Canada and India are friends, not foes. But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, by countenancing the rising anti-India activities of extremist Sikh groups in Canada, has brought relations with New Delhi under increasing strain during his term in office. Now, with his statement in the House of Commons on Monday, he has created an unusual diplomatic crisis between two major democracies.
Mr. Trudeau’s extraordinary statement was not about Canadian security agencies finding evidence of India’s involvement in the killing of a Canadian Sikh extremist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Rather, his statement was only about “allegations,” which he called credible, of a “potential” India “link” to the murder. More than three months after Mr. Nijjar’s killing, homicide investigators have not arrested a single suspect in connection with the shooting.
In this light, why would Mr. Trudeau air such allegations at this stage, knowing that doing so would hold serious implications for Canada’s relations with India? It has already sparked tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats and plunged Canada-India relations to their lowest ebb.
A wiser approach would have been to charge all the suspects and present evidence of any Indian government involvement in a court of law. But with no arrests, let alone evidence, Mr. Trudeau has dealt a major blow to Ottawa’s bilateral relationship with New Delhi by echoing the allegations of Canadian Sikh extremists who have held India responsible from the day Mr. Nijjar was shot.
India has never been accused of carrying out an assassination on Western soil, even though it has long been the target of major international terrorist attacks. India’s concerns about the operations of Sikh and Kashmiri terrorists from Anglosphere countries go back to the 1980s, when an Indian diplomat was murdered in Birmingham in Britain and a bomb downed an Air India flight from Toronto, killing all 329 people on board.
Assassinating dissidents abroad is what authoritarian regimes do. India is the world’s largest democracy, and it has not taken down even the United Nations-designated, Pakistan-based terrorists wanted for horrific attacks such as the 2008 Mumbai massacre. Mr. Nijjar, allegedly associated with a small Sikh militant group in Canada, was not on India’s list of most-wanted terrorists.
Significantly, Mr. Trudeau’s allegation came just days after he was chastised by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the G20 summit for being soft on Sikh terrorists. Mr. Modi conveyed to the Canadian Prime Minister that New Delhi had “strong concerns about continuing anti-India activities of extremist elements in Canada. They are promoting secessionism and inciting violence … The nexus of such forces with organized crime, drug syndicates and human trafficking should be a concern for Canada as well.”
India, which accused Mr. Trudeau on Tuesday of sheltering Sikh “terrorists and extremists,” has been rankled by what appear to be increasing threats against Indian diplomatic missions and diplomats in Canada. Mr. Trudeau’s minority government depends on support from the New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, who in the past has participated in events where Sikh extremists have demanded the creation of Khalistan, or a Sikh homeland carved out of India. At one such event in 2016, a speaker endorsed the use of political violence as a “legitimate form of resistance” to achieve Khalistan.
The Khalistan movement, however, has little support among Sikhs in India. Even in Canada and other English-speaking countries, such separatists make up a minority of the Sikh diaspora. But what the secessionists lack in numbers, they make up through a pitched campaign that, disturbingly, often glorifies political violence.
To be sure, rising Sikh separatist activity in Canada is not the only issue that has caused bad blood between Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Modi. In 2020, Mr. Trudeau cheered on largely Sikh farmers blockading highways near New Delhi. But while defending protesters’ rights half a world away, Mr. Trudeau declared a federal emergency in Canada last year to quash blockades of Canadians protesting his COVID-19 vaccination policy. The stunning hypocrisy has not been forgotten in New Delhi.
At a time when a major global geopolitical reordering is under way, Canada and India, which have no major clash of strategic interest, should be close partners. Indeed, their shared goals, including universal adherence to international law, make them natural allies. Against this backdrop, Mr. Trudeau’s evidence-free claim against India is not just astounding; it threatens to further corrode Canada’s relations with the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
Repairing the damage to the bilateral relationship may take time but it must begin in earnest after the present diplomatic crisis is over. This may only happen after a change of government in Ottawa.
Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books on international geopolitics, a professor of strategic studies at the independent Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
The G20 summit in New Delhi, which brought presidents, prime ministers and monarchs together, was a high point in Indian diplomacy at a time when rival China is grappling with multiple crises, from a dramatic economic downturn to growing domestic discontent. The summit’s adoption of a 37-page consensus document outlining the roadmap for a more sustainable and peaceful global future underscored India’s burgeoning economic and geopolitical clout.
Few had expected the summit to be a success, given the international divisiveness. The war in Ukraine has created a deep divide between the West and the Sino-Russian bloc. There is also a Western clash with a rising Global South. But by bridging global divides, India helped build consensus.
The rising international profile of the world’s largest democracy comes at a time when India is positioning itself as a potential mediator between the West and Russia. There is also growing Western recognition that India is well placed to serve as a key counterweight to communist China’s neo-imperial ambitions.
A fully agreed joint communique was not the only achievement of the summit. The real value of any G20 summit lies not in the pious commitments that world leaders make (which are rarely honoured) but as a venue for bilateral, trilateral or even quadrilateral meetings between the various heads of state or government. The New Delhi summit was no exception.
The discussions on the margins of the summit led to the announcement of an ambitious US-led plan to build a rail and shipping corridor linking India with the Middle East and Europe.
As part of the US approach to counter China’s decade-old Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through alternative arrangements, the corridor proposal was portrayed by American President Joe Biden as a “real big deal” that would link Middle East countries by railway and connect them to India and Europe through port interconnections, thus helping the flow of energy and trade, including by slashing shipping times and costs. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for his part, called the proposal “a big connectivity initiative” that would permit “future generations to dream bigger”.
To be sure, the corridor initiative was not the only plan to counter the BRI that emerged from the summit. The US won the summit’s endorsement for reshaping and scaling up multilateral development banks like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund by significantly boosting their lending capacities. This would help counter China’s predatory lending practices by providing an alternative means of financing for infrastructure and development projects.
China’s lending binge has made it the world’s largest sovereign creditor to developing countries. Almost every Chinese loan issued in the last decade has included a secrecy clause compelling the borrowing country not to disclose the loan’s terms—or even the loan’s existence. Many African, Asian and Latin American countries have become ensnared in a debt trap, leaving them highly vulnerable to Chinese pressure to pursue policies that advance China’s economic and geopolitical interests. According to one study, the loan contracts give China “broad latitude to cancel loans or accelerate repayment if it disagrees with a borrower’s policies”.
Xi’s absence was China’s loss
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s absence at the G20 summit drew international attention to China’s military and political tensions with India. The two demographic giants have been locked in a 41-month-long military standoff triggered by China’s stealth territorial intrusions into Ladakh in April 2020.
With Chinese forces massed along the India border, it would have been odd for Xi to visit New Delhi without taking the initiative to defuse the border confrontation with India. In the tense border crisis, India has more than matched China’s forward deployment of forces. Consequently, tens of thousands of troops on each side have been facing off along the Indo-Tibetan border.
By deciding to skip the G20 summit, Xi may have done India a favour. It would have been particularly galling to India had Xi visited New Delhi even as China’s border aggression continued.
The only way to end the military standoff is through a deal to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and de-induction of rival forces. But no deal can emerge unless the aggressor state is willing to settle matters.
One would have expected the Indian invitation to Xi to attend the G20 summit to catalyse efforts to defuse the dangerous border confrontation. After all, the risk of the military standoff escalating to intense bloody clashes or even a limited border war can no longer be discounted, given the large-scale forward military deployments by both sides.
In fact, military-to-military talks were held at different levels a few weeks before the G20 and BRICS summits. Indian media reports on the talks suggested that there was some forward movement to help defuse the border crisis in a gradual manner.
But, at the political level, Xi’s regime appeared to recoil from concluding a deal with India. This was apparent from the failure of the Xi-Modi talks on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg to achieve any progress toward ending the military standoff.
Indeed, as if to underline its hardline stance, Beijing issued a statement that undiplomatically claimed that the meeting at Johannesburg took place at Modi’s “request,” a claim India said was untrue.
The condescension inherent in that statement was apparent from its implicit advice to India to put up with China’s April 2020 land grabs in Ladakh so that the two countries can “handle properly the border issue” and stabilize their relations. Indeed, by regurgitating the same position that Beijing has held for over three years, the statement signalled that China was unwilling to climb down to some extent to help end the military standoff with India that is now in its fourth year.
The plain fact is that Xi has been wearing his intransigence on his sleeve. He created the border crisis by ordering the stealthy territorial encroachments on key borderlands of Ladakh. And now he refuses to reach a compromise settlement with India to end the border confrontation.
Simply put, the ball remains in China’s court.
However, in ordering the intrusions into Ladakh, Xi seriously miscalculated that China would be able to impose the changed territorial status quo on India as a fait accompli, without inviting a robust Indian military response. By locking horns with China even at the risk of sparking a full-scale war, India is openly challenging Chinese power and capability in a way that no other country has done in this century.
Embarrassed by the strong Indian military challenge, Xi’s regime has sought to exert greater pressure on India by deploying more Chinese forces in offensive positions, by constructing new warfare infrastructure along the frontier, and by mounting infowar and psychological operations against India.
All that, however, risks making a permanent enemy of India. This runs counter to China’s own long-term interests.
It is apparent that Xi is caught in a military crisis of his own making. His efforts to compel India to buckle have come a cropper.
Meanwhile, Xi’s regime has stepped up its buildup of military infrastructure and capabilities across the entire frontier with India, from the Aksai Chin plateau and the Uttarakhand-Tibet border to the Sikkim-Tibet and Arunachal-Tibet frontier. It is engaged in the frenzied construction of new permanent military structures as if it were preparing for war. Its construction activities are compelling India to focus on expanding its own military infrastructure along the Himalayan frontier.
The key question is: What are the strategic and military objectives that are driving China’s frenetic construction activity along the India frontier?
The construction of new permanent military structures appears designed to consolidate China’s existing territorial control, aggressively assert its claims to other Indian territories, and deter any Indian operation to regain lost territory.
But the hectic construction activity also appears aimed at a broader strategic mission — to stop India from opening another front against China when Xi decides to move against Taiwan.
Just as China invaded India in 1962 during the US-Soviet Cuban missile crisis, a Taiwan attack could offer India a historic opportunity to settle the Himalayan border. China may be seeking to constrict such an Indian option by creating new warfare infrastructure on its side of the India frontier, including boring tunnels and shafts in mountainsides to set up reinforced troop shelters and command positions as well as underground weapons storage facilities.
In any event, by digging in for the long haul and creating a “hot” border, China is doubling down on a more aggressive strategy against India. There seems little prospect of a return to the status quo ante along the frontier, even if a deal of some sorts was reached in the future to ease military tensions.
A more dangerous China?
The dilemma that Xi faces is how to resolve the India border crisis without losing face, especially at a time when China is facing mounting challenges at home and abroad. The external challenges extend far beyond India.
The fact is that, under Xi, China is turning into its own worst enemy. It is picking geostrategic fights with all of the world’s other major powers except Russia. This is possibly unprecedented in modern world history.
Xi, for his part, has shown an increasing appetite for taking major risks, as the South and East China Seas, the Himalayas and Hong Kong show. He is willing to ruthlessly run roughshod over international law and norms.
Through his aggressive revisionism, Xi has counterproductively set in motion trends in the Indo-Pacific region that seem antithetical to China’s long-term interests.
Australia has abandoned hedging and joined the AUKUS alliance against China. India is being driven closer to the United States even as it seeks to maintain its strategic autonomy. Japan has been shaken out of its complacency by China’s pursuit of Asian hegemony. And people in Taiwan are increasingly embracing a Taiwanese identity that is distinct from that of China.
Xi’s foreign policy is an outgrowth of his domestic despotism. Under Xi’s leadership, the ruling Communist Party has established an Orwellian techno-totalitarian surveillance state that seeks to bend reality to the illusions that it propagates. Egged on by state propaganda, Chinese nationalism has become feverish and vitriolic.
Yet, Xi’s domestic challenges are getting acute, from a remarkable economic downturn to a battered public trust in the party’s ability to manage the country. China is grappling with worsening macroeconomic conditions and falling investor confidence. Add to that picture high youth unemployment and an aging workforce.
Unless reversed, the economic slump over time is likely to undermine regime stability and constrain China’s geopolitical ambitions. The economic slowdown is already undercutting the Communist Party’s rationale for monopolizing power — that only it can deliver rapid growth.
Biden, calling a stagnant China a “ticking time bomb,” warned recently that, “When bad folks have problems, they do bad things.” In a reminder of that, Beijing released a new national map late last month showing inside China vast swaths of Indian land and the territories of several other neighbours, including tiny Bhutan.
The map, which drew protests from several neighbouring countries, illustrates the “bad things” Beijing is willing to do. One can expect more “bad things” from Beijing.
The party and the regime are now packed with men loyal to Xi. The tightening grip of a dictator without checks and balances, and with yes men around him, represents a major Chinese weakness because it is likely to spawn more miscalculations. It could even lead to a ruinous miscalculation.
That risk is heightened by the fact that Xi seems to be in a hurry to achieve what he calls the “Chinese dream”—that is, achieve China’s global pre-eminence.
With a demographic crisis deepening, economic growth stalled, and the global environment becoming increasingly unfavourable to China, Xi seems to have concluded that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to shape the international order in its favour. So, his appetite for risk has perceptibly grown.
In this light, as China’s economic and geopolitical fortunes sink, the risks to Taiwan and India from an aggressive China are bound to increase.
India thus has to be on its guard. Just as Mao Zedong invaded India in 1962 after his disastrous “Great Leap Forward” initiative created a manmade famine that killed countless millions of Chinese, Xi’s growing troubles could tempt him to launch a military adventure against India to help restore his standing at home and abroad.
When Mao launched his war against India, his mission, as his premier put it, was to “teach India a lesson.” Xi may be itching to teach India another lesson in order to cut it down to size and open the path to Chinese hegemony in Asia.
In military terms, defence generally has a significant advantage over offense because it is easier to protect and hold than to advance, destroy and seize. This is particularly true about mountain warfare. In mountainous terrain, the defending force can defeat an attacking force much larger than its own.
With one of the world’s largest and most-experienced mountain warfare armies, India is well placed, even without fully matching China’s military capabilities, to effectively defend itself against any Chinese aggression.
The key is not to be taken by surprise again. India failed to foresee the 2020 Chinese aggression coming largely because its foreign policy was focused on befriending China. Despite the 2017 Chinese capture of almost the entire Doklam Plateau, India allowed the “Wuhan spirit” and “Chennai connect” lullabies—like the old Hindi-Chini bhai bhai pitch—to lull it into complacency. The result is that, for more than three years, India has been locked in a costly and dangerous military standoff with China, after losing access to some strategic borderlands in Ladakh that it traditionally patrolled.
Deception, stealth and surprise have long been the key elements in China’s warfare strategy. If India were to taken unawares again, it would prove extremely costly for it because any Chinese military adventure would likely seek to leave India humiliated. But if India anticipates and effectively resists an attack, China will get a bloody nose.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books on water: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
Given the rising strategic importance of Vietnam, U.S. President Joe Biden did well by stopping in Hanoi last weekend after attending the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi.
His visit has helped cement a new American strategic partnership with Vietnam that seeks to focus on present and future Asian challenges by burying bitter memories of the past.
The stopover in one of Asia’s more authoritarian countries is the latest reminder of how Biden is not hewing to his own simplistic narrative of a “global battle between democracy and autocracy,” implicitly recognizing that the approach would crimp the wider pursuit of U.S. diplomatic interests.
In New Delhi, Biden gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a hearty handshake even though he was criticized at home for fist-bumping him last year. Biden’s embrace of the crown prince contrasts starkly with his own 2019 presidential campaign pledge to treat Saudi Arabia like “the pariah that they are.”
The mending of frayed ties with Saudi Arabia is already paying dividends for Washington. Biden and Prince Mohammed joined other leaders in New Delhi to unveil an ambitious plan to build a rail and shipping corridor that would link India with the Middle East and Europe.
Not surprisingly, Biden’s trip to Vietnam has drawn flak from American human rights activists concerned with Hanoi’s widening crackdown on dissent and peaceful protest. Taking a different stance, Biden said Vietnam is a “critical Indo-Pacific partner” for America.
The promotion of democracy and human rights has a legitimate role in American foreign policy. But if these issues are allowed to outweigh all other considerations, the U.S. will have few countries outside the Western bloc to partner with. The need for a balanced approach is underlined by the fact that even in the U.S. itself, more than two-thirds of the citizenry think the country’s democracy is broken.
Against this backdrop, Biden ought to review his administration’s use of sanctions to promote democracy. Rather than advancing democratic freedoms, punitive measures against vulnerable states often further the interests of China, the world’s largest and longest-surviving autocracy.
While flying from New Delhi to Hanoi, Biden’s Air Force One passed over Myanmar, a country with a struggling economy that has been greatly impacted by U.S. sanctions.
Seeking to restore democracy in military-ruled Myanmar through punishing sanctions while building closer partnerships with other autocracies is inherently contradictory and undercuts U.S. interests.
The fact is that there is not a single truly democratic country in the arc of Southeast Asian countries that stretches between Myanmar and Vietnam and shares a Buddhist heritage.
An alliance between Thailand’s military and monarchy has long shaped politics in that U.S. treaty ally. Nine years after a military coup, Thailand last month installed a new government that still has military-linked parties at its core, sidelining voters who showed a clear preference for opposition parties in May’s general election.
The military has also been the most powerful political player traditionally in Myanmar. But while the U.S. put up with Thailand’s coup without imposing meaningful penalties, the Biden administration imposed wide-ranging sanctions against Myanmar after generals there ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government in February 2021.
Indeed, sanctions may have contributed to the coup. Thirteen months earlier, the U.S. penalized a number of the generals in relation to Myanmar’s bloody campaign to drive out Rohingya Muslims. Some military leaders may have felt they had little to lose by seizing power.
Post-coup sanctions have made a bad situation in Myanmar worse without advancing American interests. Left with little leverage to influence political developments, the U.S. has been lending increasing support to armed resistance forces fighting military rule.
With its strategic location, Myanmar, like Vietnam, could be co-opted into America’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Instead, thanks to U.S. sanctions policy, China’s footprint in Myanmar is growing fast.
If Biden were to shift from isolating and squeezing Myanmar to gradually engaging with the junta, he would stand a better chance of accelerating the end of direct military rule. Sanctions without engagement have never worked.
Human rights activists and democracy promoters may be highly influential within the foreign policy apparatus of Biden’s Democratic Party, but despite his public rhetoric about democracy versus autocracy, the president has wisely taken a more pragmatic approach.
This approach would benefit more if long-term strategic interests, not narrow considerations or moralizing, guided engagement with any autocracy.
In beseeching China to stabilize its relationship with the U.S. through direct talks, Biden has sent a string of senior officials to Beijing since May, including the director of the CIA, his secretaries of state, treasury and commerce, as well as his climate envoy. Yet Washington has balked at even just opening lines of communication with Myanmar’s generals.
Biden managed to persuade Vietnam to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” that grants the U.S. coveted status that Hanoi previously reserved for China, Russia, India and South Korea.
The U.S. could likewise potentially become a favored partner of Myanmar by gradually developing ties with its nationalist military — the only functioning national institution in the culturally and ethnically diverse country.
Today, the U.S. maintains close cooperation with a wide array of undemocratic or weakly democratic governments. Without giving authoritarian states a free pass on democracy or rights issues, the U.S. should use positive incentives, rather than sanctions, to persuade potential and existing partner nations to address their political shortcomings. America’s sharpening competition with China makes it crucial that it prioritize strategic interests by building new partnerships.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
Whereas Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China prefers an incremental approach, enabled by stealth and deception, to advance its revisionist agenda. And, barring a major strategic blunder, it is likely to continue doing so.
It is well known that China has the world’s largest navy and coast guard – the result of a tenfold increase in military spending since 1995 – which it uses to advance its pugnacious revisionism. But there are also numerous lesser-known – indeed, highly opaque – policies, projects, and activities that are supporting Chinese expansionism and placing the entire world at risk.
China has a long record of expanding its strategic footprint through stealthy maneuvers that it brazenly denies. For example, in 2017, it established its first overseas military base in Djibouti – a tiny country on the Horn of Africa, which also happens to be deeply in debt to China – while insisting that it had no such plan.
Today, China is building a naval base in Cambodia, which has leased to China one-fifth of its coastline and some islets. The almost-complete pier at the Chinese-financed Ream Naval Base appears conspicuously similar in size and design to a pier at China’s Djibouti base. China admits to investing in the base, but claims that only Cambodia’s navy will have access to it.
Realistically, however, it seems likely that China’s navy will use the facility at least for military logistics. This would further strengthen China’s position in the South China Sea, where it has already built seven artificial islands as forward military bases, giving it effective control of this critical corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
China also takes a highly secretive approach to its massive dam projects on international rivers flowing to other countries from the Chinese-annexed Tibetan Plateau. While the world knows that the rubber-stamp National People’s Congress approved the construction of the world’s largest dam near China’s heavily militarized frontier with India in 2021, there have been no public updates on the project since.
The dam is supposed to generate three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest hydropower plant, and China has built a new railroad and highway to transport heavy equipment, materials, and workers to the remote project site. We will find out more only when construction is far enough along that the dam can no longer be hidden from commercially available satellite imagery. At that point, it will be a fait accompli.
China has used this strategy to build 11 giant dams on the Mekong, not only gaining geopolitical leverage over its neighbors, but also wreaking environmental havoc. China is now the world’s most dammed country, with more large dams in operation than the rest of the world combined, and it is constructing or planning at least eight more dams on the Mekong alone.
Opacity has also been a defining feature of the lending binge that has made China the world’s largest sovereign creditor to developing countries. Almost every Chinese loan issued in the last decade has included a sweeping confidentiality clause compelling the borrowing country not to disclose the loan’s terms. Many African, Asian, and Latin American countries have become ensnared in a debt trap, leaving them highly vulnerable to Chinese pressure to pursue policies that advance China’s economic and geopolitical interests. According to one study, the loan contracts give China “broad latitude to cancel loans or accelerate repayment if it disagrees with a borrower’s policies.”
But there can be no better illustration of the global costs of Chinese secrecy than the COVID-19 pandemic. Had China’s government responded quickly to evidence that a deadly new coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan, warning the public and implementing control measures, the damage could have been contained.
Instead, the Communist Party of China (CPC) rushed to suppress and discredit information about the outbreak, paving the way for a raging worldwide pandemic that killed almost seven million people and disrupted countless lives and livelihoods. To this day, Chinese obfuscation has prevented scientists from confirming the true origins of COVID-19, which, lest we forget, emerged in China’s main hub for research on super-viruses.
China’s willingness to violate international laws, rules, and norms compounds the opacity problem. The Chinese government has repeatedly reneged on its international commitments, including promises to safeguard the autonomy of Hong Kong and not to militarize features in the South China Sea. It was China’s furtive violation of its commitment not to alter unilaterally the status quo of its disputed Himalayan border with India that triggered a three-year (and counting) military standoff between the two countries.
There is no reason to expect China to abandon its rule-breaking, its debt-based coercion, or its other malign activities any time soon. Chinese President Xi Jinping – who has strengthened the CPC’s control over information, cutting off outside analysts’ access even to economic data – is now on track to hold power for life, and remains eager to reshape the international order to China’s benefit.
Ominously, Xi’s appetite for risk appears to be growing. This partly reflects time pressure: Xi seems to believe that China has a narrow window of opportunity to achieve global preeminence before unfavorable demographic, economic, and geopolitical trends catch up with it. But Xi has also been emboldened by the international community’s utter failure to impose meaningful consequences on China for its bad behavior.
Whereas Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China prefers incrementalism, enabled by stealth and deception, to advance its revisionist agenda. This, together with tremendous economic clout, shields it from a decisive Western response. That is why, barring a major strategic blunder by Xi, China’s salami-slicing expansionism is likely to persist.
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.
The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on Aug.5, eve of the 78th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attack: Japan was already essentially defeated before the city was destroyed. (Photo by Yo Inoue)
Atomic bombings were more about demonstrating power than securing surrender
Months before the twin atomic attacks, it had become clear that the issue was not whether Japan would surrender but when. America’s own Strategic Bombing Survey concluded in 1946 that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”
The Hollywood blockbuster “Oppenheimer” carries the somber message that the nuclear age may have doomed us all.
The biopic about American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” has renewed international attention around the morality and military necessity of the nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 78 years ago.
Why the first and only use of atomic weapons occurred is still something of a vexed question, especially because Japan was already essentially defeated before Hiroshima was destroyed. Japan was then under a crippling sea and air blockade and conventional U.S. firebombing air raids were devastating its major cities.
Years later, plagued by guilt, the real Oppenheimer acknowledged that the bomb on Hiroshima was used “against an essentially defeated enemy.”
The U.S. may have won the war before the Hiroshima bombing but it was not content with defeating Japan. It sought Japan’s unconditional surrender.
Decades later, there is still no definitive answer as to why the U.S. attacked Nagasaki with a nuclear weapon just three days after Hiroshima’s destruction and before Japan had time to fully grasp the strategic implications of the first atomic attack.
Even if the Hiroshima bombing was justifiable as a way to force Japan to surrender, what military purpose did the precipitous second attack serve?
Telford Taylor, who served as chief prosecutor at the Nazi war crime trials in Nuremberg, Germany, said, “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable, but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki.”
The unstated justification, I would argue, had little to do with Nagasaki itself. Rather, the administration of U.S. President Harry S. Truman judged the bombing as necessary to fully demonstrate America’s new destructive powers.
Truman, who took office in April 1945 days before Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide, gave Japan no firm deadline to surrender before rushing into the second atomic strike. No warning was given to the residents of either city bombed.
To be sure, all sides, including imperial Japan, engaged in mass killings during World War II, a conflict in which nearly 60 million people died. The then-prevailing political-military culture that regarded the targeting of civilian centers as a legitimate tool of warfare certainly facilitated the atomic bombings.
Did the bombings alone lead to Japan’s announcement of surrender six days after the Nagasaki attack? Disagreement among historians still persists over this issue.
The entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, one day before the Nagasaki bombing, gutted a bilateral nonaggression pact and was an equally, if not more, critical factor in Tokyo’s surrender. By opening a new front in the conflict, the Soviet move was a mortal blow to Japanese morale, making capitulation more certain.
The official U.S. narrative in the war’s immediate aftermath asserted that the atomic bombings by themselves accomplished the goal of compelling Japan to surrender, saving the lives of thousands of Americans who would have been killed if a full-scale invasion of Japan’s main islands had become necessary.
This “noble action” narrative later came under attack from American scholars who argued that Japan had been ready to surrender before the atomic bombings.
The revisionist thesis drew strength from the White House-initiated U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which in 1945-46 examined the U.S. bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. The report concluded that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”
In fact, months before the twin atomic attacks, it had become clear that the issue was not whether Japan would surrender but when. A key sticking point was the emperor’s role: The Japanese wanted the emperor to retain authority rather than be reduced to a figurehead as ultimately happened under U.S. military occupation.
In deciding how to bring the war to a close, the Truman administration overruled America’s military leadership. Indeed, a string of U.S. military leaders later publicly criticized the atomic bombings as unnecessary.
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace,” said Admiral Chester Nimitz, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. “The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view in the defeat of Japan.”
Admiral William Halsey Jr., the U.S. Third Fleet commander, said: “It was a mistake. … [The scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.”
Hiroshima was selected as the first nuclear target because of its flat terrain and because it had essentially been untouched by U.S. aid raids, thus allowing the impact of the first atomic weapon, an untested uranium bomb, to be clearly assessed.
For the second attack, the U.S. chose to employ a more powerful plutonium bomb that had been secretly tested 24 days earlier in the New Mexico desert. The city of Kokura, now part of Kitakyushu, was chosen as the primary target, but because of heavy cloud cover there on the appointed day, the U.S. B-29 bomber carrying the weapon was diverted to Nagasaki.
The techno-political imperative to show off America’s unmatched destructive prowess to the world then set in motion a new U.S.-led global order. Indeed, while the bombings may have contributed to ending a hot war, they were the opening shots of a long Cold War.
The resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons created an edgy world that today bristles with more than 13,000 atomic weapons. The Ukraine conflict, meanwhile, has increased the risks of a cataclysmic nuclear war, with both Russia and NATO conducting preparatory drills.
The legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been to put humanity’s future in jeopardy. The world today has a nuclear test ban treaty but no treaty outlawing the use of nuclear weapons.
This ominously means that parties to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while prohibited from testing on their territories, face no legal constraint to following the U.S. example in Hiroshima of employing an untested nuclear weapon against an adversary. For the time being, fortunately, political constraints still apply, even if tenuously.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
China and India have been locked in a tense conflict along their Himalayan border since April 2020, when Chinese troops stealthily encroached upon some key borderlands in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh. More than three years later, the standoff between rival forces has solidified, with China continuing to frenetically erect new warfare infrastructure along the long frontier.
Even then, Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to visit New Delhi next month for the Group of 20 summit, which is likely to be attended by other world leaders, from U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appearance is uncertain given that the war in Ukraine appears to be at a pivotal stage.
The Sept. 9-10 summit raises the possibility that Xi’s trip could propel efforts for a deal to help defuse what has become an increasingly dangerous military confrontation between the nuclear-armed demographic titans. Both sides have forward deployed more and more lethal weapons.
Meanwhile, border clashes have intermittently occurred since May 2020, even as corps commanders from the two militaries have met 18 times over three years to negotiate a pullback of forces. Through these lengthy negotiations, India has managed only to get China to convert its smaller encroachments into buffer zones — largely on Beijing’s terms, with Indian forces retreating further back into their own territory.
Today, with more than 100,000 rival troops backed by reserves locked in the standoff at multiple sites from the western to the eastern Himalayas, the military crisis can be eased only if both sides agree to sequentially disengage, de-escalate and de-induct forces from front-line positions through verifiable methods.
However, there seems little prospect of a return to the status quo ante along the disputed frontier. China has not only changed the territorial status quo in the western sector but also remains engaged in a frenzied construction of new military infrastructure along the entire border, as if it were preparing for war. The new infrastructure extends from helipads and radar sites to cold-weather troop shelters and ammunition depots.
Even if a deal of some sorts was reached to ease military tensions, the largest Himalayan buildup of rival forces in history, coupled with the expanding Chinese warfare infrastructure, promises to lastingly turn what was once a lightly patrolled frontier into a perennially hot border.
More broadly, the Himalayan conflict also holds lessons for Japan, whose control of the Senkaku Islands, calledthe Diaoyu in China, has come under increasing challenge from China. The record-long Chinese intrusion in April into Japanese territorial waters near the islets highlighted this challenge.
In fact, China is pursuing its revisionism against Japan in ways that mirror its strategy of attrition, friction and containment against India. Incremental advances by stealth below the threshold of war through a “salami-slicing” approach have become integral to China’s expansionism.
Sinicizing the names of the places it covets is also part of China’s strategy to buttress its sovereignty claims. But China’s various territorial claims in Asia are based not on international law but on alleged history.
Like Japan, India has been overly on the defensive. Consequently, the daunting challenge India faces today is to regain lost territory in the same way China took it — without resort to open combat.
For Japan, the fundamental message from Chinese expansionism in the Himalayas is that China can disturb the status quo at any time of its choosing, even if it means violating binding bilateral agreements and international norms. China’s military actions against India openly breach four separate border management agreements the two sides signed between 1993 and 2013, including forswearing any attempt to unilaterally change the territorial status quo.
As Japan’s own experience in dealing with Chinese intrusions underscores, stealth, deception and surprise are central to China’s strategy.
In fact, improvements in bilateral relations do not deter Beijing from springing a nasty surprise on the other side. The Chinese encroachments on the Indian borderlands occurred just six months after Xi declared during an India visit that, “China-India relations have entered a new phase of sound and stable development.”
Simply put, China’s aggressive actions bear no relation to the state of ties with the country it targets. Seeking better relations with Beijing, far from helping to improve Chinese behavior, can even backfire, as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has bitterly discovered. Seeking to befriend China, Modi met with Xi 18 times over five years before the Chinese encroachments occurred.
Another lesson is that booming bilateral trade and economic interdependence also do not constrain China’s behavior. If anything, expanding economic ties only constrict the other side’s strategic leeway for fear of losing access to the Chinese market.
Yet another lesson for Japan, as for India, is that being constantly on the defensive only emboldens China to needle the targeted country or infringe its sovereignty. Coming out of a reactive and defensive mode is vital to checkmate China’s expansionist designs.
Having normalized its intrusions into Japanese territorial waters and airspace, China is working to progressively alter the status quo in the East China Sea in its favor. It draws strength from its success in redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea without firing a single shot or incurring any international costs.
If Japan is not to find itself increasingly at the receiving end of China’s muscular revisionism, it must formulate a concrete counterstrategy.
Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
Ukrainian soldiers fire a M777 howitzer toward Russian positions on the front line in eastern Ukraine. (Anatolii Stepanov/Getty Images)
As the war in Ukraine drags on despite the unprecedented U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, “Ukraine fatigue” in the West is beginning to set in. Most Americans now oppose Congress authorizing further military and economic aid for Kyiv, according to a new CNN-SSRS poll.
It is easier to keep funding and arming a country when things are going well. But Ukraine’s counteroffensive against the entrenched Russian invaders is floundering, despite the West training and equipping Ukrainian formations with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of new weapons.
After the much-hyped counteroffensive began in early June, Ukraine lost as much as 20% of the newly-supplied weaponry in just the first two weeks. The stalled counteroffensive has dashed NATO’s hopes of a major military breakthrough against Russia, which still occupies nearly a fifth of Ukraine.
The counteroffensive’s lack of headway, meanwhile, places President Joe Biden in a tight spot. But instead of rethinking his strategy, he is just throwing good money after bad and hoping for a miracle — an eventual battlefield breakthrough against Russian forces or political upheaval in Moscow.
Only dialogue and diplomacy can halt the war, which, unlike the previous military invasions of sovereign states by foreign powers, is having a global impact in the form of higher food and fuel prices and increased inflation. This is largely because the conflict has shaped up as a kind of proxy war between the great powers, pitting Russia against the American-led bloc.
Biden, while keeping the door to diplomacy with Russia shut, has been beseeching China to stabilize the Sino-American relationship through direct talks. The president has sent a string of senior officials to Beijing this summer, including CIA Director Bill Burns, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and “climate czar” John Kerry. The lack of concrete results from these fence-mending visits led to an unannounced trip to Beijing by Henry Kissinger, the 100-year-old former secretary of state who has encouraged the Biden administration to adopt a more conciliatory approach to China.
The fact is that the more the United States has deepened its involvement in the Ukraine war, the more Biden has sought to appease China in the hope of forestalling a Sino-Russian axis against America.
The American-led sanctions against Russia, however, are helping to advance China’s commercial and strategic interests, without reining in the Kremlin’s war machine or pushing Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. A report from the Washington-based Free Russia Foundation has called China the “biggest winner” from the Western punitive measures against Moscow.
More ominously, the failure of the world’s toughest-ever sanctions regime to bring Russia to heel could embolden China’s expansionist designs against Taiwan, especially since similar sanctions against Beijing would have even less impact. After all, China’s economy is about 10 times larger than Russia’s. Just as Putin was clear about his plans for invading Ukraine, so has Chinese President Xi Jinping been explicit about eventually absorbing Taiwan.
Yet the U.S. is still not giving sufficient priority to deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan. The overall $1.65 trillion spending package passed by Congress late last year included $45 billion in additional aid for Ukraine but just $2 billion for Taiwan. The assistance for Taiwan was in loans, not grants.
Meanwhile, the grinding nature of the Ukraine war shows that it has reached a stalemate on the battlefield, with neither side in a position to make significant advances, let alone achieve total victory.
Deepening America’s involvement in what is now an attritional war can only drain Western military resources. It would sap America’s strength at a time of growing security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region. Indeed, the flood of American weapons to Ukraine is already weakening U.S. military muscle in Asia.
The war, for its part, is exposing some key Western military limitations. The U.S. set out to bleed Russia in Ukraine but it is America, not Russia, that is running out of critical munitions. Biden, in a recent CNN interview, admitted that, “This is a war relating to munitions. And they [Ukraine] are running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it.” So, he said, he was left with no choice but to send Ukraine cluster bombs.
Diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement ought to be a natural corollary to the current military gridlock in Ukraine. The 1950-53 Korean War was deadlocked for two years before an armistice agreement was concluded. A similar long delay in reaching a ceasefire agreement in the current war would bring greater devastation to Ukraine.
It is true that the U.S. committed to restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, with little hope of forcing Russia to retreat from the territories it has occupied in Ukraine’s east and south, a protracted war is not in America’s interest.
Just like the Cold War created an East and West Germany, a North and South Vietnam, and a still-existing North and South Korea, the likely outcome of the present war — however unpalatable it may seem — would be a Russian-held Ukrainian segment that serves as Moscow’s strategic buffer against NATO and a rump Ukraine aligned with (but not part of) NATO.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
The international focus on the war in Ukraine has helped obscure the China-India military confrontation, which has led to rival force build-ups and intermittent clashes. For more than three years, the two Asian giants have been locked in a tense military standoff along their disputed Himalayan frontier.
The risk of this confrontation escalating to intense bloody clashes or even a limited border war can no longer be discounted, given the large-scale forward military deployments by both sides.
An opposite scenario is also conceivable. If Chinese President Xi Jinping were to visit New Delhi for the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in September, the trip could catalyze efforts to defuse the dangerous confrontation, which was triggered by China’s stealth territorial encroachments into the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh in April-May 2020.
India failed to foresee the Chinese aggression largely because Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been focused on appeasing Beijing in order to chip away at the China-Pakistan axis. Mr. Xi, though, seriously miscalculated that China would be able to impose the changed territorial status quo on India as a fait accompli, without inviting a robust military response.
India has locked horns with China by more than matching Chinese force deployments. Even at the risk of sparking a full-scale war, India is openly challenging Chinese power and capability in a way that no other country has done in this century.
Discomfited by the strong Indian military challenge, Mr. Xi’s regime has sought to exert greater pressure on India by deploying more Chinese forces in offensive positions, constructing new warfare infrastructure along the frontier, and mounting infowar and psychological operations.
All this, however, risks making a permanent enemy of India, including driving it closer to the United States. Such a scenario is antithetical to China’s long-term interests. U.S. President Joe Biden’s courtship of India, and the pomp and attention he recently lavished on Mr. Modi during a state visit to the U.S., have increased Beijing’s suspicion that New Delhi is drawing closer to Washington to help blunt China.
After China’s border aggression began, New Delhi concluded the last of four foundational defence-related agreements that Washington regularly puts in place with military allies. India has also more closely integrated into the Quad arrangement with Washington, Tokyo and Canberra. And the India-initiated annual Malabar naval war games now include all the Quad partners.
The military standoff with India, meanwhile, leaves Mr. Xi with less room to accomplish what he has called a “historic mission” – the incorporation of Taiwan. India is aiding Taiwan’s defence by tying down a complete Chinese theatre force, which could otherwise be employed against that island democracy.
As Admiral Michael Gilday, the U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations, put it last year, the standoff presents China with 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.”
More fundamentally, Mr. Xi has picked a border fight with India that China cannot win. While the Chinese military relies heavily on conscripts, India, with an all-volunteer force, has the world’s most-experienced troops for mountain warfare.
A war between the two nuclear-armed demographic titans would likely end in a bloody stalemate, which would be seen internationally as a defeat for the stronger side, China. That would seriously damage Mr. Xi’s image.
So, if the confrontation with India were to escalate, Mr. Xi could risk being hoisted with his own petard.
Against this backdrop, would Mr. Xi be willing to find ways to defuse the military crisis with India?
The Sept. 9-10 G20 summit will bring together world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and possibly Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, at a time when tens of thousands of troops on each side are facing off on the Himalayan massif, it would be odd if Mr. Xi visited New Delhi without seeking to defuse the border confrontation.
At the past G20 summit in Bali, Mr. Xi and Mr. Modi briefly interacted at a cultural event in front of television cameras, but did not hold a private meeting, as each did with other leaders.
The only way to end the military standoff is through a deal to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and de-induction of rival forces. The details of such a deal could be hammered out through military-to-military talks.
Mr. Xi, however, seems caught in a military crisis of his own making. He may want to resolve the crisis, but without losing face. His efforts to compel India to buckle have come a cropper. This means that any compromise settlement would require that Mr. Xi climb down to some extent.
Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research.
China is unmatched as the world’s hydro hegemon, with more large dams in service than every other country combined. Now it is building the world’s first super dam, close to its heavily militarized frontier with India.
This megaproject, with a planned capacity of 60 gigawatts, would generate three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam, now the world’s largest hydropower plant. China, though, has given few updates about the project’s status since the National People’s Congress approved it in March 2021.
Opacity about the development of past projects has often served as cover for quiet action. Beijing has a record of keeping work on major dam projects on international rivers under wraps until the activity can no longer be hidden in commercially available satellite imagery.
The super dam is located in some of the world’s most treacherous terrain, in an area long thought impassable.
Here, the Brahmaputra, known to Tibetans as the Yarlung Tsangpo, drops almost 3,000 meters as it takes a sharp southerly turn from the Himalayas into India, with the world’s highest-altitude major river descending through the globe’s longest and steepest canyon.
Twice as deep as the U.S. Grand Canyon, the Brahmaputra gorge holds Asia’s greatest untapped water reserves while the river’s precipitous fall creates one of the greatest concentrations of river energy on Earth. The combination has acted as a powerful magnet for Chinese dam builders.
The behemoth dam, however, is the world’s riskiest project as it is being built in a seismically active area. This makes it potentially a ticking water bomb for downstream communities in India and Bangladesh.
The southeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau is earthquake prone because it sits on the geological fault line where the Indian and Eurasian plates collide.
The 2008 Sichuan earthquake, along the Tibetan Plateau’s eastern rim, killed 87,000 people and drew international attention to the phenomenon of reservoir-triggered seismicity (RTS).
Some Chinese and American scientists drew a link between the quake and Sichuan’s Zipingpu Dam, which came into service two years earlier near a seismic fault. They suggested that the weight of the several hundred million cubic meters of water impounded in the dam’s reservoir could have triggered RTS or severe tectonic stresses.
But even without a quake, the new super dam could be a threat to downriver communities if torrential monsoon rains trigger flash floods in the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra. Barely two years ago, some 400 million Chinese were put at risk after record flooding endangered the Three Gorges Dam.
Meanwhile, the 11 large dams China has built on the upper reaches of the Mekong have had many negative ecological impacts, including recurrent drought, for downriver nations. But not only is China constructing more big dams on the Mekong, it is now also turning its attention to tapping the bounteous water resources in the Brahmaputra Basin.
In pursuing its controversial megaproject on the Brahmaputra, China is cloaking its construction activity to mute international reaction.
China presented the super dam project for the approval of the National People’s Congress only after it had built sufficient infrastructure to start transporting heavy equipment, materials and workers to the remote site.
Barely two months after parliament’s approval two years ago, Beijing announced that it had accomplished the feat of completing a “highway through the world’s deepest canyon.” That highway ends very close to the Indian border.
The following month, Beijing announced the launch of a new rail line from Lhasa to Nyangtri, a frontier military base less than 16 kilometers from the India border. In fact, President Xi Jinping began a surprise tour of Tibet in July 2021 from Nyangtri, taking the new train from there to the regional capital.
The new infrastructure indicates that work on the dam’s foundation likely began quietly after the opening of the railroad and highway.
The Brahmaputra was one of the world’s last undammed rivers until China began constructing a series of midsized dams on sections upstream from the famous canyon. With its dam building now moving close to border areas, China will in due course be able to leverage transboundary flows in its relations with rival India.
But the brunt of the environmental havoc that the megaproject is likely to wreak will be borne by Bangladesh, in the last stretch of the river. The environmental damage, however, is likely to extend up through Tibet, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. In fact, with its super dam, China will be desecrating the canyon region which is a crucial Tibetan holy place.
A cardinal principle of water peace is transparency. The far-reaching strategic, environmental and inter-riparian implications of the largest dam ever conceived make it imperative that China be transparent. Only sustained international pressure can force Beijing to drop the veil of secrecy surrounding its project.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
China’s rapidly growing footprint in Myanmar is America’s strategic loss, and it is the direct result of America’s own policies. Rather than closing the door on dialogue by imposing stringent sanctions, the United States should be co-opting Myanmar’s military leaders for its own strategic benefit.
A recent joint statement by US President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “expressed deep concern about the deteriorating situation in Myanmar,” and called for a constructive dialogue to aid the country’s transition toward an inclusive federal democratic system. Unfortunately, the US-led sanctions policy has undercut this goal and made a bad situation worse.
While inflicting misery on Myanmar’s ordinary citizens, Western sanctions have left the ruling military elites relatively unscathed, giving the junta little incentive to loosen its political grip. The primary beneficiary has been China, which has been allowed to expand its foothold in a country that it values as a strategic gateway to the Indian Ocean and an important source of natural resources.
This development has amplified regional security challenges. For example, Chinese military personnel are now helping to build a listening post on Myanmar’s Great Coco Island, which lies just north of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the home to the Indian military’s only tri-service command. Once operational, this new spy station will likely assist China’s maritime surveillance of India, including by monitoring nuclear submarine movements and tracking tests of missiles that often splash down in the Bay of Bengal.
In a way, history is repeating itself. Starting in the late 1980s, previous US-led sanctions paved the way for China to become Myanmar’s dominant trading partner and investor. That sanctions regime lasted until 2012, when Barack Obama heralded a new US policy and became the first US president to visit Myanmar. In 2015, Myanmar elected its first civilian-led government, ending decades of military dictatorship.
In February 2021, however, the military staged a coup and detained civilian leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi, prompting the Biden administration to re-impose wide-ranging sanctions. Importantly, this reversal of Myanmar’s democratic project was precipitated by earlier targeted US measures against the military leadership – including the commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing – for rampant human-rights abuses against Rohingya Muslims that forced most to flee to Bangladesh. After President Donald Trump’s administration slapped sanctions on Hlaing and other top commanders in July 2019, the generals lost any incentive to sustain Myanmar’s democratization. A year and a half later, they had toppled the civilian government, after denouncing the results of the November 2020 national election as fraudulent.
The lesson for Western policymakers should be clear. Individually sanctioning foreign officials – which is essentially a symbolic gesture – can seriously hamper US diplomacy and cause unintended consequences. (Indeed, China continues to rebuff the Biden administration’s requests for direct military talks as a means of protesting US sanctions on General Li Shangfu, who became China’s defense minister in March.)
America’s longstanding lack of ties with Myanmar’s nationalist military – the only functioning institution in a culturally and ethnically diverse society – has been an enduring weakness of its policy toward the country. Owing to this limitation, Suu Kyi achieved the status of a virtual saint in the Western imagination, only for the feted Nobel Peace Prize winner’s reputation to fall precipitously after she defended her country’s Rohingya policy against accusations of genocide.
Now that the junta leaders are sanctioned and the civilian leaders are under detention, the US has little leverage to influence political developments in Myanmar. Instead, America and its allies have ratcheted up the sanctions and lent support to the armed resistance to military rule. To that end, a Myanmar-specific provision added to the 2023 US National Defense Authorization Act authorizes “non-lethal assistance” for anti-regime armed groups, including the People’s Defense Force, a notional army established by the shadow National Unity Government. Biden now has considerable latitude to aid Myanmar’s anti-junta insurrection, just as Obama did when he provided “non-lethal assistance,” in the form of battlefield support equipment, to Ukrainian forces and Syrian rebels.
But such interventions are likely to plunge Myanmar into greater disorder and poverty without advancing US interests. Even in the unlikely event that the disparate groups behind the armed insurrection manage to overthrow the junta, Myanmar would not re-emerge as a democracy. Rather, it would become a Libya-style failed state and a bane to regional security. It would also remain a proxy battleground between Western powers and China and Russia. A United Nations report estimates that, since the coup, Myanmar has imported at least $1 billion worth of weapons and dual-use goods, principally from China and Russia.
China’s rapidly growing footprint in Myanmar is America’s strategic loss. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Given its strategic location, Myanmar could be co-opted into America’s Indo-Pacific strategy through a gradual easing of sanctions in response to positive moves by the junta.
Given that sanctions naturally close the door to dialogue and influence, they should never be employed as the first tool of foreign policy. After the Thai army chief seized power in a coup in 2014, the US wisely eschewed sanctions and opted for engagement, which helped safeguard Thailand’s thriving civil society. That strategy eventually led to the general’s defeat in the recent national election.
Restoring democracy in Myanmar can be achieved only gradually by engaging with the country’s military rulers and offering them incentives to reverse course. Sanctions without engagement have never worked. If Biden can closely engage with China – the world’s largest, strongest, and longest-surviving autocracy – including by sending the CIA director, the secretary of state, and secretary of the treasury to Beijing in quick succession, he should at least open lines of communication with Myanmar’s junta.
Just as the military-monarchy alliance has long shaped political developments in Thailand, where the generals have seized power 12 times over the last nine decades, Myanmar’s armed forces have traditionally asserted themselves as the country’s most powerful political player. That was evident when they retained their power under the 2008 constitution that helped bring Suu Kyi to power. Without a shift in US policy toward gradual engagement with the junta, Myanmar will remain the playground of great powers, with no hope for a new democratic opening.
A moment of silence is observed at 11:02 am on Aug. 9 at the Peace Statue in Nagasaki, marking the moment an atomic bomb was dropped on the city in 1945. © Kyodo
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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