Monthly Archives: April 2024

The West Is Hastening Its Own Decline

Posted on by

The West’s strategic overreach vis-à-vis Russia is not only alienating much of the rest of the world, but also providing a windfall for its real rival, China. Unless it changes course, the West is likely to lose its global supremacy, including its hold on the international financial architecture.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

MUNICH – Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, the West has desperately sought ways to punish Russia without harming itself in the process. It has mostly failed.

So far, not even unprecedented sanctions have derailed Russia’s economy, let alone compelled the Kremlin to change its behavior. Instead, Russia has pivoted to a war economy: it now produces nearly three times as many munitions as NATO, including more missiles than it was producing before the war began.

Much of the West, by contrast, is facing economic stagnation, owing not least to the switch away from cheap Russian energy to costlier supplies from elsewhere. The United Kingdom is officially in recession, and there has been no growth in the eurozone since the third quarter of 2022, when gas prices surged, leading the European Central Bank to start raising interest rates to stem runaway inflation. Higher fuel prices have helped turn former economic powerhouse Germany into the worst-performing developed economy.

European growth is not the only casualty of Western sanctions against Russia. The US dollar – which was already facing “stealth erosion” before the Ukraine war – appears to have lost some of its global influence, even in oil markets, as countries pursue alternatives to the greenback in response to the West’s decision to weaponize finance. Meanwhile, rising gold purchases by central banks in China, Turkey, India, Kazakhstan, and Eastern Europe, coupled with greater geopolitical uncertainty, have helped drive prices to a record high.

The European Commission’s move to seize the profits generated by frozen Russian central-bank assets would reinforce these trends. Given the centrality of central banks in the global financial system, their assets have historically been considered sacrosanct. But Russia’s assets – over two-thirds of which are held by the Brussels-based clearing house Euroclear – were frozen unilaterally by Western governments, without authorization from the International Court of Justice or the United Nations Security Council, as required by international law.

Now, with “Ukraine fatigue” weakening Western support for continued military and financial aid, the European Commission wants to start tapping the €3.25 billion ($3.45 billion) in annual accrued interest on the frozen assets. Under its current proposal, most of the revenues would be channeled through the European Peace Facility, which refunds EU states for sending arms to Ukraine, with the rest going to the EU’s central budget, to be used to strengthen Ukraine’s weapons-manufacturing capacity.

But such a move would be unlikely to help turn the tide in the Ukraine war. What Ukraine really needs more than weapons and funds are new recruits to replenish the ranks of its exhausted and depleted forces. Here, its options are limited: not even draconian conscription practices have been able to offset the growing troop shortfall.

What seizing Russia’s earnings would do is set a dangerous precedent in international law and deal a blow to Europe’s credibility as a champion of a rules-based world order; the Commission’s proposed “legal pathway” amounts to lawfare, pure and simple. It would also signal to other countries that their money is not safe in the West, thereby strengthening further their incentive to seek alternatives to Western institutions and currencies. If this trend continues, the West’s financial-sanctions arsenal will be weakened considerably. Already, the West’s routine use of sanctions is reducing their impact.

Not only do Western sanctions fail to change the behavior of the government being targeted, whether Russia, Iran, Myanmar, or Syria; they also almost invariably advance China’s commercial and strategic interests. In fact, no country is profiting more from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and the West’s response to it – than China.

Beyond expanding the international use of the renminbi, Western sanctions against Russia created an opportunity for China to secure greater cheap supplies of Russian oil, gas, and grains. Transported along secure overland routes, these supplies would likely continue being delivered even in the event of a war with the West, easing a major source of anxiety for China over its designs on Taiwan.

Moreover, China has more than doubled its nuclear-weapons arsenal since 2020, and it is expanding its conventional forces faster than any other country has since World War II. Yet the West is so fixated on punishing Russia that China has managed to avoid much scrutiny, let alone pushback. US President Joe Biden, for example, is now attempting to “manage competition” with China by laying greater stress on diplomacy than on deterrence, with his latest budget woefully underfunding key enabling capabilities for the Indo-Pacific and even slashing the production target for Virginia-class submarines from two per year to just one. Small wonder that China is quietly oiling the Kremlin’s war machine. For China, the longer the West stays distracted, the better.

Make no mistake: China poses a far greater threat to Western interests and the rules-based world order than Russia. Whereas Russia’s designs are largely confined to its neighborhood, China has the ambition to supplant the US as the preeminent global power. It may well also have the means: China’s population and economy are about ten times larger than Russia’s, and China spends some four times as much as Russia on its military.

The West, which accounts for just 12% of the global population, should not underestimate the potential consequences of simultaneously enabling China’s increasingly aggressive rise and alienating the rest of the world. Unless it abandons its strategic overreach vis-à-vis Russia and turns its attention to its real rival, China, the West is likely to lose its global supremacy, including its hold on the international financial architecture.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2024.

Biden’s China policy prioritizes diplomacy over deterrence

Posted on by

Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands?

With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align.

The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war. So, to forestall a war over Taiwan, Biden has made a series of overtures to Xi’s regime, including stressing, along with his G7 partners, that the West is seeking to “de-risk” its relationship with China, not “decouple” from the world’s second-largest economy.

Notably, after sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing, Biden held a summit meeting with Xi in Woodside, California, last November. Biden’s recent phone call with Xi was part of the ongoing effort, as the White House put it, to responsibly manage ties with China.

But what stands out is the current US focus on a thaw with Beijing, instead of concentrating on deterring China’s aggressive expansionism. In fact, with Biden’s China strategy incorporating no clear vision of success, a “managed competition” has become an end in itself, instead of being a means to an end.

That deterrence has assumed a subsidiary role in policy is apparent from Biden’s latest proposed defense budget, which reinforces the administration’s approach of not taking the China threat seriously. It significantly underfunds key enabling capabilities for the Indo-Pacific and even cuts programs, including slashing the production goal for Virginia-class submarines from two per year to just one.

Funding just one Virginia-class attack boat is a break from the US navy’s steady two-per-year demand signal. The US is committed to selling up to three Virginia-class submarines to Australia in the 2030s under the AUKUS deal, which would make the American submarine deficit worse. In fact, America’s fiscal year 2025 budget seeks only six new battle force ships while retiring 10.

Contrast that with the way China churns out ever more weapon systems and platforms, with its surface naval fleet now significantly larger than the American fleet in number of ships. And, in terms of number of submarines, China, by embarking on a new generation of nuclear-armed subs, possibly with Russian assistance, is set to go beyond its current near parity with the US.

Meanwhile, qualitative improvements in battle force ships and more aggressive tactics by the Chinese navy are already making it more difficult for American ships and submarines to operate in China’s maritime backyard.

Make no mistake: Biden’s more conciliatory approach to China has so far yielded no tangible dividends. It has neither eased Beijing’s coercive pressures on Taiwan nor diminished China’s aggressive efforts to entrench its dominance in the South China Sea.

If anything, it has only emboldened China’s pursuit of strategic dominance in Asia. Washington now admits that China is even aiding Russia’s war in Ukraine by transferring technologies and sharing geospatial intelligence.

According to Beijing’s readout, Xi cautioned Biden during their recent phone conversation that Taiwan is a “red line that must not be crossed.”

With Xi preparing China for war against Taiwan, it has become more imperative than ever for the US to strengthen deterrence, including bolstering Taiwan’s defenses.

Yet, there is a huge backlog in US military sales to Taiwan, with weapons deals announced as long ago as 2017 still unfulfilled. For Taiwan, the US Congress previously authorized a US$1 billion-a-year replenishment of drawdown funding, but that has been slashed to US$500 million in the Pentagon’s latest budget.

In contrast to the Biden administration’s generous weapons shipments to Ukraine, there appears no urgency in providing arms to Taiwan to counter China’s increasing aggressiveness.

The administration also seems loath to address its resolve gap by stating unambiguously that the US has the strategic intent and political will to defend Taiwan against an attack.

Biden, asked last September whether American forces would defend Taiwan if China attacked, replied with a caveat, “Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.” But what would be the US response if, instead of an unprecedented attack, Xi launched a wily strategy of gradually escalating aggression against Taiwan anchored in stealth, deception and surprise?

Deterrence — or peace through strength, as it is commonly called — has stood the test of time. It has prevented wars of aggression. But failure to build and sustain adequate deterrent capabilities, by signaling weakness, can invite aggression.

Deterrence, however, must always be accompanied by diplomacy so as to forestall a destabilizing arms race or unintended conflict and create space for eventual compromise and reconciliation.

Under then-US president Ronald Reagan, the US grand strategy against the Soviet Union was designed to apply maximum pressure on the Soviet Union — diplomatic, ideological, economic and military — while pursuing a policy of engagement with Moscow. It was as much carrot as it was stick, contributing ultimately to the Soviet Union’s disintegration.

By contrast, Biden’s approach to China is more carrot than stick. “I don’t want to contain China,” Biden gratuitously declared while visiting Hanoi last September. “We’re not trying to hurt China.” The goal, Biden said, is “getting the relationship right” between the US and China.

Biden has repeatedly assured Xi that the US would not seek to change China’s political system or direct alliances against it.

Prioritizing diplomacy over deterrence has resulted in a strange paradox: the stronger established power, in attempting to preserve the status quo, is seeking to appease the revisionist power, whose expansionism continues apace.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

The South China Sea Could Boil Over

Posted on by

With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza stretching its military resources thin, a direct confrontation with China is the last thing the US needs. But America’s refusal to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism, not least in the South China Sea, may well make a clash more likely – and more destructive.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

HANOI – For over a decade now, China has been working stealthily to alter the territorial and maritime status quo in the Indo-Pacific – an effort that has increasingly stoked tensions with regional neighbors like Australia, India, Japan, Taiwan, and several Southeast Asian countries, as well as the United States. And with US attention and resources focused on conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, China has lately become even more aggressive in its expansionism. Chinese regional hegemony is closer than ever.

Almost daily, China finds a new way to bully Taiwan, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly pledged to “reunify” with the mainland (though that objective has no basis in international law or history). As China takes steps like encroaching on Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island with warships, it raises the risk of a war that would transform global geopolitics.

There are war clouds also gathering over the Himalayas, where a military standoff triggered by China’s repeated furtive encroachments on India’s borderlands has dragged on for nearly four years. And in the East China Sea, China’s intrusions into the territorial waters and airspace of the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China claims as its own, are fueling Japan’s drive toward rearmament.

But the biggest risks of escalation may well lie in the South China Sea, where China’s aggressive efforts to entrench its dominance have regularly led to dangerous near-confrontations, including with US warships and aircraft. For years, China has been working relentlessly to cement its dominance over the South China Sea and exploit that region’s vast resources and strategic position as a critical corridor through which one-third of global shipping passes.

To this end, China has constructed artificial islands atop remote reefs and atolls and transformed them into forward military bases. Though these activities constitute a blatant violation of international law, including a 2016 ruling by an arbitral tribunal at The Hague that invalidated Chinese claims in the South China Sea, there has been little pushback from three successive US administrations. As a result, China has managed to expand its maritime borders unilaterally without firing a single shot.

Now, China’s navy and air force routinely patrol its neighbors’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and its coast guard – the world’s largest and most militarized – has conducted “intrusive patrols” of others’ offshore oil and gas fields. Chinese coast-guard vessels, including megaships, wantonly employ “non-lethal” weapons like high-pressure water cannons and long-range acoustic devices.

Moreover, China has been sending its navy and coast guard to shadow, hound, and harass vessels belonging to the US, as well as to smaller neighbors, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, with territorial claims in the area. Even fishing boats have been targeted and destroyed. With Chinese ships now being deliberately designed for “ramming” and “shouldering” other vessels, it seems clear that China will become more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims – and the associated fishing and energy-exploration rights – in the South China Sea.

China’s militarization of the South China Sea poses the greatest threat to the Philippines and Vietnam. But whereas Vietnam pursues an independent foreign policy, which its prime minister calls a historical imperative, the Philippines is a longstanding US ally, with a mutual defense treaty in place since 1951.

And yet, when it comes to China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, the US has largely left the Philippines to fend for itself. In 2012, when China occupied the Scarborough Shoal, a traditional Philippine fishing ground located within the country’s EEZ, US President Barack Obama’s administration stayed silent. Since then, China has steadily eroded the Philippines’ control of other areas within its EEZ, but the US has offered its ally little beyond statements of support.

This is unlikely to change any time soon. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza stretching American military resources thin, a direct confrontation with China is the last thing the US needs. But refusing to stand up to China may well make a clash more likely – and more destructive.

Already, the US has allowed China to gain such a strong footing in the South China Sea that restoring the status quo of just a decade ago would be all but impossible without a full-scale war. And, as the recent increase in provocations in the South China Sea indicate, Xi is bolder than ever, despite the rising risk of escalation, accidental or otherwise. In the meantime, America’s failure to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism is undermining its own security and trade interests.

US President Joe Biden insists that the US wants “competition with China, not conflict.” But China wants strategic dominance – beginning with the South China Sea – and it is willing to risk conflict to get it. The South China Sea has become a test of American resolve, which Xi is expecting Biden to fail. The world, especially the countries on the front lines of Chinese expansionism, can only hope that Xi is wrong, and that the US finds ways to rein in China without armed conflict.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2024.

China’s Indian land grab has become a strategic disaster

Posted on by

Xi Jinping faces dilemma in resolving crisis without losing face

An Indian fighter plane flies over a mountain range in Ladakh: The Chinese army would be hard put to get the better of India’s armed forces in a Himalayan war. © Reuters

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

The military standoff along the long Himalayan frontier between China and India may not be grabbing international headlines these days given the open warfare raging elsewhere in the world, but the threat of the confrontation returning to armed conflict cannot be discounted.

Last week, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar called the Chinese border situation “very tense and dangerous.” Both sides have been significantly ramping up deployments of troops and weapons, girding for the possibility of war.

Soon to enter its fifth year, the current standoff was triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments into India’s northernmost territory of Ladakh in April 2020, just before thawing ice would normally reopen Himalayan access routes after the brutal winter.

Ahead of this year’s spring thaw and possible new Chinese provocations, India moved an additional 10,000 troops to the frontier. “The possibility that we may face a similar situation that we faced in 2020 is keeping us active all the time,” Indian Defense Secretary Giridhar Aramane said last month.

China has also been expanding its troop presence and frenetically building warfare-related infrastructure along the inhospitable frontier. This has included boring tunnels and shafts in mountainsides to set up command positions, reinforced troop shelters and weapons-storage facilities.

In addition, it has planted settlers in new militarized border villages that are becoming the equivalent of the artificial islands it created in the South China Sea to serve as forward military bases.

About 100,000 troops remain locked in a faceoff along the border’s westernmost Ladakh sector. Another key sector is the vulnerable area where the borders of Tibet, Bhutan and India’s Sikkim state meet, a 22-kilometer-wide corridor known as “the chicken neck” due to the crooked way it connects India’s northeast to the country’s heartland.

The corridor’s vulnerability has been increased by Chinese encroachments on Bhutan’s southwest borderlands, with the chicken neck now potentially within striking distance of China’s long-range conventional weapons.

There are also troop faceoffs in the eastern Himalayas along Tibet’s long border with India’s Arunachal Pradesh state. This has long been a heavily militarized area, largely because China claims the Indian state is part of Tibet, although the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, says this has no historical basis.

Talks to de-escalate tensions along the frontier have made little progress. In January, Indian Army chief Gen. Manoj Pande said the standoff would continue until China rolled back from its Ladakh encroachments, calling restoration of the previous frontier line “our first aim to achieve.”

Despite taking some flak at home for losing border areas to Chinese encroachment, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to seek a negotiated end to the crisis.

While his government has banned numerous Chinese apps, blocked investments by certain Chinese companies and launched enforcement actions against others over alleged tax and foreign exchange violations, it has not imposed broad sanctions against its northern neighbor.

Consequently, despite the border confrontation, China’s annual trade surplus with India has continued to rise; it is now larger than India’s annual defense spending.

Modi discussed the crisis in brief with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of multilateral summits in November 2022 and August 2023. Jaishankar reiterated earlier this month that New Delhi remains “committed to finding a fair, reasonable” agreement.

Now Xi is faced with the challenge of resolving the Himalayan military crisis without losing face.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, right, has discussed the Himalayan crisis with Chinese President Xi Jinping at two separate multilateral summits. © Reuters

For four years, tens of thousands of Chinese troops have remained deployed in extremely harsh conditions along the Himalayan frontier. If Xi somehow came to an agreement with Modi about undoing China’s territorial encroachments, he would face questions about why he embarked on the aggression in the first place.

The longer the standoff persists, though, the greater the risk that Beijing turns India into an enduring enemy, a development that would weigh down China’s global and regional ambitions.

Xi has already been confronted by his failure to anticipate India’s robust military and strategic response, with the standoff driving New Delhi closer to Washington. It also set in motion a major military buildup and modernization drive, as illustrated by a flight test last week to demonstrate that India now can put multiple independently targetable nuclear warheads on a single intercontinental ballistic missile.

Since the standoff began, India has tested several other leading-edge missile systems, including a hypersonic cruise missile, a hybrid missile-torpedo for use against submarines and aircraft carriers, an anti-radiation missile for destroying radar-equipped air defense systems and a new generation, intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads.

India has also been importing major weapon systems from the U.S. as well as France and other sources. In November, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told his U.S. counterpart that their two governments are “in agreement on strategic issues, including countering China’s aggression.” India’s growing alignment with the U.S. undoubtedly worries Xi.

Without the elements of stealth, deception and surprise that characterized China’s 2020 encroachments, the People’s Liberation Army would be hard put to get the better of India’s armed forces in a Himalayan war. While the PLA relies heavily on conscripts, India has an all-volunteer force that is considered the world’s most experienced in mountain warfare.

As two of the world’s most ancient civilizations, China and India need to find ways to peacefully coexist as neighbors and to cooperate on shared objectives. But it is far from certain that reconciliation between the two most populous nations will be possible while Xi and the Chinese Communist Party remain in power.

Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”