Since the Myanmar military’s overthrow of a civilian government in 2021, the US has taken a punitive approach to the country, emphasizing broad-based sanctions and aid to rebel groups. But far from promoting a democratic transition, this approach has perpetuated violence and suffering, while strengthening China’s strategic foothold.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

Myanmar needs help. After more than four years of brutal civil war, the country has been hit by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake, the strongest it has suffered since 1946. The resulting humanitarian crisis is dire, and continues to escalate, but despite an extraordinary appeal for international aid from Myanmar’s military ruler, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the United States has largely failed to deliver.

To be sure, President Donald Trump has said that the US is “going to be helping” with the crisis response. But while China, India, and Russiamoved swiftly to provide emergency relief, including deploying rescuers and medical teams, the US has fallen far short. The Trump administration’s gutting of foreign-assistance programs – including mass firings and contract terminations at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – is one reason why. A more important reason is that stringent US sanctions against Myanmar remain in place.

Even before the recent USAID cuts, the US was poorly positioned to deliver emergency aid to Myanmar. Since the military’s overthrow of a civilian government in February 2021, the US has taken a punitive approach to Myanmar. Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, implemented increasingly harsh sanctions, while providing “non-lethal” military aid to rebels seeking to overthrow the junta – policies that the Trump administration has so far upheld. Now several Democratic senators have urged sanctions waivers to allow quake relief to go to Myanmar.

In recent years, USAID assistance essentially has been channeled to rebel-controlled areas, where it has been used largely to establish local governance structures and provide emergency relief for internally displaced civilians. But the regions hardest hit by the earthquake remain under government control. America’s refusal to engage constructively with the junta has thus directly hampered efforts to deliver assistance where it is needed most.

More broadly, US policy toward Myanmar has done nothing to promote stability, let alone a democratic transition. On the contrary, while sanctions have done little damage to the military rulers, they have contributed to rampant lawlessness, enabling warlords, human traffickers, drug syndicates, arms dealers, and poachers to thrive. Myanmar has now surpassed Afghanistan as the world’s leading opium producer, and according to the Global Organized Crime Index, it has emerged as the “biggest nexus of organized crime,” with destabilizing spillover effects on neighboring Bangladesh, India, and Thailand.

US support for Myanmar’s fragmented resistance has compounded the human-rights catastrophe. Tellingly, the latest wave of Rohingya refugees are fleeing not from the military, which has historically committed all manner of atrocities against the minority, but from an anti-junta rebel group, the Arakan Army. So brutal are the rebels’ attacks that Rohingya militias now work with their former oppressors, the county’s armed forces.

Meanwhile, China’s strategic foothold in Myanmar is becoming stronger. Strangled by broad-based US-led economic sanctions, Myanmar’s leadership has had little choice but to allow China to exploit its vast natural resources, from natural gas and mineral ores to precious stones and gems like rubies and jade.

The US has made this mistake before. During Myanmar’s previous military dictatorship, the US pursued a punitive, isolating, sanctions-based policy for more than 20 years – and nothing changed (other than China gaining influence). It was only when then-President Barack Obama embraced strategic engagement, encouraging democratic reform with the easing of sanctions, that the tide began to turn. In 2015, three years after Obama became the first US president to visit the country, Myanmar elected its first civilian-led government in more than 50 years.

The US applied this lesson in Thailand, where, as in Myanmar, the military has traditionally been the dominant political force, having seized power 12 times in the past 90 years. When Thailand’s army chief staged a coup in 2014, the US pursued diplomatic engagement with the regime – an approach that ultimately helped facilitate a return to civilian rule in 2023.

The Trump administration should embrace a similar approach toward Myanmar today. This means, for starters, leveraging the earthquake as an opportunity to initiate limited engagement with the regime. Such engagement could allow for greater humanitarian access, improved de-escalation efforts, and enhanced security, particularly along Myanmar’s eastern border, where Chinese criminal networks operate cyber-scam centers that have stolen billions of dollars from overseas retirees and others (including in the US).

Moreover, the US should replace broad-based economic restrictions with targeted sanctions against individuals and entities directly responsible for human-rights violations. It should also roll back its military support for insurgents, which perpetuates violence, and increase direct humanitarian aid to foster stability. And it should work with ASEAN and other key regional actors, such as India and Japan, to advance a diplomatic conclusion of the civil war, guided by the recognition that a sustainable peace can be achieved only through engagement with all relevant parties – starting with Myanmar’s military.

Treating regime change in Myanmar as a moral crusade can end only one way: with the country spiraling further into chaos, to the benefit of transnational crime syndicates, narcotics traffickers, and America’s geopolitical adversaries. With a more pragmatic policy approach, however, the Trump administration can mitigate Myanmar’s humanitarian crisis, facilitate dialogue between the junta and opposition forces, and counter China’s growing influence in a strategically important country. The choice could not be clearer.

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

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

Taipei Times

Early signs suggest that US President Donald Trump’s policy on Taiwan is set to move in a more resolute direction, as his administration begins to take a tougher approach toward America’s main challenger at the global level, China. Despite its deepening economic woes, China continues to flex its muscles, including conducting provocative military drills off Taiwan, Australia and Vietnam recently.

A recent Trump-signed memorandum on America’s investment policy was more about the China threat than about anything else. Singling out the People’s Republic of China as a foreign adversary directing investments in American companies to obtain cutting-edge technologies, it said that “PRC-affiliated investors are targeting the crown jewels of US technology, food supplies, farmland, minerals, natural resources, ports and shipping terminals.”

The memorandum has proposed imposing several economic restrictions — from stopping US companies and investors from investing in industries that advance Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy to preventing “PRC-affiliated persons from buying up critical American businesses and assets.”

More broadly, in seeking to end the Ukraine war, Trump has made clear his administration’s intent to shift the US strategic focus from Europe to the Indo-Pacific, a pivotal region that is likely to shape the new world order. As US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it, Europe must take “responsibility for its own security” so that the US prioritizes “deterring war with China in the Pacific.”

The White House’s blunt message is that Europe, reliant on the US for its security, must shape up before many of the more than 100,000 American troops stationed there begin to be shipped out for likely deployment in the Indo-Pacific. Referring to China, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said, “In the Indo-Pacific, they are trying to drive us out.”

Meanwhile, a recent subtle but potentially significant change in the state department fact-sheet on Taiwan has attracted much attention, with Taiwanese Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung welcoming the “support and positive stance on US-Taiwan relations demonstrated in the relevant” document.

The state department dropped a highly symbolic phrase from its updated Taiwan fact-sheet. The fact-sheet from the previous administration of President Joe Biden had stated, “We do not support Taiwan independence.” This sentence was removed. And in another tweak to the previous US position, the new administration, while cautioning against “any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side,” stated that it advocates a resolution of the Sino-Taiwan issue by “peaceful means, free from coercion.”

Rubio later said in a TV interview that, “We are against any forced, compelled, coercive change in the status of Taiwan.” Asked how the US under Trump would respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan, Rubio stated, “America has existing commitments that it has made to prevent that from happening and to react to it, and that would be executed on.”

Against this backdrop, the US under Trump is less likely to stand idly by if China were to invade Taiwan. Unlike his predecessor Biden, who projected weakness partly because of his frail health, Trump claims to be a strong leader. Indeed, he has repeatedly asserted that, had he been the president in 2022, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.

Effective deterrence, however, requires a credible US threat, backed up by requisite military deployments, of imposing significant costs on China if it attacks Taiwan.

A comprehensive strategy involving military, diplomatic, economic and information-warfare measures is necessary to deter Chinese aggression and maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. If deterrence were to fail, forcing the US to respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the resulting war between the US and a near-peer adversary, as Rubio admitted, “would be a terrible thing for the world, and it would be a bad thing for China too.”

A multifaceted US-led strategy to deter a Chinese attack should include stepped-up arms sales to Taipei, building greater military interoperability with Taiwanese forces, strengthening Taiwan’s cybersecurity defenses and helping Taiwan to develop asymmetric warfare capabilities against China, while America increases the frequency and visibility of its military patrols in the Taiwan Strait and the wider region.

Strategic clarity to put China on notice should include clear and unambiguous statements that the US will defend Taiwan in the event of an attack, as well as high-level diplomatic visits to Taipei to demonstrate American support and commitment. The US must also help counter Chinese disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining Taiwan’s democracy and eroding support for Taipei in the international community.

According to a recent Chinese foreign ministry statement, “Gaza belongs to the Palestinians and is an integral part of the Palestinian territory.” But likewise Taiwan belongs to the Taiwanese and is integral to their territorial rights, distinct identity and democratic freedoms.

Biden’s troubled legacy left the Trump administration a mess in Ukraine and difficult policy choices on China’s aggressive expansionism. The only real winner from the Ukraine war has been China, which dwarfs Russia in terms of economic output, military spending and other material measures.

The last thing Trump would want is his legacy to be defined by failure to deter an overt Chinese aggression against Taiwan. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not only shatter Trump’s image as a strong leader but also undermine his “Make America Great Again” movement. In this light, extricating the US from the Ukraine war and prioritizing deterrence against China make strategic sense.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

White House meeting with Modi follows close on the heels of Ishiba’s visit

Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

Donald Trump and Narendra Modi prepare to shake hands as they attend a joint press conference at the White House in Washington on Feb. 13, 2025.  © Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to swiftly reorient foreign policy in his second term, shifting America’s strategic focus from Europe and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific — an increasingly pivotal region in shaping the global order. Trump has already hosted the prime ministers of India and Japan separately and initiated efforts to end the Ukraine war, a conflict that has diverted U.S. attention from pressing Indo-Pacific challenges and made China the big winner.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on his first day in office, held a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Quad, a strategic alliance of leading Indo-Pacific democracies that Trump revived in his first term after a decade-long dormancy. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking in Brussels on Feb. 12, warned Europe that “the U.S. will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency” and that Europe must take “responsibility for its own security” by leading “from the front” so that America prioritizes “deterring war with China” in the Indo-Pacific.

Vice President JD Vance followed up from European soil in Munich by reinforcing Hegseth’s warning — Europe needs to shape up before many of the more than 100,000 American troops stationed there begin to be shipped out. Vance’s statement that Europe’s main security threat is “from within” suggests the fraying transatlantic alliance is headed toward a fundamental transformation.

The U.S.-India strategic partnership was a cornerstone of Washington’s strategy from Trump’s first term for a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a vision originally conceived by then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as a shorthand for a rules-based, liberal order. The China-Russia “no-limits partnership,” which developed during Joe Biden’s presidency, has only intensified the U.S. strategic imperative to forge a “soft” alliance with another nuclear-armed power: India.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s Feb. 13 meeting in Washington with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi underscored both leaders’ commitment to revitalizing the U.S.-India relationship.

Successive American presidents since Bill Clinton have left bilateral ties with India stronger than they inherited. However, under Biden, momentum stalled as differences cropped up, including over New Delhi’s reluctance to take sides in the Ukraine war and U.S. policies toward India’s neighbors, including Bangladesh, Myanmar and PakistanA Quad meeting is held on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, in May 2023.   © Reuters

The outcome of Modi’s White House visit attests to a good start toward rebuilding mutual trust. Trump and Modi, maintaining the warm rapport they developed in their first terms, exchanged a bear hug and projected unity at a joint news conference. Notably, they avoided discord over Trump’s hot-button issues like trade and immigration.

As he did with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Feb. 7, Trump touted strong bilateral ties while pressing Modi for “fair” and balanced trade, including increased Indian imports of American hydrocarbons and weapons. In his trademark style of blending some public flattery with hard bargaining, Trump called Modi “a much tougher” and “much better negotiator than me,” just as he had said Ishiba is “a very strong person, I wish he wasn’t so strong.”

Trump, along with the Japanese and Australian prime ministers, is set to visit India in the fall for the Quad leaders’ summit, by which time he hopes significant progress will have been made by negotiators on the U.S.-India trade agreement to which Modi committed in Washington. This strategy mirrors Trump’s previous approach in leveraging tariffs to secure a trade pact with Japan in 2019.

As the U.S. pivots to the Indo-Pacific, stronger ties have become essential with India and Japan, China’s main Asian rivals strategically located on its opposite flanks. The balance of power in the Indo-Pacific will be largely shaped by developments in East Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Japan, hosting over 80 U.S. military facilities and more American troops than any other U.S. ally, is critical to the defense of Taiwan, whose annexation by China would mark the end of U.S. global dominance. Meanwhile, India, locked in a lingering military standoff with China, has actively challenged Beijing’s power and capabilities in a way no other nation has in this century.

Long before Trump entered national politics, U.S. policymakers recognized the need to shift strategic focus to the Indo-Pacific, a region emerging as the world’s economic and geopolitical hub. In 2011, then-President Barack Obama unveiled a “pivot to Asia” strategy, but it remained largely rhetorical, lacking substantive strategic initiatives.

When Trump took office in 2017, he replaced Obama’s symbolic pivot with a comprehensive strategy for a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” He also fundamentally redefined U.S. policy toward Beijing, reversing a four-decade-old U.S. approach of aiding China’s economic rise by classifying that communist behemoth as a strategic rival and threat.

Biden maintained this approach, preserving the free and open Indo-Pacific strategy, including the Quad as a key pillar, while acknowledging China as America’s primary challenger that is bent on world dominance. However, his administration’s entanglement in conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East left little space for a genuine pivot to the Indo-Pacific.

Trump’s new administration is prioritizing the resolution of these conflicts to focus on the Indo-Pacific, where U.S. global primacy is at stake. Ending involvement in the conflicts would free military resources for the Indo-Pacific, particularly from Europe.

More broadly, America’s grand strategy has long centered on driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing — a strategy that helped the West win the Cold War without direct military confrontation. However, thanks to Biden-era policies, the U.S. has become the bridge that unites Russia and China.

Ending the Ukraine war could provide an opportunity for Washington to peel Moscow away from Beijing or weaken the Sino-Russian partnership to help isolate China.

More importantly, it would allow the U.S. to concentrate on countering the challenge from a globally ascendant China, with support from allies like Japan and strategic partners like India, whose rise as an independent power meshes with the Trump administration’s aversion to friends’ dependency on the U.S.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press), which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

Taipei Times, February 10, 2025

For Taipei, last year was a particularly dangerous period, with China stepping up coercive pressures on Taiwan amid signs of US President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, which eventually led his Democratic Party to force him to abandon his re-election campaign.

The political drift in the US bred uncertainty in Taiwan and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific region about American strategic commitment and resolve. With America deeply involved in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the last thing Washington wanted was a Taiwan Strait contingency, which is why Biden invested in personal diplomacy with China’s dictator Xi Jinping (習近平).

The return of Donald Trump to the White House is anything but good news for Xi’s regime. In his first term, Trump fundamentally changed America’s approach to Beijing by ending a four-decade-long US policy since the Richard Nixon era of aiding China’s economic rise, saying his predecessors “created a monster.” Trump’s national security strategy identified China as a strategic rival and threat.

Now, in his second term, Trump has fired a warning shot across Beijing’s bow by imposing new tariffs on imports from China.

The additional 10 percent US tariffs place Xi’s regime in a predicament. Any retaliatory Chinese measures would likely invite further rounds of American tariffs, resulting in Beijing exhausting US exports to target, as happened in the first Trump administration when tariffs were initially slapped on China in 2018. But doing little against Trump’s latest punitive action would make Xi look weak at home.

Given China’s sputtering economic-growth engine, a widening trade war with the US, with its likely international spillover, would seriously harm Chinese interests. China not only exports almost four times more goods to the US than it imports, but also its economic troubles at home have made it even more reliant on exports of excess industrial output that cannot be absorbed in the domestic market.

To make matters worse, China is running into long-term structural constraints, including a shrinking and rapidly aging population and slowing productivity growth, as well as a Western pushback against its neo-imperial ambitions. This may well explain why Xi seems to have concluded that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to shape the Asian and international order in its favor. Still, Xi is likely to think twice before seeking to provoke the US on Trump’s watch.

To be sure, Trump’s return is also set to create challenges for Taipei in its economic relationship with the US, given that Taiwan’s trade surplus with America has reached a record high. Trump is intent on wielding the tariffs card to close all of America’s bilateral trade deficits.

Many countries run trade deficits with China that they partly or wholly offset by running trade surpluses with the US. But Taiwan has large trade surpluses with both China and the US.

Trump views tariffs as a game-changing instrument to help fill the nation’s coffers and bring manufacturing back to the US. As he vowed in his inaugural address, “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Taiwan’s growing trade surplus with the US puts it in the crosshairs of Trump’s tariff strategy. Trump has already lamented that chip production “left us and went to Taiwan,” while slamming his predecessor’s US$6.6 billion funding award to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in November to establish three chipmaking facilities in Arizona.

While stepping up pressure on Taipei to boost its defense spending, Trump could use the tariff card against Taiwan as part of his broader plan to cut reliance on foreign suppliers for critical semiconductors by reversing decades of offshoring in the technology industry. Almost all of the advanced chips used in the US are currently imported from Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, Taipei may have little choice but to encourage its semiconductor companies to significantly boost investments in America for producing next-generation chips. That could help tame Trump’s tariff threat, given that tariffs alone cannot help the US to replicate at home Taiwan’s semiconductor model. Taipei could also seek to placate the Trump administration by offering to jointly establish an international semiconductor supply chain.

It is in Taiwan’s own interest to significantly boost its defense spending so as to deter a Chinese attack. Unfortunately, Taiwan’s opposition-controlled legislature recently imposed significant cuts to the defense budget, including programs for developing asymmetric capabilities like drones.

Diplomacy is in part transactional, and Trump’s predecessors gave precedence to national security and geopolitical calculations even if it meant ignoring human rights and democratic governance issues. One example was Nixon’s China “opening” of 1970-71. Another example was Jimmy Carter’s presidential memo to various US government departments instructing them to help in China’s economic rise.

What stands out about Trump is that he is first and foremost a dealmaker. To advance US interests, he is willing to cut deals with America’s friends and adversaries.

Trump’s new tariffs against China, however, seem to be part of an effort to turn the tables on a country whose foreign policy has long been driven by assertive mercantilism. The deal Trump may eventually offer is likely to be too unpalatable for Beijing.

Yet, with its economic slowdown deepening, China may be reluctant to escalate tensions with the US, let alone risk a military confrontation with a Trump-led America by launching overt aggression against Taiwan.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

Failure to get to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins and spread may not only allow China to evade responsibility, but could also weaken the world’s ability to prevent another global pandemic. Fortunately, there is reason to hope that Donald Trump’s incoming administration will revive the search for an answer.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

GENEVA – The COVID-19 pandemic killed an estimated 7.1 million people worldwide, causing global life expectancy to decline by 1.6 years between 2019 and 2021. It disrupted economies, destroyed livelihoods, and strained social cohesion in many countries. Yet no one has been held accountable for it. Will US President-elect Donald Trump change that?

Five years after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), we still do not know where the pathogen first arose. Did it emerge naturally in the wet markets of Wuhan, China, or did it escape from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where studies into bat coronaviruses were underway?

We do know that China’s government allowed what might have been a local outbreak to morph into a global health crisis. After the first COVID-19 cases were reported in Wuhan, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored reports about the disease and hid evidence of human-to-human transmission for weeks. Meanwhile, travel to and from Wuhan was allowed to continue unhindered.

Unlike the Muslim gulag in Xinjiang province or naval-base construction in the South China Sea, however, Chinese authorities could not conceal the “novel coronavirus” for long, nor could the rest of the world ignore it once the secret was out. So many people contracted COVID-19 so quickly that many hospitals were soon overwhelmed, leaving many victims to be treated in tents.

China’s government then shifted from concealment to damage control. State media reframed the crisis in Wuhan as a story of successful recovery, while touting unrealistically low mortality rates. Meanwhile, Xi thwarted international efforts to initiate an independent forensic inquiry into COVID-19’s genesis, which he claimed would amount to “origin-tracing terrorism.” The only “investigation” he allowed was a 2021 joint study with the World Health Organization that China controlled and steered.

While Trump, who was president for the first few months of the pandemic, often highlighted the link between China and COVID-19, his successor, Joe Biden, effectively let China off the hook. Less than a week after his inauguration, Biden produced a presidential memorandum urging federal agencies to avoid mentioning the virus’s geographic origins.

Biden’s goal was to stem a rise in bullying, harassment, and hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The toxicity of America’s partisan politics meant that pushing back against racism – which Trump and his cohort often stoked – also meant shutting down any discussion of China’s role in causing the crisis. Social-media platforms, mainstream media, and some prominent US scientists (who hid their conflicts of interest) also aided the suppression of debate about COVID-19.

The partisan divide over whether to investigate China’s responsibility for COVID-19 persists to this day. Just last month, Democrats challenged a 520-page report – produced by the Republican-controlled US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic – which concluded, after a two-year investigation, that the virus likely escaped from the WIV, faulting the report’s methodology. So, while some US government agencies – including the Department of Energy and the FBI – have given credence to the lab-leak theory, there remains no consensus in Washington.

Failure to get to the bottom of where COVID-19 originated may not only allow China to evade responsibility; it will also weaken the world’s ability to prevent another global pandemic. But there is reason to hope that the incoming Trump administration will revive the search for an answer. Beyond Trump’s own willingness to point the finger at China, some of his cabinet picks – notably, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – challenged prevailing narratives about COVID-19 (albeit sometimes in dangerous ways).

An effective investigation will require considerable transparency from the US. The NIH, the US government’s medical-research agency, was funding studies on bat coronaviruses at the WIV as far back as 2014. The NIH knew that the work was risky; it was being done in China precisely because the US has stricter rules governing “gain-of-function” research, which involves modifying a biological agent’s genetic structure to confer on it “new or enhanced activity,” such as increasing a pathogen’s transmissibility or virulence. The NIH continued to fund research at the WIV even after multiple State Department cables flagged the lab’s lax safety standards, stopping only after the pandemic began (when it also removed the description of gain-of-function research from its website).

Making matters worse, we now know that the WIV has been carrying out classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017. A 2021 State Department fact sheet acknowledged that some US funding for civilian research could have been diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the institute.

One rule of thumb in forensic investigations is to “follow the money,” so the Trump administration should start by disclosing the full extent of US funding of coronavirus research in China. But investigators will also have to “follow the data,” meaning that the US will have to disclose the results of the research it funded in Wuhan, which was part of a collaborative US-China scientific program.

Holding China accountable for its role in the pandemic is only the first step. To safeguard humanity’s future, the Trump administration will also have to address a more fundamental issue: dangerous “gain-of-function” research is still taking place in some labs in China, Russia, and the West. The genetic enhancement of pathogens represents the greatest existential threat to humankind ever produced by science, even greater than nuclear weapons. By tightening rules on such activities – or, ideally, prohibiting lab research that could unleash a pandemic – Trump would leave an important positive legacy.

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

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

China and India have sought in recent weeks to ease a tense military standoff along their mountainous frontier. The drawn-out standoff, triggered by China’s furtive encroachments on the icy borderlands of India’s Ladakh region in 2020, has fostered rival military buildups and intermittent clashes along the Himalayas.

An Oct. 23 meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a BRICS summit highlighted mutual interest in improving relations between the Asian giants. Indeed, an agreement was reached for reciprocal steps toward defusing the military standoff and ensuring peace along their disputed frontier, which is one of the world’s longest land borders.

But can a potential thaw in the icy hostility marking bilateral relations blunt the Sino-Indian strategic rivalry, which is defining Asian geopolitics?

The origins of the tensions go back to the early 1950s, when China imposed itself as India’s neighbor by occupying the then-autonomous Tibet, a large region that historically served as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian civilizations. That annexation led to China’s 1962 border war with India. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the two countries restored diplomatic ties, but, despite efforts to establish a modus vivendi, mutual suspicions and antagonisms never disappeared.

In recent years, India is tasting the bitter fruits of Modi’s initial efforts to appease China. The 2020 Chinese territorial encroachments caught India unawares at a time when the country was preoccupied with enforcing one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Modi came to office in 2014 as a foreign policy novice. He thought that, by resetting the relationship with Beijing, he could help weaken China’s strategic alliance with Pakistan. Pakistan, like China, is a revisionist state that lays claims to sizable swaths of Indian territory. But Pakistan also has employed cross-border terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy.

The China-Pakistan axis has long generated high security costs for India, including raising the specter of a two-front war. Through a “defensive wedge strategy,” in which the status quo power seeks to split a revisionist alliance so as to focus capabilities on the more threatening challenger, India has long sought — unsuccessfully — to break the Sino-Pakistan axis.

The first prime minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, tried to win over Pakistan, famously going there by bus in 1999. Modi, by contrast, focused on befriending China after coming to power, including hosting Xi before any other world leader and opening up the Indian economy for Chinese businesses by delisting China as a “country of concern.”

But Modi’s peace overtures spectacularly backfired. Xi visited India in 2014 bearing an unusual gift — a deep Chinese military incursion into an Indian borderland. This was followed by a bigger Sino-Indian military confrontation in 2017 on the Doklam Plateau, located at the Bhutan-Tibet-India trijunction. And the 2020 Chinese encroachments occurred despite 18 meetings between Modi and Xi over the previous five years.

After taking India on a rollercoaster ride on China, Modi has been injecting greater realism into his policy, including prioritizing military modernization and bolstering border defenses.

As the military standoff has underscored, India, by locking horns with China despite the risk of a full-scale war, openly challenged Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done in this century. In fact, Xi seriously miscalculated that China would be able to impose the changed status quo on India as a fait accompli without inviting a robust military response.

The standoff has only highlighted Xi’s strategic shortsightedness in turning a once-conciliatory India into a foe that seems determined to forestall a Sinocentric Asia. With Xi accusing the U.S. of “containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us,” the last thing China needed to do was to make an enemy of its largest neighbor.

This is similar to how Xi’s muscular revisionism has impelled major shifts in the strategic postures of two other leading Indo-Pacific powers. Japan, by deciding to double its defense spending by 2027, is effectively abandoning its pacifist postwar security policy, and Australia has ended hedging by joining the U.S.-led, anti-China AUKUS alliance.

Today, the Sino-Indian efforts to reduce tensions and pull back forces massed along the common frontier are being driven by different geopolitical factors.

For India, one consideration is to gain greater maneuverability in foreign policy at a time when the once-blossoming strategic partnership with the U.S. has begun to fray, despite President Joe Biden acknowledging that this relationship is “among the most consequential in the world.”

China, for its part, is facing increasing Western pushback against its expansionism. With its economy already sputtering, China is running into long-term growth constraints, including a shrinking and rapidly aging population and slowing productivity increase. By contrast, India — which has one of the world’s most youthful populations with a median age of 28.4 — appears poised to reap a demographic dividend. While India’s economy remains smaller than China’s, it is now growing faster than any other important economy.

Whereas the People’s Liberation Army of China largely relies on conscripts who ostensibly “volunteer” for two years of service at age of 18, India’s all-volunteer military is considered the world’s most experienced force in hybrid mountain warfare. India’s military edge in the high-altitude Himalayan environment, however, could be blunted by China’s superior air power capabilities, including missile prowess.

Against this backdrop, Xi and Modi have sought to defuse the Himalayan military crisis without losing face. While deescalating tensions along the frontier makes eminent sense for both leaders, the Sino-Indian rivalry is unlikely to weaken. In fact, this rivalry promises to shape the Asian and global balance of power.

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