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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

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Any peace deal should not be about formalising China’s strategic advantages

Brahma Chellaney  | OPEN magazine

 

China and India make up more than one-third of the global population, and enduring enmity between these giants serves neither their national interests nor the cause of Asian stability and security.

The India-China military standoff along the traditional Indo-Tibetan frontier may not be grabbing international headlines, especially with two wars raging elsewhere in the world. But, as External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said earlier this year, the situation along the border remains “very tense and dangerous”.

Now in its fifth year, the standoff, which has brought potential dark clouds on the horizon, was triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments on some key Ladakh borderlands in April 2020, just before thawing ice normally reopens Himalayan access routes after a brutal winter.

The standoff, however, extends beyond the westernmost Ladakh sector of the border. It encompasses sections of the middle sector, as well as the eastern sector along Tibet’s long border with Arunachal Pradesh. One confrontation location is opposite the narrow, 22km-wide corridor known as “the chicken-neck” that connects India’s Northeast to the rest of the country. The corridor’s vulnerability has been increased by Chinese encroachments on Bhutan’s southwestern borderlands.

While both sides have significantly ramped up deployments of troops and weapons, as if preparing for a possible war, China has frenetically been building new warfare-related infrastructure along the inhospitable frontier. Its focus has been on building underground military facilities that can survive aerial attacks in war. So, it has been boring tunnels and shafts in mountainsides to set up command positions, reinforced troop shelters and weapons-storage facilities.

In addition, China has been systematically planting settlers in new militarised border villages along the India frontier. These artificial villages are becoming the equivalent of the artificial islands Beijing created in the South China Sea to serve as its forward military bases.

China, meanwhile, has stepped up other provocations against India, including Sinicising the names of places in Arunachal Pradesh to help strengthen its territorial claim to that sprawling state, which is almost three times larger in area than Taiwan. Indeed, Beijing has been calling Arunachal Pradesh “South Tibet”, contending it was once part of Tibet—a claim the Dalai Lama says has no historical basis.

Against this backdrop, talks to de-escalate tensions and end the standoff have made little headway after the two sides agreed long ago to turn three specific confrontation sites into buffer zones. The fact that those buffers have come up largely in territories that were within India’s patrolling jurisdiction has underscored China’s negotiating leverage.

Still, it makes strategic sense for both China and India to try and find common ground to defuse their border confrontation. Some signals, even if exploratory, suggest that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime may now be seeking to smooth over tensions with India.

As in 1962, when China triggered a war by invading India, the Ladakh encroachments are counterproductive to long-term Chinese interests. The 1962 war shattered Indian illusions about China and set in motion India’s shift away from pacifism. In 1967, while still recovering from the 1962 war and another war with Pakistan in 1965, India gave China a bloody nose in military clashes along the Tibet-Sikkim border.

In terms of territory gained, China’s 2020 Ladakh aggression may have been a success. But, politically, it has proved self-damaging, driving India closer to the US and setting in motion a major Indian military buildup, including in the missile and nuclear realms. Relations between Beijing and New Delhi are at a nadir.

This seems a replay of 1962, when China set out, in the words of then-Premier Zhou Enlai, to “teach India a lesson”. China won that war but lost the peace. The difference now is that, without defusing the border crisis, China risks making a permanent enemy of its largest neighbour.

Even militarily, it does not make sense for China to prolong the standoff at a time when its expansionist strategy is targeting Taiwan and seeking to transform the South China Sea into a “Chinese lake”. Referring to the Indian military’s ongoing confrontation with Chinese forces, Admiral Mike Gilday, the chief of US naval operations, said in August 2022 that India presents China a two-front problem: “They [Indians] now force China to not only look east, toward the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, but they now have to be looking over their shoulder at India.”

President Xi Jinping‘S dilemma is how to resolve the Himalayan military crisis without losing face. The longer the standoff persists, the greater would be the risk for Beijing of turning India into an enduring enemy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite taking some flak at home over China’s Ladakh encroachments, has continued to search for a settlement through quiet diplomacy

Today, Xi’s self-made dilemma is how to resolve the Himalayan military crisis without losing face. But the longer the standoff persists, the greater would be the risk for Beijing of turning India into an enduring enemy, a development that could weigh down China’s global and regional ambitions, including Xi’s self-described “historic mission” to absorb Taiwan.

Without the elements of stealth, deception and surprise, which characterised its encroachments, China would be hard put to get the better of the Indian armed forces in a war. While the Chinese military relies heavily on conscripts, India has an all-volunteer force that is considered the world’s most experienced in mountain warfare.

For his part, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite taking some flak at home over China’s Ladakh encroachments, has continued to search for a settlement through quiet diplomacy.

In stark contrast to US President Joe Biden shutting the door to diplomacy with Moscow following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Modi has kept diplomatic space for finding a negotiated end to the border crisis, including by refraining from imposing any tangible sanctions against China. While his government has banned numerous Chinese mobile apps and blocked certain Chinese investments, it has shied away from substantive punitive action.

This has led to a strange paradox: Amid the border confrontation, China’s trade surplus with India has continued to surge. Its trade surplus has already surpassed India’s total defence budget, the world’s third largest.

One incentive for India to mend fences with China is that, despite the military standoff creating room for a US-India strategic nexus, American policies and actions continue to add to India’s regional security challenges. The US and India may agree on some broader strategic issues internationally, but in India’s own neighbourhood extending from Myanmar to the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt, it is becoming clearer that American policies do not align with core Indian interests. Bangladesh is just the latest wake-up call for New Delhi.

Jaishankar said in March that India remains “committed to finding a fair, reasonable” agreement with China. In fact, Modi briefly discussed ways to defuse the border crisis with Xi on the sidelines of multilateral summits in Bali and Johannesburg in November 2022 and August 2023, respectively.

The forthcoming BRICS and G20 summits will offer opportunities for Modi and Xi to meet on the margins, creating an impetus for both sides to work out a possible deal through quiet diplomacy. The BRICS summit (the first after the group’s major expansion) will be held in Kazan, Russia, from October 22 to 24, to be followed by the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 18-19.

With Russia taking an active interest in a potential end to the Sino-Indian border confrontation, the BRICS summit (to which Russian President Vladimir Putin has also invited some non-BRICS leaders, including the presidents of Iran and Azerbaijan) could potentially serve as a catalyst for reaching some sort of a ‘peace’ deal between Beijing and New Delhi. This may well explain renewed back-channel discussions, as well as Jaishankar’s meetings with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who is also a Communist Party of China (CPC) Politburo member.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (Photo: Alamy)

The BRICS Summit could potentially serve as a catalyst for reaching some sort of a ‘peace’ deal between Beijing and New Delhi. This may well explain renewed back-channel discussions, as well as Jaishankar’s meetings with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, who is also a CPC politburo member

To be sure, New Delhi has all along been open to patching things up with China. At the same time, it has displayed an unflinching resolve to stand up to China: it has not only matched China’s Himalayan military deployments, but also made clear that the standoff cannot end as long as Beijing continues to violate bilateral border-management agreements and engage in intimidation and coercion.

Xi’s failure, while green-lighting the 2020 encroachments, to anticipate a robust Indian military response openly challenging Chinese power and capability was a serious strategic miscalculation.

Since the standoff began, India has tested several leading-edge missile systems, and recently boosted its nuclear deterrent by commissioning a second nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN). Powered by an 82.5MW pressurised light water reactor (LWR), <INS Arighat> is armed with 12 K-15 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). A third SSBN with the longer-range K-4 SLBMs to deter China is nearing completion.

However, India has done little to build bargaining leverage against China, which is why the buffer zones at Galwan Valley, Pangong Lake and Gogra-Hot Springs were established largely on Indian territories.

India should have responded to the 2020 Chinese encroachments by sending troops into strategic Chinese-held areas in Tibet. This would have raised the costs for Chinese border violations, thereby boosting deterrence.

Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russian territory sought to seize territory that could serve as a bargaining chip in future negotiations. A counter territorial grab has always made strategic and military sense. It is inexplicable why India, in response to the Chinese encroachments, has chosen to stay locked in a military standoff without seeking to gain counter-leverage by seizing some Chinese-held territory in Tibet.

To make matters worse, India even vacated the strategic Kailash Range as part of the 2021 Pangong Lake deal, which, like the buffer zones elsewhere, has worked to China’s military advantage.

In the Pangong region, the entire buffer zone was set up on territory that India had patrolled until China made its stealth encroachments in April 2020. The buffer, in fact, also includes a swath of Indian area that China had never disputed or claimed. This is the area from Finger 4 to the Indian base (between Fingers 2 and 3). All this has encouraged China to construct a division-level headquarters at the edge of the lake, along with two bridges across the lake and underground warfare-related facilities, placing it in an ascendant position in the Pangong region.

More broadly, the standoff persists despite more than four years of military and diplomatic negotiations because China has used those talks to take India round and round the mulberry bush, while it has been quietly consolidating its encroachments and building new warfare-related infrastructure along the entire Indo-Tibetan frontier.

Its frenzied construction has fundamentally changed the Himalayan military landscape. And the three buffer zones it foisted on India have formalised a changed status quo.

Today, there are still no answers to two key questions. First, why was India taken unawares by China’s stealth encroachments of April 2020, whose costs have increased with the passage of time? And second, why did India subsequently, as part of bilateral accords to set up some buffer zones, withdraw from its historically claimed areas in the Galwan, Pangong and Gogra-Hot Springs regions?

If a ‘peace’ deal were to be concluded in whatever shape, a few things will not change, though. With China having forcibly changed the territorial status quo in eastern Ladakh, a return to status quo ante is most unlikely. In January, then Indian Army Chief General Manoj Pande said the standoff would continue until China pulled back from its Ladakh encroachments, calling restoration of the previous frontier line “our first aim to achieve”. That aim is clearly unrealistic.

Chinese troops dismantling their bunkers at Pangong Tso, Ladakh, February 2021 (Photo: AP)

In the Pangong region, the entire buffer zone was set up on territory that India had patrolled until China made its stealth encroachments in April 2020. The buffer also includes a swath of Indian area that China had never disputed or claimed

Xi risks being hoisted by his own petard if he pulls back his forces from encroached areas. He would face questions at home as to why, in the first place, he embarked on the aggression against India. Indeed, China’s Ladakh encroachments appeared to be part of Xi’s larger strategy to use coercion and territorial grabs to compel neighbouring countries to acquiesce to China’s claims.

Even if a deal to end the standoff materialises, China’s warfare-related infrastructure along the Himalayan frontier will remain in place. Any agreement, even if it seeks to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and de-induction of rival forces, will not alter the new military realities that China has created.

As the 2017 Doklam disengagement deal showed, China withdraws only temporarily. Within weeks of the deal, it sent in large numbers of troops and effectively captured the Doklam Plateau.

Let us be clear: It does make eminent sense for China and India, as two of the world’s most ancient civilisations, to find ways to peacefully coexist as neighbours and cooperate on shared objectives. But the CPC’s record since it came to power in 1949 indicates that it operates on very different logic.

New Delhi is still struggling to understand why Xi—despite meeting Modi 18 times over nearly six years and despite the two countries’ commitment to the “Wuhan spirit” and to open “a new era of cooperation” through the “Chennai connect”—betrayed India’s trust by stealthily encroaching on Ladakh borderlands. If Xi wanted peaceful, mutually beneficial cooperation with India, such aggression would have been the last thing on his mind.

In this light, any ‘peace’ deal that China concludes with India will not be about peace but about formalising its strategic advantages.

Even if the Modi government were to try and market such a deal as a political win, India, militarily, would not be able to lower its guard. The Indo-Tibetan frontier is likely to remain a ‘hot’ border, underscoring both the enduring nature of the military threat posed by China and the lasting costs of India’s failure to prevent the 2020 encroachments, which have led to China significantly changing the Himalayan military landscape.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Will Bangladesh go the way of Pakistan?

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The struggling interim government confronts widespread violence and economic decline

Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, Bangladesh's army chief, arrives at Dhaka International Airport to receive Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus on Aug. 8 to lead the country's interim government.
Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, Bangladesh’s army chief, arrives at Dhaka International Airport to receive Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus on Aug. 8 to lead the country’s interim government. | AFP-JIJI

By Brahma Chellaney, The Japan Times

The recent violent upheaval that led to a military-backed regime change in Bangladesh, followed by the country’s pleas for $6.5 billion in international bailouts, raise concerns about the future direction of the world’s eighth most-populous country.

The toppling of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government has also triggered an ominous resurgence of radical Islamism, including systematic attacks on religious minorities.

As recently as 2022, Bangladesh was seen internationally as headed toward rapid economic development. But today, nothing better illustrates the unraveling of Bangladesh’s economic success story than its urgent requests for a new $3 billion International Monetary Fund bailout, as well as $1.5 billion from the World Bank and $1 billion each from the Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

Hasina, while becoming increasingly undemocratic during her over 15-year reign, gave Bangladesh political stability and impressive economic growth, before the global economic fallout from the Ukraine war began weighing on Bangladeshi finances. In fact, the country’s stability and remarkable-growth trajectory stood in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil in Pakistan, from which Bangladesh seceded in 1971 following a bloody war of liberation that left up to 3 million civilians dead in a genocide perpetrated by the Pakistani army and other pro-Pakistan forces.

Today, the military-picked interim civilian-led regime is struggling to restore the rule of law and revive an economy pummeled by large-scale mob violence and destruction that both preceded and followed Hasina’s overthrow in a youth-led uprising, with her loss of support from the powerful military proving decisive. The military has traditionally been a key player in Bangladeshi politics.

Several hundred people were killed in the violence, many in police firings but also in shootings by Islamists and other rioters, some of whom, according to the new regime, looted rifles from law-enforcement officers and others. Mobs also captured some policemen, beating them to death. At least 44 policemen were killed by mobs, with bodies of some hung from bridges in Dhaka, the nation’s capital.

With the overthrow of the 76-year-old “Iron Lady,” the Islamists have returned with a vengeance, resulting in widespread attacks on the country’s long-persecuted and dwindling Hindu minority.

To make matters worse, political vendettas have gained momentum, as the new regime has engaged in or condoned human rights abuses, including purges, arbitrary arrests, physical assaults on political detainees in courts and curtailment of the rights to liberty and freedom of expression. Academics, journalists, former justices, local officials, lawyers, political opponents and other dissidents have also been jailed on trumped-up murder charges.

In a case last weekend, an ailing, 75-year-old retired Supreme Court justice, after being arrested in a dehumanizing manner, was so badly beaten up in a magistrate’s court, including repeatedly kicked in the groin, that he needed emergency surgery.

All this raises the question whether Bangladesh could go the way of Pakistan, whose broken economy and dysfunctional politics have engendered unending violence, including Islamist extremism and cross-border terrorism. Elections in Pakistan have failed to weaken the vise-like grip of its military on national politics.

Like in Pakistan, the military in Bangladesh has now returned as the final arbiter in national politics, with the army chief becoming the power behind the throne. As if to let the cat out of the bag, M. Sakhawat Hussain, a retired military general holding a minister-level position in the interim regime, warned those pursuing political extortion that he had “requested the army chief to break your legs.” The interim administration, led by an 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, lacks constitutional legitimacy.

The Bangladeshi military holds substantial commercial assets in multiple economic sectors, like Pakistan’s armed forces.

Just as Pakistan continues to teeter on the brink of default, the Bangladesh economy is in dire straits, with foreign reserves dwindling rapidly, inflation spiraling, the banking sector in turmoil and economic activity largely at a standstill. It will not be easy to restore the confidence of foreign investors after the large-scale looting, vandalism and arson since July. Many countries’ advisories against travel to Bangladesh remain in effect.

Today, the Islamist resurgence poses a serious law-and-order challenge in Bangladesh, as it has long done in Pakistan. In fact, just as Pakistan’s military maintains cozy alliances with militant groups, the Bangladesh military has had a nexus with radical Islamists.

Hasina’s secular government had cracked down on such violent religious groups. But amid the protests, mobs broke into prisons and freed hundreds of radical Islamists and terrorists, including those wanted in India for terror activity. The attacks on prisons began more than two weeks before the government’s toppling, but gathered pace in the aftermath of Hasina’s forced departure to India. The Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist group, which was proscribed by Hasina and some Western governments, is now operating freely in Bangladesh, holding big rallies.

It was Bangladesh’s chief of the army, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, who told the nation in a televised address on Aug. 5 that Hasina had quit and left the country, saying he was “taking full responsibility” and would help to “form an interim government.”

But, instead of a broad-based government of national unity, a partisan administration is now in office that includes two student protest leaders, a hard-line Islamist preacher and three retired military generals. This has contributed to continuing purges, as well as revenge attacks and killings.

Bangladesh is a highly polarized country with a poisonous political culture that, over the decades, has fostered a cycle of frenzied violence and deadly retributions. The recent brutal violence is the latest example.

Without sincere efforts to initiate national reconciliation and healing, the deep splits in Bangladesh will likely stoke greater hate, vengeance and economic disruption, with the risk that the nation could become a mirror image of its old nemesis, Pakistan.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

South Asia’s Deepening Political Turmoil

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The ouster of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government is just the latest example of political volatility in South Asia – a region that has struggled to achieve stability, let alone democratization. This is generating acute security and economic risks for the region’s main power, India.

Street clashes in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (Rajib Dhar / Associated Press)

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

Violent student-led, Islamist-backed protests in Bangladesh have toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government, and mob attacks targeting those viewed as supporters of her secular Awami League party – in particular, the country’s dwindling Hindu minority – are proliferating. At a time when neighboring Myanmar is engulfed in violence and the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt remains fertile ground for cross-border terrorism, political upheaval in Bangladesh, two years after the overthrow of Sri Lanka’s government, is the last thing India, the regional power, needs.

Achieving lasting political stability in South Asia would require entrenching democracy. But this is no easy feat. India notwithstanding, the region remains in thrall to longstanding autocratic traditions and centralization of power. Hasina, for example, had become autocratic during her more than 15 years in office. In this context, popular demands for democracy are far more likely to lead to violence and political chaos than to smooth political transitions.

As Hasina has shown, autocratic leaders do not necessarily survive popular challenges to their rule. Consider the chaos that engulfed Sri Lanka in 2022, when a severe economic crisis triggered mass protests against the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic, un-democratic regime. Though President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, like Hasina, initially unleashed a violent crackdown, his opponents proved too powerful. Like Hasina, he gave up and fled the country, without even formally resigning. Sri Lankan protesters then occupied the presidential palace, much as Bangladeshi mobs have ransacked Hasina’s sprawling official residence.

But when an autocrat is toppled, it is often the military – not a democratic government – that takes over, even if behind a civilian facade. Bangladesh is no exception. The military has attempted at least two dozen coups since the country’s violent birth in 1971, and ruled for a number of extended periods since its 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s charismatic founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Hasina, who is Rahman’s daughter, stood out for her success at keeping the military (and Islamists) in check, at least until last week, when the army chief refused to continue supporting her crackdown on rampaging protesters. The military then facilitated her escape to India and established an interim government of civilian “advisers” who have little experience with national issues.

To be sure, some South Asian countries have made some progress toward democracy. In particular, Bhutan’s democratic transition is proceeding apace, thanks to a benevolent king who has supported the transition from a traditional monarchy to a parliamentary system. Earlier this year, the country’s fourth national election brought an opposition party to power.

But elections alone – even if competitive – do not guarantee popular empowerment or adherence to constitutional rules, especially when the military holds decisive power. Consider Pakistan, which held elections earlier this year. The military’s preferred candidate, Shehbaz Sharif, returned as prime minister, but his government will survive only at the pleasure of the country’s effective ruler, the army chief. Until the rule of law is firmly entrenched and those wielding extra-constitutional power are unequivocally reined in, democratic progress will remain limited and reversible.

Myanmar learned this the hard way. Though the military had called the shots in the country since independence in 1948, it began ceding power to a nascent civilian government in 2015, filling the country with hope for a democratic future. But in February 2021 – barely six years later – it staged a coup. This time, however, resistance has proved intense, and heavily armed insurgent groups – some receiving “non-lethal aid” from the United States – are managing to expand their territorial control. In response, the military junta has stepped up punitive air strikes and artillery barrages.

The violence and deepening humanitarian crisis are fueling instability beyond Myanmar’s borders. Already, more than 32,000 ethnic Chin have sought refuge in India’s Mizoram state, and thousands more have fled to the state of Manipur, where their arrival has stoked violent ethnic conflict. And it is not just the Chin: India is also home to millions of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, whose ranks are set to grow as desperate Hindus flee Islamist attacks against them.

When it comes to security risks, immigration is just the beginning. Political turbulence in the Maldives – which began in 2012, when Islamist radicals forced the country’s democratically elected president to resign at gunpoint – has enabled China to gain a foothold in India’s maritime backyard. This year, China signed a military pact with the Maldives and docked a giant marine research ship in a Maldivian port. Meanwhile, Islamist radicals are expanding their grassroots base, establishing ISIS and al-Qaeda cells on the archipelago.

Mounting economic pressures compound the security risks. Pakistan has repeatedly sought International Monetary Fund bailouts in recent years. And Hasina’s overthrow could usher in hard times for the once-booming Bangladeshi economy, as the country’s foreign reserves dwindle rapidly. None of this is conducive to regional prosperity. As long as South Asian countries remain plagued by political instability, strong and sustainable economic growth will remain elusive.

The difficulty of maintaining political stability and advancing democratization can also be seen in Nepal – a country with which India has close cultural and historical ties. Last month, the country swore in its 14th government in just 16 years, led by four-time prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, of the pro-China Marxist-Leninist Party. Oli, who spent years in jail in the 1970s and 1980s for waging war against the state, is Nepal’s fifth head of government in five years, having replaced another former communist guerrilla, Pushpa Kamal Dahal.

All of this puts India, the world’s largest democracy and South Asia’s geographical hub, in a difficult situation. It must minimize the spillover effects of political and economic instability in its neighborhood, even as it continues to seek economic and strategic partnerships far beyond its troubled region.

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

© Project Syndicate, 2024.

A quiet military coup in Bangladesh

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

Many media accounts have credited the toppling of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government almost entirely to a student-led uprising. Unmentioned are either the army’s role in the overthrow, including packing the “Iron Lady” off to India, or the military’s return as the final arbiter in Bangladeshi national politics.

In reality, the regime change in the world’s eighth most-populous country amounts to a quiet military coup behind a civilian facade.

By installing an interim civilian government made up of only “advisers,” the coup leaders have not only forestalled U.S.-led sanctions but also helped foster a romanticized Western media narrative of a student-led “revolution” in the country.

The appointment of Muhammad Yunus as the “chief adviser,” or the head of the interim administration, has only helped mask military rule. The 84-year-old Yunus, a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microcredit, or giving small loans to rural families to help alleviate poverty.

With the duration and scope of powers of the interim administration undefined, its advisers work essentially at the direction of the military brass, especially the army chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, the power behind the throne. The advisers include two students who led the protests, a hardline Islamist leader and two retired army generals, one of them tasked with restoring law and order in the country.

To be clear, violent student-led, Islamist-backed protests against Hasina’s 15-year secular but increasingly undemocratic reign helped force her out of office. But the decisive factor that ended her rule was loss of support from the country’s powerful army. With protesters rampaging through the streets of the capital of Dhaka, the army’s refusal to enforce a government-ordered lockdown put Hasina’s own personal safety at risk, allowing the military to prevail upon her to flee the country.

No sooner had the 76-year-old Hasina departed for India aboard a military transport plane than mobs ransacked the prime minister’s sprawling official residence, looting every item that could be carried away, from paintings and furniture to fish from the pond.

Driving Hasina into exile appears not to have been a spur-of-the-moment military decision, but rather central to a well-thought-out plan for an indirect army takeover of the country. The international costs of killing a sitting prime minister in a coup, or putting her in prison without due process, were considered too high, making her forced banishment a better choice for the military brass.

Bangladesh’s decades-old cycle of political violence, after all, began with the predawn murder of Hasina’s father, the country’s charismatic founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in a 1975 army coup. President Rahman was killed by army officers in cold blood — along with his wife, three sons and their wives — while they were asleep at Rahman’s residence. Hasina, just 28 years old then, survived because she was abroad at that time.

What followed was prolonged political turmoil that prevented democracy from taking root. Coups and countercoups resulted in extended periods of military rule in the world’s most densely populated large country.

Bangladesh has no regional adversary, yet it has maintained a relatively large military with more than 200,000 personnel. Since external defense is not a major responsibility, the military has long pursued political machinations. When not ruling directly, it has sought to wield political power through pliant civilian-led governments.

Hasina kept the military and Islamist militancy in check, until the army chief used the student-led uprising to engineer her ouster by letting mob violence go beyond the control of police and paramilitary forces. Hasina had appointed Zaman as the army chief just weeks before her downfall, taking comfort in the fact that the general was married to her cousin.

Hasina’s fall, however, triggered a near-total collapse of the state, leading to widespread looting, vandalism, revenge killings and systematic attacks on the country’s small and long-persecuted Hindu minority. But with the mission accomplished by Hasina’s departure, the army chief finally pressed his troops into action to control the situation, including letting them fire on rioting protesters.

With its focus on profit and power, the military has a long history of abuses, as well as a nexus with radical Islamists. And like the military in Pakistan, from which Bangladesh seceded in 1971 after up to three million Bengalis died in a Pakistani genocide, the Bangladeshi armed forces maintain extensive commercial business interests, extending from real estate and hotels to banking, manufacturing and shipbuilding.

After this month’s silent coup, not only will democratization become more difficult, but already-weak civilian oversight over the military could evaporate.

Yet, with a U.S.-friendly interim administration having replaced the Hasina government, which the Biden administration openly targeted over democratic backsliding, Washington has little reason to impose coup-related aid restrictions on Bangladesh.

More than two dozen coups have occurred across the world since 2009, but the U.S. failed to formally condemn about half of those military takeovers because it saw them as favorable to American interests. Washington usually calls out a coup — an action legally necessitating a cutoff of U.S. foreign assistance — when the takeover is detrimental to American power and influence in the region.

Over the years, the U.S. has maintained cozy ties with military or military-backed regimes in Bangladesh. And it views the latest regime change as a positive development. But the White House and the State Department have denied Hasina’s allegation of U.S. involvement in her overthrow.

Still, with purges and crackdowns in full swing even as the nation remains in disarray, Bangladesh faces the daunting task of restoring the rule of law and reviving an economy battered by large-scale mob violence and destruction.

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

The New Great Game

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Brahma Chellaney  | OPEN magazine

THE DRAMATIC OVERTHROW of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5 represents the biggest regional setback for India in more than a decade. The swift toppling, just six weeks after Hasina’s state visit to New Delhi, not only caught India by complete surprise but also carries adverse implications for Indian security. The development could weigh India down regionally at a time when New Delhi is seeking to play a greater role on the world stage.

Whereas New Delhi has reacted to the Bangladesh turmoil with deep concern and even alarm, India’s close strategic partner, America, has greeted Hasina’s fall with a sense of contentment. Washington’s smug satisfac­tion of Hasina’s exit extends, according to one analyst, to “gloating” by a section of the US establishment over the failure of the Indian project in Bangladesh.

US President Joe Biden’s administration had openly gunned for Hasina’s government, despite the fact that her secular regime kept the military and Islamists in check. Located thousands of miles away from the subcontinent, the US, in the name of democracy promotion, can afford to play geopolitical games without affecting its interests. But India, with vital security interests at stake, has no such luxury.

Democracy promotion has long served as a valuable geopolitical tool for the US. After greeting with glee the regime change in Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most populous country, the Biden administration is now working on a new regime-change project by offering Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “amnesty” if he ceded power.

In fact, the US targeting of Hasina’s government served as a reminder for New Delhi of the wider divergence of American and Indian interests in India’s own neighbourhood, including in relation to Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

After Myanmar—which is racked by an internal war that has been fuelled by stringent US-led sanctions and “non-lethal aid” to insurgents—Bangladesh could become the second immediate neighbour of India to be destabilised by short-sighted policies of the Biden administration. Greater turmoil in the region would seriously crimp Indian interests.

A destabilised Bangladesh would be India’s geopolitical nightmare. It would impose sustained costs on Indian interests, includ­ing potentially subverting the security of India’s vulnerable Northeast. It could also open the floodgates to the flow of Bangladeshi refugees to India, which is already home to countless millions of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on Earth, if one excludes micro-states and mini-states.

The rise of violent Islamism in Bangladesh, including scores of incidents of Islamist terrorism in this century, has been a growing Indian concern. Extremists linked with ISIS (Islamic State), Al Qaeda and the Bangladeshi, Pakistan-backed Jamaat-e-Islami have a long record of assaulting religious and ethnic minorities as well as secular, liberal activists. In a destabilised Bangladesh, such forces would proliferate and pose cross-border challenges to India’s security.

No sooner had the army chief announced Hasina’s fall than rioters systematically sought to erase symbols of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and statehood, including burning down the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka and toppling or defacing the statues and portraits of the father of the nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

Meanwhile, New Delhi’s ‘Act East’ policy, already reeling from the growing turmoil in Myanmar, has suffered another blow from the regime change in Bangladesh, which has put at risk connectivity and transit links with India.

HAVING PLAYED A CENTRAL role in forcing Hasina to flee the country, the army has re-emerged as the final arbiter in Bangladesh politics. The interim government, made up of ‘advisers’ with little experience in handling national mat­ters, is just the civilian façade for military rule.

The army chief, General Waker-uz-Zaman, despite being related to Hasina by marriage, was instrumental in her down­fall. Like her late father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader who ignored warnings in 1975 that army officers in Dhaka were plotting to stage a coup and kill him, Hasina disregarded advice that appointing the ambi­tious, Islamist-leaning Zaman as army chief could invite an army takeover. Hasina took comfort in the fact that Zaman was married to her cousin.

But just six weeks after Zaman became the army chief, Hasina fell from power. As street protests intensified, it became apparent that Zaman was wavering in his support for the Hasina government.

Through deliberate inaction, Zaman allowed the situation to deteriorate to the point that the police and paramilitary forces could no longer contain widespread looting, vandalism and arson, including attacks on public infrastructure and the Hindu minority. The army chief then used the violent upheav­al to force the prime minister to leave the country on August 5. The night before, he bluntly conveyed to Hasina the army’s refusal to enforce the lockdown she had ordered, telling her that his soldiers would not fire on protesters, many of whom by then were rampaging through the streets of Dhaka.

But with “mission accomplished”, Zaman ordered his soldiers to fire on Awami League activists protesting against Hasina’s forced departure from the country. In Gopalganj, Hasina’s home district with a sizeable Hindu minority, the military action left several people killed or wounded.

The army brass saw forcing Hasina to flee to India as a better choice than killing or imprisoning her. Bumping off Hasina in the way her father was murdered would have made her a martyr in the eyes of the millions who still support her, while jailing the sitting prime minister would have created a constitutional crisis impeding the army’s appointment of a successor administration.

Hasina’s forced departure, however, triggered greater lawlessness, extending from widespread looting and revenge killings to atrocities against the long-persecuted Hindu minor­ity, which had faced Islamist attacks periodically even under the Awami League government. In the recent protests, armed rioters, according to the official count, killed 42 policemen and looted 7.62mm rifles from law enforcement personnel. Only members of Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion and police carry this type of rifle. After the bloody mayhem, Bangladesh is struggling to fully restore order.

The total collapse of government authority in Bangladesh was redolent of the 2022 chaos in Sri Lanka when the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic regime fell apart. Just as Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country on a military jet without resigning, Hasina arrived in India suddenly aboard a Bangla­desh Air Force C-130J Super Hercules military transport plane without formally tendering her resignation to the president. And just as protesters in Colombo occupied the presidential palace, mobs in Dhaka ransacked the prime minister’s sprawl­ing official residence, looting each and every article that could be carried away.

But, unlike in Sri Lanka, the army played a key role in the re­gime change in Bangladesh, including handpicking members of the new interim administration.

There is also one ominous parallel between the upheaval in Bangladesh and the 2012 political turmoil in the Maldives, in terms of what the rioters sought to accomplish.

Sheikh Hasina leaves Dhaka on a military helicopter, August 5, 2024

The total collapse of government authority in Bangladesh was redolent of the 2022 chaos in Sri Lanka when the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic regime fell apart. Hasina arrived in India aboard a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J super hercules military transport plane without formally tendering her resignation to the president

When the Maldives’ first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, was forced to resign at gunpoint, Islamists ransacked the country’s main museum in Malé, the capital, smashing priceless Buddhist and Hindu statues made of coral and limestone, virtually erasing all evidence of the Maldives’ pre-Islamic past before Maldivians converted to Islam in the 12th century. “The whole pre-Islamic history is gone,” the museum’s director then lamented.

Similarly, no sooner had the army chief announced Hasina’s fall than rioters systematically sought to erase symbols of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and statehood, including burning down the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka and toppling or defacing the statues and portraits of the Father of the Nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The museum was cen­tral to the history of how Bangladesh was created—a violent birth that occurred after up to 3 million Bangladeshi civilians (mainly Hindus singled out by Pakistan’s army) were slaugh­tered, some 200,000 women were coerced into rape camps, and about 10 million people fled to India.

The August 5 vandalism against national symbols was an attack on Bangladesh’s identity, its history and its statehood. It showed that, more than half-a-century after the country’s birth, there are still elements within Bangladesh that have not reconciled to its secession from Pakistan.

Since 1975, Bangladesh has experienced more than two dozen army coups or coup attempts. By assassinating the father of the nation, the army became the most powerful political player, ruling Bangladesh directly or indirectly for extended periods. It was the ‘iron lady’ Hasina who kept the military (and Islamists) in check—until the recent violent uprising against her rule led the army chief to compel her to leave the country.

Today, General Zaman is the power behind the throne. When decisive power rests with an extra-constitutional authority, democratisation can hardly gain traction.

The interim government has no constitutional mandate. The Bangladesh constitution calls for elections to be held with­in 90 days of the dissolution of parliament, yet the duration (or the scope of powers) of the interim government has not been defined. Political discontent will grow if the constitutional deadline passes without the holding of elections.

The country’s president holds a largely ceremonial position. And the interim government consists only of advisers. Advisers are not the same as decision-makers. Despite a US-friendly chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, nominally heading the interim government, Hasina’s overthrow has left a major power vacuum in the country that is being filled by the military—and Islamists.

The army is puppet-mastering the moves and decisions of the interim government advisers, who, in any case, owe their positions to General Zaman.

Against this backdrop, purges are in full swing, spurring greater uncertainty and fear in Bangladesh. The country’s chief justice and the next five senior-most justices of the Supreme Court were made to resign virtually at gunpoint. The purges have extended to all institutions, from the military, intelligence agencies and police to the central bank and universities.

One can expect more purges and crackdowns, some silent ones and some possibly violent ones. The aim is to stifle all sup­port for Hasina and demolish her family’s political legacy. The Awami League has already been directed to “reorganise” itself (that is, rid itself of Hasina’s influence) in order to participate in the next election.

US President Joe Biden, Sheikh Hasina and First Lady Jill Biden in New York, September 21, 2022

The Biden administration’s hard line toward Hasina began with its December 10, 2021 imposition of sanctions on its Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on grounds that RAB committed alleged human rights abuses as part of its war on drugs

RUDYARD KIPLING’S PORTRAYAL of strategic skulduggery in his 1901 novel Kim popularised the “Great Game” of the time between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia for control over Afghanistan and Central Asia. Since then, several other Great Games have been played out or continue to be at play.

The de facto coup d’état in Bangladesh and the externally fuelled internal war in Myanmar hint at a new Great Game at play in southern Asia, despite the risks that the machinations could extend Myanmar’s destabilisation to Bangladesh and Northeast India, thereby spurring greater regional tensions and an up­surge of radical Islamism. This Great Game is being played on several levels, including diplomatic, espionage and economic, as well as through political manoeuvrings.

The US and China have separately sought to enhance their interests in southern Asia in ways that are generat­ing acute security and economic risks for India, the regional power. But while China sees India as an adversary, the US and India are friends, yet on regional issues of core Indian interest, Washington and New Delhi are not on the same page.

The US-India strategic divergence over Bangladesh began in 1971 when US President Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to the Pakistani genocide in East Pakistan and sought to prevent the birth of Bangladesh, including by urging China to open a military front against India. The US grudgingly recog­nised Bangladesh as an independent nation in April 1972 after a majority of countries had already done so.

In the subsequent years, even as India-US relations im­proved, the strategic dissonance between the two powers over Bangladesh never disappeared. US interests, after all, never aligned with Indian interests. Indeed, the dissonance became more pronounced when the Biden administration started gunning for Hasina, ignoring Indian concerns about the growing Islamist menace and political volatility in India’s neighbourhood.

In the name of seeking to restore democratic governance, the US has maintained cosy ties with every military or military-backed regime in Bangladesh since 1975.

Now, after the ouster of Hasina, Washington has said its approach to the military-chosen interim government would be based on “Bangladeshi people’s democratic aspirations and … a path to democratic governance”. It has welcomed the new interim government in Dhaka, saying it will work with it “as it charts a democratic future for the people of Bangladesh”.

But the new administration, with a radical Islamist leader as one of its advisers, is just a civilian setup for army rule. In a nod to the growing power of Islamic fundamentalists and extrem­ists in Bangladesh, the army chief included in the interim administration a leader of the Hefazat-e-Islam, a coalition of Islamist organisations that seeks a system based on Sharia (Islamic law). The Hefazat-e-Islam has been linked to attacks on the Hindu minority and to last year’s killing of a young blogger.

Muhammad Yunus being sworn in as head of Bangladesh’s interim government in Dhaka, August 8, 2024 (Photo: AFP)

The interim government consists only of advisers. Despite a US-friendly chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, nominally heading the interim government, Hasina’s overthrow has left a major power vacuum in the country that is being filled by the military

The Biden administration’s hard line toward the Hasina government began with its December 10, 2021 imposition of sanctions on Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on grounds that RAB committed alleged human rights abuses as part of its war on drugs. Bangladesh was excluded from the Summits for Democracy convened by Biden in December 2021 and March 2023, while military-dominated Pakistan was invited both times though it did not attend either.

Bangladesh’s impressive economic growth trajectory under Hasina stood in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil in Pakistan. But, while continuing to reward Pakistan by prioritising short-term geopolitical considerations, the Biden administration sharply stepped up its criticism of democratic backsliding in Bangladesh.

It also started wielding the visa-sanctions stick against the Hasina government. Secretary of State Antony Blinken un­veiled a new US policy on May 24, 2023 to restrict the issuance of visa for any Bangladeshi individual believed to be involved in undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh. Washington’s increasing hard line approach emboldened anti- Hasina political forces in Bangladesh, including Islamists and the largest opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had allied itself with the Jamaat-e-Islami.

Now Hasina, alleging a US role in her overthrow, has reportedly claimed that, “I could have remained in power if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin’s Island and allowed America to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal.” Ha­sina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed, who holds an American green card, apparently came under immediate pressure to recant her mother’s allegations. Hours after confirming to WION television chan­nel Hasina’s remarks about the US and St Martin’s, Wazed posted on X denying that she made any such statement.

The White House, asked about Hasina’s allegation that she was over­thrown because of her refusal to lease St Martin’s to the US, stated flatly that “we have had no involvement at all” in the events in Bangladesh.

It was on June 21, 2023 that Hasina openly raised the St Martin’s issue, tell­ing a news conference at her official resi­dence in Dhaka that if she were to “lease the island of St Martin’s to someone, then there would be no problem” with her staying ensconced in power. But, she added, such a lease “won’t happen” on her watch.

The US sought to build close defence ties with Bangladesh by urging the Hasina government unsuccessfully to sign the General Security of Military Information Agreement (or GSOMIA) and the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (or ACSA). But the US has never acknowledged wanting to lease St Martin’s, a small island that is closer to Myanmar than to Bangladesh’s coast.

There are already around 750 American military bases spread across at least 80 countries. The US may be seeking to expand its strategic foothold to new areas where its presence is non-existent or weak, including the Bay of Bengal.

St Martin’s, with its vantage location just eight kilometres from the Myanmar coast, could serve as a US listening post. Such a listening post, however, would be more useful for elec­tronic surveillance of sanctions-battered Myanmar and friendly India than America’s sole challenger at the global level, China.

The new Great Game, of course, also includes Russia and China. The Hasina foreign policy embraced the concept of “equidistant diplomacy” in relation to China and India to help underscore Bangladesh’s neutrality in the Sino-Indian geopo­litical rivalry. Beijing, however, saw a pro-India tilt in Hasina’s foreign policy, a perception reinforced by her more recent an­nouncement that Dhaka would chose India over China for the multibillion-dollar Teesta River development project, which is to come up on Bangladeshi territory close to India’s narrow Siliguri Corridor known as the ‘chicken neck’.

Yet, like Russia, China sees a likely American hand in the regime change in Bangladesh, with Chinese state media stating that if any foreign power deserves blame for Hasina’s overthrow, it is the US. Three weeks before the January 7, 2024 Bangladesh election, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman had warned that, if Hasina were re-elected to a third term in office, the US would create an Arab Spring-type of upheaval to bring about regime change in Dhaka.

Strategic skulduggery rarely leaves any political fingerprints. The truth may never be known, including whether, as some sug­gest, the CIA worked through its longstanding partner, Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, to foment an upris­ing against Hasina’s rule. In Pakistan, Imran Khan has blamed the US for helping to topple his own government in 2022 in league with the Pakistani military and his political opponents.

In the post-Hasina era, Bangladesh is likely to bolster its ties with China and Pakistan, which could come largely at India’s expense, including the security of the northeastern Indian states. At stake also are India’s transit rights through Bangladesh, Indian security and counterterrorism cooperation with Bangladesh, Indian investments in Bangladesh, and cooperation with Dhaka to control illegal migration to India, including by the Rohingya

What is clear, though, is that, despite Washington and New Delhi pledging in a joint statement last year to become “among the closest partners in the world”, American interests do not align with India’s core interests in the arc extending from Myanmar to Iran. Bangladesh is just the latest wake-up call for New Delhi.

Dealing with this unpalatable reality puts India on the horns of a dilemma, with no easy choices. Although India will continue to cultivate deeper ties with the US, the Indo-US stra­tegic dissonance in India’s own neighbourhood is already quite jarring, given that Narendra Modi is widely seen as the coun­try’s most pro-US prime minister since Indian independence.

As for Bangladesh, its recovery from the political turmoil is likely to be an extended and difficult process. This is apparent from the retribution campaign extending to expanded purges and crackdowns.

Political upheaval or prolonged instability imposes major economic costs. Consider the case of Pakistan, which has repeat­edly sought International Monetary Fund bailouts in recent years.

In Bangladesh, the political upheaval, by stalling economic activity and creating unrest in the banking sector, is likely to usher in hard times, with inflation already spiralling and foreign-exchange reserves dwindling fast. It will not be easy to restore the confidence of foreign investors after the large-scale looting, vandalism and arson, including attacks on public infra­structure and setting ablaze hotels, hospitals and homes.

In the post-Hasina era, Bangladesh is likely to bolster its ties with China and Pakistan, which could come largely at India’s expense, including the security of the northeastern Indian states. At stake also are India’s transit rights through Bangladesh, Indian security and counterterrorism cooperation with Bangladesh, Indian investments in Bangladesh, and cooperation with Dhaka to control illegal migration to India, including by the Rohingya.

India’s longest land border is with Bangladesh, not with Tibet or Pakistan. And this is a porous border. India has no choice but to make major investments in strengthening the security of its borders, including with Bangladesh and Myanmar. India’s open border with Nepal poses a different set of challenges, which also need to be addressed.

Taiwan’s security is linked to US policy

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Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

With polls in as many as 76 countries, 2024 is the biggest election year in history. This year’s raft of elections has already produced a left-leaning government in Britain, political gridlock in France, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s return to office for a third term, and the elevation of the pro-sovereignty William Lai (賴清德) as Taiwan’s president, but with his Democratic Progressive Party losing its majority in the legislature.

But no election will have a greater global impact than the one in the US. Whether American voters elect Kamala Harris or Donald Trump as the next president, and whether the Republicans or Democrats gain control of the US Congress, will reverberate across the world, including in Taiwan, which confronts increasing Chinese coercive pressure.

At a time when a major geopolitical reconfiguration is underway, with America’s global preeminence at stake, the US is heading to its most consequential presidential election in a generation.

US domestic politics has a bearing on international issues of peace and war. In fact, hardened polarization in the US has created a partisan divide on some key foreign policy issues. For example, according to one poll, Democrats worry about Russia above all while Republicans are most concerned about China.

Outgoing President Joe Biden’s national security team largely comprises “liberal interventionists” — essentially, hawks on the left — whereas many on the right, including Trump, can be considered non-interventionists (or, as their critics call them, “isolationists”).

If Harris, who has a biracial Black and Indian American identity, becomes the first female president of the US, she is likely to sustain the Biden approach to the Ukraine war, thereby precluding American support for any ceasefire effort. The US, without putting its own soldiers in harm’s way, is deeply involved in the war that has increasingly devastated Ukraine.

By contrast, if Trump returns to the White House, he is unlikely to prolong the US involvement in the war or support sending tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine. Tellingly, he has chosen as his running mate J.D. Vance, who led the opposition in the Senate to this year’s fresh US$61 billion Ukrainian assistance package.

Indeed, Trump’s record as president between 2017 and 2021 underlined his aversion to America funding wars or getting entangled in conflicts around the world, instead of focusing on rebuilding its power capabilities.

In 2020, he famously said at a White House news conference that the “top people in the Pentagon” want to “do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars.” This statement echoed then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about America’s “military-industrial complex.”

Last month, Trump reiterated a promise that, as president, he would end “the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine.”

But Trump has also made controversial comments about Taiwan recently, implying that he might be willing to leave Taiwan to its fate. “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything,” Trump said in a newsmagazine interview, while suggesting that the US would have difficulty defending the island because of its distance, stating “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away (from the US). It’s 68 miles away from China.”

By tacitly asking for a “protection fee,” those remarks underscore Trump’s long-held transactional approach to foreign affairs. In practice, though, a new Trump administration, if it assumes office, is likely to be tougher on China than Team Biden.

It should not be forgotten that it was the Trump administration that in 2017 reversed a 45-year US policy of aiding China’s economic rise. That policy, initiated by then-President Richard Nixon, helped spawn not only a more aggressive and expansionist China but also the greatest strategic adversary the US has ever faced.

Today, Trump has China in his sights again, which may well explain why he wants the US to stop squandering resources on the war in Ukraine, a country he sees as not being vital to American national interests. If Trump returns to the White House, the last thing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) may want to do is to order a Chinese invasion of Taiwan on the new US president’s watch.

But even if Harris defeats Trump in November, Biden’s conciliatory approach toward China may not survive. Biden could go down in history as the last American president with a softer approach toward Beijing.

Much before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden began easing Trump-era pressure on China. He effectively let China off the hook for both obscuring COVID-19’s origins and failing to meet its commitments under the 2020 “phase one” trade deal with the US. He also dropped fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of the military-linked Chinese tech giant Huawei.

But since the start of the Ukraine war, Biden has sought to focus on containing Russia by stabilizing US ties with China. This has allowed Xi’s unrelenting expansionism — from the South and East China Seas to Hong Kong and the Himalayas — to remain cost-free. US sanctions over China’s Muslim gulag have essentially been symbolic, despite the Biden administration acknowledging that the mass incarceration constitutes “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”

To advance its long-term interests, the US needs to focus more on a globally ascendant and aggressive China, which is seeking to supplant America as the world’s foremost power, than on a sanctions-battered Russia whose ambitions remain regionally confined.

At a time when the risk of Chinese aggression against Taiwan looms ever larger, the next US administration will have to redouble efforts on a priority basis to deter China from using force against that island democracy. With Xi’s appetite for risk having grown, a greater US stress on deterrence than on diplomacy has become imperative to forestall a military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait.

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).

Why a policy of targeted assassination is doomed to fail

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

Iranians take part in a funeral procession for late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, on August 1, 2024, ahead of his burial in Qatar. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

The recent assassinations in Beirut and Tehran of two of Israel’s foes — Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander, and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief — have put the Middle East on edge. The assassinations illustrate the shadow war waged for decades by Israel against Iran and its proxies. With the two nations locked in a dangerous cycle, the threat of a direct military confrontation looms ever larger.

Taking out senior figures does not destroy militant groups. Rather, it rather helps breathe new life into these groups by helping them win greater grassroots support. Yet extraterritorial assassinations have long been a favored tool of policy for Israel, just as they have been for the U.S. under successive administrations.

There has been a never-ending debate since then about the tenuous relationship of this practice with international law. The central issue, however, relates not to international law but rather to the political and military utility of a self-asserted license to kill.

Israel has a long history of assassinating its adversaries, a campaign that over the years has caused the death of several hundred militants, and at times of innocent civilians. Yet, far from tangibly advancing its security, Israel today confronts a more troubled neighborhood, including threats from virtually all directions.

If targeted assassinations could eliminate threats, Israel would not be fighting wars on several different fronts today — against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Palestinians in the West Bank. In Gaza, despite wreaking large-scale devastation and assassinating several Hamas commanders, Israeli forces are still confronting organized Hamas resistance 10 months since the overt war began, with the group even recruiting new fighters.

Israel, of course, faces an existential crisis. It may be justified to use all means at its disposal against those that threaten its existence, including the so-called “axis of resistance” made up of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. But Israeli decisionmakers over the years have often confused short-term tactical gains with long-term strategic success.

The focus on speedy victory over long-term success has made targeted killings central to Israeli defense, with the appetite for risk growing, despite assassinations not tangibly advancing Israel’s security.

Assassinated leaders are easily replaced with new leaders who are often more radicalized leaders from militant ranks. For example, Hamas took just a few days after Haniyeh’s July 31 assassination in Tehran to name Yahya Sinwar as its new political chief.

Extraterritorial assassinations, by and large, bring only transitory or near-term success. But they foster longer-term threats by stoking grassroots anger and unifying rival factions. The collateral damage from a major assassination often tends to be greater than the assassinating state bargained for. And instead of weakening a regime or a movement, major assassinations tend to strengthen it.

This is also largely true of America’s extraterritorial assassinations, which have continued apace under President Joe Biden. Indeed, the U.S. has developed a weapon that employs six long blades to “shred” a targeted person. The U.S. used this weapon, known as the “flying Ginsu,” in assassinating an Iraqi militia leader and his colleague in Baghdad in February.

When President Donald Trump’s administration assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s elite Quds Force, in early 2020, it was portrayed as a significant blow for the Iranian government. But the Iranian regime, faced with rising public discontent, turned the tactical blow into a strategic boon, using the attack to unify the nation. Paradoxically, it was calls for Soleimani’s killing in the U.S. and Israel that over a period of time helped lift him from relative obscurity in Iran to the status of a national icon.

Every Israeli or American assassination of an important Iranian figure helps Iran’s clerics reinvigorate their hold on power.

To be sure, some extraterritorial assassinations have been driven not by any strategic objectives but by the imperative to put to death, even if extrajudicially, international fugitives involved in horrific acts of terrorism, such as 9/11. Examples include al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was shot and killed in 2010 in his Pakistani hideout by Navy SEALs, and the 2022 assassination of al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul by an American drone strike.

Likewise, Israel’s covert campaign to avenge the murder of 11 of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics — dubbed “Operation Wrath of God” — came to symbolize Israeli willingness to hunt down its foes no matter how hard they may seek to hide in different countries. The 20-year campaign, which became the subject of Steven Spielberg’s movie “Munich,” killed Palestinian militants in Italy, France, Lebanon, Greece and Cyprus. 

But when Israel has carried out assassinations to achieve concrete security objectives, it has rarely achieved lasting success. For example, its suspected role in the killing of top Iranian nuclear scientists has only spurred Iran to speed up nuclear and missile advances.

And despite Israel assassinating several Hamas leaders since the Oct. 7 terrorist atrocities, the Israeli military now acknowledges that eliminating Hamas is not a feasible military goal. Nor does Israel have any real military solution against Hezbollah, a more powerful militia than Hamas. Instead, with divisions in society widening, Israel faces a war within, as symbolized by the lawlessness of right-wing protesters storming military facilities.

More broadly, extraterritorial assassinations, by inflicting blows from which militants often not only recover but also get a major political boost, lead to negative consequences, from rising regional tensions to new escalatory spirals. This means that, even in death, a slain target could exact his own final act of revenge against the assassinating state.

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

The COVID coverup still haunts the world

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COVID-19 antigen home tests indicating a positive result are photographed in New York, April 5, 2023. AP

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

A new surge of COVID-19 in the United States — highlighted by President Joe Biden and his health secretary, Xavier Becerra, both testing positive — serves as a fresh reminder that there is still no accountability for a pandemic originating in China that killed more people than World War I. In his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump referred to the “China virus.”

But, paradoxically, it is the U.S. under Biden that has effectively let Beijing off the hook for obscuring the origins of the COVID virus, including stonewalling international investigations into the credible possibility that the pathogen was functionally enhanced at China’s military-linked Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence has grown that the virus escaped from the Chinese lab due to inadequate safeguards.

The U.S. role in aiding China’s coverup is all the more ironic because America has led the world in total COVID case counts and number of deaths since the first year of the pandemic. Biden, despite being vaccinated and boosted, is battling his third bout with COVID.

Almost 1.2 million Americans, according to U.S. federal data, have died from COVID; worldwide, according to the WHO, around 7 million people died from this disease. Excess mortality studies, however, suggest that the American total is vastly undercounted. For example, one important study this year concluded that that many excess deaths attributed to natural causes in the U.S. were likely “unrecognized COVID deaths.”

Had the COVID virus originated in Russia, especially in a military-linked lab similar to the one in Wuhan, would the Biden administration have been as forgiving as it has been toward China?

To be sure, the key reason why the U.S. government seems uninterested in getting to the bottom of how the COVID virus originated is that the coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab was part of a collaborative U.S.-China scientific program funded by the American government. Washington has up to now offered no explanation why U.S. government agencies, either directly or through the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, were funneling money to the Wuhan lab that they knew was linked to the Chinese military.

More fundamentally, the most important lesson from the pandemic is that “gain of function” research (of the type U.S. government agencies funded in Wuhan) is the greatest existential threat to humankind ever produced by science — a threat bigger than nuclear weapons. Such research, aimed at studying pathogens by altering their genetic make-up to enhance their virulence or infectiousness, is still continuing in some labs in the West, China and Russia. These experiments represent a mortal threat to humanity.

Viruses leaking from laboratories are not uncommon. In 1979, anthrax escaped from a Soviet laboratory in Yekaterinburg, killing 64 people. The 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing also resulted from a lab leak. COVID originated in the city that is the center of Chinese research on super-viruses.

Unfortunately, the role of American government agencies in the Wuhan coronavirus research led to a concerted effort, extending to U.S. scientific and bureaucratic institutions, to obscure the truth on how the pandemic began. Beijing’s own efforts to conceal the virus’s origins received unexpected help from Western governments, American mainstream media, Silicon Valley social media giants and some prominent American scientists who hid their conflicts of interest, including their ties with Chinese scientists.

Until Biden in May 2021 publicly called the Wuhan lab-leak theory one of “two likely scenarios” on how the pandemic originated, major American media outlets treated that hypothesis as a crazy idea or fringe theory. Social media companies aggressively censored references to a possible lab leak, and even suspended accounts for supporting that hypothesis.

The long suppression of an open debate on the COVID origins was intended to obscure America’s probable culpability. But the prolonged silencing of free discussion likely aided China’s efforts to destroy any incriminating evidence of its negligence or complicity in the worst disaster of our time.

Simply put, the world’s most powerful autocracy and most powerful democracy were effective partners in covering up the likely genesis of a severely disruptive pandemic after their research collaboration backfired, imposing global costs. While China conducted dangerous experiments on coronaviruses with poor safeguards, U.S. funding from 2014 to 2020 enabled that reckless lack of responsibility.

Understanding what caused COVID is essential to prevent the next pandemic, yet the truth may remain hidden forever.

Against this backdrop, is it any surprise that public trust in scientists has declined sharply in the U.S., according to a Pew Research Center survey? COVID-related policy excesses, from stringent lockdowns to vaccination mandates, have also contributed to the eroding trust.

There was some hope that the widespread death and suffering from COVID would force governments to ban lab experiments that, by genetically enhancing the pathogenic power of viruses, could trigger another pandemic. A U.S. panel early last year recommended stricter rules on lab experiments that could cause a pandemic.

But, with dangerous lab research still continuing in several countries, that hope has dissipated. This is reminiscent of how the horrors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led not to a ban on nuclear weapons but to a major nuclear arms race.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

The China Factor in Modi’s Mission to Moscow

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The alliance of convenience between Russia and China threatens not only to accelerate an increasingly overstretched America’s relative decline, but also to erode Indian security. India now must take advantage of its relationship with Russia to mediate an end to the Ukraine war and drive a wedge between Russia and China.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to Russia in five years underscored the strategic importance India attaches to its relationship with Moscow. Indian leaders view that relationship as essential to a balanced foreign policy – especially at a time when India seems, at least to some, to be subtly tilting toward the West – and to provide strategic leverage against China.

Russia and India started holding annual summits in 2000. After Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2021 trip to New Delhi, it was Modi’s turn to visit Moscow in 2022. But in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – which spurred the United States and its partners to impose unprecedented sanctions on the country – Modi kept deferring his visit. (He did meet Putin in 2022 on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan, where he told the Russian leader that it was no time for war.)

Today it is apparent that Russia has neither been isolated internationally nor hobbled economically, despite the West’s best efforts. So, after narrowly winning a third term last month, Modi announced that he would take his long-delayed trip to Moscow. The objective is not to take Russia’s side; on the contrary, at last month’s G7 meeting in Italy, Modi embraced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and engaged in bilateral discussions with him. Rather, Modi seeks to affirm India’s enduring foreign-policy independence, while reaping the strategic benefits of closer ties with Russia.

India’s relationship with Russia dates back to 1971, when India was at its most vulnerable. The Pakistani military was attempting to crush the independence movement in then-East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – by any means necessary. Up to three million Bangladeshi civilians (mainly Hindus singled out by Pakistan’s Muslim army) were slaughtered, some 200,000 women were coerced into rape camps, and about ten million people fled to India.

The US was more than complicit in the carnage. Far from pushing back against Pakistan’s military dictator, General Yahya Khan, US President Richard Nixon’s administration maintained friendly relations with him, in order to advance US interests in Asia. While Khan’s army carried out the genocide in East Pakistan, Nixon sent his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, from Pakistan to Beijing on his now-famous secret trip, which led to Nixon’s own visit to China in February 1972.

At a White House meeting, Kissinger credited Khan for the success of his “cloak and dagger” diplomacy with China, joking coldheartedly, “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” On a memorandum from Kissinger regarding the crisis, Nixon wrote, “To all hands: Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.”

But that was not all. In an effort to prevent Bangladesh from achieving independence, Nixon pressed China to open a military front against India. It was Kissinger’s job to goad the Chinese into initiating troop movements toward the Indian border, according to declassified White House tapes and documents. Nixon went so far as to tell Kissinger that India needed a “mass famine.”

Faced with such hostility, India’s then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi concluded a friendship treaty with the Kremlin. The pact’s security provisions helped to deter China from opening a front against India when Indian forces eventually intervened to help Bangladesh gain independence in a swift, 13-day operation.

Nixon’s dissatisfaction was obvious: in a show of force aimed at coercing India into limiting its involvement, the US deployed a nuclear-capable naval task force off the southern tip of India. This gunboat diplomacy led India to conduct its first underground nuclear test in 1974; the US responded by imposing technology sanctions on India that remained in place for almost three decades. Meanwhile, the US and China helped Pakistan to build its own nuclear bomb.

Today, India maintains deeper and broader ties with the US than with Russia, but Nixon’s China opening still haunts the bilateral relationship. With its decades-long policy of aiding China’s economic rise, the US not only created the greatest strategic adversary it has ever faced, but also saddled India with a formidable military foe that is aggressively striving for regional hegemony. One manifestation of this is the Sino-Indian military standoff in the Himalayas, which is now in its fifth year.

This is a key motivation behind India’s efforts to strengthen its relationship with Russia, which India believes can counterbalance China. After all, Russia extends across 11 time zones and possesses huge reserves of natural resources, an enormous nuclear arsenal, increasing space prowess, and veto power at the United Nations Security Council. Moreover, Russia and China are natural competitors, with sharply diverging interests in Central Asia, Northeast Asia, and the Arctic, which each country regards as part of its strategic backyard.

Even so, Russia and China have been growing progressively closer in recent years – and it is largely America’s fault. This alliance of convenience – which Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have termed a “no-limits partnership” – threatens not only to accelerate an overstretched America’s relative decline, but also to erode Indian security. Already, China has leveraged its position as an economic lifeline for Russia to gain access to advanced Russian military technologies, which were previously sold only to India. In fact, no country is profiting more from the Ukraine war than China.

Someone must drive a wedge between Russia and China. With the US unwilling to take the lead, it is up to India to convince Russia not to align itself too closely with the People’s Republic. Fortunately, this is hardly an unrealistic proposition: though Russia’s promise to provide North Korea with immediate military assistance in the case of war is not good news, its new defense pact with China’s estranged client does suggest that Putin is willing to chart his own course.

The first step for India must be to try to mediate an end to the Ukraine war. This would allow the US to focus on bolstering security in the Indo-Pacific, thereby improving Taiwan’s chances of survival.

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

© Project Syndicate, 2024.

Democracy in crisis when authoritarianism is on the march

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Polarization stokes incendiary rhetoric despite risk of breeding extremism and violence

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Donald Trump looks on during Day 2 of the Republican National Convention (RNC), at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 16. © Reuters

The perceptible decline of political ethics in many democracies, coupled with hyperpartisanship, is fostering incivility in discourse and greater discord. This, in turn, is hardening political polarization and stoking incendiary rhetoric, despite risks of it breeding extremism and violence.

The spotlight on the attempted assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has gone from being an alleged promoter of political violence to a victim of it, should not obscure the fact that toxic discourse has become a central challenge for democracies from Europe and North America to Asia.

In polarized times, the national discourse often reeks of partisanship and pettifoggery. Fake news, conspiracy theories and fear-mongering, meanwhile, have become common, thanks to the reach of social media and the eroding objectivity of the mainstream media.

Worse still, tolerance for opposing political views is now increasingly in short supply. In fact, rival political forces have self-segregated themselves into their own ideological silos, unwilling to have dialogue across the deep divide. Distrust, contempt and anger define such broken politics.

Without the inflammatory political rhetoric giving way to civil discourse, democratic challenges will likely intensify, possibly tipping into violence.

The crisis of democracies has come ominously at a time when authoritarians are on the march, resulting in a decline in global freedoms. An estimated 72% of the world’s population now lives in autocracies.

The coarsening of public discourse and the strengthening of divisive politics in democracies are rooted in increasing polarization, with rival political parties or leaders peddling disinformation and denouncing each other as “extremist” or a “threat” to democracy. Political opponents are targeted by whatever means possible, as they are seen not as rivals but as enemies.

The fever of polarizing politics also persists because the quality of political leadership has declined across the democratic world. Instead of advancing political compromise and national unity, many leaders have fanned the embers of divisive politics.

The larger threat from bitterly polarized politics was laid bare in May when Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia was shot multiple times at close range by a gunman. Fico’s allies accused his liberal opponents of creating the atmosphere for the assassination bid, just as Republicans in the U.S. have blamed what they say is inflammatory rhetoric from President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign for the attempt to kill Trump.

Police officers stand next to police vehicles outside the hospital where Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was taken after a shooting incident in Handlova, Slovakia on May 17. © Reuters

The attempt on Trump’s life occurred in the context of a poisonous U.S. political environment, which is accelerating the decline of political and legal norms and even degrading institutions. An earlier poll found that more than two-thirds of Americans believe U.S. democracy is broken.

The left’s surge in the recent British and French elections may have bucked the rightward trend in European politics but it has underscored the intensifying polarization in Europe, whose widening political divides threaten to resurrect the violent ghosts of its past. Internal divisions have produced political gridlock in France, which is looking nearly ungovernable at present.

Extreme polarization is also blighting a number of non-Western democracies, ranging from Brazil and South Africa to Israel and South Korea.

In India, for example, hyperpartisan politics have been plumbing new depths, poisoning national discourse, widening internal fault lines and threatening to tear it apart.

The narrow victory that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party secured in the recent election is fueling greater polarization by emboldening a reenergized opposition. This is redolent of how the U.S. emerged more divided and polarized from the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The BJP, in fact, has accused the opposition of inciting violence against Modi by using rhetoric similar to that which it says led to the attack on Trump.

By weighing down the world’s largest democracy, India’s debilitating polarization has made it virtually impossible to build consensus on tackling national challenges. By fanning hate and fear, divisive politics in India has even triggered riots in recent years, including over farm reform bills and passage of a legal amendment to grant citizenship to refugees who fled religious persecution from neighboring Islamic countries.

With the Indian discourse no longer about contending ideas, political parties openly pander to class, caste, ethnic and sectarian interests, thereby deepening the divides in society.

Against this backdrop, dealing with the broader crisis of democracies has become imperative. The crisis is fostering low public trust in governments.

The choice for democracies is to stay mired in polarized politics, with venomous discourse stoking hate and violence, or move toward national healing and unity. Today, every important democracy needs to be led by a unifier and not by a divider.

By keeping partisan warfare in check, divided democracies will be able to embrace traditions of pragmatic accommodation. But if little is done to transcend hardened polarization and heal the deep splits in democracies, national institutions could begin to decay, raising the specter of civil unrest.

The essence of democracy is that political battles are settled at the ballot box, not on the streets. It is time to move past the politics of polarization and vituperation.

Uncivil discourse must cease to help extinguish uncivil war. A little respect for political opponents would go a long way in lowering the temperature on partisan conflicts and helping to begin the process of reconciliation and healing.

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” (Georgetown University Press), which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.