Category Archives: Diplomacy

Timid India allows China to nibble at Himalayan border

Posted on by

Brahma Chellaney

The National, May 7, 2013

Intruding Chinese soldiers hold banner asking Indian troops to “Go Back.”

China’s “peaceful rise” is giving way to a more muscular approach as Beijing broadens its “core interests” and exhibits a growing readiness to take risks.

As if to highlight its new multi-directional assertiveness, China’s recent occupation of a 19-kilometre-deep Indian border area, close to where the frontiers of India, Pakistan and China converge, has coincided with its escalating challenge to Japan’s decades-old control of the Senkaku Islands and territorial spats with Vietnam and the Philippines.

China is aggressively conducting regular patrols to support its sovereignty claims in the South and East China seas, while furtively enlarging its footprint in the Himalayan borderlands. While naval and air force units focus on asserting sovereignty claims on the seas, the army stays active in the Himalayas, nibbling at territory.

China is employing novel methods to alter its line of control with India in the mountains and valleys bit by bit – without having to fire a shot. For example, the Chinese army has brought ethnic Han pastoralists to the frontier and given them cover to range across the line. This tactic is designed to drive native herdsmen out of their pasturelands and assert Chinese control over those places.

Such subversion of the status quo, along with China’s ever-expanding “core interests” – which have grown from Tibet and Taiwan to include Xinjiang and now the South China Sea and the Senkakus – is at the root of instability in Asia. This pattern of increasing Chinese assertiveness began when China revived its long-dormant claim to the large, north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh just before the 2006 visit to India of China’s then-president, Hu Jintao.

The resurrection of that claim was followed by territorial spats China provoked with several other neighbours. Together these signalled that China was staking out a more domineering role in Asia. It was as if China had decided that its moment had finally arrived.

For example, playing a game of chicken, China has been posing major new challenges to India, ratcheting up strategic pressure on multiple fronts, including stepping up cross-border military forays and questioning India’s territorial sovereignty in key sectors.

China has repeatedly tried to breach the Himalayan border by taking advantage of the fact that this long, forbidding frontier is difficult for India to patrol effectively, since in many sections Indian troops are based at lower elevations. When an incursion is discovered, Beijing’s refrain is that its troops are on “Chinese land.”

Yet India remains focused on the process rather than on the substance of diplomacy. Process is important only if it buys time to build countervailing leverage. Unfortunately, a rudderless India has made little effort to craft such leverage.

India’s defensive mindset has been on full display in the latest episode. It initially blacked out the April 15 incursion, just as it has suppressed its own figures showing a rising pattern of Chinese military forays across the border.

A whole week went by before New Delhi said a word on the record about the furtive Chinese ingress. The first official Indian comment came only after Beijing issued a bland denial of the incursion, in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources.

India’s cautious, conciliatory response to the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter of a century was revealed in its decision not to scrap its foreign minister’s scheduled trip to Beijing this Thursday and to welcome Li Keqiang, the new Chinese premier on May 20.

This approach has invited rebuke from critics, who portray the intrusion as premeditated, muscle-flexing provocation backed by China’s new leadership.

The immediate crisis eased on Sunday when the Chinese government agreed to end the three-week-old standoff, in return for India’s acceptance of some Chinese demands, including the dismantling of some border-defence structures. China, meanwhile, conceded nothing, in a triumph for its coercive diplomacy.

As China’s coercive power grows, it is beginning to use its capabilities against several neighbours to alter the status quo in its favour, without having to wage open war.

In light of this, India can maintain border peace only by leaving China in no doubt that it has the capability and political will to defend itself. If the Chinese see an opportunity to nibble at Indian land, they will seize it. It is for India to ensure that such opportunities do not arise.

India thus needs a counter-strategy to tame Chinese aggressiveness. Tibet remains at the core of the Sino-Indian divide. And India’s growing strategic ties with the US increasingly rankle China.

To build countervailing leverage, India has little choice but to slowly reopen the central issue of Tibet – a card New Delhi surrendered at the altar of diplomacy. India’s recognition of full Chinese sovereignty over Tibet was based on Beijing’s acknowledgement that Tibet is an “autonomous region” in China. The fact that China has squashed Tibet’s autonomy creates an opening for India to take a more nuanced position.

More broadly, China’s strategy to assemble a “string of pearls” – ports, staging posts and hubs for expanding its interests and presence from East Africa to the Pacific – can be countered by India forming a “string of rapiers” with like-minded Asian-Pacific countries.

At the root of Asia’s growing tensions and insecurity is China’s strategic subversion of the status quo. Only cooperation can shield peace and economic growth; muscle-flexing will not accomplish it.

Brahma Chellaney is a strategic-studies scholar based in New Delhi. His most recent book is Water, Peace, and War.

(c) The National, 2013.

India sings peace to an occupier

Posted on by

Brahma Chellaney, Mint, April 30, 2013

The same old scenario has unfolded again: China quietly occupies a strategic area and a diffident India is left preaching the virtues of diplomacy and peace. When China set out to eliminate the historical buffer with India by invading Tibet, New Delhi opposed Lhasa’s desperate plea for a discussion at the United Nations. And when China stealthily took control of the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau and began building the Tibet-Xinjiang highway through it, New Delhi’s first response was to send a démarche asking Beijing naively as to how it despatched workers to Indian territory without seeking visas for them.

Whereas the People’s Republic of China was born in and built on blood, modern India was founded on a continuing myth—that it won independence by non-violence, not because Britain was in no position after the devastation wrought by World War II to hold on to its colonies. It was not until 1962 that India woke up reluctantly to Leon Trotsky’s warning: “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”

But for the lesson of 1962, India’s leaders may still have mocked George Washington’s famous words: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” Even today, the ruling and opposition leadership remains largely clueless on statecraft and national security affairs. A dysfunctional foreign policy is holding back India’s own rise.

China now is working to alter the line of control bit-by-bit by employing novel methods—without having to fire a single shot. With India a mute spectator, the People’s Liberation Army has brought pastoralists to Uttarakhand’s Barahoti sector and given them cover to range across the line. Using pastoralists in the vanguard and troops in the rear has also been tried elsewhere to drive Indian herdsmen out of their traditional pasturelands and assert Chinese control over those places.

In this way, China is encroaching, little by little, on vantage Indian land in the Chip Chap and Skakjung regions of Ladakh. Chumar in Ladakh was raided last September by helicopter-borne PLA troops, who destroyed Indian bunkers before returning. Arunachal officials are tired of complaining about New Delhi’s nonchalant attitude to aggressive PLA activities along their state’s border.

Karakoram PassFew thus should be surprised by India’s timorous response to the PLA’s occupation of a border site near the strategic Karakoram Pass linking China to Pakistan. But even by its own standards of appeasement, India has outdone itself with its grovelling reaction to the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter-century.

India initially blacked out the incursion, in the way it has suppressed its own figures showing a rising pattern of Chinese cross-border military forays. A whole week went by before New Delhi said a word on record about the PLA’s furtive ingress. The first public word, tellingly, came after Beijing issued a bland denial of the incursion in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources. Another five days passed before New Delhi revealed the incursion’s true depth—19 kilometres.

The external affairs minister has stood out as the appeaser-in-chief. The incursion is just “one little spot” of acne in an otherwise “beautiful face” to be treated with “an ointment.” When not making such embarrassingly inane comments, he has grovelled, going to the extent of saying that saving Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s planned visit will take precedence over ending the incursion. He hastily announced his own trip to Beijing, as if paying obeisance at the Chinese foreign ministry—the weakest branch of China’s government—can get the intruders out.

It is a pity that India, instead of feeling insulted by Li’s plan to stop over in New Delhi on his way to his country’s “all-weather ally” Pakistan to bless the new government to be appointed there, is bending over backward at a time of aggression. Has an Indian prime minister dared to combine a Beijing stopover with a visit to China’s rival Japan?  In fact, Taiwan should be to India what Pakistan is to China.

The shocking irony of treating Li’s stopover as exceedingly important is that every high-level Chinese visit since 2006 has been preceded by a new aggressive Chinese move. The jarring revival of China’s claim to the Austria-size Arunachal came just before President Hu Jintao’s 2006 visit. Before Premier Wen Jiabao came calling in 2010, Beijing began questioning India’s sovereignty over Jammu and Kashmir through its stapled-visa policy.

Now Li’s impending visit has gifted a deep incursion, seemingly designed to convey China’s anger over India’s belated, often-fumbling efforts to fortify border defences. To facilitate its encroachments and safeguard its military advantages, China wants India to leave the border minimally guarded by agreeing to limit Indian troop deployments and infrastructure development and by dismantling even the temporary shelters built for Indian border patrols. And New Delhi—which atrociously deploys border police to ward off the aggressive PLA patrols—is publicly signalling that it is open to meeting some of the new Chinese demands in return for the intruders’ withdrawal. Put simply, it is ready to quietly reward aggression, even at the risk of increasing Indian vulnerability.

India’s leadership fails to distinguish between caution and pusillanimity: the former helps to avert problems, but the latter conveys weakness and invites more aggression. India today risks becoming the proverbial frog in the slowly warming pot, as described by the American scholar John Garver: “A Chinese fable tells of how a frog in a pot of lukewarm water feels quite comfortable and safe. He does not notice as the water temperature slowly rises until, at last, the frog dies and is thoroughly cooked. This homily, wen shui zhu qingwa in Chinese, describes fairly well China’s strategy for growing its influence in South Asia in the face of a deeply suspicious India: move forward slowly and carefully, rouse minimal suspicion, and don’t cause an attempt at escape by the intended victim.”

(c) Mint, 2013.

China’s New War Front

Posted on by

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, April 23, 2013

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during his recent meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, asked for more openness on Chinese dam building. Singh said Xi assured him that he would have his proposal for a joint monitoring mechanism “looked into”. Beijing has now conveyed its response to New Delhi, rebuffing that transparency idea.

This snub is no surprise: China, the world’s most dammed nation, does not have a single river-collaborative or transparency mechanism with any of its 12 riparian neighbours. Unlike India — which has water-sharing treaties with both its downstream neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with each pact establishing a distinctively unique principle in international water law — China rejects the very concept of water sharing and is assertively seeking to make water a political weapon. Indeed, as if to proclaim itself as the world’s unrivalled hydro-hegemon, China recently unveiled 11 additional dam projects on the Salween, the Mekong, and the Brahmaputra.

As with territorial and maritime disputes, China is seeking to disrupt the status quo on international-river flows. Just as it has quietly encroached on disputed territory in the past to present a fait accompli — for example, Aksai Chin (1950s), Paracel Islands (1974), Johnson Reef (1988), Mischief Reef (1995), and Scarborough Shoal (2012) — China is seeking to manipulate cross-border river flows by pursuing dam projects furtively until they can no longer be kept hidden.

Although China is the source of transboundary river flows to countries ranging from Russia to Vietnam, no nation is more vulnerable to China’s reengineering of transboundary flows than India. The reason? India alone receives nearly half of all river waters that leave China. According to UN figures, a total of 718 billion cubic meters of surface water flows out of Chinese territory yearly, of which 48.33% runs directly into India.

For Chinese dam builders, the major Tibetan rivers flowing to India directly or via Nepal are a magnet for another striking reason: Their runoff volume totals 21.5% of the aggregate river flows within China, yet these rivers support just 1.6% of China’s population and sustain only 1.8% of its arable land, according to official Chinese statistics. The main beneficiary of their flows is rival India. When Beijing has shown little regard for the interests of China-friendly downriver states like Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Kazakhstan, why would it be considerate toward India?

India should be under no illusion that diplomacy alone can deter China from significantly altering cross-border flows. In fact, at a time when China’s cartographic aggression and its efforts to nibble at Indian land through stealthy incursions persist, it seems intent on opening a major new front through hydrological aggression. There are warning signs of this.

China is damming not just the Brahmaputra, on which it has already completed several dams, but it has also built a dam each on the Indus and the Sutlej and unveiled plans to erect a cascade of large dams on the Arun (Kosi) river, which helps augment downstream Ganges flows and is thus critical to India’s ability to meet its treaty obligations vis-à-vis Bangladesh. The flashfloods that ravaged Himachal and Arunachal states between 2000 and 2005 were linked to the unannounced releases from rain-swollen Chinese dams and barrages.

The Brahmaputra is a huge attraction for China’s dam programme because this river’s cross-border annual discharge of 165.4 billion cubic meters is greater than the combined transboundary flows of three key rivers running from the Tibetan plateau to Southeast Asia — the Mekong, the Salween, and the Irrawaddy. As China gradually moves its dam building toward the Brahmaputra’s water-rich Great Bend area, it is likely to embark on Mekong-style mega-dams.

India faces difficult choices, largely because of its past mistakes, from which it has learned little. India’s unrestrained recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, coupled with Beijing’s rejection of any water-treaty arrangement, has left China with a legally unfettered foundation to control international-river flows. Just as India made the mistake in the 1950s of regurgitating empty Chinese assurances about the border, only to face first covert and then overt aggression, New Delhi has been gratuitously reciting Chinese assurances to safeguard downstream interests, even as Beijing acts unilaterally.

India is far more water-stressed than China. Yet India’s capacity to store water for dry-season release is one of the world’s lowest, ranking just above Ethiopia’s. China and even Pakistan have done a much better job on that score. The paradox is that Islamabad, despite securing the most generous water-sharing treaty in modern world history, has dragged India before international arbitral proceedings over a small Indian project, while India watches helplessly as China builds much larger dams and rejects what India does routinely with Pakistan — share project designs and permit on-site scrutiny.

India can counter China’s covert water war only by innovative means, including refocusing on the core issue of Tibet. A counter-strategy must be devised and implemented before China exploits its riparian pre-eminence to emerge as the master of the Indian heartland’s water taps.

The writer is a geostrategist.

(c) The Times of India, 2013.

Indus largesse backfires on India

Posted on by

Brahma Chellaney, India Today, April 22, 2013

Indus system rivers

The six Indus-system rivers flowing from India to Pakistan, with the main rivers (the upper three) reserved for Pakistan’s use.

The Indus treaty represents the most generous water-sharing agreement in modern world history, reserving for Pakistan 80.52 percent of the waters, or 167.2 billion cubic meters annually. No other water pact in the world comes anywhere close to this level of upper-riparian munificence. In fact, the Indus treaty uniquely allocates entire rivers by drawing a north-south partition line to gift Pakistan the upper three Indus-system rivers, confining India’s full sovereignty rights to the much-smaller three rivers to the south.

Yet this 1960 treaty imposes more fetters on the upper-riparian state than any other water pact in the world. An elaborate series of India-specific curbs obviate any Indian control over the timing or quantum of the transboundary flows of the Pakistan-earmarked rivers — the Chenab and the Jhelum (which boast the largest cross-border discharge) and the main Indus stream. Indeed, the treaty remains the only interstate water agreement in the world embodying the doctrine of restricted sovereignty, whichseeks to compel an upriver state to defer to the interests of a downstream state.

Pakistan, despite securing a matchless water-sharing arrangement, has repaid India’s water largesse with blood by sponsoring acts of grisly terrorism there. This treaty of indefinite duration may stand out as a major folly bequeathed to future Indian generations by the Nehruvian era, yet no Indian government has ever sought to link water flows with an end to terrorism. However, the same question must haunt the Pakistani generals as Lady Macbeth in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”

Unfortunately for India, its already-limited sovereignty over the upper rivers is now being further crimped by a sweeping new principle defined for all future projects by the recent international arbitration award on the small Kishenganga project. This is a big price India is being made to pay for embarking on the long-delayed, 330-megawatt Kishenganga project, whose design and size, paradoxically, were changed and scaled down in 2006 in response to Pakistani objections.

The treaty permits India to build only run-of-river plants — a type that generates hydropower without a reservoir by using a river’s natural flow velocity and elevation drop.Because of very limited water storage, such plants experience fluctuations in power output due to seasonal flow changes, making them less cost-effective than the larger, storage-centred plants.

Clipboard01

Pakistan has repaid India’s water largesse with blood by sponsoring acts of terrorism.

The arbitration award represents a triumph of Pakistan’s efforts to reinterpret the treaty’s terms more narrowly so as to remove whatever leeway India may have and make the Indus regime even more lopsided. The recent award imposes a new condition on spillway configuration that would seriously undermine the run-of-river plants’ commercial viability by potentially allowing them to silt up, as happened with India’s Salal plant in the 1980s due to design changes carried out at Pakistan’s insistence. By precluding effective silt control through drawdown sluicing and flushing, the award flies in the face of the common international practice to build gated spillways.

Indeed, the arbiters have attempted to override — without any legal power — an international neutral expert’s 2007 decision in the earlier Baglihar case that such spillway outlets were consistent with the treaty’s provisions. The spillway matter is a technical issue and, as per the terms of the treaty, it must decided by a neutral expert, not by an arbitration panel. Yet, overruling India’s objection, the arbiters chose to wilfully encroach onto the technical turf.

International arbitration — with the arbiters and high-priced lawyers collecting millions of dollars in fees from the parties — often functions on the lowest common denominator. In the Kishenganga case, the panel, while upholding the legality of the Indian project, has tilted in Pakistan’s favour on the key design issue. And in an effort to further milk the two parties, the arbiters have extended the lengthy proceedings since 2010 to at least until this year-end, when they “hope” to give their “final award” on another issue that they have contrived — the minimum flow of water India would be required to release for Pakistan in the Kishenganga stream.

Fixing a minimum flow rate will go beyond the terms of the treaty and tie India’s hands, even if climate change or hydrological factors were to affect the stability and predictability of the Kishenganga flow.

Pakistan’s motive is clear: to deny the limited benefits the treaty grants Jammu and Kashmir by objecting and seeking to stall the modest-size projects that New Delhi has belatedly sought to initiate there to allay popular resentment over crippling power shortages. This motive springs from the Pakistani military’s continuing strategy to foment discontent and violence there. The arbiters have unwittingly played into Pakistan’s hands by going beyond the Indus treaty’s provisions on a crucial issue and thereby seeking to effectively arm Islamabad with a veto on any Indian project’s viability.

India must blame itself for reaping the bitter fruits of a remarkable lack of strategy. It concluded the treaty, as its chief negotiator admitted, without any long-term assessment. Despite a widening demand-supply water gap in its own Indus basin, India has yet to exercise some key treaty-sanctioned rights (such as on storage) but allowed Pakistan to drag it before international proceedings. How much longer can a parched but generous India remain visionless?

Brahma Chellaney is the author of the award-winning book, Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

(c) India Today, 2013.

East Asia’s Defining Moment

Posted on by

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

International Herald Tribune: December 22, 2012

Portrait of Brahma Chellaney

The overlapping power transitions in East Asia’s three main economies promise to mark a defining moment in the region’s tense geopolitics. After the ascension in China of Xi Jinping, regarded by the People’s Liberation Army as its own man, Japan’s swing to the right in its parliamentary election seems set to fuel nationalist passion on both sides of the Sino-Japanese rivalry at a time when their brewing territorial spat in the East China Sea has created new risks to regional peace and stability.

South Korea’s presidential election swept another conservative to power, but one who supports conditional rapprochement with North Korea — a line at variance with the policies of departing President Lee Myung-bak and President Obama to keep Pyongyang punitively isolated. Park Geun-hye, the first woman to be elected president in a country that ranks poorly in gender equality, says she intends to tread the middle path between unconditional engagement and uncompromising chastisement.

Park Geun-hye, the 60-year-old daughter of the military general who served as South Korea’s dictator for 18 years until 1979, will assume the presidency in February — a month before Xi, the new leader of the ruling Communist Party, becomes China’s president — while Shinzo Abe, a vocal nationalist, will return as Japan’s prime minister a day after Christmas.

Abe, as prime minister in 2006 and 2007, proposed a concert of democracies in the Asia-Pacific — an idea that spawned the Quadrilateral Initiative of Australia, India, Japan and the United States. Although China’s strong response prevented the “quad” from developing into a formal institution, the four countries have been building strategic collaboration on a bilateral and — in the case of India, Japan and America — even trilateral basis.

East Asia’s political transitions threaten to exacerbate regional challenges, which include the need to institute a stable balance of power and dispense with historical baggage that weighs on interstate relationships. Booming trade has failed to moderate territorial and historical disputes, highlighting that economic interdependence by itself cannot deliver regional stability unless rival states undertake genuine efforts to mend their political relations.

The timing of the political transitions is particularly problematic for the Obama administration, which has been urging China and Japan to peacefully resolve their disputes, while keeping the Stalinist regime in North Korea under stringent sanctions and seeking to promote strategic cooperation between its two allies, South Korea and Japan.

South Korea’s decade-long “sunshine policy” of engagement with North Korea was reversed by the neoconservative Lee after he took office in 2008, triggering a series of tit-for-tat actions that brought the South-North relationship to a low by 2010.

Despite Pyongyang’s successful rocket launch last week in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions, Lee’s successor and colleague in the Saenuri Party, Park, has promised to allow humanitarian aid to the North and to try to meet its young leader Kim Jong-un, who is less than half her age. Kim came to power a year ago following the death of his father. Park’s more moderate approach could undercut Obama’s sanctions-centered policy just when Pyongyang has signaled open defiance of U.S. and U.N. pressure.

Washington’s diplomatic efforts notwithstanding, the new strains in South Korea’s relationship with Japan, owing to the revival of historical issues, may also not be easy to mend. Earlier this year, Lee, at the last minute, canceled the scheduled signing of a military intelligence-sharing pact with Japan, besides scrapping a bilateral plan to finalize a military-related Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement. Weeks later, Lee provocatively visited the contested islets known as the Dokdo Islands in South Korea (which controls them) and the Takeshima Islands in Japan.

Park may seek to similarly pander to nationalist sentiment at home by taking a tough stance against Japan, especially to play down her father’s collaboration with the Japanese military while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule.

China, meanwhile, has launched a new campaign of attrition against Japan over the Senkaku Islands. By sending patrol ships frequently to the waters around the islands — and by violating the airspace over them — Beijing has sought to challenge Japan’s decades-old control, despite the risk that an incident could spiral out of control.

This assertiveness followed often-violent anti-Japanese protests in China in September. An informal Chinese boycott of Japanese goods has led to a sharp fall in Japan’s exports to China, raising the risk of another Japanese recession. China remains Japan’s largest overseas market. A nationalist backlash in Japan is in turn fanning nationalism in China, where the Communist Party has made ultranationalism the legitimating credo of its monopoly on power. Consequently, China and Japan find themselves in a vicious circle that is difficult to escape.

The risks to peace in East Asia posed by increasing nationalism and militarism are highlighted by the rise of a new Chinese dynasty of “princelings” — the sons of revolutionary heroes who have widespread contacts in the military. In fact, what distinguishes Xi, a former military reservist, from China’s other civilian leaders is his strong relationship with the military, whose rising clout has underpinned China’s increasingly muscular foreign policy.

Against this background, the central challenge for East Asia’s three largest economies is to resolve the historical issues that are preventing them from charting a more stable and prosperous future. As a Russian proverb warns, “Forget the past and lose an eye; dwell on the past and lose both eyes.”

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut.” 

(c) International Herald Tribune/New York Times, 2012.

Asia’s Power Balance

Posted on by

A U.S.-India-Japan cooperation bloc can ensure stability in Asia, especially vis-à-vis a rigid China

Brahma Chellaney, The Economic Times, November 21, 2012

The ascendancy of a new dynasty of “princelings” in China, the political uncertainty in Japan and India, and U.S. President Barack Obama’s “pivot” toward Asia underscore the challenge of building Asian power equilibrium at a time of resurgent border disputes and growing nationalism. Obama, by undertaking an Asian tour shortly after his re-election, has signalled that Asia will move up in importance in his second-term agenda.

Obama’s historic visit to Myanmar will aid India’s “Look East” policy because it formally ends a 24-year U.S. policy of punitively isolating a country that is the Indian gateway to continental Southeast Asia. The U.S. shift on Myanmar is as much about seizing trade and investment opportunities as it is about the geopolitical objective of weaning that strategically located country away from Chinese influence. Paradoxically, it was the U.S. sanctions policy that penalized Myanmar but condoned China for crushing pro-democracy protests in 1988 and 1989, respectively, that helped push the former into the latter’s strategic lap.

Obama’s “pivot” toward Asia actually chimes with India’s “Look East” policy, which has graduated to an “Act East” policy, with the original economic logic of “Look East” giving way to a geopolitical logic. The thrust of the new “Act East” policy — unveiled with U.S.’s blessings — is to contribute to building a stable balance of power in Asia by reestablishing India’s historically close ties with countries to its east.

India, in fact, has little choice but to look east because when it looks west, it sees only trouble. The entire belt to India’s west from Pakistan to Syria is a contiguous arc of instability, volatility and extremism. An eastern orientation in its policy can allow India to join the economic dynamism that characterizes Southeast and East Asia. It is in the east again that Indian and U.S. interests now converge significantly, in contrast to their bilateral dissonance on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.

India’s new strategic ties with countries as varied as Japan, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam are important moves on the grand Asian chessboard to increase its geopolitical leeway. The U.S., for its part, has strengthened and expanded its security arrangements in Asia in recent years by making the most of the growing regional concerns over China’s increasingly muscular approach on territorial and maritime disputes.

Both the U.S. and India have deepened their strategic ties with Japan, which has Asia’s largest naval fleet and a $5.5 trillion economy. The first serious Indo-Japanese naval exercise, involving a search-and-rescue operation, was held off the Japanese coast just five months ago. India and Japan, despite their messy domestic politics and endemic scandals, actually boast the fastest-growing bilateral relationship in Asia today.

The stage has been set for building closer Indo-Japanese security cooperation in the wider Indo-Pacific region. At a time when India is reflecting on the lessons of its rout by the invading Chinese forces 50 years ago — the only foreign war Communist China has won — Japan has been concerned by a new war of attrition China has launched by sending patrol ships daily to the waters around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku island group. This physical assertiveness, which coincidentally began around the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Chinese military attack on India, followed often violent anti-Japanese protests in China in September and a continuing informal boycott of Japanese goods that has led to a sharp fall in Japan’s exports, raising the risk of renewed Japanese recession.

With Asia troubled by growing security challenges, trilateral U.S.-India-Japan security cooperation is also beginning to take shape. These three democratic powers recently held their third round of security consultations in New Delhi, underlining their shift from emphasizing shared values to seeking to jointly protect shared interests. Their trilateral cooperation could lead to trilateral coordination, with a potentially positive impact on Asian security and stability.

The nascent trilateral security cooperation may signal moves to form an entente among the three leading democracies of the Asia-Pacific, along the lines of the pre-World War I Franco-British-Russian “Triple Entente,” which was designed to meet the challenge posed by the rapid rise of Germany. The present steps, however, are still tentative. Such an entente’s geopolitical utility, however, is likely to transcend its military value. A geopolitical entente, for example, can help strengthen maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region — the world’s leading trade and energy seaway — and contribute to building a stable Asian power equilibrium.

A fast-rising Asia has become the defining fulcrum of global geopolitical change. Asian policies and challenges now help to shape the international security and economic environment. Yet Asia, paradoxically, is bearing the greatest impact of such shifts. A constellation of powers linked by interlocking bilateral, trilateral, and possibly even quadrilateral strategic cooperation has thus become critical to help institute power stability in Asia and to ensure a peaceful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation.

AFTERTHOUGHT
“Asia is rich in people, rich in culture, and rich in resources. It is also rich in trouble.”
— Hubert H. Humphrey, former vice-president of the U.S.

(c) The Economic Times, 2012.

China’s Made-in-America Success Story

Posted on by

Column internationally distributed by Project Syndicate. September 2012

America’s strategy in Asia for more than a century has sought a stable balance of power to prevent the rise of any hegemon. Yet the United States, according to its official National Security Strategy, is also committed to accommodating “the emergence of a China that is peaceful and prosperous and that cooperates with us to address common challenges and mutual interests.” So America’s Asia policy has in some ways been at war with itself.

In fact, the US has played a key role in China’s rise. For example, rather than sustain trade sanctions against China after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the US decided instead to integrate the country into global institutions. But US foreign policy had been notable for a China-friendly approach long before that.

In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, who hosted the peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after the Russo-Japanese War, argued for the return of Manchuria to Manchu-ruled China and for a balance of power in East Asia. The war ended up making the US an active participant in China’s affairs.

After the Communists seized power in China in 1949, the US openly viewed Chinese Communism as benign, and thus distinct from Soviet Communism. And it was after the Communists crushed the pro-democracy movement in 1989 that the US helped to turn China into an export juggernaut that has accumulated massive trade surpluses and become the principal source of capital flows to the US.

America’s policy toward Communist China has traversed three stages. In the first phase, America courted Mao Zedong’s regime, despite its 1950-1951 annexation of Tibet and domestic witch hunts, such as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the brief liberalization that many Western observers believe was a ploy designed to flush out opponents. Courtship gave way to estrangement during the second phase, as US policy for much of the 1960’s sought to isolate China.

The third phase began immediately after the 1969 Sino-Soviet military clashes, with the US actively seeking to exploit the rift in the Communist world by aligning China with its anti-Soviet strategy. Although China clearly instigated the bloody border clashes, America sided with Mao’s regime. That helped to lay the groundwork for the China “opening” of 1970-1971, engineered by US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who until then had no knowledge of the country.

Since then, the US has pursued a conscious policy of aiding China’s rise. Indeed, President Jimmy Carter sent a memo to various US government departments instructing them to help in China’s rise — an approach that remains in effect today, even as America seeks to hedge against the risk that Chinese power gives rise to arrogance. Indeed, even China’s firing of missiles into the Taiwan Strait in 1996 did not change US policy. If anything, the US has been gradually loosening its close links with Taiwan, with no US cabinet member visiting the island since those missile maneuvers.

Seen in this light, China’s spectacular economic success — including the world’s largest trade surplus and foreign-currency reserves — owes much to US policy from the 1970’s on. Without the significant expansion in US-Chinese trade and financial relations, China’s growth would have been much slower and more difficult to sustain.

Allies of convenience during the second half of the Cold War, the US and China emerged from it as partners tied by interdependence. America depends on China’s trade surplus and savings to finance its outsize budget deficits, while China relies on its huge exports to the US to sustain its economic growth and finance its military modernization. By plowing more than two-thirds of its mammoth foreign-currency reserves into US dollar-denominated assets, China has gained significant political leverage.

China is thus very different from previous US adversaries. America’s interests are now so closely intertwined with China that a policy to isolate or confront it is not feasible. Even on the issue of democracy, the US prefers to lecture other dictatorships rather than the world’s largest autocracy.

Yet it is also true that the US is uneasy about China’s not-too-hidden aim to dominate Asia — an objective that runs counter to US security and commercial interests and to the larger goal of securing a balance in power in Asia. To avert Chinese dominance, the US has already started to build countervailing influences and partnerships, without making any attempt to contain China.

For the US, China’s growing power actually helps to validate its forward military deployments in Asia, maintain existing allies in the region, and win new strategic partners. Indeed, an increasingly assertive China has proven a diplomatic boon for the US in strengthening and expanding its Asian security relationships.

The lesson is clear: The muscle-flexing rise of a world power can strengthen the strategic relevance and role of a power in relative decline. Barely a decade ago, the US was beginning to feel marginalized in Asia, owing to several developments, including China’s “charm offensive.” But now America has returned firmly to center stage. South Korea has beefed up its military alliance with the US; Japan has backed away from an effort to persuade the US to move its Marine base out of Okinawa; Singapore has allowed the US Navy to station ships; Australia is hosting US Marine and other deployments; and India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, among others, have drawn closer to the US as well.

But no one should have any illusions about US policy. Despite America’s “pivot” to Asia, it intends to stick to its two-pronged approach: seek to maintain a balance of power with the help of strategic allies and partners, while continuing to accommodate a rising China.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2012.

Reprinting material without written consent from Project Syndicate is a violation of international copyright law. To secure permission, please contact us.

The Uneasy U.S.-India-Iran Triangle

Posted on by

India’s American Friends and Iranian Partners

By Brahma Chellaney

A column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

The United States recently took the Iran-sanctions monkey off India’s back: it granted India an exemption from Iran-related financial sanctions in exchange for significant cuts in Indian purchases of Iranian oil. Nevertheless, Iran continues to cast a pall over an otherwise brightening U.S.-India relationship.

From India’s perspective, Iran is an important neighbor with which it can ill afford to rupture its relationship. Indeed, India already seems locked geographically in an arc of failing or dysfunctional states, confronting it with external threats from virtually all directions.

If India joined the U.S. containment strategy against Iran, it would have to bear serious strategic costs. For starters, it would lose access to Afghanistan via Iran, which has served as a conduit for the substantial flow of Indian aid to Kabul. Moreover, containment would undermine India’s energy interests.

Few countries are as dependent on the Persian Gulf region’s hydrocarbons as is India, which imports almost 80% of its consumption. Iran is the world’s third-largest net oil exporter (with the world’s second-largest natural-gas reserves as well), and it is a strategically located gateway to other energy suppliers in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Iraq and Iran used to be India’s principal oil suppliers. But the first fell prey to a long U.S. occupation, and the second currently faces a U.S.-led oil-export embargo designed to throttle it financially. As a result, America’s efforts to give international effect to its new Iran Sanctions Act constitute a double whammy for India.

First, it threatens to sabotage India’s energy-import diversification strategy by making it overly dependent on the Islamist-bankrolling oil monarchies — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar — which have managed to ride out the Arab Spring. Second, further isolation of Iran will make it very difficult for India to play a more active role in Afghanistan at a time when the U.S. is hastening its military disengagement there and seeking to cut a deal with the Taliban.

India, one of the largest aid donors to Afghanistan, has no contiguous corridor to that country and must rely on Iran for access. Both countries share a common goal in Afghanistan — to ensure that the Pakistan-backed Taliban does not return to power. If the already-unstable situation there deteriorates after the end of U.S.-led combat operations, India and Iran may be compelled to revive their strategic cooperation of the 1990’s. It was the Northern Alliance, backed by India, Iran, and Russia, that overthrew the Taliban regime in Kabul in late 2001 with the help of America’s air war.

For the U.S. today, containment of Iran is dictated by several geopolitical considerations. One consideration is the need to neutralize the strategic advantage that Iran gained from the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq — a development that helped to empower Iraq’s Shia majority. President George W. Bush called Iran part of an “axis of evil,” yet his decision to invade and occupy Iraq benefited Shia-dominated Iran above all.

Moreover, regional geopolitics pits the powerful “Sunni Crescent,” led by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, against the beleaguered “Shia Crescent” states — Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. The U.S. has profited from a longstanding alliance with the Sunni bloc. In addition to the strategic advantages, America’s close ties with the oil sheikhdoms — which are among the world’s leading holders of foreign-exchange reserves — contribute to propping up the dollar.

It is against this background that the Iranian nuclear program has come to symbolize the larger geopolitical tensions underlying the confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. Indeed, the nuclear issue has served to rationalize the face-off, with Iran’s leaders playing to their domestic audience by whipping up nuclear nationalism and the U.S. playing to the international audience by harping on the proliferation threat.

India should seek to play the role of honest broker to defuse the threat of military hostilities, which would most likely shut down the world’s most important oil-export route, the Strait of Hormuz (a danger that Iran has said is also implicit in an oil-export embargo against it). But, far from being able to play the role of bridge-builder between the U.S. and Iran, India is being forced to walk a policy tightrope, and its desire to chart a neutral course has annoyed both sides.

Every time a senior Indian delegation visits Iran, or vice versa, the U.S. warns India that its cozying up to Iran “raises obstacles” to building a closer strategic partnership. Yet, by voting against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board meetings in 2005 and 2006, India invited Iranian reprisal in the form of cancellation of a highly favorable 25-year, $22-billion liquefied-natural-gas deal.

The Iran issue, in effect, has turned into a diplomatic litmus test: Will India stand up for its strategic and energy interests in the region, or will it be co-opted to serve the short-term interests of its friend, the U.S.? The U.S., for its part, must reconcile its Iran-related pressure on India, which is likely to continue despite the 180-day sanctions waiver, with the imperative to build deeper defense ties with India, thereby giving strategic heft to its declared “pivot” to Asia.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of “Asian Juggernaut” (HarperCollins) and “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

(C) Project Syndicate, 2012.

Parched and Thirsty, yet Most Generous in Water Diplomacy

Posted on by

Brahma Chellaney, The Times of India, July 3, 2012

Reciprocity is the first principle of diplomacy. But not for India, if one goes by its record. India has walked the extra mile to befriend neighbours, yet today it lives in the world’s most-troubled neighbourhood.

India’s generosity on land issues has been well documented, including its surrender of British-inherited extraterritorial rights in Tibet in 1954, the giving back of strategic Haji Pir to Pakistan after the 1965 war, and the similar return of territorial gains plus 93,000 prisoners after 1971 — all without securing any tangible reciprocity. Despite that record, there are still calls within India today for it to unilaterally cede control over the Siachin Glacier.

Even though India is reeling under a growing water crisis — with hospitals in its capital postponing surgeries because of lack of water and much of the country parched and thirsty — few seem to know that India’s generosity has extended not just to land but also to river waters.

The world’s most generous water-sharing pact is the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, under which India agreed to set aside 80.52% of the waters of the six-river Indus system for Pakistan, keeping for itself just the remaining 19.48% share. Both in terms of the sharing ratio as well as the total quantum of waters reserved for a downstream state, this treaty’s munificence is unsurpassed in scale in the annals of international water treaties. Indeed, the volume of water earmarked for Pakistan is more than 90 times greater than the 1.85 billion cubic metres the US is required to release for Mexico under the 1944 US-Mexico Water Treaty.

The unparalleled water generosity has only invited trouble for India. Within five years of the Indus treaty, Pakistan launched its second war against India to grab the rest of Kashmir when India had still not recovered from its humiliating rout in 1962 at the hands of the Chinese.

Today, Pakistan expects eternal Indian munificence on water even as its military establishment (with blood of innocent Indians on its hands) continues to export terror. Yet, with all the water flowing downstream under the treaty, the same question must haunt the Pakistani generals as Lady Macbeth in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” Meanwhile, India’s own Indus basin, according to the 2030 Water Resources Group, confronts a massive 52% deficit between water supply and demand.

India’s 1996 Ganges treaty with Bangladesh guarantees minimum cross-border flows in the dry season — a new principle in international water law. In fact, the treaty almost equally divides the downstream Ganges flows between the two countries. Because of that precedent, India seems now ready to reserve almost half of the Teesta River waters for Bangladesh in what will be the world’s first water-sharing treaty of the 21st century.

Water is a state issue, not a federal matter, in the Indian Constitution, yet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has sought to strong-arm West Bengal into accepting a Teesta River treaty on terms dictated by New Delhi. Existing water-sharing treaties elsewhere in the world, by contrast, do not come anywhere close to allocating half of all basin waters to the downstream state. Another key fact is that unlike Bangladesh, India is already a seriously water-stressed country. Whereas the annual per-capita water availability in Bangladesh averages 8,252 cubic metres, it has fallen to a paltry 1,560 cubic metres in India.

Lost in such big-hearted diplomacy is the fact that India is downriver to China, which, far from wanting to emulate India’s Indus or Ganges style water munificence, rejects the very concept of water sharing. Instead, the construction of upstream dams on international rivers such as the Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Arun, Sutlej, Indus, Irtysh, Illy and Amur shows China is increasingly bent on unilateral actions, impervious to the concerns of downstream nations. Over the next decade, as if to underscore the strategic importance it gives to controlling water resources, China plans to build more large dams than the US or India has managed in its entire history.

By seeking to have its hand on Asia’s water tap through an extensive upstream infrastructure, China challenges India’s interests more than any other country’s. Although a number of nations stretching from Afghanistan to Vietnam receive waters from the Tibetan Plateau, India’s direct dependency on Tibetan waters is greater than of any other country. With about a dozen important rivers flowing in from the Tibetan Himalayan region, India gets almost one-third of all its yearly water supplies of 1,911 cubic kilometres from Tibet, according to the latest UN data.

In this light, it is fair to ask: Is India condemned to perpetual generosity toward its neighbours? This question has assumed added urgency because India has started throwing money around as part of its newly unveiled aid diplomacy — $1 billion in aid to Bangladesh, one-fifth as grant; $500 million to Myanmar; $300 million to Sri Lanka; $140 million to the Maldives; and generous new aid to Afghanistan and Nepal. If pursued with wishful thinking, such aid generosity is likely to meet the same fate as water munificence.

Generosity in diplomacy can yield rich dividends if it is part of a strategically geared outreach designed to ameliorate the regional-security situation so that India can play a larger global role. But if it is not anchored in the fundamentals of international relations — including reciprocity and leverage building — India risks accentuating its tyranny of geography, even as it is left holding the bag.

The writer is a geostrategist.

(c) The Times of India, 2012.

Is the U.S.-India relationship losing steam?

Posted on by

Brahma Chellaney, Japan Times, June 7, 2012

WASHINGTON — Was the U.S.-India strategic partnership oversold to the extent that it has failed to yield tangible benefits for the United States? Even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just held detailed discussions in New Delhi, an increasing number of analysts in Washington have already concluded that the overhyped relationship is losing momentum.

The skeptics cite two high-visibility issues in particular: India’s rejection of separate bids by Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. to sell 126 fighter-jets, and New Delhi’s reluctance to snap energy ties with Iran. The discussion over these issues, however, obscures key facts.

Take the aircraft deal.  Despite that setback, U.S. firms have clinched several other multibillion-dollar arms deals in recent years. These contracts have been secured on a government-to-government basis, without any competitive bidding.  But in the one case where India invited bids, American firms failed to make it beyond the competition’s first round because they did not match the price and other terms offered by the French manufacturer of the Rafale aircraft and the European consortium that makes the Eurofighter Typhoon.

The most-startling yet little-publicized fact is America’s quiet emergence as the largest arms seller to India. In the decade since President George W. Bush launched the vaunted U.S.-Indian strategic partnership, India has fundamentally reoriented its defense procurement, moving away from its traditional reliance on Russia. Indeed, nearly half of all Indian defense deals by value in recent years have been bagged by the U.S. alone, with Israel a distant second and Russia relegated to the third slot.

Given that India has become the world’s largest arms importer and the United States remains the biggest exporter, U.S. firms are set to secure more contracts in India, which plans to spend more than $100 billion over the next four years to upgrade its military capabilities, including by buying submarines, heavy lift and attack helicopters, howitzers, and tanks.

Now consider the Iran issue. Just as the Indian rejection of the Boeing’s F/A 18 and Lockheed-Martin’s F-16 bids has made big news but the U.S. landing of multiple arms contracts has received little notice, India’s reluctance to publicly support U.S. energy sanctions on Iran has been in the spotlight but not the quiet Indian strategy since the late 1990s to let the share of Iranian oil in India’s energy imports gradually decline — a trend that has seen the importance of Iranian oil supplies for India considerably weaken.

Few in India consider Iran a friend. But given India’s troubled neighborhood, with the country wedged in an arc of problematic states, New Delhi is reluctant to rupture its ties with Iran, its gateway to Afghanistan — the top recipient of Indian aid. India already has paid a heavy price for taking America’s side on some critical issues in its long-running battle against Iran, even though Washington doesn’t take India’s side in its disputes with China or Pakistan.

The Bush administration persuaded India not to conclude any new long-term energy contracts with Iran, and — in return for a civil nuclear deal with the U.S. — abandon its plan to build a gas pipeline from Iran. New Delhi, by voting against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board in 2005 and 2006, invited Iranian reprisal in the form of cancellation of a 25-year, $22-billion liquefied natural gas deal which had terms highly favorable to India. That deal’s scrapping alone left India poorer by several billion dollars.

Now the U.S. energy embargo against Iran has pushed international oil prices higher, significantly increasing India’s oil bill. The embargo also threatens to undercut India’s import-diversification strategy by making it place most of its eggs in the basket of the Islamist-bankrolling, Saudi Arabia-led oil monarchies that continue to play a role in South Asia detrimental to Indian interests. In fact, thanks to the U.S. embargo against Iran, the swelling coffers of the iron-fisted oil sheikhdoms are set to overflow, increasing their leverage in the region and beyond.

Lost in the U.S. public discussion is an important fact — the declining share of Iranian crude in India’s total oil imports as part of a conscious Indian effort to reduce supply-disruption risks linked with the lurking potential for Iran-related conflict. Since 2008 alone, Iranian oil imports have swiftly fallen from 16.4 percent to 10.3 percent. Given India’s soaring oil imports and search for new sources of supply, the Iranian share is set to decline further, even without India’s participation in the U.S. embargo.

Make no mistake: India shares U.S. objectives on Iran but the exigencies of its regional situation compel it to toe a more cautious line.

The repositioning of the U.S.-India relationship was never intended to be transactional. Rather it was designed as an important geostrategic move to underpin Asian security and serve the long-term U.S. and Indian interests. But even if the relationship were viewed in transactional terms, the U.S. has reaped handsome dividends.

On Iran, the right course for U.S. policy would be to encourage India to continue reducing Iranian oil imports by granting it a waiver from American sanctions law — as Washington has to Japan and nine other countries — and by helping to finance the retrofitting of Indian refineries that presently have a technical capacity to process only Iranian oil.

More fundamentally, just as the Bush administration exaggerated the importance of a single deal with India, contending that the nuclear deal would be fundamentally transformative, it is an overstatement that the U.S.-India relationship today is losing momentum. The geostrategic direction of the relationship is irreversibly set — toward closer collaboration. Even trade between the countries has continued to grow impressively, from $9 billion in 1995 to $100 billion in 2011. While it is too much to expect a congruence of U.S. and Indian national-security objectives in all spheres, the two countries are likely to deepen their cooperation in areas where their interests converge, such as ensuring Asian power equilibrium.

Barack Obama had stroked India’s collective ego by inviting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his presidency’s first state dinner, leading to the joke that while China gets a deferential America and Pakistan secures billions of dollars in U.S. aid periodically, India is easily won over with a sumptuous dinner and nice compliments.

The mutual optimism and excitement that characterized the blooming U.S.-Indian ties during the Bush years, admittedly, has given way to more realistic assessments as the relationship has matured. Geostrategic and economic forces, however, continue to drive the two countries closer. Indeed, Obama’s recent pivot to Asia has made closer U.S. strategic collaboration with India critical.

(c) The Japan Times, 2012.