BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

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).

Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

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).

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.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

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 Biden insists 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.

© Project Syndicate, 2024.

Taipei Times

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).

Summitry seems suspended amid U.S. effort to ease tensions with China

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

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.”

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.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

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.

© Project Syndicate, 2023.

Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

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).