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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

America is quietly abandoning its Indo-Pacific strategy

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Julay 2025 with the foreign ministers of Japan, India and Australia. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

The Pentagon’s recent decision to drop “Indo” from “Indo-Pacific” may prove to be one of the most consequential bureaucratic acts of the Trump presidency.

Officially, almost nothing has changed. The newly renamed U.S. Pacific Command retains the same area of responsibility — from America’s West Coast to India’s western frontier.

But strategy is often communicated through symbols as much as it is through policy documents. In geopolitics, names are rarely cosmetic. They define priorities, shape alliances and reveal how governments see the world.

By deleting a single prefix, Washington has raised an uncomfortable question: Is America quietly abandoning the strategic vision that has guided its China policy for nearly a decade? That vision was never really about geography.

The “Indo-Pacific” was a grand strategic concept. It recognized that the center of global power had shifted, linking the Pacific and Indian Oceans into one interconnected strategic theater. The world’s busiest shipping lanes, its fastest-growing economies, its principal manufacturing hubs and its most dangerous military flashpoints had become inseparable.

The concept’s intellectual architect had been Japan’s late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who contended that the Pacific and Indian Oceans formed the “confluence of the two seas,” requiring a coalition of maritime democracies to preserve a rules-based regional order. His vision of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” sought not to isolate China but to prevent any single power from dominating Asia.

The U.S. eventually made that vision its own.

During President Trump’s first term, a free and open Indo-Pacific became the organizing principle of American strategy toward Beijing. The long-dormant Quad — bringing together the U.S., India, Japan and Australia — was revived. China was formally identified as America’s principal strategic competitor. India assumed unprecedented importance, because its geography placed it on China’s western flank while Japan anchored the eastern one. Together, they formed the bookends of a broader balancing coalition stretching across two oceans.

President Joe Biden largely preserved that framework. Although wars in Ukraine and the Middle East repeatedly diverted American attention and military resources, the underlying strategic assumption remained unchanged: China — not Russia — represented the defining geopolitical challenge of the 21st century.

Today, however, that assumption appears increasingly uncertain.

The Pentagon’s name-change is only one indicator of a broader shift. Trump has steadily softened his approach toward China, emphasizing deal-making over strategic competition. His administration has downgraded the Quad’s prominence. And his repeated references to a U.S.-China “G2” (Group of Two) suggest an emerging vision of world politics very different from the coalition-based strategy Washington spent years constructing.

Washington’s original Indo-Pacific strategy rested on the proposition that the U.S. could prevent Chinese hegemony in Asia only by strengthening a network of capable allies and partners. A G2 rests on the opposite assumption. Instead of organizing a coalition to balance China, Washington would increasingly seek stability through direct understandings with Beijing itself.

For America’s allies, the distinction is enormous. Countries such as Japan, Australia and India accepted greater strategic risks because they believed the U.S. was committed to maintaining a favorable balance of power in Asia. They invested politically and militarily in that shared vision.

But if Washington increasingly treats Beijing not as the principal challenger to be balanced but as a co-manager of global order, those assumptions begin to unravel.

The Quad illustrates the problem. Originally conceived as a strategic counterweight to Chinese expansionism, the grouping increasingly resembles an alliance searching for its purpose. No leaders’ summit has been held since 2024. Its agenda has drifted toward relatively noncontroversial cooperation on supply chains, emerging technologies and maritime awareness — important initiatives certainly, but hardly the foundation of a grand strategy.

The contradiction is becoming difficult to ignore. If Washington itself seeks accommodation with Beijing, what exactly is the Quad meant to deter?

Alliances seldom collapse dramatically. More often, they decay quietly. That is the danger confronting the Quad today.

The consequences extend well beyond one diplomatic grouping.

The Indo-Pacific strategy recognized a geopolitical reality that remains unchanged: the U.S. cannot preserve a stable Asian balance of power by itself. It needs strong partners positioned across both ends of the continent. Japan remains indispensable to East Asian security. India, with its size, military capabilities and commanding position astride the Indian Ocean, is the only Asian power capable of imposing significant strategic constraints on China from the west. Australia acts as a vital strategic anchor in the southern Pacific.

No bilateral understanding between Washington and Beijing can substitute for that wider strategic geometry.

China must be pleased with the quiet dismantling of the Indo-Pacific concept. Beijing has long viewed that concept as a containment strategy linking China’s geopolitical ambitions to a wider coalition of democracies stretching from the western Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Eliminating “Indo” narrows that strategic horizon, symbolically moving Washington closer to Beijing’s preferred conception of Asia as primarily a Pacific theater dominated by U.S.-China relations.

Perhaps the Pentagon’s name change is merely a reversion to a terminology long preferred by Beijing. But names matter, because they reveal priorities before strategy is fully articulated.

For nearly a decade, the free and open Indo-Pacific vision represented America’s answer to China’s rise: strengthen coalitions, reinforce deterrence and preserve a favorable balance of power across Asia.

If that organizing idea is quietly giving way to an emerging U.S.-China condominium, then historians may look back on the deletion of one small word not as administrative housekeeping, but as the moment America began exchanging coalition leadership for great-power management.

The consequences would be profound. They would reshape the geopolitical architecture of the world’s most important region — and, with it, the international order that the U.S. itself helped build.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“

America’s new India doctrine: Never repeat the China mistake

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U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi take part in a joint news conference at the White House in February 2025.

By Brahma Chellaney
The Japan Times

For nearly a quarter century, a rare bipartisan consensus guided American policy toward India. Washington believed that helping the world’s largest democracy become stronger — economically, technologically and militarily — served U.S. interests by creating a durable counterweight to an increasingly assertive China.

Washington’s India consensus is now quietly unraveling.

The clearest indication came not from a leaked strategy paper but from U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau speaking in New Delhi. Declaring that Washington “will not repeat its China mistake,” Landau said the U.S. would not allow India to “develop all these markets” only to outcompete America commercially.

Those remarks deserve far more attention than they received. They amount to a remarkably candid acknowledgment that Washington no longer views India’s rise as an unqualified strategic asset. Instead, it increasingly sees India through the same prism that now shapes its approach toward China: as an emerging economic giant whose technological ascent must be carefully managed.

It marks a structural shift in American strategy.

The shift is also visible in American strategic vocabulary. The Pentagon’s recent decision to drop the “Indo” from “Indo-Pacific” is far more than bureaucratic rebranding. Names in strategy reveal priorities.

For nearly a decade, the Indo-Pacific concept placed India at the heart of America’s vision for balancing China’s rise across two oceans. It reflected the belief that India’s emergence as a major power was indispensable to ensuring a stable balance in Asia.

Removing “Indo” sends a different signal. It suggests that Washington is narrowing its strategic horizon, placing greater emphasis on managing relations directly with Beijing while downgrading India’s role in its larger regional calculus. The change also aligns with U.S. President Donald Trump’s more conciliatory approach to Beijing since mid-2025 and his repeated references to a U.S.-China “Group of Two,” a framework in which the world’s two largest powers bargain directly over global affairs rather than relying on broad coalitions of partners.

Successive U.S. administrations in this century promoted India’s emergence through expanding defense cooperation, a civil nuclear deal, growing technology partnerships and repeated invocations of shared democratic values. They believed India’s rise would strengthen, not challenge, American leadership. Today that assumption is giving way to a different strategic calculation.

The lesson many policymakers in Washington drew from China’s ascent is not simply that Beijing became militarily formidable. It is that the U.S. aided the rise of an industrial and technological rival capable of dominating global manufacturing, critical supply chains and advanced technologies and challenging American primacy.

America’s new objective is to avoid repeating that experience with India. Landau merely articulated publicly what American policy has begun to reflect.

Trump’s 50% punitive tariffs on Indian exports were more than trade measures. They conveyed that “America First” applies as much to strategic partners as to competitors. His administration increasingly treats India less as a geopolitical pillar than as a market for American goods and investment. Indeed, Trump’s National Security Strategy frames the relationship in transactional commercial terms rather than as a long-term geopolitical investment.

Even more revealing are the growing obstacles surrounding the transfer of advanced jet-engine technology.

The agreement between General Electric and India’s Hindustan Aeronautics was celebrated as a watershed because it promised unprecedented technology transfer for engines to power India’s three separate indigenous fighter programs: Tejas Mk1A, Tejas Mk2 and Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft. The multibillion-dollar deal was never simply about supplying engines. It represented a potential breakthrough for India’s ambition to become an independent aerospace power.

Instead, implementation has become bogged down in unexpected roadblocks. Engine deliveries have stalled, delaying fighter production and leaving completed Indian-built aircraft stranded without propulsion systems.

That, in turn, has placed the Indian Air Force under severe operational strain, with its active strength plummeting to approximately 29 operational squadrons, as against the required 42.5 combat squadrons to effectively counter a dual-front threat from nuclear-armed allies China and Pakistan.

Whatever the official explanations, the broader strategic message is difficult to miss. Washington appears increasingly reluctant to facilitate technologies that could enable India eventually to compete at the highest end of advanced industrial manufacturing.

The U.S. shift extends to India’s own strategic backyard. If India is no longer viewed as the indispensable anchor of America’s Asian strategy, it becomes easier for Washington to pursue regional policies that diverge from New Delhi’s interests.

For much of the past decade, New Delhi assumed that growing strategic ties with Washington would naturally translate into greater American sensitivity toward India’s concerns in its immediate neighborhood. That assumption no longer holds.

In Bangladesh, Washington supported the violent overthrow of the India-friendly government of Sheikh Hasina in August 2024. Bangladesh’s consequent descent into violent Islamism threatens the security of India, which is already home to millions of illegally settled Bangladeshis.

Myanmar presents another example of how policies conceived in Washington carry direct security consequences for India. Washington’s stringent sanctions against Myanmar’s military government and “nonlethal” military aid for anti-junta forces may reflect broader American objectives, but they have contributed to instability along India’s sensitive northeastern frontier, where insurgent movements have long exploited cross-border sanctuaries.

While seeking to topple Myanmar’s junta, Washington has embraced Pakistan’s military-backed regime, feting the country’s de facto ruler, Field Marshal Asim Munir.

The U.S. modernization of Pakistan’s F-16 fleet, expanding military contacts and repeated statements by senior American officials that U.S. policy seeks to prevent any single power from dominating the Indian subcontinent have revived uncomfortable memories in New Delhi of Cold War-era balancing. Many in India see that objective as closely mirroring China’s own interest in keeping India boxed in.

America’s changing attitude toward India suggests that it is now being guided by a different strategic logic. Washington is no longer asking whether its regional policies strengthen India’s position. Instead, it appears increasingly comfortable limiting India’s geopolitical room for maneuver while simultaneously restricting the technologies that would underpin its long-term industrial ascent.

The irony is striking. For two decades, Washington encouraged India’s rise because it believed a powerful democratic India would reinforce American strategy in Asia. Today, many U.S. policymakers appear to fear that helping India become too successful economically could recreate the very mistake they believe Washington made with China.

That does not mean America seeks to contain India as it seeks to contain China. Rather, it suggests something subtler but no less consequential. Washington wants India strong enough to complicate Chinese strategy, wealthy enough to remain an attractive market for American exports and influential enough to contribute to Indian Ocean security — but not so technologically advanced or economically competitive that it eventually becomes another global economic challenger.

That is a far narrower conception of partnership than the one that guided U.S. policy for much of this century. India should recognize that this is not a passing disagreement over tariffs, energy purchases or defense contracts. It reflects a deeper reordering of American strategic priorities.

The relationship with India is consequently becoming more transactional, with Washington primarily interested in securing a larger share of the world’s fastest-growing major market.

The U.S. now views India’s rise no longer as an inherently benign development, but as a phenomenon to be carefully managed, moderated and, where necessary, constrained.

The quiet demotion of India in America’s grand strategy represents the most significant shift in U.S. policy since Washington embraced New Delhi as a strategic partner at the turn of the century.

Brahma Chellaney, a longstanding contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.

China’s Erasure of Tibet Is Accelerating

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In recent years, the international community has stood idly by while China has systematically eradicated Tibetan culture and identity. With the authorities stepping up their assimilation efforts, Asia risks not only losing one of its oldest civilizations, but also facing a China that is bigger, bolder, and more powerful than ever.

By Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

The self-immolation of exiled Tibetan activist Lobga Rangzen outside United Nations headquarters in New York on July 2 was not an expression of personal despair. It was a desperate attempt to jolt the world out of its growing indifference to one of the most important international issues of our time: Tibet’s systematic erasure.

China occupied then-autonomous Tibet shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic.. The occupation is often viewed primarily through the prism of human rights, and for good reason. But it should also be understood as an effort to lay claim to one of Asia’s most valuable geopolitical assets: the vast, resource-rich Tibetan Plateau dominates the Himalayas, contains the headwaters of Asia’s great rivers, and overlooks South, Central, and Southeast Asia.

In recent decades, China has invested heavily in the Plateau—building extensive military infrastructure, constructing mega-dams on Asia’s great rivers, and expanding extraction of strategic minerals—while relying on surveillance, coercion, and security forces to suppress resistance. But physical control of Tibet is not enough for Chinese President Xi Jinping. He wants complete and lasting control over the entire Tibetan Plateau.

The best way to achieve that, Xi has concluded, is by erasing the identity of the people who inhabit it. The Tibetan people are a distinct ethnicity, with their own language, traditions, cuisine, and dress. Stripping Tibetans of their identity—ensuring that they no longer think of themselves as Tibetan—has one goal: to extinguish resistance to permanent Chinese rule over the “Roof of the World.”

To this end, China has steadily expanded its system of state-run boarding schools, channeling Tibetan children there at younger and younger ages. Beijing portrays these “residential schools” as engines of development. In fact, the curriculum is designed to erase children’s Tibetan identity and replace it with allegiance to the Chinese state.

United Nations experts report that more than one million Tibetan children aged 6-18—about 78% of the total—attend these schools. They are separated from their families and cultures for most of each year, taught in Mandarin, exposed only to Han culture and experiences, and conditioned to view their own culture, religion, and language as inferior. In other words, China is raising a generation of Tibetans to assimilate to Chinese culture—and lose their own.

China has also taken other steps to erase Tibet. Since late 2023, Beijing has systematically replaced “Tibet” with “Xizang” as the official English-language designation in its government documents, diplomatic communications, and state media. The name derives from the Manchu Qing dynasty’s imperial terminology for Tibet. Its adoption is intended to buttress Beijing’s claim that Tibet is not a distinct historical entity, but merely an appendage of China.

The international community is making this erasure all too easy. Some museums, universities, and research institutions outside China have accepted this imperial renaming. The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris has labeled Tibetan artifacts as coming from “Xizang.” The British Museum has referred to “Tibet or the Xizang Autonomous Region” in an exhibit on the Silk Road.

Now, China is taking this effort to the next level. On July 1, a sweeping new “Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress Law” took effect, codifying Xi’s drive to force the assimilation of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities to a single state-defined Chinese identity centered on loyalty to the Communist Party. By criminalizing broadly defined threats to “ethnic unity,” the legislation amounts to yet another weapon with which China can intimidate Tibetan activists, scholars, and diaspora communities. Families in Tibet already face retaliation for the activities of relatives overseas.

The timing of the new law is not a coincidence. The Tibet question has gradually faded from the global agenda in recent years. This partly reflects the international community’s preoccupation with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, tensions over Taiwan, and acute global economic uncertainty. But many governments are also reluctant to jeopardize their relations with China. So, while they rightly condemn cultural destruction elsewhere, they largely ignore the destruction of Tibetan identity.

But this calculation overlooks an inescapable reality: China’s assault on Tibetan identity is inseparable from its great-power ambitions. A permanently assimilated Tibet would consolidate China’s military advantage over the Himalayan piedmont, strengthen its control over Asia’s water resources, secure immense deposits of strategic minerals, and remove what China perceives as the last potential source of political resistance in the region. Such a China would be better equipped—and significantly emboldened—to assert more authority beyond its borders.

The international response need not be extreme. Democratic governments should sanction officials responsible for the forced-assimilation campaign, reject official pressure to refer to the region as Xizang, and expand support for Tibetan educational and cultural institutions in exile. These modest but meaningful steps would help to preserve one of Asia’s oldest civilizations while making clear that cultural erasure cannot become an accepted instrument of statecraft.

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, 2026.

India can no longer take Nepal for granted

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Once firmly in New Delhi’s orbit, Nepal is now a three-way contest

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Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

A highway in Kathmandu on March 20, 2024. © AP Photo

India has long viewed Nepal as lying firmly within its natural sphere of influence. The two countries are bound together by geography, culture, religion and an open border. Nepal’s economy remains deeply intertwined with India’s.

Few international relationships anywhere in Asia combine such extensive people-to-people contact, cultural affinity and freedom of movement as that between India and Nepal.

Today, however, Nepal is no longer defined solely by its ties to India. China has spent the past two decades steadily expanding its political and economic footprint there. Now the U.S. is emerging as a significant third player.

The era when New Delhi could be regarded as Nepal’s indispensable external partner is quietly drawing to a close.

Recent high-level visits by senior American and Chinese officials to Kathmandu underscore a broader reality: Nepal has become an arena of strategic competition among Asia’s two great powers and the world’s leading superpower. With the three competing for influence, investment and strategic access, Nepal has become one of the clearest examples of how India’s traditional dominance on the subcontinent is increasingly under serious challenge.

The U.S. and India remain partners globally yet, as Nepal illustrates, Washington increasingly pursues policies that diverge from New Delhi’s interests on the subcontinent. Before visiting Nepal in April, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs S. Paul Kapur bluntly stated that a primary American regional objective is to “prevent the dominance of any single power in South Asia.”

Nepal, wedged between India and Chinese-ruled Tibet, remains uniquely important to New Delhi, including for internal security, given the nearly 1,800-kilometer open border that allows Nepalis and Indians to move freely without passports. Millions of Nepalis live and work in India. Hindu and Buddhist traditions connect communities on both sides of the frontier. No other power enjoys such deep historical, cultural and societal ties.

Yet such ties alone no longer guarantee political influence.

China recognized this reality before most others. Through infrastructure investments, political engagement and sustained diplomatic outreach, Beijing gradually established itself as a major player in Nepal. It built close relations with Nepal’s two, long-dominant communist parties to help cultivate a friendly government there and expand its influence along India’s northern frontier.

The communists’ crushing defeat in the March national elections has left Beijing’s preferred political channels in Nepal marginalized. Yet Chinese influence may not erode significantly as Nepal’s new Gen Z rulers realize the risks of relying too heavily on a single partner, India.

For Beijing, Nepal’s significance extends beyond economics. The country sits astride China’s sensitive Tibetan frontier and occupies a strategic position between the world’s two most populous nations. Maintaining influence in Kathmandu has become an important element of China’s broader regional strategy.

What is new is the growing American role. While both Washington and New Delhi seek to limit Chinese influence in Nepal, the U.S. is also helping create a regional environment in which India’s privileged position becomes less exclusive.

The result is not outright rivalry between the U.S. and India. Rather, it is subtle differences in outlook and strategy that suggest Washington and New Delhi do not share identical interests in India’s immediate neighborhood, including Nepal.

Washington increasingly treats Kathmandu as an independent strategic actor whose external relationships should not be constrained by any regional power. High-level American engagement with Nepal has become more frequent, while U.S.-backed development initiatives and investment programs have sharply raised Washington’s profile in Kathmandu.

America’s growing strategic footprint, however, has alarmed Beijing, which opposes U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) projects, warning Kathmandu of potential “ramifications” and “outside interference,” especially if the five-year MCC grant program were extended beyond 2028. It has also cautioned Nepal against joining the U.S. State Partnership Program or allowing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network to operate in Nepal, viewing the former as implicit strategic alignment with Washington and the latter as a security risk.

Yet focusing solely on the external powers misses the most important part of the story: Nepal itself.

Kathmandu is not merely the object of great-power competition. Successive Nepali governments have become increasingly adept at leveraging rivalries among India, China and the U.S. to expand their diplomatic room for maneuver. Rather than choosing sides, Nepal seeks to maximize opportunities from all three relationships.

This reflects a broader shift in the country’s foreign policy. Nepal’s leaders increasingly view India, China and the U.S. not as mutually exclusive partners but as complementary sources of investment, technology, development assistance and diplomatic support. What appears from New Delhi as a loss of influence often appears from Kathmandu as an expansion of strategic options.

That dynamic is likely to endure. Nepal’s political class recognizes that competition among larger powers creates opportunities that did not exist when India exercised near-exclusive influence. By maintaining ties with all major players, Kathmandu can extract benefits from each while securing greater autonomy.

For New Delhi, this changing landscape presents a challenge. India retains enormous advantages in Nepal that neither China nor the U.S. can replicate. But influence and exclusivity are not the same thing.

China has already ended India’s near-monopoly on strategic influence in Nepal. The growing American presence is further diversifying Kathmandu’s external partnerships. Nepal is becoming a genuinely competitive geopolitical space.

The real lesson is not that India is being displaced. It is that the age when New Delhi could assume primacy in its strategic backyard is fading. Across the subcontinent, influence increasingly must be earned through sustained engagement and competitive statecraft rather than inherited through geography and history.

Few countries illustrate that transformation more clearly than Nepal.

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.

Welcome to ‘Xizang’: China is quietly, permanently trying to erase Tibet

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

A Tibetan exile at a rally in India in 2017. AP Photo/Ashwini Bhatia

While international attention has rightly focused on China’s mass internment of Uyghurs and other ethnic-minority Muslims in Xinjiang, a quieter but no less consequential campaign is unfolding on the Tibetan Plateau.

In Tibet, China is not merely policing dissent or curbing religious practice, but attempting something more permanent: the systematic erasure of a people’s culture, language and identity by targeting its children.

Over the past decade, Beijing has forcibly placed more than one million Tibetan children — almost four out of every five — into state-run, Mandarin-language boarding schools. Many are taken from their families at the age of four or five and kept away for most of the year.

These institutions are presented as instruments of development. In reality, they function as tools of forced assimilation, designed to sever children from their language, faith and cultural inheritance.

This is not simply a human-rights scandal, but a geopolitical project with far-reaching implications for Asia’s future balance of power.

The boarding-school system in Tibet is built on a neo-imperial premise: “Control the child and you control the future.” Children are taught — explicitly and implicitly — that Tibetan traditions are backward, their faith suspect, and their identity subordinate to a homogenized Chinese nation.

By displacing the family and monastery as the core institutions of socialization, the state inserts itself as the primary arbiter of values and belonging. The result is a generation growing up alienated from its roots, conditioned to view its own heritage through the lens of inferiority.

This is a classic colonial maneuver. Residential schooling has long been used by imperial powers to break indigenous societies from within. Western nations now acknowledge the devastating legacy of such systems imposed on Native peoples in North America, Australia and New Zealand. China, in contrast, is actively expanding this very model in the 21st century — on an industrial scale.

The silence of Western democracies in the face of this campaign is striking. Governments that routinely condemn abuses elsewhere have largely treated Tibet’s boarding schools as an internal Chinese matter and chosen to look away.

Tibet is not a peripheral region. It is the geographic and strategic heart of Asia. Often described as the “Roof of the World,” the vast Tibetan Plateau dominates the Himalayan range and overlooks South, Southeast and Central Asia.

Control over Tibet allows China to project power across the Himalayas and exert pressure on these regions, including as the upstream controller of cross-border river flows. Tibet is the source of Asia’s main river systems. In Tibet, China is currently not only constructing the largest dam ever built on earth but also rapidly extracting the region’s rich mineral resources.

Before China’s invasion and annexation in the early 1950s, Tibet was a self-governing entity. Had it remained so, it would today rank as the world’s tenth-largest country by area. Its absorption into the People’s Republic fundamentally altered Asia’s strategic geography, including its hydrological map.

The geopolitical reality is that whoever controls Tibet holds a commanding position over the Himalayan piedmont, enjoying unparalleled military, hydrological and strategic leverage. This reality explains Beijing’s tightening grip on Tibet and its determination to extinguish any distinct Tibetan consciousness that might challenge Chinese rule.

The campaign against Tibetan identity is thus inseparable from China’s broader strategic ambitions. By reducing Tibetans to a depoliticized, assimilated population, Beijing seeks to lock in perpetual control over one of the world’s most sensitive geopolitical corridors.

The assault on identity extends beyond classrooms. Beijing has also sought to erase Tibet from global consciousness by expunging its very name. It has replaced the term “Tibet” with “Xizang,” a Qing-dynasty label meaning “Western Treasure Land.”

The goal is clear: to recast Tibet not as a distinct historical entity but as an inseparable, resource-rich appendage of China.

Disturbingly, this linguistic shift is beginning to find acceptance beyond China’s borders. Some Western museums and academic institutions have started adopting “Xizang” in place of Tibet, lending inadvertent legitimacy to Beijing’s narrative. Accepting this rebranding is acquiescence in the erasure of a nation’s historical identity.

Tibetan children, meanwhile, continue to risk dangerous journeys into exile, particularly to India, in order to preserve their language, religion and culture. India, home to the world’s largest Tibetan exile community, subsidizes Tibetan-language schools. That such risks for children are necessary is an indictment of international inaction.

Western democracies cannot plausibly claim ignorance of China’s forced-assimilation goal — to eliminate a potential source of resistance in a strategically vital region. Through the forced separation of a million children, Beijing is systematically attempting to obliterate a civilization.

At a minimum, democratic governments and international institutions should abandon their posture of silent spectatorship.

First, officials directly responsible for the Tibetan boarding-school system should face targeted Western diplomatic and economic sanctions. Cultural genocide should carry consequences more tangible than the largely symbolic visa restrictions announced by the Biden administration in 2023.

Second, governments, universities, museums and international organizations must reject the enforced use of “Xizang” in place of Tibet. Preserving historical and cultural nomenclature is a small but essential act of resistance against erasure.

Third, greater material and political support is needed for Tibetan educational and cultural institutions in exile, which remain the last line of defense for this unique culture.

The fate of Tibet’s children is a bellwether for the future of Asia’s security order. To ignore their forced separation and indoctrination is to acquiesce in China’s tightening grip on Tibet — and by extension on the strategic heart of Asia.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“

The Asian paradox: Why nuclear India should learn from pacifist Japan

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

AP Photo/Manish Swarup, File

As China accelerates its military buildup and expands its influence across Asia, its two principal regional rivals — India and Japan — face a common challenge: how to build defense institutions capable of making fast, informed decisions in an era of high-tech warfare.

Yet an intriguing paradox has emerged. Constitutionally pacifist Japan has spent the past decade modernizing its defense decision-making apparatus and empowering military professionals within government. India, despite being a nuclear-armed state confronting an increasingly assertive China along their long, disputed frontier, continues to maintain a cumbersome system that marginalizes military expertise and concentrates authority in a civilian bureaucracy largely staffed by generalist administrators.

The result is that Japan today possesses a more streamlined and operationally agile defense establishment than India.

The roots of this divergence lie in history. Following World War II, Japan feared a return to the militarism that had driven it to catastrophe. To prevent the military from ever again becoming an autonomous political force, career bureaucrats were allowed to govern the defense ministry under a doctrine known as “Bunkan Yuyu,” or civilian bureaucratic superiority.

India’s concerns were different but produced a similar outcome. As military coups swept through newly independent states across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, India’s leaders sought to insulate their young democracy by systematically downgrading the institutional role of the armed forces. The defense ministry became the preserve of civilian bureaucrats, many of whom rotated in from unrelated ministries such as agriculture, education or rural development.

Over time, both India and Japan built defense establishments in which uniformed military officers wielded little influence over policymaking. But whereas Japan eventually recognized the costs of this arrangement, India largely has not.

Confronted by China’s aggressive rise and the North Korean threat, Tokyo concluded that its clunky, bifurcated defense structure had become a strategic liability. Beginning under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan embarked on overhauling its civil-military relations.

The pivotal moment came in 2015, when Japan enacted sweeping security reforms that ended bureaucratic supremacy within the defense ministry. Uniformed officers and civilian officials were placed on equal footing, operational authority was consolidated under military leadership, and a new National Security Council helped integrate military, intelligence and political decision-making.

Tokyo did not abandon civilian control of the military. Rather, it modernized it by accepting a key distinction: Civilian control does not require bureaucratic domination.

India’s reforms, in contrast, have been partial and hesitant.

For decades, Indian military officers have complained of being largely excluded from higher defense policymaking. Unlike most major democracies, India has never fully integrated military headquarters into the defense ministry, leaving senior officers institutionally separated from the civilian bureaucracy.

In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government created the position of chief of defense staff. The new office was intended to promote jointness among the Army, Navy and Air Force, improve strategic coordination and drive the transition to integrated theater commands.

Yet the government has subsequently weakened the very institution it created.

Following the death of the first chief of defense staff, General Bipin Rawat, in a helicopter crash in 2021, New Delhi changed eligibility rules to allow retired three-star officers to be recalled to active duty and appointed to the country’s highest military post. Subsequent chief of defense staff appointments have reflected this new approach.

No public explanation has been offered for the change. Yet by selecting retired officers rather than serving chiefs, the government erodes the institutional weight and independence of the chief of defense staff position.

The change resembles what political scientists call “coup-proofing” — institutional arrangements designed to limit the emergence of a unified military leadership. Such measures may make sense in states with histories of military intervention in politics. India, however, has maintained an exceptionally strong tradition of civilian supremacy since independence. Its armed forces have consistently remained outside politics and subordinate to elected authority.

Yet India’s defense institutions continue to operate as though the principal threat to democracy comes from its own military rather than from the increasingly complex security challenges emerging beyond its borders.

The consequences extend beyond bureaucratic turf battles.

A future conflict with China will not resemble the 1962 Sino-Indian war. It will unfold simultaneously across land, sea, air, cyber and space domains, with success depending on rapid decision-making, integrated command structures, and the seamless fusion of intelligence, diplomacy and military operations — the very capabilities Japan’s reforms have been designed to strengthen.

Such requirements favor systems that elevate expertise and empower professional military judgment. They do not favor bureaucratic structures designed primarily to constrain military influence.

Here the contrast with Japan becomes especially revealing. Tokyo has concluded that effective civilian control requires informed civilian oversight, not bureaucratic gatekeeping. India, by contrast, still treats civilian bureaucratic control as a democratic safeguard in its own right.

As a result, India’s civilian bureaucracy remains the principal gatekeeper of major defense decisions, strategic planning, procurement and budgetary authority.

The irony is striking: pacifist Japan has built a more nimble and modern defense decision-making system than nuclear power India.

For years, Indian reformers looked to American models such as the Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act for inspiration. Today, however, the most relevant example may lie closer to home. Japan has demonstrated that democratic oversight and military professionalism are not competing objectives. Properly structured, they reinforce one another.

If India hopes to build genuinely integrated theater commands and prepare for the demands of a future conflict, it must finally move beyond the institutional assumptions that shaped its civil-military system in the late 1940s. The country does not need less civilian control. It needs a more sophisticated understanding of what civilian control actually means.

On that question, nuclear India may have something important to learn from pacifist Japan.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“

The US and India Have Become Regional Rivals

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By Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

On his recent visit to India, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio predictably touted India as one of America’s “most important strategic partners,” citing the two countries’ shared values, “people-to-people ties,” and strategic alignment on “all of the key issues that will define the new century.” But this familiar language of partnership rings increasingly hollow.

Much has been said about the impact US President Donald Trump’s public insults and weaponization of tariffs have had on America’s relations with India. But the bilateral relationship was under pressure well before Trump’s return to the White House in 2025. In recent years, as India’s regional standing has been steadily eroded by China’s expanding strategic footprint, the United States has pursued policies in India’s strategic backyard that have disregarded Indian interests—and sometimes run directly counter to them.

Bangladesh is a case in point. After the military-backed ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government in 2024, the US endorsed regime change. But India knew this posed serious risks, which have since materialized: Bangladesh is now gripped by Islamist violence, jeopardizing stability on India’s eastern flank.

Then there is Myanmar. Since the military’s 2021 overthrow of a civilian government, the US has maintained a punitive approach toward the junta, including tough sanctions and “non-lethal” military aid for rebel groups, despite the security risks this has created along India’s sensitive northeastern frontier. In March, a US citizen, along with six Ukrainian nationals, were arrested in India for allegedly entering the country’s northeast without permits and crossing into Myanmar to train and arm anti-junta fighters in drone warfare.

The US has also begun treating Nepal—a country bound to India through geography, culture, and economics—as a strategic priority in its own right, rather than as part of its India policy. In recent years, high-level US officials have visited Kathmandu more frequently, often without making the once-customary stop in New Delhi.

Trump has made matters much worse, not least by pursuing closer ties with Pakistan. Never mind that Pakistan continues to provide safe haven, as well as military and intelligence aid, to terrorist groups, or that Pakistani army chief Asim Munir staged a constitutional coup last November. Trump’s family members and business associates have struck lucrative deals in the country, and that is apparently good enough reason for the Trump administration to revive dangerous strategic dynamics on the subcontinent.

The US has even begun taking a more conciliatory approach toward China. Though the strategic competition between the two superpowers remains intense, Trump’s recent shift toward accommodation in some areas has created considerable uncertainty—not least for India, whose value to the US has long been rooted in its ability to act as a regional counterweight to China.

But while the US has long viewed India as a critical democratic bulwark against Chinese dominance in the Indo-Pacific, it also balks at the idea of Indian regional dominance. As US Assistant Secretary of State Samir Paul Kapur explained in February, the US is seeking to prevent any single power from gaining too much influence in South Asia. Kapur’s remarks echoed the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), according to which the US “cannot allow any nation to become so dominant” that it could “threaten [US] interests” and must maintain “global and regional balances of power.”

In America’s view, a more pluralistic regional order is inherently more stable and favorable to US interests than one dominated by any country—even a close “strategic partner.” Unlike its 2017 predecessor, the NSS barely mentions India, noting only that the US wants to “improve commercial (and other) relations” with the country, in order to encourage it to “contribute to Indo-Pacific security.”

America’s reservations are not just geopolitical. “We are not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago,” US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said on a recent visit to New Delhi, letting it “develop all these markets” and then start “beating” the US in “a lot of commercial things.” The message is clear: the US now views India less as a strategic partner to be nurtured than as a regional and economic rival to be contained.

India must adapt to this new reality, which demands a fundamental shift in its strategic thinking. India can no longer count on its close relationship with the US to sustain its influence across South Asia and beyond. Instead, it must cultivate regional influence through economic engagement, political sensitivity toward neighboring states, and the delivery of tangible public goods that appeal to smaller countries.

The US should rethink its approach as well. It might want a more diversified regional order, but this cannot come at the expense of its partnership with India, with which it continues to share important interests, from managing China’s rise to preserving stability across the Indo-Pacific. Policies that systematically weaken India’s position in its own neighborhood risk undermining these shared objectives.

The Trump administration seems to hope that the US and India can remain global partners, even as they become regional rivals. But this will be no easy feat, and the outcome will shape not only the future of the bilateral relationship, but also the strategic landscape in South Asia and beyond.

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, 2026.

Trump’s ambush diplomacy comes with long-term costs

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

Photo: Alex Brandon, Associated Press

President Trump once bragged in “The Art of the Deal” about the virtues of “truthful hyperbole” — manipulating perceptions, exaggerating momentum and creating leverage through illusion. In foreign policy, however, the same instinct has evolved into something far more dangerous: diplomacy as ambush.

One defining feature of Trump’s second presidency has been his repeated use of diplomatic negotiations not as pathways to peace or settlement but as instruments of tactical deception. Again and again, diplomatic engagement has coincided with — and appears in some cases to have facilitated — sudden military escalation. The pattern is now too consistent to dismiss as coincidence.

The risk is that if negotiations becomes associated with strategic chicanery, it could destroy the very credibility that gives U.S. diplomacy its power.

Iran offers the clearest example. In June 2025, U.S. nuclear talks with Iran in Oman provided cover for Israel’s devastating aerial assaults that caught Tehran completely off-guard, before Trump himself widened the conflict by ordering U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites.

Months later, as renewed Oman-mediated negotiations between Washington and Tehran appeared to be nearing a breakthrough, the Trump administration on February 28 abruptly launched “Operation Epic Fury” alongside Israel. Iranian negotiators reportedly believed they were moving toward a “nuclear freeze for sanctions ease” framework accord. Instead, Trump launched the war while Iranian forces were operating under reduced alert conditions.

Even after the conflict erupted, Trump repeatedly signaled possible de-escalation while widening the bombing campaign to target Iran’s civilian and economic infrastructure.

Then came the latest example. On May 25, shortly after Trump claimed that a deal with Iran to end the conflict was “largely negotiated,” U.S. forces sank two Iranian mine-laying vessels and bombed missile-launch sites in southern Iran, with the president threatening a full-scale resumption of the “shooting.”

The pattern is unmistakable: Diplomacy and military escalation are not operating on separate tracks. They are fused into a single strategy of confusion, misdirection and surprise.

Nor is Iran unique. In Venezuela, negotiations between U.S. officials and President Nicolas Maduro’s close associates continued almost until the moment Washington launched “Operation Absolute Resolve” in January. Venezuelan negotiators believed discussions over a power transition and immunity deal were making progress, even as U.S. intelligence reportedly used the diplomatic channel itself to gather targeting information and breach Maduro’s compound.

Using the negotiation process as a massive intelligence-gathering exercise enabled American agencies to pinpoint Maduro’s location before the strike order was issued, leading to his swift capture.

The same pattern appeared in Yemen. In March 2025, Omani mediators were in Washington discussing a possible maritime and security deal with the Houthis when the U.S. launched “Operation Rough Rider.” Houthi leaders, apparently expecting a diplomatic breakthrough, had not dispersed key missile assets. The opening barrage destroyed a substantial portion of their long-range strike capability, yet the operation failed to defeat the Houthis decisively.

Nigeria offers an even more jarring example, because the country has been a nominal U.S. partner. Throughout fall 2025, Washington held high-level security consultations with Nigerian authorities and negotiated expanded counterterrorism cooperation. Yet on Christmas Day, the U.S. launched strikes inside Nigeria against alleged ISIS-West Africa targets without informing the Nigerian defense ministry beforehand. Intelligence gathered by U.S. surveillance flights and during joint planning sessions reportedly helped facilitate the strikes.

In Syria, the strategy early this year took a different form — a feigned retreat. U.S. officials used deconfliction channels with Russian and Syrian counterparts to signal a “drawdown” of active patrols in the Badia desert. ISIS remnants moved into what appeared to be a security vacuum, only to find themselves drawn into predesignated kill zones targeted by U.S. loitering munitions.

Viewed individually, each case can be defended as clever statecraft or operational necessity. Together, they reveal a negotiate-to-strike doctrine. Under Trump, negotiations increasingly appear designed not merely to resolve disputes or conflicts but to lull adversaries into complacency, lower defenses, gather intelligence and maximize surprise before kinetic action begins. The diplomatic carrot remains visible until the instant the military stick lands its first blow.

Trump’s defenders argue that such tactics save American lives and that diplomacy is simply another instrument of war. But this logic ignores the long-term strategic cost. Diplomacy ultimately depends less on power than on credibility.

Military power can destroy infrastructure, topple governments and intimidate adversaries. It cannot by itself create legitimacy or durable political settlements. Those require credible diplomacy — diplomacy understood not as theater, bait or manipulation, but as a genuine effort to end conflicts or resolve disputes.

Tactical surprise can produce short-term military gains. But great powers require something deeper to sustain influence: durable trust in their intentions and commitments. Once that trust erodes, coalition-building becomes harder, crisis management becomes more dangerous, and deterrence becomes less stable.

During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow engaged in arms-control talks despite profound mistrust because both sides understood that the negotiating table was not itself a targeting mechanism. Once diplomacy is linked to deception, the incentive to negotiate collapses.

Russian officials now increasingly view U.S. diplomacy on Ukraine through a lens of dual-track manipulation — public engagement coupled with covert escalation.

Even allies are uneasy, with Trump’s Iran adventure deepening perceptions of American unpredictability.

Once adversaries conclude that American negotiations are merely preludes to coercion, they will adapt accordingly. They will become less willing to engage and more inclined to escalate preemptively.

That is the paradox at the heart of Trump’s “diplomacy as ambush” strategy: tactics designed to maximize short-term leverage may ultimately weaken America’s long-term global influence.

A superpower can survive military setbacks. It is far harder to recover once its word loses value.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“

What’s the purpose of the Quad?

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The Quad’s main challenge comes from America’s strategic drift, rather than from China

Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar speaks in front of the U.S., Japanese and Australian foreign ministers before a Quad meeting at the State Department in Washington in July 2025.
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Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

As U.S. President Donald Trump pivots from confronting China to selectively accommodating it, America’s Quad strategic coalition with Japan, India and Australia is becoming increasingly marginal to U.S. strategy and is at risk of strategic irrelevance unless the grouping restores coherence, commitment and purpose.

The Quad was once projected as the democratic world’s strategic answer to China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific. It was conceived as a strategic alliance to uphold a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” the vision advanced by the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and later adopted as a central pillar of U.S. strategy.

Today, however, the Quad is losing strategic relevance. The upcoming Quad foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi is unlikely to arrest this drift or restore momentum to a grouping that appears ever more directionless.

Increasingly, the Quad resembles a Potemkin alliance — outwardly intact but hollow at its core.

The signs of drift are unmistakable. No Quad leaders summit has been held since 2024.

In his first term, Trump revived the Quad after a decade of dormancy and made it central to U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, a priority his second term initially appeared to confirm when Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened a Quad foreign ministers meeting on his first day in office.

But the grouping’s momentum has visibly slowed as Washington’s China policy has fundamentally shifted.

The shift, highlighted by Trump’s visit this month to Beijing, began after the president’s sky-high tariffs on China prompted Beijing in April last year to halt most exports of rare-earth minerals — critical inputs for high-tech civilian and military production. China’s weaponization of its near-monopoly on rare-earth minerals forced Washington to negotiate a truce.

That accommodation has since deepened. The economic and geopolitical fallout from Trump’s Iran war has further weakened his hand, including by aggravating stagflationary pressures at home. With the U.S. still dependent on China-controlled supply chains due to the failed “decoupling” strategy of Trump’s first term, Washington needs a cooperative Beijing to keep inflation from spiraling and to discourage Chinese unloading of U.S. Treasury holdings, especially as U.S. borrowing rises.

To make matters worse, even vis-a-vis allies critical to Indo-Pacific power equilibrium, Trump has subordinated long-term strategy to short-term economic coercion, wielding trade pressure to extract concessions. Viewing allies chiefly as revenue sources may produce short-term returns, but it undermines trust and the foundations of joint strategy.

The self-inflicted damage was apparent when Trump’s trade war against India, in the form of 50% tariffs, killed any prospect of New Delhi hosting the Quad summit last year. India was originally slated to hold the Quad summit in 2024, but previous President Joe Biden persuaded it to host it in 2025 so that he could convene the leaders in his hometown of Wilmington in the twilight of his presidency.

Now India is making a renewed bid to host the Quad summit this year after the U.S. midterm elections, lest the grouping be relegated to geopolitical insignificance or even become defunct.

Washington agreed to the Quad foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi next Monday in an apparent attempt to reassure nervous partners that the arrangement still matters to it. Rubio is confirmed to attend, but the primary purpose of this meeting is essentially damage control — mainly trying to agree on a summit date to demonstrate that the Quad remains a functional pillar of Indo-Pacific security rather than a relic of previous U.S. administrations.

But symbolism cannot substitute for strategy. The reality is that the grouping increasingly lacks strategic clarity, institutional cohesion and political urgency.

The contradiction is glaring. If the U.S. itself is pursuing a more conciliatory approach toward Beijing, what exactly is the Quad’s central strategic purpose?

Originally conceived as a balancing coalition to preserve a favorable Indo-Pacific balance of power, the Quad cannot retain strategic credibility if its leading member simultaneously seeks geopolitical accommodation with the very power the grouping was implicitly designed to counterbalance.

The Trump administration’s own National Security Strategy reflects the grouping’s diminished status. The Quad receives only a single passing mention in the entire document — and even that only in relation to India. Such marginalization would have been unthinkable until 2024, when the Quad was routinely described by Washington as the cornerstone of Indo-Pacific strategy.

Meanwhile, the grouping has drifted toward low-risk initiatives — vaccines, critical technologies, supply chains and maritime-domain awareness — while avoiding the harder strategic questions that originally gave it geopolitical significance. Cooperation in these areas is useful, but such efforts cannot conceal the absence of collective political will.

India, Japan and Australia have reason for concern. Their long-term strategic calculations still rest on assumptions of sustained U.S. commitment to balancing China in the Indo-Pacific. Yet Washington’s signals are increasingly mixed: rhetorical support for the Quad paired with a broader search for accommodation with Beijing. With Trump’s China posture shifting, the Quad has become increasingly marginal to his strategy.

The result is strategic ambiguity and confusion that weaken deterrence and erode confidence among allies and partners alike.

The Quad was never meant to be a talk shop or bargaining chip in U.S.-China relations but a strategic bulwark against Chinese expansionism and a stabilizer of the Indo-Pacific balance of power. Allowing it to wither through neglect risks vindicating Beijing’s longstanding contempt for the Quad.

The Quad is unlikely to disappear formally. Too much diplomatic capital has been invested in it for that. But alliances do not become irrelevant only when they collapse; they can also gradually decay into performative institutions that hold meetings, issue communiques and stage symbolic displays of unity while losing their original strategic rationale.

That is the danger now confronting the Quad. Unless its members restore strategic coherence and political purpose, the grouping risks becoming precisely what it was never meant to be: a Potemkin alliance — impressive in appearance but increasingly hollow underneath.

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.

A striking reversal in America’s China policy: From confrontation to accommodation

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What may seem like strategic pragmatism to Trump looks like strategic retrenchment in Tokyo and other Asian capitals

President Xi Jinping of China, left, greets President Donald Trump outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing during their two-day summit, on Thursday, May 14, 2026. CREDIT: (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)

By Brahma Chellaney
Contributing Writer, The Japan Times

Soon after departing Beijing for the U.S. last Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump called Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to brief her on his talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The call was intended to reassure Tokyo after Trump’s high-stakes summit in Beijing.

But Japan can scarcely draw comfort from the symbolism of that phone call.

For Tokyo, the critical issue is whether the U.S. is fundamentally rethinking its approach toward China — and whether that shift could leave Japan dangerously exposed at a time of rising Asian instability fueled at least in part by Chinese expansionism.

The Beijing summit underscored a striking reversal in America’s China policy. Trump, casting aside both the adversarial approach of his first term (which the Biden administration largely maintained) and the hawkish rhetoric of the early months of his second term, now appears to be pursuing a policy of pragmatic accommodation.

The seismic shift in China policy, from confrontation to an increasingly dovish posture, holds profound implications for Japanese and broader Asian security, as the reversal comes just when Chinese coercive power is expanding.

During his first presidency, Trump defined China as the most consequential U.S. adversary, launched tariffs and made the Indo-Pacific central to U.S. strategy. He revived “the Quad,” strengthened pressure on Beijing and increasingly treated economic dependence on China as a national-security vulnerability.

In contrast, the latest summit projected a conspicuously conciliatory U.S. stance. The same president who often treats U.S. allies and strategic partners like freeloaders, vassals or adversaries, adopted a strikingly deferential posture toward America’s principal geopolitical rival. He lavished praise on China and Xi, even telling the Chinese leader, “It’s an honor to be your friend.”

The U.S. shift is occurring when Japan, under Takaichi’s leadership, has accelerated military normalization, increased defense spending and linked Taiwan’s security to its own. Now Tokyo faces an uncomfortable paradox: Just as Japan is seeking stronger deterrence against China, its principal ally appears to be edging toward tactical accommodation with Beijing.

For Japanese strategists, this revives an old nightmare — an “over-the-head” arrangement in which Washington and Beijing stabilize their relationship while Japanese security concerns are treated as secondary.

The concern is not that Trump will abandon allies. Rather, it is the prospect of gradual erosion: delayed or scaled-back arms sales to Taiwan, quieter naval operations, greater ambiguity in American commitments and increasing willingness to defer to Chinese “red lines” in exchange for economic or diplomatic concessions.

In a transactional framework, such concessions can accumulate incrementally. Over time, they alter the regional balance.

Trump’s willingness to roll back sanctions on Chinese refiners purchasing Iranian oil, together with his studied ambiguity on Taiwan and arms sales to Taipei, will reinforce concerns in Tokyo that immediate transactional calculations are increasingly outweighing Indo-Pacific deterrence.

His silence on China’s egregious human-rights record further underpins the perception that strategic accommodation is increasingly taking precedence over principle and long-term security.

Behind Trump’s conciliatory turn toward China lie the mounting costs of his Iran war fiasco, economic turbulence at home and slumping approval ratings.

The war against Iran has exposed serious strains in American military capacity. Precision-guided munitions, missile interceptors and other high-end systems have been consumed at alarming rates, depleting stockpiles. The conflict has also revealed vulnerabilities in U.S. forward bases and maritime operations — lessons Beijing is undoubtedly studying closely.

At the same time, China has demonstrated powerful economic leverage. A year ago, in response to Trump’s sky-high tariffs, Beijing effectively pulled a geoeconomic kill switch by halting most exports of rare-earth minerals — critical inputs for high-tech production. Washington was forced to climb down and negotiate a truce.

For Trump, confrontation with China now carries mounting economic and political costs. Inflationary pressures stemming from Middle East instability, fears of supply-chain disruption and concerns over U.S. debt have strengthened Washington’s incentives to stabilize ties with Beijing, lest China weaponize its holdings of U.S. Treasuries and America’s dependence on China-centered supply chains.

But what may seem like strategic pragmatism in Washington looks like strategic retrenchment in Tokyo and other Asian capitals that rely on the credibility of U.S. deterrence.

Japan’s security environment is uniquely vulnerable to any weakening of deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan is not a distant geopolitical issue for Japan but central to its national security. If China were to dominate Taiwan, it would gain greater control over the maritime choke points and sea lanes through which much of Japan’s energy imports and trade flow.

Moreover, the Iran conflict itself has highlighted the geopolitical power of choke points. Just as disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have delivered a global energy shock, Beijing may conclude that pressure on Taiwan and surrounding sea lanes could coerce adversaries without requiring a full-scale invasion.

For Japanese policymakers, unquestioned reliance on an all-encompassing American security umbrella is starting to look risky. That realization is likely to accelerate two trends already under way.

First, Tokyo will intensify efforts to strengthen “minilateral” security networks across the Indo-Pacific, particularly with countries such as India, Australia, the Philippines and Vietnam. These partnerships increasingly serve as insurance against uncertainty in American policy.

Second, Japan’s internal debate over constitutional revision and long-range strike capabilities is likely to accelerate further. Trump’s Beijing pivot may strengthen the argument among Japanese strategists that Japan must become a more autonomous military power capable of defending itself even if Washington’s priorities shift.

The Trump-Xi summit may have reduced immediate tensions between the world’s two largest powers. But for nations on China’s periphery, the summit reinforced a more troubling reality — that Washington increasingly sees the world’s largest autocratic state less as a challenger to be contained and more as a peer superpower whose cooperation America now urgently needs.

For Japan, the deeper fear is no longer merely a rising China, but an America growing less willing to confront it.

Brahma Chellaney, a longstanding contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.