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.
THE DRAMATIC OVERTHROW of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5 represents the biggest regional setback for India in more than a decade. The swift toppling, just six weeks after Hasina’s state visit to New Delhi, not only caught India by complete surprise but also carries adverse implications for Indian security. The development could weigh India down regionally at a time when New Delhi is seeking to play a greater role on the world stage.
Whereas New Delhi has reacted to the Bangladesh turmoil with deep concern and even alarm, India’s close strategic partner, America, has greeted Hasina’s fall with a sense of contentment. Washington’s smug satisfaction of Hasina’s exit extends, according to one analyst, to “gloating” by a section of the US establishment over the failure of the Indian project in Bangladesh.
US President Joe Biden’s administration had openly gunned for Hasina’s government, despite the fact that her secular regime kept the military and Islamists in check. Located thousands of miles away from the subcontinent, the US, in the name of democracy promotion, can afford to play geopolitical games without affecting its interests. But India, with vital security interests at stake, has no such luxury.
Democracy promotion has long served as a valuable geopolitical tool for the US. After greeting with glee the regime change in Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most populous country, the Biden administration is now working on a new regime-change project by offering Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “amnesty” if he ceded power.
In fact, the US targeting of Hasina’s government served as a reminder for New Delhi of the wider divergence of American and Indian interests in India’s own neighbourhood, including in relation to Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.
After Myanmar—which is racked by an internal war that has been fuelled by stringent US-led sanctions and “non-lethal aid” to insurgents—Bangladesh could become the second immediate neighbour of India to be destabilised by short-sighted policies of the Biden administration. Greater turmoil in the region would seriously crimp Indian interests.
A destabilised Bangladesh would be India’s geopolitical nightmare. It would impose sustained costs on Indian interests, including potentially subverting the security of India’s vulnerable Northeast. It could also open the floodgates to the flow of Bangladeshi refugees to India, which is already home to countless millions of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on Earth, if one excludes micro-states and mini-states.
The rise of violent Islamism in Bangladesh, including scores of incidents of Islamist terrorism in this century, has been a growing Indian concern. Extremists linked with ISIS (Islamic State), Al Qaeda and the Bangladeshi, Pakistan-backed Jamaat-e-Islami have a long record of assaulting religious and ethnic minorities as well as secular, liberal activists. In a destabilised Bangladesh, such forces would proliferate and pose cross-border challenges to India’s security.
No sooner had the army chief announced Hasina’s fall than rioters systematically sought to erase symbols of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and statehood, including burning down the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka and toppling or defacing the statues and portraits of the father of the nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
Meanwhile, New Delhi’s ‘Act East’ policy, already reeling from the growing turmoil in Myanmar, has suffered another blow from the regime change in Bangladesh, which has put at risk connectivity and transit links with India.
HAVING PLAYED A CENTRAL role in forcing Hasina to flee the country, the army has re-emerged as the final arbiter in Bangladesh politics. The interim government, made up of ‘advisers’ with little experience in handling national matters, is just the civilian façade for military rule.
The army chief, General Waker-uz-Zaman, despite being related to Hasina by marriage, was instrumental in her downfall. Like her late father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader who ignored warnings in 1975 that army officers in Dhaka were plotting to stage a coup and kill him, Hasina disregarded advice that appointing the ambitious, Islamist-leaning Zaman as army chief could invite an army takeover. Hasina took comfort in the fact that Zaman was married to her cousin.
But just six weeks after Zaman became the army chief, Hasina fell from power. As street protests intensified, it became apparent that Zaman was wavering in his support for the Hasina government.
Through deliberate inaction, Zaman allowed the situation to deteriorate to the point that the police and paramilitary forces could no longer contain widespread looting, vandalism and arson, including attacks on public infrastructure and the Hindu minority. The army chief then used the violent upheaval to force the prime minister to leave the country on August 5. The night before, he bluntly conveyed to Hasina the army’s refusal to enforce the lockdown she had ordered, telling her that his soldiers would not fire on protesters, many of whom by then were rampaging through the streets of Dhaka.
But with “mission accomplished”, Zaman ordered his soldiers to fire on Awami League activists protesting against Hasina’s forced departure from the country. In Gopalganj, Hasina’s home district with a sizeable Hindu minority, the military action left several people killed or wounded.
The army brass saw forcing Hasina to flee to India as a better choice than killing or imprisoning her. Bumping off Hasina in the way her father was murdered would have made her a martyr in the eyes of the millions who still support her, while jailing the sitting prime minister would have created a constitutional crisis impeding the army’s appointment of a successor administration.
Hasina’s forced departure, however, triggered greater lawlessness, extending from widespread looting and revenge killings to atrocities against the long-persecuted Hindu minority, which had faced Islamist attacks periodically even under the Awami League government. In the recent protests, armed rioters, according to the official count, killed 42 policemen and looted 7.62mm rifles from law enforcement personnel. Only members of Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion and police carry this type of rifle. After the bloody mayhem, Bangladesh is struggling to fully restore order.
The total collapse of government authority in Bangladesh was redolent of the 2022 chaos in Sri Lanka when the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic regime fell apart. Just as Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country on a military jet without resigning, Hasina arrived in India suddenly aboard a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J Super Hercules military transport plane without formally tendering her resignation to the president. And just as protesters in Colombo occupied the presidential palace, mobs in Dhaka ransacked the prime minister’s sprawling official residence, looting each and every article that could be carried away.
But, unlike in Sri Lanka, the army played a key role in the regime change in Bangladesh, including handpicking members of the new interim administration.
There is also one ominous parallel between the upheaval in Bangladesh and the 2012 political turmoil in the Maldives, in terms of what the rioters sought to accomplish.
Sheikh Hasina leaves Dhaka on a military helicopter, August 5, 2024
The total collapse of government authority in Bangladesh was redolent of the 2022 chaos in Sri Lanka when the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic regime fell apart. Hasina arrived in India aboard a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J super hercules military transport plane without formally tendering her resignation to the president
When the Maldives’ first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, was forced to resign at gunpoint, Islamists ransacked the country’s main museum in Malé, the capital, smashing priceless Buddhist and Hindu statues made of coral and limestone, virtually erasing all evidence of the Maldives’ pre-Islamic past before Maldivians converted to Islam in the 12th century. “The whole pre-Islamic history is gone,” the museum’s director then lamented.
Similarly, no sooner had the army chief announced Hasina’s fall than rioters systematically sought to erase symbols of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and statehood, including burning down the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka and toppling or defacing the statues and portraits of the Father of the Nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The museum was central to the history of how Bangladesh was created—a violent birth that occurred after up to 3 million Bangladeshi civilians (mainly Hindus singled out by Pakistan’s army) were slaughtered, some 200,000 women were coerced into rape camps, and about 10 million people fled to India.
The August 5 vandalism against national symbols was an attack on Bangladesh’s identity, its history and its statehood. It showed that, more than half-a-century after the country’s birth, there are still elements within Bangladesh that have not reconciled to its secession from Pakistan.
Since 1975, Bangladesh has experienced more than two dozen army coups or coup attempts. By assassinating the father of the nation, the army became the most powerful political player, ruling Bangladesh directly or indirectly for extended periods. It was the ‘iron lady’ Hasina who kept the military (and Islamists) in check—until the recent violent uprising against her rule led the army chief to compel her to leave the country.
Today, General Zaman is the power behind the throne. When decisive power rests with an extra-constitutional authority, democratisation can hardly gain traction.
The interim government has no constitutional mandate. The Bangladesh constitution calls for elections to be held within 90 days of the dissolution of parliament, yet the duration (or the scope of powers) of the interim government has not been defined. Political discontent will grow if the constitutional deadline passes without the holding of elections.
The country’s president holds a largely ceremonial position. And the interim government consists only of advisers. Advisers are not the same as decision-makers. Despite a US-friendly chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, nominally heading the interim government, Hasina’s overthrow has left a major power vacuum in the country that is being filled by the military—and Islamists.
The army is puppet-mastering the moves and decisions of the interim government advisers, who, in any case, owe their positions to General Zaman.
Against this backdrop, purges are in full swing, spurring greater uncertainty and fear in Bangladesh. The country’s chief justice and the next five senior-most justices of the Supreme Court were made to resign virtually at gunpoint. The purges have extended to all institutions, from the military, intelligence agencies and police to the central bank and universities.
One can expect more purges and crackdowns, some silent ones and some possibly violent ones. The aim is to stifle all support for Hasina and demolish her family’s political legacy. The Awami League has already been directed to “reorganise” itself (that is, rid itself of Hasina’s influence) in order to participate in the next election.
US President Joe Biden, Sheikh Hasina and First Lady Jill Biden in New York, September 21, 2022
The Biden administration’s hard line toward Hasina began with its December 10, 2021 imposition of sanctions on its Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on grounds that RAB committed alleged human rights abuses as part of its war on drugs
RUDYARD KIPLING’S PORTRAYAL of strategic skulduggery in his 1901 novel Kim popularised the “Great Game” of the time between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia for control over Afghanistan and Central Asia. Since then, several other Great Games have been played out or continue to be at play.
The de facto coup d’état in Bangladesh and the externally fuelled internal war in Myanmar hint at a new Great Game at play in southern Asia, despite the risks that the machinations could extend Myanmar’s destabilisation to Bangladesh and Northeast India, thereby spurring greater regional tensions and an upsurge of radical Islamism. This Great Game is being played on several levels, including diplomatic, espionage and economic, as well as through political manoeuvrings.
The US and China have separately sought to enhance their interests in southern Asia in ways that are generating acute security and economic risks for India, the regional power. But while China sees India as an adversary, the US and India are friends, yet on regional issues of core Indian interest, Washington and New Delhi are not on the same page.
The US-India strategic divergence over Bangladesh began in 1971 when US President Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to the Pakistani genocide in East Pakistan and sought to prevent the birth of Bangladesh, including by urging China to open a military front against India. The US grudgingly recognised Bangladesh as an independent nation in April 1972 after a majority of countries had already done so.
In the subsequent years, even as India-US relations improved, the strategic dissonance between the two powers over Bangladesh never disappeared. US interests, after all, never aligned with Indian interests. Indeed, the dissonance became more pronounced when the Biden administration started gunning for Hasina, ignoring Indian concerns about the growing Islamist menace and political volatility in India’s neighbourhood.
In the name of seeking to restore democratic governance, the US has maintained cosy ties with every military or military-backed regime in Bangladesh since 1975.
Now, after the ouster of Hasina, Washington has said its approach to the military-chosen interim government would be based on “Bangladeshi people’s democratic aspirations and … a path to democratic governance”. It has welcomed the new interim government in Dhaka, saying it will work with it “as it charts a democratic future for the people of Bangladesh”.
But the new administration, with a radical Islamist leader as one of its advisers, is just a civilian setup for army rule. In a nod to the growing power of Islamic fundamentalists and extremists in Bangladesh, the army chief included in the interim administration a leader of the Hefazat-e-Islam, a coalition of Islamist organisations that seeks a system based on Sharia (Islamic law). The Hefazat-e-Islam has been linked to attacks on the Hindu minority and to last year’s killing of a young blogger.
Muhammad Yunus being sworn in as head of Bangladesh’s interim government in Dhaka, August 8, 2024 (Photo: AFP)
The interim government consists only of advisers. Despite a US-friendly chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, nominally heading the interim government, Hasina’s overthrow has left a major power vacuum in the country that is being filled by the military
The Biden administration’s hard line toward the Hasina government began with its December 10, 2021 imposition of sanctions on Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on grounds that RAB committed alleged human rights abuses as part of its war on drugs. Bangladesh was excluded from the Summits for Democracy convened by Biden in December 2021 and March 2023, while military-dominated Pakistan was invited both times though it did not attend either.
Bangladesh’s impressive economic growth trajectory under Hasina stood in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil in Pakistan. But, while continuing to reward Pakistan by prioritising short-term geopolitical considerations, the Biden administration sharply stepped up its criticism of democratic backsliding in Bangladesh.
It also started wielding the visa-sanctions stick against the Hasina government. Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled a new US policy on May 24, 2023 to restrict the issuance of visa for any Bangladeshi individual believed to be involved in undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh. Washington’s increasing hard line approach emboldened anti- Hasina political forces in Bangladesh, including Islamists and the largest opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had allied itself with the Jamaat-e-Islami.
Now Hasina, alleging a US role in her overthrow, has reportedly claimed that, “I could have remained in power if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin’s Island and allowed America to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal.” Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed, who holds an American green card, apparently came under immediate pressure to recant her mother’s allegations. Hours after confirming to WION television channel Hasina’s remarks about the US and St Martin’s, Wazed posted on X denying that she made any such statement.
The White House, asked about Hasina’s allegation that she was overthrown because of her refusal to lease St Martin’s to the US, stated flatly that “we have had no involvement at all” in the events in Bangladesh.
It was on June 21, 2023 that Hasina openly raised the St Martin’s issue, telling a news conference at her official residence in Dhaka that if she were to “lease the island of St Martin’s to someone, then there would be no problem” with her staying ensconced in power. But, she added, such a lease “won’t happen” on her watch.
The US sought to build close defence ties with Bangladesh by urging the Hasina government unsuccessfully to sign the General Security of Military Information Agreement (or GSOMIA) and the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (or ACSA). But the US has never acknowledged wanting to lease St Martin’s, a small island that is closer to Myanmar than to Bangladesh’s coast.
There are already around 750 American military bases spread across at least 80 countries. The US may be seeking to expand its strategic foothold to new areas where its presence is non-existent or weak, including the Bay of Bengal.
St Martin’s, with its vantage location just eight kilometres from the Myanmar coast, could serve as a US listening post. Such a listening post, however, would be more useful for electronic surveillance of sanctions-battered Myanmar and friendly India than America’s sole challenger at the global level, China.
The new Great Game, of course, also includes Russia and China. The Hasina foreign policy embraced the concept of “equidistant diplomacy” in relation to China and India to help underscore Bangladesh’s neutrality in the Sino-Indian geopolitical rivalry. Beijing, however, saw a pro-India tilt in Hasina’s foreign policy, a perception reinforced by her more recent announcement that Dhaka would chose India over China for the multibillion-dollar Teesta River development project, which is to come up on Bangladeshi territory close to India’s narrow Siliguri Corridor known as the ‘chicken neck’.
Yet, like Russia, China sees a likely American hand in the regime change in Bangladesh, with Chinese state media stating that if any foreign power deserves blame for Hasina’s overthrow, it is the US. Three weeks before the January 7, 2024 Bangladesh election, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman had warned that, if Hasina were re-elected to a third term in office, the US would create an Arab Spring-type of upheaval to bring about regime change in Dhaka.
Strategic skulduggery rarely leaves any political fingerprints. The truth may never be known, including whether, as some suggest, the CIA worked through its longstanding partner, Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, to foment an uprising against Hasina’s rule. In Pakistan, Imran Khan has blamed the US for helping to topple his own government in 2022 in league with the Pakistani military and his political opponents.
In the post-Hasina era, Bangladesh is likely to bolster its ties with China and Pakistan, which could come largely at India’s expense, including the security of the northeastern Indian states. At stake also are India’s transit rights through Bangladesh, Indian security and counterterrorism cooperation with Bangladesh, Indian investments in Bangladesh, and cooperation with Dhaka to control illegal migration to India, including by the Rohingya
What is clear, though, is that, despite Washington and New Delhi pledging in a joint statement last year to become “among the closest partners in the world”, American interests do not align with India’s core interests in the arc extending from Myanmar to Iran. Bangladesh is just the latest wake-up call for New Delhi.
Dealing with this unpalatable reality puts India on the horns of a dilemma, with no easy choices. Although India will continue to cultivate deeper ties with the US, the Indo-US strategic dissonance in India’s own neighbourhood is already quite jarring, given that Narendra Modi is widely seen as the country’s most pro-US prime minister since Indian independence.
As for Bangladesh, its recovery from the political turmoil is likely to be an extended and difficult process. This is apparent from the retribution campaign extending to expanded purges and crackdowns.
Political upheaval or prolonged instability imposes major economic costs. Consider the case of Pakistan, which has repeatedly sought International Monetary Fund bailouts in recent years.
In Bangladesh, the political upheaval, by stalling economic activity and creating unrest in the banking sector, is likely to usher in hard times, with inflation already spiralling and foreign-exchange reserves dwindling fast. It will not be easy to restore the confidence of foreign investors after the large-scale looting, vandalism and arson, including attacks on public infrastructure and setting ablaze hotels, hospitals and homes.
In the post-Hasina era, Bangladesh is likely to bolster its ties with China and Pakistan, which could come largely at India’s expense, including the security of the northeastern Indian states. At stake also are India’s transit rights through Bangladesh, Indian security and counterterrorism cooperation with Bangladesh, Indian investments in Bangladesh, and cooperation with Dhaka to control illegal migration to India, including by the Rohingya.
India’s longest land border is with Bangladesh, not with Tibet or Pakistan. And this is a porous border. India has no choice but to make major investments in strengthening the security of its borders, including with Bangladesh and Myanmar. India’s open border with Nepal poses a different set of challenges, which also need to be addressed.
With polls in as many as 76 countries, 2024 is the biggest election year in history. This year’s raft of elections has already produced a left-leaning government in Britain, political gridlock in France, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s return to office for a third term, and the elevation of the pro-sovereignty William Lai (賴清德) as Taiwan’s president, but with his Democratic Progressive Party losing its majority in the legislature.
But no election will have a greater global impact than the one in the US. Whether American voters elect Kamala Harris or Donald Trump as the next president, and whether the Republicans or Democrats gain control of the US Congress, will reverberate across the world, including in Taiwan, which confronts increasing Chinese coercive pressure.
At a time when a major geopolitical reconfiguration is underway, with America’s global preeminence at stake, the US is heading to its most consequential presidential election in a generation.
US domestic politics has a bearing on international issues of peace and war. In fact, hardened polarization in the US has created a partisan divide on some key foreign policy issues. For example, according to one poll, Democrats worry about Russia above all while Republicans are most concerned about China.
Outgoing President Joe Biden’s national security team largely comprises “liberal interventionists” — essentially, hawks on the left — whereas many on the right, including Trump, can be considered non-interventionists (or, as their critics call them, “isolationists”).
If Harris, who has a biracial Black and Indian American identity, becomes the first female president of the US, she is likely to sustain the Biden approach to the Ukraine war, thereby precluding American support for any ceasefire effort. The US, without putting its own soldiers in harm’s way, is deeply involved in the war that has increasingly devastated Ukraine.
By contrast, if Trump returns to the White House, he is unlikely to prolong the US involvement in the war or support sending tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine. Tellingly, he has chosen as his running mate J.D. Vance, who led the opposition in the Senate to this year’s fresh US$61 billion Ukrainian assistance package.
Indeed, Trump’s record as president between 2017 and 2021 underlined his aversion to America funding wars or getting entangled in conflicts around the world, instead of focusing on rebuilding its power capabilities.
In 2020, he famously said at a White House news conference that the “top people in the Pentagon” want to “do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars.” This statement echoed then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about America’s “military-industrial complex.”
Last month, Trump reiterated a promise that, as president, he would end “the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine.”
But Trump has also made controversial comments about Taiwan recently, implying that he might be willing to leave Taiwan to its fate. “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything,” Trump said in a newsmagazine interview, while suggesting that the US would have difficulty defending the island because of its distance, stating “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away (from the US). It’s 68 miles away from China.”
By tacitly asking for a “protection fee,” those remarks underscore Trump’s long-held transactional approach to foreign affairs. In practice, though, a new Trump administration, if it assumes office, is likely to be tougher on China than Team Biden.
It should not be forgotten that it was the Trump administration that in 2017 reversed a 45-year US policy of aiding China’s economic rise. That policy, initiated by then-President Richard Nixon, helped spawn not only a more aggressive and expansionist China but also the greatest strategic adversary the US has ever faced.
Today, Trump has China in his sights again, which may well explain why he wants the US to stop squandering resources on the war in Ukraine, a country he sees as not being vital to American national interests. If Trump returns to the White House, the last thing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) may want to do is to order a Chinese invasion of Taiwan on the new US president’s watch.
But even if Harris defeats Trump in November, Biden’s conciliatory approach toward China may not survive. Biden could go down in history as the last American president with a softer approach toward Beijing.
Much before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden began easing Trump-era pressure on China. He effectively let China off the hook for both obscuring COVID-19’s origins and failing to meet its commitments under the 2020 “phase one” trade deal with the US. He also dropped fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of the military-linked Chinese tech giant Huawei.
But since the start of the Ukraine war, Biden has sought to focus on containing Russia by stabilizing US ties with China. This has allowed Xi’s unrelenting expansionism — from the South and East China Seas to Hong Kong and the Himalayas — to remain cost-free. US sanctions over China’s Muslim gulag have essentially been symbolic, despite the Biden administration acknowledging that the mass incarceration constitutes “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
To advance its long-term interests, the US needs to focus more on a globally ascendant and aggressive China, which is seeking to supplant America as the world’s foremost power, than on a sanctions-battered Russia whose ambitions remain regionally confined.
At a time when the risk of Chinese aggression against Taiwan looms ever larger, the next US administration will have to redouble efforts on a priority basis to deter China from using force against that island democracy. With Xi’s appetite for risk having grown, a greater US stress on deterrence than on diplomacy has become imperative to forestall a military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait.
Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
With his relentless espousal of non-violence, the Dalai Lama embodies Tibetan resistance to Chinese occupation. This helps to explain why China is so intent on choosing his successor, and why the US and India must make sure that it does not.
As the Dalai Lama – the spiritual leader of Tibet – visits the United States to receive medical treatment on his knees, concerns over who will succeed him have become acute. While Tibetans around the world pray that the 88-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, still has plenty of life ahead of him, China is eagerly awaiting his demise, so that it can install a puppet successor.
Tibetans regard the Dalai Lama as the living incarnation of Buddha. Since 1391, the Dalai Lama has been reincarnated 13 times. When one Dalai Lama dies, the search for the next one begins, with a council of senior disciples taking responsibility for identifying him, based on signs and visions. But in recent years, the Chinese government has insisted that only it has the right to identify the next Dalai Lama.
This would not be the first time China selected a leader of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1995, it anointed its own Panchen Lama, whose spiritual authority is second only to that of the Dalai Lama, after abducting the actual Panchen Lama – a six-year-old boy who had already been confirmed by the Dalai Lama. Almost three decades later, the real Panchen Lama is among the world’s longest-serving political prisoners.
China also appointed the Karmapa, Tibetan Buddhism’s third most important spiritual leader and the head of the Karma Kagyu sect. But in 1999, its appointee, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, fled to India. The ease with which the 14-year-old Karmapa escaped China raised suspicions among Indians about his loyalties. After imposing travel restrictions on him, India decided in 2018 no longer to recognize the China-anointed Karmapa as the legitimate head of his sect. Now, he and his rival Karmapa, Trinley Thaye Dorje, have issued a joint statement pledging to cooperatively resolve the leadership split in the Karma Kagyu sect.
But the Dalai Lama is China’s “white whale.” The incumbent – who was identified as the Dalai Lama in 1937, at age two – has been a thorn in the side of the Communist Party of China (CPC) since China’s 1951 annexation of Tibet. With his relentless espousal of non-violence, the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, embodies Tibetan resistance to the Chinese occupation. (Had Tibet remained self-governing like Taiwan, it would be the world’s tenth-largest country by area.)
In his past incarnations, the Dalai Lama was not only Tibet’s spiritual leader, but also its political leader, making him a kind of cross between a pope and a president. But the Dalai Lama ceded his political role in 2011 to a Tibetan government-in-exile, which is democratically elected every five years by Tibetan refugees living in India and elsewhere.
Moreover, the Dalai Lama has declared that he might choose not to be reborn – a decision that would undermine the legitimacy of any Chinese-anointed successor. He knows that, for China, a Dalai Lama devoted to the CPC is much more useful than no Dalai Lama at all. He also knows that, while he has retained his mental acuity, his body is weakening. In 2016, he underwent radiation therapy for prostate cancer. He says he was “completely cured,” but he continues to struggle with his knees. Given his advanced age, more health problems are to be expected.
The Dalai Lama’s frailty is one reason why his travel schedule has slowed considerably. But it is not the only one: bowing to Chinese pressure, most countries – including European democracies and Asia’s Buddhist states (except Japan) – are unwilling to grant him entry. Fortunately, some countries have retained their backbones. The US is hosting the Dalai Lama for knee treatment, and India has proudly been his home for more than 65 years. India has officially designated the Dalai Lama its “most esteemed and honored guest,” while the Tibetan leader describes himself as a “son of India.”
In fact, India is home to the vast majority of Tibetan exiles, and has played a central role in helping to preserve the Tibetan culture, including by supporting Tibetan-language schools. By contrast, China has been working actively to destroy Tibetan culture and identity, especially since Chinese President Xi Jinping has been in charge.
Meanwhile, China’s appropriation of Tibetan natural resources has gone into overdrive, with consequences that extend far beyond the Tibetan Plateau. Resource-rich Tibet is a source of fresh water for more than one-fifth of the world’s population and a global biodiversity hotspot. The plateau influences Asia’s weather and monsoonal patterns, as well as the Northern Hemisphere’s “atmospheric general circulation” – the system of winds that helps transport warm air from the equator toward higher latitudes, creating different climate zones.
It is imperative that the US and India work together to foil China’s plan to handpick the next Dalai Lama. Already, America’s Tibetan Policy and Support Act, which took effect in 2020, says that “the wishes of the 14th Dalai Lama, including any written instructions, should play a determinative role in the selection, education, and veneration of a future 15th Dalai Lama.” And it calls for sanctions on Chinese officials who interfere with Tibetan Buddhist succession practices.
But more must be done. For starters, US President Joe Biden should take the opportunity presented by the Dalai Lama’s knee treatment to fulfill a 2020 campaign promise to meet with the Dalai Lama. More broadly, the US should work with India to devise a multilateral strategy to counter Xi’s plan to capture the more than 600-year-old institution of the Dalai Lama. This must include efforts to persuade the Dalai Lama to spell out, once and for all, the rules that must be followed to identify his successor.
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.
Preserving its global dominance appears to have driven the West’s expanding involvement in the Ukraine conflict, with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently arguing in a column that a Russian victory would be “a turning point in history, the moment when the West finally loses its post-war hegemony.” Such a decisive outcome, however, seems doubtful, given the attritional character of the Ukraine war and the progressively escalating Western involvement in the conflict.
The defining moment that formally brings the era of Western preeminence to an end is more likely to be a surprise Chinese aggression aimed at subjugating Taiwan.
With the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East testing U.S.-led alliances and with America already looking overextended, Chinese aggression against Taiwan could come sooner than many in U.S. policy circles expect.
There are ominous signs that Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing his country for a war over Taiwan. But whether the U.S. is prepared to respond to such a contingency is becoming a vexed question, especially as international concerns grow that Xi might view America’s preoccupation with extended conflicts in Europe and the Middle East as a window of opportunity to act, without triggering a full-fledged war with the U.S.
The defense of Taiwan is assuming greater significance for international security for two other reasons. The first is the possibility that Xi might seek to replicate in the Taiwan Strait the techniques of incremental expansionism that his regime has successfully honed in the South China Sea without drawing a concerted U.S. response.
Tellingly, three successive U.S. administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s intensifying expansionism in the South China Sea, relying instead on rhetoric or symbolic actions. As a result, the American debate now largely centers on how the South China Sea was effectively lost and what can be done now to respond to China’s increasingly aggressive sea tactics aimed at tightening its grip on this strategic corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
These tactics are triggering a number of incidents with other claimant states, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam, even as China seeks to interfere with U.S. and allied air and maritime transits.
China’s recent menacing military drills that encircled Taiwan seemed to be a rehearsal for implementing at least a blockade with the aim of slowly throttling the island democracy. In fact, this was the third Chinese dress rehearsal in less than two years for an assault on Taiwan.
Compared to the first large-scale Chinese military exercise in August 2022, when then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei, the latest drills were more sophisticated, elaborate and geographically expansive.
The second reason is the U.S. failure to genuinely pivot to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific, despite U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin claiming that this region is “our priority theater of operations” and “the heart of American grand strategy.”
A just-released book, “Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power,” by two former American policymakers, Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine, bemoans that America’s “pivot to Asia” strategy (first unveiled in 2011) has failed thus far because a coherent approach to the Indo-Pacific remains largely absent. Consequently, the U.S. has been unable to respond adequately to China’s aggressive rise, in what the authors call one of the greatest mistakes in American foreign policy in the post-World War II period.
The plain fact is that, as long as conflicts elsewhere distract the U.S. from the pressing Asian security challenges, the Indo-Pacific is unlikely to become the hub of its grand strategy.
The latest American foreign assistance package that provides $60.8 billion for Ukraine and a meager $8.1 billion for Indo-Pacific security, including Taiwan, has dimmed the prospects of a correction in skewed strategic priorities. In fact, U.S. President Joe Biden recently plunged the U.S. deeper into the Ukraine war by permitting Kyiv to use American-donated weapons to strike inside Russia.
More fundamentally, the drawn-out Ukraine war is crimping America’s China policy and weakening its deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific, thereby making a Taiwan Strait crisis more likely.
In an effort to forestall the U.S. from realizing its worst geopolitical nightmare, a formal Sino-Russian alliance, and to dissuade China from directly aiding the Kremlin’s war machine, Biden has been compelled to adopt a more conciliatory approach to Beijing.
This approach, in turn, is emboldening China vis-à-vis Taiwan. While stepping up coercive pressures on Taiwan, Beijing is making its ultimate goal clearer. Xi recently declared that the “essence” of his national rejuvenation drive is “the unification of the motherland.” And his new defense minister, Dong Jun, while accusing the U.S. of “malign intentions [that] are drawing Taiwan to the dangers of war,” told the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that, “Anyone who dares split Taiwan from China will be smashed to pieces and court their own destruction.”
Yet some in the West insist that the U.S. must first rout Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield before turning to deter China. As if Xi would wait to move against Taiwan until the U.S. has humiliated Russia in Ukraine in a long war and then turned its attention to containing China. Indeed, the last thing Xi wants is an end to the Ukraine war because that would leave the U.S. free to pivot to Asia.
Make no mistake: With China’s lengthening shadow belligerently darkening Taiwan’s doorstep, the risks of failing to deter Chinese aggression against the self-governing island are increasing. Consequently, calls are growing in the U.S. that Washington must embrace strategic clarity in relation to Taiwan’s defense by abandoning its outdated strategic ambiguity policy, which was formulated when China was still backward and in no position to annex Taiwan.
America’s deepening involvement in the Ukraine war at a time it seems ill-prepared for armed conflict over Taiwan is a strategic mistake that could eventually come to haunt its long-term security.
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).
Photo by AFP: Supporters of Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister and leader of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), celebrate vote counting results for India’s general election, at BJP headquarters in New Delhi on June 4, 2024.
India’s election, the world’s largest democratic exercise, may have delivered a stunning surprise by denying Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party an outright majority in parliament, but this setback is unlikely to affect the stability or direction of his third-term government.
The primary reason is that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, contested the election in alliance with several small political groups, with the coalition winning a majority of seats in parliament’s ruling lower house.
Still, the BJP’s loss of its commanding majority in the lower house represents a blow to Modi’s political standing, including puncturing his air of invincibility. After stacking up political win after win, an overconfident Modi had predicted even before the campaign formally began that the BJP would secure more than two-thirds of the seats in the lower house.
The BJP’s failure to win a simple majority on its own, however, is unlikely to have a direct bearing on Modi’s national agenda or foreign policy. The allied parties Modi will depend on are provincial groups with no national vision or ideas.
Moreover, while the fragmented opposition may have unified to stop Modi’s juggernaut in the election, it lacks a common agenda or leader, which raises the question of whether its unity will endure. In fact, the combined number of seats won by the multiple parties in the opposition coalition is slightly less than what the BJP secured on its own.
Modi, 73, is entering a second decade as prime minister, despite a strong anti-incumbency sentiment in Indian society. Only one other Indian leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, secured a third term decades ago.
Modi’s leadership has given India political stability, robust economic growth and accelerated military modernization. India’s international profile and geopolitical weight are rising, partly because the end of China’s economic boom has thrown into relief the emergence of Asia’s other demographic giant as a geopolitical and economic force. India is now the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
After the election results, Modi declared that his third term would represent a “new chapter of big decisions.” But, given India’s fractious politics, big decisions often tend to fuel division and polarization, especially when they challenge entrenched interests. In his second term, Modi, for example, was compelled to repeal farm reform laws after a year of opposition-backed grassroots protests.
With his pro-growth and pro-market agenda, Modi is aiming to transform India into a global manufacturing hub at a time when Western companies are interested in shifting production away from China. Consequently, his new term is likely to see greater government spending not just in manufacturing and infrastructure but also on human capital, particularly in education and training.
The new government will have to urgently consider the nation’s foreign policy challenges, above all the military standoff with China, which recently entered its fifth year. The tense standoff, triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments on some Indian borderlands, may not be grabbing international headlines, but China persists with a frenzied buildup of force deployments along the Himalayan border, as if it is preparing for war. China recently deployed its most advanced J-20 stealth fighter jets near the India frontier.
India’s most-pressing foreign policy challenges relate to its troubled neighborhood, not least a strengthening strategic axis between China and Pakistan, with both these nuclear-armed allies staking claims to swaths of Indian territory. India is already the world’s third-largest defense spender, behind the U.S. and China.
More fundamentally, Modi has helped shape a pragmatic foreign policy vision. Shorn of ideology, Indian foreign policy has sought to revitalize the country’s economic and military security, while avoiding having to overtly choose one power over another as a dominant partner.
In practice, however, closer cooperation with the U.S. has remained Modi’s signature foreign policy initiative, despite some new irritants in the bilateral relationship, including the role of U.S.- and Canada-based Sikh militants.
While tilting toward the West, India remains loath to enter into a formal military alliance with the Western bloc. President Joe Biden’s reluctance to say anything on the Sino-Indian military standoff, let alone side with New Delhi, reminds India that it must defend itself all on its own.
India’s independent approach to international affairs is unlikely to change given that New Delhi believes in friendship without dependence. This makes India the world’s ultimate “swing state” in the current transition from the post–World War II American-led order to a new global order whose contours are still not clearly visible.
In contending with China, its sole challenger at the global level, the U.S. needs a degree of adaptability in forging partnerships, instead of hewing to the Cold War–style “us versus them” approach. A country as large as India cannot become just another Japan or Britain to America. Yet no anti-China alliance can play a strategically meaningful role without India, which has locked horns with the Chinese military in a way no other power has done in this century.
To be sure, India’s size and diversity pose enormous challenges. It is now the world’s most populous nation and is demographically and culturally very heterogeneous.
Still, as the latest election highlights, India’s democratic framework serves as a pillar of inclusion, stability and strength. By empowering people at the grassroots level through participatory processes and open dialogue, the Indian political system has enabled members of historically marginalized classes and castes to gradually gain prominence in politics and bureaucracy. Modi’s own humble beginnings illustrate this.
India today is an ascendant global player, and Modi’s focus in the third term will likely be on enabling India to play a bigger role on the world stage. India’s accelerated rise will not only increase its salience in the global balance of power but also help advance American goals in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s new economic and geopolitical hub.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
Japan has become one of Ukraine’s most-important financial backers, pouring in some $12.1 billion in aid to support the country’s war-battered economy and its defenses with nonlethal equipment such as anti-drone systems.
“As I often say, Ukraine of today may be East Asia of tomorrow,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a joint session of the U.S. Congress two weeks ago, underlining the rationale for aligning Tokyo closely with America’s de facto proxy war against Russia.
But how does Kishida’s leadership role on Ukraine, including sanctions on Russia and a long-term commitment to support postwar reconstruction, tangibly advance Japan’s strategic interests at a time when its own neighborhood is becoming increasingly dangerous?
Oddly, there has been little debate in Japan on this issue. Yet the country’s deepening engagement with Ukraine at a time it is ill-prepared for armed conflict over Taiwan is a huge strategic mistake.
The drawn-out Ukraine war is not just impeding the U.S.-led attempt to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism, it is also stretching American resources thinly and weakening Washington’s deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific region, thereby making a Taiwan Strait crisis more likely.
Kishida’s surprise move in December, at Washington’s urging, to ship Patriot air-defense systems to the U.S. to cover for ones being sent to Kyiv illustrates the risks of a Ukraine-centric approach.
Any Chinese operation to blockade or attack Taiwan would likely intrude into Japanese airspace and waters, conceivably pulling Tokyo into a war over the island democracy. Yet amid signs Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing his country to go to war over Taiwan, Kishida has agreed to take weapons out of Japan’s air defenses for an increasingly hopeless war in distant Europe.
In fact, with U.S. attention and resources focused on conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, China’s efforts to alter the territorial and maritime status quo in Asia and secure strategic dominance are reaching a tipping point.
Yet some in the West myopically insist that the U.S. must first defeat Russia in Ukraine before pivoting to deter China. As if Xi would wait to move against Taiwan until the U.S. has humiliated Russia in a long war and was then ready to direct greater attention his way. Indeed, the last thing Xi would like is an end to the Ukraine war because that would leave the U.S. free to focus on the Indo-Pacific region.
This explains why China, as Washington now acknowledges, is quietly aiding the Kremlin’s war machine by supplying technologies and geospatial intelligence. The transfers suggest that, before making a move on Taiwan, Xi wants the Ukraine war to further deplete America’s weapons and munitions stocks.
The flip side to America’s deepening involvement in conflicts elsewhere is a desire to avoid direct confrontation with China. This explains U.S. President Joe Biden’s more conciliatory approach to Beijing in recent months, including a greater emphasis on diplomacy than on deterrence.
The U.S. may still be the world’s foremost military power, but it is in no position to meaningfully take on Russia and China simultaneously. According to its own official national security doctrine, the U.S. maintains the military capability to fight and defeat China or Russia with some allied support — but not both simultaneously.
In recent decades, the U.S. has waged overlapping wars, but these were against much weaker states, namely Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, these protracted wars exposed shortcomings in America’s ability to pursue two military missions simultaneously at full tempo.
In this light, Biden has stepped up his administration’s outreach to Beijing to help avert a Chinese attack on Taiwan that could result in a direct war between the U.S. and a near-peer adversary. But with the U.S. looking overextended and Xi viewing Biden’s conciliatory posture as one of weakness, the risks of failing to deter aggression against Taiwan are increasing.
The risks are particularly acute for Japan, whose southernmost islands lie close to Taiwan. As former Prime Minister Taro Aso has warned, if Taiwan falls, “Okinawa could be next.”
Japan should recall that U.S. appreciation of its generous financial support for previous missions has been fleeting.
A classic example is the 1991 Gulf War campaign against Iraq for which Japan contributed $13 billion. Yet then-U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III said, “Your ‘checkbook diplomacy,’ like our ‘dollar diplomacy’ of an earlier era, is clearly too narrow.”
Today, Japan needs to shed its zeal toward Ukraine and focus squarely on Taiwan. This should include not sending more Patriots or other defense systems to backstop Kyiv.
An overstretched America and a Japan straining to avert recession must persuade Europe to step up and take primary responsibility for Ukraine, its own neighbor.
To safeguard Asian security and the region’s balance of power, there can be no substitute for a prudent, balanced and forward-looking approach.
With China’s lengthening shadow darkening its doorstep, Japan needs to focus primarily on its combustible neighborhood and prepare for a Taiwan Strait contingency.
This should include assuring its ability to respond to a scenario in which Xi seeks to bring Taiwan to its knees by employing the techniques of incremental expansionism that his regime has successfully honed in the South China Sea without triggering a concerted U.S. response.
Not Ukraine, but the South China Sea of today could be the Taiwan of tomorrow. This means that Japan, without being unduly distracted by developments afar, must find effective ways to beat back China’s hybrid warfare.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
The congressional breakthrough on the $95 billion foreign assistance package after months of political wrangling provides President Joe Biden’s administration with arms outlays that are larger than the defense budget of every country other than the United States, China and Russia. Biden now has considerable leverage to further conflict or deterrence across three large geographic regions encompassing more than half of the world — Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.
The package effectively opens the floodgates to the greater flow of sophisticated American weapons, especially to Ukraine. In fact, even before Biden signed the foreign assistance bill into law, Ukraine began using longer-range ATACMS missiles against Russian forces that the U.S. had secretly supplied. And as the law took effect, the Pentagon immediately rushed $1 billion worth of American weapons to Ukraine.
The package reflects the Biden administration’s skewed strategic priorities: It provides $60.8 billion for Ukraine in its war of attrition with Russia, with much of the funding going to U.S. defense contractors and the Pentagon; $26.4 billion for Israel and America’s supporting military operations in the Middle East; and a relatively miserly $8.1 billion for Taiwan and other security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region — the world’s center of gravity where America’s main rival, China, is incrementally changing the territorial and maritime status quo.
The congressional logjam over the package had jeopardized the centerpiece of Biden’s foreign policy, which has focused America’s attention and resources on the wars in Europe and the Middle East. But the region central to the global balance of power and peace is the Indo-Pacific.
The longer the U.S. remains involved in the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, the greater will be the likelihood of China invading Taiwan. It is telling that, under Biden, an overextended America is seeking to dissuade Chinese President Xi Jinping from launching an attack on Taiwan more through diplomacy than deterrence.
Biden’s latest defense budget, and the small outlays for the Indo-Pacific in the $95.3 billion package, show that deterrence against China has assumed a subsidiary policy role. The budget not only underfunds key enabling capabilities for the Indo-Pacific but also cuts programs, including slashing the production goal for Virginia-class submarines from two per year to just one.
China, on the other hand, is engaged in a frenzied naval buildup. China’s surface naval fleet is now already much larger than the American fleet. In terms of number of submarines, China, by embarking on a new generation of nuclear-armed subs, possibly with Russian assistance, is set to go beyond its current near-parity with the U.S. Meanwhile, qualitative improvements in battle force ships and more aggressive tactics by the Chinese navy are already making it more challenging for American ships and submarines to operate in China’s maritime backyard.
The Ukraine war, for its part, has helped raise the specter of the U.S. realizing its worst geopolitical nightmare: a Sino-Russian strategic axis. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken this month called China “the primary contributor” to Russia’s defense industrial base.
The conflict has already exposed NATO’s military shortcomings, including its struggle to scale up weapons and munitions manufacturing to match the output of Russia’s war economy. Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to be aiding the Kremlin’s war machine in an apparent effort to keep the U.S. tied down in Ukraine and further deplete Western arsenals before invading Taiwan.
Against this background, the massive new U.S. funding for Ukraine will further deepen American involvement in the conflict without any prospect of changing the tide of the war. U.S. officials now acknowledge that there is little prospect of Ukraine regaining the 20 percent of its territory already occupied by Russia.
The Biden administration’s narrative on the war has evolved through three distinct phases. In the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, the “save Ukraine” narrative was dominant, before being overtaken by the “bleed Russia” narrative, which presented the Western supply of weapons and battlefield intelligence to Ukrainian forces as a cost-effective investment to severely “weaken” an adversary militarily.
Even after the much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive floundered last summer, dashing NATO’s hopes of a major military breakthrough against Russia, the administration — anxious not to lose public support for the war — continued to peddle the line that Ukraine was winning the fight against Russia.
The third phase, “help Ukraine stave off defeat,” began more recently, when CIA Director Bill Burns warned that Ukraine could lose the war to Russia by year’s end absent additional American aid. The shift in the narrative from “Ukraine is winning” to “Ukraine may be facing defeat” was jarringly abrupt.
Make no mistake: Even if the new U.S. assistance of $60.8 billion helps Ukraine avert defeat, it is unlikely to dramatically reverse Ukrainian fortunes on the battlefield against a much stronger foe. Indeed, the longer the war extends, the greater is likely to be Ukraine’s devastation, making reconstruction more costly and onerous.
By sending more lethal and longer-range weapons to Ukraine, the U.S. funding, however, carries the risk of triggering a direct NATO conflict with Russia, which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Western powers have also increasingly provided Ukraine battlefield targeting data and even some actual assistance on the ground near the front lines.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz faced some flak in February for inadvertently exposing the role of Britain, France and possibly the U.S. in militarily helping direct attacks on Russian targets from Ukrainian soil through “target control.” Scholz said that if Germany followed Britain and France in supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles, it would make it a “participant in the war,” too.
Throwing good money after bad and hoping for a miracle isn’t a strategy. Yet that exactly is the basis of the new foreign assistance package.
A wise course for Biden would be to leverage the package by quietly pushing for a ceasefire in the Ukraine war through back-channel diplomacy. The alternative is to sap America’s strength by continuing to invest heavily in a failing war, thereby creating more strategic space for China to overthrow U.S. global preeminence.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands?
With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align.
The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war. So, to forestall a war over Taiwan, Biden has made a series of overtures to Xi’s regime, including stressing, along with his G7 partners, that the West is seeking to “de-risk” its relationship with China, not “decouple” from the world’s second-largest economy.
Notably, after sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing, Biden held a summit meeting with Xi in Woodside, California, last November. Biden’s recent phone call with Xi was part of the ongoing effort, as the White House put it, to responsibly manage ties with China.
But what stands out is the current US focus on a thaw with Beijing, instead of concentrating on deterring China’s aggressive expansionism. In fact, with Biden’s China strategy incorporating no clear vision of success, a “managed competition” has become an end in itself, instead of being a means to an end.
That deterrence has assumed a subsidiary role in policy is apparent from Biden’s latest proposed defense budget, which reinforces the administration’s approach of not taking the China threat seriously. It significantly underfunds key enabling capabilities for the Indo-Pacific and even cuts programs, including slashing the production goal for Virginia-class submarines from two per year to just one.
Funding just one Virginia-class attack boat is a break from the US navy’s steady two-per-year demand signal. The US is committed to selling up to three Virginia-class submarines to Australia in the 2030s under the AUKUS deal, which would make the American submarine deficit worse. In fact, America’s fiscal year 2025 budget seeks only six new battle force ships while retiring 10.
Contrast that with the way China churns out ever more weapon systems and platforms, with its surface naval fleet now significantly larger than the American fleet in number of ships. And, in terms of number of submarines, China, by embarking on a new generation of nuclear-armed subs, possibly with Russian assistance, is set to go beyond its current near parity with the US.
Meanwhile, qualitative improvements in battle force ships and more aggressive tactics by the Chinese navy are already making it more difficult for American ships and submarines to operate in China’s maritime backyard.
Make no mistake: Biden’s more conciliatory approach to China has so far yielded no tangible dividends. It has neither eased Beijing’s coercive pressures on Taiwan nor diminished China’s aggressive efforts to entrench its dominance in the South China Sea.
If anything, it has only emboldened China’s pursuit of strategic dominance in Asia. Washington now admits that China is even aiding Russia’s war in Ukraine by transferring technologies and sharing geospatial intelligence.
According to Beijing’s readout, Xi cautioned Biden during their recent phone conversation that Taiwan is a “red line that must not be crossed.”
With Xi preparing China for war against Taiwan, it has become more imperative than ever for the US to strengthen deterrence, including bolstering Taiwan’s defenses.
Yet, there is a huge backlog in US military sales to Taiwan, with weapons deals announced as long ago as 2017 still unfulfilled. For Taiwan, the US Congress previously authorized a US$1 billion-a-year replenishment of drawdown funding, but that has been slashed to US$500 million in the Pentagon’s latest budget.
In contrast to the Biden administration’s generous weapons shipments to Ukraine, there appears no urgency in providing arms to Taiwan to counter China’s increasing aggressiveness.
The administration also seems loath to address its resolve gap by stating unambiguously that the US has the strategic intent and political will to defend Taiwan against an attack.
Biden, asked last September whether American forces would defend Taiwan if China attacked, replied with a caveat, “Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.” But what would be the US response if, instead of an unprecedented attack, Xi launched a wily strategy of gradually escalating aggression against Taiwan anchored in stealth, deception and surprise?
Deterrence — or peace through strength, as it is commonly called — has stood the test of time. It has prevented wars of aggression. But failure to build and sustain adequate deterrent capabilities, by signaling weakness, can invite aggression.
Deterrence, however, must always be accompanied by diplomacy so as to forestall a destabilizing arms race or unintended conflict and create space for eventual compromise and reconciliation.
Under then-US president Ronald Reagan, the US grand strategy against the Soviet Union was designed to apply maximum pressure on the Soviet Union — diplomatic, ideological, economic and military — while pursuing a policy of engagement with Moscow. It was as much carrot as it was stick, contributing ultimately to the Soviet Union’s disintegration.
By contrast, Biden’s approach to China is more carrot than stick. “I don’t want to contain China,” Biden gratuitously declared while visiting Hanoi last September. “We’re not trying to hurt China.” The goal, Biden said, is “getting the relationship right” between the US and China.
Biden has repeatedly assured Xi that the US would not seek to change China’s political system or direct alliances against it.
Prioritizing diplomacy over deterrence has resulted in a strange paradox: the stronger established power, in attempting to preserve the status quo, is seeking to appease the revisionist power, whose expansionism continues apace.
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).
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, left, with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the reconstruction conference held in Tokyo on Feb. 19. © Reuters
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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