US president-elect Donald Trump is inheriting from President Joe Biden a challenging situation for American policy in the Indo-Pacific region, with an expansionist China on the march and threatening to incorporate Taiwan, by force if necessary.
US policy choices have become increasingly difficult, in part because Biden’s policy of engagement with China, including investing in personal diplomacy with President Xi Jinping (習近平), has not only yielded little but also allowed the Chinese military to gain a stronger footing in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
In Xi’s Nov. 16 Lima meeting with a diminished Biden, the Chinese strongman signaled little interest in softening his aggressive foreign policy or easing China’s coercive pressures on Taiwan. In fact, Xi reportedly singled out President William Lai Ching-te (賴清德) by name and cited not one but four Chinese “red lines” that he said America must not cross if it wanted to maintain peace in the region.
“The Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, China’s path and system, and China’s development right are four red lines for China. They must not be challenged,” Xi cautioned Biden, according to the Chinese readout of the meeting. In other words, the US must not even seek to challenge the Chinese Communist Party-run totalitarian system by promoting democracy and human rights in China.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s sentencing of 45 pro-democracy leaders to long prison terms for a non-violent offense marks the final step in Xi’s crushing of all dissent and snuffing out Hong Kong’s autonomy. Like in the South China Sea, where China has changed the geopolitical map by expanding its maritime borders and building 27 military outposts on disputed islands, Xi’s success in Hong Kong has come without incurring any international costs.
All this increases the dangers for Taiwan. Yet, with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East claiming America’s attention and resources, and draining US stocks of critical munitions and air defense systems, the last thing Biden wanted is greater tensions with China. This explained his conciliatory moves to help ease Chinese concerns. For example, Biden declared while visiting Hanoi in September 2023, “I don’t want to contain China … we’re not looking to hurt China, sincerely.”
The reluctance to tangibly push back against China’s aggressive expansionism, however, has come at the expense of America’s own security and trade interests. It could also make Sino-US conflict more likely in the post-Biden era.
The new Trump administration will have to deal with Xi’s drive to secure strategic dominance for China in Asia, including his willingness to risk conflict to accomplish that.
Xi’s recurring vow to “reunify” Taiwan with China has no basis in international law or history. But it raises the possibility that Xi might make good on his pledge to take control of Taiwan.
In fact, as China takes steps like encroaching on Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island through large-scale military exercises, it creates the risk of a war that would transform global geopolitics. The military exercises appear to be dress rehearsals for possible aggression, including enforcing a quarantine or military blockade of Taiwan.
While a military blockade would be tantamount to an act of war, an undeclared quarantine of Taiwan to interdict its vital shipments like energy and block access to its ports could be enforced by China’s maritime militias and coast guard — the world’s largest and most militarized — with the People’s Liberation Army playing only a supporting role. In keeping with China’s strategy of camouflaging offense as defense and relying on deception, stealth and surprise to advance its objectives, Beijing could blame aggressive moves by Taiwan or its supporters like the US for provoking China to order “law enforcement” in its “own waters.”
The Trump administration will have to be ready to respond to such a contingency in order to prevent Taiwan’s throttling.
If Trump were to disentangle the US from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, America would be able to focus its attention and resources on the Indo-Pacific region, the center of Chinese expansionism. Trump’s reelection represents a powerful mandate to stop the Ukraine war and, in doing so, help revitalize American power and influence. A majority of Ukrainians, according to the latest Gallup poll, now favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible.
The new US administration will need to prioritize safeguarding Taiwan’s autonomous status. This is critical not just to international security but also to America’s continued global preeminence.
To be sure, Trump is likely to demand that Taiwan pay the US for helping defend it from China, just as he is expected to seek higher payments from Japan and South Korea to cover the cost of the more than 80,000 American troops deployed on Japanese or South Korean territories. In his first term, though, Trump stepped up weapons sales to Taipei and sent senior officials to visit Taiwan, including his secretary of health and human services.
Today, the key to Taiwan remaining self-governing is America’s focus on dual deterrence — strengthening US-led deterrence in Asia while bolstering Taiwan’s defenses so that it has the capability to thwart an invasion. A robust dual-deterrent posture will also likely prevent a Chinese quarantine or military blockade of Taiwan.
Such a strategy could benefit from an economic component, given Taiwan’s vulnerability to China’s economic coercion. China (including Hong Kong) accounted for 35.2 percent of Taiwan’s exports and 20.3 percent of its imports last year. A US free trade agreement with Taiwan would help Taipei to diversify its outbound and inbound trade flows away from China.
Taipei also needs more concrete US support to beat back China’s efforts to turn Taiwan into an international pariah. The new US administration would do well to assist Taiwan in enlarging its diplomatic footprint internationally.
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).
China has not hesitated to use highly aggressive tactics in its effort to expand its control over the South China Sea and end America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region. If the US does not start pushing back, China will grow only bolder – and more dominant.
China has not hesitated to use highly aggressive tactics in its effort to expand its control over the South China Sea and end America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region. If the US does not start pushing back, China will grow only bolder – and more dominant.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” of global preeminence depends significantly on achieving dominance in the South China Sea and ending America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region, an emerging global economic and geopolitical hub. And China has not hesitated to use coercive tactics in service of these objectives.
In recent years, boats belonging to countries whose territorial claims China disregards, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, have faced blockades, ramming, water-cannon attacks, and even bladed-weapon assaults by Chinese vessels. Offshore energy operations endure regular harassment. Simply fishing in waters China calls its own can expose a person to a Chinese attack with iron pipes. Such violent confrontations have heightened regional tensions and undermined stability in a crucial corridor linking the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
One might have expected the United States to take action to rein in China’s behavior, especially given its mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. And yet, three successive presidents – Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden – have failed to offer anything beyond statements of support and symbolic action. In 2012, Obama allowed China’s brazen seizure of the disputed Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines to go unpunished.
This was hardly the first time the US failed to live up to its defense commitments to the Philippines. In 1995, the Philippines requested US help to block Chinese forces from capturing Mischief Reef, located just 129 nautical miles from the Philippine island of Palawan. US President Bill Clinton, smarting over the termination three years earlier of America’s right to maintain military bases in the Philippines, refused. Mischief Reef is now an important Chinese military base.
The more China has gotten away with, the bolder it has become. Following the capture of the Scarborough Shoal, Xi embarked on a land-reclamation frenzy, creating 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres) of new land in the South China Sea, including seven artificial islands that now serve as forward operating bases. China has built 27 military outposts on disputed islands, which now bristle with short-range missiles, reconnaissance gear, radar systems, and laser and jamming equipment. Its larger islands also feature aircraft hangars, runways, and deep-water harbors. By unilaterally redrawing South China Sea’s geopolitical map, China is ensuring that it is uniquely positioned to project power in the region.
Even as China has gradually eroded the Philippines’ security – including Philippine control of areas within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) – the US has continued to underscore its “ironclad” defense commitment to its ally. Late last year, the Biden administration affirmed that any armed third-party attack against the Philippine military, coast guard, aircraft, or public vessels “anywhere in the South China Sea” is covered by the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. Yet China remains unpunished – and undeterred.
What explains this yawning gap between rhetoric and action? First and foremost, the US fears escalation, especially when its resources and attention are being consumed by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Moreover, the US prefers not to weigh in on sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, where it has no territorial claims of its own. It has not even taken a position on the sovereignty of the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, which China also claims.
The US has, however, made clear that its security treaty with Japan covers those islands and cautioned against “any unilateral action that seeks to undermine Japan’s administration.” It should do the same for the Philippines, stating unequivocally that its treaty commitment to the country covers any efforts to compel a change in areas currently under Philippine administrative control, including Second Thomas Shoal, which China has been attempting to besiege.
In support of this stance, the US could cite the 2016 ruling by an international arbitration tribunal that China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea have “no legal basis” and that Chinese actions within the Philippine EEZ violated the Philippines’ sovereignty. But China’s open contempt for that ruling should dispel any hope that the South China Sea’s future will be decided by international law, which is why the US must be prepared to back up such a statement with action.
If the US does stand up for its treaty ally, it can take advantage of the nine Philippine naval and air bases to which it has gained access within the last decade, two of which are located just across from Taiwan and southern China. If it does not, China will continue to solidify its dominance over the South China Sea, thereby cornering the region’s rich energy and fishery resources and gaining the ability to disrupt supply chains and punish countries for acts it deems unfriendly.
China will not stop at the South China Sea. Under Xi’s leadership, China has used a similar combination of deception, bullying, coercion, and surprise to expand its territorial control elsewhere, from the East China Sea to the Himalayas, sparing not even the tiny country of Bhutan. As with any bully, the only way to stop China is to confront it with a credible challenger. The US must be that challenger, and it should start by defending the Philippines.
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.
Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most populous country, is at a crossroads following a military-backed regime change and violent upheaval. Amid purges, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, systematic attacks on religious and ethnic minorities, and the freeing of jailed terrorists, one development stands out — an upsurge of radical Islamism across the country.
Since its violent birth in 1971, Bangladesh has been struggling to evolve into a full-fledged democracy, with the powerful military’s two-dozen coups or coup attempts casting an enduring shadow over the country’s politics.
Today, empowered by the overthrow of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Aug. 5, when the military packed her off to neighboring India before she could formally resign, Islamists are asserting themselves on the streets.
Student marchers holding black flags or banners of the Islamic State group are calling for a caliphate. Islamists are harassing and mistreating women for not wearing veils, exposing their stomachs while wearing saris, or for having short hair. Some attacks on women have been brutal, including on mountaineer Shayla Bithi, a national icon.
The Hizbut Tahrir extremist group, proscribed by Hasina and several Western governments as an international terrorist threat, is now operating freely in Bangladesh, holding big rallies. A memorial for police officers killed while repulsing a terrorist attack mainly on foreigners at a famous cafe in Dhaka, the capital, was demolished and a Hizbut Tahrir poster put up.
Since the overthrow of Hasina’s secular government, which kept Islamists and the military in check but became increasingly undemocratic, hundreds of Islamist-backed attacks have been reported on Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and the tribespeople that inhabit the country’s southeastern hill tracts. Hindus, the largest minority, are bearing the brunt of such violence.
During the most important religious occasion of the long-persecuted Hindus, Islamists seized the podium from worshippers at a site and sang a song calling for an Islamist revolution.
According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, Islamic State created a terrorist network in 2015 with the goal of “overthrowing the Bangladeshi government to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state.” The recent regime change has clearly emboldened Islamic State supporters and sympathizers.
Seeking to Arabize Islam in Bangladesh, extremists are targeting the country’s syncretic tradition of Sufism by demolishing shrines and attacking preachers in an effort to wipe out the Sufi culture. Violent attacks have also extended to members of the Ahmadiyya sect, which Islamists refuse to accept as Muslim.
Jihadists, especially those belonging to the student wing of the Hasina-proscribed Jamaat-e-Islami organization, played a key role in the violent, youth-led uprising that overthrew the 76-year-old “Iron Lady.” Hundreds of people were killed in the violence, many by police shooting but also in shooting by rioters, some of whom, according to the new military-installed regime, looted powerful sniper rifles from law enforcement personnel or government armories.
Mob attacks on some 450 police stations reduced them to burned-out shells. Crowds captured dozens of police officers, beating them to death and hanging the bodies of some from bridges in Dhaka.
Today, lawlessness still rules Bangladesh. Amid political vendettas, mob violence and targeted attacks have persisted under the new regime, which is led by the 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus but includes a leader of the radical Hefazat-e-Islam organization that seeks the rule of Islamic law.
Yunus has sought to appease jihadists, including meeting with Islamist leaders. His regime, despite lacking constitutional legitimacy, has lifted bans on Islamist groups and freed jailed terrorists and convicted jihadists, including the chief of the outlawed al-Qaida-affiliate Ansar al-Islam. Hundreds of more Islamists have escaped from prisons.
Furthermore, to Islamist delight, the new regime is rewriting Bangladesh’s history, including attempting to erase or obscure the role of its charismatic founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose statues and portraits have been defaced or dismantled. Rahman, Hasina’s father, was killed by army officers in the first coup in 1975.
While mollycoddling Islamists, the regime has been making large-scale arrests of critics and political opponents and even scholars and journalists, often on fake murder charges. It also removed the chief justice and the five other most-senior Supreme Court justices.
Just in the first week of October, according to official figures, 7,018 people were arbitrarily jailed. At least 129 journalists have been slapped with trumped-up murder, abduction or assault charges. To make matters worse, political detainees often face physical assault in courts, with a retired Supreme Court justice needing emergency surgery after being badly beaten up.
To be sure, the army is today calling the shots behind a civilian facade, just as it did during 2007-2008 when it kept an interim civilian-led regime in power after staging a coup. The military sees Yunus, the regime’s nominal head, as its fall guy.
Meanwhile, the economic and human toll from the Islamist violence in Bangladesh, including attacks on factories, hospitals and hotels, is increasing. In a case of apparent mass murder, 182 people are still listed missing and presumed dead from the Aug. 27 burning down of an $84 million tire-manufacturing plant, the country’s largest.
Bangladesh is urgently seeking more than $5 billion in financial aid from international lenders to rescue its economy, which was one of the world’s fastest-growing until 2021 but is now in dire straits. The garment industry, which last year accounted for 85% of the country’s total export earnings, is today in turmoil due to vandalism, arson and labor unrest, with many factories shut. Is that correct?
It will not be easy to restore economic activity or reestablish the confidence of foreign investors given that Islamists now have free rein to violently push their revisionist agenda.
In fact, risk is growing that the world’s most densely populated country, excluding microstates and mini-states, could slide into jihadist chaos.
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.
(AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan, File) Indian army vehicles move in a convoy in the cold desert region of Ladakh, India, Sept. 18, 2022.
With the Oct. 22 BRICS summit meeting approaching, China and India have stepped up discussions about defusing their tense military standoff along the long Himalayan frontier. But although the 10-nation summit in the Russian city of Kazan is catalyzing efforts to resolve the confrontation — which has sparked rival force buildups and intermittent clashes — it is far from certain that any deal will be reached.
The standoff between the two Asian giants is not grabbing international headlines, thanks in part to the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East. But the threat of the confrontation escalating to a border war of the kind fought in 1962 cannot be discounted. Both sides have significantly ramped up border deployments of troops and weapons, with India acknowledging the situation is “very tense and dangerous.”
The Sino-Indian faceoff, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are detracting from the international appeal of BRICS, the world’s first major non-Western initiative. Founded 15 years ago by Brazil, Russia, India and China as BRIC, the group, with the addition of South Africa in 2011, became BRICS. And with this year’s entry of five additional countries, it has become BRICS-plus, accounting for nearly half the world’s population and 40 percent of global trade.
As many as 40 more countries have lined up to join BRICS, which seeks to shape a multipolar global order in place of the fading era of Western dominance. An easing of military tensions between nuclear-armed titans China and India could help build consensus to further enlarge BRICS.
The Sino-Indian border faceoff was triggered by China’s stealth encroachments on some Indian borderlands in April 2020. India failed to foresee the Chinese aggression largely because Prime Minister Narendra Modi had focused on appeasing Beijing in a bid to chip away at the China-Pakistan strategic axis. Between 2014 and 2019, Modi met with Chinese President Xi Jinping 18 times, building a close personal rapport. The Xi-ordered encroachments were thus widely seen in India as a stab in the back.
Xi seriously miscalculated that China would be able to present the land grabs to India as a fait accompli, like the Chinese “salami-slicing” expansionism elsewhere in Asia. In contrast to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, China prefers incremental expansionism, enabled by stealth and deception.
India’s robust military response to China’s encroachments, including more than matching Chinese force deployments, took Beijing by surprise, helping to spotlight not just the Sino-Indian territorial disputes but also India’s challenge to Chinese power and capability. No other nation, not even the U.S., has locked horns with the Chinese military in this century the way India has since 2020.
Xi, by transforming the Sino-Indian frontier into a “hot” border patrolled by tens of thousands of rival troops, has crimped the further pursuit of his own “salami-slicing” strategy on the Himalayan massif. China will find it more challenging from now on to nibble away at Indian territories.
With the U.S.-China rivalry deepening, the last thing Xi should be doing is turning India into an enduring enemy. Yet as the world’s fastest-growing major economy, India is moving closer to America, with Modi’s foreign policy showing a distinct pro-Western tilt.
With an eye on China, India has ramped up its military buildup and modernization. A stronger India aligned with Western powers and Japan is likely to stymie China’s plan to gain strategic preeminence in Asia.
A war with India could expose China’s weaknesses. Whereas the Chinese military relies largely on conscripts, India, with an all-volunteer force, has the world’s most-experienced troops in mountain warfare. The Chinese military, though, has a technological edge over Indian forces.
Against this backdrop, China’s recent charm offensive in India, including initiating renewed efforts to defuse the military standoff, suggests that Xi wants to salvage Beijing’s relationship with New Delhi — but without losing face at home.
For four-and-a-half years, tens of thousands of Chinese troops have remained deployed along the inhospitable Himalayan frontier, which has some of the harshest terrain on Earth. Oxygen levels are so low that soldiers take weeks to acclimatize before being deployed on the front lines. If Xi were to reach a deal with India centered on a pullback of rival forces, it would raise questions in China about why he ever launched this provocation in the first place.
This may well explain why, in the bilateral negotiations up to now, the Chinese side has sought a deal largely on its own terms, dimming the prospect of reaching an agreement by the time Xi and Modi could meet on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.
But even if Xi climbed down to some extent, leading to a deal to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and removal of rival forces, the new warfare-related infrastructure China has built along the India frontier will remain in place. India thus would not be able to lower its guard.
China has bored tunnels and shafts into mountainsides to set up an elaborate underground military infrastructure, as if preparing for war. In addition, it has planted settlers in new militarized border villages, the equivalent of the artificial islands it created in the South China Sea to serve as forward military bases.
China and India, which represent more than one-third of the global population, became neighbors only after the Chinese Communist Party annexed Tibet in 1951. Today, China and India need to find ways to peacefully coexist. Yet, despite the latest efforts to mend fences, their strategic rivalry seems likely to endure.
As China steps up a campaign to diplomatically isolate and squeeze Taiwan, it has become more imperative than ever that Taipei play a greater role internationally with the support of the democratic world.
To help safeguard its autonomous status, Taiwan needs to go beyond bolstering its defenses with weapons like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. With the help of its international backers, it must also expand its diplomatic footprint globally.
But are Taiwan’s foreign friends willing to translate their rhetoric into action by helping Taipei carve out more international space for itself? Beating back China’s effort to turn Taiwan into an international pariah demands sustained external support for Taipei.
The recent Quad summit of America, Australia, India and Japan, which was hosted by US President Joe Biden is his Delaware hometown of Wilmington, made no mention of Taiwan or the Taiwan Strait issue while identifying in its joint statement the challenges in the Indo-Pacific region.
Of late, though, several Western countries have criticized China for deliberately misinterpreting United Nations Resolution 2758 to claim that it enshrined Beijing’s “one China principle.” Beijing has used that 1971 resolution to exclude Taiwan from most international organizations.
By falsely conflating the 1971 resolution with its one China principle and speciously claiming that it reflects an international consensus in favor of that principle, Beijing has been vetoing Taipei’s participation even in international forums where Taiwan was present earlier, such as the World Health Organization’s decision-making World Health Assembly.
The fact is that the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758 with a vote of 76 yes to 35 no, with 17 abstentions, “recognizing that the representatives of the Government of the People’s Republic of China are the only lawful representatives of China to the United Nations and that the People’s Republic of China is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council.” While disposing of the question of who had China’s seat in the UN, the resolution made no mention of Taiwan or China’s territorial or population scope.
Simply put, the resolution does not preclude Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the UN system and other multilateral forums.
Yet, for decades, the West did not credibly push back against Beijing’s deliberate misconstruction of the 1971 resolution or its blocking of Taiwan’s participation in international organizations, thereby inadvertently strengthening China’s diplomatic hand against Taipei. Even today, China continues to misuse that resolution in an effort to chip away at Taiwan’s autonomous status.
Take the Biden administration, which says that America’s one-China policy differs from Beijing’s one-China principle. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has contended that US support for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international forums aligns with the US reading of the 1971 resolution, as well as with America’s Taiwan Relations Act and bilateral communiques with China.
Still, Biden excluded Taiwan from his Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a US-led multilateral partnership that covers everything from infrastructure to the digital economy.
The White House offered no explanation for omitting Taiwan, a technological powerhouse with the world’s 22nd-largest economy by gross domestic product that is a hub of global semiconductor production.
Biden’s geopolitical imperative to ensure that China did not undermine the unprecedented, US-led sanctions against Russia may have prompted Taiwan’s exclusion from the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Biden’s more conciliatory approach to Beijing, however, has yielded few positive results, with China quietly providing significant support to Russia’s military-industrial complex and effectively becoming Moscow’s banker.
Taiwan, a vibrant democracy, has all the attributes of a robust independent state, and most Taiwanese want it to stay that way.
What Taiwan needs from its international friends is tangible support against the designs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is totalitarian, expansionist and contemptuous of international law. In fact, under Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP has become more despotic, coercive and punitive.
As part of a strategy to annex Taiwan, the CCP is working methodically to wipe out that island democracy’s international identity by persuading countries to break off diplomatic ties with Taipei. With its “tribute nation” approach to vulnerable states, Beijing has sought to influence their foreign policy through inducements, extending from loans to bribery.
China has already poached a number of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, including in Central America where Taipei had strong relationships. From 2016 to 2024, Beijing poached 10 of Taiwan’s 22 allies across the world, with Nauru being the latest. This has left only 11 nations and the Vatican still recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation.
In one positive development, the small nation of Lithuania defied Chinese threats and allowed Taiwan in 2021 to open “The Taiwanese Representative Office” in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. This was followed by the opening of the Lithuanian Trade Representative Office in Taipei.
A “Taiwanese” representative office stands out in comparison to “Chinese Taipei” (used by a number of nations and the International Olympic Committee) or “Taipei Economic and Cultural Office” (as in Canada and the US, for example). A number of nations, from Britain to Singapore, host a “Taipei Representative Office.”
More broadly, most countries support keeping the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. So, radical ideas are unlikely to gain traction, including former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s proposal that America recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, separate from communist China.
If Taiwan gains greater presence on the international stage, it will be able to shore up its status as a de facto nation, making it more difficult for China to seize the self-governing island in the way it occupied Tibet soon after coming under communist rule in 1949.
The then-independent Tibet should have applied for United Nations membership shortly after that international body came into existence in 1945, but it never did.
If Taiwan is not to go Tibet’s way, major democracies must strengthen and broaden their ties with Taipei and assist it in enlarging its diplomatic footprint. Major democracies must act before it becomes too late.
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).
Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to be betting that America’s entanglement in conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East is sapping its military capacity and political resolve to credibly push back against his aggressive expansionism in Asia — including in the South China Sea, through which one-third of global shipping passes.
Yet, in dealing with China, the Biden administration still prioritizes diplomacy over deterrence. Indeed, as part of its effort to smooth over tensions with Beijing and stabilize the bilateral relationship, the White House said that Biden plans to speak with Xi over the phone in “coming weeks.” That statement followed the China visit last month of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who says Biden and Xi may also meet in person before the year end.
China, meanwhile, has stepped up aggressive actions against the Philippines, which has a longstanding mutual defense treaty with the U.S. The 1951 treaty incorporates America’s “ironclad commitment,” as Sullivan acknowledged, to defend the Philippines.
But that commitment has not deterred China from stepping up its provocations in the South China Sea, including ramming Philippine coast guard ships and using flares and water cannons against them, as well as blocking resupply missions and making unsafe intercepts within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Newer Chinese coast guard ships have specially designed features to enable “shouldering,” or deliberate ramming.
Chinese expansionism has stoked rising tensions with several other states. China’s furtive territorial encroachments on some Indian borderlands have resulted in a tense military standoff with India for more than four years, with both sides building up forces along their long Himalayan frontier as if preparing for possible war.
In the East China Sea, China’s increasing challenge to Japanese control of the Senkaku Islands is spurring Japan toward rearmament, as it nearly doubles its defense budget. A day before Sullivan reached Beijing, a Chinese military spy plane intruded into Japanese airspace near the Danjo Islands. Tokyo called it “not only a serious violation of Japan’s sovereignty but also…utterly unacceptable.”
As for Taiwan, which has a near-monopoly on the global output of advanced semiconductors, China seems determined to annex that thriving democracy and gain a stranglehold over the international supply of cutting-edge chips. When Sullivan met with China’s most senior uniformed military official, Zhang Youxia, he was bluntly told that Taiwan is at “the heart of China’s core interests” and that promoting “reunification” is “the mission and duty” of the Chinese military.
In the South China Sea — which is 50 percent bigger than the Mediterranean Sea — China’s aggressive sea tactics pose a pressing challenge for the U.S. Chinese expansionism, after changing the geopolitical map of this corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, is now seeking to cement China’s ascendancy there.
This is triggering dangerous incidents. Chinese brinkmanship risks triggering a major South China Sea crisis, especially as China seeks to enforce its will by employing increasingly perilous maneuvers to intimidate and coerce the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and other claimant states.
More fundamentally, China is working to create a sphere of influence, extending from Japan to India, detrimental to the interests of America and its allies and strategic partners. Such a sphere would not only threaten freedom of navigation in the South China Sea but also allow China to effectively supplant the U.S. as the dominant force in Asia.
Yet the Biden administration seems concerned not so much with the long-term strategic implications of Beijing’s drive for domination, but rather with the possibility that U.S.-China relations could move in a more adversarial direction due to maritime incidents. This may explain why it remains wary of going beyond mere statements in support of the Philippines.
Indeed, Sullivan has called for “de-escalation,” saying the administration will continue to discuss ways to ease tensions with Chinese and Filipino officials and adding, “we will do our best to try to contribute to managing this issue in a responsible way so that de-escalation is the order of the day.”
But de-escalation in the South China Sea (or, for that matter, in the Taiwan Strait) is the last thing Xi has on his mind.
Policy choices to counter China’s drive to dominate the South China Sea have become increasingly challenging, largely because three successive American administrations have failed to mount a sustained pushback. Instead, the U.S. has essentially relied on rhetoric and symbolic actions.
Xi began incrementally changing the facts in the South China Sea right after becoming the Communist Party boss in 2012. On former President Barack Obama’s watch, the U.S. did little as China seized control of the Scarborough Shoal — a traditional Philippine fishing ground — and then launched a major land reclamation program in the South China Sea, building seven artificial islands that it later turned into forward operating bases.
After a 2016 international tribunal ruling invalidated China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, Chinese expansionism only accelerated, underscoring its open contempt for international law.
More recently, China has intensified its bullying of smaller neighbors. But, after the November 2023 Biden-Xi summit in California, China’s aggressive interference with U.S. and allied air and maritime transits has eased.
Biden keeps saying that the U.S. wants “competition with China but not conflict.” Yet Xi’s expansionist strategy is intrinsically conflictual. Although Taiwan remains the most likely cause of a major conventional war, the risk that a crisis in the South China Sea could escalate to an armed conflict involving the U.S. can hardly be discounted.
The South China Sea challenge is not just about disputes over small islets, rocks and reefs but about one power’s drive to gain hegemony in a critical corridor and impose a Sino-centric system upon the Indo-Pacific, a region that will shape the next global order.
China and India make up more than one-third of the global population, and enduring enmity between these giants serves neither their national interests nor the cause of Asian stability and security.
The India-China military standoff along the traditional Indo-Tibetan frontier may not be grabbing international headlines, especially with two wars raging elsewhere in the world. But, as External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said earlier this year, the situation along the border remains “very tense and dangerous”.
Now in its fifth year, the standoff, which has brought potential dark clouds on the horizon, was triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments on some key Ladakh borderlands in April 2020, just before thawing ice normally reopens Himalayan access routes after a brutal winter.
The standoff, however, extends beyond the westernmost Ladakh sector of the border. It encompasses sections of the middle sector, as well as the eastern sector along Tibet’s long border with Arunachal Pradesh. One confrontation location is opposite the narrow, 22km-wide corridor known as “the chicken-neck” that connects India’s Northeast to the rest of the country. The corridor’s vulnerability has been increased by Chinese encroachments on Bhutan’s southwestern borderlands.
While both sides have significantly ramped up deployments of troops and weapons, as if preparing for a possible war, China has frenetically been building new warfare-related infrastructure along the inhospitable frontier. Its focus has been on building underground military facilities that can survive aerial attacks in war. So, it has been boring tunnels and shafts in mountainsides to set up command positions, reinforced troop shelters and weapons-storage facilities.
In addition, China has been systematically planting settlers in new militarised border villages along the India frontier. These artificial villages are becoming the equivalent of the artificial islands Beijing created in the South China Sea to serve as its forward military bases.
China, meanwhile, has stepped up other provocations against India, including Sinicising the names of places in Arunachal Pradesh to help strengthen its territorial claim to that sprawling state, which is almost three times larger in area than Taiwan. Indeed, Beijing has been calling Arunachal Pradesh “South Tibet”, contending it was once part of Tibet—a claim the Dalai Lama says has no historical basis.
Against this backdrop, talks to de-escalate tensions and end the standoff have made little headway after the two sides agreed long ago to turn three specific confrontation sites into buffer zones. The fact that those buffers have come up largely in territories that were within India’s patrolling jurisdiction has underscored China’s negotiating leverage.
Still, it makes strategic sense for both China and India to try and find common ground to defuse their border confrontation. Some signals, even if exploratory, suggest that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime may now be seeking to smooth over tensions with India.
As in 1962, when China triggered a war by invading India, the Ladakh encroachments are counterproductive to long-term Chinese interests. The 1962 war shattered Indian illusions about China and set in motion India’s shift away from pacifism. In 1967, while still recovering from the 1962 war and another war with Pakistan in 1965, India gave China a bloody nose in military clashes along the Tibet-Sikkim border.
In terms of territory gained, China’s 2020 Ladakh aggression may have been a success. But, politically, it has proved self-damaging, driving India closer to the US and setting in motion a major Indian military buildup, including in the missile and nuclear realms. Relations between Beijing and New Delhi are at a nadir.
This seems a replay of 1962, when China set out, in the words of then-Premier Zhou Enlai, to “teach India a lesson”. China won that war but lost the peace. The difference now is that, without defusing the border crisis, China risks making a permanent enemy of its largest neighbour.
Even militarily, it does not make sense for China to prolong the standoff at a time when its expansionist strategy is targeting Taiwan and seeking to transform the South China Sea into a “Chinese lake”. Referring to the Indian military’s ongoing confrontation with Chinese forces, Admiral Mike Gilday, the chief of US naval operations, said in August 2022 that India presents China a two-front problem: “They [Indians] now force China to not only look east, toward the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, but they now have to be looking over their shoulder at India.”
President Xi Jinping‘S dilemma is how to resolve the Himalayan military crisis without losing face. The longer the standoff persists, the greater would be the risk for Beijing of turning India into an enduring enemy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite taking some flak at home over China’s Ladakh encroachments, has continued to search for a settlement through quiet diplomacy
Today, Xi’s self-made dilemma is how to resolve the Himalayan military crisis without losing face. But the longer the standoff persists, the greater would be the risk for Beijing of turning India into an enduring enemy, a development that could weigh down China’s global and regional ambitions, including Xi’s self-described “historic mission” to absorb Taiwan.
Without the elements of stealth, deception and surprise, which characterised its encroachments, China would be hard put to get the better of the Indian armed forces in a war. While the Chinese military relies heavily on conscripts, India has an all-volunteer force that is considered the world’s most experienced in mountain warfare.
For his part, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite taking some flak at home over China’s Ladakh encroachments, has continued to search for a settlement through quiet diplomacy.
In stark contrast to US President Joe Biden shutting the door to diplomacy with Moscow following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Modi has kept diplomatic space for finding a negotiated end to the border crisis, including by refraining from imposing any tangible sanctions against China. While his government has banned numerous Chinese mobile apps and blocked certain Chinese investments, it has shied away from substantive punitive action.
This has led to a strange paradox: Amid the border confrontation, China’s trade surplus with India has continued to surge. Its trade surplus has already surpassed India’s total defence budget, the world’s third largest.
One incentive for India to mend fences with China is that, despite the military standoff creating room for a US-India strategic nexus, American policies and actions continue to add to India’s regional security challenges. The US and India may agree on some broader strategic issues internationally, but in India’s own neighbourhood extending from Myanmar to the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt, it is becoming clearer that American policies do not align with core Indian interests. Bangladesh is just the latest wake-up call for New Delhi.
Jaishankar said in March that India remains “committed to finding a fair, reasonable” agreement with China. In fact, Modi briefly discussed ways to defuse the border crisis with Xi on the sidelines of multilateral summits in Bali and Johannesburg in November 2022 and August 2023, respectively.
The forthcoming BRICS and G20 summits will offer opportunities for Modi and Xi to meet on the margins, creating an impetus for both sides to work out a possible deal through quiet diplomacy. The BRICS summit (the first after the group’s major expansion) will be held in Kazan, Russia, from October 22 to 24, to be followed by the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 18-19.
With Russia taking an active interest in a potential end to the Sino-Indian border confrontation, the BRICS summit (to which Russian President Vladimir Putin has also invited some non-BRICS leaders, including the presidents of Iran and Azerbaijan) could potentially serve as a catalyst for reaching some sort of a ‘peace’ deal between Beijing and New Delhi. This may well explain renewed back-channel discussions, as well as Jaishankar’s meetings with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who is also a Communist Party of China (CPC) Politburo member.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (Photo: Alamy)
The BRICS Summit could potentially serve as a catalyst for reaching some sort of a ‘peace’ deal between Beijing and New Delhi. This may well explain renewed back-channel discussions, as well as Jaishankar’s meetings with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi, who is also a CPC politburo member
To be sure, New Delhi has all along been open to patching things up with China. At the same time, it has displayed an unflinching resolve to stand up to China: it has not only matched China’s Himalayan military deployments, but also made clear that the standoff cannot end as long as Beijing continues to violate bilateral border-management agreements and engage in intimidation and coercion.
Xi’s failure, while green-lighting the 2020 encroachments, to anticipate a robust Indian military response openly challenging Chinese power and capability was a serious strategic miscalculation.
Since the standoff began, India has tested several leading-edge missile systems, and recently boosted its nuclear deterrent by commissioning a second nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN). Powered by an 82.5MW pressurised light water reactor (LWR), <INS Arighat> is armed with 12 K-15 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). A third SSBN with the longer-range K-4 SLBMs to deter China is nearing completion.
However, India has done little to build bargaining leverage against China, which is why the buffer zones at Galwan Valley, Pangong Lake and Gogra-Hot Springs were established largely on Indian territories.
India should have responded to the 2020 Chinese encroachments by sending troops into strategic Chinese-held areas in Tibet. This would have raised the costs for Chinese border violations, thereby boosting deterrence.
Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russian territory sought to seize territory that could serve as a bargaining chip in future negotiations. A counter territorial grab has always made strategic and military sense. It is inexplicable why India, in response to the Chinese encroachments, has chosen to stay locked in a military standoff without seeking to gain counter-leverage by seizing some Chinese-held territory in Tibet.
To make matters worse, India even vacated the strategic Kailash Range as part of the 2021 Pangong Lake deal, which, like the buffer zones elsewhere, has worked to China’s military advantage.
In the Pangong region, the entire buffer zone was set up on territory that India had patrolled until China made its stealth encroachments in April 2020. The buffer, in fact, also includes a swath of Indian area that China had never disputed or claimed. This is the area from Finger 4 to the Indian base (between Fingers 2 and 3). All this has encouraged China to construct a division-level headquarters at the edge of the lake, along with two bridges across the lake and underground warfare-related facilities, placing it in an ascendant position in the Pangong region.
More broadly, the standoff persists despite more than four years of military and diplomatic negotiations because China has used those talks to take India round and round the mulberry bush, while it has been quietly consolidating its encroachments and building new warfare-related infrastructure along the entire Indo-Tibetan frontier.
Its frenzied construction has fundamentally changed the Himalayan military landscape. And the three buffer zones it foisted on India have formalised a changed status quo.
Today, there are still no answers to two key questions. First, why was India taken unawares by China’s stealth encroachments of April 2020, whose costs have increased with the passage of time? And second, why did India subsequently, as part of bilateral accords to set up some buffer zones, withdraw from its historically claimed areas in the Galwan, Pangong and Gogra-Hot Springs regions?
If a ‘peace’ deal were to be concluded in whatever shape, a few things will not change, though. With China having forcibly changed the territorial status quo in eastern Ladakh, a return to status quo ante is most unlikely. In January, then Indian Army Chief General Manoj Pande said the standoff would continue until China pulled back from its Ladakh encroachments, calling restoration of the previous frontier line “our first aim to achieve”. That aim is clearly unrealistic.
Chinese troops dismantling their bunkers at Pangong Tso, Ladakh, February 2021 (Photo: AP)
In the Pangong region, the entire buffer zone was set up on territory that India had patrolled until China made its stealth encroachments in April 2020. The buffer also includes a swath of Indian area that China had never disputed or claimed
Xi risks being hoisted by his own petard if he pulls back his forces from encroached areas. He would face questions at home as to why, in the first place, he embarked on the aggression against India. Indeed, China’s Ladakh encroachments appeared to be part of Xi’s larger strategy to use coercion and territorial grabs to compel neighbouring countries to acquiesce to China’s claims.
Even if a deal to end the standoff materialises, China’s warfare-related infrastructure along the Himalayan frontier will remain in place. Any agreement, even if it seeks to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and de-induction of rival forces, will not alter the new military realities that China has created.
As the 2017 Doklam disengagement deal showed, China withdraws only temporarily. Within weeks of the deal, it sent in large numbers of troops and effectively captured the Doklam Plateau.
Let us be clear: It does make eminent sense for China and India, as two of the world’s most ancient civilisations, to find ways to peacefully coexist as neighbours and cooperate on shared objectives. But the CPC’s record since it came to power in 1949 indicates that it operates on very different logic.
New Delhi is still struggling to understand why Xi—despite meeting Modi 18 times over nearly six years and despite the two countries’ commitment to the “Wuhan spirit” and to open “a new era of cooperation” through the “Chennai connect”—betrayed India’s trust by stealthily encroaching on Ladakh borderlands. If Xi wanted peaceful, mutually beneficial cooperation with India, such aggression would have been the last thing on his mind.
In this light, any ‘peace’ deal that China concludes with India will not be about peace but about formalising its strategic advantages.
Even if the Modi government were to try and market such a deal as a political win, India, militarily, would not be able to lower its guard. The Indo-Tibetan frontier is likely to remain a ‘hot’ border, underscoring both the enduring nature of the military threat posed by China and the lasting costs of India’s failure to prevent the 2020 encroachments, which have led to China significantly changing the Himalayan military landscape.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
The recent violent upheaval that led to a military-backed regime change in Bangladesh, followed by the country’s pleas for $6.5 billion in international bailouts, raise concerns about the future direction of the world’s eighth most-populous country.
The toppling of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government has also triggered an ominous resurgence of radical Islamism, including systematic attacks on religious minorities.
As recently as 2022, Bangladesh was seen internationally as headed toward rapid economic development. But today, nothing better illustrates the unraveling of Bangladesh’s economic success story than its urgent requests for a new $3 billion International Monetary Fund bailout, as well as $1.5 billion from the World Bank and $1 billion each from the Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.
Hasina, while becoming increasingly undemocratic during her over 15-year reign, gave Bangladesh political stability and impressive economic growth, before the global economic fallout from the Ukraine war began weighing on Bangladeshi finances. In fact, the country’s stability and remarkable-growth trajectory stood in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil in Pakistan, from which Bangladesh seceded in 1971 following a bloody war of liberation that left up to 3 million civilians dead in a genocide perpetrated by the Pakistani army and other pro-Pakistan forces.
Today, the military-picked interim civilian-led regime is struggling to restore the rule of law and revive an economy pummeled by large-scale mob violence and destruction that both preceded and followed Hasina’s overthrow in a youth-led uprising, with her loss of support from the powerful military proving decisive. The military has traditionally been a key player in Bangladeshi politics.
Several hundred people were killed in the violence, many in police firings but also in shootings by Islamists and other rioters, some of whom, according to the new regime, looted rifles from law-enforcement officers and others. Mobs also captured some policemen, beating them to death. At least 44 policemen were killed by mobs, with bodies of some hung from bridges in Dhaka, the nation’s capital.
With the overthrow of the 76-year-old “Iron Lady,” the Islamists have returned with a vengeance, resulting in widespread attacks on the country’s long-persecuted and dwindling Hindu minority.
To make matters worse, political vendettas have gained momentum, as the new regime has engaged in or condoned human rights abuses, including purges, arbitrary arrests, physical assaults on political detainees in courts and curtailment of the rights to liberty and freedom of expression. Academics, journalists, former justices, local officials, lawyers, political opponents and other dissidents have also been jailed on trumped-up murder charges.
In a case last weekend, an ailing, 75-year-old retired Supreme Court justice, after being arrested in a dehumanizing manner, was so badly beaten up in a magistrate’s court, including repeatedly kicked in the groin, that he needed emergency surgery.
All this raises the question whether Bangladesh could go the way of Pakistan, whose broken economy and dysfunctional politics have engendered unending violence, including Islamist extremism and cross-border terrorism. Elections in Pakistan have failed to weaken the vise-like grip of its military on national politics.
Like in Pakistan, the military in Bangladesh has now returned as the final arbiter in national politics, with the army chief becoming the power behind the throne. As if to let the cat out of the bag, M. Sakhawat Hussain, a retired military general holding a minister-level position in the interim regime, warned those pursuing political extortion that he had “requested the army chief to break your legs.” The interim administration, led by an 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, lacks constitutional legitimacy.
The Bangladeshi military holds substantial commercial assets in multiple economic sectors, like Pakistan’s armed forces.
Just as Pakistan continues to teeter on the brink of default, the Bangladesh economy is in dire straits, with foreign reserves dwindling rapidly, inflation spiraling, the banking sector in turmoil and economic activity largely at a standstill. It will not be easy to restore the confidence of foreign investors after the large-scale looting, vandalism and arson since July. Many countries’ advisories against travel to Bangladesh remain in effect.
Today, the Islamist resurgence poses a serious law-and-order challenge in Bangladesh, as it has long done in Pakistan. In fact, just as Pakistan’s military maintains cozy alliances with militant groups, the Bangladesh military has had a nexus with radical Islamists.
Hasina’s secular government had cracked down on such violent religious groups. But amid the protests, mobs broke into prisons and freed hundreds of radical Islamists and terrorists, including those wanted in India for terror activity. The attacks on prisons began more than two weeks before the government’s toppling, but gathered pace in the aftermath of Hasina’s forced departure to India. The Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist group, which was proscribed by Hasina and some Western governments, is now operating freely in Bangladesh, holding big rallies.
It was Bangladesh’s chief of the army, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, who told the nation in a televised address on Aug. 5 that Hasina had quit and left the country, saying he was “taking full responsibility” and would help to “form an interim government.”
But, instead of a broad-based government of national unity, a partisan administration is now in office that includes two student protest leaders, a hard-line Islamist preacher and three retired military generals. This has contributed to continuing purges, as well as revenge attacks and killings.
Bangladesh is a highly polarized country with a poisonous political culture that, over the decades, has fostered a cycle of frenzied violence and deadly retributions. The recent brutal violence is the latest example.
Without sincere efforts to initiate national reconciliation and healing, the deep splits in Bangladesh will likely stoke greater hate, vengeance and economic disruption, with the risk that the nation could become a mirror image of its old nemesis, Pakistan.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
The ouster of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government is just the latest example of political volatility in South Asia – a region that has struggled to achieve stability, let alone democratization. This is generating acute security and economic risks for the region’s main power, India.
Street clashes in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (Rajib Dhar / Associated Press)
Violent student-led, Islamist-backed protests in Bangladesh have toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government, and mob attacks targeting those viewed as supporters of her secular Awami League party – in particular, the country’s dwindling Hindu minority – are proliferating. At a time when neighboring Myanmar is engulfed in violence and the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt remains fertile ground for cross-border terrorism, political upheaval in Bangladesh, two years after the overthrow of Sri Lanka’s government, is the last thing India, the regional power, needs.
Achieving lasting political stability in South Asia would require entrenching democracy. But this is no easy feat. India notwithstanding, the region remains in thrall to longstanding autocratic traditions and centralization of power. Hasina, for example, had become autocratic during her more than 15 years in office. In this context, popular demands for democracy are far more likely to lead to violence and political chaos than to smooth political transitions.
As Hasina has shown, autocratic leaders do not necessarily survive popular challenges to their rule. Consider the chaos that engulfed Sri Lanka in 2022, when a severe economic crisis triggered mass protests against the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic, un-democratic regime. Though President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, like Hasina, initially unleashed a violent crackdown, his opponents proved too powerful. Like Hasina, he gave up and fled the country, without even formally resigning. Sri Lankan protesters then occupied the presidential palace, much as Bangladeshi mobs have ransacked Hasina’s sprawling official residence.
But when an autocrat is toppled, it is often the military – not a democratic government – that takes over, even if behind a civilian facade. Bangladesh is no exception. The military has attempted at least two dozen coups since the country’s violent birth in 1971, and ruled for a number of extended periods since its 1975 assassination of Bangladesh’s charismatic founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Hasina, who is Rahman’s daughter, stood out for her success at keeping the military (and Islamists) in check, at least until last week, when the army chief refused to continue supporting her crackdown on rampaging protesters. The military then facilitated her escape to India and established an interim government of civilian “advisers” who have little experience with national issues.
To be sure, some South Asian countries have made some progress toward democracy. In particular, Bhutan’s democratic transition is proceeding apace, thanks to a benevolent king who has supported the transition from a traditional monarchy to a parliamentary system. Earlier this year, the country’s fourth national election brought an opposition party to power.
But elections alone – even if competitive – do not guarantee popular empowerment or adherence to constitutional rules, especially when the military holds decisive power. Consider Pakistan, which held elections earlier this year. The military’s preferred candidate, Shehbaz Sharif, returned as prime minister, but his government will survive only at the pleasure of the country’s effective ruler, the army chief. Until the rule of law is firmly entrenched and those wielding extra-constitutional power are unequivocally reined in, democratic progress will remain limited and reversible.
Myanmar learned this the hard way. Though the military had called the shots in the country since independence in 1948, it began ceding power to a nascent civilian government in 2015, filling the country with hope for a democratic future. But in February 2021 – barely six years later – it staged a coup. This time, however, resistance has proved intense, and heavily armed insurgent groups – some receiving “non-lethal aid” from the United States – are managing to expand their territorial control. In response, the military junta has stepped up punitive air strikes and artillery barrages.
The violence and deepening humanitarian crisis are fueling instability beyond Myanmar’s borders. Already, more than 32,000 ethnic Chin have sought refuge in India’s Mizoram state, and thousands more have fled to the state of Manipur, where their arrival has stoked violent ethnic conflict. And it is not just the Chin: India is also home to millions of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, whose ranks are set to grow as desperate Hindus flee Islamist attacks against them.
When it comes to security risks, immigration is just the beginning. Political turbulence in the Maldives – which began in 2012, when Islamist radicals forced the country’s democratically elected president to resign at gunpoint – has enabled China to gain a foothold in India’s maritime backyard. This year, China signed a military pact with the Maldives and docked a giant marine research ship in a Maldivian port. Meanwhile, Islamist radicals are expanding their grassroots base, establishing ISIS and al-Qaeda cells on the archipelago.
Mounting economic pressures compound the security risks. Pakistan has repeatedly sought International Monetary Fund bailouts in recent years. And Hasina’s overthrow could usher in hard times for the once-booming Bangladeshi economy, as the country’s foreign reserves dwindle rapidly. None of this is conducive to regional prosperity. As long as South Asian countries remain plagued by political instability, strong and sustainable economic growth will remain elusive.
The difficulty of maintaining political stability and advancing democratization can also be seen in Nepal – a country with which India has close cultural and historical ties. Last month, the country swore in its 14th government in just 16 years, led by four-time prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, of the pro-China Marxist-Leninist Party. Oli, who spent years in jail in the 1970s and 1980s for waging war against the state, is Nepal’s fifth head of government in five years, having replaced another former communist guerrilla, Pushpa Kamal Dahal.
All of this puts India, the world’s largest democracy and South Asia’s geographical hub, in a difficult situation. It must minimize the spillover effects of political and economic instability in its neighborhood, even as it continues to seek economic and strategic partnerships far beyond its troubled region.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
Many media accounts have credited the toppling of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government almost entirely to a student-led uprising. Unmentioned are either the army’s role in the overthrow, including packing the “Iron Lady” off to India, or the military’s return as the final arbiter in Bangladeshi national politics.
In reality, the regime change in the world’s eighth most-populous country amounts to a quiet military coup behind a civilian facade.
By installing an interim civilian government made up of only “advisers,” the coup leaders have not only forestalled U.S.-led sanctions but also helped foster a romanticized Western media narrative of a student-led “revolution” in the country.
The appointment of Muhammad Yunus as the “chief adviser,” or the head of the interim administration, has only helped mask military rule. The 84-year-old Yunus, a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microcredit, or giving small loans to rural families to help alleviate poverty.
With the duration and scope of powers of the interim administration undefined, its advisers work essentially at the direction of the military brass, especially the army chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, the power behind the throne. The advisers include two students who led the protests, a hardline Islamist leader and two retired army generals, one of them tasked with restoring law and order in the country.
To be clear, violent student-led, Islamist-backed protests against Hasina’s 15-year secular but increasingly undemocratic reign helped force her out of office. But the decisive factor that ended her rule was loss of support from the country’s powerful army. With protesters rampaging through the streets of the capital of Dhaka, the army’s refusal to enforce a government-ordered lockdown put Hasina’s own personal safety at risk, allowing the military to prevail upon her to flee the country.
No sooner had the 76-year-old Hasina departed for India aboard a military transport plane than mobs ransacked the prime minister’s sprawling official residence, looting every item that could be carried away, from paintings and furniture to fish from the pond.
Driving Hasina into exile appears not to have been a spur-of-the-moment military decision, but rather central to a well-thought-out plan for an indirect army takeover of the country. The international costs of killing a sitting prime minister in a coup, or putting her in prison without due process, were considered too high, making her forced banishment a better choice for the military brass.
Bangladesh’s decades-old cycle of political violence, after all, began with the predawn murder of Hasina’s father, the country’s charismatic founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in a 1975 army coup. President Rahman was killed by army officers in cold blood — along with his wife, three sons and their wives — while they were asleep at Rahman’s residence. Hasina, just 28 years old then, survived because she was abroad at that time.
What followed was prolonged political turmoil that prevented democracy from taking root. Coups and countercoups resulted in extended periods of military rule in the world’s most densely populated large country.
Bangladesh has no regional adversary, yet it has maintained a relatively large military with more than 200,000 personnel. Since external defense is not a major responsibility, the military has long pursued political machinations. When not ruling directly, it has sought to wield political power through pliant civilian-led governments.
Hasina kept the military and Islamist militancy in check, until the army chief used the student-led uprising to engineer her ouster by letting mob violence go beyond the control of police and paramilitary forces. Hasina had appointed Zaman as the army chief just weeks before her downfall, taking comfort in the fact that the general was married to her cousin.
Hasina’s fall, however, triggered a near-total collapse of the state, leading to widespread looting, vandalism, revenge killings and systematic attacks on the country’s small and long-persecuted Hindu minority. But with the mission accomplished by Hasina’s departure, the army chief finally pressed his troops into action to control the situation, including letting them fire on rioting protesters.
With its focus on profit and power, the military has a long history of abuses, as well as a nexus with radical Islamists. And like the military in Pakistan, from which Bangladesh seceded in 1971 after up to three million Bengalis died in a Pakistani genocide, the Bangladeshi armed forces maintain extensive commercial business interests, extending from real estate and hotels to banking, manufacturing and shipbuilding.
After this month’s silent coup, not only will democratization become more difficult, but already-weak civilian oversight over the military could evaporate.
Yet, with a U.S.-friendly interim administration having replaced the Hasina government, which the Biden administration openly targeted over democratic backsliding, Washington has little reason to impose coup-related aid restrictions on Bangladesh.
More than two dozen coups have occurred across the world since 2009, but the U.S. failed to formally condemn about half of those military takeovers because it saw them as favorable to American interests. Washington usually calls out a coup — an action legally necessitating a cutoff of U.S. foreign assistance — when the takeover is detrimental to American power and influence in the region.
Over the years, the U.S. has maintained cozy ties with military or military-backed regimes in Bangladesh. And it views the latest regime change as a positive development. But the White House and the State Department have denied Hasina’s allegation of U.S. involvement in her overthrow.
Still, with purges and crackdowns in full swing even as the nation remains in disarray, Bangladesh faces the daunting task of restoring the rule of law and reviving an economy battered by large-scale mob violence and destruction.
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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