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About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Beijing’s Triumph of Coercive Diplomacy

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In exchange for withdrawing from India’s own territory, China wins a slew of military concessions from New Delhi.

Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2013

When India announced on Monday that Chinese troops would draw back from a disputed Himalayan border region, Indian politicians hailed the retreat as a return to normalcy and a win for quiet diplomacy. In truth, the three-week Sino-Indian standoff on the Debsang plateau gravely weakened New Delhi’s strategic position in a region that straddles key access routes linking China’s rebellious Tibet and Xinjiang regions as well as China to Pakistan, while Beijing conceded nothing of value.

The dispute was a study in Chinese coercive diplomacy and Indian fecklessness. Beijing’s incursion 20 kilometers past the de facto Himalayan borderline in mid-April bore all the hallmarks of modern Chinese brinksmanship, such as a reliance on surprise and a complete disregard for the risks of wider military escalation.

Above all, the move demonstrated a keen sense of timing. India has never been so weak internally, and its response to the crisis was hobbled by political paralysis and leadership drift.

Chinese troops in Ladakh, India, on May 5 — Associated Press

Merely by deploying a single platoon of no more than 50 soldiers, China won military concessions far beyond what it has gained through peaceful negotiations. In exchange for Beijing’s retreat from an area China never had the right to control, New Delhi will dismantle a key forward observation post, destroy bunkers and other defensive fortifications, and potentially halt infrastructure development near the border.

Meanwhile, China will continue to build up its offensive capability in the Himalayas so that it can strike without warning. Over the past decade, an increasingly assertive China has steadily encroached on India’s Himalayan territory in the name of expanding its “core interests”—a tactic reminiscent of its ongoing territorial and maritime spats with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. India’s spineless Himalayan strategy should be a lesson to those other states on how not to respond to Chinese provocations.

New Delhi’s bumbling began in earnest three years ago, when the Congress Party-led government inexplicably replaced army troops with border police to patrol the frontier. More recently, the entire government leadership kept mum for a week on the latest intrusion, only to break its silence with inanities making light of the encroachment. While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called it a “localized problem,” Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid described it as “one little spot” of acne on the “beautiful face” of India-China relations—an issue that can be “addressed by simply applying an ointment” because “ointment is part of the process of growing up.” The garrulous Khurshid went on to say that “incidents do happen.”

Had Beijing persisted with the standoff, it would have led to cancellation of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s New Delhi visit on May 20—his first overseas trip since assuming office. It was in India’s interest to raise the diplomatic costs for China so as to deter such intrusions in the future. However, the domestic woes of India’s corruption-tainted government left New Delhi no space for it to stand firm or consider how capitulation could embolden the adversary. A never-ending series of scandals have paralyzed the government and undermined its public credibility.

The result was that India wilted in the Himalayas just as China was coming under an adverse international spotlight for its provocations. Instead beefing up its forces and letting Beijing stew for a while, India rewarded the aggressor with concessions. In all likelihood, New Delhi rushed a deal so that its foreign minister could go ahead with a scheduled trip to Beijing this week to prepare for Li’s visit. It was as if Li’s stopover in New Delhi on his way to visit “all-weather ally” Pakistan is more important for India than for China..

The irony is that every visit of a Chinese leader to India in recent years has been preceded by a new aggressive Chinese move. The jarring revival of China’s claim to the Austria-size northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh came just before President Hu Jintao’s 2006 visit. Before Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2010 visit, Beijing began questioning India’s sovereignty over Kashmir through a new visa policy. And now Mr. Li’s visit has been preceded by a military incursion, which has soured relations.

Instead, the main diplomatic legacy of the Himalayan faceoff will be permanent damage to the Sino-Indian border accords of 2005, in which both states agreed to “strictly respect and observe” the de facto border known as the Line of Actual Control. China openly violated these accords by pitching tents in Indian-held territory and raising banners that read “This Is Chinese Land.” Given New Delhi’s timidity, such proclamations may yet become a reality.

Mr. Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Timid India allows China to nibble at Himalayan border

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Brahma Chellaney

The National, May 7, 2013

Intruding Chinese soldiers hold banner asking Indian troops to “Go Back.”

China’s “peaceful rise” is giving way to a more muscular approach as Beijing broadens its “core interests” and exhibits a growing readiness to take risks.

As if to highlight its new multi-directional assertiveness, China’s recent occupation of a 19-kilometre-deep Indian border area, close to where the frontiers of India, Pakistan and China converge, has coincided with its escalating challenge to Japan’s decades-old control of the Senkaku Islands and territorial spats with Vietnam and the Philippines.

China is aggressively conducting regular patrols to support its sovereignty claims in the South and East China seas, while furtively enlarging its footprint in the Himalayan borderlands. While naval and air force units focus on asserting sovereignty claims on the seas, the army stays active in the Himalayas, nibbling at territory.

China is employing novel methods to alter its line of control with India in the mountains and valleys bit by bit – without having to fire a shot. For example, the Chinese army has brought ethnic Han pastoralists to the frontier and given them cover to range across the line. This tactic is designed to drive native herdsmen out of their pasturelands and assert Chinese control over those places.

Such subversion of the status quo, along with China’s ever-expanding “core interests” – which have grown from Tibet and Taiwan to include Xinjiang and now the South China Sea and the Senkakus – is at the root of instability in Asia. This pattern of increasing Chinese assertiveness began when China revived its long-dormant claim to the large, north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh just before the 2006 visit to India of China’s then-president, Hu Jintao.

The resurrection of that claim was followed by territorial spats China provoked with several other neighbours. Together these signalled that China was staking out a more domineering role in Asia. It was as if China had decided that its moment had finally arrived.

For example, playing a game of chicken, China has been posing major new challenges to India, ratcheting up strategic pressure on multiple fronts, including stepping up cross-border military forays and questioning India’s territorial sovereignty in key sectors.

China has repeatedly tried to breach the Himalayan border by taking advantage of the fact that this long, forbidding frontier is difficult for India to patrol effectively, since in many sections Indian troops are based at lower elevations. When an incursion is discovered, Beijing’s refrain is that its troops are on “Chinese land.”

Yet India remains focused on the process rather than on the substance of diplomacy. Process is important only if it buys time to build countervailing leverage. Unfortunately, a rudderless India has made little effort to craft such leverage.

India’s defensive mindset has been on full display in the latest episode. It initially blacked out the April 15 incursion, just as it has suppressed its own figures showing a rising pattern of Chinese military forays across the border.

A whole week went by before New Delhi said a word on the record about the furtive Chinese ingress. The first official Indian comment came only after Beijing issued a bland denial of the incursion, in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources.

India’s cautious, conciliatory response to the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter of a century was revealed in its decision not to scrap its foreign minister’s scheduled trip to Beijing this Thursday and to welcome Li Keqiang, the new Chinese premier on May 20.

This approach has invited rebuke from critics, who portray the intrusion as premeditated, muscle-flexing provocation backed by China’s new leadership.

The immediate crisis eased on Sunday when the Chinese government agreed to end the three-week-old standoff, in return for India’s acceptance of some Chinese demands, including the dismantling of some border-defence structures. China, meanwhile, conceded nothing, in a triumph for its coercive diplomacy.

As China’s coercive power grows, it is beginning to use its capabilities against several neighbours to alter the status quo in its favour, without having to wage open war.

In light of this, India can maintain border peace only by leaving China in no doubt that it has the capability and political will to defend itself. If the Chinese see an opportunity to nibble at Indian land, they will seize it. It is for India to ensure that such opportunities do not arise.

India thus needs a counter-strategy to tame Chinese aggressiveness. Tibet remains at the core of the Sino-Indian divide. And India’s growing strategic ties with the US increasingly rankle China.

To build countervailing leverage, India has little choice but to slowly reopen the central issue of Tibet – a card New Delhi surrendered at the altar of diplomacy. India’s recognition of full Chinese sovereignty over Tibet was based on Beijing’s acknowledgement that Tibet is an “autonomous region” in China. The fact that China has squashed Tibet’s autonomy creates an opening for India to take a more nuanced position.

More broadly, China’s strategy to assemble a “string of pearls” – ports, staging posts and hubs for expanding its interests and presence from East Africa to the Pacific – can be countered by India forming a “string of rapiers” with like-minded Asian-Pacific countries.

At the root of Asia’s growing tensions and insecurity is China’s strategic subversion of the status quo. Only cooperation can shield peace and economic growth; muscle-flexing will not accomplish it.

Brahma Chellaney is a strategic-studies scholar based in New Delhi. His most recent book is Water, Peace, and War.

(c) The National, 2013.

China’s India Land Grab

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A column internationally distributed by Project Syndicate

Stoking tensions with Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines over islands in the South and East China Seas has not prevented an increasingly assertive China from opening yet another front by staging a military incursion across the disputed, forbidding Himalayan frontier. On the night of April 15, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) platoon stealthily intruded near the China-India-Pakistan tri-junction, established a camp 19 kilometers (12 miles) inside Indian-controlled territory, and presented India’s government with the potential loss of a strategically vital 750-square-kilometer high-altitude plateau.

A stunned India, already reeling under a crippling domestic political crisis, has groped for an effective response to China’s land-grab — the largest and most strategic real estate China has seized since it began pursuing a more muscular policy toward its neighbors. Whether China intends to stay put by building permanent structures for its troops on the plateau’s icy heights, or plans to withdraw after having extracted humiliating military concessions from India, remains an open – and in some ways a moot – question.

The fact is that, with its “peaceful rise” giving way to an increasingly sharp-elbowed approach to its neighbors, China has broadened its “core interests” – which brook no compromise – and territorial claims, while showing a growing readiness to take risks to achieve its goals. For example, China has not only escalated its challenge to Japan’s decades-old control of the Senkaku Islands, but is also facing off against the Philippines since taking effective control of Scarborough Shoal last year.

What makes the Himalayan incursion a powerful symbol of China’s aggressive new stance in Asia is that its intruding troops have set up camp in an area that extends beyond the “line of actual control” (LAC) that China itself unilaterally drew when it defeated India in the 1962 Chinese-initiated border war. While China’s navy and a part of its air force focus on supporting revanchist territorial and maritime claims in the South and East China seas, its army has been active in the mountainous borderlands with India, trying to alter the LAC bit by bit.

One of the novel methods that the PLA has employed is to bring ethnic Han pastoralists to the valleys along the LAC and give them cover to range across it, in the process driving Indian herdsmen from their traditional pasturelands. But the latest crisis was sparked by China’s use of direct military means in a strategic border area close to the Karakoram Pass linking China to Pakistan.

Because the LAC has not been mutually clarified – China reneged on a 2001 promise to exchange maps with India – China claims that PLA troops are merely camping on “Chinese land.” Yet, in a replay of its old strategy of furtively encroaching on disputed land and then presenting itself as the conciliator, China now counsels “patience” and “negotiations” to help resolve the latest “issue.”

China is clearly seeking to exploit India’s political disarray to alter the reality on the ground. A paralyzed and rudderless Indian government initially blacked out reporting on the incursion, lest it come under public pressure to mount a robust response. Its first public statement came only after China issued a bland denial of the intrusion in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources.

To add to India’s woes, Salman Khurshid, the country’s bungling foreign minister, initially made light of the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter-century. The garrulous minister called the intrusion just “one little spot” of acne on the otherwise “beautiful face” of the bilateral relationship – a mere blemish that could be treated with “an ointment.” Those inept comments fatally undercut the government’s summoning of the Chinese ambassador to demand a return to the status quo ante.

With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s corruption-tainted government tottering on the brink of collapse, there has been no official explanation of how India was caught napping in a militarily critical area where, in the recent past, China had made repeated attempts to encroach on Indian land. In fact, the government inexplicably replaced regular army troops with border police in 2010 to patrol the mountain-ringed plateau into which the PLA has now intruded. Known as Depsang, the plateau lies astride an ancient silk route connecting Yarkhand in Xinjiang to India’s Ladakh region through the Karakoram Pass.

India, with a military staging post and airstrip just south of the Karakoram Pass, has the capacity to cut off the highway linking China with its “all-weather ally,” Pakistan. The PLA intrusion, by threatening that Indian base, may have been intended to foreclose India’s ability to choke off supplies to Chinese troops and workers in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region, where China has expanded its military footprint and strategic projects. To guard those projects, several thousand Chinese troops reportedly have been deployed in the rebellious, predominantly Shia region, which is closed to the outside world.

For India, the Chinese incursion also threatens its access to the 6,300-meter-high Siachin Glacier, to the west of Depsang. Pakistan claims the Indian-controlled glacier, which, strategically wedged between the Pakistani- and Chinese-held parts of Kashmir, served as the world’s highest and coldest battleground (and one of the bloodiest) from the mid-1980s until a cease-fire took effect in 2003.

Hungry dragonIndia’s nonmilitary options to force a Chinese withdrawal from Depsang range from diplomatic (suspension of all official visits or reconsideration of its recognition of Tibet as part of China) to economic (an informal boycott of Chinese goods, just as China has hurt Japan through a nonofficial boycott of Japanese-made products). A possible military response could involve the Indian army establishing a camp of its own on Chinese territory elsewhere that China’s leaders regard as highly strategic.

But, before it can exercise any option credibly, India needs a stable government. Until then, China will continue to assert its claims by whatever means – fair or foul – it deems advantageous.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

China’s furtive wars of acquisition

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY
In the way China made land-grabs across the mighty Himalayas in the 1950s by launching surreptitious encroachments, it is now waging furtive wars — without firing a single shot — to change the status quo in the South and East China seas, on the long line of control with India, and on international-river flows.

Although China has risen from a poor state to a global economic powerhouse, the key elements in its statecraft and strategic doctrine have not changed.

Since the Mao Zedong era, China has adhered to ancient theorist Sun Tzu’s advice: “The ability to subdue the enemy without any battle is the ultimate reflection of the most supreme strategy.”

This approach involves taking an adversary by surprise by exploiting its weaknesses and seizing an opportunistic timing, as well as camouflaging offense as defense. As Sun Tzu said, “All warfare is based on deception.” Only when a war by stealth cannot achieve the sought objectives should an overt war be unleashed.

China did stage overt military interventions even when it was poor and internally troubled. A Pentagon report has cited Chinese military preemption in 1950, 1962, 1969 and 1979 as examples of offense as defense. There was also China’s seizure of the Paracel Islands in 1974, the Johnson Reef in 1988, the Mischief Reef in 1995, and the Scarborough Shoal last year.

However, for a generation after Deng Xiaoping consolidated power, China actively promoted good-neighborly ties with other Asian states so as to concentrate on rapid economic growth. This strategy allowed Beijing to accumulate considerable economic and strategic heft while permitting its neighbors to spur their own economic growth by plugging into China’s dramatic economic rise.

The good-neighborly approach began changing from the past decade as the Chinese leadership started believing China’s moment in the sun had finally come.

One of the first signs was China’s 2006 revival of its long-dormant claim to the large northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Other evidence of a shift to a muscle-flexing approach followed, with China picking territorial fights with multiple neighbors and broadening its “core interests.” And last year, China formally staked a claim under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to more than 80 percent of the South China Sea.

From employing its trade muscle to inflict commercial pain on a rival to exploiting its monopoly on the global production of a vital resource like rare-earth minerals, China has staked out a more muscular role, heightening Asian and wider concerns. In fact, the more openly China has embraced market capitalism, the more indigenized its political ideology has become. The country’s elites — by turning their back on Marxist dogma, imported from the West — have put Chinese nationalism at the center of their political legitimacy. As a result, China’s new assertiveness has become more and more linked with national renewal.

Against this background, China’s increasing resort to furtive war to accomplish political and military objectives is turning into a principle source of strategic instability in Asia. The instruments employed are diverse, ranging from waging economic warfare to creating a new class of stealth warriors under the aegis of paramilitary agencies, such as the Maritime Safety Administration, the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command, and the State Oceanic Administration.

These agencies, with the support of the Chinese navy, have been in the vanguard to change the status quo in China’s favor in the South and East China seas. China has already scored some successes, encouraging it to pursue multidirectional assertiveness against more than one neighbor at the same time.

For example, after a months-long standoff with the Philippines, China took effective control of the Scarborough Shoal since last year by deploying ships around it and denying its adversary any access. Philippine fishermen can no longer enter a lagoon that served as their traditional fishing preserve.

With the Chinese ships staying put, the Philippines has been faced with a strategic Hobson’s choice: accept the new Chinese-dictated reality or risk open war.

Even as China has effectively changed the status quo on the ground, the U.S. has done little to come to the aid of its ally, the Philippines. The U.S. kept urging restraint and caution on both sides after a Philippine warship squared off with Chinese vessels near the shoal a year ago, prompting China to embark on economic warfare.

Beijing sought to bankrupt many banana growers in the Philippines and hammer the tourism industry there by curbing banana imports and issuing an advisory against travel to that country. The shoal lies more than 800 kilometers from the Chinese mainland but is well within the Philippines’ “exclusive economic zone,” as defined under the Law of the Sea Convention.

In China’s furtive offensive to contest the decades-old Japanese control over the Senkaku Islands, Beijing has already succeeded in its opening gambit — to make the international community recognize the existence of a dispute. In that sense, the new war of attrition China has launched against Japan over the Senkakus has helped shake the status quo.

By sending patrol ships frequently to the waters around the islands since last fall — and by violating the airspace over them — Beijing has ignored the risk that an incident could spiral out of control, with dire consequences. Indeed, it engaged in a recklessly provocative act early this year when a Chinese vessel locked its weapon-targeting radar on a Japanese ship — an action equivalent to a sniper locking the little red dot of his laser sight onto the forehead of a chosen target.

The campaign against Japan has also spawned economic warfare, with an informal Chinese boycott of Japanese goods leading to a fall in Japan’s exports to China and a decline in sales of Japanese products made in China.

What has been the U.S. response to all this? It has urged both its ally Japan and economic-partner China to tone down their political crisis over the uninhabited islands. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told reporters while traveling to Japan in September 2012 that, “I am concerned that when these countries engage in provocations of one kind or another over these various islands that it raises the possibility that a misjudgment on one side or the other could result in violence and could result in conflict.”

China, in addition to seeking hegemony over the South China Sea and much of the East China Sea, has stepped up strategic pressure on India on multiple flanks, including by ratcheting up territorial disputes. Unlike Japan, the Philippines and some other Asian states that are separated from China by an ocean, India shares with that country the world’s longest contested land border. It is, therefore, more vulnerable to direct Chinese military pressure.

The largest real estate China seeks is not in the South or East China seas; it is not even Taiwan. It is in India — Arunachal Pradesh, which is three times as large as Taiwan and twice bigger than Switzerland. The tensions over China’s territorial disputes with India arise for the same reason as in the South and East China seas — moves to disturb the status quo.

Although the Indian government chooses to underplay Chinese actions so as not to provoke greater aggressiveness, its figures reveal that — in keeping with a pattern witnessed since 2007 — the number of surreptitious Chinese forays into Indian territory again increased last year. With the Himalayan frontier vast and inhospitable and thus difficult to effectively patrol in full, Chinese troops repeatedly attempt to sneak in, both to needle India and to possibly push the line of control southward.

In the latest aggression that has cast a pall over the China-India relationship, a platoon of Chinese troops quietly intruded 19 kilometers across the line of control into disputed land in the Ladakh sector of Kashmir on the night of April 15, setting up a camp. The brazen intrusion into a highly strategic area controlling key access routes has triggered a dangerous military faceoff with India rushing troops to that area. How has the U.S. State Department responded? By urging India and China to work “together to settle their boundary disputes bilaterally and peacefully.”

As in the case of the territorial and maritime disputes, China is seeking to disturb the status quo on international-river flows to its neighbors. Just as it has furtively encroached on disputed land in the past to present a fait accompli, China is seeking to reengineer cross-border river flows by starting dam projects almost by stealth.

China values controlling transboundary water flows to gain greater economic and political leverage over neighboring countries. Power, control and leverage are central elements in Chinese statecraft. Once its planned dam cascades on transnational rivers are completed, it will acquire implicit leverage over neighbors’ behavior.

In this light, China’s increasingly fractious relations with its neighbors and the U.S. — characterized by a security deficit and a norms deficit — are set to face new challenges. Persuading China to accept the status quo has become pivotal to Asian peace and stability.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author of “Asian Juggernaut” (HarperCollins) and “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield).

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.

India sings peace to an occupier

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Brahma Chellaney, Mint, April 30, 2013

The same old scenario has unfolded again: China quietly occupies a strategic area and a diffident India is left preaching the virtues of diplomacy and peace. When China set out to eliminate the historical buffer with India by invading Tibet, New Delhi opposed Lhasa’s desperate plea for a discussion at the United Nations. And when China stealthily took control of the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau and began building the Tibet-Xinjiang highway through it, New Delhi’s first response was to send a démarche asking Beijing naively as to how it despatched workers to Indian territory without seeking visas for them.

Whereas the People’s Republic of China was born in and built on blood, modern India was founded on a continuing myth—that it won independence by non-violence, not because Britain was in no position after the devastation wrought by World War II to hold on to its colonies. It was not until 1962 that India woke up reluctantly to Leon Trotsky’s warning: “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”

But for the lesson of 1962, India’s leaders may still have mocked George Washington’s famous words: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” Even today, the ruling and opposition leadership remains largely clueless on statecraft and national security affairs. A dysfunctional foreign policy is holding back India’s own rise.

China now is working to alter the line of control bit-by-bit by employing novel methods—without having to fire a single shot. With India a mute spectator, the People’s Liberation Army has brought pastoralists to Uttarakhand’s Barahoti sector and given them cover to range across the line. Using pastoralists in the vanguard and troops in the rear has also been tried elsewhere to drive Indian herdsmen out of their traditional pasturelands and assert Chinese control over those places.

In this way, China is encroaching, little by little, on vantage Indian land in the Chip Chap and Skakjung regions of Ladakh. Chumar in Ladakh was raided last September by helicopter-borne PLA troops, who destroyed Indian bunkers before returning. Arunachal officials are tired of complaining about New Delhi’s nonchalant attitude to aggressive PLA activities along their state’s border.

Karakoram PassFew thus should be surprised by India’s timorous response to the PLA’s occupation of a border site near the strategic Karakoram Pass linking China to Pakistan. But even by its own standards of appeasement, India has outdone itself with its grovelling reaction to the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter-century.

India initially blacked out the incursion, in the way it has suppressed its own figures showing a rising pattern of Chinese cross-border military forays. A whole week went by before New Delhi said a word on record about the PLA’s furtive ingress. The first public word, tellingly, came after Beijing issued a bland denial of the incursion in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources. Another five days passed before New Delhi revealed the incursion’s true depth—19 kilometres.

The external affairs minister has stood out as the appeaser-in-chief. The incursion is just “one little spot” of acne in an otherwise “beautiful face” to be treated with “an ointment.” When not making such embarrassingly inane comments, he has grovelled, going to the extent of saying that saving Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s planned visit will take precedence over ending the incursion. He hastily announced his own trip to Beijing, as if paying obeisance at the Chinese foreign ministry—the weakest branch of China’s government—can get the intruders out.

It is a pity that India, instead of feeling insulted by Li’s plan to stop over in New Delhi on his way to his country’s “all-weather ally” Pakistan to bless the new government to be appointed there, is bending over backward at a time of aggression. Has an Indian prime minister dared to combine a Beijing stopover with a visit to China’s rival Japan?  In fact, Taiwan should be to India what Pakistan is to China.

The shocking irony of treating Li’s stopover as exceedingly important is that every high-level Chinese visit since 2006 has been preceded by a new aggressive Chinese move. The jarring revival of China’s claim to the Austria-size Arunachal came just before President Hu Jintao’s 2006 visit. Before Premier Wen Jiabao came calling in 2010, Beijing began questioning India’s sovereignty over Jammu and Kashmir through its stapled-visa policy.

Now Li’s impending visit has gifted a deep incursion, seemingly designed to convey China’s anger over India’s belated, often-fumbling efforts to fortify border defences. To facilitate its encroachments and safeguard its military advantages, China wants India to leave the border minimally guarded by agreeing to limit Indian troop deployments and infrastructure development and by dismantling even the temporary shelters built for Indian border patrols. And New Delhi—which atrociously deploys border police to ward off the aggressive PLA patrols—is publicly signalling that it is open to meeting some of the new Chinese demands in return for the intruders’ withdrawal. Put simply, it is ready to quietly reward aggression, even at the risk of increasing Indian vulnerability.

India’s leadership fails to distinguish between caution and pusillanimity: the former helps to avert problems, but the latter conveys weakness and invites more aggression. India today risks becoming the proverbial frog in the slowly warming pot, as described by the American scholar John Garver: “A Chinese fable tells of how a frog in a pot of lukewarm water feels quite comfortable and safe. He does not notice as the water temperature slowly rises until, at last, the frog dies and is thoroughly cooked. This homily, wen shui zhu qingwa in Chinese, describes fairly well China’s strategy for growing its influence in South Asia in the face of a deeply suspicious India: move forward slowly and carefully, rouse minimal suspicion, and don’t cause an attempt at escape by the intended victim.”

(c) Mint, 2013.

Counter the ‘String of Pearls’ with a ‘String of Rapiers’

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Brahma Chellaney, The Economic Times, April 28, 2013

With China’s “peaceful rise” giving way to a more muscular approach, Beijing has broadened its “core interests” and exhibited a growing readiness to take risks. As if to highlight its new multidirectional assertiveness, China’s occupation of a 19-kilometer-deep Indian border area close to the strategic Karakoram Pass has coincided with its escalating challenge to Japan’s decades-old control of the Senkaku Islands. China is aggressively conducting regular patrols to solidify its sovereignty claims in the South and East China seas and to furtively enlarge its footprint in the Himalayan borderlands.

In this light, it will be a mistake to view the Chinese intrusion in Ladakh in isolation of the larger pattern of increasing Chinese assertiveness that began when Beijing revived its long-dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh just before the 2006 India visit by its president, Hu Jintao. The resurrection of that claim, which was followed by its provoking territorial spats with several other neighbours, was the first pointer to China staking out a more domineering role in Asia. It was as if China had decided that its moment has finally arrived.

Playing a game of chicken, China has been posing major new challenges to India, ratcheting up strategic pressure on multiple flanks, including stepping up cross-border military forays and shortening the length of the Sino-Indian border so as to question India’s territorial sovereignty in the eastern and western sectors. It has repeatedly attempted to breach the Himalayan border through surreptitious incursions by taking advantage of the fact that the frontier is vast and forbidding and thus difficult to effectively patrol by Indian forces, who are located in many sections on the lower heights. When an incursion is discovered, Beijing’s refrain — as in the present episode — is that its troops are on “Chinese land.”

Still, the intrusion into a highly strategic area shows India’s political and army leadership in poor light and exposes the country’s floundering China policy. Along with the subsequent violation of Indian airspace by Chinese helicopters in Ladakh, it brings out how China is seeking to alter the realities on the ground by exploiting India’s leadership deficit and political disarray, which have crimped military modernization and undermined national security. The question the Indian army leadership must answer is how it was caught napping in a militarily critical area where, in the recent past, China repeatedly had made attempts to encroach on Indian land.

Instead of regular Indian army troops patrolling the line of control, border police have been deployed. The Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel, with their defensive training and mindset, are no match to the aggressive designs of the People’s Liberation Army and thus continue to be outwitted by them. Even in response to the incursion, the government has sent largely ITBP troops to pitch tents at a safe distance from the intruders’ camp.

Worse yet, India remains focused on the process than on the substance of diplomacy, even as China steps up its belligerence. Process is important but only if it buys you time to build countervailing leverage. Unfortunately, a rudderless India has made little effort to craft such leverage. Rather, New Delhi is playing right into Chinese hands by merely flaunting the process of engagement and thereby aiding Beijing’s strategy to use this process as cover to further change the status quo on the ground.

India’s defensive and diffident mindset has been on full display in the latest episode. Not only has it publicly downplayed an act of naked aggression — the worst Chinese intrusion since the 1986 Sumdurong Chu incursion brought the two countries to the brink of war — but India also insists on going with an outstretched hand to an adversary still engaged in hostile actions, unconcerned that it could get the short end of the stick yet again.

India should be under no illusion that diplomacy alone will persuade China to withdraw its camped soldiers. One way to force China’s hand would be for the Indian army to intrude and occupy a highly strategic area elsewhere across the line of control and use that gain as a trade-off.

More fundamentally, India can maintain border peace only by leaving China in no doubt that it has the capability and political will to defend peace. If the Chinese see an opportunity to nibble at Indian land, they will seize it. It is for India to ensure that such opportunities do not arise. In other words, the Himalayan peace ball is very much in India’s court.

India thus must have a clear counter-strategy to tame Chinese aggressiveness. Significantly, Tibet remains at the core of the Sino-Indian divide, with India’s growing strategic ties with the U.S. increasingly rankling China. Even as old rifts persist, new issues are roiling the relationship.

Booming bilateral trade, including a widening trade surplus in China’s favour, has failed to subdue Chinese belligerence. Although in 1962 China set out, in the words of Premier Zhou Enlai, to “teach India a lesson,” it has frittered away the political gains it made by decisively defeating India on the battleground. Indeed, as military tensions rise and border incidents increase, the relationship risks coming full circle.

To build countervailing leverage, India has little choice but to slowly reopen the central issue of Tibet — a card New Delhi wholly surrendered at the altar of diplomacy during the time Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prime minister. Of course, the process of surrendering the card began under Jawaharlal Nehru when India in 1954 recognized the “Tibet region of China” without any quid pro quo — not even Beijing’s acceptance of the then prevailing Indo-Tibetan border.

Vajpayee’s recognition of full Chinese sovereignty over Tibet was based on Beijing’s acknowledgment that Tibet is an “autonomous region” in China. The fact that China has squashed Tibet’s autonomy creates an opening for India to take a more nuanced position.

More broadly, China’s “string of pearls” strategy can be countered by forming a “string of rapiers” with likeminded Asian-Pacific countries. At the root of the growing tensions and insecurity in Asia is China’s ongoing strategy to subvert the status quo. Only mutually beneficial cooperation can shield Asian peace and economic renaissance, not muscle-flexing and furtive moves.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author. His book, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

(c) The Economic Times, 2013.

(Reprinting material from this Web site without written consent is a violation of international copyright law.)

China’s New War Front

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Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, April 23, 2013

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during his recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, asked for more openness on Chinese dam building. Singh said Xi assured him that he would have his proposal for a joint monitoring mechanism “looked into”. Beijing has now conveyed its response to New Delhi, rebuffing that transparency idea.

This snub is no surprise: China, the world’s most dammed nation, does not have a single river-collaborative or transparency mechanism with any of its 12 riparian neighbours. Unlike India — which has water-sharing treaties with both its downstream neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with each pact establishing a distinctively unique principle in international water law — China rejects the very concept of water sharing and is assertively seeking to make water a political weapon. Indeed, as if to proclaim itself as the world’s unrivalled hydro-hegemon, China recently unveiled 11 additional dam projects on the Salween, the Mekong, and the Brahmaputra.

As with territorial and maritime disputes, China is seeking to disrupt the status quo on international-river flows. Just as it has quietly encroached on disputed territory in the past to present a fait accompli — for example, Aksai Chin (1950s), Paracel Islands (1974), Johnson Reef (1988), Mischief Reef (1995), and Scarborough Shoal (2012) — China is seeking to manipulate cross-border river flows by pursuing dam projects furtively until they can no longer be kept hidden.

Although China is the source of transboundary river flows to countries ranging from Russia to Vietnam, no nation is more vulnerable to China’s reengineering of transboundary flows than India. The reason? India alone receives nearly half of all river waters that leave China. According to UN figures, a total of 718 billion cubic meters of surface water flows out of Chinese territory yearly, of which 48.33% runs directly into India.

For Chinese dam builders, the major Tibetan rivers flowing to India directly or via Nepal are a magnet for another striking reason: Their runoff volume totals 21.5% of the aggregate river flows within China, yet these rivers support just 1.6% of China’s population and sustain only 1.8% of its arable land, according to official Chinese statistics. The main beneficiary of their flows is rival India. When Beijing has shown little regard for the interests of China-friendly downriver states like Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Kazakhstan, why would it be considerate toward India?

India should be under no illusion that diplomacy alone can deter China from significantly altering cross-border flows. In fact, at a time when China’s cartographic aggression and its efforts to nibble at Indian land through stealthy incursions persist, it seems intent on opening a major new front through hydrological aggression. There are warning signs of this.

China is damming not just the Brahmaputra, on which it has already completed several dams, but it has also built a dam each on the Indus and the Sutlej and unveiled plans to erect a cascade of large dams on the Arun (Kosi) river, which helps augment downstream Ganges flows and is thus critical to India’s ability to meet its treaty obligations vis-à-vis Bangladesh. The flashfloods that ravaged Himachal and Arunachal states between 2000 and 2005 were linked to the unannounced releases from rain-swollen Chinese dams and barrages.

The Brahmaputra is a huge attraction for China’s dam programme because this river’s cross-border annual discharge of 165.4 billion cubic meters is greater than the combined transboundary flows of three key rivers running from the Tibetan plateau to Southeast Asia — the Mekong, the Salween, and the Irrawaddy. As China gradually moves its dam building toward the Brahmaputra’s water-rich Great Bend area, it is likely to embark on Mekong-style mega-dams.

India faces difficult choices, largely because of its past mistakes, from which it has learned little. India’s unrestrained recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, coupled with Beijing’s rejection of any water-treaty arrangement, has left China with a legally unfettered foundation to control international-river flows. Just as India made the mistake in the 1950s of regurgitating empty Chinese assurances about the border, only to face first covert and then overt aggression, New Delhi has been gratuitously reciting Chinese assurances to safeguard downstream interests, even as Beijing acts unilaterally.

India is far more water-stressed than China. Yet India’s capacity to store water for dry-season release is one of the world’s lowest, ranking just above Ethiopia’s. China and even Pakistan have done a much better job on that score. The paradox is that Islamabad, despite securing the most generous water-sharing treaty in modern world history, has dragged India before international arbitral proceedings over a small Indian project, while India watches helplessly as China builds much larger dams and rejects what India does routinely with Pakistan — share project designs and permit on-site scrutiny.

India can counter China’s covert water war only by innovative means, including refocusing on the core issue of Tibet. A counter-strategy must be devised and implemented before China exploits its riparian pre-eminence to emerge as the master of the Indian heartland’s water taps.

The writer is a geostrategist.

(c) The Times of India, 2013.

Indus largesse backfires on India

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Brahma Chellaney, India Today, April 22, 2013

Indus system rivers

The six Indus-system rivers flowing from India to Pakistan, with the main rivers (the upper three) reserved for Pakistan’s use.

The Indus treaty represents the most generous water-sharing agreement in modern world history, reserving for Pakistan 80.52 percent of the waters, or 167.2 billion cubic meters annually. No other water pact in the world comes anywhere close to this level of upper-riparian munificence. In fact, the Indus treaty uniquely allocates entire rivers by drawing a north-south partition line to gift Pakistan the upper three Indus-system rivers, confining India’s full sovereignty rights to the much-smaller three rivers to the south.

Yet this 1960 treaty imposes more fetters on the upper-riparian state than any other water pact in the world. An elaborate series of India-specific curbs obviate any Indian control over the timing or quantum of the transboundary flows of the Pakistan-earmarked rivers — the Chenab and the Jhelum (which boast the largest cross-border discharge) and the main Indus stream. Indeed, the treaty remains the only interstate water agreement in the world embodying the doctrine of restricted sovereignty, whichseeks to compel an upriver state to defer to the interests of a downstream state.

Pakistan, despite securing a matchless water-sharing arrangement, has repaid India’s water largesse with blood by sponsoring acts of grisly terrorism there. This treaty of indefinite duration may stand out as a major folly bequeathed to future Indian generations by the Nehruvian era, yet no Indian government has ever sought to link water flows with an end to terrorism. However, the same question must haunt the Pakistani generals as Lady Macbeth in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”

Unfortunately for India, its already-limited sovereignty over the upper rivers is now being further crimped by a sweeping new principle defined for all future projects by the recent international arbitration award on the small Kishenganga project. This is a big price India is being made to pay for embarking on the long-delayed, 330-megawatt Kishenganga project, whose design and size, paradoxically, were changed and scaled down in 2006 in response to Pakistani objections.

The treaty permits India to build only run-of-river plants — a type that generates hydropower without a reservoir by using a river’s natural flow velocity and elevation drop.Because of very limited water storage, such plants experience fluctuations in power output due to seasonal flow changes, making them less cost-effective than the larger, storage-centred plants.

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Pakistan has repaid India’s water largesse with blood by sponsoring acts of terrorism.

The arbitration award represents a triumph of Pakistan’s efforts to reinterpret the treaty’s terms more narrowly so as to remove whatever leeway India may have and make the Indus regime even more lopsided. The recent award imposes a new condition on spillway configuration that would seriously undermine the run-of-river plants’ commercial viability by potentially allowing them to silt up, as happened with India’s Salal plant in the 1980s due to design changes carried out at Pakistan’s insistence. By precluding effective silt control through drawdown sluicing and flushing, the award flies in the face of the common international practice to build gated spillways.

Indeed, the arbiters have attempted to override — without any legal power — an international neutral expert’s 2007 decision in the earlier Baglihar case that such spillway outlets were consistent with the treaty’s provisions. The spillway matter is a technical issue and, as per the terms of the treaty, it must decided by a neutral expert, not by an arbitration panel. Yet, overruling India’s objection, the arbiters chose to wilfully encroach onto the technical turf.

International arbitration — with the arbiters and high-priced lawyers collecting millions of dollars in fees from the parties — often functions on the lowest common denominator. In the Kishenganga case, the panel, while upholding the legality of the Indian project, has tilted in Pakistan’s favour on the key design issue. And in an effort to further milk the two parties, the arbiters have extended the lengthy proceedings since 2010 to at least until this year-end, when they “hope” to give their “final award” on another issue that they have contrived — the minimum flow of water India would be required to release for Pakistan in the Kishenganga stream.

Fixing a minimum flow rate will go beyond the terms of the treaty and tie India’s hands, even if climate change or hydrological factors were to affect the stability and predictability of the Kishenganga flow.

Pakistan’s motive is clear: to deny the limited benefits the treaty grants Jammu and Kashmir by objecting and seeking to stall the modest-size projects that New Delhi has belatedly sought to initiate there to allay popular resentment over crippling power shortages. This motive springs from the Pakistani military’s continuing strategy to foment discontent and violence there. The arbiters have unwittingly played into Pakistan’s hands by going beyond the Indus treaty’s provisions on a crucial issue and thereby seeking to effectively arm Islamabad with a veto on any Indian project’s viability.

India must blame itself for reaping the bitter fruits of a remarkable lack of strategy. It concluded the treaty, as its chief negotiator admitted, without any long-term assessment. Despite a widening demand-supply water gap in its own Indus basin, India has yet to exercise some key treaty-sanctioned rights (such as on storage) but allowed Pakistan to drag it before international proceedings. How much longer can a parched but generous India remain visionless?

Brahma Chellaney is the author of the award-winning book, Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

(c) India Today, 2013.

China’s great water wall

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Damming downstream flow to neighbors could trigger water wars

By Brahma Chellaney, Washington Times, Monday, April 8, 2013

The Chinese government’s recent decision to build an array of new dams on rivers flowing to other countries seems set to roil inter-riparian relations in Asia and make it more difficult to establish rules-based water cooperation and sharing.

Asia, not Africa, is the world’s driest continent. China, which already boasts more large dams than the rest of the world combined, has emerged as the key impediment to building institutionalized collaboration on shared water resources. In contrast to the bilateral water treaties between many of its neighbors, China rejects the concept of a water-sharing arrangement or joint, rules-based management of common resources.

The long-term implications of China’s dam program for India are particularly stark because several major rivers flow south from the Tibetan plateau. India has water-sharing treaties with both the countries located downstream from it: the Indus pact with Pakistan guarantees the world’s largest cross-border flows of any treaty regime, while the Ganges accord has set a new principle in international water law by assuring Bangladesh an equal share of downriver flows in the dry season. China, by contrast, does not have a single water-sharing treaty with any neighbor.

Yet most of Asia’s international rivers originate in territories that China annexed after its 1949 communist “revolution.” The sprawling Tibetan plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood of mainland China, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Other Chinese-held homelands of ethnic minorities contain the headwaters of rivers such as the Irtysh, Illy and Amur, which flow to Russia and Central Asia.

China’s dam program on international rivers is following a well-established pattern: Build modest-size dams on a river’s difficult uppermost reaches, and then construct larger dams in the upper-middle sections as the river picks up greater water volume and momentum, then embarking on megadams in the border area facing another country. The cascade of megadams on the Mekong River, for example, is located in the area just before the river enters continental Southeast Asia.

Most of the new dam projects announced recently by China’s state council, or Cabinet, are concentrated in the seismically active southwest, covering parts of the Tibetan plateau. The restart of dam building on the Salween River after an eight-year moratorium is in keeping with a precedent set on other river systems: Beijing temporarily suspends a controversial plan after major protests flare so as to buy time — before resurrecting the same plan.

The Salween — Asia’s last largely free-flowing river — runs through deep, spectacular gorges, glaciated peaks and karst on its way into Burma and along the Thai border before emptying into the Andaman Sea. Its upstream basin is inhabited by 16 ethnic groups, including some, like the Derung tribe, with tiny populations numbering in the thousands. As one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions, the upper basin boasts more than 5,000 plant species and nearly half of China’s animal species.

The decision to formally lift the moratorium and construct five dams — with work to start immediately on the Songta dam, the farthest upriver structure in Tibet — threatens the region’s biodiversity and could uproot endangered aboriginal tribes. There is also the risk that the weight of huge, new dam reservoirs could accentuate seismic instability in a region prone to recurrent earthquakes.

No country is more vulnerable to China’s re-engineering of transboundary flows than India. The reason is that India alone receives nearly half of the river waters that leave Chinese-held territory. According to United Nations figures, a total of 718 billion cubic meters of surface water flows out of Chinese territory yearly, of which 347 billion cubic meters (or 48.3 percent of the total) runs directly into India.

China already has a dozen dams in the Brahmaputra River basin and one each on the Indus and the Sutlej rivers. On the Brahmaputra, it is currently close to completing one dam and has just cleared work on three others. Two more are planned in this cascade before the dam-building moves to the water-rich border segment as the river makes a U-turn to enter India.

Asia awaits a future made hotter and drier by climate and environmental change, and resource depletion. The continent’s water challenges have been exacerbated by consumption growth, unsustainable irrigation practices, rapid industrialization, pollution, environmental degradation and geopolitical shifts.

If Asia is to prevent water wars, it must build institutionalized cooperation in transboundary basins that co-opts all riparian neighbors. If a dominant riparian state refuses to join, such institutional arrangements — as in the Mekong basin — will be ineffective. The arrangements must be centered on transparency, unhindered information flow, equitable sharing, dispute settlement, pollution control and a commitment to refrain from any projects that could materially diminish transboundary flows. International dispute-settlement mechanisms, as in the Indus treaty, help stem the risk that water wrangles could escalate to open conflict.

China — with its hold over Asia’s transnational water resources and boasting more than half of the world’s 50,000 large dams — has made the control and manipulation of river flows a pivot of its power and economic progress. Unless it is willing to play a leadership role in developing a rules-based system, the economic and security risks arising from the Asian water competition can scarcely be mitigated.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of “Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

(c) Washington Times, 2013.

Asia’s Resource Scramble

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A Project Syndicate column

Competition for strategic natural resources – including water, mineral ores, and fossil fuels – has always played a significant role in shaping the terms of the international economic and political order. But now that competition has intensified, as it encompasses virtually all of Asia, where growing populations and rapid economic development over the last three decades have generated an insatiable appetite for severely limited supplies of key commodities.

Asia is the world’s most resource-poor continent, and overexploitation of the natural resources that it does possess has created an environmental crisis that is contributing to regional climate change. For example, the Tibetan Plateau, which contains the world’s third-largest store of ice, is warming at almost twice the average global rate, owing to the rare convergence of high altitudes and low latitudes – with potentially serious consequences for Asia’s freshwater supply.

In other words, three interconnected crises – a resource crisis, an environmental crisis, and a climate crisis – are threatening Asia’s economic, social, and ecological future. Population growth, urbanization, and industrialization are exacerbating resource-related stresses, with some cities experiencing severe water shortages, and degrading the environment (as anyone who has experienced Beijing’s smog can attest). Fossil-fuel and water subsidies have contributed to both problems.

Faced with severe supply constraints, Asian economies are increasingly tapping other continents’ fossil fuels, mineral ores, and timber. But water is extremely difficult – and prohibitively expensive – to import. And Asia has less fresh water per person than any continent other than Antarctica, and some of the world’s worst water pollution.

Likewise, food scarcity is a growing problem for Asian countries, with crop yields and overall food production growing more slowly than demand. At the same time, rising incomes are altering people’s diets, which now include more animal-based proteins, further compounding Asia’s food challenges.

The intensifying competition over natural resources among Asian countries is shaping resource geopolitics, including the construction of oil and gas pipelines. China has managed to secure new hydrocarbon supplies through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia. But this option is not available to Asia’s other leading economies – Japan, India, and South Korea – which are not contiguous with suppliers in Central Asia, Iran, or Russia. These countries will remain dependent on oil imports from an increasingly unstable Persian Gulf.

Furthermore, China’s fears that hostile naval forces could hold its economy hostage by interdicting its oil imports have prompted it to build a massive oil reserve, and to plan two strategic energy corridors in southern Asia. The corridors will provide a more direct transport route for oil and liquefied gas from Africa and the Persian Gulf, while minimizing exposure to sea-lanes policed by the United States Navy.

One such corridor extends 800 kilometers from the Bay of Bengal across Burma to southern China. In addition to gas pipelines – the first is scheduled to be completed this year – it will include a high-speed railroad and a highway from the Burmese coast to China’s Yunnan province, offering China’s remote interior provinces an outlet to the sea for the first time.

The other corridor – work on which has been delayed, owing to an insurrection in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province – will stretch from the Chinese-operated port at Gwadar, near Pakistan’s border with Iran, through the Karakoram mountains to the landlocked, energy-producing Xinjiang province. Notably, in giving China control of its strategic Gwadar port in February, Pakistan has permitted the Chinese government to build a naval base there.

Given the significant role that natural resources have historically played in global strategic relations – including driving armed interventions and full-scale wars – increasingly murky resource geopolitics threatens to exacerbate existing tensions among Asian countries. Rising dependence on energy imports has already been used to rationalize an increased emphasis on maritime power, raising new concerns about sea-lane safety and vulnerability to supply disruptions.

This partly explains the current tensions between China and Japan over their conflicting territorial claims to islands in the East China Sea, which occupy an area of only seven square kilometers, but are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves. Disputes in the South China Sea involving China and five of its neighbors, and in southern Asia, are equally resource-driven.

While strategic competition for resources will continue to shape Asia’s security dynamics, the associated risks can be moderated if Asia’s leaders establish norms and institutions aimed at building rule-based cooperation. Unfortunately, little progress has been made in this area. For example, 53 of Asia’s 57 transnational river basins lack any water-sharing or cooperative arrangement.

Indeed, Asia is one of only two continents, along with Africa, where regional integration has yet to take hold, largely because political and cultural diversity, together with historical animosities, have hindered institution-building. Strained political relations among most of Asia’s sub-regions make a region-wide security structure or more effective resource cooperation difficult to achieve.

This could have significant implications for Asia’s ostensibly unstoppable rise – and thus for the West’s supposedly inevitable decline. After all, Asian economies cannot sustain their impressive economic growth without addressing their resource, environmental, and security challenges – and no single country can do it alone.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, and the forthcoming Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.