the Khalistan movement and extradite extremists wanted in India for terrorist acts is now getting attention even in the Canadian media.
New Delhi, however, should not expect Trudeau to back down. Trudeau’s track record shows that he never admits that he was wrong. Instead, he seeks to palm off blame to someone else. Even in the tribute-to-a-Nazi case, he has refused to take responsibility, with the House of Commons speaker becoming the fall guy.
The truth about Trudeau, however unpalatable, is that he is a serial hypocrite. For example, while shedding crocodile tears over the killing of a dreaded Sikh terrorist that his government long shielded, including by rebuffing New Delhi’s demand to send him over for prosecution, Trudeau has cited the importance of a “rules-based order.” But in August 2022, Trudeau extolled the US assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a 71-year-old retired terrorist living with his children and grandchildren in a Kabul apartment, hailing the hit-job as “a step toward a safer world”.
Trudeau has accused New Delhi of interfering in Canada’s internal affairs. Yet, illustrating his blatant interference in India’s domestic affairs, Trudeau in 2020 cheered on anti-government Indian farmers blockading highways near New Delhi. While defending protesters’ rights half a world away, Trudeau declared a national emergency in Canada last year to crush peaceful protests against his mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy, calling their blockades a security threat akin to terrorism. The gun-toting terrorists in Canada, meanwhile, remain untouched by his government.
It is such stunning hypocrisy that has contributed to plunging Indo-Canadian relations to their lowest point ever. Not surprisingly, India today identifies terrorism as the core issue troubling its ties with Ottawa, with its travel advisory warning Indian nationals that Canada is plagued by “politically condoned” violence.
Canada’s indulgence of Sikh separatists, in general, and Sikh terrorists, in particular, has increasingly rankled India. During his term in office, Trudeau has employed freedom of expression as a cover to allow rising anti-India activities of Sikh extremists, as if Canada has no laws against hate or incitement to violence. The extremists openly espouse political violence as a legitimate tool to achieve Khalistan.
With the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) content to look the other way, Canada has done little to ensure that its territory is not used for terrorist financing. Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Director Ward Elcock has raised the question whether Ottawa is wilfully “tolerating terrorist groups operating from Canada”. As Elcock put it, “There is a history in this country of Sikh extremism verging into terrorism”. Cutting off terrorist financing would help choke the Khalistan movement in Canada.
But make no mistake: The rising concern over Canada’s harbouring of terrorists and extremists is not just about Indo-Canadian relations or Indian security; it also holds implications for wider security. A day may come when Canadian Khalistanis carry out a major terrorist strike in Canada or a third country.
After all, Ottawa appears to have learned no lesson from the 1985 Air India flight bombing. Nor is there recognition in Ottawa that it is easier to damage a bilateral relationship with a fellow democracy than to rebuild it.
The emergence of Canada as the international epicentre of Khalistan militancy, however, should not obscure the broader role of the Anglosphere in sheltering and shielding Sikh extremists fomenting terrorism in India. Still, good relations with the Anglosphere countries are pivotal to the wider pursuit of India’s diplomatic interests. India must leverage access to its huge market, including trade deals, as well as geopolitical and military cooperation to bring the Anglosphere countries under sustained pressure to stop tolerating violent Khalistanis.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books on water: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
Under Trudeau, Canada has become Khalistani extremism’s global hub. He cannot cite free speech law to defend inaction as Canada has other laws against hate and incitement to violence that should be invoked.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has tried to deflect attention away from his cosy political ties to radicals and his government’s indulgence of violence-espousing Khalistanis by seeking to put India in the dock with an astounding allegation. Trudeau’s evidence-free claim should not obscure a larger problem confronting India — the five Anglosphere countries’ sheltering of Sikh extremists that endorse violence as a legitimate tool to achieve Khalistan.
The Khalistan idea has few takers among Sikhs in India, as the highly regarded, Washington-based Pew Research Centre highlighted in a poll released in 2021. The survey found that 95% of Sikhs are “very proud to be Indians”. In fact, 70% of Sikhs believe “a person who disrespects India cannot be a Sikh”. Even in Canada and other English-speaking countries, Khalistan supporters make up just a fraction of the Sikh diaspora.
Yet an unholy combination of two factors is keeping Khalistan militancy alive overseas. The first is Pakistan’s funding, support and possible training of Khalistanis in a bid to destabilize India, as a Hudson Institute report brought out.
More surprising is the role of Canada, Britain, the US, Australia and, marginally, New Zealand, as if no lesson has been learned from the 1985 bombing by Khalistani extremists of an Air India flight from Toronto that killed all 329 people on board. These countries continue to look the other way as Sikh radicals step up their militancy from Western soil, including issuing death threats and calls to violence. The inaction has emboldened the extremists to vandalize Indian diplomatic missions and Hindu temples and threaten Indian diplomats.
Long before Trudeau’s allegation plunged Indo-Canadian ties to their lowest ebb, New Delhi was urging the Anglosphere countries to rein in the rising tide of Khalistani militancy directed at India. Instead what India got were nasty surprises — from militants storming the Indian High Commission in London and dual attacks on the Indian consulate in San Francisco to an anti-India parade in Canada seeking to immortalize Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassins.
Khalistani militancy is particularly acute in Canada, which explains why its British Columbia province has become the global hub of the Khalistan movement. With India’s patience wearing thin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a frosty meeting with Trudeau during the G-20 summit, gave him a dressing-down for being soft on Sikh terrorists.
To keep his minority government afloat, Trudeau depends on support from the New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, a Khalistan sympathizer. With the tail wagging the dog, Trudeau has pandered to hardline Canadian Sikhs. Take just one example: Trudeau cheered on Indian farmers blockading highways near New Delhi and then later, in the style of an autocrat, declared a national emergency in Canada and crushed peaceful protests against his COVID-19 vaccination policy, calling their blockades a security threat akin to terrorism.
Yet Trudeau refuses to act against the real terrorists in Canada that threaten Indian security. Harbouring violent extremists also threatens Canadian and international security because a day may come when Canadian Khalistani militants carry out a major terrorist strike within Canada or another Western country.
Canada’s record of shielding Khalistani terroristsis a case of“like father, like son”. Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, turned down Indira Gandhi’s 1982 request for extradition of Babbar Khalsa chief Talwinder Parmar who, according to Canada’s official probe, went on to become the mastermind of the Air India flight bombing. Today, the growing nexus between Khalistani extremists and criminal bands in British Columbia has spawned gangland killings.
In this light, Trudeau’s allegation against India clearly seems a diversionary tactic to help obscure sordid facts, including the continued cover he is giving to operations of Khalistani militants in the name of free speech. His allegation is based not on any police-collected evidence but on purported inputs from the murky world of espionage. In the spy games, geopolitics often trumps facts.
India should not allow Trudeau to deflect attention from Canada’s answerability on becoming a safe haven for militants promoting or glorifying terrorism. Canada cannot cite free speech law to defend inaction because it has other laws against hate or incitement to violence that ought to be invoked. Without curbing its Khalistani militancy, Canada could undermine its internal security, becoming one day the Pakistan of the West.
Indian diplomacy must also exert sustained pressure on the other Anglosphere countries to stop countenancing the rising anti-India activities of extremist Khalistani groups operating from their territories. The paradox is that even as a tilt toward the West is becoming apparent in Indian foreign policy, the Anglosphere countries seem to be looking at the violent Khalistani extremists they shelter as potential leverage against India. Mutual respect and mutual security are indispensable to an informal alliance between the West and India.
For starters, Canada and India must arrest the downward spiral in their relations through quiet diplomacy. With no significant conflict of strategic interest, these two major democracies ought to be close partners. Trudeau can secure India’s cooperation on the murder probe if he is willing to clean up his act at home — in Canada’s own long-term interest.
The end of China’s four-decade-long economic boom has thrown into relief the emergence of Asia’s other demographic giant as a geopolitical and economic force. But while India appears stable and resurgent under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, its future will depend on its ability to maintain political stability and rapid economic growth.
China’s sharp economic slowdown has raised alarm bells around the world. But it has also thrown into relief the rise of another demographic powerhouse next door. The Indian economy grew at an impressive 7.8% annual rate in the second quarter of 2023, and the country recently reached an important milestone by becoming the first to land a spacecraft on the Moon’s potentially water-rich south pole. And, India’s ascent, unlike China’s, has not been accompanied by an increasingly assertive foreign policy or an appetite for other countries’ territory.
As India’s geopolitical, economic, and cultural clout grows, so does its global footprint. China’s “decline,” as some have begun to call the conclusion of the country’s four-decade-long economic boom, opens new opportunities for the Indian economy and other developing and emerging countries.
Earlier this year, India reached another milestone when its population officially surpassed that of China, which had been the world’s most populous country for more than 300 years. While China’s shrinking, rapidly aging population is likely to impede economic growth and may curtail its geopolitical ambitions, India – one of the world’s youngest countries, with a median age of 28.2 – is poised to reap a huge demographic dividend.
But the driving force behind India’s emergence as a major global power is its rapid economic growth. While India’s GDP is still smaller than China’s, the country is currently the world’s fastest-growing major economy and is projected to account for 12.9% of global growth over the next five years, surpassing the United States’ 11.3% share.
In addition to fueling a consumption boom, India’s youthful population is also driving innovation, as evidenced by the country’s world-class information economy and its recent moon landing, which the country managed to achieve despite a national space budget equivalent to roughly 6% of what the US spends on space missions. Having already surpassed the United Kingdom, its former colonial ruler, India’s GDP is poised to overtake that of Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, behind the US and China.
Given its increasingly unstable neighborhood, it should come as no surprise that India has the world’s third-largest defense budget. The deepening strategic alliance between China and Pakistan underscores India’s precarious position as the only country bordering two nuclear-armed revisionist states with expansionist ambitions. Moreover, for the past three years, India has been locked in a tense military standoff with China along its Himalayan border. Bilateral relations, marked by intermittent clashes in the disputed Tibet-Ladakh border region, are at their lowest point in decades.
By confronting China despite the risk of a full-scale war, India has challenged Chinese power in a way no other country has done in this century. But despite leaning toward forging closer ties with the West, India remains hesitant to enter into formal military alliances with Western countries.
Western powers are partly to blame. US President Joe Biden’s reluctance to comment on the Sino-Indian military standoff, let alone openly support India, has sent a clear signal that India is responsible for its own defense. Given that the country’s future growth hinges on its ability to defend itself against external threats, India will likely step up its efforts to modernize its conventional armed forces and enhance its nuclear deterrence.
The escalating geopolitical rivalry between China and India could also impede efforts to unite the Global South and transform the BRICS group into a credible alternative to the G20 and G7. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) recently agreed to expand the group by adding six new members: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, Argentina, and Iran. Given the 11 members’ divergent interests, BRICS+ will likely find it even harder to reach consensus on any major issue.
Meanwhile, China’s economic slump could prompt President Xi Jinping to double down on his expansionist agenda. Biden recently characterized the stagnating Chinese economy as a “ticking time bomb,” warning that, “When bad folks have problems, they do bad things.” China’s controversial new national map, which depicts vast areas of India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Bhutan (and even a bit of Russia) as Chinese territory, underscores the threat posed by China’s increasingly aggressive behavior.
In addition to these external threats, India’s future will be shaped by its response to domestic economic challenges. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made great strides in modernizing the notoriously outdated Indian bureaucracy and promoting e-government to reduce red tape and attract foreign direct investment. His government has invested heavily in upgrading and expanding the country’s infrastructure, implemented regulatory reforms, and sought to boost domestic manufacturing through Modi’s “Make in India” initiative. But to transform itself into a global manufacturing hub, India must invest in human capital, particularly in education and training.
Moreover, India’s size and diversity also pose enormous challenges. India may be the first developing economy that, from the beginning, has pursued modernization and prosperity through a democratic system. But as one of the world’s most culturally diverse countries, its seemingly never-ending election cycle has often fueled division and polarization.
But, despite its US-style polarized politics, India’s democratic framework has served as a pillar of stability. By fostering open expression and dialogue, the Indian political system has empowered grassroots communities and individuals, enabling members of historically marginalized classes and castes to rise to the highest levels of policymaking.
Whether India can maintain its current upward trajectory will depend on its ability to maintain political stability, rapid economic growth, domestic and external security, and a forward-looking foreign policy. Success would enhance India’s global standing and help advance US interests in the Indo-Pacific, the world’s new geopolitical fulcrum and home to its fastest-growing economies.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
Canada and India are friends, not foes. But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, by countenancing the rising anti-India activities of extremist Sikh groups in Canada, has brought relations with New Delhi under increasing strain during his term in office. Now, with his statement in the House of Commons on Monday, he has created an unusual diplomatic crisis between two major democracies.
Mr. Trudeau’s extraordinary statement was not about Canadian security agencies finding evidence of India’s involvement in the killing of a Canadian Sikh extremist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Rather, his statement was only about “allegations,” which he called credible, of a “potential” India “link” to the murder. More than three months after Mr. Nijjar’s killing, homicide investigators have not arrested a single suspect in connection with the shooting.
In this light, why would Mr. Trudeau air such allegations at this stage, knowing that doing so would hold serious implications for Canada’s relations with India? It has already sparked tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats and plunged Canada-India relations to their lowest ebb.
A wiser approach would have been to charge all the suspects and present evidence of any Indian government involvement in a court of law. But with no arrests, let alone evidence, Mr. Trudeau has dealt a major blow to Ottawa’s bilateral relationship with New Delhi by echoing the allegations of Canadian Sikh extremists who have held India responsible from the day Mr. Nijjar was shot.
India has never been accused of carrying out an assassination on Western soil, even though it has long been the target of major international terrorist attacks. India’s concerns about the operations of Sikh and Kashmiri terrorists from Anglosphere countries go back to the 1980s, when an Indian diplomat was murdered in Birmingham in Britain and a bomb downed an Air India flight from Toronto, killing all 329 people on board.
Assassinating dissidents abroad is what authoritarian regimes do. India is the world’s largest democracy, and it has not taken down even the United Nations-designated, Pakistan-based terrorists wanted for horrific attacks such as the 2008 Mumbai massacre. Mr. Nijjar, allegedly associated with a small Sikh militant group in Canada, was not on India’s list of most-wanted terrorists.
Significantly, Mr. Trudeau’s allegation came just days after he was chastised by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the G20 summit for being soft on Sikh terrorists. Mr. Modi conveyed to the Canadian Prime Minister that New Delhi had “strong concerns about continuing anti-India activities of extremist elements in Canada. They are promoting secessionism and inciting violence … The nexus of such forces with organized crime, drug syndicates and human trafficking should be a concern for Canada as well.”
India, which accused Mr. Trudeau on Tuesday of sheltering Sikh “terrorists and extremists,” has been rankled by what appear to be increasing threats against Indian diplomatic missions and diplomats in Canada. Mr. Trudeau’s minority government depends on support from the New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, who in the past has participated in events where Sikh extremists have demanded the creation of Khalistan, or a Sikh homeland carved out of India. At one such event in 2016, a speaker endorsed the use of political violence as a “legitimate form of resistance” to achieve Khalistan.
The Khalistan movement, however, has little support among Sikhs in India. Even in Canada and other English-speaking countries, such separatists make up a minority of the Sikh diaspora. But what the secessionists lack in numbers, they make up through a pitched campaign that, disturbingly, often glorifies political violence.
To be sure, rising Sikh separatist activity in Canada is not the only issue that has caused bad blood between Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Modi. In 2020, Mr. Trudeau cheered on largely Sikh farmers blockading highways near New Delhi. But while defending protesters’ rights half a world away, Mr. Trudeau declared a federal emergency in Canada last year to quash blockades of Canadians protesting his COVID-19 vaccination policy. The stunning hypocrisy has not been forgotten in New Delhi.
At a time when a major global geopolitical reordering is under way, Canada and India, which have no major clash of strategic interest, should be close partners. Indeed, their shared goals, including universal adherence to international law, make them natural allies. Against this backdrop, Mr. Trudeau’s evidence-free claim against India is not just astounding; it threatens to further corrode Canada’s relations with the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
Repairing the damage to the bilateral relationship may take time but it must begin in earnest after the present diplomatic crisis is over. This may only happen after a change of government in Ottawa.
Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books on international geopolitics, a professor of strategic studies at the independent Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
The G20 summit in New Delhi, which brought presidents, prime ministers and monarchs together, was a high point in Indian diplomacy at a time when rival China is grappling with multiple crises, from a dramatic economic downturn to growing domestic discontent. The summit’s adoption of a 37-page consensus document outlining the roadmap for a more sustainable and peaceful global future underscored India’s burgeoning economic and geopolitical clout.
Few had expected the summit to be a success, given the international divisiveness. The war in Ukraine has created a deep divide between the West and the Sino-Russian bloc. There is also a Western clash with a rising Global South. But by bridging global divides, India helped build consensus.
The rising international profile of the world’s largest democracy comes at a time when India is positioning itself as a potential mediator between the West and Russia. There is also growing Western recognition that India is well placed to serve as a key counterweight to communist China’s neo-imperial ambitions.
A fully agreed joint communique was not the only achievement of the summit. The real value of any G20 summit lies not in the pious commitments that world leaders make (which are rarely honoured) but as a venue for bilateral, trilateral or even quadrilateral meetings between the various heads of state or government. The New Delhi summit was no exception.
The discussions on the margins of the summit led to the announcement of an ambitious US-led plan to build a rail and shipping corridor linking India with the Middle East and Europe.
As part of the US approach to counter China’s decade-old Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through alternative arrangements, the corridor proposal was portrayed by American President Joe Biden as a “real big deal” that would link Middle East countries by railway and connect them to India and Europe through port interconnections, thus helping the flow of energy and trade, including by slashing shipping times and costs. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for his part, called the proposal “a big connectivity initiative” that would permit “future generations to dream bigger”.
To be sure, the corridor initiative was not the only plan to counter the BRI that emerged from the summit. The US won the summit’s endorsement for reshaping and scaling up multilateral development banks like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund by significantly boosting their lending capacities. This would help counter China’s predatory lending practices by providing an alternative means of financing for infrastructure and development projects.
China’s lending binge has made it the world’s largest sovereign creditor to developing countries. Almost every Chinese loan issued in the last decade has included a secrecy clause compelling the borrowing country not to disclose the loan’s terms—or even the loan’s existence. Many African, Asian and Latin American countries have become ensnared in a debt trap, leaving them highly vulnerable to Chinese pressure to pursue policies that advance China’s economic and geopolitical interests. According to one study, the loan contracts give China “broad latitude to cancel loans or accelerate repayment if it disagrees with a borrower’s policies”.
Xi’s absence was China’s loss
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s absence at the G20 summit drew international attention to China’s military and political tensions with India. The two demographic giants have been locked in a 41-month-long military standoff triggered by China’s stealth territorial intrusions into Ladakh in April 2020.
With Chinese forces massed along the India border, it would have been odd for Xi to visit New Delhi without taking the initiative to defuse the border confrontation with India. In the tense border crisis, India has more than matched China’s forward deployment of forces. Consequently, tens of thousands of troops on each side have been facing off along the Indo-Tibetan border.
By deciding to skip the G20 summit, Xi may have done India a favour. It would have been particularly galling to India had Xi visited New Delhi even as China’s border aggression continued.
The only way to end the military standoff is through a deal to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and de-induction of rival forces. But no deal can emerge unless the aggressor state is willing to settle matters.
One would have expected the Indian invitation to Xi to attend the G20 summit to catalyse efforts to defuse the dangerous border confrontation. After all, the risk of the military standoff escalating to intense bloody clashes or even a limited border war can no longer be discounted, given the large-scale forward military deployments by both sides.
In fact, military-to-military talks were held at different levels a few weeks before the G20 and BRICS summits. Indian media reports on the talks suggested that there was some forward movement to help defuse the border crisis in a gradual manner.
But, at the political level, Xi’s regime appeared to recoil from concluding a deal with India. This was apparent from the failure of the Xi-Modi talks on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg to achieve any progress toward ending the military standoff.
Indeed, as if to underline its hardline stance, Beijing issued a statement that undiplomatically claimed that the meeting at Johannesburg took place at Modi’s “request,” a claim India said was untrue.
The condescension inherent in that statement was apparent from its implicit advice to India to put up with China’s April 2020 land grabs in Ladakh so that the two countries can “handle properly the border issue” and stabilize their relations. Indeed, by regurgitating the same position that Beijing has held for over three years, the statement signalled that China was unwilling to climb down to some extent to help end the military standoff with India that is now in its fourth year.
The plain fact is that Xi has been wearing his intransigence on his sleeve. He created the border crisis by ordering the stealthy territorial encroachments on key borderlands of Ladakh. And now he refuses to reach a compromise settlement with India to end the border confrontation.
Simply put, the ball remains in China’s court.
However, in ordering the intrusions into Ladakh, Xi seriously miscalculated that China would be able to impose the changed territorial status quo on India as a fait accompli, without inviting a robust Indian military response. By locking horns with China even at the risk of sparking a full-scale war, India is openly challenging Chinese power and capability in a way that no other country has done in this century.
Embarrassed by the strong Indian military challenge, Xi’s regime has sought to exert greater pressure on India by deploying more Chinese forces in offensive positions, by constructing new warfare infrastructure along the frontier, and by mounting infowar and psychological operations against India.
All that, however, risks making a permanent enemy of India. This runs counter to China’s own long-term interests.
It is apparent that Xi is caught in a military crisis of his own making. His efforts to compel India to buckle have come a cropper.
Meanwhile, Xi’s regime has stepped up its buildup of military infrastructure and capabilities across the entire frontier with India, from the Aksai Chin plateau and the Uttarakhand-Tibet border to the Sikkim-Tibet and Arunachal-Tibet frontier. It is engaged in the frenzied construction of new permanent military structures as if it were preparing for war. Its construction activities are compelling India to focus on expanding its own military infrastructure along the Himalayan frontier.
The key question is: What are the strategic and military objectives that are driving China’s frenetic construction activity along the India frontier?
The construction of new permanent military structures appears designed to consolidate China’s existing territorial control, aggressively assert its claims to other Indian territories, and deter any Indian operation to regain lost territory.
But the hectic construction activity also appears aimed at a broader strategic mission — to stop India from opening another front against China when Xi decides to move against Taiwan.
Just as China invaded India in 1962 during the US-Soviet Cuban missile crisis, a Taiwan attack could offer India a historic opportunity to settle the Himalayan border. China may be seeking to constrict such an Indian option by creating new warfare infrastructure on its side of the India frontier, including boring tunnels and shafts in mountainsides to set up reinforced troop shelters and command positions as well as underground weapons storage facilities.
In any event, by digging in for the long haul and creating a “hot” border, China is doubling down on a more aggressive strategy against India. There seems little prospect of a return to the status quo ante along the frontier, even if a deal of some sorts was reached in the future to ease military tensions.
A more dangerous China?
The dilemma that Xi faces is how to resolve the India border crisis without losing face, especially at a time when China is facing mounting challenges at home and abroad. The external challenges extend far beyond India.
The fact is that, under Xi, China is turning into its own worst enemy. It is picking geostrategic fights with all of the world’s other major powers except Russia. This is possibly unprecedented in modern world history.
Xi, for his part, has shown an increasing appetite for taking major risks, as the South and East China Seas, the Himalayas and Hong Kong show. He is willing to ruthlessly run roughshod over international law and norms.
Through his aggressive revisionism, Xi has counterproductively set in motion trends in the Indo-Pacific region that seem antithetical to China’s long-term interests.
Australia has abandoned hedging and joined the AUKUS alliance against China. India is being driven closer to the United States even as it seeks to maintain its strategic autonomy. Japan has been shaken out of its complacency by China’s pursuit of Asian hegemony. And people in Taiwan are increasingly embracing a Taiwanese identity that is distinct from that of China.
Xi’s foreign policy is an outgrowth of his domestic despotism. Under Xi’s leadership, the ruling Communist Party has established an Orwellian techno-totalitarian surveillance state that seeks to bend reality to the illusions that it propagates. Egged on by state propaganda, Chinese nationalism has become feverish and vitriolic.
Yet, Xi’s domestic challenges are getting acute, from a remarkable economic downturn to a battered public trust in the party’s ability to manage the country. China is grappling with worsening macroeconomic conditions and falling investor confidence. Add to that picture high youth unemployment and an aging workforce.
Unless reversed, the economic slump over time is likely to undermine regime stability and constrain China’s geopolitical ambitions. The economic slowdown is already undercutting the Communist Party’s rationale for monopolizing power — that only it can deliver rapid growth.
Biden, calling a stagnant China a “ticking time bomb,” warned recently that, “When bad folks have problems, they do bad things.” In a reminder of that, Beijing released a new national map late last month showing inside China vast swaths of Indian land and the territories of several other neighbours, including tiny Bhutan.
The map, which drew protests from several neighbouring countries, illustrates the “bad things” Beijing is willing to do. One can expect more “bad things” from Beijing.
The party and the regime are now packed with men loyal to Xi. The tightening grip of a dictator without checks and balances, and with yes men around him, represents a major Chinese weakness because it is likely to spawn more miscalculations. It could even lead to a ruinous miscalculation.
That risk is heightened by the fact that Xi seems to be in a hurry to achieve what he calls the “Chinese dream”—that is, achieve China’s global pre-eminence.
With a demographic crisis deepening, economic growth stalled, and the global environment becoming increasingly unfavourable to China, Xi seems to have concluded that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to shape the international order in its favour. So, his appetite for risk has perceptibly grown.
In this light, as China’s economic and geopolitical fortunes sink, the risks to Taiwan and India from an aggressive China are bound to increase.
India thus has to be on its guard. Just as Mao Zedong invaded India in 1962 after his disastrous “Great Leap Forward” initiative created a manmade famine that killed countless millions of Chinese, Xi’s growing troubles could tempt him to launch a military adventure against India to help restore his standing at home and abroad.
When Mao launched his war against India, his mission, as his premier put it, was to “teach India a lesson.” Xi may be itching to teach India another lesson in order to cut it down to size and open the path to Chinese hegemony in Asia.
In military terms, defence generally has a significant advantage over offense because it is easier to protect and hold than to advance, destroy and seize. This is particularly true about mountain warfare. In mountainous terrain, the defending force can defeat an attacking force much larger than its own.
With one of the world’s largest and most-experienced mountain warfare armies, India is well placed, even without fully matching China’s military capabilities, to effectively defend itself against any Chinese aggression.
The key is not to be taken by surprise again. India failed to foresee the 2020 Chinese aggression coming largely because its foreign policy was focused on befriending China. Despite the 2017 Chinese capture of almost the entire Doklam Plateau, India allowed the “Wuhan spirit” and “Chennai connect” lullabies—like the old Hindi-Chini bhai bhai pitch—to lull it into complacency. The result is that, for more than three years, India has been locked in a costly and dangerous military standoff with China, after losing access to some strategic borderlands in Ladakh that it traditionally patrolled.
Deception, stealth and surprise have long been the key elements in China’s warfare strategy. If India were to taken unawares again, it would prove extremely costly for it because any Chinese military adventure would likely seek to leave India humiliated. But if India anticipates and effectively resists an attack, China will get a bloody nose.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books on water: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
Given the rising strategic importance of Vietnam, U.S. President Joe Biden did well by stopping in Hanoi last weekend after attending the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi.
His visit has helped cement a new American strategic partnership with Vietnam that seeks to focus on present and future Asian challenges by burying bitter memories of the past.
The stopover in one of Asia’s more authoritarian countries is the latest reminder of how Biden is not hewing to his own simplistic narrative of a “global battle between democracy and autocracy,” implicitly recognizing that the approach would crimp the wider pursuit of U.S. diplomatic interests.
In New Delhi, Biden gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a hearty handshake even though he was criticized at home for fist-bumping him last year. Biden’s embrace of the crown prince contrasts starkly with his own 2019 presidential campaign pledge to treat Saudi Arabia like “the pariah that they are.”
The mending of frayed ties with Saudi Arabia is already paying dividends for Washington. Biden and Prince Mohammed joined other leaders in New Delhi to unveil an ambitious plan to build a rail and shipping corridor that would link India with the Middle East and Europe.
Not surprisingly, Biden’s trip to Vietnam has drawn flak from American human rights activists concerned with Hanoi’s widening crackdown on dissent and peaceful protest. Taking a different stance, Biden said Vietnam is a “critical Indo-Pacific partner” for America.
The promotion of democracy and human rights has a legitimate role in American foreign policy. But if these issues are allowed to outweigh all other considerations, the U.S. will have few countries outside the Western bloc to partner with. The need for a balanced approach is underlined by the fact that even in the U.S. itself, more than two-thirds of the citizenry think the country’s democracy is broken.
Against this backdrop, Biden ought to review his administration’s use of sanctions to promote democracy. Rather than advancing democratic freedoms, punitive measures against vulnerable states often further the interests of China, the world’s largest and longest-surviving autocracy.
While flying from New Delhi to Hanoi, Biden’s Air Force One passed over Myanmar, a country with a struggling economy that has been greatly impacted by U.S. sanctions.
Seeking to restore democracy in military-ruled Myanmar through punishing sanctions while building closer partnerships with other autocracies is inherently contradictory and undercuts U.S. interests.
The fact is that there is not a single truly democratic country in the arc of Southeast Asian countries that stretches between Myanmar and Vietnam and shares a Buddhist heritage.
An alliance between Thailand’s military and monarchy has long shaped politics in that U.S. treaty ally. Nine years after a military coup, Thailand last month installed a new government that still has military-linked parties at its core, sidelining voters who showed a clear preference for opposition parties in May’s general election.
The military has also been the most powerful political player traditionally in Myanmar. But while the U.S. put up with Thailand’s coup without imposing meaningful penalties, the Biden administration imposed wide-ranging sanctions against Myanmar after generals there ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government in February 2021.
Indeed, sanctions may have contributed to the coup. Thirteen months earlier, the U.S. penalized a number of the generals in relation to Myanmar’s bloody campaign to drive out Rohingya Muslims. Some military leaders may have felt they had little to lose by seizing power.
Post-coup sanctions have made a bad situation in Myanmar worse without advancing American interests. Left with little leverage to influence political developments, the U.S. has been lending increasing support to armed resistance forces fighting military rule.
With its strategic location, Myanmar, like Vietnam, could be co-opted into America’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Instead, thanks to U.S. sanctions policy, China’s footprint in Myanmar is growing fast.
If Biden were to shift from isolating and squeezing Myanmar to gradually engaging with the junta, he would stand a better chance of accelerating the end of direct military rule. Sanctions without engagement have never worked.
Human rights activists and democracy promoters may be highly influential within the foreign policy apparatus of Biden’s Democratic Party, but despite his public rhetoric about democracy versus autocracy, the president has wisely taken a more pragmatic approach.
This approach would benefit more if long-term strategic interests, not narrow considerations or moralizing, guided engagement with any autocracy.
In beseeching China to stabilize its relationship with the U.S. through direct talks, Biden has sent a string of senior officials to Beijing since May, including the director of the CIA, his secretaries of state, treasury and commerce, as well as his climate envoy. Yet Washington has balked at even just opening lines of communication with Myanmar’s generals.
Biden managed to persuade Vietnam to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” that grants the U.S. coveted status that Hanoi previously reserved for China, Russia, India and South Korea.
The U.S. could likewise potentially become a favored partner of Myanmar by gradually developing ties with its nationalist military — the only functioning national institution in the culturally and ethnically diverse country.
Today, the U.S. maintains close cooperation with a wide array of undemocratic or weakly democratic governments. Without giving authoritarian states a free pass on democracy or rights issues, the U.S. should use positive incentives, rather than sanctions, to persuade potential and existing partner nations to address their political shortcomings. America’s sharpening competition with China makes it crucial that it prioritize strategic interests by building new partnerships.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
Whereas Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China prefers an incremental approach, enabled by stealth and deception, to advance its revisionist agenda. And, barring a major strategic blunder, it is likely to continue doing so.
It is well known that China has the world’s largest navy and coast guard – the result of a tenfold increase in military spending since 1995 – which it uses to advance its pugnacious revisionism. But there are also numerous lesser-known – indeed, highly opaque – policies, projects, and activities that are supporting Chinese expansionism and placing the entire world at risk.
China has a long record of expanding its strategic footprint through stealthy maneuvers that it brazenly denies. For example, in 2017, it established its first overseas military base in Djibouti – a tiny country on the Horn of Africa, which also happens to be deeply in debt to China – while insisting that it had no such plan.
Today, China is building a naval base in Cambodia, which has leased to China one-fifth of its coastline and some islets. The almost-complete pier at the Chinese-financed Ream Naval Base appears conspicuously similar in size and design to a pier at China’s Djibouti base. China admits to investing in the base, but claims that only Cambodia’s navy will have access to it.
Realistically, however, it seems likely that China’s navy will use the facility at least for military logistics. This would further strengthen China’s position in the South China Sea, where it has already built seven artificial islands as forward military bases, giving it effective control of this critical corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
China also takes a highly secretive approach to its massive dam projects on international rivers flowing to other countries from the Chinese-annexed Tibetan Plateau. While the world knows that the rubber-stamp National People’s Congress approved the construction of the world’s largest dam near China’s heavily militarized frontier with India in 2021, there have been no public updates on the project since.
The dam is supposed to generate three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest hydropower plant, and China has built a new railroad and highway to transport heavy equipment, materials, and workers to the remote project site. We will find out more only when construction is far enough along that the dam can no longer be hidden from commercially available satellite imagery. At that point, it will be a fait accompli.
China has used this strategy to build 11 giant dams on the Mekong, not only gaining geopolitical leverage over its neighbors, but also wreaking environmental havoc. China is now the world’s most dammed country, with more large dams in operation than the rest of the world combined, and it is constructing or planning at least eight more dams on the Mekong alone.
Opacity has also been a defining feature of the lending binge that has made China the world’s largest sovereign creditor to developing countries. Almost every Chinese loan issued in the last decade has included a sweeping confidentiality clause compelling the borrowing country not to disclose the loan’s terms. Many African, Asian, and Latin American countries have become ensnared in a debt trap, leaving them highly vulnerable to Chinese pressure to pursue policies that advance China’s economic and geopolitical interests. According to one study, the loan contracts give China “broad latitude to cancel loans or accelerate repayment if it disagrees with a borrower’s policies.”
But there can be no better illustration of the global costs of Chinese secrecy than the COVID-19 pandemic. Had China’s government responded quickly to evidence that a deadly new coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan, warning the public and implementing control measures, the damage could have been contained.
Instead, the Communist Party of China (CPC) rushed to suppress and discredit information about the outbreak, paving the way for a raging worldwide pandemic that killed almost seven million people and disrupted countless lives and livelihoods. To this day, Chinese obfuscation has prevented scientists from confirming the true origins of COVID-19, which, lest we forget, emerged in China’s main hub for research on super-viruses.
China’s willingness to violate international laws, rules, and norms compounds the opacity problem. The Chinese government has repeatedly reneged on its international commitments, including promises to safeguard the autonomy of Hong Kong and not to militarize features in the South China Sea. It was China’s furtive violation of its commitment not to alter unilaterally the status quo of its disputed Himalayan border with India that triggered a three-year (and counting) military standoff between the two countries.
There is no reason to expect China to abandon its rule-breaking, its debt-based coercion, or its other malign activities any time soon. Chinese President Xi Jinping – who has strengthened the CPC’s control over information, cutting off outside analysts’ access even to economic data – is now on track to hold power for life, and remains eager to reshape the international order to China’s benefit.
Ominously, Xi’s appetite for risk appears to be growing. This partly reflects time pressure: Xi seems to believe that China has a narrow window of opportunity to achieve global preeminence before unfavorable demographic, economic, and geopolitical trends catch up with it. But Xi has also been emboldened by the international community’s utter failure to impose meaningful consequences on China for its bad behavior.
Whereas Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China prefers incrementalism, enabled by stealth and deception, to advance its revisionist agenda. This, together with tremendous economic clout, shields it from a decisive Western response. That is why, barring a major strategic blunder by Xi, China’s salami-slicing expansionism is likely to persist.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on Aug.5, eve of the 78th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attack: Japan was already essentially defeated before the city was destroyed. (Photo by Yo Inoue)
Atomic bombings were more about demonstrating power than securing surrender
Months before the twin atomic attacks, it had become clear that the issue was not whether Japan would surrender but when. America’s own Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in 1946 that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”
The Hollywood blockbuster “Oppenheimer” carries the somber message that the nuclear age may have doomed us all.
The biopic about American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” has renewed international attention around the morality and military necessity of the nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 78 years ago.
Why the first and only use of atomic weapons occurred is still something of a vexed question, especially because Japan was already essentially defeated before Hiroshima was destroyed. Japan was then under a crippling sea and air blockade and conventional U.S. firebombing air raids were devastating its major cities.
Years later, plagued by guilt, the real Oppenheimer acknowledged that the bomb on Hiroshima was used “against an essentially defeated enemy.”
The U.S. may have won the war before the Hiroshima bombing but it was not content with defeating Japan. It sought Japan’s unconditional surrender.
Decades later, there is still no definitive answer as to why the U.S. attacked Nagasaki with a nuclear weapon just three days after Hiroshima’s destruction and before Japan had time to fully grasp the strategic implications of the first atomic attack.
Even if the Hiroshima bombing was justifiable as a way to force Japan to surrender, what military purpose did the precipitous second attack serve?
Telford Taylor, who served as chief prosecutor at the Nazi war crime trials in Nuremberg, Germany, said, “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable, but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki.”
The unstated justification, I would argue, had little to do with Nagasaki itself. Rather, the administration of U.S. President Harry S. Truman judged the bombing as necessary to fully demonstrate America’s new destructive powers.
Truman, who took office in April 1945 days before Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide, gave Japan no firm deadline to surrender before rushing into the second atomic strike. No warning was given to the residents of either city bombed.
To be sure, all sides, including imperial Japan, engaged in mass killings during World War II, a conflict in which nearly 60 million people died. The then-prevailing political-military culture that regarded the targeting of civilian centers as a legitimate tool of warfare certainly facilitated the atomic bombings.
Did the bombings alone lead to Japan’s announcement of surrender six days after the Nagasaki attack? Disagreement among historians still persists over this issue.
The entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, one day before the Nagasaki bombing, gutted a bilateral nonaggression pact and was an equally, if not more, critical factor in Tokyo’s surrender. By opening a new front in the conflict, the Soviet move was a mortal blow to Japanese morale, making capitulation more certain.
The official U.S. narrative in the war’s immediate aftermath asserted that the atomic bombings by themselves accomplished the goal of compelling Japan to surrender, saving the lives of thousands of Americans who would have been killed if a full-scale invasion of Japan’s main islands had become necessary.
This “noble action” narrative later came under attack from American scholars who argued that Japan had been ready to surrender before the atomic bombings.
The revisionist thesis drew strength from the White House-initiated U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which in 1945-46 examined the U.S. bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. The report concluded that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”
In fact, months before the twin atomic attacks, it had become clear that the issue was not whether Japan would surrender but when. A key sticking point was the emperor’s role: The Japanese wanted the emperor to retain authority rather than be reduced to a figurehead as ultimately happened under U.S. military occupation.
In deciding how to bring the war to a close, the Truman administration overruled America’s military leadership. Indeed, a string of U.S. military leaders later publicly criticized the atomic bombings as unnecessary.
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace,” said Admiral Chester Nimitz, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. “The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view in the defeat of Japan.”
Admiral William Halsey Jr., the U.S. Third Fleet commander, said: “It was a mistake. … [The scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.”
Hiroshima was selected as the first nuclear target because of its flat terrain and because it had essentially been untouched by U.S. aid raids, thus allowing the impact of the first atomic weapon, an untested uranium bomb, to be clearly assessed.
For the second attack, the U.S. chose to employ a more powerful plutonium bomb that had been secretly tested 24 days earlier in the New Mexico desert. The city of Kokura, now part of Kitakyushu, was chosen as the primary target, but because of heavy cloud cover there on the appointed day, the U.S. B-29 bomber carrying the weapon was diverted to Nagasaki.
The techno-political imperative to show off America’s unmatched destructive prowess to the world then set in motion a new U.S.-led global order. Indeed, while the bombings may have contributed to ending a hot war, they were the opening shots of a long Cold War.
The resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons created an edgy world that today bristles with more than 13,000 atomic weapons. The Ukraine conflict, meanwhile, has increased the risks of a cataclysmic nuclear war, with both Russia and NATO conducting preparatory drills.
The legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been to put humanity’s future in jeopardy. The world today has a nuclear test ban treaty but no treaty outlawing the use of nuclear weapons.
This ominously means that parties to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while prohibited from testing on their territories, face no legal constraint to following the U.S. example in Hiroshima of employing an untested nuclear weapon against an adversary. For the time being, fortunately, political constraints still apply, even if tenuously.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
China and India have been locked in a tense conflict along their Himalayan border since April 2020, when Chinese troops stealthily encroached upon some key borderlands in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh. More than three years later, the standoff between rival forces has solidified, with China continuing to frenetically erect new warfare infrastructure along the long frontier.
Even then, Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to visit New Delhi next month for the Group of 20 summit, which is likely to be attended by other world leaders, from U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appearance is uncertain given that the war in Ukraine appears to be at a pivotal stage.
The Sept. 9-10 summit raises the possibility that Xi’s trip could propel efforts for a deal to help defuse what has become an increasingly dangerous military confrontation between the nuclear-armed demographic titans. Both sides have forward deployed more and more lethal weapons.
Meanwhile, border clashes have intermittently occurred since May 2020, even as corps commanders from the two militaries have met 18 times over three years to negotiate a pullback of forces. Through these lengthy negotiations, India has managed only to get China to convert its smaller encroachments into buffer zones — largely on Beijing’s terms, with Indian forces retreating further back into their own territory.
Today, with more than 100,000 rival troops backed by reserves locked in the standoff at multiple sites from the western to the eastern Himalayas, the military crisis can be eased only if both sides agree to sequentially disengage, de-escalate and de-induct forces from front-line positions through verifiable methods.
However, there seems little prospect of a return to the status quo ante along the disputed frontier. China has not only changed the territorial status quo in the western sector but also remains engaged in a frenzied construction of new military infrastructure along the entire border, as if it were preparing for war. The new infrastructure extends from helipads and radar sites to cold-weather troop shelters and ammunition depots.
Even if a deal of some sorts was reached to ease military tensions, the largest Himalayan buildup of rival forces in history, coupled with the expanding Chinese warfare infrastructure, promises to lastingly turn what was once a lightly patrolled frontier into a perennially hot border.
More broadly, the Himalayan conflict also holds lessons for Japan, whose control of the Senkaku Islands, calledthe Diaoyu in China, has come under increasing challenge from China. The record-long Chinese intrusion in April into Japanese territorial waters near the islets highlighted this challenge.
In fact, China is pursuing its revisionism against Japan in ways that mirror its strategy of attrition, friction and containment against India. Incremental advances by stealth below the threshold of war through a “salami-slicing” approach have become integral to China’s expansionism.
Sinicizing the names of the places it covets is also part of China’s strategy to buttress its sovereignty claims. But China’s various territorial claims in Asia are based not on international law but on alleged history.
Like Japan, India has been overly on the defensive. Consequently, the daunting challenge India faces today is to regain lost territory in the same way China took it — without resort to open combat.
For Japan, the fundamental message from Chinese expansionism in the Himalayas is that China can disturb the status quo at any time of its choosing, even if it means violating binding bilateral agreements and international norms. China’s military actions against India openly breach four separate border management agreements the two sides signed between 1993 and 2013, including forswearing any attempt to unilaterally change the territorial status quo.
As Japan’s own experience in dealing with Chinese intrusions underscores, stealth, deception and surprise are central to China’s strategy.
In fact, improvements in bilateral relations do not deter Beijing from springing a nasty surprise on the other side. The Chinese encroachments on the Indian borderlands occurred just six months after Xi declared during an India visit that, “China-India relations have entered a new phase of sound and stable development.”
Simply put, China’s aggressive actions bear no relation to the state of ties with the country it targets. Seeking better relations with Beijing, far from helping to improve Chinese behavior, can even backfire, as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has bitterly discovered. Seeking to befriend China, Modi met with Xi 18 times over five years before the Chinese encroachments occurred.
Another lesson is that booming bilateral trade and economic interdependence also do not constrain China’s behavior. If anything, expanding economic ties only constrict the other side’s strategic leeway for fear of losing access to the Chinese market.
Yet another lesson for Japan, as for India, is that being constantly on the defensive only emboldens China to needle the targeted country or infringe its sovereignty. Coming out of a reactive and defensive mode is vital to checkmate China’s expansionist designs.
Having normalized its intrusions into Japanese territorial waters and airspace, China is working to progressively alter the status quo in the East China Sea in its favor. It draws strength from its success in redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea without firing a single shot or incurring any international costs.
If Japan is not to find itself increasingly at the receiving end of China’s muscular revisionism, it must formulate a concrete counterstrategy.
Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
Ukrainian soldiers fire a M777 howitzer toward Russian positions on the front line in eastern Ukraine. (Anatolii Stepanov/Getty Images)
As the war in Ukraine drags on despite the unprecedented U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, “Ukraine fatigue” in the West is beginning to set in. Most Americans now oppose Congress authorizing further military and economic aid for Kyiv, according to a new CNN-SSRS poll.
It is easier to keep funding and arming a country when things are going well. But Ukraine’s counteroffensive against the entrenched Russian invaders is floundering, despite the West training and equipping Ukrainian formations with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of new weapons.
After the much-hyped counteroffensive began in early June, Ukraine lost as much as 20% of the newly-supplied weaponry in just the first two weeks. The stalled counteroffensive has dashed NATO’s hopes of a major military breakthrough against Russia, which still occupies nearly a fifth of Ukraine.
The counteroffensive’s lack of headway, meanwhile, places President Joe Biden in a tight spot. But instead of rethinking his strategy, he is just throwing good money after bad and hoping for a miracle — an eventual battlefield breakthrough against Russian forces or political upheaval in Moscow.
Only dialogue and diplomacy can halt the war, which, unlike the previous military invasions of sovereign states by foreign powers, is having a global impact in the form of higher food and fuel prices and increased inflation. This is largely because the conflict has shaped up as a kind of proxy war between the great powers, pitting Russia against the American-led bloc.
Biden, while keeping the door to diplomacy with Russia shut, has been beseeching China to stabilize the Sino-American relationship through direct talks. The president has sent a string of senior officials to Beijing this summer, including CIA Director Bill Burns, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and “climate czar” John Kerry. The lack of concrete results from these fence-mending visits led to an unannounced trip to Beijing by Henry Kissinger, the 100-year-old former secretary of state who has encouraged the Biden administration to adopt a more conciliatory approach to China.
The fact is that the more the United States has deepened its involvement in the Ukraine war, the more Biden has sought to appease China in the hope of forestalling a Sino-Russian axis against America.
The American-led sanctions against Russia, however, are helping to advance China’s commercial and strategic interests, without reining in the Kremlin’s war machine or pushing Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. A report from the Washington-based Free Russia Foundation has called China the “biggest winner” from the Western punitive measures against Moscow.
More ominously, the failure of the world’s toughest-ever sanctions regime to bring Russia to heel could embolden China’s expansionist designs against Taiwan, especially since similar sanctions against Beijing would have even less impact. After all, China’s economy is about 10 times larger than Russia’s. Just as Putin was clear about his plans for invading Ukraine, so has Chinese President Xi Jinping been explicit about eventually absorbing Taiwan.
Yet the U.S. is still not giving sufficient priority to deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan. The overall $1.65 trillion spending package passed by Congress late last year included $45 billion in additional aid for Ukraine but just $2 billion for Taiwan. The assistance for Taiwan was in loans, not grants.
Meanwhile, the grinding nature of the Ukraine war shows that it has reached a stalemate on the battlefield, with neither side in a position to make significant advances, let alone achieve total victory.
Deepening America’s involvement in what is now an attritional war can only drain Western military resources. It would sap America’s strength at a time of growing security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region. Indeed, the flood of American weapons to Ukraine is already weakening U.S. military muscle in Asia.
The war, for its part, is exposing some key Western military limitations. The U.S. set out to bleed Russia in Ukraine but it is America, not Russia, that is running out of critical munitions. Biden, in a recent CNN interview, admitted that, “This is a war relating to munitions. And they [Ukraine] are running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it.” So, he said, he was left with no choice but to send Ukraine cluster bombs.
Diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement ought to be a natural corollary to the current military gridlock in Ukraine. The 1950-53 Korean War was deadlocked for two years before an armistice agreement was concluded. A similar long delay in reaching a ceasefire agreement in the current war would bring greater devastation to Ukraine.
It is true that the U.S. committed to restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, with little hope of forcing Russia to retreat from the territories it has occupied in Ukraine’s east and south, a protracted war is not in America’s interest.
Just like the Cold War created an East and West Germany, a North and South Vietnam, and a still-existing North and South Korea, the likely outcome of the present war — however unpalatable it may seem — would be a Russian-held Ukrainian segment that serves as Moscow’s strategic buffer against NATO and a rump Ukraine aligned with (but not part of) NATO.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
The international focus on the war in Ukraine has helped obscure the China-India military confrontation, which has led to rival force build-ups and intermittent clashes. For more than three years, the two Asian giants have been locked in a tense military standoff along their disputed Himalayan frontier.
The risk of this confrontation escalating to intense bloody clashes or even a limited border war can no longer be discounted, given the large-scale forward military deployments by both sides.
An opposite scenario is also conceivable. If Chinese President Xi Jinping were to visit New Delhi for the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in September, the trip could catalyze efforts to defuse the dangerous confrontation, which was triggered by China’s stealth territorial encroachments into the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh in April-May 2020.
India failed to foresee the Chinese aggression largely because Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been focused on appeasing Beijing in order to chip away at the China-Pakistan axis. Mr. Xi, though, seriously miscalculated that China would be able to impose the changed territorial status quo on India as a fait accompli, without inviting a robust military response.
India has locked horns with China by more than matching Chinese force deployments. Even at the risk of sparking a full-scale war, India is openly challenging Chinese power and capability in a way that no other country has done in this century.
Discomfited by the strong Indian military challenge, Mr. Xi’s regime has sought to exert greater pressure on India by deploying more Chinese forces in offensive positions, constructing new warfare infrastructure along the frontier, and mounting infowar and psychological operations.
All this, however, risks making a permanent enemy of India, including driving it closer to the United States. Such a scenario is antithetical to China’s long-term interests. U.S. President Joe Biden’s courtship of India, and the pomp and attention he recently lavished on Mr. Modi during a state visit to the U.S., have increased Beijing’s suspicion that New Delhi is drawing closer to Washington to help blunt China.
After China’s border aggression began, New Delhi concluded the last of four foundational defence-related agreements that Washington regularly puts in place with military allies. India has also more closely integrated into the Quad arrangement with Washington, Tokyo and Canberra. And the India-initiated annual Malabar naval war games now include all the Quad partners.
The military standoff with India, meanwhile, leaves Mr. Xi with less room to accomplish what he has called a “historic mission” – the incorporation of Taiwan. India is aiding Taiwan’s defence by tying down a complete Chinese theatre force, which could otherwise be employed against that island democracy.
As Admiral Michael Gilday, the U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations, put it last year, the standoff presents China with a “two-front” problem: “They [Indians] now force China to not only look east, toward the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, but they now have to be looking over their shoulder at India.”
More fundamentally, Mr. Xi has picked a border fight with India that China cannot win. While the Chinese military relies heavily on conscripts, India, with an all-volunteer force, has the world’s most-experienced troops for mountain warfare.
A war between the two nuclear-armed demographic titans would likely end in a bloody stalemate, which would be seen internationally as a defeat for the stronger side, China. That would seriously damage Mr. Xi’s image.
So, if the confrontation with India were to escalate, Mr. Xi could risk being hoisted with his own petard.
Against this backdrop, would Mr. Xi be willing to find ways to defuse the military crisis with India?
The Sept. 9-10 G20 summit will bring together world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and possibly Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, at a time when tens of thousands of troops on each side are facing off on the Himalayan massif, it would be odd if Mr. Xi visited New Delhi without seeking to defuse the border confrontation.
At the past G20 summit in Bali, Mr. Xi and Mr. Modi briefly interacted at a cultural event in front of television cameras, but did not hold a private meeting, as each did with other leaders.
The only way to end the military standoff is through a deal to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and de-induction of rival forces. The details of such a deal could be hammered out through military-to-military talks.
Mr. Xi, however, seems caught in a military crisis of his own making. He may want to resolve the crisis, but without losing face. His efforts to compel India to buckle have come a cropper. This means that any compromise settlement would require that Mr. Xi climb down to some extent.
Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research.
China is unmatched as the world’s hydro hegemon, with more large dams in service than every other country combined. Now it is building the world’s first super dam, close to its heavily militarized frontier with India.
This megaproject, with a planned capacity of 60 gigawatts, would generate three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam, now the world’s largest hydropower plant. China, though, has given few updates about the project’s status since the National People’s Congress approved it in March 2021.
Opacity about the development of past projects has often served as cover for quiet action. Beijing has a record of keeping work on major dam projects on international rivers under wraps until the activity can no longer be hidden in commercially available satellite imagery.
The super dam is located in some of the world’s most treacherous terrain, in an area long thought impassable.
Here, the Brahmaputra, known to Tibetans as the Yarlung Tsangpo, drops almost 3,000 meters as it takes a sharp southerly turn from the Himalayas into India, with the world’s highest-altitude major river descending through the globe’s longest and steepest canyon.
Twice as deep as the U.S. Grand Canyon, the Brahmaputra gorge holds Asia’s greatest untapped water reserves while the river’s precipitous fall creates one of the greatest concentrations of river energy on Earth. The combination has acted as a powerful magnet for Chinese dam builders.
The behemoth dam, however, is the world’s riskiest project as it is being built in a seismically active area. This makes it potentially a ticking water bomb for downstream communities in India and Bangladesh.
The southeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau is earthquake prone because it sits on the geological fault line where the Indian and Eurasian plates collide.
The 2008 Sichuan earthquake, along the Tibetan Plateau’s eastern rim, killed 87,000 people and drew international attention to the phenomenon of reservoir-triggered seismicity (RTS).
Some Chinese and American scientists drew a link between the quake and Sichuan’s Zipingpu Dam, which came into service two years earlier near a seismic fault. They suggested that the weight of the several hundred million cubic meters of water impounded in the dam’s reservoir could have triggered RTS or severe tectonic stresses.
But even without a quake, the new super dam could be a threat to downriver communities if torrential monsoon rains trigger flash floods in the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra. Barely two years ago, some 400 million Chinese were put at risk after record flooding endangered the Three Gorges Dam.
Meanwhile, the 11 large dams China has built on the upper reaches of the Mekong have had many negative ecological impacts, including recurrent drought, for downriver nations. But not only is China constructing more big dams on the Mekong, it is now also turning its attention to tapping the bounteous water resources in the Brahmaputra Basin.
In pursuing its controversial megaproject on the Brahmaputra, China is cloaking its construction activity to mute international reaction.
China presented the super dam project for the approval of the National People’s Congress only after it had built sufficient infrastructure to start transporting heavy equipment, materials and workers to the remote site.
Barely two months after parliament’s approval two years ago, Beijing announced that it had accomplished the feat of completing a “highway through the world’s deepest canyon.” That highway ends very close to the Indian border.
The following month, Beijing announced the launch of a new rail line from Lhasa to Nyangtri, a frontier military base less than 16 kilometers from the India border. In fact, President Xi Jinping began a surprise tour of Tibet in July 2021 from Nyangtri, taking the new train from there to the regional capital.
The new infrastructure indicates that work on the dam’s foundation likely began quietly after the opening of the railroad and highway.
The Brahmaputra was one of the world’s last undammed rivers until China began constructing a series of midsized dams on sections upstream from the famous canyon. With its dam building now moving close to border areas, China will in due course be able to leverage transboundary flows in its relations with rival India.
But the brunt of the environmental havoc that the megaproject is likely to wreak will be borne by Bangladesh, in the last stretch of the river. The environmental damage, however, is likely to extend up through Tibet, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. In fact, with its super dam, China will be desecrating the canyon region which is a crucial Tibetan holy place.
A cardinal principle of water peace is transparency. The far-reaching strategic, environmental and inter-riparian implications of the largest dam ever conceived make it imperative that China be transparent. Only sustained international pressure can force Beijing to drop the veil of secrecy surrounding its project.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
China’s rapidly growing footprint in Myanmar is America’s strategic loss, and it is the direct result of America’s own policies. Rather than closing the door on dialogue by imposing stringent sanctions, the United States should be co-opting Myanmar’s military leaders for its own strategic benefit.
A recent joint statement by US President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “expressed deep concern about the deteriorating situation in Myanmar,” and called for a constructive dialogue to aid the country’s transition toward an inclusive federal democratic system. Unfortunately, the US-led sanctions policy has undercut this goal and made a bad situation worse.
While inflicting misery on Myanmar’s ordinary citizens, Western sanctions have left the ruling military elites relatively unscathed, giving the junta little incentive to loosen its political grip. The primary beneficiary has been China, which has been allowed to expand its foothold in a country that it values as a strategic gateway to the Indian Ocean and an important source of natural resources.
This development has amplified regional security challenges. For example, Chinese military personnel are now helping to build a listening post on Myanmar’s Great Coco Island, which lies just north of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the home to the Indian military’s only tri-service command. Once operational, this new spy station will likely assist China’s maritime surveillance of India, including by monitoring nuclear submarine movements and tracking tests of missiles that often splash down in the Bay of Bengal.
In a way, history is repeating itself. Starting in the late 1980s, previous US-led sanctions paved the way for China to become Myanmar’s dominant trading partner and investor. That sanctions regime lasted until 2012, when Barack Obama heralded a new US policy and became the first US president to visit Myanmar. In 2015, Myanmar elected its first civilian-led government, ending decades of military dictatorship.
In February 2021, however, the military staged a coup and detained civilian leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi, prompting the Biden administration to re-impose wide-ranging sanctions. Importantly, this reversal of Myanmar’s democratic project was precipitated by earlier targeted US measures against the military leadership – including the commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing – for rampant human-rights abuses against Rohingya Muslims that forced most to flee to Bangladesh. After President Donald Trump’s administration slapped sanctions on Hlaing and other top commanders in July 2019, the generals lost any incentive to sustain Myanmar’s democratization. A year and a half later, they had toppled the civilian government, after denouncing the results of the November 2020 national election as fraudulent.
The lesson for Western policymakers should be clear. Individually sanctioning foreign officials – which is essentially a symbolic gesture – can seriously hamper US diplomacy and cause unintended consequences. (Indeed, China continues to rebuff the Biden administration’s requests for direct military talks as a means of protesting US sanctions on General Li Shangfu, who became China’s defense minister in March.)
America’s longstanding lack of ties with Myanmar’s nationalist military – the only functioning institution in a culturally and ethnically diverse society – has been an enduring weakness of its policy toward the country. Owing to this limitation, Suu Kyi achieved the status of a virtual saint in the Western imagination, only for the feted Nobel Peace Prize winner’s reputation to fall precipitously after she defended her country’s Rohingya policy against accusations of genocide.
Now that the junta leaders are sanctioned and the civilian leaders are under detention, the US has little leverage to influence political developments in Myanmar. Instead, America and its allies have ratcheted up the sanctions and lent support to the armed resistance to military rule. To that end, a Myanmar-specific provision added to the 2023 US National Defense Authorization Act authorizes “non-lethal assistance” for anti-regime armed groups, including the People’s Defense Force, a notional army established by the shadow National Unity Government. Biden now has considerable latitude to aid Myanmar’s anti-junta insurrection, just as Obama did when he provided “non-lethal assistance,” in the form of battlefield support equipment, to Ukrainian forces and Syrian rebels.
But such interventions are likely to plunge Myanmar into greater disorder and poverty without advancing US interests. Even in the unlikely event that the disparate groups behind the armed insurrection manage to overthrow the junta, Myanmar would not re-emerge as a democracy. Rather, it would become a Libya-style failed state and a bane to regional security. It would also remain a proxy battleground between Western powers and China and Russia. A United Nations report estimates that, since the coup, Myanmar has imported at least $1 billion worth of weapons and dual-use goods, principally from China and Russia.
China’s rapidly growing footprint in Myanmar is America’s strategic loss. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Given its strategic location, Myanmar could be co-opted into America’s Indo-Pacific strategy through a gradual easing of sanctions in response to positive moves by the junta.
Given that sanctions naturally close the door to dialogue and influence, they should never be employed as the first tool of foreign policy. After the Thai army chief seized power in a coup in 2014, the US wisely eschewed sanctions and opted for engagement, which helped safeguard Thailand’s thriving civil society. That strategy eventually led to the general’s defeat in the recent national election.
Restoring democracy in Myanmar can be achieved only gradually by engaging with the country’s military rulers and offering them incentives to reverse course. Sanctions without engagement have never worked. If Biden can closely engage with China – the world’s largest, strongest, and longest-surviving autocracy – including by sending the CIA director, the secretary of state, and secretary of the treasury to Beijing in quick succession, he should at least open lines of communication with Myanmar’s junta.
Just as the military-monarchy alliance has long shaped political developments in Thailand, where the generals have seized power 12 times over the last nine decades, Myanmar’s armed forces have traditionally asserted themselves as the country’s most powerful political player. That was evident when they retained their power under the 2008 constitution that helped bring Suu Kyi to power. Without a shift in US policy toward gradual engagement with the junta, Myanmar will remain the playground of great powers, with no hope for a new democratic opening.
Plenty of skeptics in the West believe that US efforts to cement ties with India will disappoint, not least because of India’s longstanding policy of non-alignment. But the US and India are united by shared strategic interests, beginning with the maintenance of a rules-based Indo-Pacific free of coercion.
No bilateral relationship has deepened and strengthened more rapidly over the last two decades than the one between the United States and India. In fact, Narendra Modi’s upcoming visit to the US will be his eighth as India’s prime minister, and his second since US President Joe Biden took office. The US has at least as much to gain from the growing closeness as India does.
India just overtook China in population size, and although its economy remains smaller, it is growing faster. In fact, India is now the world’s fastest-growing major economy, with GDP having already surpassed that of the United Kingdom and on track to overtake that of Germany. India thus represents a major export market for the US, including for weapons.
But commercial opportunities are just the beginning. In an era of sharpening geopolitical competition, the US is seeking partners to help it counter the growing influence – and assertiveness – of China (and its increasingly close ally Russia). India is an obvious partner for its fellow democracies in the West, though what it really represents is a critical “swing state” in the struggle to shape the future of the Indo-Pacific and the world order more broadly. The US cannot afford for it to swing toward the emerging Russia-China alliance.
Consider America’s quest to bolster supply-chain resilience through so-called friend-shoring. As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has explained, India is among the “trusted trading partners” with which the US is “proactively deepening economic integration,” as it attempts to diversify its trade “away from countries that present geopolitical and security risks” to its supply chain.
India is also integral to maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Its military standoff with China – now entering its 38th month – is a case in point. By refusing to back down, India is openly challenging Chinese expansionism, while making it more difficult for China to make a move on Taiwan. Biden has not commented on the confrontation, but he is certainly paying attention. It is telling that both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan visited New Delhi this month.
Already, India holds more military exercises with the US than any other power, and as of 2020, it had signed all four of the “foundational” agreements that the US maintains with all its allies. This means that the two countries, among other things, provide reciprocal access to each other’s military facilities and share geospatial data from airborne and satellite sensors. Meanwhile, India’s involvement in the Quad – along with the US, Australia, and Japan – has lent the grouping much-needed strategic heft.
Fortifying the strategic relationship with India is one of the rare issues eliciting bipartisan consensus in the US. The latest invitation to Modi to address the US Congress – he is the first Indian leader to do so twice – came from Democratic and Republican leaders alike.
Nonetheless, plenty of skeptics in the West believe that US efforts to cement strategic ties with India will disappoint. For example, one commentator recently declared that India will never be an ally of the US, and another argued that treating India as a key partner will not help the US in its geopolitical competition with China.
A key concern is India’s commitment to retaining its strategic independence. While India has rarely mentioned non-alignment since Modi came to power, in practice, it has been multi-aligned. As it has deepened its partnerships with democratic powers, it has also maintained its traditionally close relationship with Russia.
But India’s relationships with the US and Russia seem to be moving in opposite directions. India is building a broad and multifaceted partnership with the US – covering everything from cooperation on human spaceflight to the construction of resilient semiconductor supply chains – whereas its relationship with Russia now seems limited almost exclusively to defense and energy.
Nonetheless, India is not prepared to shun Russia, as the West has since the invasion of Ukraine, not least because India still views Russia as a valuable counterweight to China. In India’s view, China and Russia are not natural allies at all, but natural competitors that have been forced together by US policy. A Sino-Russian strategic axis serves neither India’s nor America’s interests, yet, much to India’s frustration, the US appears to have little interest in rethinking its policy.
This is not the only area where India believes that US policy undermines Indian security interests. India also takes issue with America’s insistence on maintaining severe sanctions on Myanmar and Iran, while coddling Pakistan, where mass arrests, disappearances, and torture have become the norm. The US is now threatening visa sanctions against officials of Bangladesh’s secular government – which is locked in a battle against Islamist forces – if it believes they are undermining elections that are due early next year.
The US is not accustomed to being challenged by its partners. Its traditional, Cold War-style alliances position the US as the “hub” and its allies as the “spokes.” But this will never work with India. As the White House’s Asia policy czar, Kurt Campbell, has acknowledged, “India has a unique strategic character,” and “a desire to be an independent, powerful state.” Far from a US client, India “will be another great power.”
Campbell is right. But that does not mean that the skeptics are also right. While a traditional treaty-based alliance with India would not work, the kind of soft alliance the US is pursuing, which requires no pact but does include, as Campbell also underlined, “people-to-people ties” and cooperation on “technology and the like,” can benefit both sides.
The US and India are united by shared strategic interests, not least in maintaining a rules-based Indo-Pacific free of coercion. As long as China remains on its current course, so will the Indo-American relationship.
How does one explain the fact that the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has made Bangladesh a focus of its democracy promotion efforts by dangling the threat of visa sanctions against officials who undermine free elections while staying silent on the undeclared martial law situation in Pakistan, where mass arrests, disappearances and torture have become political weapons?
The short answer is that U.S. promotion of democratic rights has long been selective, with geopolitical considerations often dominant. The pursuit of moral legitimacy for the cause of democracy promotion has also contributed to making sanctions the tool of choice for U.S. policymakers.
In the case of Bangladesh, the Biden administration is seeking to leverage two other factors: that close relatives of many Bangladeshi politicians live in the U.S. or Britain, including Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s son who holds an American green card; and that the bulk of Bangladesh’s exports go to the West, with the U.S. the top destination.
Few can object to what Secretary of State Antony Blinken says is the U.S. goal: that Bangladesh’s next election in early 2024 is free and fair. However, his threat to withhold visas from individuals “responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic election process” is hardly conducive to the promotion of this aim. If anything, it is likely to prove counterproductive.
Hasina, daughter of the country’s independence leader and first head of state, contends that the U.S. is pursuing a strategy of regime change in her country. “They are trying to eliminate democracy and introduce a government that will not have a democratic existence,” she told parliament in April. “It will be an undemocratic action.”
Leading a secular government since 2009 that Bangladesh’s Islamists detest, Hasina has given the country political stability and rapid economic growth, although the global economic fallout from the Ukraine war is now weighing on the country’s finances.
Bangladesh’s impressive growth trajectory stands in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil seen in Pakistan, which today is teetering on the brink of default. Yet while Bangladesh was excluded from the Summits for Democracy convened in 2021 and earlier this year by Biden, Pakistan was invited both times though it did not attend either.
While continuing to reward Pakistan by prioritizing short-term geopolitical considerations, the Biden administration has been criticizing democratic backsliding in Bangladesh. In 2021, it designated Bangladesh’s elite Rapid Action Battalion and six of its current and former leaders as complicit in, or engaged in, serious human rights abuses in relation to the country’s war on drugs, effectively freezing all their assets in the U.S.
In December, Peter Haas, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, insolently demanded that the authorities investigate a deadly clash between police and members of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is the country’s largest opposition party and has allied itself with radical Islamist parties. More recently, Blinken told Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Abdul Momen of his “concerns about violence against, and intimidation of, the media and civil society,” according to a State Department statement.
Blinken’s wielding of the visa-sanctions stick is clearly aimed at members of Hasina’s government, including law enforcement and other security officials, although the announcement of the new policy also mentioned members of opposition parties.
But sanctioning foreign officials usually serves no more than a symbolic purpose while hampering diplomacy. It can also have unintended consequences.
Earlier this month, Beijing rebuffed Washington’s request for a meeting in Singapore between U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Li Shangfu, his Chinese counterpart. Beijing cited Li’s presence on a U.S. sanctions list to which he was added five years before his appointment in March as defense minister.
It could even be argued that U.S. sanctions against Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of the Myanmar military, alongside three other senior commanders, contributed to the coup that ousted the country’s civilian government in 2021, as the generals may have felt they had little to lose personally by going ahead. Added sanctions since then have only exacerbated Myanmar’s internal situation and driven the country closer to China.
From Myanmar and Iran to Belarus and Cuba, U.S. sanctions have failed to bring about political change. The relative decline of American influence and the ongoing shift in global power from the West to the East are making U.S.-led sanctions less and less effective. However, with the West still controlling the global financial architecture and the dollar remaining the world’s primary reserve currency, sanctions are still an attractive option for American policymakers.
The new hard line toward Dhaka makes little sense. The Hasina government could be a significant partner in the U.S. war on terror and in improving Asian security. Instead, bilateral relations are under strain. No one from the Biden administration even met with Hasina when she visited Washington last month for discussions with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
While in Singapore this month, Austin declared that America “will not flinch in the face of bullying or coercion” from China. But bullying and coercion are also unlikely to advance U.S. interests in Bangladesh.
In fact, bullying the world’s seventh-most populous country, far from helping to promote a free and fair election, is more likely to revive painful memories of how the U.S. looked the other way in 1971 as the Pakistani military brutally resisted Bangladesh’s efforts to achieve independence from Islamabad, slaughtering up to 3 million people. What is Washington really after now?
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the foundations of the international order, a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would lead to a profound global geopolitical reordering — including ending America’s global preeminence. The longer the Ukraine war continues to distract the United States from the growing challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, the greater the risk of a Chinese attempt to throttle Taiwan through an informal blockade.
It is clear that the single greatest threat to American security is posed not by a declining Russia but by an ascendant China that is seeking to supplant the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power. Still, President Biden rightly emphasizes the importance of talks with Beijing, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calling dialogue “not a reward” but “a necessity” after his Chinese counterpart declined to hold a meeting with him on the sidelines of the Asia Security Summit in Singapore.
Oddly, however, the Biden administration shuns dialogue and diplomacy with Russia, thus prolonging a war in Ukraine that, far from advancing America’s long-term interests, is a drain on U.S. resources. The war is revealing Western military shortcomings, with America’s critical munitions being depleted and capacity to restock proving insufficient.
The last thing Chinese President Xi Jinping wants is an end to the Ukraine war, because that would leave the U.S. free to focus on the Indo-Pacific.
Biden’s strategy is to continue bleeding Russia in Ukraine. In fact, Biden’s joint communiqué with the other Group of Seven leaders in Hiroshima, Japan, May 20 committed to “increasing the costs to Russia” while pledging “unwavering support for Ukraine for as long as it takes.”
More ominously, Biden and the other six leaders put forth maximalist demands for an end to the war in Ukraine, including that Russia “completely and unconditionally withdraw its troops and military equipment from the entire internationally recognized territory of Ukraine.” But, with the conflict settling into a war of attrition that inhibits either side from making significant battlefield advances, a complete and unconditional Russian withdrawal is unlikely to ever happen. In fact, after formally annexing the vast swaths of Ukrainian territory it has seized, Russia has been fortifying its defenses to hold on to its war gains.
In their joint statement, Biden and the other G7 leaders have also committed to efforts to ensure “Russia pays for the long-term reconstruction of Ukraine.”
Their statement states that the G7 states “will continue to take measures available within our domestic frameworks to find, restrain, freeze, seize, and, where appropriate, confiscate or forfeit the assets of those individuals and entities that have been sanctioned in connection with Russia’s aggression.” It continues, “We reaffirm that, consistent with our respective legal systems, Russia’s sovereign assets in our jurisdictions will remain immobilized until Russia pays for the damage it has caused to Ukraine.”
Not only is the unilateral impoundment of Russian assets contrary to a rules-based international order, but the maximalist demands set out by the G7 leaders are a recipe for an unending conflict, which can only benefit China economically and strategically while weakening Russia and sapping Western strength.
With the age of Western dominance already in retreat, a long war in Ukraine would accelerate the shift in global power from the West to the East.
Meanwhile, CIA Director Bill Burns’s recent clandestine visit to Beijing exemplifies Biden’s efforts to placate China as he ramps up sanctions and military pressure on Russia. While seeking economic collapse and regime change in Russia, Biden has tried to reassure Xi with what Beijing says are “Five Nos”: No to changing China’s communist system; no to seeking U.S. economic decoupling from China; no to a policy of “one China, one Taiwan”; no to containing China; and no to a new Cold War with China.
The White House may not have directly corroborated such commitments, but similar formulations can be found in the Biden administration’s public declarations, including an assurance in the administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy that the U.S. “objective is not to change the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” the world’s most populous, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy.
Biden is mistaken if he thinks he can bring around China or dissuade it from ganging up with Russia against America. Xi is determined to make China a world power second to none. Indeed, China and Russia, with important allies like Iran, are in the process of forming a “Eurasian Axis” to challenge the American-led global order, including the status of the dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency.
Against this backdrop, it would be in America’s interest to encourage quiet diplomacy to explore ways to bring about a ceasefire in a war that is having a negative worldwide impact by triggering energy and food crises, which in turn contribute to high inflation and slowing global growth. Ukraine’s impending launch of its long-planned counteroffensive, meanwhile, promises to heighten the risk of a direct Russia–NATO conflict.
Even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warns that “a large number of soldiers will die” in his country’s counteroffensive because Russia retains the upper hand in air power, Kyiv, with U.S. backing, continues to reject proposals of peace talks that do not center on Russia first vacating the areas it has occupied.
After more than 15 months of war, it is clear that neither Russia nor Ukraine and its Western allies is in a position to achieve its primary strategic objectives. A ceasefire is the only way out of the current military deadlock.
In the Korean War, it took two years of military stalemate to achieve an armistice agreement. A similarly long delay in reaching an armistice agreement in the current war would mean greater bloodshed and devastation without either side making any significant strategic gains.
An extended Ukraine war will help formalize a Sino-Russian strategic axis while increasing the likelihood of Chinese aggression against Taiwan. By contrast, a frozen Ukraine conflict arising from a ceasefire will keep Moscow preoccupied while letting America focus less on Russia, the world’s most-sanctionedcountry, and more on a globally expansionist China.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
Following former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s arrest, Pakistan has been thrown into turmoil. This explosion of political unrest, coupled with the Afghan Taliban regime’s support for terrorists, has grave implications for international security.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are sinking deeper into disarray, and the United States bears a significant share of the blame. As long as this long-troubled region remains mired in turmoil, Islamist terrorism will continue to thrive, with grave implications for international security.
Begin with Afghanistan. In the nearly 22 months since the US abandoned the country to the Pakistan-backed Taliban militia, a terrorist super-state has emerged. Beyond committing atrocities against the Afghan people and re-imposing medieval practices, including reducing Afghan women’s status to that of chattels, the Taliban has sustained cozy ties with al-Qaeda and several other terror groups.
As a leaked Pentagon assessment reports, Afghanistan has become a safe haven and staging ground for al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists planning attacks on targets in Asia, Europe, and the US. This should come as no surprise. The Taliban regime’s cabinet includes a veritable who’s who of international terrorists and narcotics traffickers, and it was in Kabul last year that an American drone strike killed al-Qaeda leader and United Nations-designated global terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri.
While the Islamic State may be seeking to expand its international operations from Afghanistan, it is al-Qaeda’s alliance with the Taliban that poses the greater long-term international threat. When the US withdrew suddenly from the country, it not only abandoned its allies there, but also left behind billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated American military equipment, in addition to several military bases, including the strategically valuable Bagram airbase. The Taliban is now the world’s only terrorist organization with its own air force, however rudimentary.
In a 12-page document issued last month, President Joe Biden’s administration sought to shift the blame for the Afghan fiasco onto Donald Trump, claiming that Biden’s “choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.” But, while the Trump administration undoubtedly cut a terrible deal with the Taliban, it was Biden who – overruling his top military generals – made the choices that triggered Afghanistan’s descent into chaos and facilitated the Taliban’s swift return to power.
US policy toward Pakistan has also been deeply misguided. It is thanks to a longstanding partnership with the US that Pakistan’s military and its rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency have been able to use terrorism as an instrument of state policy against neighboring countries. The Trump administration seemed to recognize this, and pledged to keep Pakistan at arm’s length until it ended its unholy alliance with terrorist organizations.
But the Biden administration has reversed this policy. Even though Pakistan played an integral role in enabling the Taliban – which the ISI helped create in the early 1990s – to defeat the US in Afghanistan, the Biden administration helped the Pakistani government stave off debt default last year. Soon after, the US unveiled a $450-million deal to modernize Pakistan’s US-supplied F-16s (which it values as delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons). The US then helped Pakistan get off the “gray list” maintained by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, the inter-governmental agency combating terrorist financing.
Today, Pakistan is facing profound political instability, rooted in a skewed civil-military relationship. Pakistan’s military has long been untouchable. It has ruled directly for 33 years. And when not technically in power, it has insisted on a pliant civilian administration that defers to the generals’ de facto leadership. Pakistan’s military, and its intelligence and nuclear establishment, have never answered to the civilian government. On the contrary, since 2017, two prime ministers have been ousted after falling out of favor with the military.
But supporters of one of those prime ministers, Imran Khan, are now mounting the first direct challenge to the military’s authority since Pakistan’s founding 75 years ago. Following Khan’s arrest on corruption charges earlier this month, mass protests erupted across Pakistan. Demonstrators stormed military properties, including the army headquarters and a major ISI facility, and set ablaze a top army commander’s home.
As the political crisis unfolds, Pakistan continues to teeter on the brink of default. It is being kept afloat by short-term loans from allies, until it can convince the International Monetary Fund to restart a suspended bailout program. This gives the international community leverage to force change in the country.
It is developments at home, especially the unprecedented anti-military protests, that have the greatest potential to force a rebalancing of civilian-military relations. But the military will not go down without a fight: the creeping shadow of military rule has already led to mass arrests, with the chief of army staff announcing trials under military law of civilians charged in the recent violence. The military could declare a state of emergency, in order to give itself carte blanche to stifle dissent, or it could stage another coup. The conflict could also erupt into civil war – ideal conditions for international terrorist forces to thrive.
For now, Pakistan remains a hub of terrorism and is contributing significantly to Afghanistan’s destabilization. Unless the nexus between Pakistan’s military and terrorist groups is severed, the situation in Afghanistan will not improve, and the battle against international terrorism will not be won.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s last-minute cancellation of his planned appearance at a Quad summit in Australia will strengthen the perception that the war of attrition in Ukraine is deflecting Washington’s attention from mounting security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region.
Citing the imperative of cutting a deal with congressional leaders to avert a looming U.S. debt default, Biden also scrapped plans to stop in Papua New Guinea for what was to be the first visit by a U.S. president to a Pacific Island nation.
The dual cancellations will reinforce questions about America’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific, which is shaping up as the world’s economic and geopolitical hub.
If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the foundations of the international order, as many observers contend, a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would usher in a new global order by ending America’s preeminence and irreparably damaging the U.S.-led alliance system. Yet the Biden administration remains overly focused on European security.
Biden’s planned Pacific tour next week had promised to put the international spotlight back on the Indo-Pacific and would have signaled that Washington had not taken its eye off the region despite America’s increasing involvement in the Ukraine war in terms of providing weapons, training and battlefield targeting data to Kyiv.
Only China can be pleased by Biden’s decision to simply return to the White House after the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan.
Just as China is the sole country really benefiting from the conflict in Ukraine, Biden’s scrapped visits are likely to bolster Chinese ambitions in the Pacific while setting back Washington’s efforts to contain Beijing’s growing influence. Using its economic power and the world’s largest naval fleet, China has been making rapid inroads among Pacific island nations.
Biden’s canceled visits serve as a fresh reminder that hyperpartisan politics and hardened polarization in the U.S. are crimping the country’s foreign policy. Indeed, America’s partisan divide has a direct bearing on its foreign policy priorities, with Republicans most concerned about China and Democrats about Russia, according to opinion polls.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to proceed without Biden to Papua New Guinea for a summit with Pacific island leaders, and then to go on to Australia.
India has been steadily expanding its outreach to strategically located Pacific nations, stepping up foreign aid and establishing the Forum for India-Pacific Island Cooperation. Meanwhile, around 24,000 people have registered to welcome Modi to Stadium Australia in Sydney next Tuesday.
More broadly, the Quad summit’s cancellation could not come at a worse time for a grouping that is already at a crossroads.
The Quad was resurrected during U.S. President Donald Trump’s term but summits among its leaders began only after Biden took office in 2021. Despite this increased engagement, the Quad’s challenges have been growing due to the absence of a clearly defined strategic mission for the group.
Biden is the third straight U.S. president to commit to shifting America’s primary strategic focus to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific. But the deepening U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict, coupled with the possibility that the war could drag on for a long time, suggests that he, too, could fail to genuinely make a pivot.
As if that were not bad enough, Biden has saddled the Quad with an increasingly expansive agenda that dilutes its Indo-Pacific strategic focus.
Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy, unveiled last year, underlined how the Quad has turned its attentions to everlasting universal challenges ranging from climate change and cybersecurity to global health and resilient supply chains. Such an ambitious agenda has little to do with the Quad’s original core objectives, including acting as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensuring a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.
By pursuing a strategy to bleed Russia in Ukraine, Biden may be weakening a major adversary, but he is also sapping America’s strength.
The war is revealing Western military shortcomings, with weapons in short supply, critical munitions depleted, and U.S. capacity to restock insufficient. More fundamentally, it is distracting America from growing Indo-Pacific challenges.
The last thing Chinese President Xi Jinping wants is an end to the Ukraine war because that would leave the U.S. free to focus on the Indo-Pacific.
Indeed, before moving on Taiwan, Xi could seek to further deplete U.S. weapons arsenals through indirect arms shipments to Russia that could force the West to send more supplies to Ukraine. To a limited extent, Xi is already aiding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war by supplying drones, navigation equipment, jamming technology, fighter-jet parts and semiconductors to sanctioned Russian entities.
Against this backdrop, the Ukraine war is accentuating the Quad’s challenges, even while its leaders continue to regularly hold discussions, including an expected gathering on the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Hiroshima where Modi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will appear as special guests.
To acquire clear strategic direction and meaning, the Quad must focus on dealing with Indo-Pacific challenges, not global ones. Without a distinct strategic vision and agenda, the Quad will have little impact and just be an ineffective talking shop.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
By standing up to China, India has openly challenged Xi Jinping’s expansionism in a way that no other world power has done. The current military stalemate in the Himalayas serves as yet another reminder that Xi has picked a border fight with India that he cannot win.
Three years after China stealthily began encroaching on India’s territory in the Himalayas, no end is in sight for the two countries’ border standoff. While the rival military buildups and intermittent clashes have received little attention in the West, the escalating border confrontation has set in motion a long-term rivalry that could reshape Asian geopolitics.
By locking horns with China despite the risk of a full-scale war, India has openly challenged Chinese power in a way no other world power, including the United States, has done in this century. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s strategic overreach has caused India to shift away from its previous appeasement policy and accelerate its military buildup, turning a potential partner into an enduring foe, while appearing determined to forestall a Sinocentric Asia.
Similarly, Xi’s muscular revisionism and geopolitical ambitions have forced Japan and Australia to readjust their strategic frameworks and work to counter China’s expansionism in the Indo-Pacific. By drawing up plans to double defense spending by 2027, Japan has effectively abandoned its pacifist postwar national-security policy. Australia, for its part, has renounced its previous hedging approach and joined the AUKUS defense pact with the US and the United Kingdom.
China’s attempt in spring 2020 to occupy hundreds of square kilometers in the icy borderlands of India’s northernmost Ladakh region, at a time when India was enforcing the world’s strictest national lockdown, amounted to a cynical effort to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic to further Xi’s strategic aims. But Xi miscalculated when he assumed that China could force India to accept the new status quo as a fait accompli. Since then, India has more than matched China’s military deployments, fueling the largest-ever military buildup in the Himalayas, one of the world’s most inhospitable regions.
With India refusing to buckle, Xi has sought to overwhelm its defenses by opening up a new front in the eastern Himalayas, more than 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) from China’s 2020 land grabs. In December 2022, a Chinese incursion into the strategically crucial border state of Arunachal Pradesh was repelled by Indian forces, reportedly with help from US intelligence.
In an effort to strengthen its territorial claim and provoke India, China has Sinicized the names of sites in Arunachal Pradesh. Calling Arunachal Pradesh “South Tibet,” the Chinese government has asserted that the sprawling state – more than twice the size of Taiwan – is “Chinese territory” and that Sinicizing Indian lands is its “sovereign right.”
All this has given India a stake in Taiwan’s continued autonomous status. If Taiwan were to fall to China, the Austria-sized Arunachal Pradesh could become the Chinese government’s next target for “reunification.” China’s annexation of Tibet in 1951 proved to be one of the most significant geopolitical developments in post-World War II history, giving China common borders with India, Nepal, Bhutan, and northwest Myanmar. A Chinese takeover of Taiwan could lead to a similar geopolitical reordering, enabling Chinese naval forces to break out of the “first island chain” and easily access the Pacific.
China’s claim that Taiwan has “always been” part of China is historically dubious. Taiwan did not become a Chinese province before the late nineteenth century, and China lost control of the island just eight years later, when the Qing Dynasty ceded it to Japan in perpetuity following its defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War. But in laying claim to Taiwan, Xi is working to complete Mao Zedong’s expansionist vision of a “Greater China.”
Similarly, Tibet is the key to Chinese expansionism in the Himalayas despite the fact that it was a part of China only when China itself was occupied by outsiders like the Mongols and the Manchus. Because it cannot claim any Han-Chinese connection, its territorial claims in the Himalayas rest on alleged Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links. Even tiny Bhutan has not been spared; China has been nibbling away at its borderlands.
Against this backdrop, India’s willingness to stand up to China is crimping Xi’s expansionist agenda. As Admiral Michael M. Gilday, the US Navy’s chief of naval operations, put it last year, India presents China with a “two-front” problem. “They [Indians] now force China to not only look east, toward the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, but they now have to be looking over their shoulder at India,” he said.
Moreover, the Sino-Indian rivalry has flared up at a time when China’s economy is running into long-term constraints, including a shrinking and rapidly aging population and slowing productivity growth. By contrast, India, which has one of the world’s youngest populations with a median age of 28.4, is reaping a demographic dividend. While its GDP is still smaller than China’s, it is the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
Given that its military is the world’s most experienced in hybrid mountain warfare, India has an edge in the high-altitude Himalayan environment. Moreover, in contrast to India’s all-volunteer military, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army largely relies on conscripts who ostensibly “volunteer” for two years of service after they reach the age of 18. That helps explain why China has chosen to engage in stealth encroachments rather than direct combat.
The current military stalemate in the Himalayas serves as yet another reminder that Xi has picked a border fight with India that he cannot win. With the US-China rivalry deepening, the last thing China needed was to make a permanent enemy of its largest neighbor. Ultimately, bringing India and America closer could prove to be Xi’s lasting legacy – an unintended consequence that threatens to undermine his regime’s aggressive irredentism.
China appears to be building a military listening post on Great Coco Island, which sits between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea just north of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago where India has multiple naval and air force facilities and about 210 kilometers southwest of the mouth of Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River.
Such a spy station could be used to carry out maritime surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence collection against India — and would highlight how U.S.-led sanctions are exacerbating regional-security challenges by pushing military-ruled Myanmar into China’s strategic lap.
Great Coco Island, measuring nearly 8 sq. kilometers and home to around 1,500 people, is one of three main islands in Myanmar’s Coco group, which also includes several small islets. The Coco Islands are separated from India’s North Andaman Island by the 20-km wide Coco Channel.
Beijing and Naypyitaw have each denied Chinese involvement in militarizing the Coco Islands. However, satellite images of an expanded airstrip, new aircraft hangars, a large pier and a radar station with a protective dome indicate that military infrastructure is rapidly going up on Great Coco, previously home to rudimentary infrastructure.
In recent months, India has confronted Myanmar with satellite imagery and other intelligence about assistance being provided by China for building military and dual-use facilities on Great Coco. Chinese military engineers and other personnel have been spotted there, Indian officials say.
A causeway is under construction at the southern end of Great Coco to connect it with a neighboring island, where the clearing of forested land suggests a further extension of facilities.
China has a record of issuing denials while expanding its strategic footprint through stealthy but incremental moves. It set up its first overseas military base in Djibouti while insisting it had no such plan.
A more striking example is how China turned its artificially created islands in the South China Sea into forward military bases soon after President Xi Jinping, standing with then-U.S. President Barack Obama in the White House Rose Garden in 2015, said, “China does not intend to pursue militarization.”
The U.S. believes that China is working to establish an international network of logistics and base infrastructure while concealing the terms of its agreements with host nations and the intended purpose of dual-use facilities that it finances, possibly including a naval outpost in Cambodia. Facilities under scrutiny include commercial ports in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, and Gwadar, Pakistan that have been taken over by Chinese state-owned companies.
China’s large spy ships, which serve as mobile listening and tracking platforms, are also playing a role. One such ship, the Yuan Wang 5, docked at Hambantota International Port last August despite Indian protests. The Yuan Wang 6 appeared in the Indian Ocean in December when New Delhi tested the Agni 5 intercontinental ballistic missile.
Myanmar’s junta, faced with crippling Western sanctions and foreign-backed armed resistance to its rule, has neither the capability nor the motivation to build sophisticated maritime reconnaissance and surveillance facilities on remote Great Coco on its own. At a time when it is struggling to retake control of large swaths of the country, the last thing it would do is build a spy station directed at friendly India, which has refused to join the American-led sanctions campaign.
But Beijing has the means, strategic impetus and ambition to set up facilities to monitor Indian activities, including naval communications and movements, satellite launches and tests of missiles which often splash down in the Bay of Bengal. China has long had interest in the Coco Islands, with talk of building a signals-intelligence facility there first surfacing in the early 1990s.
U.S.-led sanctions against Myanmar are now working to China’s advantage just as they did for nearly a quarter of a century before Obama’s historic Myanmar visit in 2012 heralded a change of policy. In response to the military’s February 2021 seizure of power, U.S. President Joe Biden promptly reimposed sanctions without heeding the history of how China had earlier become Myanmar’s dominant trading partner and investor.
The militarization of the Coco Islands will extend China’s growing penetration of Myanmar, which serves Beijing as a strategic gateway to the Indian Ocean, an important source of natural resources and a major market for its arms exports.
To bypass the narrow Malacca Strait between Peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, Beijing has been investing heavily in the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. The initiative includes a deep-sea port at Kyaukpyu and seeks to facilitate direct energy imports overland into Yunnan province.
In the past, the Coco Islands were administratively grouped with the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, but British colonial authorities split off the Cocos after the killing of a British lighthouse keeper by an Indian in 1877, reassigning responsibility to their outpost in Rangoon, now Yangon.
In 1942, the island groups were reunited by invading Japanese forces, who soon passed control to Indian nationalist forces fighting for independence from British rule. But upon independence in 1947, the Indian government did not assert control over the Cocos which then stayed with Burma as it too moved toward independence from the U.K.
Spread across 750 km, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands give India commanding oversight over a key stretch of the main sea lanes that connect East Asia with Europe and the Middle East. The islands’ strategic importance in relation to the Malacca Strait explains why the Indian military’s only tri-service command is headquartered there.
China’s strategic foothold on the Coco Islands, if confirmed, will not only weaken this Indian advantage but also create a new maritime threat to India.
FILE – The American and Chinese flags wave at Genting Snow Park ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics, Feb. 2, 2022, in Zhangjiakou, China. The Commerce Department is tightening export controls to limit China’s ability to get advanced computing chips, develop and maintain supercomputers, and make advanced semiconductors. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)
If it is to remain the world’s preeminent power, the United States must focus its attention on the globally ascendant and expansionist China, which, as President Biden acknowledged in his 48-page national security strategy in October, “is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective.”
The subsequently released National Defense Strategy bluntly stated that China represents “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security.”
Yet America’s deepening involvement in the proxy war with Russia over Ukraine’s future is deflecting U.S. attention from the core challenge posed by China. Instead of exploring a ceasefire agreement to halt what has increasingly become a war of attrition, with neither side in a position to make major advances on the battlefield, the Biden administration and several U.S. allies are training thousands of new Ukrainian military recruits and rapidly arming Ukraine for a spring offensive to help it regain some of its Russia-occupied territories.
With the West sending 40 percent of all its weapons to Ukraine since December, the flow of arms has become a torrent. But offense is inherently much tougher than defense. A major spring offensive by Ukrainian forces (relying on newly supplied Western equipment and with mostly new recruits) could result in massive casualties on their side.
In fact, the longer the war in Ukraine extends, the greater is the likelihood of two tectonic developments unfolding: Russia and China cementing a strategic axis against the West; and Chinese President Xi Jinping launching aggression against Taiwan.
In the second half of the Cold War, following President Nixon’s opening to China, the U.S. co-opted China against the Soviet Union, gradually turning the Sino-American relationship into an informal alliance geared toward containing and rolling back Soviet influence. This two-against-one competition contributed to the Soviet Union’s imperial overstretch and, ultimately, to the West’s triumph in the Cold War without armed conflict.
Today, a two-against-one competition is emerging again, but with China and Russia bandying together against the U.S.
A forward-looking U.S. administration would avoid confronting Russia and China simultaneously, and instead seek to play one off against the other. Yet, U.S. policy is helping turn two natural competitors, Russia and China, into close strategic partners. Consequently, the U.S. seriously risks accelerating its relative decline through strategic overreach.
U.S. sanctions policy is promoting a mutually beneficial partnership between Russia and China by helping advance a natural division of strategic priorities. China’s primary focus is on its periphery, stretching from Japan across Southeast Asia to India, while Russia’s attention is concentrated largely on Eastern and Central Europe. While Russia seeks to regain influence among states bordering its western flank, China’s muscular revisionism is aimed at establishing “hegemony along its periphery, especially regarding Taiwan, the South China Sea and India.”
Today, with Russia tying the U.S. down in the European theater, Xi has greater strategic room to achieve what he has called China’s “historic mission” — the forcible absorption of Taiwan.
The issue is no longer if but when Xi will move against Taiwan, a thriving democracy that also happens to be the world’s semiconductor superpower. Just the giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) accounts for more than 90 percent of the global output of the most advanced semiconductors. The U.S. National Security Council has projected that a Chinese takeover of TSMC could cause a more than $1 trillion disruption of the global economy, besides threatening U.S. military and technological leadership.
In his first speech as a third-term president on March 13, Xi unambiguously linked the incorporation of Taiwan to the success of his national rejuvenation policy, saying the “essence” of his great rejuvenation drive was “the unification of the motherland.”
More ominously, at a time when his communist regime has unveiled new air-raid shelters in cities across the strait from Taiwan; new military readiness laws, including to more easily activate reservists; and new countrywide mobilization offices, Xi said last month that China must prepare for war to cope with a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle.” Before demitting office as premier, Li Keqiang also called for heightened “preparations for war.”
After changing the territorial status quo in the South China Sea and the Himalayas, Xi is itching to move against Taiwan, despite the risk of direct conflict with the U.S.
Before meeting Xi in Bali, Indonesia, in November, Biden had said he wanted to discuss “red lines” in the tense relationship with Beijing. But it was Xi who, in great detail, spelled out China’s No. 1 red line — Taiwan. A lengthy account in the Chinese readout of the meeting said Xi “stressed that the Taiwan question is at the very core of China’s core interests, the bedrock of the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, and the first red line that must not be crossed in China-U.S. relations.”
Xi, in speeches at home last month, singled out the U.S. as China’s foe and then joined hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin in explicitly identifying America in a nine-point joint statement as their common adversary.
Against this backdrop, deterring China from upending the world order by invading Taiwan has become more imperative than ever for the Biden administration.
But instead of committing sufficient resources to defend Taiwan, the administration is signaling anxiety over America’s dependency on that island’s cutting-edge chip industry. It is ramping up U.S. chip-making capacity with the help of American companies that have pledged tens of billions of dollars for semiconductor projects.
The scale of the ramp-up in the U.S. chip-making plans has been likened to America’s Cold War-era investments in the space race following the Soviet Union’s launch of its Sputnik satellite in 1957.
More fundamentally, the U.S. should be addressing its strategic overstretch, not exacerbating it through greater entanglement in European security. The current U.S. focus on containing Russia’s regional ambitions is at the cost of countering China’s drive to supplant America as the world’s foremost power.
The longer the U.S. is involved in the war in Ukraine, the greater will be the strategic space for China to advance its expansionist agenda, including by accelerating its accumulation of military and economic power.
Meanwhile, Biden, by opposing a unilateral change in the Taiwan status quo without credibly signaling a genuine willingness to defend the island militarily, risks encouraging China to launch aggression that takes the U.S. by surprise.
In fact, just when Xi is seeking to raise the cost of American intervention over Taiwan, the U.S., in supporting Ukraine, is rapidly depleting its munitions stockpiles and exposing its woefully inadequate capacity to restock, setting off alarm bells in Washington.
If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the foundations of the international order, as many in the West believe, a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would usher in a new global order by ending America’s global preeminence and undermining the U.S.-led alliance system. It would change the trajectory of the 21st century in the way that World War I transformed the 20th.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press), which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.
In his national security strategy released in October, U.S. President Joe Biden promised to focus on restoring a damaged democracy at home. But the first-ever indictment of a former president in American history is likely to deepen the divide in an already bitterly polarized United States. Biden, far from promoting national reconciliation and healing as president, has proved as divisive as his predecessor, Donald Trump.
After the unsealing of the indictment, the criminal case against Trump looks even weaker than expected.
Indeed, some of former Trump’s fiercest critics, like Mitt Romney, have slammed the Manhattan district attorney’s case against the former president (who is running again for the same office) as flimsy and designed “to fit a political agenda.” Legal experts say it sets a dangerous precedent to go after political opponents. The district attorney belongs to the same party as Biden, against whom Trump is running.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll, more than two-thirds of Americans think U.S. democracy is broken. America’s image as a flawed democracy is likely be reinforced by the weaponization of the justice system, which is what Trump’s indictment represents.
The essence of democracy is that those in office will not misuse their power to go after political opponents. Yet high-profile political prosecutions through the misuse of the judicial apparatus are increasing in democracies.
For example, Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, was in 2017 convicted for alleged corruption and jailed until the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the judge who presided over the trial was biased against da Silva. Indeed, that judge became justice minister under President Jair Bolsonaro, who possibly would not have been elected in 2018 had da Silva not been in prison.
Stretching the law to target Biden’s leading opponent will make it more difficult for the U.S. to heal the deep split in society and transcend hardened polarization. Trump’s indictment followed the FBI’s unusual raid last August on his Mar-a-Lago residence in search of classified documents. Ironically, classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president were subsequently discovered at his Delaware home and elsewhere.
As president, Trump’s remarks often bore the hallmarks of bombastic assertions. But he also at times displayed refreshing candour and honesty on U.S. national security and foreign policy, which made him a key target of the “Deep State”, thus spurring false Russia-collusion claims and two failed impeachments.
To be sure, democratic ethics and values have come under growing pressure across the free world. The fever of polarizing politics has risen largely because the quality of political leadership has declined in almost all democratic countries. Instead of seeking national reconciliation, leaders have fanned the embers of divisive politics.
Media outlets have helped amplify such hyper-partisanship. They not only reflect but also drive the polarization in many democracies. Instead of adhering to a guiding ethic to report news objectively and in a balanced way, many newspapers and TV channels market, not report, news. According to one Gallup poll, Americans’ trust in the media has sunk to just 36%.
Many democracies are intensely polarized — from South Africa and India to South Korea and Brazil. Public trust in politicians across the democratic world has reached an all-time low.
But the U.S. is so polarized that it has been referred to as “One America, Two Nations.” It has morphed into the Polarized States of America, with both sides of the political divide resorting to inflammatory rhetoric and fuelling the deep divide.
Thanks to the widening schism between the two sides — which are segregated in their own ideological silos — tolerance for opposing views is increasingly in short supply. Such is America’s political divide that people holding rival beliefs are unwilling to even communicate with each other.
The partisan divide extends even to foreign policy. While U.S. public opinion surveys show that China has left Russia far behind to become America’s greatest enemy, far more Democrats than Republicans remain fixated on Russia. This has a bearing on actual policy, with Biden more focused on a declining Russia than on a globally expansionist China.
Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to move further away from the healing and unity Biden called for in his inauguration speech. Far from helping to end what he described as the “uncivil war” between liberals and conservatives, Biden has added fuel to the divisive politics. As Biden acknowledges in his national security strategy, “We live at a moment of passionate political intensities and ferment that sometimes tears at the fabric of the nation”.
U.S. hyper-partisan politics is plumbing new depths, cementing political divisions and poisoning national discourse. It is also undermining America’s international standing. This has emboldened the world’s largest and longest-surviving autocracy, China, to cheekily lecture the U.S. on human rights and democracy. For example, Yang Jiechi, the leader of the Chinese delegation at the March 2021 talks in Anchorage, Alaska, delivered a 16-minute jeremiad against U.S. hypocrisy and double standards.
Instead of fixing its broken democracy, the U.S. seeks regime change in the countries it targets — from Russia to Myanmar and Iran. It also lectures other countries, including India, on human rights, even as the human rights situation remains appalling within the U.S., where police kill more than 1,000 civilians each year.
For example, the State Department annually releases country reports on human rights practices that target America’s friends and foes alike. Meanwhile, the killing and maiming of unarmed Black people by police in the U.S. continues to increase.
The blunt truth is that hyper-partisan politics and debilitating polarization are not just weighing American democracy down, but also threatening to erode America’s global pre-eminence. After all, the bitterly divisive politics impedes the pursuit of long-term objectives.
Given the relative decline of its power, the U.S. needs a dynamic, forward-looking president who can unify an increasingly divided country. A poll last year found that almost two-thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. is on the wrong track under Biden.
Against this background, the last thing America needed is a criminal case against a former president that represents a further erosion of legal and democratic norms. More than China or Russia, America’s biggest enemy is within: It needs to find ways to move past its politics of polarization and vituperation so as to heal the wide divide in society.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground”.
The United States and India are close friends today, but American policy has long undermined Indian security, first by arming Pakistan as a counterweight to India from the 1950s onward and then aiding China’s rise following President Richard Nixon’s opening to China. That helped create an expansionist power on India’s northern borders. As president, Donald Trump acknowledged that his predecessors “created a monster” by facilitating China’s rise.
Under President Xi Jinping, China seems determined to achieve hegemony in Asia, which explains its stealth border aggression against India in April 2020 that has resulted in continuing military standoffs along the Himalayan border. India-China relations have fallen to their lowest point in decades, with no end in sight to the border confrontation between the two countries.
Yet, amid the military standoffs, Xi’s regime persists with provocative actions against India, including seeking to open new fronts. The fact that Beijing continues to provoke India without incurring any tangible costs points to a faltering China policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Despite the imperative to create incentives and disincentives to influence China’s conduct, New Delhi has shied away from substantive action, other than reinforcing military deployments and stepping up infrastructure development along the Himalayan frontier in response to the buildup of Chinese forces. The Indian government has refused to employ economic and diplomatic cards against Beijing, let alone name and shame China for its continuing border aggression.
Unfortunately for New Delhi, American policy under President Joe Biden is likely to further embolden Xi’s regime, with China’s neighbours likely to bear the brunt of the heightened Chinese revisionism.
Biden’s preoccupation with Russia, including bleeding it on the Ukrainian battlefields, limits his administration’s strategic space to deal with the threat from a globally expansionist China. The US may still be the world’s foremost military power but it is in no position to meaningfully take on Russia and China simultaneously.
The only potential winner from the war in Ukraine is likely to be America’s main rival, China. A recent report from a Washington-based organization said that China was already the “biggest winner” from the Western sanctions on Moscow. China has become Russia’s banker and most-important trade partner. China is also building an energy safety net through greater overland oil and gas flows from Russia at heavily discounted prices, thereby setting up secure supply lines that cannot be interrupted even if it invaded or blockaded Taiwan.
Indeed, the longer and deeper the US is involved in the war in Ukraine, the greater will be the dual likelihood of Xi launching aggression against Taiwan and Washington’s strategic nightmare — a Sino-Russian strategic axis — turning into reality. By compelling Russia (now the world’s most-sanctioned country) to pivot to China, US sanctions policy is chipping away at India’s strategic interests by making it more difficult to build Asian power equilibrium.
TAIWAN, THE NEXT UKRAINE?
The big question facing the world today is whether Taiwan could become the next Ukraine. If China were to succeed in incorporating Taiwan, Chinese military and strategic pressure on India would intensify. Indeed, India could bear the brunt of the geopolitical fallout from such a development.
Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin was clear about his plans for invading Ukraine, so has Xi been explicit about absorbing Taiwan.
The live-fire Chinese military drills around Taiwan last August, by simulating an air and sea blockade, demonstrated China’s combat capability to accomplish Xi’s “historic mission” to absorb that island. The drills allowed Chinese troops to practice enforcing Taiwan’s gradual economic strangulation or quarantine, suggesting that Xi could prefer a strategy of calibrated squeeze so as to force that island democracy to merge with China.
Make no mistake: Chinese aggression against Taiwan would likely have a greater global fallout than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Conflict over Taiwan would shape the new global order. A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would upend the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region, and irreparably damage America’s reputation as a reliable ally, prompting US allies to re-evaluate their alliances.
The US National Security Council has projected that China’s annexation of Taiwan “could disrupt the world economy to the tune of more than $1 trillion.” Taiwan, after all, is the world’s unrivalled superpower in semiconductors. Just the giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) accounts for more than 90% of the global output of the most advanced semiconductors.
Xi seems pleased that the war in Ukraine is revealing Western military shortcomings, with weapons in short supply, critical munitions being depleted, and US capacity to restock insufficient, even as the American and European political consensus on the war is weakening.
Such shortcomings could tempt Xi, before moving on Taiwan, to help further deplete US weapons arsenals through indirect arms shipments to Russia, forcing the West to increase arms supplies to Ukraine. Xi is already aiding Putin’s war to a limited extent by supplying navigation equipment, jamming technology, fighter-jet parts, and semiconductors to sanctioned Russian entities.
Those in the West that say a negotiated armistice in Ukraine would only embolden Beijing’s designs against Taiwan overlook the fact that Xi, given his own cost-free expansionism from the South China Sea to the Himalayas, does not need to learn from Russia that aggression works. As a recent report from the influential think tank Rand Corporation suggested, a protracted Ukraine war — with its constant flows of US money and weapons and dangerously elevated risk of NATO-Russia conflict — would crimp a US pivot to the growing China challenge.
Xi, after changing the territorial status quo in the South China Sea and the Himalayas, is itching to move against Taiwan. With Russia tying the US down in the European theatre, Xi has greater strategic room to forcibly incorporate Taiwan. The issue is no longer if but when Xi will move against Taiwan.
Taiwan’s autonomous existence presently ties up a sizable portion of the armed forces of China, which also faces a strong US-Japan alliance in the defence of that island.
India likewise is helping Taiwanese defences by tying down a complete Chinese theatre force, which could otherwise be employed against Taiwan. Admiral Mike Gilday, the US Navy chief, said last August that India presents China a two-front problem: “They [Indians] now force China to not only look east, toward the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, but they now have to be looking over their shoulder at India”.
Still, given the looming spectre of Chinese aggression, deterring an attack on Taiwan has become more pressing than ever. Admiral Philip Davidson, who led the US Indo-Pacific Command, told the US Congress in 2021 that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could happen by 2027. But US intelligence now reportedly believes that Xi could move against Taiwan much earlier, possibly during President Biden’s current term. As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said some months ago, China seems determined to absorb Taiwan “on a much faster timeline” than it had previously contemplated.
Biden’s surrender of Afghanistan to a terrorist militia in August 2021, and his growing involvement in the Ukraine war after failing to deter a Russian invasion of that country, have presented the US in a weakened position. Xi’s designs against Taiwan are also being encouraged by the failure of the unprecedented US-led Western sanctions to bring about economic collapse or regime change in Russia or even to force Russian forces to retreat from Ukraine. Economic war on this scale has never been waged against any country before.
Taiwan’s fall would significantly advance China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia, not least by enabling China to break out of the “first island chain” that runs from the Japanese archipelago, through Taiwan, the Philippines, and on to Borneo, enclosing China’s coastal seas.
The security implications for India of Taiwan’s annexation would be particularly ominous. The largest Asian territory Beijing covets is the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is almost three times as large as Taiwan. If Taiwan’s falls, China’s attention would shift to Arunachal Pradesh.
Against this background, it has become imperative for India, the US, Japan and Australia to step up consultations with each other, and with Taipei, on how they could contribute to shoring up Taiwan’s defences and deterring a Chinese attack on that island.
To be sure, America’s role is central to Taiwan’s autonomous future. If the US fails to prevent Taiwan’s subjugation, it would be widely seen as unable or unwilling to defend any other ally, including Japan, which hosts more American soldiers than any other foreign country.
The only thing that can deter China from attacking Taiwan is an understanding with certitude that it would incur unbearably high costs.
PROVOKING INDIA
The enduring costs of China’s stealthy land grabs in Ladakh in April 2020 have transformed the Himalayan frontier, fostering rival military buildups and raising the risks of armed conflict. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar acknowledged recently that the India-China border situation remains “very fragile” and, with rival forces deployed in close proximity, “dangerous”, while the Army chief Gen. Manoj Pande said China is building new military infrastructure along the border “at a very hectic pace”.
More fundamentally, China’s actions, including the forward deployment of artillery, missiles and bombers, are turning what was once a lightly patrolled frontier into a perennially hot border. The Tibetan Plateau has become a vast military base for China, which enjoys the advantage of a relatively flat terrain against India.
For India, a hot border means the diversion of even greater resources for frontier defence. This development would not only make it more difficult for India to focus on its broader strategic competition with China, but also further strengthen China’s alliance with Pakistan with the shared goal to box India in and present it with a two-front war scenario.
Not content with the military standoffs in Ladakh, China has more recently built up offensive new forces along the Arunachal and Sikkim borders and in occupied Doklam. Over the past winter, it aggressively deployed thousands of additional troops along the border of Arunachal Pradesh and thousands more near India’s “chicken-neck”, a narrow, 22-kilometer-wide corridor that connects the country’s northeast to the mainland. Xi’s Lunar New Year inspection in February of the Chinese military’s combat readiness against India showed how involved he is in the Himalayan military confrontation.
Relations between Beijing and New Delhi may be at a nadir, but that hasn’t stopped Xi’s regime from continuing to provoke India. This only exposes India’s China policy as ineffectual.
In December, Chinese forces attempted to seize key mountaintop positions in the Yangtse area of Tawang, which is the birthplace of a previous Dalai Lama. Tawang controls access to Bhutan’s Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, which China has claimed since mid-2020.
China, meanwhile, has stepped up its campaign to Sinicize names of places in India’s sprawling Arunachal state. It released this month a new set of Chinese names for places in Arunachal Pradesh. Enacting a Land Borders Law in 2021 and then accelerating the Sinicization of places in Arunachal seem part of a well-thought-out revanchist strategy.
Yet India’s Ministry of External Affairs issued a tame response to Beijing’s latest provocation, that too a day late, which allowed China to hog the headlines with its action. The MEA has yet to grasp that timely communication is critical for foreign policy in an era in which social media and mass media increasingly help shape narratives. It invariably is slow to respond to China’s infowar, psy-ops or lawfare. At times it even fails to respond.
Meanwhile, China is possibly seeking to open a front against India in the Bay of Bengal by assisting Myanmar’s militarization of the Coco Islands, which are a northern extension of the Andaman and Nicobar chain. Myanmar’s military regime, increasingly isolated and squeezed by US-led Western sanctions, is in no position to build military facilities on its own on the Coco Islands. The plain fact is that Western sanctions are counterproductively pushing Myanmar into China’s arms.
Separated from India’s North Andaman Island by the 20-kilometer-wide Coco Channel, the Coco Islands were historically Indian possessions. But in 1887, after a British lighthouse keeper was killed by an Indian, the Calcutta-based British colonial authorities transferred jurisdiction of the Coco Islands to Rangoon. India gained independence before Myanmar, yet Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government failed to assert Indian control over the Coco Islands.
The fact that Xi’s regime is seeking to open new fronts against India — from Tawang to the Coco Islands — casts an unflattering light on the Modi government’s China policy. China is also continuing to build up force levels along the Himalayas even as its military standoffs with India enter the 35th month.
To Modi’s credit, India has refused to buckle to the increasing Chinese military pressure. India has more than matched China’s Himalayan military deployments. By locking horns with China in this manner despite the risk of a full-scale war, India has openly challenged Chinese capability and power in a way no other power, including the US, has done in this century.
China’s April 2020 land-grabs in Ladakh and the consequent military standoffs have set in motion a major Indian defence buildup. India has ramped up construction of new border infrastructure, and last month appointed a committee of secretaries to fast-track all such projects.
So, why has India, despite its strong military response, failed to persuade China to end the border crisis or deter it from committing other acts of aggression?
The answer is that Indian policymakers have failed to comprehend that deterrence can never be effective without a comprehensive approach that extends beyond military-power projection to the use of all available tools, including economic and diplomatic leverage. The Modi government’s ban on numerous Chinese mobile phone apps, its restriction of Chinese companies’ access to official Indian contracts, and its launch of tax and customs probes against Chinese phone makers have been no more than an annoyance for Beijing.
India’s overly defensive, risk-averse approach, including a reluctance to impose tangible costs, is aiding China’s strategy of having its cake and eating it too.
In fact, New Delhi has allowed China’s bilateral trade surplus to far surpass India’s total defence budget (the world’s third largest). Last year, China’s trade surplus with India jumped nearly 50% — from $69.38 billion in 2021 to $101.02 billion in 2022. This means that the Indian trade deficit with just one country, China, now accounts for about 64% of India’s total global trade deficit.
China’s international trade surplus is now the main engine of its slowing economy, allowing it to finance its aggressive manoeuvres in the Himalayas and other Indo-Pacific theatres. And India last year contributed 11.51% to China’s overall trade surplus of $877.6 billion.
This shows that India, instead of establishing disincentives to Chinese military belligerence, has handed Beijing a potent incentive to sustain its aggressive behaviour and even seek to open new fronts.
India is reluctant to even impose any diplomatic costs on China. Far from launching a diplomatic offensive to spotlight the Chinese aggression, New Delhi remains reticent to name and shame China, even as Beijing has had no hesitation in raking up the Kashmir issue at the United Nations Security Council. Indeed, New Delhi maintains a normal diplomatic relationship with Beijing.
Furthermore, New Delhi still uses euphemisms to describe the Himalayan crisis: “unilateral change of status quo” for China’s aggression; “friction points” for captured areas; and “full restoration of peace and tranquillity,” or rollback of the Chinese intrusions, for bilateral relations to become “normal” again.
While publicly contending that bilateral ties cannot return to normal as long as disengagement and de-escalation don’t happen, India is pursuing normal relations with China in the economic and diplomatic realms. In effect, despite its rhetoric, India is doing exactly what China wants — separating the border confrontation from the rest of the relationship. It is thus no wonder that Beijing gloats over what it calls a “recovery momentum” in ties with India.
The long-term implications of China’s actions are ominous for Indian security. Consider, for example, China’s frenzied construction of new military infrastructure along the inhospitable Himalayan border. This big buildup either signals that Beijing sees war as likely, or that it intends to ramp up sustained pressure on India over the long-term.
Indeed, tying India down along the long Himalayan frontier could even help China secure a greater foothold in the Indian Ocean. Opening a maritime front against India, including by gaining a foothold on the Coco Islands, would complete its strategic encirclement of India.
Since Sardar Patel’s forewarning to Nehru that the Chinese communists intended to annex Tibet—a warning Nehru dismissed—India has repeatedly failed to take China’s words and moves seriously, only to pay a heavy price later. Some in India today are scoffing at China’s stepped-up campaign to Sinicize names of places in Arunachal Pradesh, terming it silly.
But there seems a method to the Chinese madness. China enacts a Land Borders Law one and a half years after its land-grabs in Ladakh and then accelerates the Sinicization of places in Arunachal, which suggests that this is part of a well-thought-out revanchist strategy.
By renaming places in Arunachal Pradesh, China is perhaps laying the groundwork for waging war to “reclaim” that region. Whether it would succeed or not in such an endeavour is a moot point, but it would be a mistake on India’s part to dismiss the Chinese move as little more than a meaningless effort to rename places under Indian control.
The 2021 Land Borders Law was enacted primarily with the aim of advancing China’s territorial revisionism in the Himalayas. The law effectively negates the possibility of peacefully resolving the territorial disputes with India. Instead of mutually settled borders, the law enables unilaterally imposed borders.
The Land Borders Law also extends to transboundary river waters. With Xi’s regime approving the construction near the India border of a “super dam” larger than even the Three Gorges Dam, this law seeks to uphold China’s “legitimate rights and interests” over the Tibet-originating cross-border rivers.
Xi is increasingly using lawfare (or the misuse and abuse of domestic law for strategic ends) to underpin China’s expansionism. Xi, for example, used a new national security law to crush Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and bring the city into political lockstep with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in breach of China’s United Nations-registered treaty with Britain.
Who predicted that Xi-led China would redraw the geopolitical map of the South China Sea without firing a single shot or without incurring any international costs? No one. It would be a serious mistake to discount the possibility of Xi launching aggression against Taiwan.
If Taiwan falls, China’s next target in the name of “reunification” would likely be Arunachal Pradesh.
Against this background, India needs to rethink and recalibrate its China policy. India needs a wiser, more forward-looking China policy that leverages Indian buying power and diplomatic strength. India should be less reactive and more proactive. For example, why should salami-slicing be the prerogative of only the Chinese side?
Given that Beijing’s claims on Indian territories are based on its occupation of Tibet, including calling Arunachal Pradesh “South Tibet”, it is self-defeating for New Delhi to still hew to the stance that Tibet is an integral part of China. New Delhi must adopt a more nuanced approach, including referring to the Himalayan border as the “Indo-Tibetan” frontier and showing in its official maps that India borders Tibet.
India also needs to find ways to stop Beijing from reaping rewards of aggression. For starters, it must address its burgeoning trade deficit with China, including by slashing non-essential imports. It is very counterproductive to India’s interests that New Delhi is effectively underwriting the economic and geopolitical power of an adversary that is playing the long game in the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean.
After more than a year of fighting, it is clear that neither side in the Russia-Ukraine war can win on the battlefield. A negotiated ceasefire is the only way out of the current military deadlock, and it must happen before Russia and China cement a strategic axis that weakens the West and leaves Taiwan more vulnerable than ever.
The recent face-to-face meeting in New Delhi between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – the first such high-level interaction since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – suggests that diplomacy may no longer be a dirty word.
The ten-minute meeting on the sidelines of the G20 gathering occurred after US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly urged Ukraine to show Russia that it is open to negotiating an end to the war. Together, these recent developments offer a glimmer of hope that a ceasefire is within the realm of the possible.
The war in Ukraine, which has shaken the foundations of the international order, is in many ways a proxy war between the world’s two major powers, with Russia backed by China and Ukraine backed by the United States. Over the past year, the war has triggered global energy and food crises, spurred higher inflation amid slowing global growth, and heightened the risks – underscored by Russia’s recent downing of a US drone over the Black Sea – of a direct Russia-NATO conflict.
And yet, after more than a year of fighting, it is clear that the conflict has settled into a war of attrition, with both sides struggling to make significant advances on the battlefield. A ceasefire is the only way out of this military deadlock, but reaching an agreement could take a long time. The 1950-53 Korean War, for example, was deadlocked for two years before an armistice agreement was reached.
Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly believes that a prolonged war of attrition works in his favor, enabling his army to wreak havoc on Ukraine and testing Western resolve. To overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses, Russia is launching more missiles simultaneously, including its Kinzhal hypersonic weapons, which are all but impossible to shoot down. Despite the flood of Western weapons systems it has received, Ukraine is in no position to thwart Russia’s intensifying aerial assaults.
But it is also becoming increasingly clear that Russia cannot achieve its strategic objective in Ukraine. It may have occupied nearly one-fifth of the country’s territory but it has created a more hostile neighbor and reinvigorated NATO, which is now poised to admit Finland and most likely Sweden. Moreover, many of the unprecedented sanctions the West has imposed on Russia will likely endure beyond the war and inflict long-lasting damage on the Russian economy.
At the same time, US President Joe Biden’s “hybrid war” strategy, which seeks to cripple Russia through soft-power techniques and the weaponization of global finance, has failed to bring about Putin’s downfall or turn the ruble into “rubble,” as Biden vowed in the early stages of the war. The US-led sanctions regime has severely limited Russia’s ability to resupply its forces but has fallen short of halting the Kremlin’s war machine. While the sanctions have dented its earnings from energy exports, Russia has found willing buyers for its oil and natural gas in non-Western markets (albeit at a discount).
Short of a collapse in morale causing Russian soldiers to surrender en masse – which is a possibility, given the history of the Russian army – it is unlikely that Ukraine will be able to force Russia to withdraw fully from the territories it has occupied in the country’s east and south. While the US has committed to upholding Ukraine’s territorial integrity, restoring Ukrainian control over these regions seems like a distant goal at best.
Meanwhile, China is the only country that stands to benefit from a protracted conflict. As a recent report by the Washington, DC-based Free Russia Foundation says, China is already the “biggest winner” from the Western sanctions on Russia. China has become Russia’s banker and most important trade partner, using the war to implement an energy safety net by securing greater Russian oil and gas supplies that could not be disrupted even if China decided to invade Taiwan.
The more the US is dragged into the war in Ukraine, the greater the likelihood that China invades Taiwan and America realizes its worst geopolitical nightmare: a Sino-Russian strategic axis. The US may remain the world’s foremost military power for now, but taking on the combined force of China and Russia would be a herculean task.
The war has already exposed the West’s military shortcomings, such as depletion of supplies of critical munitions, America’s struggle to scale up weapons manufacturing, and the weakening of the US-European consensus on Ukraine. All this could tempt Chinese President Xi Jinping to seek to deplete Western arsenals further before invading Taiwan, by indirectly shipping arms to Russia and forcing the US and other governments to increase weapons supplies to Ukraine. Xi is already aiding Putin’s war to a limited extent by supplying Russia and sanctioned Russian entities with drones, navigation equipment, jamming technology, fighter-jet parts, and semiconductors.
While some in the West believe that a negotiated ceasefire in Ukraine would embolden China to attack Taiwan, Xi does not need Russia to show him that aggression works. China’s own cost-free expansionism, from the South China Sea to the Himalayas, is all the proof he needs.
As a recent RAND report points out, a protracted Ukraine war is not in America’s interest. A prolonged conflict would lead to increased flows of US money and weapons into Ukraine, elevating the risk of a NATO-Russia conflict and hindering the ability of the US to respond to the China challenge. As Biden has already acknowledged, a “negotiated settlement” is the only way to end the war – better to seek it now than after months or years of bloodshed and devastation.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s trip this coming weekend to New Delhi, close on the heels of Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese’s own India tour, is indicative of growing strategic cooperation among the Indo-Pacific region’s major democracies.
Just as Germany’s rapid rise prior to World War I led to the Triple Entente among France, Britain and Russia, China’s aggressive expansionism has given the key Indo-Pacific democracies strong impetus to work together as a countervailing coalition.
The Quad, though without the form of a formal alliance, represents an emerging entente among the Indo-Pacific region’s four leading democracies: Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.
More fundamentally, the Indo-Pacific power balance will be determined, first and foremost, by events in East Asia and the Indian Ocean. This in turn makes the Japan-India relationship central to the region’s power equilibrium and stability.
Unlike the U.S. and Australia, India and Japan, which share frontiers with China, have seen their security come under direct pressure from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s muscular revisionism.
Kishida has pledged to double defense spending over the next five years following his government’s release of a new National Security Strategy which concluded that the country faces “the most severe and complex security environment since the end of World War II.”
This would potentially give Japan the world’s third-largest military budget, after the U.S. and China.
India, now No. 3 in defense spending, has been locked in a tense, 34-month military standoff with China along their disputed Himalayan border after being taken unawares by stealth incursions into Ladakh, its northernmost territory. India-China relations are at their lowest level in decades as clashes continue to erupt intermittently.
By locking horns with Beijing despite the risk of full-scale war, India may have openly challenged Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done yet in this century.
Yet there is growing recognition in New Delhi and Tokyo — this year’s Group of 20 and Group of Seven presidents, respectively — that no single democratic power can impose sufficient costs on Xi’s regime for its maritime and territorial revisionism, much less compel Beijing to change course.
In this light, Japan and India, which are China’s main peer rivals in Asia and are strategically located on its opposite flanks, aim to frustrate Beijing’s ambition to achieve hegemony in Asia by forging deepening strategic and economic bonds.
By working together to constrain Chinese behavior without provoking escalation or open conflict, Japan and India can also help stabilize Asian power dynamics.
To be sure, Japanese and Indian defense priorities are not the same.
As an island nation, Japan has traditionally focused on maritime defense, a posture reinforced by the growing frequency of China’s forays into the territorial waters and airspace around the Senkaku Islands, which Beijing calls the Diaoyu.
China’s “gray zone” tactics just below the threshold of armed conflict have been so successful in the South China Sea that it is seeking to replicate them against Japan in the East China Sea.
India, faced with the strengthening China-Pakistan strategic nexus, maintains a land-based defense posture. It is the only Quad member to have gone to war with China in the post-World War II period.
There are important parallels between the way Xi’s regime is pursuing its territorial revisionism against Japan and India, including following a strategy of attrition, friction and containment to weigh them down and strengthen its own claims of sovereignty over disputed areas.
Against this backdrop, Japan and India share common strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific region. An economically ascendant India and a politically rising Japan are both seeking to uphold the present Asian order. After all, the alternative would be a Sinocentric Asia inimical to their interests.
Unlike China, India and Japan are not seen as hungry for the land and resources of others. Indeed, Japan has not fired a shot in anger since its defeat in World War II, while India’s rise has not been accompanied by greater assertiveness toward its neighbors.
In fact, Japan-India cooperation is driven by complementary interests, the absence of historical baggage or disputes, and a shared vision for a rules-based order free from unilateralism or coercion.
To underpin a liberal and values-based order, the two countries in 2017 created the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, but it remains much smaller than China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. In India’s politically sensitive northeast region, sandwiched between Chinese-ruled Tibet, Myanmar and Bangladesh, Japan is the only foreign government that New Delhi has allowed to participate in infrastructure projects.
Impediments to speedier development of India-Japan collaboration are essentially bureaucratic and cultural: Ethnically and linguistically diverse India contrasts starkly with comparatively homogenous Japan, some of whose companies struggle to navigate New Delhi’s bureaucracy and regulatory environment.
The stakes could not be higher for India and Japan. Without building a de facto alliance that puts discreet checks on the exercise of Chinese power, the two are likely to bear the brunt of Beijing’s revisionist policies.
Japan and India need to quietly move from emphasizing shared values to jointly advancing shared interests, including thwarting China’s effort to establish itself as the hegemon of an illiberal regional order. Their close strategic collaboration can help lay the foundation for what late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called a “democratic security diamond” in the Indo-Pacific region.
Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
For any treaty to survive, the advantages it confers on all parties must outweigh the duties and responsibilities it imposes. The Indus Waters Treaty – widely considered the world’s most generous water-sharing pact – is nowhere near meeting that standard for India, and it is in Pakistan’s interest to remedy that.
More than six decades ago, the world’s most generous water-sharing pact was concluded. Under the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), upstream India left the lion’s share of the waters from the subcontinent’s six-river Indus system for downstream Pakistan. But repeated Pakistani efforts to use the treaty to disrupt India’s efforts to safeguard its own water security have driven India to rethink its largesse.
Last month, India issued notice to Pakistan that it intends to negotiate new terms for the IWT. In its current form, the treaty permits the World Bank to refer any India-Pakistan disagreement to either a neutral international expert or a court of arbitration in The Hague. But India contends that Pakistan, with its repeated bids for international intercession to block modestly sized Indian hydropower projects over technical objections, has abused and even breached the IWT’s dispute-settlement provisions.
India’s frustration intensified last October when the World Bank appointed both a neutral expert and a court of arbitration, under two separate processes, to resolve differences with Pakistan over India’s Kishenganga and Ratle hydroelectric projects in Jammu and Kashmir. India claims that the arbitral court proceedings, which began two days after it issued its notice to Pakistan, contravene the IWT, so it is boycotting them. The World Bank, for its part, has acknowledged that “carrying out the two processes concurrently poses practical and legal challenges.”
India’s renegotiation plan – which focuses on barring third parties from intervening in bilateral disputes under the IWT – appears to be a direct response to these developments. But, as India well knows, Pakistan is highly unlikely to agree to negotiations. This suggests that India’s recent notice to Pakistan is just its opening gambit. The next step may well be an attempt to force Pakistan’s hand on its long-term sponsorship of cross-border terrorism.
This has been coming for some time. Six years ago, after an attack by Pakistan-based terrorists on the Indian military in Jammu and Kashmir killed 19 troops, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “blood and water cannot flow together.” In a sense, his statement got to the heart of the IWT, which India pursued precisely to improve relations with Pakistan and avoid bloodshed on the subcontinent.
When the IWT was signed in 1960, Sino-Indian tensions were high, so India effectively attempted to trade water for peace with its other large neighbor, Pakistan. The IWT – under which India keeps less than 20% of the total basin waters – is the only international water agreement embodying the doctrine of restricted sovereignty, with the upstream country agreeing to forego significant use of a river system for the benefit of its downstream counterpart.
But the deal appeared only to whet Pakistan’s appetite for the Indian-administered region of Jammu and Kashmir, through which the largest three rivers of the Indus system flow. Five years later, in 1965, Pakistan launched a surprise war – the second conflict between the two countries over the region’s status.
All the while, the IWT guaranteed to Pakistan a huge share of Jammu and Kashmir’s water – the region’s main natural resource. This hampered economic development, led to chronic electricity shortages, and fueled popular frustration in that territory. And when India attempted to address the region’s energy crunch by building run-of-the-river hydropower plants – which are permitted by the Indus treaty, and would not materially alter transboundary water flows – Pakistan did everything it could to block progress.
Ironically, Pakistani officials and lawmakers have sometimes issued their own calls to renegotiate the IWT, with the Pakistani Senate even passing a 2016 resolution to “revisit” the treaty and “make new provisions” that favored Pakistan. But far from advancing Pakistan’s interests, such actions have merely reminded the Indian public that, at a time of growing water stress, the Indus treaty is an albatross around their country’s neck.
To be sure, Pakistan has plenty of its own water-related problems. A deep divide has emerged between downriver provinces and the upriver Punjab province, which appropriates the bulk of the Indus waters to sustain its profligate agricultural practices. Punjab’s water diversion – aided by large China-backed dams in the Pakistani portion of Kashmir, including the massive Diamer Bhasha Dam – is turning the Indus Delta into a saline marsh, which represents a major ecological disaster.
But none of this is the fault of the IWT, which is clearly in Pakistan’s interest to safeguard. To do that, Pakistan must stop focusing only on its treaty-related rights, while neglecting its responsibilities. This includes rethinking the use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy – a tactic that runs counter to the spirit of the IWT and threatens to drive India unilaterally to withdraw from it.
Such action would not cause river flows to Pakistan suddenly to stop, as India lacks the kind of hydro infrastructure this would require, and has no plans to change that. But it would enable India to pursue reasonable hydro projects without dam reservoirs, regardless of Pakistani objections. More fundamentally, it would sever a crucial diplomatic thread between India and Pakistan.
For any treaty to survive, the advantages it confers on all parties must outweigh the duties and responsibilities it imposes. The IWT is nowhere near meeting that standard for India, which has so far accrued no tangible benefits from it. What has been called the “world’s most successful water treaty” has overwhelmingly benefited Pakistan, which has a powerful incentive to abandon its combative approach and embrace the compromise and cooperation needed to save it.
The flight of a Chinese reconnaissance balloon across the continental U.S. for several days before it was shot down has put into stark relief the fact that a rising China, not a declining Russia, poses the biggest threat to America.
Indeed, a number of observers believe that the biggest beneficiary of Western sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine has been Beijing, not Kyiv. This reminder of sanctions’ side effects should be moving Washington to rethink its approach, rather than relying ever more heavily on trade penalties.
Sanctions have long been a favorite foreign policy tool of the White House and the U.S. Congress, even though they rarely change the behavior of targeted countries. But with the relative decline of American power, the efficacy of sanctions has been noticeably eroding.
The unprecedented American-led sanctions against Moscow have had a global impact without reining in the Kremlin’s war machine or pushing Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. At the same time, they are helping China to advance its economic and strategic interests.
“China has emerged, by a wide margin, to be Russia’s most important trade partner. It now receives about 20% of Russia’s total exports and is the source of over 35% of Russia’s total imports,” the Free Russia Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy group, said last month in a study based on 40 million customs records. It called China the “biggest winner” from Western punitive measures.
The sanctions are bringing America’s two main adversaries, China and Russia, closer together, cementing their anti-Western partnership and boosting bilateral trade in military technologies and equipment.
In exchange for greater access to Russian military technology, China has been aiding Moscow’s war in Ukraine by supplying navigation equipment, jamming technology and fighter jet parts to sanctioned entities, according to customs records reviewed by Washington research center C4ADS and The Wall Street Journal.
Russia and China, although natural competitors, have grown closer since the U.S. started to sanction Moscow over its 2014 seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
But Chinese President Xi Jinping does not need to learn from Russia that aggression works, given his own expansionistic maneuvering from the South China Sea to the Himalayas. Indeed, none of his actions, including redrawing the geopolitical map and his mass incarceration of more than 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang have drawn a sanctions response remotely comparable to that imposed on Russia.
But the largely ineffectual sanctions campaign against Moscow looks likely to embolden Xi’s designs on Taiwan, especially since comparable penalties against Beijing would have even less impact given the much larger size of China’s economy and the countermeasures it has undertaken. Just as Putin was clear about his plans for invading Ukraine, so has Xi been explicit about absorbing Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Europe’s shift from cheap Russian energy to importing costlier supplies from elsewhere has opened the path for China to build a safety net that could withstand Western sanctions and even a blockade in the event of war over Taiwan. China has significantly boosted overland oil and gas flows from Russia at heavily discounted prices, setting up a supply line that would be difficult to interrupt.
U.S.-led sanctions have failed to change the behavior of other targets, too, including North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Cuba, Syria and Venezuela. In each case, the penalties have only reinforced the regime’s renegade behavior.
Iran and North Korea have made significant advances in their nuclear, missile and drone programs while facing some of the harshest sanctions that the U.S. and its allies have ever imposed. Iranian drones are also playing an important role in Russia’s bombing campaign in Ukraine, while North Korea recently surprised Seoul by flying five drones through South Korean airspace for five hours, with one nearing the president’s office and none being shot down.
China has usually been quick to seize opportunities arising from a sanctions-hit country’s isolation. As a result, U.S. sanctions often help advance Beijing’s commercial and strategic interests.
For example, American trade penalties have pushed resource-rich Myanmar and Iran into China’s arms. China has not only emerged as a top investor in, and security partner of, Iran, but also has almost cornered Tehran’s oil exports at a hefty discount.
Asked about European Union sanctions over human rights violations, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen told attendees at Nikkei’s 2021 Future of Asia conference, “If I don’t rely on China, who will I rely on?”
The fact that sanctions often tend to be a blunt instrument prompted U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration in its early days to order an internal review of American sanctions programs to understand their utility and consequences.
According to a declassified version of the review released in October 2021, the U.S. should assess whether sanctions are “the right tool for the circumstances” before imposing them, and coordinate punitive measures with allies to magnify their impact and achieve clear policy objectives.
The review, however, has done little to moderate the growing U.S. use of sanctions. While the Biden administration often acts in coordination with America’s allies, this support does not guarantee the penalties’ effectiveness as the West is no longer economically dominant.
Washington, instead of developing objective criteria for the circumstances that would justify sanctions, allows moral outrage and narrow geopolitical considerations to drive its sanctions policy. This needs to change, or its overreach could accelerate the relative decline of U.S. wealth and power.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
As India considers how to make the most of its demographic dividend, China has reported its first annual population decline since 1961. At the same time, the West is courting India for trade and security partnerships, and attempting to shift its supply chains away from China, in part to limit Chinese technological development. And while analysts predict that India will become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027, many are now questioning China’s ability to overtake the United States as the world’s largest within the next few decades.
Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to be in a hurry to achieve what he calls the “Chinese dream” – that is, China’s global preeminence. With a demographic crisis looming, economic growth stalled, and the global environment becoming increasingly unfavorable, Xi seems to have concluded that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to shape the international order in its favor. So, his appetite for risk has grown.
But, while China remains a middle-income country, long-term structural constraints – including a shrinking and rapidly aging population, slowing productivity growth, and massive debts – are already beginning to bite. This could severely hamper Xi’s ability to advance his ambitions and even threaten China’s status as the world’s factory.
India, by contrast, has demographics on its side. With a median age of 28.4, India is one of the world’s youngest countries. This large youthful population is propelling rapid economic growth, contributing to a consumption boom, and driving innovation, reflected in the emergence of a world-class information economy. About one-fifth of the world’s working-age population is likely to live in India by 2025.
India has about 600 million more people than all of Europe’s 44 countries combined. Moreover, India is the first developing economy that, from the beginning, has strived to modernize and prosper through a democratic system, despite the challenges posed by its cultural and ethnic diversity. And, unlike China, India is not seen as hungry for the land and resources of others, and its rise has not been accompanied by greater assertiveness.
But for the century to belong to India, the country must make the most of its relatively low labor costs and Western companies’ growing interest in shifting production away from China to become a manufacturing powerhouse. This would not only be good for the global economy; India’s accelerated rise could also help counter Chinese expansionism.
To Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s credit, India has more than matched China’s Himalayan military deployments, refusing to put up with its furtive territorial encroachments of April 2020 in eastern Ladakh. So, why has the robust Indian military response failed to persuade China to defuse the almost 33-month frontier crisis or deter it from opening new fronts, like when it attempted to intrude into Tawang last month?
The answer to this question is in the newly released bilateral trade figures, which show that China’s trade surplus with India has jumped nearly 50% in just one year — from $69.38 billion in 2021 to $101.02 billion in 2022. This means that the Indian trade deficit with just one country, China, now accounts for about 64% of India’s total global trade deficit.
Another paradox is that China’s bilateral trade surplus has been ballooning since it launched its border aggression, surpassing by 2021 India’s total defence budget (the world’s third largest). China’s international trade surplus is now the main engine of its slowing economy, allowing it to finance its aggressive manoeuvres in the Himalayas and other Indo-Pacific theatres. And India last year contributed 11.51% to China’s overall trade surplus of $877.6 billion.
In effect, India is underwriting China’s economic and geopolitical power. This shows how India, instead of establishing disincentives to Chinese military belligerence, has handed Beijing a potent incentive to sustain its aggression.
To emerge as a global power, India must become a manufacturing powerhouse so that factory work helps lift Indian youths out of poverty. But the avalanche of imports from China has already devastated a key job creator — the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) industry. Opening the floodgates to “Made in China” is also decimating the “Make in India” initiative.
By refusing to cut even non-essential imports from China, including of cheap, substandard goods, India not only harms its economic interests, but also allows its recalcitrant adversary to have its cake and eat it too.
The Modi government’s reluctance to leverage India’s buying power is just one facet of its increasingly confusing China policy. It has also been loath to impose any diplomatic costs. Indeed, it has scrupulously refrained from naming and shaming China for its expansionist creep, even as Beijing has raked up the Kashmir issue at the UN Security Council.
Importantly, the government still uses euphemisms to describe the military crisis: “unilateral change of status quo” for China’s aggression; “friction points” for captured areas; and “full restoration of peace and tranquillity” for rollback of the Chinese intrusions and military deployments.
Soft-pedalling the aggression, unfortunately, only aids China’s strategy of downplaying the severity of the border crisis so as to shield its booming trade surplus and deflect global attention from its use of force to change the territorial status quo. The Chinese aggression also draws encouragement from India’s disinclination to impose meaningful costs on Beijing, with New Delhi restricting its retaliation to largely symbolic actions, such as banning Chinese mobile phone apps.
Despite tens of thousands of Indian troops in the Himalayas hunkered down for the brutal winter, the government seems keen to host Chinese President Xi Jinping for two separate summits this year — the G-20 Summit and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit. A Xi visit could catalyse efforts to ease the military crisis. But Beijing is likely to leverage the importance of a Xi visit for either summit to mould the terms of any such deal.
This kind of a scenario could compound India’s dual blunder in vacating the strategic Kailash Heights and accepting Chinese-designed “buffer zones” in three separate Ladakh areas. The Galwan, Pangong and Gogra-Hot Springs “buffer zones” have come up largely on lands that were under India’s exclusive patrolling jurisdiction, with Indian forces retreating further back into Indian territory.
China is playing the long game in the Himalayas through its frenzied buildup of warfare infrastructure. Its new security installations, roads, helipads, electronic warfare facilities, dual-use border villages and other assets position it strongly in the long run. Just as China has shown little interest over the decades in settling the border dispute, its frenetic buildup of new border infrastructure suggests that it wants, not peace and tranquillity, but a “hot” frontier to bog India down.
So, no deal linked to a Xi visit is likely to truly restore border peace. In fact, India’s approach of letting China reap rewards of aggression has made restoration of status quo ante in eastern Ladakh illusory, with a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece dubbing a return to the April 2020 positions as “unrealistic fantasies” in India.
It is not too late for Indian decision-makers to grasp China’s true intentions, and recognize that deterrence can never be effective without a comprehensive approach that extends beyond military-power projection to the use of all available tools, including economic leverage, to impose costs.
While Japan’s move toward rearmament is welcome, the embrace of Tomahawk missiles and hypersonic weapons alone will not force China to stop waging hybrid warfare. Japan must also find ways to frustrate China’s furtive efforts to alter the regional status quo while avoiding the risk of open combat.
For decades, Japan has based its international clout on economic competitiveness, not military might. But, with China’s lengthening shadow darkening its doorstep, Japan now seems to be abandoning its pacifist postwar security policy – which capped defense spending at about 1% of GDP and shunned offensive capabilities – in favor of assuming a central role in maintaining security in the Indo-Pacific region.
Last month, Japan unveiled a bold new national-security strategy, which includes a plan to double defense expenditure within five years. That spending – amounting to some $320 billion – will fund Japan’s largest military build-up since World War II, and implies the world’s third-largest defense budget, after the US and China. Importantly, the new strategy includes acquisition of preemptive counterstrike capabilities, such as Tomahawk cruise missiles from the United States, and the development of its own hypersonic weapons.
Japan began laying the groundwork for this shift under former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, who was assassinated last July. On Abe’s watch, Japan increased defense spending by about 10%, and, more significantly, reinterpreted (with parliament’s approval) the country’s US-imposed “peace constitution” to allow the military to mobilize overseas for the first time since WWII. Abe also sought to amend Article 9 of the constitution, which renounces “the threat or use of force” by Japan, but his efforts were stymied by popular protests.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has not run into the same resistance. On the contrary, opinion polls show that a majority of Japanese support the military build-up. A similar shift has taken place in Kishida himself, who was widely considered a dove when he was foreign minister – a label that he publicly embraced.
The impetus for this shift is clear. In 2013, the year Xi Jinping became China’s president, Japan’s national-security strategy called China a strategic partner. According to the updated strategy, by contrast, China represents “an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge in ensuring the peace and security of Japan.” China’s incremental but unrelenting expansionism under Xi has rendered Japan’s pacifist stance untenable.
This is more apparent than ever in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has intensified fears that China could pursue a military option against Taiwan, which is effectively an extension of the Japanese archipelago. Last August, five of the nine missiles China fired during military exercises in the waters around Taiwan landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone. Japan understandably views Taiwan’s security as vital for its own.
Japan is not the only once-conciliatory power to respond to Xi’s muscular revisionism with a newfound determination to bolster its defenses and forestall the emergence of a Sinocentric Indo-Pacific. Australia and India have embarked on the same path.
Moreover, a similar trend toward militarization has emerged among Japan’s Western allies. Germany, another pacifist country, has pledged to boost its defense spending to 2% of GDP (the same level Kishida is targeting) and accept a military leadership role in Europe. The United Kingdom has already surpassed the 2%-of-GDP level, yet aims to double its defense spending by 2030. The US has just hiked its already-mammoth military spending by 8%. And Sweden and Finland are joining a reinvigorated NATO.
While Japan’s rearmament is more widely accepted than ever – and for good reason – it is unlikely to be enough to deter China’s expansionist creep. After all, despite having the world’s third-largest defense budget, India has been locked in a military standoff with China on the disputed Himalayan border since 2020, when stealth encroachments by the People’s Liberation Army caught it by surprise. Clashes continue to erupt intermittently, including just last month.
Unlike Russia, which launched a full frontal assault on Ukraine, China prefers salami tactics, slicing away other countries’ territories with a combination of stealth, deception, and surprise. The PLA’s so-called “Three Warfares,” which focus on the psychological, public-opinion, and legal aspects of conflict, has enabled China to secure strategic victories in the South China Sea – from seizing the Johnson South Reef in 1988 to occupying the Scarborough Shoal in 2012 – while barely firing a shot.
Because China generally avoids armed conflict, it incurs minimal international costs for its actions, even as it unilaterally redraws the geopolitical map of the South China Sea and nibbles away at Bhutan’s borderlands, one pasture at a time. The government in Beijing managed to decimate Hong Kong’s autonomy without facing significant Western sanctions.
All this impunity has only emboldened Xi, who is now seeking to replicate the South China Sea strategy in the East China Sea by escalating maritime and aerial incursions to strengthen its claims to the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands. It has even tried to police the waters off the Senkakus.
Japan’s response to China’s provocations has so far remained restrained, to say the least: no Japanese defense minister has so much as conducted an aerial inspection of the Senkakus, lest it anger China. Yet Japan’s embrace of Tomahawk missiles and hypersonic weapons does not necessarily represent an effective means of resisting China’s hybrid warfare, either. For that, Japan must find ways to frustrate China’s furtive efforts to alter the status quo while avoiding the risk of open combat.
Japan’s push to become more self-reliant on defense should be welcomed. Improved defense capabilities will translate into a more confident and secure Japan – and a more stable Indo-Pacific. But if Japan is to “disrupt and defeat” threats, as the national-security strategy puts it, Japanese leaders must move proactively to beat China at its own game.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, right, has discussed the Himalayan crisis with Chinese President Xi Jinping at two separate multilateral summits. © Reuters
A profound geopolitical reconfiguration is in the making, especially as the erosion in America’s leadership role accelerates. 
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, right, and U.S. President Joe Biden in June: Despite an improved relationship, U.S. strategic objectives still diverge from core Indian interests. © Reuters
A banner erected by the Indian army near Pangong Tso lake along the country’s frontier with China. © AP
A moment of silence is observed at 11:02 am on Aug. 9 at the Peace Statue in Nagasaki, marking the moment an atomic bomb was dropped on the city in 1945. © Kyodo
The last thing Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, wants is an end to the Ukraine war because that would leave the U.S. free to focus on the Indo-Pacific. © Reuters
The Indian military’s only tri-service command is headquartered at a base in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands capital of Port Blair, seen here in 2014. © Reuters
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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