With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza stretching its military resources thin, a direct confrontation with China is the last thing the US needs. But America’s refusal to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism, not least in the South China Sea, may well make a clash more likely – and more destructive.
HANOI – For over a decade now, China has been working stealthily to alter the territorial and maritime status quo in the Indo-Pacific – an effort that has increasingly stoked tensions with regional neighbors like Australia, India, Japan, Taiwan, and several Southeast Asian countries, as well as the United States. And with US attention and resources focused on conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, China has lately become even more aggressive in its expansionism. Chinese regional hegemony is closer than ever.
Almost daily, China finds a new way to bully Taiwan, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly pledged to “reunify” with the mainland (though that objective has no basis in international law or history). As China takes steps like encroaching on Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island with warships, it raises the risk of a war that would transform global geopolitics.
There are war clouds also gathering over the Himalayas, where a military standoff triggered by China’s repeated furtive encroachments on India’s borderlands has dragged on for nearly four years. And in the East China Sea, China’s intrusions into the territorial waters and airspace of the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China claims as its own, are fueling Japan’s drive toward rearmament.
But the biggest risks of escalation may well lie in the South China Sea, where China’s aggressive efforts to entrench its dominance have regularly led to dangerous near-confrontations, including with US warships and aircraft. For years, China has been working relentlessly to cement its dominance over the South China Sea and exploit that region’s vast resources and strategic position as a critical corridor through which one-third of global shipping passes.
To this end, China has constructed artificial islands atop remote reefs and atolls and transformed them into forward military bases. Though these activities constitute a blatant violation of international law, including a 2016 ruling by an arbitral tribunal at The Hague that invalidated Chinese claims in the South China Sea, there has been little pushback from three successive US administrations. As a result, China has managed to expand its maritime borders unilaterally without firing a single shot.
Now, China’s navy and air force routinely patrol its neighbors’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and its coast guard – the world’s largest and most militarized – has conducted “intrusive patrols” of others’ offshore oil and gas fields. Chinese coast-guard vessels, including megaships, wantonly employ “non-lethal” weapons like high-pressure water cannons and long-range acoustic devices.
Moreover, China has been sending its navy and coast guard to shadow, hound, and harass vessels belonging to the US, as well as to smaller neighbors, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, with territorial claims in the area. Even fishing boats have been targeted and destroyed. With Chinese ships now being deliberately designed for “ramming” and “shouldering” other vessels, it seems clear that China will become more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims – and the associated fishing and energy-exploration rights – in the South China Sea.
China’s militarization of the South China Sea poses the greatest threat to the Philippines and Vietnam. But whereas Vietnam pursues an independent foreign policy, which its prime minister calls a historical imperative, the Philippines is a longstanding US ally, with a mutual defense treaty in place since 1951.
And yet, when it comes to China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, the US has largely left the Philippines to fend for itself. In 2012, when China occupied the Scarborough Shoal, a traditional Philippine fishing ground located within the country’s EEZ, US President Barack Obama’s administration stayed silent. Since then, China has steadily eroded the Philippines’ control of other areas within its EEZ, but the US has offered its ally little beyond statements of support.
This is unlikely to change any time soon. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza stretching American military resources thin, a direct confrontation with China is the last thing the US needs. But refusing to stand up to China may well make a clash more likely – and more destructive.
Already, the US has allowed China to gain such a strong footing in the South China Sea that restoring the status quo of just a decade ago would be all but impossible without a full-scale war. And, as the recent increase in provocations in the South China Sea indicate, Xi is bolder than ever, despite the rising risk of escalation, accidental or otherwise. In the meantime, America’s failure to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism is undermining its own security and trade interests.
US President Joe Bideninsists that the US wants “competition with China, not conflict.” But China wants strategic dominance – beginning with the South China Sea – and it is willing to risk conflict to get it. The South China Sea has become a test of American resolve, which Xi is expecting Biden to fail. The world, especially the countries on the front lines of Chinese expansionism, can only hope that Xi is wrong, and that the US finds ways to rein in China without armed conflict.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
The military standoff along the long Himalayan frontier between China and India may not be grabbing international headlines these days given the open warfare raging elsewhere in the world, but the threat of the confrontation returning to armed conflict cannot be discounted.
Last week, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar called the Chinese border situation “very tense and dangerous.” Both sides have been significantly ramping up deployments of troops and weapons, girding for the possibility of war.
Soon to enter its fifth year, the current standoff was triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments into India’s northernmost territory of Ladakh in April 2020, just before thawing ice would normally reopen Himalayan access routes after the brutal winter.
Ahead of this year’s spring thaw and possible new Chinese provocations, India moved an additional 10,000 troops to the frontier. “The possibility that we may face a similar situation that we faced in 2020 is keeping us active all the time,” Indian Defense Secretary Giridhar Aramane said last month.
China has also been expanding its troop presence and frenetically building warfare-related infrastructure along the inhospitable frontier. This has includedboring tunnels and shafts in mountainsides to set up command positions, reinforced troop shelters and weapons-storage facilities.
In addition, it has planted settlers in new militarized border villages that are becoming the equivalent of the artificial islands it created in the South China Sea to serve as forward military bases.
About 100,000 troops remain locked in a faceoff along the border’s westernmost Ladakh sector. Another key sector is the vulnerable area where the borders of Tibet, Bhutan and India’s Sikkim state meet, a 22-kilometer-wide corridor known as “the chicken neck” due to the crooked way it connects India’s northeast to the country’s heartland.
There are also troop faceoffs in the eastern Himalayas along Tibet’s long border with India’s Arunachal Pradesh state. This has long been a heavily militarized area, largely because China claims the Indian state is part of Tibet, although the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, says this has no historical basis.
Talks to de-escalate tensions along the frontier have made little progress. In January, Indian Army chief Gen. Manoj Pande said the standoff would continue until China rolled back from its Ladakh encroachments, calling restoration of the previous frontier line “our first aim to achieve.”
Despite taking some flak at home for losing border areas to Chinese encroachment, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to seek a negotiated end to the crisis.
While his government has banned numerous Chinese apps, blocked investments by certain Chinese companies and launched enforcement actions against others over alleged tax and foreign exchange violations, it has not imposed broad sanctions against its northern neighbor.
Consequently, despite the border confrontation, China’s annual trade surplus with India has continued to rise; it is now larger than India’s annual defense spending.
Modi discussed the crisis in brief with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of multilateral summits in November 2022 and August 2023. Jaishankar reiterated earlier this month that New Delhi remains “committed to finding a fair, reasonable” agreement.
Now Xi is faced with the challenge of resolving the Himalayan military crisis without losing face.
For four years, tens of thousands of Chinese troops have remained deployed in extremely harsh conditions along the Himalayan frontier. If Xi somehow came to an agreement with Modi about undoing China’s territorial encroachments, he would face questions about why he embarked on the aggression in the first place.
The longer the standoff persists, though, the greater the risk that Beijing turns India into an enduring enemy, a development that would weigh down China’s global and regional ambitions.
Xi has already been confronted by his failure to anticipate India’s robust military and strategic response, with the standoff driving New Delhi closer to Washington. It also set in motion a major military buildup and modernization drive, as illustrated by a flight test last week to demonstrate that India now can put multiple independently targetable nuclear warheads on a single intercontinental ballistic missile.
Since the standoff began, India has tested several other leading-edge missile systems, including a hypersonic cruise missile, a hybrid missile-torpedo for use against submarines and aircraft carriers, an anti-radiation missile for destroying radar-equipped air defense systems and a new generation, intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads.
India has also been importing major weapon systems from the U.S. as well as France and other sources. In November, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told his U.S. counterpart that their two governments are “in agreement on strategic issues, including countering China’s aggression.” India’s growing alignment with the U.S. undoubtedly worries Xi.
Without the elements of stealth, deception and surprise that characterized China’s 2020 encroachments, the People’s Liberation Army would be hard put to get the better of India’s armed forces in a Himalayan war. While the PLA relies heavily on conscripts, India has an all-volunteer force that is considered the world’s most experienced in mountain warfare.
As two of the world’s most ancient civilizations, China and India need to find ways to peacefully coexist as neighbors and to cooperate on shared objectives. But it is far from certain that reconciliation between the two most populous nations will be possible while Xi and the Chinese Communist Party remain in power.
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.”
When Beijing says “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China” and calls this “an indisputable legal and historical fact,” it promotes a claim that has absolutely no basis in international law or history.
But by aggressively stating that claim time and again over the years, it has made many in the world believe that fiction, especially when the dominant Western media outlets are reluctant to challenge the Chinese narrative.
Indeed, some international publications now use the phrase “reunify” without quotation marks while referring to Beijing’s Taiwan goal.
The truth is that Taiwan, for most of its history, had no relationship with China and has remained fully outside Chinese control for the last 129 years since 1895 when, following defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, China’s Manchu-run Qing government signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ceded Taiwan to Japan.
In international law, a territorial claim must be based on lasting and peaceful exercise of sovereignty over the entire territory concerned.
But Taiwan has never been an integral part of China in history. And the only outside power that secured control over all of Taiwan was Japan.
While Taiwan remained under Japanese colonial rule until 1945, Japan officially renounced its sovereignty over it only in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, but without the transferee being identified.
The communist-led People’s Republic of China, having exercised no territorial sovereignty over Taiwan, lacks the legal standing to lay claim to the island democracy.
In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921, long regarded Taiwan as a foreign territory and articulated for the first time its goal of “liberating” the island just months before it seized power in Beijing in 1949.
Beijing, likewise, dubiously claims that the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands have always been part of China. There is unquestionably no concrete evidence that China ever had effective control over those islands.
In fact, China began claiming the Senkakus only after a United Nations agency’s report in 1969 referred to the possible existence of oil reserves in the East China Sea.
It was not until the early 1970s that Chinese documents began applying the name “Diaoyu” (釣魚) to the Senkakus and claiming they were part of China.
Sinicizing the names of the territories it claims is a standard tactic of the CCP, which it is also applying to the Himalayan borderlands of India, Bhutan and Nepal.
This tactic is designed to lend credence to its assertion that the areas it covets have always been part of China.
For example, in three separate batches between 2017 and 2023, Beijing renamed a number of places in India’s sprawling Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is almost three times larger than Taiwan.
When India protested, Beijing doubled down, contending that Arunachal Pradesh is its own “territory” and Sinicizing names of places there is “China’s sovereign right.”
Such aggressive tactics, including claiming that a region controlled by another country has been part of China since ancient times, help over time to gain wide international recognition that the territory concerned is disputed.
This then encourages China to disturb the territorial status quo through stealthy maneuvers or encroachments.
China’s nearly four-year-long Himalayan military standoff with India has its origins in the April 2020 furtive Chinese encroachments on key borderlands in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh, which is located 2,000 kilometers from Arunachal Pradesh.
India, challenging Chinese power and capability, has more than matched China’s Himalayan military deployments and made clear that the standoff would continue until Beijing agrees to restore status quo ante.
More broadly, China, under President Xi Jinping (習近平), has been pushing expansive territorial claims in Asia on the basis of an ingenious principle — “what is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable.”
It is telling that these territorial claims, from the East and South China Seas to the Taiwan Strait and the Himalayas, are based not on international law but on revisionist history. China’s weak legal case was highlighted by the 2016 Hague ruling, when an international arbitral tribunal invalidated Chinese claims in the South China Sea.
Yet, such is Beijing’s unmitigated scorn for international law that, in defiance of the Hague ruling, it has accelerated its expansionism in the South China Sea, turning its seven human-made islands into forward military bases and gradually securing greater and greater control of this critical corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
China’s “nine-dash line” encompassing much of the South China Sea exemplifies how it uses alleged history to pursue aggressive expansionism.
But Beijing’s manipulation of history extends beyond advancing extravagant territorial claims.
It also uses history to instill among the Chinese an abiding sense of grievance over the 110 years of national humiliation that China suffered up to the communist takeover in Beijing.
While Beijing misses no opportunity to shame Japan with the history card, its selective historical memory is highlighted by Chinese school textbooks, which black out the Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet in the early 1950s and the wars it unleashed against India (1962) and Vietnam (1979).
In fact, as the mythical Middle Kingdom, China claims to be the mother of all civilizations, weaving legend with history to claim a dual historical entitlement — to recover “lost” lands and become a world power second to none. This helps to rationalize its muscular foreign policy, which seeks to make real the legend that drives the CCP’s revisionist history — China’s centrality in the world.
In the name of “reunification,” Xi seems determined to annex Taiwan, just as Mao Zedong (毛澤東) occupied the then-autonomous and resource-rich Tibet.
Chinese aggression against Taiwan would constitute the biggest threat to world peace in a generation.
It has thus become imperative to contest Beijing’s strange fairy tale that Taiwan was part of China since time immemorial.
Taiwan has all the attributes of a robust independent state, and most Taiwanese want it to stay that way.
After all, why would the Taiwanese be willing to give up their freedoms and be absorbed by the world’s largest autocracy, which is also a technology-driven Orwellian surveillance state?
People in Taiwan, in fact, have developed an identity that is distinct from that of Chinese citizens.
Brahma Chellaney, a 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).
Quad leaders meet on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May 2023: Another summit is unlikely to happen until early 2025. (Pool via Reuters)
When U.S. President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he ardently embraced the Quad initiative that had been revived by his predecessor, Donald Trump, elevating discussions in the four-nation grouping with Australia, India and Japan to the level of summits of national leaders instead of just meetings of foreign ministers.
Biden first brought his counterparts together in March 2021 online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House then hosted the first in-person Quad summit six months later.
Yet after a flurry of similar meetings, including an informal gathering in Hiroshima, Japan last May on the sidelines of a Group of Seven summit at which the four leaders committed to jointly “meet the challenges” facing the Indo-Pacific region, there is no tangible plan in place now for another summit.
Indeed, U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti has suggested that the next summit will likely have to wait until after November’s presidential election.
This in effect probably rules out any fresh summit before early 2025 even as regional security challenges mount, with China applying increasing coercive pressure on Taiwan in the wake of the presidential election victory of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lai Ching-te and further tensions building along China’s frontiers with India and Bhutan, and with the Philippines in the South China Sea.
If that was not discouraging enough, it must be noted also that little concrete progress has been made in the six Quad working groups established over the last three years, covering critical and emerging technologies, climate change, cybersecurity, infrastructure, space and COVID-19 vaccines.
To be sure, an overly ambitious agenda, as underscored by the working groups’ focus on diverse global issues, has constrained the Quad’s ability to produce tangible results.
The Quad, as a grouping of just four democracies, is in little position to manage universal challenges. Yet this is the course Biden has taken the Quad on, with the result that the group’s Indo-Pacific security objectives have sometimes taken a back seat to discussion of global challenges.
The Quad’s core agenda, as affirmed by the U.S. in 2019, is supposed to center on realizing members’ vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region. This should mean effectively acting as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensuring a stable balance of power in a region that brings together the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
But Biden’s policy of engagement with China may explain why, despite a changing geostrategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, the Quad now lacks clear strategic direction and resolve.
With the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East claiming America’s attention and resources, and draining stocks of critical munitions and air defense systems, the last thing Biden wants is conflict or even greater tensions with China.
This likely explains his moves to ease Chinese concerns.
“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden declared while visiting Hanoi last September. “We’re not trying to hurt China.”
The goal, he said, is “getting the relationship right” between the world’s two leading powers. Biden earlier assured Chinese President Xi Jinping that the U.S. would not seek to change China’s political system nor direct alliances against it.
After sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing for discussions, Biden made a promise to “responsibly manage the relationship” during talks with Xi in San Francisco on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.
The stepped-up effort to steady the fraught Sino-U.S. relationship thus may have contributed to U.S. soft-pedaling of the Quad. Indeed, the four Quad leaders pointedly did not convene when they were all together at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi last September as they did in Hiroshima four months before.
The question then is whether Biden’s policy of coexistence and cooperation with China is paying dividends.
It would not seem so. Xi, seeing America distracted with Europe and the Middle East, has upped the ante by stepping up coercion of Taiwan. There have also been more frequent Chinese provocations and maritime incidents in the South China Sea, including with U.S. aircraft and ships.
Xi may even see a window of opportunity for more dramatic action over Taiwan. At the same time, the new U.S. cold war with Russia has pushed Moscow closer to Beijing and turned China into its banker and most important trade partner, risking the creation of a pan-Eurasian axis that could further overstretch America and accelerate its relative decline.
While Xi is still willing to talk to the U.S., his actions suggest that, despite a slowing economy, he believes China, with a ramped-up nuclear arsenal, is in a position of strategic strength that it must leverage.
Against this backdrop, it would be a mistake to relegate the Quad to the periphery or turn it into a mere showpiece.
If anything, it is time to refocus the Quad’s attention on the strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, as it remains critical to the global balance of power and world peace. This means reaffirming the Quad’s strategic mission of preserving the present regional order. Without that, the goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific could become illusory.
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 contrast between the elections held earlier this month in the mountain kingdom of Bhutan and that held in populous Bangladesh — the former peaceful and the latter marred by violence and an opposition boycott — underscore the challenges involved with consolidating democratic transitions in South Asia, a region with long autocratic traditions.
India, the region’s geographical hub, is considered the world’s largest democracy. But authoritarian structures have not been fully dismantled in neighboring countries ranging from Nepal to the Maldives.
The region, in fact, illustrates that elections alone cannot ensure genuine democratic transitions. Even if competitive, elections do not guarantee genuine democratic empowerment at the grassroots level or adherence to constitutional rules by those wielding power.
Pakistan and Myanmar, for example, are to hold parliamentary elections this year that are unlikely to weaken the viselike grip of their militaries on domestic politics.
Myanmar’s generals derailed their nation’s democratic transition in February 2021 by ousting Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, leading the U.S. and its allies to impose wide-ranging sanctions.
Military ruler Min Aung Hlaing said earlier this month that “free and fair multiparty democratic elections” will be held once the current state of emergency is lifted, with “state responsibilities” then to pass to the duly elected government.
Few, however, put much credence in talk of the army going back to its barracks. Directly or indirectly, the military has called the shots in Myanmar since the country’s independence in 1948.
More ominously, escalating armed attacks by insurgents and pro-democracy groups attempting to overthrow the military junta, coupled with crippling U.S.-led sanctions, are threatening to turn Myanmar into a failed state.
The U.N. warned last month that Myanmar is slipping into a deepening humanitarian crisis, with more than 2 million people internally displaced and one-third of the country’s 54 million population requiring humanitarian aid.
The military has also been the most powerful political player traditionally in Pakistan. The generals there today wield power indirectly through a caretaker civilian-led government that remains in office even after failing to meet a constitutional mandate to hold elections within 90 days of the dissolution last August of the National Assembly.
The election is now scheduled for Feb. 8 but could be further postponed. The military-friendly Senate passed a resolution on Jan. 6 calling for a delay due to “prevailing security conditions” and harsh seasonal weather in certain parts of the country.
The head of Pakistan’s army has long acted as the country’s effective ruler. The military, intelligence agencies and the nuclear establishment have never been answerable to civilian-led governments.
When decisive power rests with generals, democratization can scarcely gain traction. In contrast, Bhutan and Nepal have each been transitioning from traditional monarchy to parliamentary government.
Bhutan’s recent fourth national election has brought an opposition party to power amid an economic crisis. A benevolent king has helped facilitate the country’s democratic transition.
Nepal’s tenuous democracy, however, has come under the shadow of former communist guerrillas who waged war against the state, notably Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal as well as opposition leader K.P. Sharma Oli.
Ahead of parliamentary elections to be held Jan. 25, the communists’ ascendance has raised questions about whether their ideology is compatible with democracy. After all, communism has traditionally eroded individual rights and freedoms that democracies enshrine. While democracy is pluralistic, communism in practice has tended to be monopolistic, as in neighboring China.
Democracy is struggling in Bangladesh, too, in part due to the growth of radical Islamist forces. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has led a secular government that has given Bangladesh political stability and rapid economic growth, on Jan. 7 secured a fourth straight term in office, with her party winning nearly three-quarters of the parliamentary seats as the main opposition party sat out the vote.
Excluding Singapore, the Maldives and other small nations, Bangladesh is the world’s most densely populated country. Given its porous borders, its continued stability is pivotal to regional security.
The Maldives offers a lesson on how democratic progress can be easily reversed if the entrenched forces of the old order are not cut down to size and the rule of law firmly established.
After an election in 2008 swept away decades of autocratic rule, it took barely four years for authoritarianism to rear its ugly head again. President Mohamed Nasheed was forced to resign at gunpoint, as Islamists stormed the national museum and smashed priceless Buddhist and Hindu statues, erasing evidence of the country’s pre-Islamic past.
Since then, Islamic radicals have significantly expanded their grassroots base in the strategically important Indian Ocean archipelago, resulting in Mohamed Muizzu winning election to the presidency two months ago. Despite a population of barely 550,000, the tropical islands are home to cells of Islamic State and al-Qaida.
Around South Asia, past authoritarian regimes in effect promoted extremist forces by establishing opportunistic political alliances with them. The combination of dire economic conditions and a powerful national protest movement can often help topple such a regime.
In Sri Lanka, an economic meltdown in 2022 led to mass protests and chaos that caused the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic government to fall apart. With the support of their party, Ranil Wickremesinghe has since served as president, but the country is due to hold fresh presidential and parliamentary polls later this year.
India will also be going to the polls in the coming months to elect a new parliament in the world’s largest election exercise, stretching over several weeks.
India is a raucous democracy that confronts intensifying partisanship and polarization. In its hyperpartisan environment, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become a lightning rod for allegations that he is acting as a strongman pursuing divisive policies, and that he favors populism over constitutionalism. These complaints mirror criticisms of Donald Trump when he was in the White House, but Modi and his party are likely to fare better in their reelection campaign.
But the sputtering democratic transitions around India, and the specter of spillover effects from an unstable neighborhood, pose important challenges for New Delhi. They also impede regional cooperation and free trade. Whether or not elections are held, democratic development still has a distance to go in most South Asian states.
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.”
It was America’s abandonment of a failed sanctions policy in favor of calibrated engagement that helped bring about the formal end of Myanmar’s military dictatorship in 2015. Today, US President Joe Biden’s administration must adopt a similar strategy – or risk allowing Myanmar to become a failed state.
As the Israel-Hamas war rages, the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza is grabbing headlines – as well it should. But another armed conflict, in Myanmar, is also causing mass suffering, with more than two million people internally displaced and over a million more streaming into neighboring Bangladesh, India, and Thailand. And it is attracting far less international attention.
This is not to say that outside forces are not engaged in the conflict in Myanmar. On the contrary, the United States seems to view supporting the rebel and pro-democracy groups attempting to overthrow the military junta – which returned to power in a February 2021 coup – as a kind of moral test. But its approach is doing Myanmar little good.
After the military overthrew Myanmar’s nascent civilian government – to which it had begun ceding power barely six years earlier – US President Joe Biden’s administration re-imposed wide-ranging sanctions, which it has since ratcheted up. But, so far, the sanctions have left Myanmar’s military elites relatively unscathed, even as they have unraveled the economic progress made over the last decade and inflicted misery on ordinary citizens.
The Biden administration has also deepened engagement with the so-called National Unity Government that was formed as an alternative to the junta. Though the US, like the rest of the world, has refrained from formally recognizing the shadow government, this has not stopped the Biden administration from providing “non-lethal aid” to its notional army, the People’s Defense Force, as well as to ethnic insurgent organizations and pro-democracy groups, under the BURMA Act. And the US has a history of interpreting “non-lethal” rather loosely. Non-lethal support for Syrian rebels, for example, included enhancing their operational capabilities on the battlefield.
The groups the Biden administration supports in Myanmar do not share a common cause, let alone a single political strategy. The shadow government has failed to win the support of all major ethnic groups, and its armed wing lacks a unified military command. The ethnic insurgent groups – some of which have records of brutality – are often more interested in securing autonomy for their communities than in building an inclusive federal democratic system, and some are willing to collaborate with the junta to get it. Complicating matters further, these groups’ territorial claims sometimes overlap.
It is impossible to say for certain whether growing US aid flows have fueled more violence in Myanmar. But there is no doubt that rebel attacks have lately intensified, with serious consequences not only for civilians, who often are caught in the crossfire, but also for neighboring states. Just last month, a major offensive – which enabled the rebels to gain control of several border towns and dozens of military outposts – drove at least 72 government soldiers to flee to India in just one week. The junta responded by intensifying its own lethal force, including punitive air strikes and artillery barrages.
Meanwhile, more than 32,000 ethnic Chin from Myanmar have taken refuge in India’s Chin-majority Mizoram state, where they live mostly in refugee camps. Thousands more have fled to another Indian border state, Manipur, fueling an increasingly violent conflict between the local population’s two main ethnic groups.
US aid to armed groups around the world has often fueled disorder and suffering, undercutting the quest for democracy. Judging by Myanmar’s deteriorating humanitarian situation, it seems that this may well be happening again. And Myanmar’s neighbors are being affected in much the same way the US would be affected if faraway powers sought to punish Mexico and aid rebel groups there. Yet, far from letting the neighboring countries take the lead in setting policy toward Myanmar, the Biden administration has insisted they toe the US line.
America’s uncompromisingly punitive approach to Myanmar’s military junta has hopelessly divided the ten-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations, preventing it from playing a constructive role in the conflict. Paradoxically, the US has sought to co-opt ASEAN to promote democracy in Myanmar, even though the majority of the group’s members remain under authoritarian rule.
India, the world’s most populous democracy, is increasingly concerned that the US approach is pushing resource-rich Myanmar into China’s arms. India not only shares long land and sea borders with Myanmar, but also views the country as a strategic corridor to Southeast Asia. Given the cross-border movement of people and guerrillas – some trained and armed by China – close counterinsurgency cooperation with Myanmar is vital for India’s security.
Biden’s misguided Myanmar policy seems to align with his public rhetoric about a “global battle between democracy and autocracy.” But elsewhere, his administration has adopted a more pragmatic foreign-policy approach, deepening strategic relations with non-democracies in order to counter China’s growing influence. For example, during the G20 summit in New Delhi this past September, Biden sought to mend ties with Saudi Arabia. He then visited Vietnam, calling it a “critical Indo-Pacific partner.”
Such realism should be welcomed: if the promotion of democracy and human rights overrode all other considerations, US diplomacy would have very few partners outside the West. But this approach needs to be extended to Myanmar. The US would stand a better chance of helping to end direct military rule there by opening up lines of communication with the junta and offering it incentives to reverse course.
It was the abandonment of a failed sanctions policy in favor of calibrated US engagement that helped bring about the formal end of Myanmar’s military dictatorship in 2015. If Myanmar is to avoid becoming a failed state, the Biden administration must adopt a similar strategy today.
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.
American fantasies about China helped create the biggest strategic adversary the US has ever faced. For over 45 years, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, successive American presidents aided China’s economic rise as a matter of policy. Even as Beijing cheated on trade rules, stole technology, and flexed its military muscle, including against Taiwan, the US looked the other way, in the naive hope that a more prosperous China would liberalize economically and politically.
Despite the fundamental shift in America’s China policy introduced by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, US fantasies, to some extent, still persist, complicating the pursuit of a cleareyed strategy to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) from moving against Taiwan.
Consider, for example, President Joe Biden’s greater emphasis on placating Beijing than on strengthening deterrence, including by taking the possibility of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan seriously. The US needs to urgently help bolster Taiwan’s defenses by stepping up arms sales and military training. But with Biden continuing to prioritize weapons deliveries to Ukraine despite its failed counteroffensive against Russian forces, US arms transfers to Taipei are lagging years behind orders.
This year has stood out for Biden’s conciliatory moves toward China — from sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing and holding a summit meeting with Xi in California to emphasizing that the US-led effort is to “de-risk” the relationship with China but not to “decouple” from it.
While keeping the door to diplomacy with Russia shut, Biden has beseeched China to stabilize bilateral ties. By presenting the US, the stronger power, as more zealous than China to improve relations, Biden could embolden Xi’s risk-taking.
In dealing with China, Biden has a weaker hand that he would like. The deepening US involvement in the Ukraine and Israel wars is sapping America’s diplomatic and military resources. This could tempt Xi to move on Taiwan, especially because he knows the US would struggle to deal with a third war simultaneously. In fact, the longer the Ukraine and Gaza wars rage, the greater would be the likelihood of Beijing launching aggression against Taiwan.
Yet, while letting hope drive his overtures to China, Biden has not only doubled down on his Ukraine strategy but also is raising the specter of “American troops fighting Russian troops” if the US Congress does not approve US$61 billion in additional assistance for Kyiv. A US mired in a protracted Ukraine war would open greater opportunity for Beijing to move on Taiwan.
Despite the China-policy debate in the US reflecting more realism in recent years, illusions continue to guide Biden’s approach. One illusion is to believe, as Biden apparently does, that China would cooperate with the US on major global issues. Another illusion is that risks of aggression against Taiwan or miscommunication can be mitigated through regular dialogue, including military-to-military contact.
Such thinking misses the fact that China’s strategy centers on stealth, deception and surprise. These three elements have characterized China’s expansionism from the South China Sea to the Himalayas. Xi’s unpredictability demands greater US attention to shoring up deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Unfortunately, the China fantasies extend to some American scholars. For example, three China specialists argued in a recent essay that averting Chinese aggression against Taiwan demands that the US “reassure, not just threaten, China.” Their thesis effectively calls for rewarding China for steadily regularizing its coercion of Taiwan.
This is redolent of how the US looked the other way as China created and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. Indeed, at the height of Xi’s island-building drive, Obama argued in his final year in the White House that “we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.” Such appeasement helped turn China’s contrived historical claims to the South China Sea into reality without Beijing incurring any international costs.
Success in the South China Sea has made Xi more determined to annex Taiwan on his watch, especially as China erodes America’s military’s edge in the Indo-Pacific. Worse still, America’s entanglement in the Ukraine war has made Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression. Ukraine has secured key war materiel that could have gone to Taipei.
Yet, some Americans still argue that the US must first defeat Russia in Ukraine before pivoting to deter China. It is as if Xi would wait on Taiwan until the US has humiliated Russia on the battlefield and turned its attention to containing China!
Taiwan’s continued autonomous status is central to America’s safeguarding of its global preeminence. Yet, at a time when more than two-thirds of American voters worry about the 81-year-old Biden’s mental and physical health, the lack of US strategic clarity on how to deter or respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan is striking.
If Xi perceives that China has a window of opportunity to act during the Biden presidency, he will likely move on Taiwan. If that were to happen, China would likely emerge as a pressing military threat to the US itself.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
The latest round of talks between China and Bhutan over their unsettled border concluded last week with an agreement about the responsibilities and functions of a new joint technical team set up to demarcate the frontier.
The team was formed as the result of an agreement the two governments reached in August. That in turn followed a 2021 memorandum of understanding to expedite the border talks, which have been going on since 1984.
Despite these recent outward signs of accord, however, China and Bhutan in fact remain far apart and a resolution to the border talks is not imminent.
For China, the talks are a way to deflect attention from its incremental encroachments into Bhutanese territory, one pasture and one valley at a time. Beijing has linked fundamental resolution of its border claims to the establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations and securing permission to open an embassy in Thimphu.
That is a sensitive point. Under a 1949 treaty of friendship, Bhutan pledged “to be guided by the advice of the government of India in regard to its external relations.” In a revised 2007 treaty, this promise was reframed as a commitment by both countries to “cooperate closely with each other on the issues relating to their national interests.”
India, however, remains the de facto security guarantor of Bhutan, which is a diplomatic minnow. It has no official diplomatic relations with any of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and only India, Bangladesh and Kuwait have embassies in the Bhutanese capital.
To be sure, China has also dragged out the border settlement talks it launched with India in 1981. Seeking to replicate in the Himalayas its expansionism in the South China Sea, Beijing has made stealth encroachments on Indian borderlands. China’s ongoing military standoff with India at multiple points along their frontier was triggered by Chinese incursions into the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh in April 2020.
In Bhutan, Beijing is seeking to carve out a strategic footprint in the way it has done in nearby Nepal, which also has close ties to India. China’s influence has been on the rise in recent years in Nepal, as it has poured money into loans and infrastructure projects despite concerns from observers about the sustainability of the debt Kathmandu is taking on.
It was Mao Zedong’s 1951 annexation of Tibet, whose religion and culture have shaped Bhutanese society, that made China the neighbor of Bhutan as well as of Nepal and India.
Mao considered Tibet to be the palm of China’s right hand. In turn, he saw the “fingers” of that hand, “to be liberated” in due course, as Bhutan, Nepal, and what are now the Indian territories of Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Chinese incursions into the borderlands of the five fingers in recent years suggest that President Xi Jinping may be seeking to complete Mao’s expansionist vision.
Beijing has previously signaled a willingness to withdraw from areas it has occupied in northern Bhutan, including the sacred, monastery-rich valley of Beyul Khenpajong, if Thimphu were to give up some of its western borderlands. Since 2017, China has been encroaching on Bhutan’s western regions as well, including the Doklam Plateau, a Sino-Indian strategic flashpoint, despite a 1998 commitment “not to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border.”
By building military roads through Bhutanese territory and planting settlers on encroached land, China has effectively opened a new front on India’s most vulnerable point, the Siliguri Corridor that connects the country’s remote northeast to its heartland. The corridor, sandwiched between Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, is barely 22 kilometers wide at its narrowest point.
The settlements, roads and military facilities China has constructed on occupied land suggest that the encroachments may not be rolled back, even if Beijing eventually reached a border settlement with Bhutan.
If anything, Beijing has continued to up the ante against Bhutan. In 2020, it laid claim to the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, home to some of the world’s most-endangered mammals, in the east of Bhutan. The fact that this sanctuary can be accessed only through the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh suggests that the move was directed against both Bhutan and India. Chinese maps already show Arunachal Pradesh — more than twice the size of Bhutan — as part of China.
Against this backdrop, it is scarcely a surprise that a Sino-Bhutanese border settlement is still not on the cards. Indeed, Bhutanese Prime Minister Lotay Tshering said in March that demarcation of the frontiers of Bhutan, China and India where they converge at the Doklam Plateau can be done only trilaterally.
“It is not up to Bhutan alone to solve the problem,” he told an interviewer. “We are three.”
Bhutan remains treaty-bound to respect Indian interests. India remains opposed to the cession of Bhutanese territory to China, particularly around the Doklam Plateau. So while Bhutan and China may reach more incremental agreements on how to take forward their talks, the end still appears nowhere in sight.
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 G20 summit in New Delhi, which brought presidents, prime ministers and monarchs together, was a high point in Indian diplomacy at a time when rival China is grappling with multiple crises, from a dramatic economic downturn to growing domestic discontent. The summit’s adoption of a 37-page consensus document outlining the roadmap for a more sustainable and peaceful global future underscored India’s burgeoning economic and geopolitical clout.
Few had expected the summit to be a success, given the international divisiveness. The war in Ukraine has created a deep divide between the West and the Sino-Russian bloc. There is also a Western clash with a rising Global South. But by bridging global divides, India helped build consensus.
The rising international profile of the world’s largest democracy comes at a time when India is positioning itself as a potential mediator between the West and Russia. There is also growing Western recognition that India is well placed to serve as a key counterweight to communist China’s neo-imperial ambitions.
A fully agreed joint communique was not the only achievement of the summit. The real value of any G20 summit lies not in the pious commitments that world leaders make (which are rarely honoured) but as a venue for bilateral, trilateral or even quadrilateral meetings between the various heads of state or government. The New Delhi summit was no exception.
The discussions on the margins of the summit led to the announcement of an ambitious US-led plan to build a rail and shipping corridor linking India with the Middle East and Europe.
As part of the US approach to counter China’s decade-old Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through alternative arrangements, the corridor proposal was portrayed by American President Joe Biden as a “real big deal” that would link Middle East countries by railway and connect them to India and Europe through port interconnections, thus helping the flow of energy and trade, including by slashing shipping times and costs. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for his part, called the proposal “a big connectivity initiative” that would permit “future generations to dream bigger”.
To be sure, the corridor initiative was not the only plan to counter the BRI that emerged from the summit. The US won the summit’s endorsement for reshaping and scaling up multilateral development banks like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund by significantly boosting their lending capacities. This would help counter China’s predatory lending practices by providing an alternative means of financing for infrastructure and development projects.
China’s lending binge has made it the world’s largest sovereign creditor to developing countries. Almost every Chinese loan issued in the last decade has included a secrecy clause compelling the borrowing country not to disclose the loan’s terms—or even the loan’s existence. Many African, Asian and Latin American countries have become ensnared in a debt trap, leaving them highly vulnerable to Chinese pressure to pursue policies that advance China’s economic and geopolitical interests. According to one study, the loan contracts give China “broad latitude to cancel loans or accelerate repayment if it disagrees with a borrower’s policies”.
Xi’s absence was China’s loss
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s absence at the G20 summit drew international attention to China’s military and political tensions with India. The two demographic giants have been locked in a 41-month-long military standoff triggered by China’s stealth territorial intrusions into Ladakh in April 2020.
With Chinese forces massed along the India border, it would have been odd for Xi to visit New Delhi without taking the initiative to defuse the border confrontation with India. In the tense border crisis, India has more than matched China’s forward deployment of forces. Consequently, tens of thousands of troops on each side have been facing off along the Indo-Tibetan border.
By deciding to skip the G20 summit, Xi may have done India a favour. It would have been particularly galling to India had Xi visited New Delhi even as China’s border aggression continued.
The only way to end the military standoff is through a deal to implement a sequential process of disengagement, de-escalation and de-induction of rival forces. But no deal can emerge unless the aggressor state is willing to settle matters.
One would have expected the Indian invitation to Xi to attend the G20 summit to catalyse efforts to defuse the dangerous border confrontation. After all, the risk of the military standoff escalating to intense bloody clashes or even a limited border war can no longer be discounted, given the large-scale forward military deployments by both sides.
In fact, military-to-military talks were held at different levels a few weeks before the G20 and BRICS summits. Indian media reports on the talks suggested that there was some forward movement to help defuse the border crisis in a gradual manner.
But, at the political level, Xi’s regime appeared to recoil from concluding a deal with India. This was apparent from the failure of the Xi-Modi talks on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg to achieve any progress toward ending the military standoff.
Indeed, as if to underline its hardline stance, Beijing issued a statement that undiplomatically claimed that the meeting at Johannesburg took place at Modi’s “request,” a claim India said was untrue.
The condescension inherent in that statement was apparent from its implicit advice to India to put up with China’s April 2020 land grabs in Ladakh so that the two countries can “handle properly the border issue” and stabilize their relations. Indeed, by regurgitating the same position that Beijing has held for over three years, the statement signalled that China was unwilling to climb down to some extent to help end the military standoff with India that is now in its fourth year.
The plain fact is that Xi has been wearing his intransigence on his sleeve. He created the border crisis by ordering the stealthy territorial encroachments on key borderlands of Ladakh. And now he refuses to reach a compromise settlement with India to end the border confrontation.
Simply put, the ball remains in China’s court.
However, in ordering the intrusions into Ladakh, Xi seriously miscalculated that China would be able to impose the changed territorial status quo on India as a fait accompli, without inviting a robust Indian military response. By locking horns with China even at the risk of sparking a full-scale war, India is openly challenging Chinese power and capability in a way that no other country has done in this century.
Embarrassed by the strong Indian military challenge, Xi’s regime has sought to exert greater pressure on India by deploying more Chinese forces in offensive positions, by constructing new warfare infrastructure along the frontier, and by mounting infowar and psychological operations against India.
All that, however, risks making a permanent enemy of India. This runs counter to China’s own long-term interests.
It is apparent that Xi is caught in a military crisis of his own making. His efforts to compel India to buckle have come a cropper.
Meanwhile, Xi’s regime has stepped up its buildup of military infrastructure and capabilities across the entire frontier with India, from the Aksai Chin plateau and the Uttarakhand-Tibet border to the Sikkim-Tibet and Arunachal-Tibet frontier. It is engaged in the frenzied construction of new permanent military structures as if it were preparing for war. Its construction activities are compelling India to focus on expanding its own military infrastructure along the Himalayan frontier.
The key question is: What are the strategic and military objectives that are driving China’s frenetic construction activity along the India frontier?
The construction of new permanent military structures appears designed to consolidate China’s existing territorial control, aggressively assert its claims to other Indian territories, and deter any Indian operation to regain lost territory.
But the hectic construction activity also appears aimed at a broader strategic mission — to stop India from opening another front against China when Xi decides to move against Taiwan.
Just as China invaded India in 1962 during the US-Soviet Cuban missile crisis, a Taiwan attack could offer India a historic opportunity to settle the Himalayan border. China may be seeking to constrict such an Indian option by creating new warfare infrastructure on its side of the India frontier, including boring tunnels and shafts in mountainsides to set up reinforced troop shelters and command positions as well as underground weapons storage facilities.
In any event, by digging in for the long haul and creating a “hot” border, China is doubling down on a more aggressive strategy against India. There seems little prospect of a return to the status quo ante along the frontier, even if a deal of some sorts was reached in the future to ease military tensions.
A more dangerous China?
The dilemma that Xi faces is how to resolve the India border crisis without losing face, especially at a time when China is facing mounting challenges at home and abroad. The external challenges extend far beyond India.
The fact is that, under Xi, China is turning into its own worst enemy. It is picking geostrategic fights with all of the world’s other major powers except Russia. This is possibly unprecedented in modern world history.
Xi, for his part, has shown an increasing appetite for taking major risks, as the South and East China Seas, the Himalayas and Hong Kong show. He is willing to ruthlessly run roughshod over international law and norms.
Through his aggressive revisionism, Xi has counterproductively set in motion trends in the Indo-Pacific region that seem antithetical to China’s long-term interests.
Australia has abandoned hedging and joined the AUKUS alliance against China. India is being driven closer to the United States even as it seeks to maintain its strategic autonomy. Japan has been shaken out of its complacency by China’s pursuit of Asian hegemony. And people in Taiwan are increasingly embracing a Taiwanese identity that is distinct from that of China.
Xi’s foreign policy is an outgrowth of his domestic despotism. Under Xi’s leadership, the ruling Communist Party has established an Orwellian techno-totalitarian surveillance state that seeks to bend reality to the illusions that it propagates. Egged on by state propaganda, Chinese nationalism has become feverish and vitriolic.
Yet, Xi’s domestic challenges are getting acute, from a remarkable economic downturn to a battered public trust in the party’s ability to manage the country. China is grappling with worsening macroeconomic conditions and falling investor confidence. Add to that picture high youth unemployment and an aging workforce.
Unless reversed, the economic slump over time is likely to undermine regime stability and constrain China’s geopolitical ambitions. The economic slowdown is already undercutting the Communist Party’s rationale for monopolizing power — that only it can deliver rapid growth.
Biden, calling a stagnant China a “ticking time bomb,” warned recently that, “When bad folks have problems, they do bad things.” In a reminder of that, Beijing released a new national map late last month showing inside China vast swaths of Indian land and the territories of several other neighbours, including tiny Bhutan.
The map, which drew protests from several neighbouring countries, illustrates the “bad things” Beijing is willing to do. One can expect more “bad things” from Beijing.
The party and the regime are now packed with men loyal to Xi. The tightening grip of a dictator without checks and balances, and with yes men around him, represents a major Chinese weakness because it is likely to spawn more miscalculations. It could even lead to a ruinous miscalculation.
That risk is heightened by the fact that Xi seems to be in a hurry to achieve what he calls the “Chinese dream”—that is, achieve China’s global pre-eminence.
With a demographic crisis deepening, economic growth stalled, and the global environment becoming increasingly unfavourable to China, Xi seems to have concluded that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to shape the international order in its favour. So, his appetite for risk has perceptibly grown.
In this light, as China’s economic and geopolitical fortunes sink, the risks to Taiwan and India from an aggressive China are bound to increase.
India thus has to be on its guard. Just as Mao Zedong invaded India in 1962 after his disastrous “Great Leap Forward” initiative created a manmade famine that killed countless millions of Chinese, Xi’s growing troubles could tempt him to launch a military adventure against India to help restore his standing at home and abroad.
When Mao launched his war against India, his mission, as his premier put it, was to “teach India a lesson.” Xi may be itching to teach India another lesson in order to cut it down to size and open the path to Chinese hegemony in Asia.
In military terms, defence generally has a significant advantage over offense because it is easier to protect and hold than to advance, destroy and seize. This is particularly true about mountain warfare. In mountainous terrain, the defending force can defeat an attacking force much larger than its own.
With one of the world’s largest and most-experienced mountain warfare armies, India is well placed, even without fully matching China’s military capabilities, to effectively defend itself against any Chinese aggression.
The key is not to be taken by surprise again. India failed to foresee the 2020 Chinese aggression coming largely because its foreign policy was focused on befriending China. Despite the 2017 Chinese capture of almost the entire Doklam Plateau, India allowed the “Wuhan spirit” and “Chennai connect” lullabies—like the old Hindi-Chini bhai bhai pitch—to lull it into complacency. The result is that, for more than three years, India has been locked in a costly and dangerous military standoff with China, after losing access to some strategic borderlands in Ladakh that it traditionally patrolled.
Deception, stealth and surprise have long been the key elements in China’s warfare strategy. If India were to taken unawares again, it would prove extremely costly for it because any Chinese military adventure would likely seek to leave India humiliated. But if India anticipates and effectively resists an attack, China will get a bloody nose.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books on water: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.
Given the rising strategic importance of Vietnam, U.S. President Joe Biden did well by stopping in Hanoi last weekend after attending the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi.
His visit has helped cement a new American strategic partnership with Vietnam that seeks to focus on present and future Asian challenges by burying bitter memories of the past.
The stopover in one of Asia’s more authoritarian countries is the latest reminder of how Biden is not hewing to his own simplistic narrative of a “global battle between democracy and autocracy,” implicitly recognizing that the approach would crimp the wider pursuit of U.S. diplomatic interests.
In New Delhi, Biden gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a hearty handshake even though he was criticized at home for fist-bumping him last year. Biden’s embrace of the crown prince contrasts starkly with his own 2019 presidential campaign pledge to treat Saudi Arabia like “the pariah that they are.”
The mending of frayed ties with Saudi Arabia is already paying dividends for Washington. Biden and Prince Mohammed joined other leaders in New Delhi to unveil an ambitious plan to build a rail and shipping corridor that would link India with the Middle East and Europe.
Not surprisingly, Biden’s trip to Vietnam has drawn flak from American human rights activists concerned with Hanoi’s widening crackdown on dissent and peaceful protest. Taking a different stance, Biden said Vietnam is a “critical Indo-Pacific partner” for America.
The promotion of democracy and human rights has a legitimate role in American foreign policy. But if these issues are allowed to outweigh all other considerations, the U.S. will have few countries outside the Western bloc to partner with. The need for a balanced approach is underlined by the fact that even in the U.S. itself, more than two-thirds of the citizenry think the country’s democracy is broken.
Against this backdrop, Biden ought to review his administration’s use of sanctions to promote democracy. Rather than advancing democratic freedoms, punitive measures against vulnerable states often further the interests of China, the world’s largest and longest-surviving autocracy.
While flying from New Delhi to Hanoi, Biden’s Air Force One passed over Myanmar, a country with a struggling economy that has been greatly impacted by U.S. sanctions.
Seeking to restore democracy in military-ruled Myanmar through punishing sanctions while building closer partnerships with other autocracies is inherently contradictory and undercuts U.S. interests.
The fact is that there is not a single truly democratic country in the arc of Southeast Asian countries that stretches between Myanmar and Vietnam and shares a Buddhist heritage.
An alliance between Thailand’s military and monarchy has long shaped politics in that U.S. treaty ally. Nine years after a military coup, Thailand last month installed a new government that still has military-linked parties at its core, sidelining voters who showed a clear preference for opposition parties in May’s general election.
The military has also been the most powerful political player traditionally in Myanmar. But while the U.S. put up with Thailand’s coup without imposing meaningful penalties, the Biden administration imposed wide-ranging sanctions against Myanmar after generals there ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government in February 2021.
Indeed, sanctions may have contributed to the coup. Thirteen months earlier, the U.S. penalized a number of the generals in relation to Myanmar’s bloody campaign to drive out Rohingya Muslims. Some military leaders may have felt they had little to lose by seizing power.
Post-coup sanctions have made a bad situation in Myanmar worse without advancing American interests. Left with little leverage to influence political developments, the U.S. has been lending increasing support to armed resistance forces fighting military rule.
With its strategic location, Myanmar, like Vietnam, could be co-opted into America’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Instead, thanks to U.S. sanctions policy, China’s footprint in Myanmar is growing fast.
If Biden were to shift from isolating and squeezing Myanmar to gradually engaging with the junta, he would stand a better chance of accelerating the end of direct military rule. Sanctions without engagement have never worked.
Human rights activists and democracy promoters may be highly influential within the foreign policy apparatus of Biden’s Democratic Party, but despite his public rhetoric about democracy versus autocracy, the president has wisely taken a more pragmatic approach.
This approach would benefit more if long-term strategic interests, not narrow considerations or moralizing, guided engagement with any autocracy.
In beseeching China to stabilize its relationship with the U.S. through direct talks, Biden has sent a string of senior officials to Beijing since May, including the director of the CIA, his secretaries of state, treasury and commerce, as well as his climate envoy. Yet Washington has balked at even just opening lines of communication with Myanmar’s generals.
Biden managed to persuade Vietnam to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” that grants the U.S. coveted status that Hanoi previously reserved for China, Russia, India and South Korea.
The U.S. could likewise potentially become a favored partner of Myanmar by gradually developing ties with its nationalist military — the only functioning national institution in the culturally and ethnically diverse country.
Today, the U.S. maintains close cooperation with a wide array of undemocratic or weakly democratic governments. Without giving authoritarian states a free pass on democracy or rights issues, the U.S. should use positive incentives, rather than sanctions, to persuade potential and existing partner nations to address their political shortcomings. America’s sharpening competition with China makes it crucial that it prioritize strategic interests by building new partnerships.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, right, has discussed the Himalayan crisis with Chinese President Xi Jinping at two separate multilateral summits. © Reuters
A banner erected by the Indian army near Pangong Tso lake along the country’s frontier with China. © AP
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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