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.
Armed conflict, not peace, defined 2022, thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and raging wars elsewhere, from Yemen and Syria to Ethiopia. Internal conflict, meanwhile, exacerbated in several countries, from the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt to Myanmar and Nigeria.
But what has stood out is the international fallout from the war in Ukraine, which, by contributing to global energy and food crises, has affected countries across the world.
Will 2023 be a better year for international peace and stability? And is there any prospect of the global energy and food crises easing and the COVID-19 pandemic finally coming under full control?
The disruption in global energy markets, which has led to soaring energy prices, is largely linked to Europe’s rapid shift away from cheap Russian energy, which long powered its growth. Given that the European Union accounts for 11 percent of global energy consumption, its switch to alternative sources at a time when international oil and LNG supplies are already tight is having an adverse global impact.
High energy prices have spurred runaway inflation in many countries. And high inflation, in turn, has triggered a cost-of-living crisis. The specter of a global recession looms large in 2023.
Meanwhile, just when COVID-19 fears are easing and relative normalcy is returning in everyday life, the COVID-19 tsunami in China threatens to spread new strains globally.
Three years ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime created a global pandemic with its coverup and slow response to the COVID-19 outbreak at home. Now, it has put the world in peril again by abruptly abandoning its unsustainable “zero COVID” policy and easing almost all restrictions in one go, resulting in a huge COVID-19 surge in China that has reignited fears that the country could export new variants.
That probability has been heightened by another factor: China, instead of containing the current COVID spike within its borders, has just lifted all international-travel restrictions for Chinese, leading to a major boom in sales of air tickets out of the country.
This is redolent of how China spawned the pandemic: After COVID originated within its borders, it allowed residents of Wuhan and other virus-battered areas of Hubei province to travel abroad but imposed domestic-travel restrictions on them so that they did not take the coronavirus to Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities. In fact, it was only after COVID cases with Wuhan links were detected in Thailand and South Korea that China belatedly acknowledged its coronavirus outbreak through the party-run People’s Daily on Jan. 21, 2020, including admitting human-to-human spread.
It’s a testament to China’s rising power that, without incurring any international costs, it has effectively stonewalled international investigations into the origins of the COVID-19 virus, including its possible escape from the military-linked Wuhan Institute of Virology.
President Biden’s administration, meanwhile, has effectively let China off the hook, in part because American government agencies – from the National Institutes of Health to USAID – funded dangerous research on bat coronaviruses at this Wuhan lab.
More broadly, although 2022 was not a good year for peace, 2023 may not be much better, given the new cold war.
It is worth remembering that competition and conflict are inherent in a world in which there is no supranational government to enforce international law or protect the weaker states against the more powerful states. This explains why weak, vulnerable states seek protection by aligning themselves with one great power or the other.
The harsh truth about international law is this: International law is powerful against the powerless but powerless against the powerful. Just the history of the past 25 years is replete with examples of big powers invading small, weak nations, including reducing several of them to failed or failing states.
International conflict often arises when major powers attempt to maximize their security, including by asserting spheres of influence or seeking to contain rival or emerging powers. If one great power feels that a nation within its traditional sphere of influence is drifting into the orbit of a rival power, it will use all possible means to try to reverse that direction, as exemplified by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
While seeking to consolidate its hold on the nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory it occupies, Russia has since October launched volleys of cruise missiles and drones at Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, especially its energy grid, in an apparent strategy of undermining morale by throwing that country into cold and darkness amid freezing winter temperatures. Ukraine, despite a growing arsenal of Western advanced weapons, including air-defense systems, has been unable to stop such debilitating attacks, resulting in widespread power outages becoming common.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the “save Ukraine” narrative has been eclipsed by the “bleed Russia dry” narrative, which is rooted in the belief that the costs to the American taxpayers for providing weapons, battlefield intelligence and other aid to Ukraine are dwarfed by the benefits.
The U.S. directed about $50 billion in assistance to Ukraine in 2022, and its new $1.66-trillion spending plan includes $45 billion in additional aid for that country. The assistance may be massive (it is the largest U.S. aid to any European nation in more than seven decades), yet its proponents contend that, from a bang-per-buck perspective, it is highly cost-effective in helping to degrade an enemy’s military capabilities for a single-digit share of America’s annual defense budget — without the loss of a single American soldier.
In this light, the war is unlikely to end anytime soon, despite its devastating costs for Ukraine and its people.
Eventually, when Russia and the U.S. both realize that they are unlikely to achieve their key objectives in Ukraine, a negotiated settlement to the conflict could emerge.
But with the Ukraine war diverting America’s attention away from the growing strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, the danger is growing that China could move against Taiwan. U.S. intelligence now reportedly believes that Xi could act against Taiwan before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
A Chinese attack on Taiwan would likely have a greater global impact than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
America’s role is central to preventing a Chinese takeover of Taiwan, a technological powerhouse with the world’s 22nd-largest economy by gross domestic product. The new $1.66-trillion spending plan, however, provides just $2 billion for Taiwan (and in loans, not grants), prompting the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), to quip, “We say we want to meet the China challenge but then we don’t fund Taiwan in a way that is necessary.”
Against this background, 2023 is likely to prove a challenging year for international peace, especially as the war in Ukraine grinds on and China persists with its expansionism in the Indo-Pacific, including intensifying coercive pressure on Taiwan.
Meanwhile, with politics coming ahead of public health, the threat from the pandemic is far from over. Whether COVID-19 had a natural or human-made origin remains unknown.
As we look ahead, the enduring lesson from the failure to unravel the genesis of a pandemic that has killed some 6.7 million people, including more Americans than did World War II, is that “gain of function” research of the type conducted in Wuhan is the greatest existential threat to humankind ever produced by science — a bigger threat than nuclear weapons.
Such research to enhance the virulence or infectiousness of pathogens by altering their genetic make-up is continuing in some labs in the West, China and Russia. And it needs to stop.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press). Follow him on Twitter @Chellaney.
The latest border clash between Chinese and Indian troops on Dec. 9 took place nearly 2,000 kilometers from the sites of previous skirmishes. This underscores the enduring costs of Beijing’s stealthy land grabs along India’s borderlands and how much those encroachments have spurred military buildups and tensions along the two nations’ entire long Himalayan frontier.
When asked to comment on the fighting four days after this month’s clash, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said: “As far as we know, the China-India border areas are generally stable. The two sides have maintained smooth communication on boundary-related issues through diplomatic and military channels.”
This is in keeping with a strategy described in the U.S. Department of Defense’s annual China military report, which stated that Beijing has “sought to downplay the severity of the crisis … to prevent the standoff from harming other areas of its bilateral relationship with India.”
Through its aggressive revisionism, however, China has set in motion forces that are likely to come back to haunt its own long-term interests.
Its increasingly muscular approach and border provocations are beginning to shake India out of its complacency and trigger much-needed modernizations of the country’s military, including major investments in counterintervention capabilities, greater missile power and formation of additional mountain-warfare forces.
Yet in the short term, China’s efforts to silo the border crisis are showing some signs of success.
For example, China’s large trade surplus with India has continued to surge since the military confrontation began in May 2020 when Indian troops discovered the incursions by the Chinese military.
Indeed, India’s trade deficit with China is now the world’s third-largest such imbalance and has even overtaken New Delhi’s 5.25 trillion rupee ($63.45 billion) defense budget in size. After reaching $77 billion in the Indian financial year that ended in March, the bilateral deficit is projected to cross $88 billion this fiscal year.
In effect, India is underwriting Beijing’s economic and military power even as its forces seek to contain creeping Chinese expansionism.
The latest clashes were sparked by a Chinese attempt to seize mountaintop positions in Tawang, the birthplace of a previous Dalai Lama and a district of the state of Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing has been calling “South Tibet” since 2006. Tawang controls access to Bhutan’s Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, which China has claimed since mid-2020.
By playing down the military confrontation, Beijing has been able to maintain the veneer of stable diplomatic relations with India. This was underscored by smiling pictures of Chinese President Xi Jinping interacting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the recent Group of 20 summit in Bali, although the two did not hold a private meeting, as each did with other leaders.
Xi’s larger objective is to avoid driving New Delhi closer to Washington and making a U.S.-India strategic alliance a reality.
Yet Beijing’s aggression has prodded New Delhi into concluding the last of four foundational defense-related agreements that Washington regularly puts in place with military allies and has also breathed new life into the Quad arrangement with Washington, Canberra and Tokyo, with India’s annual Malabar war games now including all three partners.
For New Delhi, soft-pedaling Chinese border aggression is a way to save face. Modi, while openly challenging China’s capability and power by resolutely sustaining the military standoff, does not want to draw public attention to Beijing’s territorial grabs, as they took his government by complete surprise.
Indeed, Modi has made no comment on the land grabs. His government last week thwarted a discussion in parliament on the latest border clash, telling lawmakers to be content with a brief statement from the defense minister.
India failed to foresee the territorial losses largely because Modi had been focused on befriending Beijing to chip away at the China-Pakistan axis. As part of that effort, Modi met with Xi 18 times over the five years before the 2020 encroachments and missed warning signs, including Chinese combat exercises and frenzied military-infrastructure construction along the two nations’ frontier.
As an old adage goes, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The dogged courtship of Mao Zedong by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-independence prime minister, helped create New Delhi’s China problem. On Nehru’s watch, China annexed buffer state Tibet to impose itself as India’s neighbor and then began encroaching on Indian territories before launching a border war in the Himalayas in 1962.
Today, China may have reason to gloat over what it calls “recovery momentum” in ties with India. Far from launching a diplomatic offensive to spotlight Chinese aggression, New Delhi remains reticent about naming and shaming Beijing even as its rival has spotlighted issues involving Kashmir at the U.N. Security Council.
The Modi administration, in fact, still uses euphemisms to describe the Himalayan crisis, or what it calls a “unilateral change of status quo” involving “friction points” that should be resolved by the “full restoration of peace and tranquility.”
New Delhi has also shied away from imposing meaningful costs on Beijing, including by exercising its trade leverage. While New Delhi has banned numerous Chinese mobile phone apps, restricted Chinese companies’ access to Indian government contracts and launched tax and customs probes against Chinese phone makers, this has been no more than an annoyance for Beijing.
Deterrence, to be effective, must extend beyond military strength to the use of all available tools.
More fundamentally, why should salami-slicing be the prerogative of only the Chinese side? Why does India not pay China back in the same coin?
India’s overly defensive, risk-averse approach, including a reluctance to impose costs, is aiding China’s strategy of having its cake and eating it too.
India’s shortcomings, however, cannot obscure China’s glaring shortsightedness. Xi’s aggression against India promises to prove costly for China in the long run.
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 hybrid mountain warfare. A war between these two nuclear-armed giants would likely end in a bloody stalemate.
Worse still, Xi’s strategic miscalculation promises to turn a once-conciliatory neighbor into a long-term foe determined to forestall a Sinocentric Asia.
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.”
While Russia has suffered as a result of Western sanctions, nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory remains under Russian occupation. If the European Union is enduring severe economic pain while Russia’s aggression proceeds apace, sanctions become tantamount to self-flagellation.
With its rapid shift away from Russian energy, Europe has done more damage to its own economy than to Russia’s war effort.
BERLIN: It seems obvious that sanctions – an increasingly important tool of Western foreign policy – should inflict significant pain on the target without exacting unsustainably high costs from the country imposing them. But the European Union’s sanctions on Russia – intended to punish the country for its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine – do not meet this condition.
At the center of the EU’s plan to punish Russia is an effort to eliminate its dependence on the cheap Russian energy that long powered its growth, including by increasing its reliance on liquefied natural gas imported from the United States and elsewhere. But LNG has long been an overpriced (and carbon-intensive) alternative to piped gas: before Russia invaded Ukraine, it was 4-5 times more expensive than natural gas. Now, it is even more exorbitantly priced: since the war began, the cost of LNG has more than doubled.
But with the Kremlin slashing gas flows to Europe, in order to ensure that it – not the EU – dictates the timetable for phasing out Russian supplies, European countries have had little choice but to rely increasingly on LNG imports. This is creating serious challenges for Europe’s manufacturing base, to the point that some European firms are now considering shifting production to the US, which offers not only cheaper fuel, but also massive subsidies and tax credits under its new Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Already, Europe’s decision to turn its back on Russian gas has increased the likelihood of a deep recession. Skyrocketing gas prices – which are a staggering 14 times higher than two years ago – have fueled inflation and destabilized eurozone financial markets. So, just when Europe’s economies are on the brink of contraction, the cost of living is spiking – and the threat of rolling power outages looms.
European policymakers’ adoption of desperate measures like price caps and regulated tariffs could well exacerbate the situation. To conserve gas, some European governments have even turned to coal. Moreover, European leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron have pleaded with US President Joe Biden to ease pressure on their economies by adjusting some controversial IRA provisions. Months after an agreement to strengthen and expand NATO, transatlantic relations are beginning to fray.
The one thing the EU appears unwilling to consider is changing course on sanctions. This month alone, it has imposed an embargo on imports of Russian crude and joined its G7 partners in introducing a $60-per-barrel price cap.
Europe’s sanctions recall America’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which substantially raised import duties on more than 20,000 goods. Far from protecting US industry, the tariffs prompted other countries to retaliate, deepening the Great Depression and contributing to the rise of political extremism, especially in Europe.
Today, too, many European countries’ politics are lurching rightward. Italy’s current governing party traces its roots to Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement; likewise, the Sweden Democrats has neo-Nazi roots. In Poland and Hungary, right-wing governments show increasing authoritarian tendencies. If soaring energy prices and runaway inflation worsen economic conditions – a likely scenario in the short term – far-right forces could gain further ground across the continent.
One might be able to argue that the sanctions’ large costs were worth shouldering if they were significantly hampering Russia’s war effort. But while Russia has certainly suffered, and Ukraine has achieved some high-profile military victories, nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory remains under Russian occupation. If the EU is enduring so much pain, while Russia’s aggression proceeds apace, sanctions become tantamount to self-flagellation. This is why moral outrage, however justified, should never drive policy.
To be sure, the EU’s international image has long rested on its reputation as a force for democracy, human rights, and a rules-based order, which strengthens the case for a bold, if costly, response to Russian aggression. But, had cooler heads prevailed, it would have been obvious that a rapid transition away from Russian energy supplies would undermine the EU’s global standing by denting its sustainability credentials – the turn to coal is a case in point – and causing a global energy crisis, which is hurting poorer countries.
As a result, when the EU rejected Russian energy, the world suddenly faced energy scarcity, with countries in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere losing access to some supplies on which they had previously depended. In fact, soaring European gas prices have encouraged some shippers to divert LNG cargoes from Asia to Europe.
For far too long, the EU believed that economic and trade relations could be managed without regard for foreign-policy and security considerations. The Ukraine war made this approach untenable. But this should have prompted a more considered debate about what should come next, rather than an abrupt transition away from Russian energy supplies. This was a huge decision directly bearing on Europe’s socioeconomic security; by making it rashly, the EU committed a major strategic blunder.
Russia’s actions in Ukraine are clearly both unjustified and unconscionable. But it makes little sense for Europe to respond by damaging its own competitiveness and global standing. It will take years for Europe to recover from the unprecedented energy crisis that it has helped to create.
The details of China’s loan contracts with developing countries are only beginning to come to light. But it is already clear that China’s creditor imperialism holds far-reaching risks, both for the debtors themselves and for the future of the international order.
Recently released details of Kenya’s 2014 loan agreement with China to finance a controversial railway project have once again highlighted the predatory nature of Chinese lending in developing countries. The contract not only imposed virtually all risk on the borrower (including requiring binding arbitration in China to settle any dispute), but also raised those risks to unmanageable levels (such as by setting an unusually high interest rate). With terms like that, it is no wonder that multiple countries around the world have become ensnared in sovereignty-eroding Chinese debt traps.
Over the last decade, China has become the world’s largest single creditor, with loans to lower- and middle-income countries tripling in this period, to $170 billion at the end of 2020. Its outstanding foreign loans now exceed 6% of global GDP, making China competitive with the International Monetary Fund as a global creditor. And through loans extended under its $838-billion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China has overtaken the World Bank as the world’s largest funder of infrastructure projects.
To be sure, since the start of the made-in-China COVID-19 pandemic, China’s overseas lending for infrastructure projects has been on the decline (until 2019, it was rising sharply). This is partly because the pandemic left partner countries in dire economic straits, though growing international criticism of China’s predatory lending has likely also contributed.
One might hope that this downward trend augurs the end of colonial-style lending by China. But the decline has been offset by an increase in bailout lending, mostly to BRI partner countries – including Kenya – which were already weighed down by debts owed to China.
The scale of the bailout lending is massive. The top three borrowers alone – Argentina, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – have received $32.8 billion in rescue lending from China since 2017. Pakistan has been the biggest borrower by far, receiving a staggering $21.9 billion in Chinese emergency lending since 2018.
This highlights the self-reinforcing debt spiral into which China thrusts countries. Because China, unlike the IMF, does not attach stringent conditions to its loans, countries simply borrow more to service outstanding debts, thus sinking ever deeper into debt.
Crucially, China’s loan contracts are typically shrouded in secrecy; Kenya’s revelations, for example, were technically in violation of its agreement’s sweeping confidentiality clause. In many cases, the loans are hidden from taxpayers, undermining government accountability. China also increasingly directs its lending not to governments directly, but to state-owned companies, state-owned banks, special purpose vehicles, and private-sector institutions in recipient countries. The result is crushing levels of “hidden debt.”
Consider Laos, where hidden debts to China eclipse official debts. To stave off default following the pandemic shock, the small, landlocked country was forced to hand China majority control of its national electricity grid. And it may find itself with little choice but to barter away land and natural resources.
There is ample precedent for this. Already, several of China’s debtors have been forced to cede strategic assets to their creditor. Tajikistan has surrendered 1,158 square kilometers (447 square miles) of the Pamir mountains to China, granted Chinese companies rights to mine gold, silver, and other mineral ores in its territory, and approved the Chinese-funded construction of a military base near its border with Afghanistan.
Sri Lanka’s debt crisis first attracted international attention in 2017. Unable to repay Chinese loans, the country signed away the Indian Ocean region’s most strategically important port, Hambantota, and more than 6,000 hectares of land around it, by granting a 99-year lease to China. In Sri Lanka, the port transfer was likened to a heavily indebted farmer giving his daughter to an unyielding money lender. Despite this sacrifice, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debts earlier this year.
Similarly, Pakistan has given China exclusive rights to run its strategically located Gwadar port for four decades. During that time, China will pocket a whopping 91% of the port’s revenues. Moreover, the China Overseas Ports Holding Company will enjoy a 23-year tax holiday to facilitate its installation of equipment and machinery at the site.
Near Gwadar, China plans to build an outpost for its navy – a move that follows a well-established pattern. Debt entrapment enabled China to gain its first overseas naval base in Djibouti, strategically situated at the entrance to the Red Sea. China is also now seeking a naval base on the West African coastline, where it has made the most progress in Equatorial Guinea, a heavily indebted low-income country.
This is the result of a lending strategy that is focused squarely on maximizing leverage over borrowers. As one international study showed, “cancellation, acceleration, and stabilization clauses in Chinese contracts potentially allow the lenders to influence debtors’ domestic and foreign policies.” China often exercises this policy leverage by reserving the right to recall loans arbitrarily or demand immediate repayment.
In this way, China can use its overseas lending to advance its economic and diplomatic interests. If China can dim the lights in Laos, for example, it has a certain ally in multilateral forums. If it can drive a country to debt default, it can secure all the trade and construction contracts it wants. And if it can control a country’s ports, it can strengthen its strategic position.
The details of China’s loan contracts with developing countries have not yet come fully to light. But it is already clear that China’s creditor imperialism carries far-reaching risks, both for the debtors themselves and for the future of the international order.
Biden claims U.S. leverage over China is lacking. But he thinks the U.S. has leverage to cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia, an approach clearly based on hope. His focus on the wrong foe while seeking to appease China threatens to accelerate America’s relative decline.
The new export curbs U.S. President Joe Biden recently imposed on the Chinese chip industry to help slow Beijing’s technological and military advances have obscured his administration’s relatively conciliatory stance since taking office.
Even the export curbs have been undercut by exemptions granted to major Taiwanese and South Korean companies for their chipmaking facilities in China.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, wants Biden to live up to “Five Nos” which Beijing claims the U.S. president has committed to: No to changing China’s authoritarian system; no to containing China; no to seeking U.S. economic decoupling from China; no to a policy of “one China, one Taiwan;” and no to conflict or a new Cold War with China.
According to the official Chinese readout of the two leaders’ recent meeting in Bali, “President Xi said he takes very seriously President Biden’s ‘Five Nos’ statement.”
The White House may not have directly corroborated such commitments, but similar formulations can be found in Biden’s comments and his administration’s public declarations and documents.
For example, in sharp contrast to predecessor Donald Trump’s ideological offensive against China as a predatory communist state without political legitimacy or the rule of law, Biden and his national security team have repeatedly disclaimed any intention to transform the country’s political system.
Biden himself assured Xi in a virtual summit a year ago that the U.S. would not seek to change China’s political system or direct alliances against it. On a call with Xi in September 2021, Biden sought to explain American actions toward China “in a way that [is] not misinterpreted as … somehow trying to sort of undermine Beijing in particular ways,” a senior administration official told reporters.
Similar reassurances have been embedded in Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which declares that, “Our objective is not to change the [People’s Republic of China] but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates.” In Bali, Biden went a step further by telling Xi that the U.S. “respects China’s system,” according to Beijing’s account of the meeting.
China is not just the world’s largest autocracy. It is a technology-driven Orwellian surveillance state that is seeking to stamp out the cultural and linguistic identities of ethnic minorities whose sprawling homelands the Communist Party seized after coming to power in 1949. In the largest mass incarceration on religious grounds since the Nazi period, more than 1 million Muslims have been detained in Xi’s Xinjiang gulag.
Contrast Biden’s reassurances to China despite the country’s totalitarianism with his narrative that the Western conflict with Russia symbolizes a “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”
While publicly seeking economic collapse and regime change in Russia, the Biden administration declared in May that it is seeking neither to block China’s “role as a major power” nor to “sever China’s economy from ours or from the global economy.” It added that it remains committed to its “One China” policy.
More recently, Biden assured Xi in Bali that the U.S. is “not looking for conflict” with China. “I absolutely believe there need not be a new Cold War,” the American president said.
Indeed, the Biden administration is seeking to “coexist and cooperate” with China, resisting labeling it as an outright enemy, despite Beijing covering up the origins of COVID-19, its oppression in Hong Kong and other territories, its redrawing of the geopolitical map of the South China Sea, and its forcibly changing the territorial status quo in the Himalayas.
The Biden-Xi agreement in Bali to empower senior officials to engage in a sustained effort to manage bilateral differences is scarcely going to stabilize U.S.-China relations, given that Beijing is a revisionist power. Indeed, Biden’s conciliatory approach may only embolden Xi.
Sensing weakness on the U.S. side, Xi has upped the ante on several fronts, from his frenzied buildup of nuclear weapons to hypersonic missile testing. Biden, who just turned 80, claims U.S. leverage on China is lacking, so he wants to work with U.S. allies to shape Beijing’s behavior.
Deterrence of further Chinese expansionism must start with Taiwan, whose Chinese takeover would upend the world order. Yet in Bali, Xi warned Biden that Taiwan is Beijing’s “first red line that must not be crossed in China-U.S. relations.”
More broadly, Biden’s emphasis on “outcompeting China and restraining Russia” runs counter to the statement in his 48-page national security strategy last month that 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.”
While Russia is trying to mitigate a perceived security threat in its neighborhood, China is seeking to supplant the U.S. as the preeminent global power.
China’s population and economy are each about 10 times the size of Russia’s, and its military expenditures are more than four times greater. Yet the U.S. proxy war with Russia, which has led Washington to commit a total of $91 billion for Ukraine and ask Congress for more than $37 billion in additional emergency aid, is deepening Biden’s conciliatory approach toward China while simultaneously pushing Moscow closer to Beijing.
The U.S. is in no position to meaningfully take on China and Russia simultaneously. The Biden administration’s goal to “see Russia weakened” and allow the U.S. to single-mindedly focus on the threat of China is based on hope, not reality.
The worst outcome for the U.S. from the present international crisis would be the creation of a pan-Eurasian, China-Russia axis which would compound America’s strategic overreach and accelerate its relative decline. In fact, with the blowback from the economic war on Russia exacting an increasing toll on the West, China is likely to emerge as the only winner from the conflict over Ukraine’s future.
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.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s tenure has already been marked by high ambition and aggression, including territorial and maritime expansionism. Xi’s vision, the “Chinese dream,” is to make China the world’s leading power by 2049, the centenary of communist rule.
But Xi—who has just crowned himself China’s new emperor and elevated his favourite “yes” men to the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s highest decision-making body—may be biting off more than he can chew. His third term is likely to take a toll on China’s economy and international standing while leading the country to a major war over Taiwan.
Xi’s decade-long reign has already turned China into a wrathful, expansionist power that pursues “wolf warrior” tactics and debt-trap diplomacy and flouts international law at will. Two successive US administrations have described as genocide and crimes against humanity Xi’s Xinjiang gulag, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi period. About a million Muslims continue to languish in Xi’s gulag, without Xi or China facing tangible Western sanctions.
The international costs of Xi’s increasing authoritarianism are apparent from the devastating consequences of the China-originating Covij-19 pandemic, which officially has killed more than 6.5 million people worldwide. Nearly three years on, the world still does not know whether Covid-19 began as a natural spillover from wildlife or was triggered by the accidental leak of a lab-enhanced virus in Wuhan city. What is apparent, though, is that Xi’s regime lied about the initial spread of the disease, hid evidence of human-to-human transmission, and silenced doctors who sought to warn about the emergence of a novel coronavirus.
More ominously, a massive cover-up in China to obscure the genesis of the virus suggests the world may never know the truth. Beijing has refused to cooperate with international investigations, characterising them as “origin-tracing terrorism,” and instead peddled conspiracy theories.
Xi, meanwhile, has accelerated national production of nuclear warheads so rapidly that the Pentagon, in just one year, revised up its estimate of the number of such weapons China will deploy by 2030 from 400 to more than 1,000. China has already fielded its first operational hypersonic-weapons system and “intends to increase the peacetime readiness of its nuclear forces by moving to a launch-on-warning (LOW) posture with an expanded silo-based force,” according to a Pentagon report. The unprecedented speed and scale of the nuclear build-up is linked to Xi’s international expansionism, including seeking China’s global primacy by 2049.
But thanks to Xi’s actions, China’s global image has been badly dented, forcing the country to increasingly rely on its coercive power. A 2021 global survey found that unfavourable views of China were at or near historic highs in most advanced economies.
Yet, instead of undertaking a course correction, Xi is doubling down on his scofflaw actions, as underscored by China’s stepped-up bullying of Taiwan. After Beijing’s success in swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea and changing the territorial status quo in the Himalayan borderlands with India, Nepal and Bhutan, Taiwan is likely to be Xi’s next target.
Xi’s unbridled authority, however, does not augur well for international security and China’s own future. In fact, in a forewarning that Xi could lead China into a war, the customary phrase ‘peace and development remains the theme of the era’ was absent from his speech as well as report to the party Congress
It speaks for itself that, even before Xi secured a precedent-defying third term as the country’s leader at the recent party congress, his record in power was drawing comparisons to the past century’s most brutal rulers.
For example, Robert O’Brien, national security adviser to then-US President Donald Trump, last year equated Xi to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Some others have compared Xi to Adolf Hitler, even coining the nickname “Xitler.”
Xi, for his part, has cultivated a Mao Zedong-style personality cult and embarked on completing the expansionist agenda that the communist China’s founder left unfinished. Indeed, Xi has sought to model himself on Mao, the 20th century’s top butcher.
Like Mao Zedong Thought, Xi Jinping Thought has been enshrined in China’s constitution and made the central doctrine guiding the Communist Party. Also like Mao, Xi is now reverently referred to as renminlingxiu, or “people’s leader.”
China’s new Mao, while ideologically committed to classical Marxism-Leninism, as his speech at the opening of the party congress underscored, is apparently seeking to build fascism with Chinese characteristics.
A critical element of Xi’s strategy to realise the Chinese dream has been the “One Belt, One Road” project, renamed as the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, under which China has considerably invested in infrastructure projects abroad, with the goal of bringing countries firmly into China’s orbit. What Xi has called “the project of the century” has no parallel in modern history. The BRI is more than 12 times the size of the Marshall Plan, America’s post-World War II initiative to aid the reconstruction of Western Europe’s devastated economies.
Although the BRI has of late faced increasingly strong headwinds over partner countries’ debt-trap concerns, compelling Beijing to scale back the initiative, its significant and lasting impact should not be underestimated. The BRI, however, also remains a symbol of China’s imperial overreach, with Xi stretching the country’s resources to help advance his aggressive foreign policy.
Xi’s strategic overreach in international relations actually mirrors his domestic overreach, including imposing mass lockdowns and quarantines as part of a zero-Covid policy that has exacted major economic and social costs. Xi’s domestic overreach has extended to tightening the reins on the private sector, including the tech industry, as China increasingly becomes a state-driven economy that prioritises politics and national security over growth. Although China’s economic rise was driven by its embrace of a free market, Xi’s speech at the party congress emphasised Marxism more than markets.
According to a Chinese proverb, “To feed the ambition in your heart is like carrying a tiger under your arm.” The further Xi pushes his neo-imperial agenda, the more likely it is to bite him.
What Xi’s third term could bring
It is scarcely a surprise that Xi has tightened his grip on power by securing a ground-breaking third term as the country’s president following the week-long party congress. If there was any surprise at the party congress, it was the ease with which Xi has stacked the powerful Politburo Standing Committee with his acolytes and brought other loyalists or protégés to leadership positions, effectively creating a one-man rule under the Communist Party flag.
Surrounded by a closed circle of “yes” men who will be competing among themselves to show how loyal they are, the president will likely be told only what he would like to hear. As the American writer Walter Lippmann once warned, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
Xi’s centralisation of authority means he will have a freer hand to speed up China’s rise as a military and technological superpower, while crushing all dissent at home and accelerating the Sinicisation of ethnic minorities, especially Tibetans and Uighurs. With his unchecked power, Xi can now do whatever he wants.
Xi Jinping with the members of the Chinese Communist Party’s new Politburo Standing Committee in Beijing on October 23, 2022
So, unlike in the past when he could blame others for mistakes, Xi will find it more difficult to palm off responsibility for problems. After all, Xi reigns supreme and unchallenged, without any heir apparent.
In his speech to the party congress, Xi left little doubt that he wants China to become a world power second to none, including by reducing its reliance on Western know-how and emerging as a leading technology power in its own right. Citing a host of perceived dangers, he also vowed to continue expanding the country’s already formidable national-security apparatus.
Xi’s unbridled authority, however, does not augur well for international security and China’s own future. In fact, in a forewarning that Xi could lead China into a war, the customary phrase “peace and development remains the theme of the era” was absent from his speech as well as report to the party congress. Instead, Xi darkly warned of “dangerous storms” on the horizon.
Domestic politics in any country, including in a leading democracy like the US, has a bearing on its foreign policy. This is especially so in the case of the world’s largest autocracy, China. Under Xi, China has discarded Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, “Hide your strength, bide your time.” Instead, China has increasingly taken pride in baring its claws. This trend is likely to become even more pronounced in Xi’s third term.
Surrounded by a closed circle of ‘yes’ men who will be competing among themselves to show how loyal they are, the president will likely be told only what he would like to hear. As the American writer Walter Lippmann once warned, ‘where all think alike, no one thinks very much’
At home, Xi’s surveillance state will likely grow by leaps and bounds. Already, China’s unrivalled surveillance, censorship and propaganda systems can control or construct a narrative. But Xi is set to further expand his Orwellian surveillance state while cultivating a climate of fear.
In fact, to stamp out dissent, Xi’s regime has been whipping up ultra-nationalism by blending the digital tools of surveillance with the political tactics of the Cultural Revolution, which claimed more than a million lives. No less ominously, China’s repression and surveillance at home is a corollary of its aggressive revisionism abroad, which is largely concentrated against its neighbours.
More repression and more heavy-handedness at home are likely to be accompanied by a more aggressive military posture and a more forceful international agenda. Xi seems to believe that Chinese money can buy international acquiescence to China’s playing by its own rules, including aggressively pursuing an expansionist agenda.
With its “two steps forward, one step back” strategy, the Xi-led China will keep progressing toward its ambitious goals. Its territorial and maritime expansionism also mirrors that strategy. In this light, one can expect China to remain defiant in the face of international criticism of its renegade behaviour and actions.
Neighbouring countries will bear the brunt
The Chinese Communist Party has since its power grab in 1949 shown that it is intrinsically totalitarian, belligerent, arbitrary, expansionist and contemptuous of international law. But under Xi, the party and its rule have become more despotic, coercive, punitive and racist.
With its “tribute nation” approach to weak, vulnerable states, China seeks to influence their sovereign decisions through economic and political coercion. Indeed, Xi believes China has accumulated sufficient power to begin remaking the global order in its image, thereby reinventing itself as the mythical Middle Kingdom.
China’s territorial assertiveness and expansionism, meanwhile, have become intertwined with its national renewal. China has sought to extend its control to strategic territories and resources as part of a shrewd, high-stakes strategy to achieve political, economic, and military pre-eminence in Asia. It sees dominance in Asia as a stepping stone to supplanting the US as the world’s preeminent power.
Against this background, China’s muscular foreign policy is set to become even more assertive, with important implications for its neighbours. China will also exploit its status as the world’s unmatched hydro-hegemon to gain strategic leverage over its downstream neighbours, as the Mekong River Basin already exemplifies.
To stamp out dissent, Xi’s regime has been whipping up ultra-nationalism by blending the digital tools of surveillance with the political tactics of the cultural revolution, which claimed more than a million lives. No less ominously, China’s repression and surveillance at home is a corollary of its aggressive revisionism abroad, which is largely concentrated against its neighbours
The plain fact is that the rise of Xi’s neo-Maoist dictatorship will likely spell trouble for the democratic world but especially for neighbouring countries, which already are bearing the brunt of China’s recidivist policies. Indeed, Xi has shown an increasing appetite for taking major risks, as the South China Sea, the Himalayas and Hong Kong show.
Xi will continue expanding China’s influence and territorial and maritime control by stepping up pressure on other countries, a strategy that has already resulted in a fundamental change of the status quo in the South China Sea, without Beijing incurring any international costs.
Xi is now working to replicate his South China Sea strategy in the Himalayas by unilaterally changing facts on the ground, with little regard for the diplomatic and geopolitical fallout. He has not spared even Bhutan, one of the world’s smallest countries, by nibbling away at Bhutanese borderlands, one valley or pasture at a time.
China’s encroachments on several Ladakh borderlands in April-May 2020, for their part, have served as a reminder that, unlike Russia’s frontal, full-force attack on Ukraine, the Chinese Communist Party prefers a stealthy, salami-slicing approach to expand the country’s frontiers. Its tactics normally fall short of armed conflict, as a Pentagon report has noted.
The incremental, salami-slicing approach below the threshold of armed conflict explains why China’s often bulletless aggression draws little international costs. For example, without inviting any concrete Western sanctions, China has changed the status in the South China Sea and Hong Kong. What was one of Asia’s freest and most open cities, Hong Kong, has rapidly been turned into a repressive police state.
China’s salami-slicing strategy, however, did not develop under Xi. The party honed salami-slicing in the 1950s, when China sliced off the Switzerland-sized Aksai Chin plateau, which was part of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. But under Xi’s leadership, the salami-slicing strategy has progressed to a “cabbage” approach to contested or claimed borderlands, with the People’s Liberation Army stealthily cutting off access to a neighbour’s previously controlled territory and surrounding it with multiple security layers.
Looking ahead, deception, stealth and surprise will remain integral to China’s expansion of its maritime and land borders. And China will likely rely more and more on coercive bargaining, including intimidating smaller nations from defending their interests.
It is important to note that China’s military drills are rarely empty shows of force. In 2020, China’s unusually large, wintertime troop exercise near the India border became the launchpad for its stealthy land grabs in Ladakh, triggering still continuing military standoffs between the two Asian giants at multiple sites along their long and inhospitable Himalayan frontier.
The more recent live-fire Chinese military drills around Taiwan in August, by simulating an air and sea blockade, demonstrated China’s combat capability to accomplish what Xi has called a “historic mission” to absorb that island democracy. The drills allowed Chinese troops to practice enforcing a gradual economic strangulation or quarantine of Taiwan.
Taiwan could well become the next Ukraine. Xi will wait for an opportune moment before moving on Taiwan, taking by complete surprise a distracted US, which is increasingly embroiled in the Ukraine war including through transfers of sophisticated weapons and battlefield intelligence. Xi’s aggression, however, is likely to take the form of a calibrated, gradually intensifying squeeze of Taiwan, rather than a full-fledged invasion.
The White House acknowledged in August that China is pursuing a “boiling the frog” strategy against Taiwan by regularising crossings of the median line in the Taiwan Strait, stepping up coercive pressures and slowly altering the status quo.
The parable of the frog is about sensory adaptation to small changes over time: If a frog is put into a pot of boiling water, it will instantly jump out, but if it is placed in a pot of cool water that is then very slowly brought to a boil, the frog will not notice, cooking to death. Likewise, Xi pursues his expansionism incrementally, conditioning international power elites to China’s expanding footprint and preventing a concerted Western response until it becomes too late.
Yet US President Joe Biden, asked recently whether American forces would defend Taiwan if China attacked, replied, “Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.” But China, instead of launching an unprecedented attack, is more likely to slowly throttle Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Xi, far from seeking to hide China’s frenzied nuclear weapons build-up, is virtually flaunting it, as if to underline that the country’s rapidly growing nuclear arsenal is driven more by political than military considerations. China’s neighbours need to pay close attention to this build-up, even though it may be primarily aimed at dissuading the US from challenging the Xi regime’s actions at home and abroad.
Just as Xi’s muscular revisionism has largely centred on Asia—from the East and South China Seas to the Himalayas—the security-related impacts (as opposed to the geopolitical implications) of the fast-growing Chinese nuclear armoury are likely to be felt principally by Asian states. With a larger nuclear arsenal, Xi could be further emboldened to step up his conventional-military tactics and hybrid warfare from behind China’s highly protective nuclear shield.
Questions are already being raised in the US about the strategic wisdom of defending Taiwan against a potential Chinese invasion, with some analysts contending that any US plan to come to Taiwan’s rescue is far too risky and that Taipei ought to do more for its self-defence. A China armed to its teeth with nuclear weapons would cast further doubt on whether the US would come to Taiwan’s defence, given the greater risks involved.
More fundamentally, if China cannot be at peace with itself, it will not be at peace with others. Xi’s lurch toward totalitarianism will foster greater discontent among the Chinese people, spawning a pressure cooker syndrome.
History is replete with examples of dictators blinded by hubris and overreach leading their countries down a disastrous path. With the last checks and balances gone, Xi’s overweening ambition, absolute power and reliance on “yes” men are likely to spell trouble for China. Under Xi, China has already damaged its international reputation and left itself with only one real lever of power: brute force. But if Xi stays on his present course, he is likely to lead China into a war.
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.
Tensions stemming from the war in Ukraine and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan have strained the strategic partnership between the US and India. But President Joe Biden cannot afford to alienate America’s most important partner in countering China’s rise.
The strategic partnership between the United States and India is pivotal to maintaining the balance of power in the vast Indo-Pacific region and counterbalancing China’s hegemonic ambitions. The US is India’s second-largest trading partner, and deepening the ties between the two countries is one of the rare bipartisan foreign policies that exists in Washington today.
The upcoming October 18-31 joint military exercise known as Yudh Abhyas (War Practice), in a high-altitude area less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from India’s border with China, highlights the partnership’s growing strategic importance. India holds more annual military exercises with the US than any other country, as the two powers seek to improve their forces’ interoperability. As Admiral Michael M. Gilday, the US Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations, put it recently, India is a “crucial partner” in countering China’s rise.
But President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan and effectively surrender the country to a Pakistan-reared terrorist militia, in addition to tensions related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have strained the relationship between the world’s most powerful and most populous democracies.
Like many other countries, including US allies such as Israel and Turkey, India has taken a neutral stance on the war in Ukraine. Much to the chagrin of the US and Europe, the country has continued to purchase discounted oil from Russia, rebuffing the Biden administration’s offer to replace Russian oil with US supplies. Instead, India has increased its imports of Russian crude.
At the heart of India’s decision is fear of losing out to China. Since 2019, the US has used the sanctions on Iran’s oil exports to deprive India of cheaper Iranian oil, thereby turning it into the largest market for US energy exporters. The main beneficiary of the sanctions is China, which has increased its purchases of Iranian oil at a discount and developed a security partnership with the Islamic Republic without facing US reprisal.
While the US has already surpassed Russia as India’s largest weapons supplier, the American defense sector views the war in Ukraine as a “great opportunity” for arms sales to India to “surge.” Moreover, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has urged Indian officials to avoid buying Russian equipment and purchase US-made weapons from now on.
Yet Biden’s overriding focus on punishing Russia could exacerbate India’s security challenges, especially if the international efforts to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin inadvertently empower an expansionist China. The US-led sanctions and Europe’s shift away from Russian energy effectively put Russia – the world’s most resource-rich country – in the pocket of the resource-hungry Chinese. Its alliance with Russia has allowed China to build an energy safety net through an increase in land-based imports, which, unlike sea-borne deliveries, cannot be blockaded if Chinese President Xi Jinping decides to invade Taiwan.
Meanwhile, America’s recent $450 million deal to modernize Pakistan’s F-16 fleet – unveiled days after the US helped the country stave off an imminent debt default through an International Monetary Fund bailout – has evoked bitter memories of the US arming Pakistan against India and supporting the initial development of the Pakistani nuclear-weapons program during the Cold War.
The Biden administration’s disingenuous claim that upgrading Pakistan’s US-supplied F-16 fleet would advance counterterrorism has prompted a sharp response from India. During a recent visit to Washington, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar publicly condemned the deal, saying that the American explanation “is not fooling anyone”: Pakistan would undoubtedly deploy the upgraded fighter jets against India.
Against this backdrop, some observers have revived the old theory that US-India ties fare better under Republican administrations. Bilateral relations thrived during President Donald Trump’s administration, which relied heavily on India in developing its Indo-Pacific strategy. Trump instituted new US policies on China and Pakistan, whose increasingly close partnership has raised the prospect of India fighting a two-front war. In a major policy shift, Trump ended the 45-year US policy of aiding China’s rise. He also cut off security aid to Pakistan for not severing its ties with terrorist groups.
Biden, on the other hand, has resumed America’s coddling of Pakistan, made outreach to Beijing a high priority, and said nothing about China’s encroachments on Indian territory in the Himalayas. But by locking horns with China in a 30-month military standoff, India has openly challenged Chinese power in a way no other world power has done in this century.
Nothing better illustrates Biden’s neglect of the relationship with India than the fact that, since he took office, there has been no US ambassador in New Delhi. Meanwhile, the US ambassador to Pakistan, Donald Blome, caused an uproar during a visit to the Pakistani-held part of Kashmir, which he called by its Pakistani name – “Azad [Liberated] Jammu and Kashmir” – instead of “Pakistan-administered Kashmir,” as the United Nations calls it.
Moreover, the Biden administration has been trying to leverage human-rights issues against India. In April, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken alleged a “rise in human-rights abuses” in the country, prompting Jaishankar to counter that India is similarly concerned about the state of human rights in the US. Likewise, prominent members of the US Democratic Party can barely conceal their hostility to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his brand of Hindu nationalism.
Given that the US and India are both bitterly polarized democracies, officials should avoid statements that could inflame domestic tensions. If the US wishes to shift strategic focus to the Indo-Pacific, it must improve relations with its most important strategic ally in Asia. To that end, Biden must not squander the historic opportunity to forge a “soft” alliance with India. If the US is to prevail in its escalating rivalry with China and Russia and avoid strategic overreach, it needs India more than ever. But without mutual respect, the bilateral partnership is doomed.
China’s relentless expansionism in the frigid high Himalayas through furtive territorial encroachments has fostered a nearly 30-month military standoff with India.
The confrontation, and the wider faceoff between the world’s two most populous nations, persists even as both militaries have pulled back recently from some front line areas to establish buffer zones so as to reduce the risk of inadvertent clashes.
China’s Himalayan encroachments are a reminder that in contrast to Russia’s full-force attack on Ukraine, Beijing prefers to act gradually with stealth, deception and surprise to expand the country’s frontiers.
This incremental, salami-slicing approach of bulletless aggression comes at little international cost. Most prominently, China has redrawn the geopolitical map of the South China Sea and maritime Southeast Asia without inviting any concrete Western sanctions.
In the Himalayas, Beijing is seeking to replicate its South China Sea strategy by unilaterally changing facts on the ground, assuming there will be little diplomatic or geopolitical fallout. It has not spared even tiny Bhutan, nibbling away at its borderlands one valley at a time.
China honed its salami-slicing strategy in the 1950s when it carved off the Aksai Chin plateau, a Switzerland-sized area originally part of the princely Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Under President Xi Jinping, this strategy has evolved into a “cabbage” approach with the People’s Liberation Army stealthily cutting off neighboring states’ access to contested territory they previously controlled and surrounding the acquired areas with multiple layers of security forces.
China’s current military standoff with India involves some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth. But no sooner had New Delhi declared a nationwide lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged from China in early 2020 than the PLA clandestinely invaded the borderlands of India’s northernmost region of Ladakh, enveloping hundreds of square kilometers of territory with layers of defense lines.
Although India has responded with heavy military deployments, leading to the largest Himalayan buildup of rival forces in history, the PLA remains in control of the larger areas it grabbed in April 2020. Through lengthy negotiations, India has managed only to get China to convert its smaller encroachments into buffer zones — largely on Beijing’s terms.
The daunting challenge for a traditionally defensive India is to regain lost territory in the same way China took it — without resort to open combat. The scale of the challenge may explain why Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has agreed to the establishment of four separate buffer zones, with the latest established in September in the Hot Springs area of eastern Ladakh.
Under these deals, the rival forces have pulled back by equal distances from specified confrontation sites to create no man’s lands between them. The buffers in effect advance China’s “10 miles forward, eight miles back” strategy, forcing Indian forces to retreat further back into their own territory while illustrating what Beijing calls “meeting each other halfway.”
In the more strategically valuable areas it has seized, China has fortified front line positions by establishing permanent military bases and deploying large, combat-ready forces with tanks, artillery and cold-weather troop shelters to preclude any Indian attempt to regain lost territory through counterforce operations.
Indeed, since the faceoff began, China has expanded its frenzied buildup of military infrastructure and capabilities along its entire disputed frontier with India. New heliports and expanded air bases near the border have strengthened China’s vertical lift capability.
Modi, while seeking to befriend China after taking office in 2014, coined the phrase “inch toward miles” as a motto for bilateral cooperation. Beijing has cynically translated that slogan to incrementally advance its territorial aggrandizement in the Himalayas.
Simply put, China’s strategy is proving just as effective on land as it has been at sea. In fact, its terrestrial aggression has attracted even less international attention than its blue-water expansionism.
China’s actions in muscling into its neighbors’ territory reflect the Communist Party’s goal of achieving Asian hegemony as a stepping stone toward supplanting the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power. Advancing that ambition means asserting the country’s economic and strategic interests and territorial claims, including by rewriting history and disregarding international law.
Should Beijing next target Taiwan, its aggression is likely to take the form of a slow squeeze of the island democracy rather than a full-fledged invasion. China’s live-fire exercises around Taiwan in August simulated the steps it might take to slowly throttle the island, including by imposing a blockade.
The White House acknowledged in August that China is pursuing a “boiling the frog” strategy against Taiwan by regularizing crossings of the median line that previously restricted military activities in the Taiwan Strait, stepping up coercive pressure and slowly altering the status quo.
The parable of the frog is about sensory adaptation to small changes over time: If a frog is put into a pot of boiling water, it will instantly jump out, but if it is placed in a pot of cool water that is then only slowly brought to a boil, the frog will not notice before it is killed by the heat.
China likewise pursues its expansionism incrementally, conditioning international power elites to its expanding footprint and thwarting a concerted Western response until it is too late.
Asked recently whether American forces would defend Taiwan if China attacks, U.S. President Joe Biden replied, “Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”
China is more likely to slowly throttle Taiwan than directly attack, however. Would Biden put up with a gradual squeeze of Taiwan?
The singular focus of the U.S. and Europe on isolating and punishing Russia for its invasion of Ukraine has deflected attention away from China’s creeping, covert warfare. But while Russia’s strategic ambitions are essentially limited to its near abroad, China is seeking to fundamentally alter global power dynamics.
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 Biden administration could have used Pakistan’s economic crisis to compel the country to sever its longstanding ties to terrorist groups. Instead, the US continues to protect and reward it, putting short-term geopolitical considerations ahead of long-term interests.
The United States rarely learns from its mistakes, because it suffers from what the late political scientist Hans Morgenthau called “strategic narcissism.” Each US president seems to believe the world is waiting for American direction and devises policies based on this flawed assumption.
For example, President Joe Biden seems determined to repeat past blunders by resuming America’s coddling of Pakistan. Successive US presidents have failed to appreciate that America’s longstanding partnership with Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency has allowed Pakistan to institutionalize terrorism by employing armed jihadists in low-intensity asymmetric warfare against neighboring countries. For example, Pakistan has always sought to colonize Afghanistan by installing a regime that would do its bidding, so the ISI created the Taliban in the early 1990s. With the Taliban back in control after the ISI engineered America’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, Pakistan has gotten its wish.
Pakistan itself has become an extremist mecca that hosts multiple United Nations-designated terrorist entities. The US found al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden – the mastermind behind the worst terrorist attack in American history – living next to the Pakistan Military Academy. Other 9/11 plotters – including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s third in command, and Abu Zubeida, the network’s operations chief – were also captured in Pakistan. And yet, despite its terrorist ties, Pakistan’s politically powerful military, including its ISI, has managed to get off scot-free.
On the recent 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Biden pledged to continue monitoring and disrupting terrorist activities “wherever we find them, wherever they exist,” while noting that it took “ten years to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.” Yet, disturbingly, Biden has reversed the policy of his predecessor, Donald Trump, to keep Pakistan at arm’s length until it ended its unholy alliance with terrorist organizations.
Biden could have taken advantage of Pakistan’s desperate need for an International Monetary Fund bailout to compel it to sever its links with state-backed terrorist groups. Instead, his administration recently helped the country stave off an imminent debt default by securing the IMF board’s approval for the immediate disbursement of a $1.1 billion aid package.
This is not the only leverage over Pakistan that the Biden administration has been reluctant to use. With American and Chinese support, Pakistan is close to exiting the “gray list” of the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Paris-based inter-governmental agency combating terrorist financing and money laundering. The fact that Pakistani authorities have not addressed the reason their country was placed on that list in 2018 – tolerating terrorist financing – appears to matter little. In fact, Pakistan should have been placed on the FATF’s most punitive “black” list, a status that usually invites Western sanctions. But American troops were fighting the Taliban at the time, and the US, seeking to moderate Pakistan’s approach to Afghanistan, successfully lobbied against it.
Nothing better illustrates Biden’s embrace of Pakistan than the $450-million deal unveiled this month to modernize the cash-strapped country’s US-supplied F-16 fleet, despite the risk that it might harm America’s close strategic relationship with India. For decades, the US had armed Pakistan to the teeth, a role subsequently taken over by China as a maneuver against India. The F-16s were given to Pakistan as a reward for its serving as the staging ground for the covert US war against the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Pakistan also launched its nuclear-weapons program clandestinely. Pakistan’s four active F-16 squadrons remain central to its air-warfare plans against India; in fact, some were involved in a February 2019 skirmish across the Line of Control in Kashmir.
The US justified the deal by disingenuously claiming that equipping Pakistan’s F-16s with cutting-edge avionics would advance counterterrorism. But the move – announced without warning India, which was hosting senior US officials at the time – will likely renew skepticism toward the US among Indian officials. Biden has said nothing about China’s 28-month-long frontier aggression against India, and his State Department chose to remain neutral by urging the two powers to find “a peaceful resolution.” By strengthening Pakistan – China’s client state – the F-16 deal further imperils US-India relations.
Biden’s enthusiastic re-engagement with Pakistan dismisses those who called on the US to punish Pakistan for its pivotal role in the Afghanistan debacle. Far from imposing sanctions or adding Pakistan to the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, his administration has championed the country as a “major non-NATO ally,” a status conferred on 17 other countries as well – but not India.
This approach should not come as a surprise. The US did not impose sanctions on Pakistan even after it aided and abetted the Taliban’s killing of American soldiers. Instead, the US treated Pakistan as a gatekeeper of its geopolitical interests in the region. America’s weakened position following its Afghan fiasco has only increased its dependence on the ISI, which continues to facilitate the Biden administration’s outreach to the Taliban.
The recent assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul by an American drone strike would not have been possible without US access to Pakistani airspace, which explains Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s commitment to “expanding the US-Pakistan partnership.” But at the heart of this partnership is a Faustian bargain whereby the Biden administration condones Pakistan’s harboring of known terrorists and eases sanctions on the brutal Taliban regime, despite its close ties with al-Qaeda.
The Biden administration’s reluctance to learn from previous US failures ensures that short-term geopolitical considerations will continue to drive American foreign policy, despite the long-term strategic damage to America’s interests. Biden’s approach will nurture a major hub of international terrorism and jihadism, allowing Pakistan to set regional fires while pretending to be a firefighter.
Can the Indo-Pacific region be America’s top priority if U.S. President Joe Biden is deepening commitments and resources for Europe and the Middle East?
This question is central to the future of the Quad, the strategic coalition of leading Indo-Pacific democracies comprising India, Australia, Japan and the U.S.
High-level Quad meetings, like last week’s senior officials’ gathering in New Delhi, are becoming more frequent. The group’s four national leaders alone have held four summit meetings since Biden took office in January 2021.
The accelerating tempo of meetings, though, can obscure the fact that the Quad faces important challenges, including establishing a clear strategic mission in the Indo-Pacific region, a sprawling area shaping up as the world’s economic and geopolitical hub. The Quad may have been designed to serve as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism, but Biden has coaxed the group into adopting an expansive agenda.
To be sure, the Quad has steadily gained strength since it was resurrected in 2017 from a decadelong dormancy. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi famously mocked the Quad in 2018 as a “headline-grabbing idea” that will dissipate “like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Oceans.” But China’s increasingly muscular policies have helped the Quad to build momentum.
The waters of the Indo-Pacific have become an arena of competition for resources and geopolitical influence, which explains the Quad’s emphasis on the maritime domain. Indeed, as underscored by current concerns over Taiwan and the East and South China Seas, future Indo-Pacific crises are likely to be triggered at sea.
The Quad has also been catalyzed by the threat of an illiberal hegemonic regional order, which would pose significant risks to international security and global markets. The free and open Indo-Pacific vision driving the Quad was originally set out by Shinzo Abe, the late Japanese prime minister, and has since become shorthand for a rules-based, liberal order.
The Quad’s future, however, is fundamentally tied to American policies. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in June called America’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific region “the core organizing principle of American national-security policy.”
It is “our priority theater of operations,” “the heart of American grand strategy” and “our center of strategic gravity,” Austin declared.
However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing hybrid war effort led by the U.S. against Moscow are distracting America from growing Indo-Pacific challenges. America’s new strategic focus on Europe and force deployments there — along with the rise of a more robust NATO, which has named Russia as its primary adversary and China as just a “challenge” — make it harder for the U.S. to genuinely pivot to the Indo-Pacific.
In fact, as the U.S. gets more deeply involved in a proxy conflict with Russia, including supplying offensive weapons and battlefield intelligence to Ukraine, the Quad faces new uncertainties. Biden is the third straight president to commit to shifting America’s primary strategic focus to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific. But Biden’s expressed belief that the Ukraine “war could continue for a long time” suggests that he too could fail, as Donald Trump and Barack Obama did.
The new cold war with Moscow, meanwhile, is constraining Biden from taking a tough line toward Beijing, lest it help cement the nascent China-Russia axis. China, with an economy 10 times larger than Russia’s, has the capacity to seriously undercut Western sanctions against Moscow and bail out the Russian economy. All this is reinforcing the more conciliatory approach toward Beijing that Biden has pursued since taking office.
Against this backdrop, it is scarcely a surprise that the Quad’s security agenda has begun to take a back seat.
In fact, Biden has saddled the Quad with an increasingly global agenda that dilutes its Indo-Pacific strategic focus. Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy, as unveiled in February, confirmed the Quad’s shift toward universal challenges, from global health security and climate change to cybersecurity, resilient supply chains and green shipping.
As a small group, the Quad is in no position to deal with global challenges. Yet having launched six separate working groups on climate change, COVID-19 vaccines, critical and emerging technologies, cybersecurity, infrastructure and space, the Quad is getting weighed down by an overly ambitious agenda, crimping its ability to produce results.
The danger of overcommitting and underdelivering has been highlighted by the difficulties encountered by the Quad in supplying 1 billion Indian-manufactured COVID-19 vaccine doses to the developing world by year-end as promised. Even with the support of all four members, the Quad is set to fall far short of its vaccine pledge.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. pours military resources into Europe and the Middle East, the geostrategic dynamics are changing rapidly in the Indo-Pacific, where China is working quietly to eclipse America militarily and economically. The bulk of U.S. economic and military assistance still goes to the Middle East, even as the U.S. prioritizes NATO in order to dominate European security.
The paradox in this situation is that the Quad is becoming stronger through greater engagement among its leaders and senior officials, yet the group appears in danger of losing its strategic vision and purpose. Unless its member states imbue the Quad with a clear strategic direction and meaning, it could become a showpiece or a mere U.S. tool of leverage with Beijing.
Before critics pummel the Quad for being all bark and no bite, the group must refocus its attention on the strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific region.
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.”
Guard towers stand on the perimeter wall of the Urumqi No. 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng in western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on April 23, 2021. China’s discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity, the U.N. human rights office said in a long-awaited report released on Aug. 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
China’s prolonged detention of more than 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang represents the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi era. Yet, disturbingly, China has incurred no international costs.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, the brain behind the scheme, and his inner circle have faced no consequences for sustaining the Muslim gulag since at least March 2017. Despite two successive U.S. administrations describing the unparalleled repression in Xinjiang as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” Western actions against China have largely been symbolic.
The just-released report on Xinjiang by the United Nations’ human rights office cites serious human-rights violations there and recommends that Beijing take “prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty” in that sprawling ethnic-minority homeland.
Yet this report, paradoxically, is a fresh reminder that China has escaped scot-free, with little prospect that it will be held to account for its mass internment of Muslim minorities, including expanding detention sites in Xinjiang since 2019. The Xinjiang repression also includes forced sterilization and abortion, torture of detainees, slave labor and draconian curbs on freedom of religion and movement.
The report’s release came after nearly a yearlong delay and just minutes before the four-year term of Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, ended. U.N. investigators had compiled the Xinjiang report almost a year ago, but Bachelet kept stalling its release, despite growing pressure from Western countries.
In May, after lengthy discussions with Beijing on arrangements, Bachelet undertook a controversial official visit to China, the first by a U.N. high commissioner for human rights since 2005. During her tenure, Bachelet – a former Chilean president and political detainee under dictator Augusto Pinochet – stayed mum on the Chinese repression in Xinjiang (and Tibet). She said nothing on the crackdown in Xinjiang even when she briefly visited that region during her restrictive China tour, which glossed over abuses by Xi’s regime.
Bachelet had earlier acknowledged that she was under “tremendous pressure” over the report, with China asking her to bury it. The eventual release of the report, minutes before Bachelet’s retirement at midnight on Aug. 31, indicated that she did not want her successor or temporary replacement to take credit for publishing it. Failing to release the report would have left a glaring black mark on her tenure.
Days before her retirement, Bachelet sent a copy of the report to Beijing because, as she explained in a Sept. 1 statement, she “wanted to take the greatest care to deal with the responses and inputs received from the (Chinese) government last week.” In response to the 48-page U.N. assessment, China wrote a 131-page rebuttal, with its foreign ministry calling the report a “farce.”
China has been emboldened by the international community’s indifference and indulgence. It successfully hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics, probably the most divisive games since the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, which helped strengthen the hands of Germany’s Adolf Hitler.
Underscoring China’s growing economic power and geopolitical clout, even Muslim countries, by and large, have remained shockingly silent on the Xinjiang repression. As if that weren’t bad enough, the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation in March honored Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi as a speaker at its foreign ministers’ forum in Pakistan.
Xi’s Muslim gulag has made a mockery of the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which China acceded in 1983 (with the rider that it does not consider itself bound by Article IX, the clause allowing any party in a dispute to lodge a complaint with the International Court of Justice). The Genocide Convention requires its parties, which include the United States, to “prevent and punish” acts of genocide.
Chinese authorities have subjected Uyghur and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang, including ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, to Orwellian levels of surveillance and control over many details of life. As Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo warned, China is weaponizing biotechnology to “pursue control over its people and its repression of members of ethnic and religious minority groups.”
The Xinjiang repression is aimed at indoctrinating not just political dissidents and religious zealots but entire Muslim communities by imposing large-scale deprogramming of Islamic identities. A gulag archipelago of 380 internment camps (or “reeducation hospitals,” as Beijing calls them) has become integral to this larger assault on Islam.
It is against this background that the carefully worded U.N. report warns that, “The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups … and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” The report cited “patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” in the detention centers, including “credible” allegations of sexual violence.
The U.N. report may carry the imprimatur of the world’s only truly universal organization and its member states, yet China was quick to pour scorn on it. Just as it rubbished a 2016 international arbitral tribunal ruling that invalidated its territorial claims in the South China Sea, China ridiculed the U.N. report, calling it a pack of “disinformation and lies.”Could long COVID finally make us take chronic pain seriously?It’s crucial to reintegrate Taiwan into the ICAO
The 1945-46 Nuremberg Military Tribunal, set up after Germany’s surrender in World War II, prosecuted those involved in crimes against humanity, the same crimes now being perpetrated in Xinjiang. Yet, with China a rising power, there seems little prospect that Chinese officials behind the Muslim gulag will face similar justice.
Indeed, just as China responded to the tribunal’s ruling by accelerating its expansionism in the South China Sea, including militarizing the region, it could step up its repression in Xinjiang until it manages to fully Sinicize and tame Muslim groups.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press). Follow him on Twitter @Chellaney.
Chinese military drills are rarely empty shows of force.
In 2020, China’s unusually large winter exercises on the Tibetan Plateau became the launchpad for stealthy land grabs in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh. This triggered a military standoff between the two Asian giants at multiple sites across a long and inhospitable stretch of the Himalayas, leading to deadly clashes and China’s first combat casualties since its 1979 invasion of Vietnam.
This month’s live-fire military drills around Taiwan, which effectively simulated an air and sea blockade, demonstrated China’s combat capability to accomplish President Xi Jinping’s “historic mission” of absorbing the island democracy.
The drills allowed Chinese troops to practice enforcing a quarantine around Taiwan that would result in its gradual economic strangulation, suggesting Xi may prefer a strategy of calibrated squeeze to force the island to unify with China.
In a reminder that any Chinese operation to cut off access to Taiwan would likely intrude into Japanese airspace and perhaps pull Tokyo into a war over the island, five Chinese missiles sent over Taiwan during the drills landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone. Taiwan, Imperial Japan’s first colony, is, after all, geographically an extension of the Japanese archipelago.
Could Chinese aggression against Taiwan also embroil India? It is important to remember that Chinese and Indian forces have remained on a war footing along the vast glaciated heights of the Himalayas for more than two years now, with tens of thousands of troops on each side facing off in the biggest military buildup ever in this area.
Given Xi’s efforts to regularize and intensify coercive pressure on Taiwan, joint U.S.-India military exercises planned for October in an area at an altitude above 3,000 meters in the Himalayas have assumed greater significance.
As if to signal that Beijing could potentially face a second front if it were to move against Taiwan, the latest edition of the annual U.S.-India high-altitude, cold-climate drills is being held barely 100 kilometers from the Chinese frontier, closer than ever before.
Taiwan, a technological powerhouse with the world’s 22nd-largest economy by gross domestic product, plays an important, if indirect, role in Asian security: its autonomous existence ties up a sizable portion of China’s armed forces.
India likewise is helping Taiwan’s defense by tying down a complete Chinese theater force, which could otherwise be employed against the island.
Given the looming specter of a sharp uptick in Chinese aggression, deterring an attack on Taiwan has become more pressing than ever. Philip Davidson, testifying to Congress last year when he was leading the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said he believed a Chinese invasion could be launched by 2027.
U.S. intelligence now reportedly believes that Xi could move against Taiwan much earlier, specifically within the two-year window between the Chinese Communist Party congress due to take place in the next couple months and the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan to a terrorist militia a year ago and his growing involvement in the Ukraine war after failing to deter a Russian invasion of that country have left Washington in a weakened position. Xi’s designs on Taiwan have been further encouraged by the failure of Western sanctions to force Russia to retreat from Ukraine.
The fall of Taiwan to Beijing 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 that encloses its coastal seas from the Japanese archipelago southward.
But the largest Asian territory Beijing covets is the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is almost three times as large as Taiwan. Beijing’s maps already show it as part of China.
After Beijing began giving its own names to places inside Arunachal Pradesh last year, the staid foreign ministry in New Delhi hit back with uncharacteristic firmness, calling it “a ridiculous exercise to support untenable territorial claims.”
Against the background of China’s designs on Arunachal Pradesh and perhaps even Okinawa, it is imperative that India and Japan step up consultations with each other, as well as with Taipei and Washington, on how they could contribute to shoring up Taiwan’s defenses and deterring a Chinese attack.
While India would not get directly involved in defending Taiwan, it could potentially play a useful role in activating another front against China in the event of a Taiwan Strait crisis, but only in close collaboration with the U.S.
India holds more annual military exercises with the U.S., its largest trading partner and an increasingly important strategic partner, than with any other country. But Biden has still not uttered a single word about the last 28 months of Himalayan border aggression by China. Nor has the Biden administration shown urgency in fortifying Taiwan’s defenses.
To be sure, America’s role is central to Taiwan’s autonomous future. A U.S. that fails to prevent Taiwan’s subjugation would be widely seen as unable or unwilling to defend any other ally.
The status quo on Taiwan is more likely to be preserved if the U.S. coordinates its island-related defense plans with Japan, India and Australia, including how to respond to potential Chinese moves to restrict access to Taiwan, whether physically or digitally. The only thing that can deter China from aggression against Taiwan is the expectation that it would incur high concrete costs.
The Taliban regime is behaving as expected, turning the country into a breeding ground for international terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and mass migration. There is no justification for attempts by US President Joe Biden’s administration to engage with it.
In the year since the United States’ disgraceful abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban, the country has gone down precisely the path any logical observer would have predicted: a medieval, jihadist, terrorist-sheltering emirate has been established. The US will incur costs for betraying its Afghan allies for a long time to come. But nobody will pay a higher price than Afghans.
The geopolitical fallout of America’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan – after President Joe Biden followed through on the withdrawal commitment of his predecessor, Donald Trump – is still growing. By exposing the US as a power in decline, the withdrawal gave a huge boost to militant Islamists everywhere, while emboldening Russia and China. It is no coincidence that, not long after the fall of Kabul, Russia began massing forces along Ukraine’s borders, and China sent a record number of warplanes into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense identification zone.
But things are much worse in Afghanistan. Women and girls have lost their rights to employment and education, with many girls subjected to sexual slavery through forced marriages to Taliban fighters. Taliban death squads have been systematically identifying and murdering those who cooperated with US forces. Torture and execution have become commonplace. Afghanistan’s Hindus and Sikhs – descendants of those who withstood the medieval-era conversions to Sunni Islam by the country’s Arab conquerors – have been fleeing to India to avoid slaughter.
The regime’s cabinet is a veritable who’s who of international terrorists and narcotics kingpins. Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is responsible for Afghanistan’s internal security and preventing the country from becoming a safe haven for international terrorists, is the leader of the ruthless Haqqani network. The US has designated him a “global terrorist” and placed a $10 million bounty on his head.
Not surprisingly, the Taliban continues to shelter known terrorists, as the recent Biden-ordered assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in central Kabul showed. While Biden was quick to take a victory lap after al-Zawahiri’s killing, the assassination hardly reflects well on him. A year ago, when ordering US troops to beat a hasty retreat, he claimed that the US no longer had any interest in Afghanistan, because al-Qaeda was already “gone.” (No matter that, just weeks earlier, a United Nations Security Council report had shown that al-Qaeda militants were fighting alongside their Taliban associates.)
Compounding the danger to Afghanistan and its neighbors, the US left behind $7.1 billion worth of weapons in its chaotic withdrawal from the country. According to a recent Pentagon report, the US has no plans to retrieve or destroy the equipment, despite recognizing that the Taliban has already “repaired some damaged Afghan Air Force aircraft and made incremental gains in its capability to employ these aircraft in operations.”
In short, Biden’s decision to overrule his generals and withdraw from Afghanistan – a month before his own target date of September 11 – has created a security and humanitarian nightmare. And Biden is nowhere near finished making foreign-policy blunders in Afghanistan.
After Kabul’s fall, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the US would judge its future engagement with the Taliban-led government based on “one simple proposition”: whether it helps the US advance its interests, including “seeing that women’s rights are upheld,” delivering humanitarian assistance, and pursuing counterterrorism. But even though the Taliban has failed on all three counts, the Biden administration is gradually easing sanctions on the regime.
At the UN, the US spearheaded a resolution providing for a humanitarian exemption to the sanctions imposed on Afghanistan. The US Treasury Department’s General Licenses, aimed at facilitating the provision of humanitarian relief, now allow financial transactions involving the Taliban and the Haqqani network. And the US is currently negotiating with the Taliban over the release of $3.5 billion of Afghan central-bank reserves.
Meanwhile, the US refuses to target Haqqani or other leading terrorists in Kabul. Yes, al-Zawahiri was assassinated, but, contrary to the Biden administration’s narrative, he was not all that influential. He was largely retired, living with members of his extended family in a Kabul house under Haqqani’s protection.
What’s next? Will the US now reward Pakistan – one of America’s 18 “major non-NATO allies” – for opening its airspace to the drone that killed al-Zawahiri? True, Pakistan reared the Taliban and engineered the US defeat in Afghanistan, but now it wants an early International Monetary Fund loan dispersal to help it avert a debt default.
Likewise, will the US now continue to pursue the release of Afghanistan’s central-bank reserves to the Taliban, despite its indisputable harboring of terrorists and establishment of an oppressive and violent Islamic state? The Biden administration defends its engagement with the Taliban by speciously contending that the top terrorist threat in Afghanistan is the Islamic State-Khorasan. But ISIS-K has relatively few members, no state sponsor or Afghan allies, and controls no territory.
The Biden administration seems committed to striking a kind of Faustian bargain with the Taliban. But to what end? The Taliban’s political power and Islamist ideology make it a critical link in the international jihadist movement. And its rule is threatening to turn Afghanistan into a breeding ground for international terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and mass migration. There is no justification for engaging with it.
Through its precipitous and bungling withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration handed Islamists worldwide their greatest victory. But the war in Afghanistan is hardly over. As the Taliban’s self-styled emir, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, recently declared, “This war never ends, and it will continue till judgment day.”
China’s strategy has been to advance its foreign-policy objectives largely through bluff, bluster, and bullying. Without sparking direct armed conflict, China’s leaders have sought to intimidate and coerce neighboring countries into yielding to their demands.
In contrast to Russia’s frontal assaults on Ukraine, China’s expansionism in Asia – from the South China Sea to the Himalayas – has been pursued incrementally. For example, China’s ongoing military standoff with India along the two countries’ disputed Himalayan border was triggered by its stealthy land grabs in Indian Ladakh in April 2020.
The last thing China wants is to get into an armed conflict with the United States, a superior military power, because this would expose chinks in its armor.
By going to Taipei recently, US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called China’s bluff. But her visit also served as a pretext for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime to step up coercive pressure on Taiwan by carrying out provocative military drills in a dress rehearsal for a blockade. Long before Pelosi considered visiting Taipei, China had been ramping up its campaign of intimidation, with its warplanes regularly crossing the median line in the Taiwan Strait.
Xi’s increasing troubles at home, including economic growth slowing almost to a halt, amplify the risk that he will resort to nationalist brinkmanship as a distraction. The odds are increasing that he will move against Taiwan in the two-year period between securing a norm-breaking third term as Communist Party chairman this November and the 2024 US presidential election.
But, rather than order a full-scale invasion, Xi is more likely to throttle Taiwan slowly. That will leave US President Joe Biden with difficult choices, with inaction likely to prove fatal for the island. A Taiwan fiasco on Biden’s watch, after his Afghanistan debacle and failure to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, would gravely undermine America’s global power.
President Biden has still to grasp that Taiwan is far more important than Ukraine to the future of American power in the world. Yet the likelihood is growing that, on Biden’s watch, Chinese President Xi Jinping would move on Taiwan, just as Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
In a forewarning of that, China has recently started claiming that it owns the critical international waterway, the Taiwan Strait. Just as it did earlier in the South China Sea — the strategic corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, through which one-third of global maritime trade passes — Xi’s regime is seeking to advance its expansionism by laying an expansive claim to the Taiwan Strait, which, by connecting the South and East China Seas, serves as an important passage for commercial shipping as well as foreign naval vessels.
The new claim signals that Xi is preparing to move on Taiwan at an opportune time — an action that would involve exercising maritime domain control.
By forcibly absorbing Taiwan, China would drive the final nail in the coffin of America’s global preeminence. A takeover of Taiwan would also give China a prized strategic and economic asset.
The defense of Taiwan has assumed greater significance for international security because three successive U.S. administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, relying instead on rhetoric or symbolic actions.
Biden, rather than working to deter and thwart a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan, is seeking to shield his tentative rapprochement with China, which has been forged through a series of virtual meetings with Xi and by offering Beijing important concessions. This explains why Biden publicly pushed back against a Taiwan visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
It is important to remember that, much before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden had begun to ease pressure on China. He effectively let Xi’s regime off the hook for both covering up COVID-19’s origins and failing to meet its commitments under the 2020 “phase one” trade deal with Washington. Biden also dropped fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of the military-linked Chinese tech giant Huawei. U.S. sanctions over China’s Muslim gulag remain essentially symbolic.
And now Biden is planning to roll back tariffs on Chinese goods, which will further fuel China’s spiraling trade surplus with America. After swelling by more than 25% last year to $396.6 billion, the trade surplus with the U.S. now makes up almost three-quarters of China’s total global surplus.
The mammoth surplus is helping to keep the Chinese economy afloat at a time when growth has slowed almost to a halt, triggering rising unemployment and mortgage and debt crises. The situation has been made worse by Xi’s lockdown-centered, zero-tolerance approach to COVID-19, which is breeding anger and resistance amid a property implosion.
Xi’s growing domestic troubles at a critical time when he is seeking a norm-breaking third term as Communist Party chairman heighten the risk of the Chinese leader resorting to nationalist brinkmanship as a distraction. After all, initiating a foreign intervention or crisis to divert attention from domestic challenges is a tried-and-true technique of leaders of major powers.
In his latest virtual meeting with Biden on July 28, Xi sharply warned against U.S. interference in the Taiwan issue, saying that those who “play with fire will perish by it.” Biden, by contrast, struck a defensive tone, reaffirming the U.S. commitment to a one-China policy and reassuring Xi that American “policy has not changed and that the United States strongly opposes anyone who will change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
Having swallowed Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party seems itching to move on Taiwan, a technological powerhouse that plays a central role in the international semiconductor business. Annexing Taiwan will make China a more formidable rival to America and advance its goal of achieving global preeminence by the 100th anniversary of communist rule in 2049.
Against this background, Biden’s conciliatory approach toward China threatens to embolden Xi’s designs against Taiwan.
Taiwan’s imperative is to expand its global footprint in order to help safeguard its autonomous status. Instead of aiding that effort, Biden inexplicably excluded that island democracy from his recently unveiled Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — an economic platform that seeks to promote cooperation among its member-states.
Biden’s pursuit of a rapprochement with China also explains his administration’s proposal to roll back tariffs on Chinese products, an action that would break his promise not to unilaterally lift tariffs unless Beijing’s behavior improved.
Not once, not twice, but at least three times Biden has said in recent months that he is willing to get militarily involved to defend Taiwan, only to have his senior officials walk back his comments on every occasion. The last time when he sowed international confusion afresh, Biden himself walked back his Taiwan comments, telling reporters a day later, “My policy has not changed at all.”
In seeking to placate China, Biden is sending out contradictory signals, leaving Taiwan vexed and confused.
Instead of privately advising Pelosi against visiting Taiwan, Biden gratuitously told a reporter that “the military” thinks a Pelosi visit to Taiwan is “not a good idea right now.” Pelosi then told the media, “I think what the president is saying is that maybe the military was afraid our plane would get shot down or something like that by the Chinese.”
The president’s unusual remark conveyed American weakness by implying that the U.S. military was not capable of securing the flight path of the Pelosi-carrying military aircraft to Taiwan or effectively responding to any Chinese provocation. The comment also encouraged Xi’s regime to escalate its bullying threats to stymie a Taiwan visit by the person second in line to the U.S. presidency.
More fundamentally, if Biden fears a Pelosi visit to Taipei would set back his nascent rapprochement with China and ignite new tensions, it raises serious doubts whether he will have the political will to help defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Xi is also likely encouraged by Biden’s failure to force Russian forces to retreat from Ukraine, despite Washington spearheading unprecedented Western actions against Russia, including weaponizing finance, slapping wide-ranging sanctions and arming Ukraine with a plethora of sophisticated weapons.
With Biden’s poll numbers already in the tank, the president is likely to emerge further weakened from the approaching midterm election. By contrast, a strengthened Xi securing a precedent-defying third term is likely to be bolder and more assertive in pursuing his geopolitical ambitions.
Instead of ordering a full-scale invasion, Xi may begin to slowly throttle Taiwan so as to force it to merge with China. A strangulation strategy would likely include blockading the Taiwan Strait (which will close off Taiwan’s main port, Kaohsiung) and seeking to cut off Taiwan’s undersea cables, internet connections and energy imports.
Make no mistake: Xi perceives an advantageous window of opportunity to accomplish what he has called a “historic mission” to incorporate Taiwan. And, in the style recommended by ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, Xi’s aggression will likely begin with stealth, deception, surprise and innovative methods.
For Xi, taking Taiwan is essential to achieving larger strategic goals, including making China a world power second to none by displacing America from regional and global order.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press). Follow him on Twitter @Chellaney.
Internal factors alone cannot explain Sri Lanka’s economic collapse. In a forewarning of wider international instability, Sri Lanka slid from a serious balance-of-payments crisis to bankruptcy due to the spiraling global fuel and food prices triggered by the Western sanctions against Russia.
Sri Lanka’s economic collapse exemplifies how poorer countries are paying the price of Western sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.
Instead of focusing on how the sanctions are fueling a global energy and food crisis, much of the international attention is on the new Cold War between the West and Moscow. Unable to pay for basic imports and crippled by domestic shortages of fuel, food and medicine, Sri Lanka is facing its worst financial crisis since independence in 1948.
After hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Colombo over the weekend, and the risk of violent unrest intensified, Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and interim Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe separately announced they were stepping down. Gotabaya, however, fled the country on a military jet without handing in his resignation.
Rooted in fiscal imbalances, external debt and government mismanagement, Sri Lanka’s economic crisis predates the Western imposition of unparalleled sanctions on Russia over its attack on Ukraine.
But, thanks to spiraling international fuel and food prices in recent months, Sri Lanka has slid from a serious balance-of-payments crisis to bankruptcy, with Wickremesinghe declaring that the national economy had “completely collapsed.”
By taking out a crucial chunk of the global energy supply, the sanctions against Russia have triggered a surge in inflation in Western nations, which now confront cost-of-living crises. But in poorer countries, the sanctions are compounding national debt woes and threatening livelihoods and social stability.
Russia, the world’s largest exporter of oil and gas before the war, has been critical to stability in international energy markets, while its fertilizer exports remain vital for global food production, in which energy accounts for up to 30% of the cost.
Financial sanctions have made it so difficult to make payments to Russia that supplies of even sanctions-exempt commodities such as fertilizers and wheat — of which Russia is also the world’s biggest exporter — have been disrupted. Russia, for its part, has blocked shipments of Ukraine’s leading exports: sunflower oil, corn and wheat.
It is these unintended consequences that have hastened Sri Lanka’s economic meltdown. The rapid depletion of foreign exchange reserves has left its citizens without basic necessities. Rolling electricity outages and queues for fuel that run for miles have forced authorities to temporarily shut schools and offices.
Sri Lanka’s debt crisis first caught international attention in 2017 when, unable to repay Chinese loans, the nation handed a strategic port complex at Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease. Despite slipping into a debt trap, Sri Lanka went ahead with other grandiose Chinese projects, including a massive development project across the bay from Colombo on reclaimed land.
Other factors also contributed to making Sri Lanka’s debt unsustainable. A terrorist bombing spree on Easter Sunday in 2019 that killed nearly 300 people and led to a near cessation of foreign tourist arrivals, followed by the COVID pandemic, devastated the resource-poor nation’s revenue stream.
The Rajapaksa family, which has long dominated Sri Lanka’s political landscape and was instrumental in opening the door to China, racked up debt on a grand scale by committing to an array of ambitious infrastructure projects, several of which continue to bleed money. Worse still, drastic tax cuts in 2019 wiped out about a third of the government’s revenues.
More recently, after violent protests toppled Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government in May, his brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, appointed an old political rival, former Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, to head an interim government and help rescue the nation from the economic death spiral.
Wickremesinghe, whose private home was set on fire by arsonists on Saturday, earlier described the national situation as unprecedented. “We’ve had difficult times [before]… But not like this. I have not seen… people without fuel, without food.”
Sri Lanka has confronted multiple economic crises in the past — since 1965 the country has secured 16 International Monetary Fund loans — but its current talks with the IMF for a bailout package are difficult because, in Wickremesinghe’s words, “we are participating in the negotiations as a bankrupt country.” An IMF approval appears months away.
China, now the world’s biggest official creditor, has balked at paring Sri Lanka’s debt, saying it would set a precedent for other borrowing countries to demand similar relief. With China’s typical loan contract compelling a borrowing country to keep confidential even the loan’s existence, Sri Lanka is reeling under a hidden debt problem, with its actual debt to Beijing perhaps making up as much as 20% of its total external debt.
To stay afloat in recent months, Sri Lanka has largely relied on help from India, which has provided over $4 billion in credit lines and other aid. But Wickremesinghe says Sri Lanka urgently needs more assistance, especially from India, Japan, the U.S. and China.
Sri Lanka’s economic meltdown, which has forced it to seek Russian oil, wheat and fertilizers on credit, may be an extreme example of the global fallout from the U.S.-led sanctions on Moscow.
But violent demonstrations from Latin America to Africa over the dizzying spiral in fuel and food prices are a forewarning that more vulnerable countries could go bust. “I think by the end of the year, you could see the impact in other countries” as well, Wickremesinghe said.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
Through a combination of authoritarianism, nepotism, cronyism, and hubris, the Rajapaksa family weighed down Sri Lanka’s economy with more debt than it could possibly bear. The country’s next leaders will have to address shortages of basic necessities, rebuild a wrecked economy, and reestablish the rule of law.
For much of nearly two decades, the four Rajapaksa brothers and their sons have run Sri Lanka like a family business – and a disorderly one, at that. With their grand construction projects and spendthrift ways, they saddled Sri Lanka with unsustainable debts, driving the country into its worst economic crisis since independence. Now, the dynasty has fallen.
Mahinda Rajapaksa was instrumental in establishing the Rajapaksa dynasty. After becoming president in 2005, he ruled with an iron fist for a decade, attacking civil liberties, expanding presidential powers (including abolishing term limits), and making bad deal after bad deal with China. Throughout this process, he kept his family close, with his younger brother Gotabaya holding the defense portfolio.
But in 2015, Mahinda narrowly lost the presidential election, and the Rajapaksas were briefly driven from power. During that time, parliament restored the presidential term limit, ruling out another Mahinda presidency. Yet the family quickly devised a plan to restore their dynasty: Gotabaya would renounce his US citizenship and run for president.
Gotabaya was well-positioned to win. After all, he had been defense secretary in 2009 when Mahinda ordered the final military offensive against the Tamil Tiger rebels, bringing a brutal 26-year civil war to a decisive end. With that, the Rajapaksa brothers emerged as heroes among Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority.
To be sure, the final offensive killed as many as 40,000 civilians and sparked international accusations of war crimes. The United Nations described it as a “grave assault on the entire regime of international law.” According to Sarath Fonseka, the wartime military commander, Gotabaya ordered the summary execution of surrendering rebel leaders. In California, where he was previously domiciled, Gotabaya faces civil charges over alleged war crimes.
But the Rajapaksa brothers simply presented themselves as hardheaded custodians of Sinhalese interests. And, thanks largely to his ethno-nationalist credentials, Gotabaya won the 2019 election – at which point he immediately appointed Mahinda as his prime minister. Mahinda then appointed his two sons, his other two brothers, and a nephew as ministers or to other government positions.
The same year, 277 people were killed, and hundreds more wounded, in bombings carried out by Islamist extremists on Easter Sunday. The attack highlighted tensions that had been simmering since 2009: though the military offensive marginalized the Hindu-majority Tamils, the war’s end sowed the seeds of religious conflict between the Buddhist-majority Sinhalese and Sri Lanka’s Muslims, who constitute one-tenth of the country’s population. The Easter Sunday terrorist bombings provided new ammunition for the Rajapaksas to whip up Sinhalese nationalism.
Beyond deepening ethnic and religious fault lines, Gotabaya followed his brother in establishing an imperial presidency, exemplified by the passage in 2020 of a constitutional amendment expanding the president’s power to dissolve the legislature. And he helped to push Sri Lanka further into the economic death spiral that his brother had helped create, not least through his dealings with China.
During Mahinda’s rule, as China shielded the Rajapaksas from war-crime charges at the UN, it won major infrastructure contracts in Sri Lanka and became the country’s leading lender. Debt to China piled up, incurred largely over the construction of monuments to the Rajapaksa dynasty in the family’s home district of Hambantota.
Examples include “the world’s emptiest” airport, a cricket stadium with more seats than the district capital’s population, and a $1.4 billion seaport that remained largely idle until it was signed away to China in 2017 on a 99-year lease. The most extravagant China-backed project is the $13-billion “Port City,” which is being built on land reclaimed from the sea close to the center of the capital, Colombo.
China’s modus operandi is to cut deals with strongmen and exploit their countries’ vulnerabilities to gain a strategic foothold. China’s larger aims in Sri Lanka were suggested in 2014, when two Chinese submarines made separate unannounced visits to Colombo, docking at a newly built container terminal owned largely by Chinese state companies.
So, China gained leverage over a country located near some of the world’s most important shipping lanes, and Sri Lanka became increasingly mired in debt, including “hidden debt” to China from loans whose public disclosure was prohibited by their terms. But hubris prevented the Rajapaksas from recognizing the looming crisis. On the contrary, they enacted a sweeping tax cut in 2019 that wiped out a third of the country’s tax revenues.
Then the pandemic hit, crushing the tourism and garment industries – Sri Lanka’s two main foreign-exchange earners. More recently, the war in Ukraine, by triggering soaring international energy and food prices, helped to drain Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves, creating fuel, food, medicine, and electricity shortages. It was the final straw for many Sri Lankans, who took to the streets in droves.
On May 9, Mahinda reluctantly resigned from his post as prime minister, in an effort to appease protesters. But protests continued to rage, culminating in the storming of the seaside presidential palace by demonstrators. Gotabaya fled minutes earlier before conveying his decision to resign.
Within Sri Lanka, photos of protesters lounging on the president’s bed and cooking in his backyard have become a symbol of people’s power. But they should also serve as a warning to political dynasties elsewhere in the world, from Asia to Latin America. When a family dominates a government or party, accountability tends to suffer, often leading to catastrophe. This can cause even the most entrenched dynasty to fall – and swiftly.
There is also a lesson for other heavily indebted countries. Unless they take action to make their debts sustainable, they could quickly be overwhelmed by crisis.
As for Sri Lanka, its next leaders will have to address shortages of basic necessities, rebuild a wrecked economy, reestablish the rule of law, and hold responsible those who caused the current disaster. But in a country where politics is a blood sport, one should not underestimate the challenge of overcoming the Rajapaksas’ corrosive legacy.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine now in its fifth month, Western leaders are beginning to recognize, if not openly acknowledge, that their unprecedented sanctions against Moscow are hurting their own countries’ economies without significantly crimping the Kremlin’s war machine. As the recent back-to-back Group of Seven and NATO summits underscored, Western leaders are straining to find new ways to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In fact, the fallout from the U.S.-led sanctions on Russia has ended the era of cheap oil and gas and contributed to surging inflation, supply-chain disruptions and a looming recession in the West. In poorer countries, by sending fuel and food prices higher, the sanctions are threatening livelihoods and political stability.
Sanctions historically have produced unintended and undesirable consequences, yet they have become the policy tool of choice for the United States.
U.S.-led sanctions on relatively small and economically vulnerable nations like Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela have essentially failed to change their behavior. But that reality did little to temper Western leaders’ strategic expectations when they launched a comprehensive, sanctions-centered hybrid war against Russia, a commodities powerhouse with the world’s largest nuclear-weapons arsenal.
The greater the size and capability of the target country, the lesser is usually the deterrent effect of sanctions. As the West is now discovering, sanctions against a large, powerful state not only entail significant costs for the countries imposing them, but they also reward nations that refuse to enforce them. Indeed, the sanctions have delivered Russia a windfall from high-price energy exports that no Western-sponsored price cap can significantly roll back.
Today, the increasingly apparent limits of the sanctions approach against Russia are highlighting the limits of Western power. With economic power moving east, the West needs a broad range of international partners more than ever to make a difference. But much of the non-Western world has not joined the West’s sanctions campaign, with all the major democracies in the Global South, Israel and the Gulf Arab states declining to take sides in the NATO-Russia conflict.
The principal lesson from the Russian aggression is that President Biden’s threats to inflict severe economic punishment failed to deter Putin from launching an all-out invasion. And that the Western imposition of sanctions has had little effect on Russia’s war effort.
Yet, ignoring that lesson, the clamor for more and more punitive actions has led to a steadily increasing number of sanctions against Russia and a greater flow of lethal aid to Ukraine, as if there is no threshold that would satiate the Western urge for reprisals or military involvement in the conflict.
Russia already occupies one-fifth of Ukraine, the largest country located entirely within Europe, as Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, acknowledged last week. What Haines didn’t disclose is that Russia now controls Ukraine’s mineral-rich industrial heartland, more than 90% of its energy resources (including all offshore oil), and much of its port and shipping infrastructure. Russia has also created a strategically important land bridge to Crimea and turned the Sea of Azov into its inland waters.
Biden boasted too soon in March that sanctions were “crushing the Russian economy” and that “the ruble is reduced to rubble.” The sanctions campaign against Russia has scarcely been effective, with Putin’s war machine showing no sign of easing up.
One key reason is that Russia’s finances remain strong. Despite Western governments freezing about $400 billion in Russian central bank assets and at least $240 billion in private wealth, Moscow has roughly $300 billion in foreign currency and gold reserves. The ruble has now hit a seven-year high against the dollar.
The Western discourse is finally beginning to face up to the unpalatable realities. Claims that “Russia is losing” and that “Putin is running out of options to avoid defeat” have given way to open concern that, despite the unparalleled sanctions on Moscow and the frenzied arming of Ukraine, Russia will end up gaining permanent control over sizable Ukrainian territories, thereby unambiguously demonstrating that aggression works.
This, in turn, is likely to encourage China to move on Taiwan, potentially embroiling the U.S. and its ally Japan in a conflict whose geopolitical fallout and economic and human toll could be greater than that from the Ukraine war. Just as Putin was clear about his plans for invading Ukraine, so has Chinese President Xi Jinping been clear about forcibly absorbing Taiwan — a development that would drive the final nail in the coffin of America’s global preeminence.
That the Western sanctions campaign against Russia has largely been ineffective will only embolden Xi’s expansionist agenda. Xi just took a victory lap in Hong Kong after rapidly turning one of Asia’s freest cities into a repressive police state. Like his expansionism in the South China Sea and the Himalayas, Xi brought Hong Kong to heel without incurring any international costs.
When sanctions have proved ineffectual in changing Russia’s behavior, any similar sanctions would fare even worse against China, whose economy is about 10 times larger than Russia’s. Indeed, the damage to Western economies from Russia-type sanctions against China would likely dwarf the current economic pain that the West is bearing from its sanctions on Moscow.
The West’s economic pain from sanctions that are doing little to hurt Russia’s war effort or push Putin to the negotiating table represents a classic example of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Western leaders clearly overestimated their capacity to undermine the Russian economy and Putin’s hold on power, while underestimating the resilience of a country that historically has endured extraordinary economic and human toll (including in World War II) to pursue strategic objectives.
Some of the West’s economic pain is self-inflicted. At a time when global supplies are already tight, Europe’s decision to switch from cheap Russian energy to alternative supplies has led to stratospheric international prices and a scramble to find new sources of supply, besides stoking a costly competition with the thriving economies of Asia, the world’s largest energy consumer.
The European Union (EU) has agreed on a time frame to wean itself off Russian oil and gas. But Moscow is intent on not letting the EU dictate the timetable for phasing out Russian supplies. With European gas prices already six times higher than a year ago, a possible Russian cutoff of gas supplies to punish the EU for sanctions will compound the already-grim European economic situation.
In the U.S., the soaring prices of gasoline, diesel and natural gas, which have fueled runaway inflation, are due to rising energy exports, with American energy producers seeking to profit from the skyrocketing global prices by selling their products to the highest bidders in international markets. The profits bonanza for the U.S. exporters of crude oil, gas and refined petroleum products is proving costly for American consumers.
Meanwhile, spiraling international food prices are contributing to an alarming hunger problem in poor countries. The Russian invasion has blocked shipment of Ukraine’s leading exports — sunflower oil, corn and wheat. But worse in global impact is the sanctions-linked disruption in supplies of fertilizers and wheat from the world’s No. 1 exporter of both, Russia.
In the face of the global food and energy crises, the West risks losing the international battle of narratives.
This may explain why the Biden administration, despite a wholly punitive approach toward Russia, is now offering to write “comfort letters” for international companies reassuring them that they won’t face penalties for importing Russian fertilizers and grains. But, given the sweeping sanctions against Moscow, such an offer may provide little comfort for Western importers, many of whom have reduced their exposure to Russian commodities because of the sanctions-related difficulty of making payments into Russia.
Having played all his major economic cards, Biden’s sanctions drive has run into a dead-end, even as U.S. and European economic woes worsen.
This is redolent of how America’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, by substantially raising import duties and prompting other countries to retaliate, deepened the Great Depression and contributed to the rise of political extremism, which then enabled Adolf Hitler to gain power. The risk now is that, instead of the wished-for economic collapse and regime change in Russia, the Western sanctions campaign could transform global geopolitics by provoking a Russian nationalist backlash and cementing the Sino-Russian axis.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press). Follow him on Twitter @Chellaney.
There is no question that the world must cut its reliance on fossil fuels. But building more hydroelectric dams – especially in highly biodiverse river basins, such as the Amazon, the Brahmaputra, the Congo, and the Mekong – is not the way to do it.
The era of cheap oil and gas is over. Russia’s war in Ukraine – or, more specifically, Europe’s ambitious effort to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels at a time when international supplies are already tight – is driving up global energy prices and raising the specter of a global energy crisis. Alternative sources of energy are looking more appealing by the day, as they should. But the embrace of hydropower, in particular, carries its own risks.
Hydropower is currently the most widely used renewable, accounting for almost half of all low-carbon electricity generation worldwide. Its appeal is rooted in several factors. For decades, it was the most cost-competitive renewable, and many hydropower plants can increase or decrease their electricity generation much faster than nuclear, coal, and natural-gas plants. And whereas wind and solar output can fluctuate significantly, hydropower can be dependably produced using reservoirs, making it a good complement to these more variable sources.
But there is a hitch. The most common type of hydropower plant entails the damming of rivers and streams. And hydroelectric dams have a large and lasting ecological footprint.
For starters, while hydroelectric generation itself emits no greenhouse gases, dams and reservoirs emit significant amounts of methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide. Under some circumstances – such as in tropical zones – they can generate more greenhouse gases than fossil-fuel power plants. One study found that methane – a greenhouse gas that is at least 34 times more potent than CO2 – can make up some 80% of emissions from artificial reservoirs, though a wide variety of geographical, climatic, seasonal, and vegetational factors affect reservoir emissions.
Moreover, while hydroelectric dams are often touted for delivering clean drinking water, controlling floods, and supporting irrigation, they also change river temperatures and water quality and impede the flow of nutrient-rich sediment. Such sediment is essential to help re-fertilize degraded soils in downstream plains, prevent the erosion of the river channel, and preserve biodiversity.
When dams trap the sediment flowing in from the mountains, deltas shrink and sink. This allows salt water to intrude inland, thereby disturbing the delicate balance between fresh water and salt water that is essential for the survival of critical species in coastal estuaries and lagoons. It also exposes deltas to the full force of storms and hurricanes. In Asia, heavily populated deltas – home to megacities like Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Bangkok, and Dhaka – are already retreating fast.
Dams also carry high social costs. In 2007, then-Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao revealed that China had relocated 22.9 million people to make way for water projects – a figure larger than the populations of more than 100 countries. The Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower station, which became fully operational in 2012, displaced more than 1.4 million people.
To top it all off, there is good reason to doubt hydropower’s reliability. If mitigation measures prove unable to slow global warming adequately – an increasingly likely scenario – the frequency and intensity of droughts will continue to rise. As water levels in rivers and reservoirs drop – exacerbated by evaporation from open reservoirs – so will the water pressure needed to spin turbines, resulting in less electricity. And this is to say nothing of giant dams’ ability to compound downstream droughts, as has been seen in the Mekong River Basin.
Given that dams are expensive, years-long undertakings, the wisdom of investing in building more of them is questionable, to say the least. But the world’s love affair with dams continues. Almost two-thirds of the Earth’s long rivers have already been modified by humans, with most of the world’s almost 60,000 large dams having been built over the last seven decades. And, global dam construction continues at a breakneck pace. In 2014, at least 3,700 significant dams were under construction or planned. Since then, the dam boom has become more apparent, with the developing world now a global hotspot of such construction.
While dam-building activity can be seen from the Balkans to South America, China leads the way as both the world’s most-dammed country and its largest exporter of dams. From 2001 to 2020, China lent over $44 billion for the Chinese construction of hydropower projects totaling over 27 gigawatts in 38 countries.
China is not hesitating to build dams even in seismically active areas, despite the risk of triggering a devastating earthquake. And China really should know better: its own scientistslinked the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which killed more than 87,000 people in the Tibetan Plateau’s eastern rim, to the new Zipingpu Dam, located near the quake’s epicenter.
There is no question that the world must cut its reliance on fossil fuels. But building more hydroelectric dams – especially in the Earth’s most biodiverse river basins, such as the Amazon, the Brahmaputra, the Congo, and the Mekong – is not the way to do it. On the contrary, the global dam frenzy amounts to a kind of a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our planet’s long-term health for a fleeting sense of energy security.
Two years after nighttime hand-to-hand combat with Indian troops resulted in China’s first combat deaths since its 1979 Vietnam invasion, the Chinese and Indian militaries remain locked in multiple standoffs over some of the most inhospitable terrains on Earth.
The war in Ukraine may be obscuring China’s border conflict with India, including the largest Himalayan buildup of rival forces in history. But as U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reminded the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last weekend, “we see Beijing continue to harden its position along the border that it shares with India.”
With tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian troops facing off against each other, the risks of renewed skirmishing, if not outright war, are significant.
The clashes of June 15, 2020, were the bloodiest of a series of skirmishes or scuffles that began more than six weeks earlier after China, taking advantage of India’s preoccupation with enforcing the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdown, stealthily infiltrated key border areas in the high-altitude Indian region of Ladakh and established heavily fortified bases there.
The surprise encroachments were not nearly as clever a plan as Chinese President Xi Jinping probably thought when he gave his go-ahead. Far from handing China an easy win, they have plunged Sino-Indian relations to a nadir, kept the border crisis simmering and made the fact of a major Indian military buildup inevitable.
The June 15, 2020, clashes not just marked a watershed in India-China relations; they also stood out for their savagery. With a 1996 bilateral agreement prohibiting the two countries’ soldiers from using guns at the border in peacetime, encroaching Chinese soldiers employed metal fence posts and clubs wrapped in barbed wire in a post-sunset ambush attack on an Indian army patrol.
Some Indian soldiers were beaten to death, others were thrown from the soaring cliffs into the fast-flowing Galwan River before Indian reinforcements arrived and fought pitched hand-to-hand battles with the intruders under a moonlit sky.
After the hours-long fighting, India quickly honored its 20 fallen soldiers as martyrs and then established a war memorial to commemorate their sacrifices. But China has still not disclosed its death toll, which U.S. intelligence reportedly placed at 35 and Russia’s government-owned Tass news agency estimated at 45. More than eight months after the clashes, Beijing announced posthumous awards for four Chinese soldiers without revealing the full death toll.
This should not be a surprise, as the Chinese Communist Party rarely reveals the full truth: it disclosed the Chinese death toll from the 1962 war with India more than three decades later in 1994 after significantly lowering the figure.
With the world’s most powerful propaganda machine, the CCP seeks to manufacture reality. While releasing a propaganda video of the clashes, it jailed at least six Chinese bloggers for criticizing its death toll cover-up, with one blogger who had 2.5 million followers on Weibo sentenced to eight months in prison. More recently, it picked the military commander who led the ambush attack as a torchbearer of the Beijing Winter Olympics, provocatively feting him as a hero.
The border crisis has also cast an unflattering light on India, which has instituted no inquiry into why its army was taken unawares by the multiple Chinese intrusions, some of them deep into Indian territory.
India is the world’s third-largest defense spender after the U.S. and China, with the army continuing to appropriate the lion’s share of the defense budget. Yet over the years, the Indian army has repeatedly been caught napping by the cross-border actions of China and Pakistan.
Indeed, it has become somewhat of a tradition in India that, whenever an adversary springs a military surprise, the army generals take cover behind the political leaders, and the ruling politicians hide behind the generals, allowing accountability to go unenforced.
Chinese forces braved harsh weather to intrude into forbidding landscapes, just before thawing ice reopened access routes. But the Indian army ignored warning signs from China’s heightened military activities near the frontier, including an unusually large, wintertime troop exercise that became the launchpad for the aggression.
Yet not a single Indian army commander was relieved of his command for the fiasco. Worse still, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has maintained a conspicuous silence on the military crisis for the past two years.
Instead, Modi has put faith in negotiations, with Beijing using endless talks to string India along while frenetically building new warfare infrastructure that General Charles A. Flynn, head of the U.S. Army Pacific, recently called “eye-opening” and “alarming.”
While withdrawing from some positions it seized, China has turned other captured areas into permanent all-weather military encampments, with large combat-ready forces and newly built roads and heliports that allow front-line positions to be quickly reinforced with fresh troop inductions.
Xi’s aim against India, as in the East and South China Seas, is for China to ultimately win without fighting by employing coercion under the shadow of its deployed military might. To Modi’s credit, India appears determined to frustrate that goal, vowing to sustain the military standoffs, despite the risk of a full-scale war, until China rolls back its encroachments.
India, the world’s largest democracy, is on the front-lines of the battle between democracy and autocracy. If China is able to coerce India into submission, it will open the path for the world’s biggest autocracy to gain supremacy in Asia and reshape the international order in its favor. No wonder Secretary Austin said in Singapore that India’s “growing military capability and technological prowess can be a stabilizing force in the region.”
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
President Biden is yet to make his long-anticipated China strategy speech to define his approach to a country that has emerged as the greatest rival that the United States has ever faced. Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out the administration’s approach in a speech that acknowledged that China poses “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order.”
In Blinken’s words, “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.”
The president, however, has been fixated since taking office on the weaker of America’s two main foes, Russia, while letting China escape scot-free for covering up the COVID-19 virus’s origins and for detaining more than a million Muslims in internment camps. Indeed, the Biden administration labels only Russia as an adversary, while calling China merely a competitor.
A careful examination of Blinken’s speech, the White House’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy” released in February and Biden’s own actions since last year confirms that a conciliatory approach toward China is taking root, despite occasional tough-sounding rhetoric.
Under President Trump’s administration, a fundamental shift in China policy occurred with the aim of reining in a country that, with U.S. help, became America’s main rival. The paradigm shift formally ended America’s “China fantasy,” which lasted over 45 years — a period in which successive presidents, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, aided China’s rise in the naive hope that, as China became increasingly prosperous, it would naturally pursue economic and even political liberalization.
Backed by a broadly bipartisan consensus in favor of ending China’s free ride, this policy change promised to reshape global geopolitics and trade.
Biden, however, has unobtrusively undertaken a course correction, with Blinken’s speech offering more evidence of the administration’s efforts to “coexist and cooperate” with the world’s largest autocracy.
Blinken’s soothing message for Beijing was that the U.S. does not seek to block China’s “role as a major power,” or hinder its economic growth or “transform” its totalitarian system. “We are not looking for conflict or a new Cold War. To the contrary, we’re determined to avoid both,” he declared.
In contrast to the Trump administration’s launch of an ideological offensive against China as a predatory communist state without political legitimacy or the rule of law, Team Biden has repeatedly forsworn any intention to transform that country’s political system in any way.
Biden himself assured Chinese President Xi Jinping in a virtual summit meeting last November that the U.S. will not seek to change China’s political system or direct its alliances against it. And when he telephoned Xi last September, Biden, according to a U.S. background briefer, sought to explain American actions toward China “in a way that [is] not misinterpreted as … somehow trying to sort of undermine Beijing in particular ways.”
Similar reassurances are embedded in the Biden Indo-Pacific strategy document, which declares that, “Our objective is not to change the PRC [People’s Republic of China] but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates…” Contrast that with the administration’s publicly declared goal to “see Russia weakened,” including triggering its economic collapse and degrading its military capabilities.
With Biden willing to give China a pass on its expansionist policies, the risk is growing that Xi will make Taiwan his next target after his regime’s success in swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea and changing the territorial status quo in the Himalayas.
Not once, not twice, but three times in recent months Biden has said that the U.S. will militarily defend Taiwan, only to have his senior officials on each occasion walk back his comments. While creating international confusion afresh on that issue during his Tokyo visit, Biden played down the possibility of China invading Taiwan, saying, “My expectation is that it will not happen.”
But by appeasing China, Biden may invite such aggression. Indeed, Biden’s deepening of U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict offers Xi an opening to move on Taiwan at an opportune time when a distracted America is taken by complete surprise. Through rising bullying, Xi is already normalizing China’s hostile pressure on Taiwan.
Nothing better illustrates Biden’s efforts to appease China than Taiwan’s exclusion from his newly unveiled Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. The White House has offered no credible explanation for omitting this economic powerhouse, which is a hub of global semiconductor production.
Taiwan’s exclusion shows how Biden, by bending over backwards not to antagonize Beijing, is sending mixed messages about U.S. commitment to that island democracy. Prioritizing Ukraine’s defense over Taiwan’s, Washington has informed Taipei that the 2022 scheduled delivery of an important U.S. artillery system would be delayed until 2026 at the earliest. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, meanwhile, referred to Taiwan by the demeaning name of “Chinese Taipei” while listing it as one of the founding members of the newly established Cross-Border Privacy Rules Forum.
Make no mistake: Xi is unlikely to be deterred by the harsh U.S.-led sanctions against Russia. The Chinese economy is 10 times larger than the Russian economy, and enforcing sanctions against China would cause serious economic disruptions in the West and upend global supply chains.
In this light, the mixed messages from Washington could lead Xi to believe that Biden lacks the strategic vision and political will to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
More fundamentally, Biden is quietly dismantling, brick by brick, the Trump administration’s China policy without drawing attention to it. U.S. pressure on Xi’s regime is gradually being eased. Examples include letting it off the hook over its great COVID-19 stonewall and dropping fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of China’s military-linked Huawei Technologies.
Despite the FBI director publicly warning that Chinese spying in the U.S. has reached unparalleled levels, Biden has effectively disbanded the “China Initiative,” which was intended to empower the Justice Department to combat Beijing’s vast espionage campaign.
Biden may now target the Trump-era trade tariffs on $370 billion worth of Chinese goods, telling reporters in Tokyo that he was considering rolling them back. As a first step in that direction, his administration has initiated a legally required review of the tariffs, which were slapped on as part of a strategy to use economic levers to weaken China — a kind of death from a thousand cuts.
Rolling the tariffs back would break Biden’s promise not to unilaterally lift them unless China improved its behavior on issues of U.S. concern — from its unfair trade practices to its theft of intellectual property. Team Biden has already condoned Beijing’s failure to meet commitments in the so-called Phase One trade deal with Washington. It also has reinstated exemptions from Trump-era tariffs on 352 products imported from China.
America’s trade deficit with China, meanwhile, continues to swell, jumping over 25 percent in 2021 to $396.6 billion. It now makes up nearly 60 percent of China’s total global trade surplus, which has become the main engine of its economy, besides financing its warfare machine.
Continuing to underwrite China’s economic and geopolitical power not only means that the U.S. has yet to learn from how it aided the rise of a hostile giant; it also is likely to accelerate America’s relative decline.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press). Follow him on Twitter @Chellaney.
India not only shares long land and maritime borders with Myanmar, but it also sees the country as a strategic corridor to Southeast Asia. Given the porous state of the frontier and 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.
Yet, as the host of the June 16-17 Association of Southeast Asian Nations-India foreign ministers’ meeting, New Delhi is giving Myanmar the cold shoulder.
Falling in line with double standards practiced by the U.S., India will host the foreign minister of Thailand, where the army chief who staged a coup in 2014 remains in power in civilian garb, but not Myanmar’s foreign minister after the military there seized power 16 months ago.
The military has long dominated politics in Myanmar and Thailand. But Washington, while seeking to isolate and squeeze Myanmar, has deepened cooperation with the Thai government, despite its crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, including use of lese-majeste laws to imprison anyone deemed to have insulted the king.
The 10-nation ASEAN has traditionally favored a policy of engagement and noninterference, which explained the presence of Myanmar military chief Min Aung Hlaing at its April 2021 leaders’ meeting in Jakarta that emphasized “the ASEAN family.” But later, wilting under stepped-up U.S. pressure, ASEAN excluded him from its annual summit last October.
Here is the irony: In the name of promoting democratic rights, U.S. President Joe Biden’s Myanmar policy has sought to win the cooperation of ASEAN, most of whose member states are under authoritarian rule.
They include Brunei, an absolutist monarchy; communist-ruled Vietnam and Laos; Singapore, governed by only one party since independence; and Cambodia, where the ruling party holds all the parliamentary seats.
Indeed, Biden invited only three ASEAN states — Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia — to his democracy summit last December, while at his recent special summit with ASEAN leaders, Myanmar was represented by an empty chair.
The bigger paradox centers on India, whose security over the years has come under pressure from specious U.S. distinctions between “good” and “bad” terrorists and “good” and “bad” autocrats.
For example, despite Pakistan’s politically dominant military maintaining a close nexus with terrorist groups, Washington still retains that state as a “major non-NATO ally,” a special status conferred on 17 other countries but not India.
Yet, by not inviting Myanmar’s foreign minister to a meeting during the officially proclaimed India-ASEAN Year of Friendship, New Delhi is giving credence to Washington’s geopolitically driven distinction between Myanmar and the other ASEAN states.
In justifying Myanmar’s foreign minister’s exclusion, India’s foreign ministry has sought to hide behind the U.S.-shaped ASEAN stance of inviting a nonpolitical Myanmar representative. In response to India inviting just its top foreign ministry bureaucrat, Myanmar will likely boycott the New Delhi meeting, as it has done with other ASEAN meetings since last October.
More fundamentally, Biden’s sanctions against Myanmar affect that country’s neighbors in the same way the U.S., already confronting a southern border crisis, would be affected if it sought to punish and isolate Mexico. Still, without consulting Myanmar’s neighbors that face an influx of refugees, Biden has stepped up his sanctions drive against Myanmar, even as he eases sanctions pressure on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Biden’s use of economic and political levers to help unseat Myanmar’s military regime has only worsened the situation in that strategically located country, emboldening some opponents to take up arms and hardening the military regime’s crackdown while exacerbating cross-border impacts.
And just as the deepening U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict to help inflict a strategic defeat on Russia is beginning to fracture European unity, Biden’s uncompromisingly punitive approach toward Myanmar has hopelessly divided ASEAN, unraveling its long tradition of a consensus-based decision making.
Meanwhile, in less than six months, a feckless India has gone from sending its foreign secretary to Myanmar to meet the military ruler to excluding that country’s foreign minister from its upcoming meeting with ASEAN.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s yielding to U.S. pressure has already undercut India’s once-growing relationship with a key neighbor, Iran. The U.S. used its Iran sanctions to deprive India of cheaper oil and turn it into the world’s largest importer of American energy — a development that allowed India’s rival, China, to become Iran’s almost exclusive buyer of oil at a hefty discount, as well as becoming top security partner and investor.
Now Modi could be making a similar mistake with Myanmar, which China views as its gateway to the Indian Ocean. Myanmar has historically been a peaceful neighbor for India, never posing a threat to its security. But the Modi government’s snub could jeopardize Indian projects in Myanmar and counterinsurgency cooperation.
Biden’s Myanmar policy has had the perverse effect of weakening America’s hand while strengthening China’s. And by nudging India into giving Myanmar the cold shoulder, Biden is pushing that resource-rich nation into China’s arms.
Modi, for his part, is forgetting that a country that allows its policies toward its own neighbors to be influenced by a distant power will inevitably be seen as weak.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping has picked a border fight that he cannot win, and transformed a previously conciliatory India into a long-term foe. This amounts to an even bigger miscalculation than Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s failure to see it coming.
With global attention focused on Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s territorial expansionism in Asia – especially its expanding border conflict with India – has largely fallen off the international community’s radar. Yet, in the vast glaciated heights of the Himalayas, the world’s demographic titans have been on a war footing for over two years, and the chances of violent clashes rise almost by the day.
The confrontation began in May 2020. When thawing ice reopened access routes after a brutal winter, India was shocked to discover that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had stealthily occupied hundreds of square miles of the borderlands in its Ladakh region. This triggered a series of military clashes, which resulted in China’s first combat deaths in over four decades, and triggered the fastest-ever rival troop buildup in the Himalayan region.
India’s counterattacks eventually drove the PLA back from some areas, and the two sides agreed to transform two battlegrounds into buffer zones. But, over the last 15 months, little progress has been made to defuse tensions in other areas. With tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian troops standing virtually at attention along the long-disputed border, a military stalemate has emerged.
But stalemate is not stagnation. China has continued to alter the Himalayan landscape rapidly and profoundly in its favor, including by establishing 624 militarized border villages – mirroring its strategy of creating artificial militarized islands in the South China Sea – and constructing new warfare infrastructure near the frontier.
As part of this effort, China recently completed a bridge over Pangong Lake – the site of past military clashes – that promises to strengthen its position in a disputed area of India’s Ladakh region. It has also built roads and security installations on territory that belongs to Bhutan, in order to gain access to a particularly vulnerable section of India’s border overlooking a narrow corridor known as the “Chicken Neck,” which connects its far northeast to the heartland.
All of this, China hopes, will enable it to dictate terms to India: accept the new status quo, with China keeping the territory it has grabbed, or risk a full-scale war in which China has maximized its advantage. China’s expansionism relies on deception, stealth, and surprise, and on apparent indifference to the risks of military escalation. The aim of its brinkmanship is to confound the other side’s deterrence strategy and leave it with no real options.
China learned from its strategic folly of invading Vietnam in 1979 and has become adept at waging asymmetric or hybrid warfare, usually below the threshold of overt armed conflict. This enables it to advance its strategic objectives, including land grabs, incrementally. Coercive bargaining and overt intimidation also help to overcome resistance.
This salami-slicing strategy has already enabled Chinese President Xi Jinping to redraw the geopolitical map in the South China Sea. And the terrestrial application of this approach being deployed against India, Bhutan, and Nepal is proving just as difficult to counter. As India is learning firsthand, countries have virtually no options other than the use of force.
One thing is certain: simply hoping that China will stop encroaching on Indian territory will do India little good. After all, India got into this situation precisely because its political and military leadership failed to take heed of China’s military activities near the frontier. On the contrary, while China was laying the groundwork for its territorial grabs, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was bending over backwards to befriend Xi. In the five years before the first clashes flared in May 2020, Modi met with his Chinese counterpart 18 times. Even a 2017 standoff on a remote Himalayan plateau did not dissuade Modi from pursuing his appeasement policy.
Seeking to protect his image as a strong leader, Modi has not acknowledged the loss of Indian territories. India’s media enables this evasion by amplifying government-coined euphemisms: China’s aggression is a “unilateral change of status quo,” and the PLA-seized areas are “friction points.” Meanwhile, Modi has allowed China’s trade surplus with India to rise so rapidly – it now exceeds India’s total defense budget (the world’s third largest) – that his government is, in a sense, underwriting China’s aggression.
But none of this should be mistaken for unwillingness to fight. India is committed to restoring the status quo ante and is at its “highest level” of military readiness. This is no empty declaration. If Xi seeks to break the current stalemate by waging war, both sides will suffer heavy losses, with no victor emerging.
In other words, Xi has picked a border fight that he cannot win, and transformed a conciliatory India into a long-term foe. This amounts to an even bigger miscalculation than Modi’s policy incoherence. The price China will pay for Xi’s mistake will far outweigh the perceived benefits of some stealthy land grabs.
In a sense, China’s territorial expansionism represents a shrewder, broader, and slower version of Russia’s conventional war on Ukraine – and could provoke a similar international backlash against Xi’s neo-imperial agenda. Already, China’s aggression has prompted Indo-Pacific powers to strengthen their military capabilities and cooperation, including with the United States. All of this will undercut Xi’s effort to fashion a Sino-centric Asia and, ultimately, achieve China’s goal of global preeminence.
Xi might recognize that he has made a strategic blunder in the Himalayas. But, at a time when he is preparing to secure a precedent-defying third term as leader of the Communist Party of China, he has little room to change course, and the costs will continue to mount.
Nearly five years after it was resurrected from a decadelong dormancy, and then integrated as a strategic coalition of the Indo-Pacific’s leading democracies, the Quad is struggling to make a difference in a region whose rising economic and geopolitical heft promises to reshape the international order.
Amid the deepening global fallout from the Ukraine war and the NATO-Russia proxy coflict, this week’s Quad summit in Tokyo showed that the group comprising the U.S., India, Japan and Australia has its work cut out if it is to make a meaningful impact, which will be measured in terms of deliverables, rather than the number of times its leaders get together and make promises.
While the Quad is trying to get its act together, the geostrategic dynamics are changing rapidly in the Indo-Pacific, where the world’s fastest economic growth is incongruously juxtaposed with fast-rising naval capabilities and the most dangerous strategic hot spots.
Intended to serve as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism, from the South and East China Seas to the Himalayas, the Quad has done little to rein in China’s unilateral moves to alter the regional status quo, with Beijing’s wide-ranging security accord with the Solomon Islands just the latest example.
In Tokyo, U.S. President Joe Biden stole the summit’s thunder with various pre-summit announcements or assertions, including unveiling his administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — an economic platform that seeks to promote cooperation among its 13 member-states on global issues such as supply chains, clean energy and digital rules, but without reducing trade barriers or tariffs.
Biden’s indication that the U.S. would use force to defend Taiwan grabbed global headlines, yet, paradoxically, Biden has gradually been easing pressure on China. Examples include letting China off the hook over the COVID-19 origins, dropping U.S. fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of China’s Huawei Technologies, and allowing Beijing to escape scot-free over its failure to meet commitments in the so-called Phase One trade deal with Washington.
Further, Biden revealed in Tokyo that he was considering rolling back trade tariffs on Chinese products, an action that would break his promise not to unilaterally lift tariffs unless Beijing’s behavior improved.
Not once, not twice, but three times Biden has said in recent months that the U.S. will militarily defend Taiwan, only to have his senior officials walk back his comments on every occasion. A day after sowing international confusion afresh, Biden himself walked back his Taiwan comments, telling reporters, “My policy has not changed at all.”
Lost was the exclusion of Taiwan from Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, with the White House offering no explanation for omitting the global semiconductor hub.
The defense of Taiwan has assumed greater significance for Indo-Pacific security, given that three successive U.S. administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, relying instead on rhetoric or symbolic actions. Beijing’s swallowing of Hong Kong also has essentially been cost-free.
All of this has renewed questions about the Quad’s strategic direction and mission. While it remains integral to the U.S. strategy of a free and open Indo-Pacific, Biden’s September 2021 launch of the AUKUS alliance with Australia and Britain signaled the Anglosphere is back and confirmed a shift in the Quad’s focus under him to everlasting universal challenges, from climate change and cybersecurity to global health and resilient supply chains.
Biden, after taking office in January last year, initiated the practice of Quad leaders holding summit meetings, with the Tokyo meeting representing the fourth such summit in just 14 months. But under Biden’s leadership, the group has also taken on an expansive agenda.
Given its small size, the Quad is in no position to deal with larger international challenges. Yet the first Quad summit in March 2021, held virtually, launched working groups on climate change, vaccines and critical and emerging technologies.
When the Quad leaders met in person at the White House last September, three more working groups were established on cybersecurity, infrastructure and space. With the Quad unable to meet its own target of delivering one billion Indian-manufactured doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the developing world by the end of this year, this raises the danger that the group will underdeliver on other core promises.
This week’s summit in Tokyo was a reminder that a very broad and ambitious agenda not only dilutes the Quad’s Indo-Pacific focus but also makes it more difficult to produce results.
The leaders’ joint statement was heavy with pious declarations about cooperating on issues extending from peace and security to climate, space, global health security and cybersecurity, but light on concrete plans, including on combating what it acknowledged were “coercive, provocative or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo” in the region.
The Quad’s moment of truth has arrived. The group today faces a clear choice: start translating its rhetoric into action by leveraging its members’ strengths, or risk becoming a mere talking shop. Given that the Quad is now more integrated than ever, it ought to focus on deliverables to help underscore its strategic value.
Unless the Quad gets cracking, an illiberal hegemonic order in Asia could emerge, creating significant risks for international security and global markets.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
The era of cheap oil and gas is over. In an increasingly risky and turbulent world, geopolitics more than supply chain issues has driven up fossil fuel prices and spurred growing energy insecurity.
The war in Ukraine has also made global inflation worse, increased debt and slowed economic growth. Financial markets have become more volatile as they start to price in the dual risk of stagnant economic growth and persistently high inflation.
Yet here’s the paradox: as many as 37 advanced economies, from Japan to Australia and Canada, have joined the unprecedented U.S.-led sanctions campaign to isolate and squeeze Russia. Unwittingly, these countries have created a self-defeating trap: their punitive campaign is raising international energy and commodity prices, as well as Russia’s revenues, despite a significant decrease in its energy exports.
And by fueling inflation at home and cutting into their citizens’ standard of living, those imposing sanctions are imposing costs on themselves, with the International Monetary Fund expecting global growth to slow to 3.6% this year from 6.1% last year.
Against this background, Europe’s ambitious mission to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels has been hailed as a “geostrategic game-changer.” In reality, Europe’s scramble to find alternative energy sources is stoking the further rise of international prices and compounding the debt woes of poorer countries.
More fundamentally, Europe’s energy shift, given the scale of its planned supply switch, is set to trigger costly competition with the thriving economies of Asia, the world’s largest energy consumer.
The 27-country European Union, which consumes 11% of the total global energy supply, currently relies on Russia for 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil.
With OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo already stating that there is not sufficient global oil capacity to compensate for the loss of Russian supply, it is no wonder that oil prices immediately jumped 4% earlier this month when the EU proposed a phased ban on imports of Russian oil.
Brent crude futures are currently trading more than 50% higher than last year’s annual average of $70.40. Diesel, meanwhile, is already in short supply, with its price soaring as European distributors move away from Russian supplies, while American and other producers of Liquefied Natural Gas are already struggling to meet the increased demand from Europe.
The U.S., the world’s second-largest natural-gas exporter after Russia, is on track to become the world’s largest LNG exporter this year, overtaking Qatar and Australia. Yet, thanks to Europe’s scramble, U.S. natural-gas prices at home have more than doubled this year, pushing up inflation to a four-decade high of 8.3%.
Still, no region will be more affected by Europe’s shift to non-Russian sources of energy supply than Asia.
By severing its energy ties with Russia and decoupling two interlocked parts of the global energy system, Europe will become the main competitor for the energy that otherwise supplies Asia.
The EU has also opened a path for China to build an energy safety net through greater land-based imports from Russia that cannot be blockaded, even if it were to invade Taiwan.
Rewiring European economies that have long depended on cheap Russian energy will be a costly and lengthy process, requiring the building of new or expanded LNG infrastructure and the recalibrating of oil refineries that are configured for processing only Russian crude.
Meanwhile, the specter of Russia cutting supplies through counter-sanctions has led Europe to frenetically stock up on imported LNG, crude and diesel, often by outbidding Asian buyers.
Since last month, European energy imports from Africa, the Middle East and North America have hit a record high and commanded premium prices. Ironically, the EU is also stocking up on Russian gas, oil and coal, paying Moscow 44 billion euros in just the first two months of the war for such imports, compared with about 140 billion euros for the whole of 2021.
The changing dynamics compound the challenges for Japan, whose companies have invested in the Russian Sakhalin-1, Sakhalin-2 and Arctic LNG 2 projects, each of which has been deemed essential for Japanese energy security. Japan, which relies on Russia for just 4% of its total crude imports and 9% of its gas, is loath to find alternative sources at this stage, despite slapping its own sanctions on Moscow.
Replacing just its Sakhalin-2 LNG with spot-market LNG could raise Japan’s total yearly import bill by as much as 50% on current trends. India, one of the world’s largest energy consumers and heavily reliant on foreign supplies, has already seen its energy-import bill rise by billions of dollars per week.
Energy markets today can ill-afford a large economy like Japan joining Europe’s scramble. Europe’s frenzied efforts to secure alternative sources already spell trouble for importing states with lower-paying power, such as cash-strapped Sri Lanka, which has declared an unprecedented nationwide curfew to deal with violent street protests.
The risk is growing that the EU, in seeking to hurt Russia, may end up hurting itself while severely penalizing developing economies. Higher energy prices will benefit all the world’s major energy exporters, from the U.S. to Russia. According to the Oslo-based Rystad Energy, despite Russian crude production projected to decline sharply in 2022, Moscow’s total income from oil alone is likely to soar to $180 billion, up 45%.
At a time of such geopolitically driven market disruptions, a Europe competing with Asia for securing greater energy supplies will not only continue to drive up prices but also could derail the economic recovery from the pandemic.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
The Indo-Pacific’s four leading democracies can hold as many leaders’ summits as they want, but without a clear strategic vision – and an agenda to match – they will have little impact. The group’s purpose is to act as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensure a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.
When the Quad was first conceived as a strategic coalition of the Indo-Pacific’s four leading democracies, many doubted that it would amount to much. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi mocked it as a “headline-grabbing idea” that would dissipate “like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean.” But continued Chinese expansionism, combined with former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s determination to build broad resistance to it, has produced an increasingly consolidated group, with real potential to bolster regional security. The question is whether it will deliver.
One thing is certain: all four Quad members – Australia, India, Japan, and the United States – are essential to realize the vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” introduced by Japan in 2016 and affirmed by the US in 2017. While the Quad took some time to get off the ground – it was resurrected during US President Donald Trump’s administration but leaders’ summits began only after Joe Biden took office – it has gained considerable momentum. Its members have held three summits since last year (two of them virtual) and are set to meet in person in Tokyo on May 24.
But the Quad still has a long way to go, not least because its members’ own actions are undercutting its strategic rationale – the need to prevent China from upending security in the Indo-Pacific. A key problem is that all four countries have allowed themselves to be seduced by the Chinese narrative that economic relations can be separated from geopolitics.
China’s trade surplus, which reached a record $676.4 billion last year, is now the main engine of its economy. Without it, Chinese growth would likely stall, especially as President Xi Jinping strengthens state control over private companies. This would also hinder China’s ability to invest in its military and finance its aggressive maneuvers in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
And yet the US and India are major contributors to China’s trade surplus. The US leads the way: its trade deficit with China swelled by more than 25% in 2021, to $396.6 billion, and now comprises over 58% of China’s total surplus. India’s trade deficit with China – which hit $77 billion in the 12 months through this March – exceeds its defense budget, even as the two countries are locked in a dangerous military confrontation on their long Himalayan frontier.
China’s stealth encroachments on some Indian border areas in 2020 triggered deadly clashes, setting in motion a buildup of forces and border infrastructure that continues to this day. This should have been a wake-up call for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had been so committed to appeasing China that he was blindsided by its aggression. But India’s large and growing trade deficit with China suggests that he is still asleep.
Australia and Japan have similarly built up significant dependency on Chinese trade. China accounts for nearly one-third of Australia’s international trade and is Japan’s largest export market. Moreover, both countries are members of the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. For them, enabling China to shape trade rules in the Indo-Pacific is apparently a small price to pay for the economic benefits of increased regional commerce.
Rather than continuing to underwrite China’s economic and geopolitical power, the Quad should be making economic cooperation – including increased trade among its members – a central feature of its agenda. Unfortunately, though Biden has pledged to unveil an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework covering everything from infrastructure to the digital economy, his administration’s unwillingness to commit more resources to the region or offer regional partners better access to US markets severely limits the initiative’s potential. Moreover, Biden has pushed an expansive Quad agenda covering topics that have nothing to do with the group’s core objectives – everything from climate change to COVID-19 vaccine delivery to supply-chain resilience.
America’s deepening proxy conflict with Russia further muddies the strategic picture. Biden is the third successive US president to commit to shifting America’s primary strategic focus to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific. But the Ukraine war – which he believes “could continue for a long time” – may well cause him, like his predecessors, not to complete that pivot.
The war might also spur Biden to take a more conciliatory approach to China. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden had begun to ease pressure on China. He effectively let China off the hook for both obscuring COVID-19’s origins and failing to meet its commitments under the 2020 “phase one” trade deal with the US. He also dropped fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of the military-linked Chinese tech giant Huawei. US sanctions over China’s Muslim gulag remain essentially symbolic.
Now, as Biden attempts to ensure that Xi does not offer Russian President Vladimir Putin an economic lifeline, thereby neutralizing the impact of Western sanctions, he is likely to adopt an even more conciliatory approach. Already, the US Trade Representative has reinstated exemptions from Trump-era tariffs on 352 products imported from China. And now the White House is considering a broader reduction of tariffs on non-strategic goods from China.
The Quad can hold as many leaders’ summits as it wants, but without a clear strategic vision – and an agenda to match – it will have little impact. The group’s purpose is to act as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensure a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. At its May 24 summit, all other issues should take a backseat to this objective.
BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR, THE HILL
The unprecedented U.S.-led Western sanctions against Russia have been likened to economic weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that would ultimately destroy the Russian economy. In reality, the sanctions are like a double-edged sword — they inflict pain on Russia but also impose costs on their imposers.
The West, in fact, is caught in a trap: The sanctions and the deepening conflict, by helping to raise global commodity and energy prices, translate into higher revenues for Moscow in spite of a significant decrease in its exports. And the higher international prices, by fueling inflation, mean political trouble at home for those behind the sanctions.
Look at another paradox: Despite Russia being cut off from the world’s financial arteries, the Russian ruble has dramatically recovered through state intervention. But, as if to signal that Japan is paying a price for following the U.S. lead on Russia, the Japanese yen (the world’s third-most-traded currency) has sunk to a 20-year low against the U.S. dollar, ranking this year as the worst performing of the 41 currencies tracked — worse than the ruble.
Meanwhile, the runaway inflation and supply-chain disruptions are threatening Western corporate profits, while the interest-rate hikes to rein in inflation make a bad situation worse for consumers. With economic trouble looming large, April became the worst month for Wall Street since the pandemic-triggered March 2020 plunge. The S&P 500 fell 8.8 percent in April.
In the first two months of the war in Ukraine, those imposing the sanctions ironically helped Russia to nearly double its revenues to about €62 billion from selling fossil fuels to them, according to a report of a Finland-registered think tank, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. The top 18 importers, with the sole exception of China, were the sanctions imposers, with the European Union (EU) alone accounting for 71 percent of the purchases of Russian fuels in this period.
While Turkey, South Korea and Japan also remain reliant on Russian energy supplies, the EU’s imports of gas, oil and coal from Russia totaled around €44 billion in this two-month period, compared with about €140 billion for the whole of 2021.
Russia, even as its economy takes a hit from the Western sanctions, is doing its bit to keep international energy and commodity prices high, including by cutting off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. Moscow could raise prices further through broader counter-sanctions and yet manage to cushion its export earnings.
The fact is that Russia is the world’s richest country when it comes to natural resources, including serving among the world’s largest exporters of natural gas, uranium, nickel, oil, coal, aluminum, copper, wheat, fertilizers and precious metals such as palladium, which is more precious than gold and used largely in catalytic converters.
Through no fault of theirs, the real losers from the Russia-NATO conflict, sadly, are the poorer countries, which are bearing the brunt of the economic fallout. From Peru to Sri Lanka, rising fuel, food and fertilizer prices have triggered violent street protests, which in some states have spiraled into continuing political turmoil. The debt woes of many poor nations have deepened.
In employing the full range of its economic weaponry, the West sought to unleash “shock and awe” on Russia, as if to underscore that sanctions are a form of war. But like armed conflict, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates, sanctions are unpredictable in shaping outcomes and often lead to unintended or undesirable consequences.
Squeezing a major power, especially one that has the world’s largest nuclear-weapons arsenal, with a raft of harsh sanctions is fraught with danger, especially as increasingly sophisticated and heavier Western weapons pour into Ukraine, with the United States also supplying battlefield intelligence, including targeting data.
Almost every day brings a fresh reminder that this conflict is not just about the control of Ukraine or its future status. Rather, this is a full-fledged new Cold War between Washington and Moscow, with Europe as the theater of the growing confrontation. President Biden’s strategy of Containment 2.0 against Moscow is designed to ensnare Russia in a military quagmire in Ukraine, trigger the collapse of the Russian economy and bring about the overthrow of President Vladimir Putin.
As the war has progressed, Biden has become bolder, including deepening America’s involvement in it. Biden’s implicit call for regime change in Moscow and his administration’s publicly declared goal of a “weakened” Russia, however, run counter to what the president said about two weeks into the war: “Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”
Unfortunately, there has been little American debate on whether sanctions can weaken Russia or whether the generous military assistance to Ukraine can really bog down the Russian military in a protracted conflict. What if, instead of a weakened Russia, a nationalistic backlash spawns a more militarily assertive, neo-imperial Russia?
After its initial missteps that resulted in heavy Russian casualties, Russia is now militarily focused on consolidating its control in the resource-rich east and south of Ukraine. Russia has carved out a land corridor to Crimea and gained control of regions that hold 90 percent of Ukraine’s energy resources, including all its offshore oil and much of its critical port infrastructure. The Ukrainian ports on the Sea of Azov and four-fifths of Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline are now with Russia, which earlier established control over the Kerch Strait that connects those two seas.
Can the flood of weapons the West is sending to Ukraine undo these new military realities? If Russia stays focused on narrow military objectives centered on establishing a buffer zone in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s south and east, it could avert a quagmire, while remaining free to continue systematically targeting military infrastructure across that expansive country.
Let’s be clear: Sanctions historically have worked better against small, vulnerable states than large or powerful ones. But they have rarely produced timely change. The current Western sanctions could take years to seriously hurt the Russian economy.
The irony is that, despite employing all possible coercive economic instruments against Russia and making it difficult to negotiate an end to the war, the Biden White House doesn’t believe that sanctions alone will work, which explains why it has increasingly turned to weapons supply, including asking Congress for a staggering $33 billion in additional military and economic funds to fuel the conflict and stymie Russian war objectives.
But the sanctions, by signaling the advent of a new era of U.S.-led unilateralism, are likely to weaken and ultimately even undermine the Western-controlled global financial architecture that they are meant to defend. The sweeping sanctions, by spurring broader concerns about the weaponization of finance and its implications for any country that dared to cross a U.S. red line, have created a new incentive for non-Western states to explore establishing parallel arrangements. China will not only lead this process but also is set to emerge as the real winner of the NATO-Russia conflict.
Biden’s belief that “this war could continue for a long time” is backed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, who testified that he expects it to last years. But as the conflict drags on and the boomerang effects of the sanctions deepen the cost-of-living crisis, the divides in the Western camp will widen and “Ukraine fatigue” will set in.
The West will be left with little choice but to negotiate with Putin to end the conflict, as predicted by Javier Solana, a former NATO chief who also served as Spain’s foreign minister. Such negotiations will be vital to halt Ukraine’s destruction and avert Europe from paying the main price.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press). Follow him on Twitter @Chellaney.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s concerted effort to cajole nations into joining the American-led coalition against Russia recalls the famous words of the legendary anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, who said the grievous mistake some Westerners make is to insist that “their enemies should be our enemies.”
In the conflict between the West and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, much of the non-Western world has declined to take sides. So why has Biden especially bristled at India’s independent stance when the world’s major non-Western democracies — from Brazil and Mexico to South Africa and Indonesia — have all chartered a course of neutrality?
Because India is the world’s largest democracy, its neutrality undermines Biden’s narrative that the conflict symbolizes a “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Never mind that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s regime is no less autocratic than Russian President Vladimir Putin’s.
The fact is that whichever side the U.S. has armed over the decades was invariably portrayed by it as “fighting for freedom” — from the anti-Soviet Islamist guerrillas in Afghanistan from whom al-Qaida and the Taliban evolved, to Syria’s anti-Bashar Assad jihadists who gave rise to ISIS. Biden’s “new battle for freedom,” as he calls it, has led to increasingly sophisticated Western weapons pouring into Ukraine, with the U.S. also supplying battlefield intelligence, including targeting data.
Here’s the paradox: While seeking to co-opt New Delhi in his new Cold War with Moscow, Biden has still not uttered a single word on China’s two-year-long border aggression against India, which has triggered the largest Himalayan buildup of rival forces in history. In keeping with Biden’s outreach to Beijing, his State Department, equating the victim with the aggressor, has urged India and China to find “a peaceful resolution of the border disputes.”
India holds more annual military exercises with America, its largest trading partner and an increasingly important strategic partner, than any other country. U.S. arms sales to India went from near zero in 2008 to over $20 billion in 2020. India’s almost $150-billion goods and services trade with the U.S. dwarfs New Delhi’s $12.8 billion trade with Russia, its largest defense partner.
Team Biden’s growing warnings to countries intent on sitting out the new Cold War to pick a side or face economic consequences could undermine the blossoming partnership with India, which stayed neutral even when the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq or waged regime-change war in Libya. Biden’s top economic adviser, Brian Deese, touched a raw nerve in India when he threatened that “the costs and consequences” for it would be “significant and long-term.”
However, the more positive tone emanating from Washington following the latest U.S.-India discussions suggests that the White House may have secured an Indian assurance on “sanctions compliance,” as an American background briefer phrased it.
On April 11, Biden held an hourlong virtual discussion with Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a prelude to the “two-plus-two” discussions that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken jointly had with the visiting Indian defense and foreign ministers.
Encouraged by how America’s Iran sanctions have helped undercut India’s relationship with Tehran, Biden sees his Russia sanctions as opening a major opportunity to undermine the traditionally strong New Delhi-Moscow ties.
The U.S. used its Iran sanctions to deprive India of cheaper oil and turn it into the world’s largest importer of American energy. The main beneficiary of those sanctions has been India’s rival, China, which, without facing American reprisals, has been buying Iranian oil at a hefty discount, besides becoming Iran’s security partner and top investor.
Now Washington seems intent on employing its Russia sanctions to downgrade Indian defense ties with Moscow, with Austin calling on India to cut defense transactions with Russia and turn to America for all its military requirements. Indeed, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told Congress that the U.S. sees “a great opportunity” for defense sales to India to “surge.”
Energy purchases and payments are exempt from America’s Russia sanctions. Yet, as if heeding Biden’s call to India not to accelerate or increase imports of heavily discounted Russian oil, the state-run Indian Oil Corporation, the country’s leading refiner, recently dropped Russia’s flagship Urals crude from its newest tender. And Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, by saying that “we won’t be in the top 10” buyers of Russian oil, has signaled that India will not significantly go beyond its traditionally modest imports of Russian energy.
Still, Biden is not easing pressure on India. While appeasing communist China, his administration is paradoxically trying to employ human-rights issues as leverage against India. After the two-plus-two discussions, Blinken took a swipe at India, alleging “a rise in human rights abuses.” But barely nine months earlier, Blinken had sung a different tune, saying “both of our democracies are works in progress.”
These are challenging times for U.S.-India relations. Undermining what should be America’s most important strategic partnership in Asia makes little strategic sense, especially if the U.S. wishes to genuinely pivot to the Indo-Pacific.
India’s neighborhood is already troubled, with a crisis-torn Sri Lanka suspending foreign debt payments and mounting Chinese repression triggering fresh self-immolations in Tibet. Yet, Biden surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban terrorists, thereby strengthening Pakistan at India’s expense. And he is pushing military-ruled Myanmar into China’s arms with his sanctions policy.
Biden’s overriding focus on punishing Russia threatens to exacerbate India’s regional-security challenges, especially by aiding the further rise of an expansionist China. The U.S.-led sanctions will effectively put Russia, the world’s richest country in natural resources, in the pocket of a resource-hungry China.
The main brunt of the rise of a more powerful and aggressive China will be borne by its neighbors, especially India. Unlike Japan and Australia, which are under the U.S. security and nuclear umbrella, India must deal with China on its own, as the current Himalayan military crisis shows.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
Biden, going beyond the traditional tools of deterrence and diplomacy, is relying entirely on his unprecedented sanctions to shape the behavior of a rival nuclear power, which has a long record of enduring economic hardship.
President Biden’s gaffes during his recent European tour – from suggesting to American troops in Poland that they would be in war-torn Ukraine and saying NATO would respond “in kind” if Russia used chemical weapons to seemingly calling for regime change in Moscow – led to considerable clean-up efforts by his team. Biden, by his own admission, has a record of being a “gaffe machine.”
But the president’s misstatements on issues of war and peace in this perilous time carry significant risks, which explains why his top officials were quick to walk back his apparent regime-change call, lest it further erode U.S.-Russia relations. U.S.-Russia ties are already at an all-time low.
More fundamentally, Biden’spropensity for making misstatements that land his administration in difficult situations is detracting attention from the larger question of whether the president has a strategy to end the war in Ukraine.
Biden’s statements, in fact, are making it increasingly difficult to negotiate an end to the war. Washington’s overriding focus on punishing Russia for its brazen invasion suggests that top U.S. officials are not thinking of how to terminate the war, even as Moscow and Kyiv hold talks.
Punishing Russia for invading Ukraine, while essential, has ceased to be a means to an end and has apparently become an end in itself.
This may explain why Biden has discarded some key tenets of diplomacy, including avoiding insulting another country’s head of state or conveying an unintended policy message to preserve space for direct negotiations.
The use of aggressive language began long before the Ukraine war. Just weeks after entering the White House, Biden said Putin is “a killer,” vowing that the Russian leader will “pay a price” for allegedly meddling in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
By contrast, Biden has treated Chinese President Xi Jinping with respect. Despite Xi’s coverup of the origins of the COVID-19 virus, his Asian expansionism and his Muslim gulag (which represents the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since Adolf Hitler), the president has not hurled any personal insult at him. Nor has he imposed any sanctions on the Chinese leader or those in his inner circle.
The unintended consequence of Biden’s vilification of Putin is to seriously crimp space for the U.S. and Russia to reach a modus vivendi to rein in their conflict. Putin now has a greater reason to double down and continue his invasion until the Russian forces carve out a strategic buffer against NATO that effectively partitions Ukraine into two, with the Dnieper River possibly serving as the approximate dividing line.
Biden, going beyond the traditional tools of deterrence and diplomacy, is relying entirely on his unprecedented sanctions to shape the behavior of a rival nuclear power, which has a long record of enduring economic hardship. In the post-World War II period, the U.S. has generally relied on sanctions to help bring weak states to heel. Regime change likewise has been imposed only on weak, vulnerable nations.
Squeezing a major power with a raft of harsh sanctions is fraught with danger. The unforeseen consequences could trigger an escalating spiral leading to devastating armed conflict. It was U.S. sanctions against Imperial Japan that ultimately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading to the Pacific war and eventually the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today’s Biden-initiated Western sanctions on Russia are the largest, coordinated punitive measures ever rolled out against any country in history. But just as Biden’s threat to impose such sanctions failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine, their actual imposition, far from chastening Moscow, is likely to resurrect the Iron Curtain and spur the emergence of a remilitarized, neo-imperial Russia.
The U.S.-led sanctions that followed Russia’s 2014 Crimea annexation, while fueling Russian nationalism, compelled Moscow to pivot to China, turning two natural competitors into close strategic partners. Those sanctions also led Russia to build a parallel payments system that has now helped take the sting out of the recent exit of Visa and Mastercard, thereby setting an example for other nations to invest in building their own payments infrastructure.
Today, the rise in international oil and gas prices, by directly contributing to inflation and political trouble at home, is underscoring that sanctions also impose costs on their imposers. Those costs would escalate and possibly even engender recession if the cycle of sanctions, counter-sanctions and fresh sanctions substantially diminished Russian energy exports.
In a further reminder that sanctions are blunt instruments and often produce unintended and undesirable consequences, the West’s comprehensive hybrid war against Russia is helping boost Putin’s popularity at home. According to a poll by the Levada Center, an independent, Moscow-based pollster that has been designated a “foreign agent” in Russia, Putin’s approval ratings shot up from 69 percent in January to 83 percent in late March.
Biden’s primary strategic focus ought to be on preserving America’s global preeminence. For years, the U.S. waged self-debilitating wars in the Islamic world, allowing China to emerge as its primary challenger globally. Now, as it pours military resources into Europe, America’s renewed focus on European security threatens to distract it from its long-term strategic objectives.
After losing Afghanistan to sandal-wearing terrorists, Biden should not allow the impulse for revenge against Moscow to drive his foreign policy. Ukraine is Europe’s problem, and he should exert pressure on Europeans to take greater ownership of their security so that the U.S. can single-mindedly focus on arresting its relative decline.
The current crisis represents the most dangerous period since the end of the Cold War. Stable Washington-Moscow relations can help to avert a wider conflict and reach a NATO-Russia agreement on Ukraine modeled on the 1955 treaty under which Austria established itself as a buffer state between the East and West and declared its neutrality.
More broadly, the U.S. should seek to drive a wedge in the China-Russia axis, instead of becoming a bridge that unites them. The deepening China-Russia entente is perhaps the biggest U.S. foreign-policy failure of the post-Cold War era.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is helping to obscure China’s expansionism in Asia, where it continues to redraw its land and maritime borders and exert growing pressure on Taiwan. Unlike Russia’s frontal military assault, China’s preferred mode of expansionism is salami-slicing, or altering the status quo in its favor, little by little.
In the latest example, the Chinese government’s news website Tibet.cn reported earlier this month that the People’s Liberation Army had quietly completed the 624 villages that China had set out to build in disputed or captured Himalayan border areas.
China’s militarized villages in the Himalayan borderlands, that India, Bhutan and Nepal consider to be within their own national boundaries, are the equivalent of its artificial islands that it is turning into forward military bases in the South China Sea.
What is remarkable about its village-building spree in the Himalayas is that China has reportedly managed to complete it despite the specter of armed conflict raised by its ongoing military confrontation with India. The Indian and Chinese militaries have remained locked in multiple Himalayan standoffs for the past 23 months after China stealthily encroached on some key border areas in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh, leading to the first deadly Chinese-Indian military clashes since 1975.
Recent talks to defuse the military crisis, including between military commanders and later between the foreign ministers, made little headway. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s New Delhi trip on Mar. 25 was the highest-level visit between the two countries since the standoffs in the frigid Himalayan heights began.
Effective control is the most vital element of a strong territorial claim in international law. This explains why establishing new facts on the ground, whether in the form of high-altitude artificial villages with planted settlers or human-made islands, is integral to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s territorial aggrandizement.
Xi’s expansionism has not spared even tiny Bhutan, with a population of barely 800,000. In disregard of a 1998 bilateral treaty that obligated its parties “not to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border,” several of China’s militarized villages have come up in Bhutan’s northern and western borderlands.
More broadly, China’s territorial revisionism follows a cabbage strategy: gradually wrapping a claimed or contested area in multiple layers of security, like the concentric leaves of a cabbage, thereby denying access to any rival.
Just like the concentric layers of occupation around the South China Sea islands by Chinese fishing boats, coastguard ships and naval ships, expansionism in the Himalayas has involved bringing in people from afar to settle in desolate, previously uninhabited areas, with civilian militias, paramilitary police and regular PLA forces forming multilayered security.
China’s strategy of territorial creep relies on a steady progression of actions to outmaneuver a rival state, in keeping with the ancient Chinese game of Go, in which the goal is to incrementally gain more territory through unrelenting attacks on the opponent’s weak points. Before initiating a jurisdictional claim through a rising tempo of incursions, Beijing has a history of constructing a dispute.
In the East China Sea, China succeeded in getting the world to recognize the existence of a dispute over the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands by steadily increasing the frequency and duration of its intrusions into their territorial waters and airspace and by popularizing the islands’ Chinese name Diaoyu.
Even as Beijing started dispatching armed ships and larger vessels, Japan has recoiled from purely defensive steps like building a lighthouse on the Senkakus. Indeed, no Japanese defense minister has conducted an aerial survey of the uninhabited Senkakus in order not to provoke China.
By keeping opponents off-balance, Xi’s strategy bears all the hallmarks of brinkmanship, including reliance on stealth, surprise and an indifference to the risks of military escalation. Camouflaging offense as defense, it casts the burden of starting a war on the other side.
In international law, a territorial claim must be based on continuous and peaceful exercise of sovereignty over the territory concerned. But even after an international arbitral tribunal’s 2016 ruling invalidated its territorial claims in the South China Sea, Beijing imposed “might makes right” in that region.
In more recent years, however, China has increasingly employed new domestic law both as a cover for unlawful actions and to underpin its territorial claims in international law. Through domestic legislation, Xi has sought to legitimize Chinese actions ranging from the human-made militarized islands and new administrative districts in the South China Sea to the Himalayan border villages.
China’s shadowy expansionism in the Himalayas extends far beyond the 624 border villages whose construction a 2017 Chinese government document unveiled. To project power and enable more rapid movement of troops, weaponry and equipment, Beijing has pursued frenzied construction of new military infrastructure, including in disputed borderlands. New Chinese roads through Bhutanese territory have opened an axis against India’s most vulnerable point — the Siliguri Corridor, which connects the country’s far northeast to the Indian heartland.
What stands out is the speed and scale with which China is redrawing facts on the ground without firing a shot. China’s territorial creep is contributing to increasing insecurity in Asia, the world’s most dynamic region economically.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
For all the talk of a rules-based order, the world’s rule-makers have reverted unhesitatingly to unilateralism during the Ukraine war. While this will leave Russia and the US worse off, it will enable China to advance its interests and bolster its global influence.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s unprecedented response, represent a watershed in international relations, marking the formal end of the post-Cold War era and setting the stage for seismic geopolitical and geo-economic shifts. But one defining feature of international relations will remain: to paraphrase Thucydides, the strong will continue to do what they can, and the weak will continue to suffer what they must.
It is true that leaders and observers around the world often speak of strengthening or defending the “rules-based international order.” But that order was always more aspirational than real. Countries that possess military or economic might reserve the right not only to make and enforce the rules, but also to break them.
It is when the rule-makers disagree that the greatest risks arise. The Ukraine war – the first conflict of the post-Cold War period that pits great powers against each other – is a case in point. On one side, Russia has been carrying out a brutal conventional military assault on Ukraine, in an apparent effort to bring the country – which Russian President Vladimir Putin believes is rightly part of his country – back into the Kremlin fold. On the other side, NATO, led by the United States, has been waging a comprehensive hybrid war against Russia.
The West’s war has included the supply of huge quantities of weapons to Ukrainian forces: US President Joe Biden alone has authorized the transfer of $1.35 billion worth of lethal weapons since the war began, with much more to come. The West has also implemented ever-escalating economic and financial sanctions, virtually expelling Russia from the Western-led financial order and sequestering the assets of many wealthy Russians. And it has sought to shape international opinion, with many countries now blocking access to Russian state media.
For all the talk of a rules-based order, the world’s rule-makers have reverted unhesitatingly to unilateralism. The risks are legion. The flood of weapons the West is sending to Ukraine – a country with a long history of weak governance and widespread corruption – could eventually flow westward, fueling organized crime, narcotics trafficking, and terrorist violence across Europe. And the Iron Curtain’s revival may hasten the emergence of a militarily robust, neo-imperial Russia. Putin, who has called the Soviet Union’s collapse a “tragedy” and the end of “historical Russia,” has indicated that Kazakhstan, like Ukraine, is not a country.
And it is not just Russia that will become isolated. The Ukraine war could trigger the unraveling of decades of broader global economic engagement, long viewed as a key deterrent to great-power conflict.
Of course, the notion that countries would rather trade than invade has never been unassailable. Economic interdependence has not stopped China, for example, from engaging in relentless expansionism, from the South and East China Seas to the Himalayas.
Even today, however, economic interdependence has forced rule-makers to exercise some restraint. Despite the raft of financial and economic sanctions it has imposed on Russia, Europe continues to support the Russian economy’s mainstay: oil and gas exports. This undermines the West’s own mission, especially as the confrontation drives up energy prices. But Europe’s longstanding dependence on Russian energy supplies has left it with no good alternatives – at least for now.
Such a tradeoff may not arise in the future. The European Union has already vowed to eliminate its dependence on Russian energy by 2030. At the same time, countries that want to uphold trade ties with Russia are seeking solutions outside Western-controlled channels. For example, India is buying Russian oil with rupees. Similar moves elsewhere – for example, Saudi Arabia is considering renminbi-based oil sales to China – threaten to erode the US dollar’s global supremacy.
This is probably the beginning of a broader bifurcation of the global economy. At a time when economic power has shifted eastward but the West still controls the world’s financial architecture – including the main international payments system, the primary currencies for trade and financial flows, and the leading credit-ratings agencies – the establishment of parallel arrangements seems imminent.
China, which dwarfs Russia in terms of both economic power and military spending, will likely lead this process. In fact, China is set to emerge as the real winner of the NATO-Russia conflict. An overstretched America’s renewed preoccupation with European security will create strategic space for China to press its strategic objectives – its leaders have been as clear about absorbing Taiwan as Putin was about claiming Ukraine – and bolster its global influence, at the expense of the US.
Chinese global dominance would amount to the final nail in the coffin of the rules-based order. Since its establishment in 1949, the People’s Republic has displayed blatant contempt for international law, more than doubling its land mass by annexing Xinjiang and Tibet and currently detaining over a million Muslims. Yet China has paid no tangible price. The Kremlin, for its part, probably did not think twice about rejecting the International Court of Justice order to suspend its military operations in Ukraine.
International law may be powerful against the powerless, but it is powerless against the powerful. The League of Nations, created after World War I, failed because it could not deter important powers from flouting international law. Its beleaguered successor, the United Nations, may be facing a similar reckoning. How can the UN Security Council fulfill its mandate of upholding international peace and stability if its five veto-wielding permanent members are arrayed into two opposing camps?
The world is headed for an era of greater upheaval. However it plays out, the pretense of a shared commitment to international law will be the first casualty.
President Biden has made clear that the United States has embarked on a strategy of Containment 2.0 against Russia with what he calls “the broadest sanctions in history.” But Biden is unlikely to have factored in the possibility of a boomerang effect. The unintended consequences could bifurcate the global economy, polarize international politics and strengthen China at America’s expense.
Over the years, the relative ease of imposing economic sanctions has turned them into a grossly overused tool of American diplomacy. The efficacy of U.S. sanctions has been eroding with the relative decline of American power, and a growing body of evidence suggests that such measures have often proved counterproductive to America’s own economic and geopolitical interests.
The U.S. has virtually ejected Russia from the Western-led financial order at a time when economic power is moving east. Expelling the world’s 11th-largest economy from an order that the U.S. seeks to uphold could intensify the search for a viable alternative system that isn’t dominated by the West.
What is more certain is that the new U.S.-led hybrid war against Russia, centered on unparalleled sanctions, will help deepen the undeclared Beijing-Moscow axis against Washington and make China the big winner financially and geopolitically, thereby aiding its expansion of economic and military power.
The West’s heavy economic penalties on Moscow, including unplugging key Russian banks from the international SWIFT payments system, are set to turn China into Russia’s banker, enabling it to reap vast profits. In structural terms too, Russia’s sanctions pain will be China’s gain: To help insulate itself from similar Western sanctions if it were to invade Taiwan, Beijing is seeking to boost the payments and reserve role of the yuan and the international use of its competitor to the SWIFT network — the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS. The West’s Russia sanctions are likely to provide a fillip to both efforts.
Furthermore, the sanctions have opened the path for China to build an energy safety net through greater land-based imports so that it can withstand a potential U.S.-led energy embargo or blockade in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The re-imposition of sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is welcome news for Beijing, which is seeking to further boost energy imports from Russia after concluding new oil and gas deals worth a whopping $117.5 billion during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Beijing visit last month.
Here’s the paradox: China has faced no Western financial or other meaningful sanctions despite swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea, expanding its land frontiers in the Himalayas and establishing a Muslim gulag with more than one million detainees in what two successive U.S. administrations have called “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.” By contrast, as Biden’s two rounds of sanctions last year underscored, Russia has remained an easy target for escalating American sanctions over the past decade because the U.S. has little stake in the Russian economy.
In this light, the West’s targeting of just Russia is certain to make China the main beneficiary of the sanctions, thus aiding Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “China dream” of supplanting the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power.
The new Biden-led sanctions against Russia will likely be undercut by Xi’s regime — unless the West goes after China too. But that possibility seems remote.
As part of a diplomatic strategy to extract important concessions from the West, Beijing will play the same cat-and-mouse game with Washington over the Russia sanctions that it has long played vis-à-vis the North Korea sanctions. It will pretend to cooperate with the U.S. while quietly undermining the Western sanctions, including by helping Russia to find China-centered financial workarounds.
The outrage over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should not obscure one key fact: China, with about a 10 times larger population and economy than Russia, poses the biggest challenge to America. Whereas Russia’s strategic priorities and ambitions are concentrated in its neighborhood, China is working to supplant the U.S. as the dominant global power.
As FBI Director Christopher Wray said last month, “There is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation and our economic security than China.” And the “scale of their hacking program…is greater than every other country combined.” China has expanded its spying in the U.S. to such an extent, according to Wray, that the FBI is launching one new counterintelligence investigation on average every 12 hours.
For China, whose global image is at a historic low, the new Washington-Moscow cold war (with Russia reemerging as the “evil empire” in Western perceptions) couldn’t come at a better time. Xi has shown an increasing appetite for taking major risks, believing China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to modify the international order in its favor before it confronts a demographic crisis, stalled economic growth and an unfavorable global environment.
Putin, through his war of aggression, is unwittingly helping Beijing, including distracting the U.S. from its China challenge. The war, which has the makings of a drawn-out and dangerous confrontation between Russia and NATO, will help Xi’s pursuit of his “China dream.”
Biden is likely to live up to his pledge to make Russia pay “dearly, economically and strategically.” Taming a largely hostile Ukraine could mire Russia in a quagmire, especially as Western lethal weapons continue to flow to Ukrainian resistance forces. Biden’s request to Congress for a staggering $10 billion in additional Ukrainian assistance shows that his Containment 2.0 strategy includes an Afghanistan 2.0 plan to replicate in Ukraine the CIA-led covert war of the 1980s that ultimately drove Soviet forces out from Afghanistan.
America’s increasing entanglement in European security, however, will open greater space for Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific, a region that will shape the new world order. In fact, U.S. policy, instead of driving a wedge between Russia and China, is serving as a bridge that unites them against an overstretched America.
More fundamentally, U.S. policy has learned little from its strategic blunder in aiding China’s rise under successive American presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, which has resulted in that country today posing a military, economic and technological challenge on a scale America has not seen before. Almost every time the U.S. has slapped any country with sanctions in the post-Cold War period, it has helped advance Chinese commercial and strategic interests.
The Russia sanctions, although they hold no promise of changing Putin’s behavior, constitute one of the biggest gifts American policymakers have delivered to Beijing. By effectively putting Russia, the world’s richest country in natural resources, in Beijing’s pocket, the sanctions will yield major dividends for a resource-hungry China, including allowing it to dictate the terms of the bilateral relationship and secure greater access to Russian military technology.
After Biden’s Afghan debacle and failure to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, could Taiwan become his next foreign policy disaster? Xi will likely bide his time and wait for an opportune moment before moving on Taiwan, taking a distracted U.S. by utter surprise and bringing down the curtain on the West’s long ascendancy.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
The world’s center of gravity is shifting to the Indo-Pacific. The new global order will be shaped by developments in a sprawling region where interstate rivalries and tensions are sharpening geopolitical risks. Building a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific has become more important than ever, but China’s territorial and maritime revisionism, and its heavy-handed use of economic and military power, are causing instability and undercutting international norms.
Against this background, the expanding strategic partnership between the world’s most powerful and most populous democracies — the United States and India — has become pivotal to equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific. With India’s closer integration, the four-nation Quad — Australia, India, Japan and the US — is blossoming as a strategic coalition of the leading Indo-Pacific democracies.
The Quad is central to the US’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy. As American preeminence erodes, the US must augment its power with that of allies and partners. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi famously mocked the Quad in 2018 as a “headline-grabbing idea” that will dissipate “like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean.” Instead, and thanks to China’s expansionist policies, the Quad continues to gain strength — despite the new, US-initiated AUKUS alliance with Australia and Britain. The US cannot build an Asian power equilibrium without India, Japan and Australia — and they cannot build it without the US.
Today, the US is also close to achieving a long-sought goal: a “soft alliance” with India that needs no treaty. The US has already emerged as the largest arms seller to India, leaving its traditional supplier, Russia, far behind. US defense transactions with India went from near zero in 2008 to over $20 billion in 2020. Furthermore, India has signed the four “foundational” agreements that the US maintains with all its close defense partners. These accords range from providing reciprocal access to each other’s military facilities and securing military communications to sharing geospatial data from airborne and satellite sensors.
India, a founder and leader of the Nonaligned Movement that sought to chart a neutral course in the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, now makes little mention of nonalignment. Instead, it is multi-aligned and building close partnerships with democratic powers from Asia to Europe. India now holds more annual military exercises with America than any other country.
The main driver of the growing US-India strategic collaboration is China’s neo-imperial expansionism. President Xi Jinping believes that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to modify the international order in its favor before it confronts a demographic crisis, stalled economic growth and an unfavorable global environment. Accordingly, Xi has shown an increasing appetite for taking major risks.
American and Indian strategic priorities regarding China are, however, not the same. The US has never considered fighting a land war against China. The primary American objective is non-military: to counter China’s geopolitical, economic and ideological challenges. By contrast, China poses a pressing military challenge for India. The spotlight on the Chinese threats against Taiwan has helped obscure China’s more serious military confrontation with India along the long Himalayan frontier — a confrontation that is still raging.
The US and India, however, are united by other shared strategic interests. These include the rule of law, respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, freedom of navigation, peaceful dispute resolution and a rules-based Indo-Pacific free of coercion. The biggest challenge to all these principles comes from China.
In May 2020, a shocked India discovered that China had stealthily encroached on several key border areas in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh. The discovery led to the first deadly Chinese-Indian military clashes in the Himalayas since 1975, including China’s first combat deaths in over four decades. The Indian and Chinese militaries remain locked in multiple standoffs, and the steadily increasing introduction of new weapons and troops by both sides has amplified the risk of renewed border skirmishing, if not outright war. Xi has picked a border fight with India that China cannot win. A war between these two nuclear- armed demographic giants is likely to end in a bloody stalemate with heavy losses on both sides. This is not the only instance in which Xi’s aggressive policies have proved to be counterproductive.
For India, China’s territorial aggression proves the importance of building close strategic collaboration with the US and likeminded powers. India today seems more determined than ever to frustrate China’s ambition to achieve Asian hegemony. By locking horns with China in tense military standoffs despite the risk of a full-scale war, India has openly challenged Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done in this century. Since 2020, when India let Australia join the annual Exercise Malabar war games with the American, Japanese and Indian navies, the Quad has possessed a platform for an annual military exercise involving all its members.
Xi must now also contend with the strengthening US-India relationship. In a pivot to Asia that much of the US media either ignored or derided, the Trump administration gave India pride of place in its Indo-Pacific strategy. It also instituted fundamental shifts in US policies on China and Pakistan, two close allies whose strengthening strategic axis in southern Asia imposes high security costs on India, including raising the specter of a two-front war. Trump reversed the forty-five-year US policy of aiding China’s rise; with bipartisan support, he designated China as a strategic rival and threat. His administration also cut off security aid to Pakistan for not severing its ties with terrorist groups.
Relations between the Indo-Pacific’s two largest democratic powers thrived during the Trump presidency. Trump built a personal rapport with India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, with whom he shares a love for big audiences and theatrics. Trump joined Modi’s September 2019 public rally in Houston, which was attended by 59,000 Indian Americans and a number of US congressmen and senators. Then, during his February 2020 standalone visit to India, Trump spoke at the largest rally any American president has ever addressed — at home or abroad.
More than 100,000 people packed the world’s largest cricket stadium, in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. “America loves India, America respects India, and America will always be faithful and loyal friends to the Indian people,” Trump declared. After returning home, Trump called India an “incredible country,” saying, “Our relationship with India is extraordinary right now.”
The US and India are both bitterly polarized democracies. In each, rival political forces are self-segregated into their own ideological silos. Trump and Modi have faced similar accusations from critics. Both are accused of being blinkered demagogues, of pursuing divisive policies and choosing populism over constitutionalism. Each consciously avoided saying anything that could give a handle to the other’s domestic critics.
President Biden, by contrast, entered the White House after criticizing Modi’s government on issues like Kashmir and a new Indian law on citizenship for non-Muslim refugees who had fled religious persecution in neighboring Islamic countries. Biden’s election victory created uncertainty over the future direction of US-India ties. Indeed, as a senator, Biden had spearheaded a congressional sanctions move in 1992 that helped block Russia’s sale of cryogenic-engine technology for India’s civilian space program, setting it back many years.
Yet President Biden has sustained the momentum in the growth of the bilateral relationship. As with tacit acceptances of Trump’s other unorthodox foreign-policy initiatives, Biden has no choice but to recognize India’s centrality in an Asian balance of power. Despite his party’s hostility to Modi and Hindu nationalism, Biden’s interactions with Modi have been characterized by ease and warmth. In September, Biden welcomed Modi to the White House as “my friend” and said, “I’ve long believed that the US-India relationship can help us solve an awful lot of global challenges.”
Booming US exports to India — one of the world’s fastest-growing markets —reinforce bipartisan support in Washington for a closer partnership with New Delhi. The US has rapidly become an important source of crude oil and petroleum products for India, which is the world’s third-largest oil consumer after the US and China. But the US and India are not entirely on the same page.
America’s self-inflicted defeat and humiliation in Afghanistan at the hands of a Pakistan-backed terrorist militia have compounded India’s security challenges at a time when it should be fully focused on countering China’s Himalayan expansionism. Worse still, Team Biden, unlike the Trump administration, has placed outreach to Beijing as a high priority, and has been wary of publicly supporting India against Chinese aggression. The Democrats’ Russia fixation, meanwhile, is only strengthening under Biden.
Nevertheless, India will continue to quietly gain greater salience in US policy — especially as Russia and China deepen their entente. Instead of driving a wedge between these two natural competitors, US policy has helped turn them into close strategic partners. If the US is not to accelerate its relative decline through strategic overreach, it needs India more than ever. It would be doubly ironic, given Vice President Kamala Harris’s Indian heritage, if Biden did not seize the opportunity to formalize the US’s de facto and deepening security alliance with India.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2022 World edition.
One paradox in Asia stands out: China, by occupying water-rich Tibetan Plateau, dominates Asia’s water map, yet it refuses to enter into a water-sharing treaty with any neighbour. But water-stressed India has a water-sharing treaty with each of the two countries located downstream to it — Pakistan and Bangladesh. And each of these treaties has set a new principle in international water law.
The 1996 Ganges treaty set a new standard by guaranteeing Bangladesh specific cross-border flows in the critical dry season. And the 1960 Indus treaty with Pakistan still remains the world’s most generous water-sharing arrangement, in terms of both the sharing ratio and the total volume of cross-border flows.
Under this treaty of indefinite duration, India foolishly reserved 80.52% of the aggregate water flows in the six-river Indus system for Pakistan, with that arch-nemesis securing 90 times greater volume of water than Mexico’s share under a 1944 pact with the US.
In fact, the treaty effectively partitioned the rivers in the Indus Basin, with India’s full sovereignty rights limited to the three smaller rivers in the lower section and Pakistan bagging the bigger rivers of the upper basin. It remains the world’s only water pact embodying the ‘doctrine of restricted sovereignty’ in which the upper riparian state defers to the interests of a downstream state.
To make matters worse, only four of the six Indus-system rivers originate in India; the other two start in Tibet, with China free to reengineer cross-flow flows.
Against this background, the Indus treaty remains a millstone around India’s neck. India should be seeking to mitigate the burdens of a treaty that carries no benefits for it but which emboldens Pakistan’s sponsorship of cross-border terrorism. Pakistan repays India’s unparalleled water generosity with its self-avowed “War of a Thousand Cuts”.
How can India allow its water largesse to be repaid with blood? A feckless India continues to shore up the treaty, including by sending a 10-member delegation to Pakistan for a Permanent Indus Commission meeting from March 1. For the first time in the commission’s history, female officers (all from India) will participate.
The commission’s meetings can be suspended, as they have been in the past, but India clings to the treaty’s letter and spirit, even as Pakistan flouts international norms without incurring any costs. In fact, by failing to build sufficient storage, India allows unutilized waters from its meagre share to flow to Pakistan as a continuing bonus.
Other world powers have dumped binding accords at will. One of Russia’s grievances contributing to the present crisis with the US, with Ukraine as the theatre of Russian invasion, has been Washington’s unilateral termination of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (which was of unlimited duration) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. China has demonstrated its contempt for bilateral pacts through its current border aggression against India and by its 2017 withholding of data from India on upstream river flows.
A scofflaw Pakistan wants rights without responsibilities. It demands eternal Indian water munificence while its military sustains export of terrorism to India. Leveraging the Indus treaty to help reform Pakistan’s behaviour offers India a bloodless path.
Pakistan’s use of state-reared terrorist groups could be invoked by India under international law as constituting reasonable grounds for withdrawal from the treaty. The International Court of Justice has upheld the principle that a treaty may be dissolved by reason of a fundamental change of circumstances.
But without withdrawing from the treaty, India can seek to balance the scales by invoking its treaty rights to enforce Pakistan’s responsibilities. For starters, it should condition further consultations and information exchanges, including on project-related design data, to Pakistan’s verified severing of ties with terrorist groups. Keeping its Indus commissioner’s post vacant for some years would effectively suspend riparian consultations with Pakistan. Given India’s proverbial red tape, such a vacancy will be easy to explain.
India’s approach should be to speak softly but carry a big stick. It should shun meaningless hyperbole and let its actions speak for themselves. India, however, must make clear that it has no intention of turning off or even restricting water flows to Pakistan. Indeed, India doesn’t have the hydro-infrastructure to limit river flows. The issue is about ending Pakistan’s roguish actions.
Building basin leverage can serve as a potent instrument in India’s arsenal against Pakistan.
The worst option for India is to continue hewing to its present approach by mechanically bearing all the burdens of the treaty without any tangible benefits accruing to it. Instead of advertising that its bark is worse than its bite, an imaginative India should work to remake the terms of the Indus engagement.
India, having confronted Chinese border aggression over the past 22 months, has taken a restrained stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, underscoring its focus on countering Beijing’s military actions without affecting its close relationships with the United States and Russia. The new U.S.-Russia Cold War, however, promises to compound India’s strategic challenges.
India is the only member of “the Quad” to refrain from openly condemning Russia for invading a sovereign country. In fact, like its archnemesis China, India abstained from the Feb. 25 vote at the United Nations Security Council on a U.S.-sponsored resolution deploring the Russian invasion as a violation of the U.N. Charter. India, however, has implicitly criticized Russia’s abandonment of the path of diplomacy and called for an end to all violence.
Unlike Japan and Australia, which are under the U.S. security (and nuclear) umbrella, India has to deal with China on its own, as the current Himalayan border conflict has highlighted. And while China poses a pressing military challenge for India along a more than 4,000-kilometer-long land frontier, the U.S. has never considered a land war against China and its primary objective is nonmilitary — to counter China’s geopolitical, economic and ideological challenges to its global preeminence.
India’s solo struggle to rein in an expansionist China in the icy Himalayan region has helped influence its measured response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine. After all, which head of a Western government has condemned China’s aggression against India or even urged Beijing to pull back its forces from the Himalayan frontier?
U.S. President Joe Biden has not uttered a word on the subject. His State Department on Feb. 3 urged India and China to find “a peaceful resolution of the border disputes,” and then added in general terms, “We have previously voiced our concerns of Beijing’s pattern of ongoing attempts to intimidate its neighbors.”
The Biden administration, unlike former President Donald Trump’s administration, has placed outreach to Beijing as a high priority, and has been wary of publicly supporting India against Chinese aggression. Indeed, Biden’s recently unveiled Indo-Pacific Strategy refers to China’s military actions against India since 2020 not as “aggression,” but in neutral language — as “the conflict along the Line of Actual Control with India.”
In May 2020, a shocked India discovered that China had stealthily encroached on several key border areas in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh. The discovery led to the first deadly Chinese-Indian military clashes in the Himalayas since 1975, including China’s first combat deaths in over four decades.
By locking horns with China in tense military standoffs despite the risk of a full-scale war, India has openly challenged Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done in this century. China has massed up to 200,000 soldiers along the frontier, but India has more than matched the Chinese force deployments — with the steadily increasing induction of new weapons and troops by both sides amplifying the risk of renewed border skirmishing, if not outright war.
The U.S.-India strategic partnership, meanwhile, continues to strengthen. The U.S. has already surpassed Russia as the largest arms seller to India. American defense transactions with India, according to the State Department, went from “near zero in 2008 to over $20 billion in 2020.”
Still, in an effort to make India its sole arms client, the U.S. has sought to leverage a domestic law — the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act — to downgrade Indian defense ties with Moscow. Russia, however, remains a critical source of arms and military technology for India.
In the current Himalayan military crisis, Russia, despite its deepening entente with China, has transferred weapons to help strengthen India’s defenses. It is advancing the delivery of its S-400 air and anti-missile defense system that India urgently needs as a protection against China’s forward deployment of an array of lethal missiles.
The latest Western financial sanctions on Moscow, however, threaten to affect Russia-India defense trade by complicating the issue of payments. The escalating sanctions could also impede India’s plans for greater investment both in the Russian oil and gas sector and in Russia’s Far East.
The U.S., with the aid of its energy sanctions on Iran, has emerged as an important source of crude oil and petroleum products for India, the world’s third-largest oil consumer after America and China. And its new sanctions on Russia are expected to facilitate greater American arms exports to India.
More fundamentally, the advent of the new Cold War promises to make India’s neutrality more challenging. Biden has made clear that he has embarked on a strategy of Containment 2.0 against Russia.
The new U.S. sanctions, which Biden has called “the broadest sanctions in history,” seek to disrupt the Russian economy. Simultaneously, Biden is planning to ensnare Russia in a military quagmire in Ukraine through massive arms supplies to the Ukrainian armed forces and other resistance forces. He has asked Congress for a staggering $6.4 billion for this mission.
However, U.S. power now faces a double whammy: China’s military, economic and technological challenge on a scale the U.S. has not seen before and a re-militarized Russia challenging the NATO creep to its borders.
But with its strategic focus shifting to shoring up European security, the U.S. is pouring military resources into that theater — and the main casualty of such a shift is likely to be Asian security.
By compounding America’s strategic overstretch and distracting it from the China challenge, the new Cold War will open greater space for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s aggressive revisionism. It will also likely advance China’s economic power and energy security by making Beijing the main beneficiary of the new Western sanctions on Russia.
India may have no dog in the fight, yet — like Japan — it will not be able to escape the larger strategic ramifications of the conflict over Ukraine. This could prove a watershed moment in international relations and complicate India’s ability to walk a diplomatic tightrope.
Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
The Indo-Pacific region — home to the world’s most populous nations, largest economies and largest militaries — has emerged as the world’s economic and geopolitical hub. This vast region will shape the new world order, including America’s geopolitical standing, in the coming years.
Greater volatility in the Indo-Pacific, however, seems inevitable as a result of the deepening international crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Western retaliation in the form of an unprecedented hybrid war against Moscow.
Sanctions are a form of warfare whose unforeseen consequences have, historically, set in motion an escalating spiral leading to devastating armed conflict. It was a raft of U.S. sanctions intended to squeeze Imperial Japan that ultimately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading to the Pacific war and eventually the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Russia, now the world’s most-sanctioned country, remains a nuclear and cyber superpower, as well as the world’s richest country when it comes to natural resources, and its own likely reprisals to the West’s hybrid war will increase the risks of a wider conflict.
The new Cold War will constrain an overstretched Washington from genuinely pivoting to the Indo-Pacific or robustly countering the challenge to its global preeminence from China, which dwarfs Russia in economic power and military spending.
Since taking office, U.S. President Joe Biden has sought to stabilize the geopolitical competition with China so as to focus on containing Russia, in keeping with what he told CBS “60 Minutes” just before being elected: Russia is “the biggest threat to America” and China “the biggest competitor.”
As part of that approach — a reversal of the Trump administration policy of treating the Chinese Communist Party as an existential threat to U.S. interests — Biden last year poured a record $650 million in military aid into Ukraine. Last autumn’s U.S.-NATO military exercises near Russia’s Black Sea coast incensed Moscow, foreshadowing Russian aggression today.
To help stabilize relations with Beijing, Biden has taken a number of steps, including a decision not to reinstate certain tariffs. Biden allowed Beijing to escape scot-free over its failure to meet commitments in the so-called Phase One trade deal with the Trump administration. China’s increased purchases of U.S. goods and services fell far below its commitment of $200 billion over 2017 levels during the deal’s two-year period that ended on Dec. 31, 2021.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unrelenting expansionism from the South and East China Seas to Hong Kong and the Himalayas has essentially been cost-free. Even Xi’s mass incarceration of over a million Muslims in Xinjiang, which the Biden administration acknowledges is “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” has gone unpunished, with the U.S. imposing only symbolic sanctions.
Biden, after more than a year in office and barely two weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, unveiled the “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States.” This followed criticism at home that he lacked clarity on a region central to long-term U.S. interests.
Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy, while acknowledging that “our allies and partners in the region bear much of the cost” of China’s “harmful behavior,” goes out of its way to mollify Xi’s regime, stating that America’s “objective is not to change the PRC (People’s Republic of China) but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates.” It also says the U.S. will “manage competition with the PRC responsibly” and “work with the PRC in areas like climate change and nonproliferation.”
As if seeking to allay China’s concerns, Biden has also progressively diluted the Quad’s agenda, broadening it, as his Indo-Pacific strategy attests, to everlasting universal challenges like climate change, sustainability, “global health” and “advancing common technology principles.” The Quad, however, was designed as a bulwark against China’s expansionism.
Biden has yet to comment on China’s nearly two-year border aggression against India. Nor has the U.S. asked Beijing to pull back the nearly 200,000 Chinese troops it has massed along the Indian frontier. Yet Biden, seeking to co-opt India in his new Cold War with Russia, hosted a special Quad summit by video link on Mar. 3 to discuss the Russian aggression.
But the summit, as the unusually short White House statement indicated, achieved little. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi put his foot down over extending the Quad’s sphere to Ukraine, saying the group must “remain focused on its core objective… in the Indo-Pacific region.”
India — the only Quad member not under the U.S. security and nuclear umbrella — has taken an independent stance on Ukraine, calling for an end to hostilities and a return to the path of diplomacy but abstaining from the United Nations votes to condemn Russia.
As Biden steps up his hybrid war against Russia, his conciliatory approach will become more pronounced toward China, which has the capacity to bail out the Russian economy. But Xi is likely to work toward neutralizing similar Western sanctions against China in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Xi is expected to fast-track progress on parallel international financial arrangements that are free from Western domination and weaponization.
Biden’s imperative to win Chinese cooperation on his sanctions against Russia gives Beijing important leverage. Like a double-edged sword, it will wield that leverage to extract U.S. and Russian concessions. With Biden’s characterization of Russia as Enemy No. 1 becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, a major casualty is likely to be America’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is just the latest example of “might makes right”. Despite claims to the contrary, the world has never had a rules-based order. Just consider the history of this century, especially the number of military invasions of sovereign states that have occurred since the year 2001.
International law is powerful against the powerless, but powerless against the powerful. Both the Russian invasion and the West’s no-holds-barred retaliatory economic war against Russia, including practically expelling it from the Western-led financial order, mock a rules-based order. While Russia’s aggression is violating Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, the West’s economic warfare is violating Russia’s economic sovereignty.
Yet this conflict holds global implications, with the potential to remake our world, including spawning the polarization of both the world economy and international politics.
As a new Cold War dawns, the US appears returning to a “with us or against us” approach. This promises to bring countries that take an objective and balanced view under intense pressure. It is also likely to complicate, if not strain, American ties with countries that insist on remaining neutral or taking a more nuanced approach than Washington’s black-and-white portrayal of the situation.
In echoes of a familiar Manichaean logic, US President Joe Biden’s administration is seeking to prod India to be on America’s side against Russia by implicitly asking, “Are you with us or against us?”
Team Biden has bristled at India abstaining from the United Nations votes to condemn Moscow, including at the Security Council on February 25 when Russia vetoed a US-sponsored resolution deploring the Russian invasion as a violation of the UN Charter. India, however, has implicitly criticized Russia’s abandonment of the path of diplomacy and repeatedly called for an end to all violence.
According to the US-based news website Axios, the State Department has recalled a strongly-worded cable to American embassies instructing them to inform India and the United Arab Emirates that their neutral stance on Ukraine put them “in Russia’s camp”. US diplomacy has a record of using media “leaks” to convey messages or warnings. In 1998, to spoil India’s ties with China, the White House leaked Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s letter to President Bill Clinton about the Indian nuclear tests.
The Axios story ended by saying that India “has faced allegations — rarely discussed by the US in public — of democratic backsliding and repression of religious minorities.” The implication is that, unless New Delhi falls in line, the Biden administration could start discussing such allegations in public.
US pressure has already compelled the UAE to reverse course. After abstaining in the Security Council, it voted in support of the March 2 non-binding resolution in the General Assembly condemning Russia. However, 35 countries abstained on the General Assembly resolution, including all of India’s major neighbours, while a further 11 didn’t vote at all.
Here’s the paradox: No head of a Western government has condemned China’s nearly 23-month-long border aggression against India or even urged Beijing to pull back the nearly 200,000 troops it has massed along the Himalayan frontier in violation of binding bilateral accords. Yet the Western bloc demands that India be firmly on its side over the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which is a member of neither NATO nor the European Union.
When Donald Trump was the US president, his top officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, regularly blasted China’s aggression against India, calling it “incredibly aggressive action”, “unacceptable behaviour” and part of a “clear and intensifying pattern of bullying”.
But the Biden administration, having placed outreach to Beijing as a high priority, has been wary of publicly supporting India against the Chinese aggression. Biden hasn’t uttered a word on that aggression. Indeed, Biden’s recently unveiled “Indo-Pacific Strategy” refers to China’s military actions against India since 2020 not as “aggression” but in neutral language — as “the conflict along the Line of Actual Control with India”.
Even in the India-Pakistan context, Team Biden isn’t firmly on India’s side. It has hedged its bets by retaining Pakistan as a “major non-NATO ally”, despite America’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of Pakistan-backed Taliban terrorists. Biden’s failure to impose any penalties on Pakistan also explains why that country is still missing from America’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Yet now Team Biden demands that India side with the US against Russia over Ukraine, which historically has been viewed by Moscow as its strategic buffer. Its unstated message to India is: “Do as I say, not as I do”.
India’s measured response to the Russian aggression enjoys bipartisan support at home. For India, the US has increasingly become an important strategic partner. But Moscow, which rescued India half a dozen times by vetoing UN Security Council resolutions over the decades, remains an equally important friend.
Had India voted with the Western bloc to condemn Russia, it would have burned its bridges with a country that remains a critical source of weapons and military technology in projects ranging from the Brahmos missile to nuclear submarines. To help shore up India’s defences against China, Russia has advanced the delivery of its S-400 air and anti-missile system.
The US values its strategic autonomy. So should India. Undermining ties with Moscow would make India dependent on America, whose unpredictability is legendary.
The US is already bagging billions of dollars worth of Indian arms contracts every year. Yet it is working to make India its sole arms client, including by seeking to leverage its domestic law — the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) — to downgrade Indian defence ties with Moscow. Given the advent of the new Cold War, it is likely to step up that effort.
India now holds more annual military exercises with America than any other country. The US has already overtaken Russia as the largest arms seller to India. New Delhi wishes to further deepen its ties with Washington. But such cooperation cannot be exclusionary.
A “with us or against us” approach that seeks to compel India to make a choice between the US and Russia will only bring the blossoming Indo-American relationship under strain.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
US President Joe Biden is treating a “rogue” Russia as a peer competitor, when he should be focused on the challenge from America’s actual peer, China. Not only is China more powerful than Russia; it also genuinely seeks to supplant the US as the preeminent global power.
Much of the democratic world would like the United States to remain the preeminent global power. But with the US apparently committed to strategic overreach, that outcome risks becoming unlikely.
The problem with America’s global leadership begins at home. Hyper-partisan politics and profound polarization are eroding American democracy and impeding the pursuit of long-term objectives. In foreign policy, the partisan divide can be seen in perceptions of potential challengers to the US: according to a March 2021 poll, Republicans are most concerned about China, while Democrats worry about Russia above all.
This may explain why US President Joe Biden is treating a “rogue” Russia as a peer competitor, when he should be focused on the challenge from America’s actual peer, China. In comparison to Russia, China’s population is about ten times bigger, its economy is almost ten times larger, and its military expenditure is around four times greater. Not only is China more powerful; it genuinely seeks to supplant the US as the preeminent global power. By contrast, with its military buildup on Ukraine’s borders, Russia is seeking to mitigate a perceived security threat in its neighborhood.
Hastening the decline of US global leadership is hardly the preserve of Democrats. A bipartisan parade of US leaders has failed to recognize that the post-Cold War unipolar world order, characterized by unchallenged US economic and military predominance, is long gone. The US squandered its “unipolar moment,” especially by waging an expensive and amorphous “Global War on Terrorism,” including several military interventions, and through its treatment of Russia.
After its Cold War victory, the US essentially took an extended victory lap, pursuing strategic maneuvers that flaunted its dominance. Notably, it sought to expand NATO to Russia’s backyard, but made little effort to bring Russia into the Western fold, as it had done with Germany and Japan after World War II. The souring of relations with the Kremlin contributed to Russia’s eventual remilitarization.
So, while the US remains the world’s foremost military power, it has been stretched thin by the decisions and commitments it has made, in Europe and elsewhere, since 1991. This goes a long way toward explaining why the US has ruled out deploying its own troops to defend Ukraine today. What the US is offering Ukraine – weapons and ammunition – cannot protect the country from Russia, which has an overwhelming military advantage.
But US leaders made another fatal mistake since the Cold War: by aiding China’s rise, they helped to create the greatest rival their country has ever faced. Unfortunately, they have yet to learn from this. Instead, the US continues to dedicate insufficient attention and resources to an excessively wide array of global issues, from Russian revanchism and Chinese aggression to lesser threats in the Middle East and Africa and on the Korean Peninsula. And it continues inadvertently to bolster China’s global influence, not least through its overuse of sanctions.
For example, by barring friends and allies from importing Iranian oil, two successive US administrations enabled China not only to secure oil at a hefty discount, but also to become a top investor in – and security partner of – the Islamic Republic. US sanctions have similarly pushed resource-rich Myanmar into China’s arms. As Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, whose country has faced a US arms embargo over its ties to China, asked last year, “If I don’t rely on China, who will I rely on?”
Russia has been asking itself the same question. Though Russia and China kept each other at arm’s length for decades, US-led sanctions introduced after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea drove President Vladimir Putin to pursue a closer strategic partnership with China. The bilateral relationship is likely to deepen, regardless of what happens in Ukraine. But the raft of harsh new sanctions the US has promised to implement in the event of a Russian invasion will accelerate this shift significantly, with China as the big winner.
The heavy financial penalties the US has planned – including the “nuclear option” of disconnecting Russian banks from the international SWIFT payments system – would turn China into Russia’s banker, enabling it to reap vast profits and expand the international use of its currency, the renminbi. If Biden fulfilled his pledge to block the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is set to deliver Russian supplies directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea, China would gain greater access to Russian energy.
In fact, by securing a commitment from Putin this month to a nearly tenfold increase in Russian natural gas exports, China is building a safety net that could – in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan – withstand Western energy sanctions and even a blockade. China could also benefit militarily by demanding greater access to Russian military technology in exchange for its support.
For the US, a strengthened Russia-China axis is the worst possible outcome of the Ukraine crisis. The best outcome would be a compromise with Russia to ensure that it does not invade and possibly annex Ukraine. By enabling the US to avoid further entanglement in Europe, this would permit a more realistic balancing of key objectives – especially checking Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific – with available resources and capabilities.
The future of the US-led international order will be decided in Asia, and China is currently doing everything in its power to ensure that order’s demise. Already, China is powerful enough that it can host the Winter Olympics even as it carries out a genocide against Muslims in the Xinjiang region, with limited pushback. If the Biden administration does not recognize the true scale of the threat China poses, and adopt an appropriately targeted strategy soon, whatever window of opportunity for preserving US preeminence remains may well close.
The success of the Beijing Winter Olympics is another feather in Xi’s cap. Like Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, Xi’s Games succeeded after an international boycott campaign collapsed. Will an emboldened Xi now embark on fresh repression and expansionism?
While the Olympic movement seeks to promote “a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play,” murky politics can lurk beneath the surface.
Powerful autocracies serving as hosts have a history of using the Olympics to project themselves as friendly, peace-loving nations so as to advance their geopolitical objectives and cloak their human rights abuses. Yet their actions often speak for themselves.
As the 24th Winter Olympics in Beijing were opening, China warned foreign athletes not to “violate the Olympic spirit” by speaking out on political issues. Yet it has defended its own gross violation of the Olympic spirit by feting as an Olympic torchbearer and national hero a Chinese military officer who led an ambush attack in the Himalayas that killed 20 unarmed Indian soldiers in June 2020.
The lionizing of such a military commander is a telling commentary on the tactics and values of the Chinese Communist Party and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Army. The action also showed that China mixes politics and sports better than any other country.
Since China’s boycott of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, the CCP has treated sports as politics by other means. It has engaged in bullying tactics against, among others, America’s National Basketball Association (NBA) and England’s Premier League. And it has used threats of withdrawing lucrative sports contracts, broadcast deals and sponsorship opportunities to buy silence regarding its human rights record.
The Beijing Winter Olympics, dubbed the “Genocide Games” by several international human rights organizations, are probably the most divisive games since the Berlin Summer Olympics. The 1936 Games helped strengthen the hands of Germany’s Adolf Hitler, emboldening his expansionism. The 2022 Games follow Chinese President Xi Jinping’s own expansionism, extending from the South China Sea and Hong Kong, to the Himalayas.
In fact, Xi has taken a page out of the 1936 Olympics playbook: Just as Hitler sought to camouflage his segregation and persecution of Jews by permitting one Jewish athlete — fencing champion Helene Mayer — to join the German team, Xi has tried to whitewash his atrocities in Xinjiang by presenting a Uighur skier as the face of the 2022 Games.
Mayer’s inclusion in the German team not only helped end international calls for a boycott of the Games but also allowed Hitler to project the image of a peace-loving statesman. Xi, for his part, opened the 2022 Games with peace doves and an obscure female Uighur skier, Dinigeer Yilamujiang, as the star of the opening ceremony. Chinese state media quickly claimed Yilamujiang had “showed the world a beautiful and progressive Xinjiang.”
There are some other troubling parallels between the two games. Before the 1936 Games, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp had been established and Hitler’s army had marched into the demilitarized Rhineland. The 2022 Games have followed Xi’s expansionism across Asia and what two successive U.S. administrations have labeled “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang, where more than a million detainees languish in a Muslim gulag.
Since 2015, when Beijing defeated Almaty, Kazakhstan, to win the bid to host the 2022 Games, China has, among other things, established forward military bases on a chain of artificial islands in the South China Sea, set up the Xinjiang gulag, militarized the Himalayan borderlands and encroached on Indian, Bhutanese and Nepalese territories, weaponized debt and gobbled up Hong Kong.
And at home, Xi has established a globally unparalleled techno-authoritarian state whose soaring budget for internal security has overtaken the country’s massive military budget. A repressive internal machinery, aided by an Orwellian surveillance system, is fostering a state strategy to culturally smother ethnic minorities in their traditional homelands, including through demographic change and harsh policing.
With “Xi Jinping Thought” enshrined in the national constitution and turned into the central doctrine guiding the CCP, China’s destiny is now in the hands of one party, one leader and one ideology.
More broadly, just as a long debate has raged over how Western powers had played into Hitler’s hands by participating in the 1936 Games, the failed boycott of the 2022 Games is likely to be a subject of intense discussion in future years.
To be sure, a number of Western countries, including Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Kosovo, Lithuania and the U.S., refused to send officials to Beijing for the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies in protest against China’s human rights abuses.
India, too, at the last minute decided not to grace the ceremonies with its official presence. But such diplomatic boycotts have essentially been symbolic as athletes from those countries are participating fully in the Games, including in the opening and closing ceremonies.
Xi’s Olympic Games are being held under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, now in its third year. China’s refusal to cooperate with international efforts to determine the origin of the virus first detected in the city of Wuhan — despite the pandemic’s devastating global impact — underlines the international costs of Xi’s rule.
The U.S., as the world’s leading sports nation and preeminent power, could have undercut the credibility of the Winter Games by deciding not to send its athletes and by leading a wider international boycott. But, as in 1936, it decided to allow its athletes to participate.
Meanwhile, by highlighting that Wall Street remains China’s powerful ally, some of America’s biggest corporations — from Coca-Cola and Visa to Intel and Proctor & Gamble — are underwriting the global spectacle. Very vocal when it comes to political rights at home, such sponsors have kept silent on Xinjiang, the repression in Tibet and Beijing’s clampdown on Hong Kong.
Three years after the 1936 Games, World War II began. Will the 2022 Games also come back to haunt the world? Buoyed by the success of the Games, Xi could embark on fresh repression and expansionism.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
America’s death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic, now in its third year, is closing in on one million, with Americans continuing to succumb to the disease at internationally high rates. Both in total case counts and number of deaths since 2020, the United States has led the world. New data show that Americans’ life expectancy in the first year of the pandemic fell 1.8 years — the sharpest decline since at least World War II.
Given the extent of its pain and suffering, the U.S. should have a major stake in unraveling how the COVID-19 virus originated. Knowing the origins of this virus has become imperative to forestall the fourth coronavirus pandemic of the 21 Century after SARS, MERS and COVID-19.
In this light, isn’t it odd that the U.S. government is no longer seeking to get to the bottom of how the virus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan? In fact, by relieving pressure on China to come clean on the virus’s origins, President Biden’s administration is effectively letting that communist behemoth off the hook despite the costliest government coverup perhaps of all time.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored all news about the initial spread of COVID-19, including hiding evidence of human-to-human transmission, resulting in a local outbreak morphing into a global health calamity. Even today, by covering up the truth on how the virus emerged, Xi’s regime disrespects the memory of the more than 5.7 million people who have died thus far. The only probe China has allowed was a 2021 “joint study” with the World Health Organization (WHO) that it controlled and steered.
Because of Beijing’s stonewalling of investigations, the world still does not know whether COVID-19 evolved naturally from wildlife or was triggered by the accidental escape of a genetically engineered coronavirus from a lab in Wuhan, the center of Chinese research on super-viruses. Xi’s regime has frustrated all efforts, including by the WHO, to conduct an independent forensic inquiry into the Wuhan labs, labeling such an audit “origin-tracing terrorism.”
The only concession Xi has made is that last September, after the pandemic had already devastated much of the world, he ordered enhanced oversight of Chinese labs handling lethal viruses.
Against this background, China has been comforted by Biden’s easing of pressure on it. Soon after Kabul fell to the Taliban last August, marking America’s humiliating defeat at the hands of terrorists, a weakened Biden appeared to bow to the Chinese demand that the U.S. stop investigating the virus’s origins by not extending the 90-day term of the intelligence inquiry that he had instituted, despite the probe failing to reach a definitive conclusion.
Since then, Biden has avoided any reference to the pandemic’s origins. And after having prematurely proclaimed on the Fourth of July that “we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus,” Biden is now preparing Americans for the “new normal” of living with COVID-19, not conquering it.
Biden’s first misstep occurred just after his inauguration as the 46th president when he announced America’s immediate rejoining of the WHO. He could have leveraged his predecessor’s withdrawal from the WHO to make that international organization take steps to separate itself from the malign influence of China before formalizing America’s reentry.
The WHO led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was complicit in China’s coverup. Indeed, it made important concessions to Beijing that may have compromised the search for the virus’s origins. So, America’s unconditional return to the WHO did little more than advertise U.S. weakness and harden Xi’s intransigence.
Then, on Jan. 26, 2021, Biden signed a presidential memorandum that ordered federal agencies to stop referring to the virus by the “geographic location of its origin,” saying that such references contribute to “racism.” So, as a matter of official U.S. policy, the virus could no more be linked to China.
Consequently, official U.S. reports, including the last annual unclassified intelligence report on threats to America, stopped mentioning the virus’s Wuhan origin. Yet, oddly, it has been okay to refer to the virus’s variants by their geographic origins or even slap on a racially tinged travel ban, as Biden did with eight southern Africa countries for five weeks after the omicron variant emerged.
More recently, the Biden administration’s inexplicable decision not to field a candidate against Tedros left his bid unopposed for a second five-year term as the WHO chief. Indeed, France, Germany and 15 other European Union countries, with possible U.S. acquiescence, took the lead in nominating Tedros for a second term, even as his home country of Ethiopia denounced him.
Here’s the paradox: Further undermining the WHO’s credibility, Tedros attended the Beijing Winter Olympics, despite a U.S.-led diplomatic boycott, and heaped renewed praise on China’s COVID-19 handling. In fact, Tedros carried the Olympic torch in a relay that also prominently featured another torchbearer, a Chinese military officer who led the ambush killing of 20 Indian troops in June 2020 and who, in gross violation of the Olympic spirit, is now being feted by China as a national hero. Yet, thanks to Western support, Tedros’s reelection in May has become a mere formality.
To Biden’s credit, last May he helped end the long suppression of an open debate on a possible lab leak by calling that hypothesis one of “two likely scenarios” on how the pandemic originated. Until then, the hypothesis was treated as a pure conspiracy theory by major U.S. news organizations, social-media giants and some influential scientists who hid their conflicts of interest. Facebook and Instagram even suspended accounts that repeatedly referred to the virus’s possible escape from a lab.
The concerted effort to obscure the truth also extended to U.S. scientific and bureaucratic institutions, largely because U.S. government agencies – from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to USAID – funded dangerous research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from 2014 to 2020. The long suppression of a debate only aided China’s designs, including giving it sufficient time to conceivably eliminate any incriminating evidence of its negligence or complicity in the worst disaster of our time.
One key question remains unanswered: Why were official U.S. agencies funding research on viruses at the WIV, which, according to the U.S. government’s own admission, was linked to the Chinese military? A January 2021 State Department fact sheet raised concern over “whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.” But why did the funding proceed despite that risk?
It appears likely that Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and his then-boss, Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), began funding risky experiments at the WIV so as to circumvent the restrictions in the U.S. on “gain of function” research — or altering the genetic make-up of pathogens to enhance their virulence or infectiousness. The NIH money was routed through the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, whose largest source of funds is the Pentagon. The Pentagon has yet to unequivocally deny that any of the almost $39 million it gave to EcoHealth Alliance ended up in Wuhan.
The NIH, for its part, has sought to obfuscate its role by scrubbing its website of the “gain of function” definition.
The Beijing Winter Olympics, meanwhile, symbolize an ascendant China that is too powerful to be punished for its COVID-19 coverup, its genocide in Xinjiang and its expansionism across Asia.
Relieving U.S. pressure on China is clearly a mistake. The Biden White House would do well to rebuild pressure on Beijing by lifting the veil on the precise role the U.S. played in supporting WIV research on increasing the transmissivity of bat coronaviruses to human cells. For starters, the U.S. should disclose the full extent of its WIV funding. America’s own transparency is essential for credible pressure on an opaque China.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
History will remember U.S. President Joe Biden for consigning Afghanistan to the dark age of terrorist rule.
Yet Biden still says he has “no apologies” for his Afghan debacle. America’s self-inflicted defeat and humiliation at the hands of a brutal, Pakistan-backed Islamist militia spawned the greatest victory for terrorists in the modern history of global jihadism.
“I make no apologies for what I did,” Biden defiantly stated at his recent news conference, his first in months. By simply washing his hands of the humanitarian and security nightmare that he created in Afghanistan, Biden has compounded the greatest U.S. foreign-policy disaster in decades.
At a time when global affairs are already in a precarious state, the costs of the Afghan blunder are becoming increasingly apparent, including weakening Biden’s hand against America’s principal adversaries, China and Russia.
While highlighting the decline in American power, the Afghan fiasco has created greater space for China’s muscular revisionism in Asia and enhanced Russia’s geopolitical ambitions in the former Soviet republics extending from Ukraine to Georgia and Kazakhstan.
Worse still, the Taliban’s triumph over the “Great Satan” is serving as a real shot in the arm for Islamic terrorist groups across the world, inspiring jihadi attacks.
One example was the Jan. 15 hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue by a British Pakistani man who sought to free a convicted female Pakistani terrorist, Aafia Siddiqui, serving an 86-year sentence at a nearby prison.
Emboldened militants in Syria in recent days attacked a major prison housing thousands of former ISIS fighters, triggering a six-day wider fight with American ground troops that included U.S. airstrikes. Hundreds reportedly died. It was the biggest confrontation involving the U.S. military in three years since ISIS lost the last remaining portion of its so-called caliphate.
Meanwhile, in the deadliest attack in several years on an Iraqi military base, jihadis recently killed 10 soldiers and an officer. Such attacks raise concerns over the possible rebirth of global terrorism, including the re-emergence of ISIS.
America’s retreat from Afghanistan, meanwhile, is proving a strategic boon for Russia and China, which have ratcheted up their military threats against Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively.
Whereas Russia has massed some 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border as if poised to invade Ukraine, a record number of Chinese warplanes have intruded into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense identification zone since October.
The U.S. may still be the world’s preeminent military power, but it is in no position to meaningfully take on China and Russia simultaneously. So the U.S.-NATO tensions with Moscow over the Russian military buildup around Ukraine risk whetting Chinese President Xi Jinping’s appetite for risk-taking, especially against Taiwan, his possible next target after notching up successes in the South China Sea and Hong Kong.
Biden’s Afghan disaster, meanwhile, has exacerbated security challenges for America’s regional friends, especially India, which now confronts a strengthening China-Pakistan-Taliban nexus. The rejuvenated epicenter for terrorism in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt threatens to detract from India’s current efforts to counter China’s border aggression, which began with stealth incursions into the northern Indian territory of Ladakh in April 2020.
While Biden has elevated the Russian military threat against Ukraine to an international crisis, he, in jarring contrast, has not uttered a word on China’s larger-scale Himalayan military buildup that threatens to ignite a war with one of America’s most vital strategic partners, India.
Xi’s summit this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing — the Chinese leader’s first face-to-face meeting with a head of state in nearly two years — underlines the deepening strategic axis between China and Russia, which are now “more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s,” according to a U.S. intelligence assessment.
This may be little more than a marriage of convenience so as to jointly collaborate against their common foe in Washington. But since the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, Beijing and Moscow have surprised America with major joint military exercises, including naval war games off Russia’s Far East coast in October and recent naval drills with Iran in the Gulf of Oman. The Sino-Russian collaboration reportedly extends to hypersonic-weapons technology.
Afghanistan may no longer be grabbing headlines in the West, yet it is ordinary Afghans who are paying for Biden’s blunder, as highlighted by the Taliban’s arbitrary detentions and killings, sexual enslavement of girls through forced “marriages” to their fighters, and stripping women and girls of their rights to education and equality.
The Taliban’s narco-terrorist state, serving as a haven for al-Qaida and other violent jihadi groups, is a threat to regional and international security.
The U.S., for its part, has suffered lasting damage to its international credibility and standing from Biden’s strategic folly in Afghanistan, including throwing America’s allies — the Afghan government and military — under the bus.
The damage is not only emboldening Russia, China and violent Islamists; it also has a bearing on America’s alliances, given that Biden rejected allied demands for a conditions-based withdrawal from Afghanistan.
This adds greater urgency to a question pending since earlier U.S. blunders in Iraq, Syria and Libya: How to reform alliances so that there is less U.S. diktat and more prior consultations with its allies?
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
As the world attempts to figure out how to live with COVID-19, it must also commit to identifying the missteps – accidental and otherwise – that caused the pandemic. That means, first and foremost, turning a critical eye toward China.
As the pandemic enters its third year, questions about COVID-19’s origins appear increasingly distant. But if we are to forestall another coronavirus pandemic in the twenty-first century, understanding the causes of the current one is imperative.
Our chances of eliminating COVID-19 now appear increasingly remote. But, as we attempt to figure out how to live with the virus, we must also identify the missteps – accidental and otherwise – that led us here. And that means, first and foremost, turning a critical eye toward China.
It is well known that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored early reports that a new, deadly coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan and hid evidence of human-to-human transmission, thereby enabling a local outbreak to become a global calamity. What remains to be determined is whether COVID-19 emerged naturally in wildlife or was leaked from a lab – namely, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Here, too, China has embraced obfuscation rather than transparency. Xi’s regime has blocked an independent forensic inquiry into COVID-19’s origins, arguing that any such investigation amounts to “origin-tracing terrorism.” After Australia called for a probe into China’s handling of the outbreak, Xi’s government punished it with a raft of informal sanctions.
China had help covering up its bad behavior. Early in the pandemic, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus parroted the Chinese government’s talking points and praised its handling of the outbreak. Instead of verifying China’s claims, the WHO broadcast them to the world.
Yet far from condemning this failure of global health leadership, France and Germany took the lead in nominating Tedros for a second term at the WHO’s helm, and the United States decided not to field a candidate to challenge him. Having run unopposed, Tedros will now lead this critical institution for another five years.
The West also helped China to divert attention from the lab-leak hypothesis. Not only are several labs in the West engaged in research to engineer super-viruses; Western governments have ties to the WIV – a French-designed institute where US-funded research has been carried out. Both the National Institutes of Health and USAID have issued grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a group studying bat coronaviruses in collaboration with WIV researchers.
The US government has not disclosed the full extent of its funding to WIV projects, let alone explained why its agencies would fund research at an institution linked to the Chinese military. A January 2021 State Department fact sheet proclaimed that the US has “a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.” But why was that risk deemed acceptable in the first place?
The conflicts of interest surrounding the lab-leak hypothesis distorted early discussions about the origins of COVID-19. A letter published in the Lancet in February 2020, signed by a group of virologists, is a case in point. The letter “strongly condemned” those “suggesting that COVID-19 did not have a natural origin.” The message was clear: to lend any credence to the possibility of a lab leak would be unscientific.
The letter turned out to be organized and drafted by the president of EcoHealth Alliance. But by the time the conflicts of interest came to light, it was too late. Major US news organizations and social-media giants were treating the lab-leak hypothesis as a baseless conspiracy theory, with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter censoring references to a lab accident.
It should always have been clear that the lab-leak hypothesis had merit: the 2004 outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in Beijing resulted from such a leak. Instead, frank discussion of the possibility was suppressed until May 2021, when US President Joe Biden announced that a lab accident was one of “two likely scenarios” on which US intelligence agencies would focus, as they carried out a 90-day inquiry into the pandemic’s origins.
By then, however, Chinese authorities had had plenty of time to cover whatever tracks there may have been. Add to that its unwillingness to cooperate in a probe, and it should not be surprising that the inquiry’s results were inconclusive.
But the exercise was apparently enough to convince Biden to take the pressure off China. Despite pledging to “do everything [possible] to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world,” he did not extend the intelligence inquiry, and he has since avoided any reference to the pandemic’s origins.
Xi announced last September that Chinese labs handling deadly pathogens would face closer scrutiny, but he continues to denounce any insinuation that the coronavirus could have been leaked. Meanwhile, China is profiting from the pandemic; exports are surging. The country has capitalized on the crisis to advance its geopolitical interests, including by stepping up its territorial aggression, from East Asia to the Himalayas.
But a reckoning may yet come. Nearly three-quarters of Americans now believe that it is “likely” that COVID-19 was leaked from the WIV. Moreover, as China’s neo-imperialist ambitions have become clear, unfavorable views of China have reached record highs in many advanced economies. If world leaders wanted a mandate to pursue further inquiries into the pandemic’s origins, it is safe to say they have it.
This is not the first made-in-China pandemic – the country also produced SARS in 2003, the Asian flu in 1957, the Hong Kong flu in 1968, and the Russian flu in 1977. If the world keeps letting China off the hook, it will not be the last.
Do you know that Taiwan plays an indirect role in the defense of India because its autonomous existence ties up a sizable portion of China’s armed forces? If China succeeds in recolonizing Taiwan, India’s security will come under greater pressure.
After swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the South China Sea’s geopolitical map and encroaching on Indian and Bhutanese borderlands, an expansionist China is itching to move on Taiwan. This island democracy is a technological powerhouse central to the international semiconductor business. Taiwan also plays an indirect role in the defence of India because its autonomous existence ties up a sizable portion of China’s armed forces.
Beijing’s claim that Taiwan has “always been” part of China is dubious, at best, and based on revisionist history. For most of its history, Taiwan was inhabited by Malayo-Polynesian tribes and had no ties with China until the island’s Dutch colonial rulers in the 17th century invited Chinese workers to emigrate. Geographically, Taiwan is closer to the Philippines than China.
The world cannot afford to let Taiwan go the way of the once-autonomous Tibet, which was gobbled up by Mao Zedong’s regime in the early 1950s. Tibet’s annexation remains one of the most far-reaching geopolitical developments in post-World War II history, which resulted in China imposing itself as India’s neighbour and waging unending aggression.
Today, Taiwan has all the attributes of a robust independent state, and most Taiwanese want it to stay that way. But China’s new Mao, Xi Jinping, calls the island’s incorporation a “historic mission”. Xi is working to implement the expansionist agenda that Mao left unfinished, which explains why he has not spared even tiny Bhutan.
In the way a porcupine’s quills protect it from larger predators by making it difficult to digest, Taiwan needs to create porcupine-like defences with weapons like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. By turning a Chinese invasion into a bloody and protracted guerrilla campaign, a porcupine Taiwan would inflict high costs on China, including major military casualties.
But no less important than bolstering its defences is Taiwan’s imperative to carve out greater international space for itself. If Taiwan gains greater presence on the global stage, it will be able to shore up its status as a de facto nation, making it more difficult for China to seize the island in the way it occupied Tibet and Xinjiang soon after coming under communist rule in 1949. The then-independent Tibet, for example, should have applied for United Nations membership shortly after that international body came into existence in 1945, but it never did.
China, as a step towards annexing Taiwan, is working to wipe out its international identity by bribing countries to break off diplomatic ties with Taipei and by vetoing Taiwan’s presence even in international forums. Its poaching has left only 13 nations and the Vatican still recognizing Taiwan.
But recently, China has been forced to eat humble pie by a puny nation. Lithuania, with just 18,500 active military personnel, has set an example for bigger countries on how to stand up to the global Goliath’s bullying. Undeterred by China’s sanctions campaign against it, Lithuania has allowed Taiwan to open a de facto embassy. With some other European states — from the Czech Republic and Poland to Slovakia — already seeking to deepen ties with Taiwan, Lithuania indeed promises to serve as a bellwetherof sorts.
India, locked in several military standoffs with China, needs to think and act creatively, including helping Taiwan by learning from its historical mistake on Tibet. When China invaded Tibet in 1950, India opposed Tibet’s desperate plea for a UN discussion before acquiescing in the Chinese annexation of the buffer, including withdrawing its military escorts from Tibet and handing over Tibet’s postal, telegraph and telephone services that it was running.
If Taiwan is not to go Tibet’s way, India must do its part to help Taiwan reinforce its defences and self-governing status. India must follow the lead of Japan and the US in strengthening ties with Taipei. And it should emulate the example set by minnow Lithuania and allow Taiwan to rename its “Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre” in New Delhi as the “Taiwanese Representative Office”, while rebranding its own mission in Taipei as the “India Representative Office”.
Make no mistake: Taiwan is on the frontline of international defence against Xi’s totalitarianism and expansionism, which have spawned a Muslim gulag in Xinjiang, brutal repression in Tibet and Himalayan aggression. Major democracies must act before it becomes too late to save Taiwan, a democratic success story. If China succeeds in recolonizing Taiwan, India’s security will come under greater pressure.
The writer is professor of strategic studies, Centre for Policy Research.
The Quad, a partnership of democracies that had once appeared more concept than reality, has been fortified. But it faces important challenges, including an expansive agenda that could dilute its focus and the absence of an economic pillar to lend support.
Resurrected in November 2017, the Australia-India-Japan-United States Quad has come a long way toward cementing a strategic coalition of the leading democracies of the Indo-Pacific region.
But the question of where the Quad is headed has gained greater salience in the wake of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) taking effect with Japan and Australia included in it.
RCEP, billed as the world’s largest trade bloc, and the separate Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) seek to promote economic integration around China and Japan, even as Beijing pursues its neo-imperial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that has already ensnared some vulnerable states in sovereignty-eroding debt traps. The U.S. and India were to be members of CPTPP and RCEP, respectively, but then both decided not to join.
The change of administrations in the U.S. and Japan in 2021 and in Australia in 2018, far from slowing momentum, has helped build continuity, making the Quad’s future more durable.
The past year will be remembered for the first-ever Quad leaders summits — a virtual summit in March, and then an in-person summit at the White House in September. The summits yielded the first-ever Quad joint statements, which articulated a clear-eyed vision. Until then, the pattern was for each state to issue its own statement at the end of a meeting of officials from the Quad countries.
To be sure, when U.S. President Joe Biden was elected, there was uncertainty over the Quad’s future, including whether Biden would carry forward his predecessor’s FOIP strategy. Only after being sworn in did Biden embrace the FOIP concept and speak about the Quad.
There is a reason why the Quad remains central to America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, despite the new, Biden-initiated AUKUS alliance with Australia and Britain. The U.S., given its relative decline, needs its allies more than ever so that, in seeking to address international challenges, American power is augmented with that of its allies and strategic partners. Asian power equilibrium cannot be built without Japan, India and Australia.
In contrast to the AUKUS alliance’s security mission, the Quad now has an agenda extending to geoeconomic issues. While then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration helped give the Quad strategic meaning, the Biden administration has sought to reorient the group toward dealing with geoeconomic challenges.
The Quad initiatives since 2021 reflect this new focus. The initiative to build resilient supply chains, for example, extends from the technology and public-health sectors to semiconductors and clean energy. It draws strength from the hard lessons many economies have learned about China-dependent supply chains.
The Quad is also seeking to deliver transparent, high-standard infrastructure by coordinating technical assistance and capacity-building efforts with regional states. The objective is to set up public-private partnership projects that are properly planned and financially and environmentally sustainable, in contrast to China’s BRI projects, many of which have also faced allegations of corruption and malpractice.
The Quad Vaccine Partnership, the most-visible initiative, is aimed at fostering equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines by expanding vaccine manufacturing capacity in the quartet and by donating vaccines to other countries. Vaccine donations collectively by the quartet already rank the largest in the world.
Such initiatives show that the Quad, although catalyzed into action by China’s aggressive actions and irascible behavior, has become more directed toward larger geoeconomic issues.
A partnership of democracies that had once appeared more concept than reality has been fortified, with its leaders pledging to promote a rules-based Indo-Pacific that is “undaunted by coercion.”
However, the Quad’s new attention on global issues, from climate change — Biden’s pet concern — to cybersecurity and the pandemic, risks diluting the group’s Indo-Pacific focus. Its expansive geoeconomic agenda could also weigh it down.
Furthermore, American, Australian, Indian and Japanese interests are not entirely congruent. For example, India, facing the China-Pakistan strategic axis, maintains a land-based defense posture, whereas Australia, Japan and the U.S. are all focused on the maritime domain. And while America’s main objective regarding China is nonmilitary — to counter its geopolitical, ideological and economic challenge to U.S. preeminence — Japan and India confront a direct Chinese threat.
According to Chinese state media commentary, Japan and Australia’s participation in RCEP has taken “the wind out of the Quad’s anti-Chinese sails.” Australia and Japan have consistently refused to bend to Chinese pressure. But they have been lured by the billions of additional dollars that they will likely earn from RCEP’s boosting of regional trade, even as China gains a greater say in shaping trade rules in the Indo-Pacific.
Arrangements like RCEP, CPTPP and BRI, in fact, underscore the imperative for an economic pillar for the FOIP vision in order to give the Quad more comprehensive meaning. The Biden administration says it will unveil an economic framework that will go beyond these arrangements.
The Quad’s security role needs to be complemented with a concretized Indo-Pacific economic dimension so that security and economic interests are fused. Otherwise, if its members pick economic interests over security interests, the Quad’s relevance will erode.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”
Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru talk over a cup of tea in Beijing in October 1954: The dogged courtship of Mao by Nehru helped create New Delhi’s China problem. © Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
A Japanese-made carrier is anchored near an LNG plant on Sakhalin island: The changing dynamics compound the challenges for Japan. © Reuters
Indian and U.S. soldiers take part in a joint combat exercise in Ranikhet, India, in September 2016: India holds more annual military exercises with America than any other country. © Reuters
Chinese marine surveillance ship cruising in the East China Sea near Senkaku Islands in February 2021. (Photo by Hitoshi Nakama) © Kyodo
Warships attend a joint naval exercise of the Iranian, Chinese and Russian navies in the northern Indian Ocean on Jan. 19. © West Asia News Agency/Reuters
Leaders of participating nations at the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership meeting in Singapore, pictured in November 2018: the question of where the Quad is headed has gained greater salience in the wake of RCEP taking effect on Jan. 1. © Reuters
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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