New disclosures reveal that China’s planned super-dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo — the world’s highest-altitude major river, better known as the Brahmaputra — is not a single structure. Rather, it is a a vast, tunnel-linked hydropower and water-diversion complex, spanning roughly 150 kilometers through the Himalayas.
The project would transform an internationally shared river, originating in water-rich Tibet, into a strategic instrument of state power.
For years, China’s super-dam was discussed as a single, if colossal, piece of infrastructure. That description is now obsolete. What Beijing is constructing on the so-called “Everest of Rivers,” near Tibet’s border with India, is not just the largest dam ever attempted. It is an extensive subterranean network designed to give China effective command over the river before it reaches any downstream country.
A cascade of barrages, reservoirs and power stations — linked by giant tunnels bored through the world’s highest mountain range — will together form a titanic, integrated hydropower system.
It remains unclear whether some of the impounded water will be diverted into what Beijing calls the Great South-North Water Diversion Project. While the eastern and central routes — already operational — transfer water from China’s southern rivers to its arid north, including Beijing, the controversial western line aims to reroute waters from Tibet-originating international rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people across South and Southeast Asia.
The new project is centered near the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra, where the river makes a dramatic U-turn around a Himalayan peak before plunging toward India. Over a stretch of just 30 miles, the river drops some 6,500 feet — one of the steepest descents of any major river on Earth.
China plans to exploit this extraordinary gradient not with a single concrete wall, but by diverting the river through multiple tunnels, some extending more than 12 miles, to feed a cascade of five power stations. Their combined generating capacity is estimated at over 60 gigawatts — almost three times that of the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest.
This design fundamentally alters the risk calculus for downstream states. Beijing has described the project as “run-of-the-river,” a term meant to reassure neighboring countries that water storage — and therefore Chinese control — will be limited. But the scale of tunneling and the interlinked reservoirs undermines that claim. Even without massive surface reservoirs, the ability to divert, withhold or abruptly release enormous volumes of water through subterranean channels gives China de facto control over the river’s flow just before it leaves Tibet, which Beijingannexed in 1951.
By occupying Tibet, China effectively redrew the water map of much of Asia. The Tibetan Plateau is the source of ten major river systems that together sustain nearly one-fifth of the world’s population. China’s intensive dam-building and resource extraction across the plateau since the 1990s thus poses a growing risk to Asian water security, ecological stability and regional peace. Control over the headwaters of key transboundary rivers confers immense leverage, turning water into a potential geopolitical tool and raising the specter of environmental disaster and conflict.
Nothing illustrates these dangers more starkly than the current gargantuan project, which officially began in 2025, although evidence suggests preparatory work started much earlier. What is taking shape is, in strategic terms, a hydrological weapon system. It is capable of degrading fragile ecosystems while giving China unprecedented coercive leverage over South Asia — especially India.
There is also a profound seismic gamble. The project lies in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones, where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates collide.
Geologists warn of reservoir-triggered seismicity, in which the immense weight of stored water increases stress along fault lines, even if the statistical probability of a major quake remains uncertain. A partial failure, caused by an earthquake or a massive landslide into a reservoir, could unleash a cascading flood racing toward India’s densely populated Assam Valley, with catastrophic consequences for downstream communities, cities and infrastructure.
What makes this project uniquely destabilizing is not only its scale but its opacity. China has released no meaningful technical details, including information on design parameters or water-storage capacity. The project has proceeded without environmental impact assessments open to international scrutiny and without consultation with downstream states that stand to bear the greatest risks.
This is a textbook case of hydrological hegemony: unilateral control over a shared lifeline exercised by an upstream power.
The international response has been strikingly muted. Governments that rightly scrutinize Chinese ports, telecommunications networks and supply chains have largely treated this mega-project as a regional matter rather than a global concern. That is a mistake. Water insecurity is a well-documented accelerator of conflict, forced migration and state fragility. A project capable of degrading ecosystems and affecting tens of millions of people downstream implicates not only Asian stability but the international order itself.
China’s Brahmaputra mega-system should therefore be understood for what it is: an unprecedented experiment in high-altitude engineering, ecological transformation and geopolitical leverage rolled into one. It is a strategic instrument whose consequences will flow far beyond the Himalayas.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House, many foreign governments assumed his second term would simply mirror the first—more noise, more tariffs, more brash moves, but no fundamental break. They misjudged him. In its first year itself, Trump’s second presidency has redefined the norms, institutions and expectations that have governed international politics since the end of the Cold War.
What once looked like impulsive theatre has hardened into a governing philosophy. Unpredictability is no longer a quirk of Trump’s personality; it is a strategic tool he deploys openly. Norm violations are no longer tactical deviations; they have become a defining feature of American policy.
The result is a more transactional, coercive and personalized global order. In this order, power is asserted directly, institutions are circumvented or stripped of authority, and stability is offered only in exchange for submission.
More fundamentally, Trump is not simply eroding the international order. He is attempting to construct an alternative in its place.
From disruption to doctrine
During Trump’s first term, allies and adversaries alike learned to discount much of what he said. Tweets contradicted policy. Threats were issued and withdrawn. In his second term, however, the pattern has changed. Disruption itself has become US doctrine. His administration now treats uncertainty not as a risk to be managed, but as leverage to be exploited.
This shift is visible across domains. Trade policy is no longer governed primarily by economic logic but wielded as an instrument of political coercion. Diplomacy is no longer mediated through institutions but centralized in the president himself—his whims and fancies, and his efforts to expand an already-sprawling personal business empire. Military power is no longer restrained by concerns of legitimacy but openly deployed to assert control over other states’ resources and territory. Soft power—the quiet, accumulative influence of norms, culture and credibility—has been dismissed as weakness.
The pattern is unmistakable. Trump no longer seeks to lead the international system; he seeks to dominate it, transaction by transaction, deal by deal.
Nowhere is this shift clearer than in trade. By weaponizing tariffs, Trump has ushered in an era of what Western executives now call “tariff roulette.”
Tariffs have been moved from the margins of economic policy to the centre of American statecraft. On April 2, 2025—branded by the White House as “Liberation Day”—he invoked America’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose a universal 10% tariff on all imports. This was not a negotiating tactic aimed at reforming rules; it was a unilateral assertion of power.
Targeted tariffs have gone even further. These measures are not calibrated responses to unfair trade practices but punitive tools meant to force capitulation. Worse still, they are unpredictable. Announcements are frequently made with little warning, often through social media, leaving governments and firms scrambling to respond.
Months after concluding a trade agreement with South Korea, Trump abruptly raised US tariffs on South Korean goods from 15% to 25%. His tariffs on India now exceed even those imposed on China, America’s principal strategic rival. Agreements offer no insulation; strategic partnerships provide no security.
The economic effects are already evident in the US. Business confidence has been shaken by the inability to plan investment or supply chains amid sudden policy reversals. Inflationary pressures have intensified, with US personal consumption expenditures projected to rise by more than three per cent. Confronted with policy-driven volatility, the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates on hold to avoid amplifying uncertainty.
The deeper damage, however, is systemic. The global trading system depends less on low tariffs than on credible commitments. Trump has shattered the expectation that the US will adhere to predictable, norms-based processes. In its place, he has delivered a stark message: stability is available only through direct, bilateral concessions to Washington. Multilateral rules no longer protect; they merely delay punishment.
Rules give way to raw power
If weaponized trade represents the economic pillar of Trump’s new order, the creation of the “Board for Peace” is its institutional centrepiece. Launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, the Board is presented as a bold alternative to what Trump calls the United Nations’ “permanent failure” to resolve modern conflicts.
The contrast could not be sharper. The UN, for all its flaws, derives legitimacy from process: universal membership, formal rules and a (sometimes paralyzing) commitment to sovereignty and law. The Board for Peace rejects this model entirely. Membership is selective, reportedly contingent on substantial financial contributions. Decision-making authority is centralized. Trump himself holds absolute veto power over its agenda, decisions and membership—and even the designation of his successor. In other words, the Board is effectively a one-man show.
What is being set up is privatized global governance. Conflict resolution becomes a pay-to-play enterprise, overseen by personal authority. Trump has said the Board will “work with” the UN. Yet he has also openly suggested that it could replace it. In practice, the Board is already a mechanism to bypass international law rather than enforce it.
Actions speak louder than words.When Trump arbitrarily rescinded Canada’s invitation to join the Board soon after its launch, he revealed its true nature: not a forum governed by rules, but a court governed by favour. The message to the world is that peace is no longer a collective good. It is a commodity, dispensed at the discretion of Washington.
Another dramatic shift in Trump’s second term has occurred in the Western Hemisphere. Long portrayed as an isolationist, Trump has in fact embraced a form of aggressive expansionism. The US is no longer merely asserting influence in the Americas; it is asserting ownership.
On January 3, American forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by carrying out the first bombing of a South American capital in modern history. Trump subsequently declared that the US would “run the country and take its oil.” The statement was not a gaffe. It was a declaration of intent that is now being implemented. Proceeds from selling stolen oil are being deposited in a US bank account in Qatar, to be spent without US congressional approval. Venezuelan oil worth $500 million has already been sold, according to the White House.
The military action against Venezuela followed America’s large-scale naval deployments in the Caribbean, its unilateral renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” and renewed discussions about annexing Greenland and reasserting direct control over the Panama Canal. These moves reflect a coherent worldview of the Trump administration: North and South Americas constitute a privileged zone of US control.
Trump has revived the Monroe Doctrine not as a warning to external powers, but as a license for military intervention or political interference in other nations’ domestic affairs. Sovereignty, in this framework, belongs not to states but to those strong enough to enforce it. The language of partnership has been replaced by the language of possession.
As hard power has been elevated, US soft power has been systematically dismantled. Funding for USAID has been slashed. Voice of America has been effectively shuttered. Cultural diplomacy has withered.
Soft power does not coerce, but it shapes preferences. It reduces the cost of leadership by making influence appear legitimate. The Trump administration, however, does not regard soft power as an asset.
The US withdrawal from the World Health Organization in January is emblematic. For decades, global health was one domain in which US leadership was uncontested. That leadership is now gone, surrendered not after debate, but by presidential decree.
America’s relations with Europe have also deteriorated sharply. The 2025 US National Security Strategy describes Europe as a victim of “civilizational erasure” and calls for alignment with “patriotic” movements there rather than mainstream governments. Such ideological interference signals that, even in the Western bloc, shared values no longer bind. What matters is ideological affinity and transactional utility.
A world remade
Taken together, these shifts amount to more than a change in tone. They represent a transformation in how power is exercised and justified. Trump’s second term has accelerated the erosion of an international system built on norms, institutions and predictability. In fact, he has stepped up efforts to replace it with one organized around coercion, personal authority and short-term gain.
In effect, Trump has not merely taken the world by storm; he is reshaping the environment in which global politics operates. And unlike the social-media posts that signal these changes, the consequences of his reshaping of international relations will endure.
It is against this backdrop that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney became the star at this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos with his remarkable candour in exposing longstanding Western hypocrisy and describing what a Trump-reshaped world meant.
Delivering a prepared speech, Carney declared, “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
The plain fact is that the new, Trump-driven order is not stable. It invites emulation by other strongmen. It encourages pre-emptive defiance by smaller states. It fragments global cooperation into spheres of influence governed by fear rather than trust. Yet it is coherent. And that coherence is precisely what makes it dangerous.
The most consequential legacy of Trump’s second term may not be the policies he enacts, but the precedents he sets. Even if a future US administration seeks to restore the old order, it will confront a world that has already adapted to its absence. Once credibility is lost, it cannot simply be reclaimed by presidential proclamation.
India as the pivotal swing state
No country is more exposed to—or more consequential for—the world Trump is remaking than India. As the world’s largest democracy, its fastest-growing major economy, and a central node in Indo-Pacific strategy, India now finds itself cast not as a partner in a US-led order, but as a swing state in a coercive, transactional system.
Trump’s second term presents India with a paradox. On one hand, Washington sees New Delhi as indispensable to balancing China. On the other, it treats India less as a strategic partner than as a negotiable asset—subject to tariffs, pressures and episodic favours. The result is a relationship marked by simultaneous courtship and coercion.
Trade policy illustrates the dilemma starkly. India has sought deeper economic integration with the US but instead it has faced some of the steepest tariffs imposed by the Trump administration—higher even than those levied on China. Market access is dangled not through long-term accords, but through ad hoc bargaining. Stability in the bilateral relationship is conditional.
Strategically, India is being pulled into a vision of order that sits uneasily with its own traditions. Trump’s disdain for multilateral institutions and his open embrace of unilateral force clash with India’s longstanding emphasis on strategic autonomy and international law. The creation of new international bodies such as the “Board for Peace,” governed by personal veto rather than collective legitimacy, places India in an awkward position: participation may offer influence, but at the cost of endorsing a precedent that weakens the very norms India has relied upon as a post-colonial power.
There is also a deeper reputational risk. As Trump reframes global politics as a contest among civilizational strongmen, democracies are valued less for their institutions than for their utility. India is courted not as a democracy, but as a counterweight. This instrumentalization erodes the moral capital that once distinguished democratic alignment from mere alliance.
Trump’s second term is also reshaping the triangular dynamic among China, India and the US—a strategic triangle that is central to Indian interests. Washington now frames its India policy almost exclusively through the prism of countering Beijing, while simultaneously undermining the norms and institutions that once sought to constrain Chinese power. The contradiction is stark: the US asks India to assist American strategy in Asia even as it legitimizes unilateral pressures on New Delhi to compel shifts in trade, energy and strategic policies.
For China, Trump’s unilateralism is an opportunity to step up its own coercive and expansionist policies, especially against its neighbours, including India. It is also an opportunity for China to quietly expand its influence in institutions the US has vacated.
For India, the triangle is more perilous. It faces sustained pressures from China along the Himalayas and via surrogate Pakistan, yet it is being asked by Washington to align with an American strategy that normalizes spheres of influence and transactional dominance. In such a world, today’s partner can become tomorrow’s pressure point.
The erosion of a norms-based order challenges all middle powers like India that rely on predictability to balance asymmetry. As China’s immediate neighbour, India’s challenge is also to navigate this triangle without becoming locked into a logic where raw power becomes the only currency that matters.
India is not without agency. Precisely because Trump’s world is transactional, India’s choices carry outsized weight. Accommodation would signal that even the world’s largest democracy and most-populous country sees no alternative to coercive bilateralism. Resistance—through diversification of partnerships, renewed investment in multilateral forums, and strategic patience—would suggest that the erosion of the old order is not yet complete.
More broadly, Trump has made one reality unmistakably clear: the post-World War II international order is no longer being quietly eroded; it is being openly displaced. Norms are giving way to deals. Institutions are yielding to personalities. Predictability is being replaced by leverage. This is a structural shift, which could gain permanence.
In this emerging order, the world’s future direction will not be determined solely by Washington or Beijing. It will also be shaped by the choices of key states that still retain strategic autonomy. Among them, none matters more than India.
India’s response to Trump’s world will signal whether the country that is home to 18% of the global population believes that power without restraint is inevitable—or whether it still sees value in preserving norms that protect the weak from the strong. Alignment driven purely by fear or expediency would accelerate the very transformation that leaves all democracies more vulnerable. Strategic patience, diversification and selective resistance are likely to slow it.
Whether the 21st century tilts decisively toward coercion or retains space for constraint and norms may well depend on middle powers like India. India is no longer merely rising. It is deciding—by its economic and strategic partnerships and policy choices alike—what kind of world will rise with it.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books.
China badly misread Japan. It sought to intimidate Tokyo into silence on Taiwan. Instead, it has achieved the opposite by hardening Japanese resolve.
By trying to bludgeon a major power like Japan into accepting its “red lines” — above all on Taiwan — China laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states. From the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas to the Himalayan frontier, Beijing has increasingly relied on economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation and military pressure to bend neighbors to its will.
Confident in its growing power, China appeared to believe that even Japan — the world’s third-largest economy and a US treaty ally — could be cowed into compliance.
In unleashing an unusually ferocious campaign of diplomatic, economic and military pressure against Tokyo, Beijing pointedly targeted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) telephoned US President Donald Trump to vent his fury at Takaichi. And, by seeking to inflict pain on Japan through undeclared economic warfare, Xi’s regime sought to marshal Japanese business lobbies against the country’s first female prime minister, who heads a narrow conservative coalition.
The catalyst was Takaichi’s warning in parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, triggering Tokyo’s right to collective self-defense under its 2015 security legislation. That language was not rhetorical; it carried real legal and strategic consequences. That legislation allows Tokyo to exercise the right of collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s own survival.
In clarifying what geography has long dictated, Takaichi made explicit what Beijing hoped to keep ambiguous: Japan cannot remain a bystander in a Taiwan contingency.
Taiwan, once ruled by Imperial Japan, is not a distant flashpoint for Tokyo. It lies along the same island chain as Japan — a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago that underpins Japan’s own security.
This reality has been highlighted by China’s live-fire drills around Taiwan that effectively rehearsed an air and sea blockade. During the drills, Chinese missiles sent over Taiwan landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, a stark reminder that a Taiwan crisis would not remain confined to the Taiwan Strait.
It is against this background that China’s fierce, full-spectrum campaign against Japan must be seen. Chinese officials issued furious denunciations. Military pressure intensified around Japan’s southwestern islands. Economic coercion followed, including restrictions on Japanese exports and Chinese tourism to Japan, as well as threats against supply chains. The message was unmistakable: cross China’s Taiwan red lines and pay a hefty price.
It is now apparent that China made a fundamental miscalculation. Rather than intimidating Takaichi into retracting her statement, China’s bullying is pushing Japan toward greater strategic clarity — and closer operational alignment with the US, as well as more explicit contingency planning involving Taiwan.
The Japanese statement on Taiwan matters because it raises the potential costs of aggression for Beijing.
In recent years, China has used ambiguity — about US resolve, allied involvement and escalation thresholds — to preserve freedom of action in the Taiwan Strait and step up coercive pressure on Taiwan. Now, Tokyo’s linkage between Japan’s survival and Taiwan’s security narrows that ambiguity.
Any Chinese use of force would clearly risk drawing in not just Washington but also a militarily advanced Japan positioned astride China’s maritime access routes.
Japan hosts more American troops than any other US ally in the world. American forces based in Okinawa would be indispensable in any Taiwan contingency, making Japan an unavoidable participant regardless of political preferences.
In this light, China’s coercive pressure only reinforces the logic of deeper contingency planning and interoperability among the US, Japan and Taiwan. Beijing’s campaign is accelerating the very security integration it seeks to prevent.
The irony is stark. China claims its pressure is meant to deter “external interference” in what it claims is an “internal matter.” In practice, Beijing is internationalizing the Taiwan issue further — and transforming Japan from a cautious stakeholder into a more determined deterrent actor in the Taiwan Strait.
Far from reinforcing Beijing’s red lines, the Chinese campaign against Tokyo has narrowed strategic ambiguity, deepened regional alignment and raised the potential costs of any use of force against Taiwan.
Beijing has also exposed a broader pattern in its Asian strategy. By targeting Japan — a historic great power — China is signaling how it intends to deal with others in Asia: through intimidation, economic punishment and calibrated nationalist wrath. This is likely to stiffen resistance among those with the capacity to push back.
Indeed, China’s coercion is already accelerating Japan’s military modernization. Tokyo has pledged to double defense spending, acquire long-range strike capabilities, and harden supply chains against economic blackmail. Collectively, these steps enhance deterrence around Taiwan, even if Taiwan is not named explicitly.
At the same time, tensions are rising in adjacent theaters. Increased Chinese military activity near the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands — known to Taiwan and China as the Diaoyutais (釣魚台) — heightens the risk of accidents and miscalculation. By widening the geographic scope of confrontation, China is multiplying escalation pathways. This is a dangerous strategy for a power that claims to value stability.
For Taiwan, the implications, paradoxically, appear reassuring. China’s effort to isolate the self-governing democracy diplomatically is instead clarifying the stakes for regional actors. Japan’s shift from studied ambiguity toward conditional clarity strengthens deterrence by signaling that a Taiwan conflict would not remain confined. That signal, more than any single weapons system, raises the threshold for war.
Simply put, China’s coercion of Japan is strategically counterproductive for Beijing and, ironically, stabilizing for Taiwan.
To be sure, all this does not guarantee stability. A more crowded and militarized environment carries its own risks. But if China’s objective is to keep Japan neutral and Taiwan isolated, its bullying campaign is a strategic own goal.
By trying to tame Japan, Beijing is compelling Tokyo to prepare more seriously. And far from weakening the emerging deterrent architecture around Taiwan, China is helping to build it.
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).
Trump’s presidency has been animated by a relentless urge to pry loose the resources of other nations. Yet in a telling contradiction, he has preserved a Biden-era policy of isolating Myanmar—now China’s largest external source of heavy rare earth elements. The result has been perverse but predictable: by constricting alternative supplies, Washington has only deepened Beijing’s near-monopoly over rare-earth supply chains, strengthening the leverage that has repeatedly forced Trump to tread carefully around China
Myanmar’s generals have begun staging their long-promised national elections — the first since they seized power in 2021. Their aim is not to restore democracy, but to entrench military rule through civilian proxies. Conducted in three stages and devoid of credible opposition, the vote is merely designed to launder the junta’s legitimacy at home and abroad.
For Washington, these sham elections should prompt more than ritual moral condemnation. They highlight how the U.S., by working to isolate Myanmar through stringent sanctions, has forfeited strategic leverage in a resource-rich country where China’s influence is steadily expanding.
In a country of mounting strategic importance,, U.S. policy should aim to shape outcomes, not to remain a bystander as Beijing steadily consolidates its foothold in Myanmar and greedily exploits its resources.
China is the primary beneficiary of Myanmar’s rare-earth minerals and is deeply involved in the extraction of other resources, including jade, natural gas, oil, and timber. Most consequentially, Beijing relies on Myanmar as its largest external source of heavy rare earth elements, using these imports to underpin its dominance over global rare-earth supply chains.
As Beijing increasingly weaponizes its control over rare-earth supplies, President Trump has sought to cut deals with other countries, to loosen China’s chokehold on the American economy. That objective alone should prompt a review of U.S. policy toward Myanmar, largely shaped under former President Joe Biden, of isolating one of the world’s largest suppliers of rare earths. For it only keeps strengthening China’s hand.
The U.S. has lost ground in Myanmar largely because Biden-era policy toward that geopolitically pivotal country followed a well-worn script: sweeping sanctions, diplomatic isolation and “nonlethal” aid for rebel groups fighting the junta. The aim was to coerce the military to relinquish power and restore democratic rule.
As the fifth anniversary of the coup approaches in February, the failure of this policy is unmistakable. The generals remain firmly in control. The humanitarian toll of the internal conflict has mounted, and China has emerged as the main strategic beneficiary.
As the Trump administration charts its foreign-policy course, it should resist the temptation to double down on this failed approach. Instead, it should pursue calibrated, interest-based engagement with Myanmar — a country whose strategic value will only grow amid intensifying U.S.-China rivalry, global supply-chain realignment and the race for critical minerals.
The reality on the ground has shifted in ways that U.S. policymakers often are slow to comprehend. Myanmar’s rebel forces, which made dramatic gains in 2023 and early 2024, are now largely on the defensive. Their reversal owes less to battlefield weakness than to geopolitics. China, alarmed by the prospect of state collapse along its southern periphery, executed a sharp pivot — pressuring rebels (some trained and armed by Beijing itself) into ceasefires and reasserting its role as the ultimate power broker. Beijing’s objective is clear: stability on its own terms.
Yet Washington’s response remains frozen in time. By treating Myanmar solely as a human-rights problem rather than a strategic arena, the U.S. has ceded influence by default. Broad sanctions have weakened Myanmar’s economy but not its rulers, pushing the generals closer to Beijing — even though the country’s fiercely nationalistic military has long harbored deep suspicion of China. Meanwhile, U.S. allies in Asia have opted for pragmatic engagement with the junta to contain instability, refugee flows and illicit cross-border activity.
Engagement need not mean endorsement. The U.S. not only engages with China — the world’s largest, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy — but cooperates with it where interests converge.
The contrast with U.S. policy toward Myanmar’s neighbors is striking. Washington props up or works pragmatically with military-linked governments in Bangladesh and Pakistan, yet pursues a regime-change strategy in Myanmar that fuels proxy warfare and regional spillover. Such inconsistency undermines U.S. credibility and complicates relations with Asian partners that prioritize stability over ideology.
At a time when the U.S. is scrambling to diversify supply chains away from China, why should it exclude itself from Myanmar?
A calibrated strategy would replace blanket isolation with selective pressure and conditional cooperation. Sanctions should target individuals and entities directly responsible for abuses, while easing restrictions that impede humanitarian relief, economic stabilization and diplomatic access. Dialogue — bilateral or via regional intermediaries — would give Washington a seat at the table China currently dominates.
History indicates that sanctions without engagement rarely deliver political breakthroughs. More often, punitive isolation empowers external patrons willing to ignore norms altogether.
Myanmar today is not merely a domestic tragedy; it is a geopolitical battleground. Continued U.S. disengagement leaves China free to shape outcomes, lock in infrastructure corridors, secure mineral access and entrench itself as the indispensable external actor. Strategic space, once lost, will be difficult to recover.
The election will not legitimize Myanmar’s rulers. But it should legitimize a long-overdue rethink in Washington. The Trump administration has an opportunity to reshape policy in a way that advances U.S. interests, constrains China’s influence and reclaims leverage in a country that will matter more and more in the years ahead.
For all Donald Trump’s talk about security, he proves far more interested in lining his own pockets. No country that hosts a major Trump-branded property or strikes a high-profile business deal with a member of Trump’s inner circle – including some with well-documented ties to global terrorism – faces US travel restrictions.
Last month, US President Donald Trump banned or severely restricted nationals of 20 additional countries from entering the United States, expanding the entry restrictions he put in place in June, supposedly to mitigate “national security and public safety threats.” But a cursory glance at the list of targeted countries makes clear that this is just another case of ethnonationalist politics dressed up as an anti-terrorism measure.
Many of the countries Trump targeted in 2025 – including Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Haiti, Laos, Malawi, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – have virtually no history of exporting transnational terrorism. But a large share of them – 16 out of the 20 announced last month and 26 of the 39targeted in 2025 – are in Africa. The obvious conclusion, especially in light of Trump’s wider agenda and rhetoric, is that racial bias is informing US policy, much as religious bias guided his first administration’s 2017 restrictions on travel and resettlement from seven Muslim-majority countries.
To be sure, US officials say their decisions reflect “demonstrated, persistent, and severe deficiencies in screening, vetting, and information-sharing,” as well as criteria like visa-overstay rates and even refusal to accept US deportation flights. But these justifications are more improvised than airtight. For example, as the American Immigration Council observes, the Trump administration is using non-immigrant overstay rates to justify bans on immigrant visas.
Moreover, much like Trump’s tariffs, the criteria are being selectively applied, with some countries, such as Egypt and Kuwait, facing no new restrictions, despite high overstay rates, documented information-sharing, and vetting deficiencies. Even countries with longstanding links to global jihadism, such as Pakistan and Qatar, are being spared, despite Trump’s claim to be motivated by national-security considerations. Saudi Arabia belongs to both groups, yet it has never been targeted by Trump.
Some of these privileged countries are almost certainly dangerous. What they have in common is not that they are safe, but that they are useful. Countries like Egypt and Iraq are considered strategically indispensable. Saudi Arabia is not only a key US defense partner; it is, like Qatar, a major investor in the US – and in the investment firm of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Pakistan signed a major investment deal with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm majority-owned by the Trump family, as part of its aggressive courtship of the US administration. It’s a strategy that never fails to pay off: No country that hosts a major Trump-branded property or has struck a high-profile business deal with a member of Trump’s inner circle faces US travel restrictions.
A telling example of this pattern is that while the Trump administration tightened restrictions on many countries, it lifted its pre-existing ban on non-immigrant visas for Turkmenistan, which has supposedly made “significant progress in improving its identity-management and information-sharing procedures.” Conspicuously, the decision came just a few weeks after the reclusive, gas-rich country agreed to cooperate with the US on energy and critical minerals, and to consider granting preferential treatment to US firms.
This lesson is clear: countries that have strong personal ties to the Trump administration or lucrative business relationships with his family and cronies receive favorable treatment. The boundary between US public office and private gain has never been so porous, with Trump’s business empire expanding rapidly since his return to the presidency.
The result is absurd. A citizen of Burkina Faso, a country with no history of threatening US security, is barred from entering the country, but a national of Bangladesh, which is beset by Islamist violence and anti-American extremism, is not. This incongruity undermines the credibility of US diplomacy and counterterrorism efforts, as it sends a dangerous message to states that sponsor or tolerate extremism: accountability is negotiable.
If Trump actually wanted to protect the US from terrorism, he would pursue a strategy based on credible intelligence and consistent standards. He would recognize that international terrorism is not confined to weak or isolated states; on the contrary, some of its most prolific enablers are regional powers. And he would demonstrate a willingness to confront US partners and adversaries alike.
Unfortunately, for all of Trump’s talk about security, he has proven far more interested in lining his own pockets. His latest travel restrictions are a case study in how the language of national security can be repurposed for coercive diplomacy and private gain.
In a sense, this was the natural evolution of the “America First” ethos. The concept was always intended to justify a transactional approach to international engagement. But during Trump’s second presidency, it has ascended to a higher level of cynicism. Now, those who fail to produce adequate offerings for Trump are punished, while those who prove themselves useful to him can act virtually with impunity – US national security be damned.
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.
India has long prided itself on charting an independent course in world affairs — cultivating friendships without dependence and partnerships without formal alliances. For years, that posture seemed not only principled but effective.
A nonaligned India enjoyed unusually warm ties across rival power centers. Some American strategists even described India as the ultimate “swing state” in an emerging multipolar order, capable of tilting the global balance through its choices.
Yet 2025 will be remembered as the year that exposed the fragility of these assumptions. A succession of external shocks revealed structural weaknesses in Indian foreign policy and forced New Delhi into increasingly uncomfortable strategic corners. The cumulative effect was not a single diplomatic failure but a broader loss of strategic room for maneuver.
The most jarring shock came from Washington. Under President Donald Trump’s second-term administration, U.S. policy toward a rising India turned overtly punitive. The imposition of 50% tariffs on Indian exports was more than a trade dispute; it was a political signal that the world’s largest democracy was now viewed less as a strategic partner and more as an economic rival to be squeezed.
This shift was underscored by the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy, which — unlike its 2017 predecessor — barely mentions India or the Quad and frames the relationship in narrowly transactional terms of “improving commercial relations.”
More galling for New Delhi was the document’s claim that Washington had “mediated” the May 2025 India-Pakistan ceasefire — an assertion India has vehemently rejected. For a country that has invested years in projecting itself as a net security provider and responsible regional power, the implication that it required American mediation was diplomatically humiliating.
The chill in ties was also visible at the personal level. Prime Minister Narendra Modi skipped the United Nations General Assembly and ASEAN summits, reportedly to avoid an awkward encounter with Trump, symbolizing how thoroughly the bonhomie between the two had evaporated. While the Trump administration has shown similar brusqueness toward America’s traditional allies, from Germany to Japan, the sting was sharper for India, which had grown accustomed to steadily deepening strategic ties with Washington.
If relations with the U.S. froze, India’s immediate neighborhood grew markedly colder.
For decades, New Delhi assumed that its surrounding region, though perpetually turbulent, could be managed through sustained engagement and economic outreach. In 2025, that assumption collapsed.
The most dramatic blow came with the announcement of a Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defense Pact declaring that “aggression against one is aggression against both.” For over a decade, Modi had invested heavily in cultivating Saudi Arabia as a strategic partner. The pact revealed the limits of that courtship and underscored Riyadh’s enduring security affinity with Islamabad.
At the same time, India’s own retaliatory military response to the Pahalgam terror attack ended in a ceasefire after merely three days, just as Indian forces appeared to have gained the upper hand. The abrupt halt highlighted how India’s escalation dominance is now constrained by shifting great-power calculations, narrowing its options in a crisis.
The sense of encirclement was compounded by its lingering border tensions with China, political turbulence in Nepal and Bangladesh’s slide into Islamist chaos. Rather than projecting confidence as a regional stabilizer, India in 2025 often appeared reactive, struggling to keep pace with fast-moving developments in its own backyard.
Adding to these pressures was the reemergence of a familiar and uncomfortable pattern: the U.S.-Pakistan security relationship. After two decades of Indian diplomatic efforts to isolate Pakistan internationally over its nexus with terrorist groups, New Delhi watched as Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief and revived a transactional partnership with Islamabad — highlighted by the Trump family’s lucrative cryptocurrency deal.
Perhaps most troubling was not any single diplomatic setback, but the muted domestic response to this cascade of reverses. A year marked by serious foreign-policy shocks generated surprisingly little introspection within India’s strategic community or political class.
Part of the explanation lay in New Delhi’s tendency to reframe setbacks as strategy. India’s renewed outreach to Russia and tentative engagement with its principal rival, China, were presented as evidence of successful “multi-alignment.” In reality, the effort to mend fences with China was less a strategic choice than a compelled response to Western pressure. The rhetoric of strategic autonomy thus obscured a year in which India exercised less agency, not more.
A measure of hubris compounded the problem. Growing instability in India’s neighborhood exposed an inflated sense of New Delhi’s ability to shape political outcomes beyond its borders. Influence was assumed to be enduring when, in fact, it proved fragile.
If 2025 was the year of shocks, 2026 will be the year of hard decisions. India can no longer afford reactive diplomacy cloaked in reassuring slogans.
The relationship with the U.S., despite its deterioration, remains vital to India’s interests. A limited trade deal is likely, even as Indian officials insist they will not negotiate “with a gun to our head.” In reality, New Delhi already finds itself doing precisely that.
The danger is that U.S. economic coercion will extract significant concessions from India without delivering genuine strategic reassurance in return. India has now opened up its commercial nuclear power sector to private companies, including from abroad, and raised foreign direct investment in the insurance sector to 100% from 74%.
The era of lofty talk about U.S.-Indian strategic convergence has given way to cold commercial bargaining, a reality India must confront with clear-eyed pragmatism rather than wounded indignation.
India’s assumption of the BRICS presidency in 2026 will further test its diplomatic agility. Leading a grouping increasingly viewed by the Trump team as hostile will require high-wire diplomacy. New Delhi will seek to champion the Global South without endorsing the overtly anti-Western rhetoric of fellow-members China and Russia — a balance that will be difficult to sustain amid intensifying great-power rivalry.
The strategic landscape facing India has shifted decisively. The world has changed faster than India’s foreign-policy machinery has adapted.
The 2025 shocks serve as a warning to India that, in 2026, it should abandon complacency, question its own assumptions, and return to the principles that once underpinned its diplomatic success: realism over rhetoric, flexibility over dogma, and strategy grounded in hard choices rather than comforting narratives.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
China badly misread Japan. It sought to intimidate Tokyo into silence on Taiwan. Instead, it has achieved the opposite by hardening Japanese resolve.
By trying to bludgeon a major power like Japan into accepting its “red lines” — above all on Taiwan — China laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states. From the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas to the Himalayan frontier, Beijing has increasingly relied on economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation and military pressure to bend neighbors to its will.
Confident in its growing power, China appeared to believe that even Japan — the world’s third-largest economy and a US treaty ally — could be cowed into compliance.
In unleashing an unusually ferocious campaign of diplomatic, economic and military pressure against Tokyo, Beijing pointedly targeted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) telephoned US President Donald Trump to vent his fury at Takaichi. And, by seeking to inflict pain on Japan through undeclared economic warfare, Xi’s regime sought to marshal Japanese business lobbies against the country’s first female prime minister, who heads a narrow conservative coalition.
The catalyst was Takaichi’s warning in parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, triggering Tokyo’s right to collective self-defense under its 2015 security legislation. That language was not rhetorical; it carried real legal and strategic consequences. That legislation allows Tokyo to exercise the right of collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s own survival.
In clarifying what geography has long dictated, Takaichi made explicit what Beijing hoped to keep ambiguous: Japan cannot remain a bystander in a Taiwan contingency.
Taiwan, once ruled by Imperial Japan, is not a distant flashpoint for Tokyo. It lies along the same island chain as Japan — a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago that underpins Japan’s own security.
This reality has been highlighted by China’s live-fire drills around Taiwan that effectively rehearsed an air and sea blockade. During the drills, Chinese missiles sent over Taiwan landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, a stark reminder that a Taiwan crisis would not remain confined to the Taiwan Strait.
It is against this background that China’s fierce, full-spectrum campaign against Japan must be seen. Chinese officials issued furious denunciations. Military pressure intensified around Japan’s southwestern islands. Economic coercion followed, including restrictions on Japanese exports and Chinese tourism to Japan, as well as threats against supply chains. The message was unmistakable: cross China’s Taiwan red lines and pay a hefty price.
It is now apparent that China made a fundamental miscalculation. Rather than intimidating Takaichi into retracting her statement, China’s bullying is pushing Japan toward greater strategic clarity — and closer operational alignment with the US, as well as more explicit contingency planning involving Taiwan.
The Japanese statement on Taiwan matters because it raises the potential costs of aggression for Beijing.
In recent years, China has used ambiguity — about US resolve, allied involvement and escalation thresholds — to preserve freedom of action in the Taiwan Strait and step up coercive pressure on Taiwan. Now, Tokyo’s linkage between Japan’s survival and Taiwan’s security narrows that ambiguity.
Any Chinese use of force would clearly risk drawing in not just Washington but also a militarily advanced Japan positioned astride China’s maritime access routes.
Japan hosts more American troops than any other US ally in the world. American forces based in Okinawa would be indispensable in any Taiwan contingency, making Japan an unavoidable participant regardless of political preferences.
In this light, China’s coercive pressure only reinforces the logic of deeper contingency planning and interoperability among the US, Japan and Taiwan. Beijing’s campaign is accelerating the very security integration it seeks to prevent.
The irony is stark. China claims its pressure is meant to deter “external interference” in what it claims is an “internal matter.” In practice, Beijing is internationalizing the Taiwan issue further — and transforming Japan from a cautious stakeholder into a more determined deterrent actor in the Taiwan Strait.
Far from reinforcing Beijing’s red lines, the Chinese campaign against Tokyo has narrowed strategic ambiguity, deepened regional alignment and raised the potential costs of any use of force against Taiwan.
Beijing has also exposed a broader pattern in its Asian strategy. By targeting Japan — a historic great power — China is signaling how it intends to deal with others in Asia: through intimidation, economic punishment and calibrated nationalist wrath. This is likely to stiffen resistance among those with the capacity to push back.
Indeed, China’s coercion is already accelerating Japan’s military modernization. Tokyo has pledged to double defense spending, acquire long-range strike capabilities, and harden supply chains against economic blackmail. Collectively, these steps enhance deterrence around Taiwan, even if Taiwan is not named explicitly.
At the same time, tensions are rising in adjacent theaters. Increased Chinese military activity near the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands — known to Taiwan and China as the Diaoyutais (釣魚台) — heightens the risk of accidents and miscalculation. By widening the geographic scope of confrontation, China is multiplying escalation pathways. This is a dangerous strategy for a power that claims to value stability.
For Taiwan, the implications, paradoxically, appear reassuring. China’s effort to isolate the self-governing democracy diplomatically is instead clarifying the stakes for regional actors. Japan’s shift from studied ambiguity toward conditional clarity strengthens deterrence by signaling that a Taiwan conflict would not remain confined. That signal, more than any single weapons system, raises the threshold for war.
Simply put, China’s coercion of Japan is strategically counterproductive for Beijing and, ironically, stabilizing for Taiwan.
To be sure, all this does not guarantee stability. A more crowded and militarized environment carries its own risks. But if China’s objective is to keep Japan neutral and Taiwan isolated, its bullying campaign is a strategic own goal.
By trying to tame Japan, Beijing is compelling Tokyo to prepare more seriously. And far from weakening the emerging deterrent architecture around Taiwan, China is helping to build it.
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 Quad — the U.S., Japan, India and Australia — was conceived as a strategic coalition to uphold a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a concept articulated by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2016 and later elevated to a centerpiece of U.S. strategy. At stake was nothing less than preserving a rules-based order in the world’s most consequential region, which will shape the next global order.
Yet today, at the very moment when China’s coercive power is expanding, the Quad is sliding toward strategic irrelevance — undermined less by external pressure than by Washington’s own drift.
The irony is striking. It was President Trump who, in his first term, revived the Quad after a decade of dormancy and embedded it firmly in U.S. strategy. He replaced the Obama administration’s largely symbolic “pivot to Asia” with a hard-edged “free and open Indo-Pacific” framework, while decisively overturning four decades of U.S. policy toward Beijing by reclassifying China from partner to strategic rival. The Quad emerged as a central pillar of that shift.
Successive administrations have acknowledged the reality that the Indo-Pacific is now the world’s economic and geopolitical center of gravity, and China — not Russia — poses the defining long-term challenge to U.S. power.
Barack Obama announced a pivot to Asia in 2011 but failed to resource it adequately. Trump’s first term supplied strategic clarity. Joe Biden preserved the Trump-era framework, keeping the Quad intact and openly identifying China as America’s principal challenger. Yet Biden’s deep entanglement in the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts consumed attention, resources and political capital, leaving little room for a genuine Indo-Pacific pivot.
Trump returned to office pledging to resolve these conflicts and free up American bandwidth for the Indo-Pacific. But now the gap between rhetoric and policy has become glaring. His attempt to end the Ukraine war has stalled amid resistance from both Kyiv and Moscow, delaying any meaningful reallocation of U.S. military resources.
More damaging still, Trump has subordinated long-term strategy to short-term economic extraction, wielding tariffs and trade coercion as blunt instruments — even against allies critical to Indo-Pacific power equilibrium.
This approach is actively hollowing out the Quad. India today faces higher U.S. tariffs than China — an extraordinary outcome for a country Washington routinely describes as a key counterweight to the communist behemoth.
Japan, meanwhile, has been pressured into committing $550 billion in U.S. investments under terms that allow Washington to dictate how the funds are deployed and to claim the lion’s share of profits from the Japanese-financed projects. As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick conceded, Tokyo may have to strain its own balance sheet simply to comply.
Treating allies as revenue sources may generate short-term gains, but it corrodes trust and undermines collective strategy.
That self-inflicted damage is especially puzzling because stronger ties with India and Japan are not optional but indispensable. Strategically located on China’s opposite flanks, Japan and India represent Beijing’s most consequential regional counterweights.
Trump understood this in his first term, according India pride of place in U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy as the only Asian power with the demographic weight, geographic position, military capability and geopolitical heft to help balance China over the long run. That imperative has only grown with the consolidation of the China-Russia partnership.
Yet Trump’s second-term policies have instead alienated New Delhi. India was slated to host the Quad leaders’ summit in 2025. That prospect collapsed under the weight of Washington’s punitive trade measures. The result is a Quad that is adrift and increasingly marginal to U.S. strategy.
The warning signs are unmistakable. The Quad merits just a single, passing mention in the newly released U.S. National Security Strategy — buried in a brief reference to India. For a grouping once advertised as a cornerstone of the Indo-Pacific strategy, this near-expurgation is telling.
The Quad was never meant to be a talk shop or a disposable bargaining chip in U.S.-China relations. Its core purpose has always been to serve as a strategic bulwark against Chinese expansionism and to uphold a stable Indo-Pacific balance of power.
Allowing it to wither through neglect and allies’ alienation risks vindicating Beijing’s long-standing contempt. When the Quad was first established, China’s foreign minister dismissed it as a fleeting, “headline-grabbing idea” that would dissipate like sea foam. Washington’s current trajectory threatens to prove him right.
It is not too late to avert that outcome. But doing so will require Washington to align economic policy with geopolitical priorities, treat allies as partners rather than profit centers, and restore the Quad to the center of its Indo-Pacific vision. Without such a course correction, the Quad’s existential crisis will deepen, eroding America’s own capacity to sustain a favorable balance of power in the defining region of the 21st century.
Since its creation in 1947, Pakistan has rarely escaped the grip of its powerful army. Even when not ruling outright, generals have wielded authority from the shadows, making and breaking governments, shaping foreign and security policy, and ensuring that no civilian leader ever becomes truly independent.
Now, for the first time, the military has reasserted direct control in a novel way. Instead of staging a coup d’état, it has engineered something more durable and more insidious: a constitutional coup.
Army chief Asim Munir — extolled by President Trump as “my favorite field marshal,” “a great, great guy” and “an inspiring personality” — has effectively become Pakistan’s ruler behind a civilian façade.
This has been made possible by Pakistan’s 27th constitutional amendment, which formally enshrines the military’s supremacy over all state institutions. By codifying the army’s preeminence, the recent amendment legitimizes its status as the ultimate arbiter of foreign policy, national security and even economic strategy. Civilian leaders have been reduced to little more than figureheads, their authority hollowed out by constitutional design.
In effect, Munir has achieved what Pakistan’s past military dictators never quite managed: absolute power with legal cover.
He now exercises power without responsibility, enjoying the insulation of a civilian front government while maintaining control over all the levers of state power. Meanwhile, the country’s most popular politician — Imran Khan, who was removed as prime minister in 2022 after falling out with the generals — languishes in prison, even though his supporters won the most parliamentary seats in last year’s elections.
The U.S. has watched all this with striking silence. While Trump has chanted “I love Pakistan,” Pakistan’s already frail democracy is being strangled. Rather than push back against an action widely condemned by international human rights and legal bodies, Washington has effectively acquiesced.
The International Commission of Jurists has called the amendment a “full-frontal assault on the rule of law,” while UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that it gravely undermines judicial independence and raises serious concerns about the military’s accountability. Yet Trump is openly courting Pakistan’s generals.
This marks a remarkable reversal. During his first term, Trump cut off security assistance to Pakistan for failing to sever ties with terrorist groups. He charged that the country gave the U.S. “nothing but lies and deceit” in return for billions in aid, citing how Pakistan secretly shelteredOsama bin Laden for nearly a decade until U.S. Navy SEALs killed him in 2011.
What explains Trump’s pivot from punitive isolation to warm embrace?
Pakistan invested heavily this year in a targeted Washington lobbying campaign, hiring two of Trump’s closest confidants — George Sorial of the Trump Organization and former Oval Office director Keith Schiller. Pakistan also employed effusive flattery, claims of rare-earth reserves and a lucrative cryptocurrency partnership with the Trump family-controlled firm World Liberty Financial.
In June, Trump hosted Munir for a private White House luncheon — the first time a U.S. president had welcomed a Pakistani army chief who was not the country’s official leader. The symbolism was unmistakable: Washington was prepared to work directly with Pakistan’s real power center.
Emboldened, Munir moved to secure his dominance. Using a pliable government that he helped install, he maneuvered himself into the rank of field marshal — the first such promotion in almost six decades. Then came the constitutional amendment that elevated him to Pakistan’s first-ever “chief of defense forces,” giving him command over the nuclear arsenal, army, air force and navy. The amendment also hands him lifelong immunity from prosecution and an additional five years in office.
Perhaps most extraordinarily, it specifies that any general elevated to field marshal is a “national hero” who “shall retain his rank, privileges, and remain in uniform for life.” This is constitutionalized militarism — the formalization of a praetorian state.
Pakistan, a nation of 250 million, has often been compared to a one-party system akin to its longtime patron, China. But the analogy is imperfect. China’s People’s Liberation Army is an arm of the ruling Communist Party; Pakistan’s army is itself the ruling institution. It controls the state, not the other way around.
With the amendment, Pakistan has taken a decisive step: The military no longer needs to manipulate politics from the shadows. It can now dictate the direction of the government, economy and society openly, with constitutional legitimacy.
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif warned in 2020 that the army was evolving from a “state within a state” into a “state above the state.” That prophecy has now come true. And as Sharif observed, this dominance is the “root cause” of Pakistan’s dysfunction — sustaining a violence-prone state that nurtures terrorist groups while suppressing democratic forces.
What has changed is not Pakistan’s military but Washington’s willingness to look away. By offering tacit approval, the U.S. risks being complicit in cementing a constitutional dictatorship in an unstable, nuclear-armed nation. The cost of that complicity will not be borne by Pakistan alone.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to New Delhi should be a wake-up call for the United States: attempting to coerce India into actions that compromise its national interest is a recipe for estrangement. Given that India remains crucial to balance China’s aggressive rise, such an outcome would carry high costs for the US.
At a time when US policy toward India has become distinctly punitive, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s warm reception of Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi last week could not have been more pointed. Modi’s message was clear: India is a sovereign power that will not be dragooned into choosing sides in a widening rift between “the West and the rest.” Instead, it will continue to chart its own course in international affairs.
No major power is more vital to America’s long-term strategic interests than India. It is, after all, the only country with the population size, geographical position, and military might (including nuclear weapons) necessary to challenge China’s efforts to dominate Asia and ultimately supplant the United States as a global hegemon.
Ever since George W. Bush’s presidency, senior US officials have recognized the partnership with India as crucial to maintaining a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. This has never been mere rhetoric: over the last decade, US-India security ties have deepened rapidly, particularly in terms of military interoperability, intelligence cooperation, and technology exchanges.
Part of this progress occurred during US President Donald Trump’s first administration. As he ramped up pressure on China and cut security aid to Pakistan, Trump expanded cooperation with India, which stood at the center of his administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy. The result is evident today: India now conducts more military exercises with the US than with any other country, and the US has emerged as India’s largest trading partner.
But even as this process unfolded, the US gave India plenty of reason to be wary. Its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – which took place under President Joe Biden, but resulted from a deal cut earlier by Trump – raised serious doubts about the judgment and reliability of America’s leaders, as it effectively handed that country back to Taliban terrorists.
Concerns heightened in 2022, when the Biden administration helped Pakistan secure an International Monetary Fund bailout and then approved a $450 million deal to modernize the country’s US-supplied F-16 fleet, reviving in India bitter memories of America’s arming of Pakistan during the Cold War. Trump has intensified this embrace of Pakistan, not least in the interest of personal enrichment – highlighted by a lucrative cryptocurrency deal signed in April.
Although the US often disregarded India’s own interests, it nonetheless expected total loyalty when it came to enforcing sanctions on Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But India – like other US allies such as Israel and Turkey – refused to comply, instead increasing purchases of discounted Russian oil. India saw no reason to sacrifice its national interests for a distant conflict, especially when the chief beneficiary of Western pressure on Russia was China.
India has seen this dynamic unfold before. When Trump reimposed harsh sanctions on Iran in 2019, India was deprived of one of its cheapest and most reliable energy sources, while China seized the opportunity to import Iranian crude at steep discounts and expand its security footprint there.
A similar pattern emerged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By isolating Russia from Western markets, sanctions effectively turned China into Russia’s economic lifeline, giving it leverage to strengthen its overland energy-supply routes from Russia. China now knows that, even if it moves against Taiwan, it will not lose access to Russian energy. While this trend undoubtedly undermines India’s strategic interests, at least this time India also took advantage of discounts on Russian oil.
The Trump administration, however, was not having it. It imposed an extra 25% tariff on US imports from India – raising total duties to 50% – and threatened secondary sanctions, claiming that India was undermining US efforts to counter “Russia’s harmful activities.” Yet Trump spared other major importers of Russian energy and even granted a sanctions exemption to Hungary, whose autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is a close Trump ally. US tariffs on Indian goods now exceed those applied to Chinese exports. This is nothing short of a US economic war on India.
The US calls India indispensable, but treats its interests as peripheral. It wants India to serve as a pillar of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, but adopts policies that directly undercut India’s economic strength, regional security, and strategic autonomy. Trump’s foreign policy may be particularly erratic but the underlying pattern has spanned multiple administrations. The result is an increasingly embittered and mistrustful India that sees no choice but to hedge its bets by accelerating self-reliance and strengthening ties with alternative partners, beginning with Russia.
Putin’s visit to New Delhi should serve as a wake-up call for the US: coercion and inconsistency are a sure path to estrangement. A flexible, interest-driven “soft alliance” with India remains one of America’s few credible means of balancing China’s aggressive rise. In this sense, the US needs India more than India needs the US. Instead of trying to force India to “fall in line,” the US must rebuild the relationship by treating India as an equal partner. This means engaging with India as it is, not as American policymakers want it to be.
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.
Indian President Droupadi Murmu walks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi on Dec. 5. © Reuters
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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