What can a Quad summit hosted by a lame-duck American president achieve? Will the summit essentially mark the swan song of President Joe Biden?
The odd timing of the Sept. 21 summit has also been underscored by the fact Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will leave office just days after returning from his U.S. visit.
It was India’s turn to host the Quad summit. But Biden, eager to hold the event in his Delaware hometown of Wilmington, persuaded India to defer its hosting until next year. The summit date was also dictated by Kishida’s decision in August to resign just before the Sept. 27 leadership contest in Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party.
The Quad coalition (the U.S., Japan, India and Australia) is essential to realize the vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific region” introduced by late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2016 and affirmed by the U.S. in 2017 as a shorthand for a rules-based, liberal order. But with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East distracting the U.S. from security challenges in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. has yet to genuinely pivot to this critical region that will shape the next global order.
Biden’s overriding focus on weakening Russia is sapping the Quad’s main strategic purpose, which is to act as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensure a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. The deepening proxy war with Russia has made America increasingly wary of taking on China simultaneously, which may explain why Biden prioritizes diplomacy over deterrence with Beijing.
The Quad leaders, in fact, will meet amid rising U.S.-Russia tensions over Anglo-French-American moves to allow Ukraine to use long-range cruise missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia — an action Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned would mean direct Western involvement in the war, placing his country and NATO “at war.” Such missiles would rely on U.S. navigational data and other technology, including satellite reconnaissance, giving NATO, according to Putin, effective control over targeting.
Jarringly, the specter of escalation has emerged just when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stepped up efforts to broker a cease-fire in the war. After his visits to Moscow and Kyiv, Modi, on the sidelines of the Quad summit, will brief Biden on his peacemaking effort and then meet with Putin again next month during a BRICS leaders’ meeting in Kazan, Russia. Modi’s initiative can make little headway without full support from the U.S.
The Biden administration backed Modi’s Kyiv visit, but at the same time it has deepened U.S. involvement in the war. This has not only stymied U.S. efforts to position the Indo-Pacific at the “heart” of its grand strategy but also crimped America’s strategic options against its main challenger at the global level, China, which is seeking to supplant the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power.
In an effort to dissuade Beijing from directly aiding the Kremlin’s war machine or cementing an anti-U.S. strategic axis with Moscow, Biden has pursued a more conciliatory approach toward China. But his overtures have yielded few positive results.
China and Russia today appear closely aligned, with Beijing providing substantial support for the Russian military-industrial complex. In Asia, China has upped the ante, including intensifying coercive pressures on Taiwan, stepping up provocations in the South China Sea and staying locked in a border military standoff with India.
Yet, after the Quad summit, Biden plans to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping over the phone and then possibly meet him in person before the year-end. Biden wants to steady the U.S.-China relationship by smoothing over bilateral tensions. “I don’t want to contain China,” Biden said last September while visiting Vietnam. “We’re not trying to hurt China.”
Placating China and strengthening the Quad seem basically incompatible. Today, in the absence of a clear strategic mission, the Quad seems adrift.
Under Biden’s leadership, the Quad’s agenda has shifted from a strategic focus on the Indo-Pacific to global challenges. But the Quad, as a grouping of just four democracies, is in no position to deal with universal challenges. It is thus scarcely a surprise that little concrete progress has been made in the six Quad working groups covering critical and emerging technologies, climate change, cybersecurity, infrastructure, vaccines and outer space.
While saddling the Quad with an overly ambitious global agenda, the Biden administration has flaunted a new quadrilateral grouping, the so-called Squad, made up of America, Australia, Japan and the Philippines. It has also showcased the new AUKUS (Australia-U.K.-U.S.) alliance, although that initiative will be able to play an important role in the Indo-Pacific only in the next decade after the transfer of nuclear-powered submarines to Canberra.
To safeguard Indo-Pacific security, there is no substitute for a Quad with clear strategic direction and resolve.
The Quad leaders’ joint statement at their last summit in Hiroshima in May 2023 said the group would be “a global force for good” through a “positive, practical agenda,” identifying their top priorities as climate security, clean energy supply chains, health security and resilient infrastructure. The Wilmington summit statement could also emphasize the global agenda while making passing references to the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China seas.
But if the Quad is to play a meaningful role, its attention must be refocused squarely on the pressing Indo-Pacific challenges. It is not too late to ensure the Quad realizes its strategic promise, rather than gradually drifting into irrelevance or being reduced to a mere instrument of leverage for the U.S. in its fraught relationship with China.
Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
(Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP) Flames rise and debris is scattered on the ground after a Russian aerial bomb struck a multi-story residential building in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Sunday Sept. 15, 2024.
The second apparent assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump in just over two months involved a gunman who had previously said he was willing to fight and die in Ukraine. This underscores how that war is not just influencing American politics and foreign policy but also having an impact on the nation’s social fabric.
As one issue that divides Americans along party lines, the war has helped harden political polarization in American society.
According to one survey, 66 percent of Republicans would like the U.S. to encourage Kyiv to negotiate with Moscow, whereas the bulk of Democrats (62 percent) favor supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes. The partisan divide in foreign policy extends even to perceptions of which country represents America’s main adversary: Republicans are most concerned about China, whereas Democrats worry about Russia above all.
As part of President Joe Biden’s strategy to bleed Russia in Ukraine, the U.S. has played a critical role in bankrolling the Ukrainian fight against the invading Russian forces, with Congress approving almost $175 billion in military and nondefense assistance. But American assistance has been unable to turn the tide in the war, with Russia still making slow but steady territorial gains in eastern Ukraine.
One key reason is that, more than weapons and funds, Ukraine needs new recruits to replenish the ranks of its exhausted and depleted forces. But even draconian conscription practices have not been able to offset its mounting troop shortfall.
The war also carries hidden costs, including inflation at home. A survey found that 49 percent of Americans support negotiations between Ukraine and Russia so that costs for U.S. households do not increase further.
The U.S. dollar, which was facing “stealth erosion” before the Ukraine war, now confronts a more open but nascent challenge to its global dominance in response to the West’s weaponization of finance and seizure of Russia’s earnings on its central-bank assets frozen by Western governments. As countries explore alternatives to the dollar, the greenback is beginning to lose some of its global influence, especially in oil markets.
Meanwhile, as a hedging strategy, central banks in many countries — especially China, Turkey, India, Kazakhstan and in Eastern Europe — have increasingly been buying gold. Such hoarding, coupled with greater geopolitical uncertainty, has helped drive gold prices to a record high.
The Ukraine war’s hidden costs also extend to the geopolitical realm, especially by hindering the ability of the U.S. to respond to the greater challenge it faces from China.
China poses a far greater threat than Russia to Western interests and the U.S.-led world order. Whereas Russia’s designs are largely confined to its neighborhood, China is seeking to supplant the U.S. as the world’s foremost power. It also has the means: China’s economy, like its population, is about 10 times larger than Russia’s, and China spends four times as much as Russia on its military.
Furthermore, China is currently engaged in the largest peacetime military buildup in history. It has more than doubled its nuclear-weapons arsenal since 2020 and is expanding its conventional forces faster than any other country since World War II.
The last thing Chinese President Xi Jinping wants is an end to the Ukraine war, because that would leave the U.S. free to focus on the Indo-Pacific, a critical region that will shape the next global order. China’s expansionism is centered in the Indo-Pacific, from the East and South China Seas, to the Taiwan Strait, to the Himalayas.
The U.S. is dedicating insufficient attention and resources to countering Chinese expansionism and also continues to inadvertently bolster China’s global influence, not least through its overuse of sanctions against a host of countries.
With its military resources already stretched thin by its involvement in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the U.S. needs a more realistic balancing of its key geopolitical objectives at a time when a majority of Americans believe that the nation’s power is declining on the world stage. Without such rebalancing, the U.S. may well fail to deter China from attacking Taiwan or cementing a strategic axis with Russia, just as Biden failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine.
The U.S. must face up to the reality that, despite substantial Western military assistance, Kyiv is in no position to oust Russia from the territories it has occupied in Ukraine’s east and south. Letting Ukraine use long-range Western cruise missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia with U.S. navigational data and other technology would only risk a direct NATO-Russia conflict.
More fundamentally, a protracted Ukraine war is not in America’s interest. But bringing an end to the war demands dialogue and diplomacy, which Biden has shunned with Moscow.
Amid heightened U.S.-Russia tensions, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sought to broker a cease-fire. After his visits to Moscow and Kyiv, Modi will brief Biden on his peacemaking effort when they meet at the Sept. 21 Quad summit in Wilmington, Del. Without full support from the U.S., Modi — who is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin again next month at a BRICS leaders’ summit — can achieve little.
A possible American policy shift in favor of a cease-fire may have to await the outcome of the November election. Given that a negotiated deal is the only way to halt the war, it is better to seek it sooner rather than after months or years of more bloodshed and devastation.
THE DRAMATIC OVERTHROW of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5 represents the biggest regional setback for India in more than a decade. The swift toppling, just six weeks after Hasina’s state visit to New Delhi, not only caught India by complete surprise but also carries adverse implications for Indian security. The development could weigh India down regionally at a time when New Delhi is seeking to play a greater role on the world stage.
Whereas New Delhi has reacted to the Bangladesh turmoil with deep concern and even alarm, India’s close strategic partner, America, has greeted Hasina’s fall with a sense of contentment. Washington’s smug satisfaction of Hasina’s exit extends, according to one analyst, to “gloating” by a section of the US establishment over the failure of the Indian project in Bangladesh.
US President Joe Biden’s administration had openly gunned for Hasina’s government, despite the fact that her secular regime kept the military and Islamists in check. Located thousands of miles away from the subcontinent, the US, in the name of democracy promotion, can afford to play geopolitical games without affecting its interests. But India, with vital security interests at stake, has no such luxury.
Democracy promotion has long served as a valuable geopolitical tool for the US. After greeting with glee the regime change in Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most populous country, the Biden administration is now working on a new regime-change project by offering Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “amnesty” if he ceded power.
In fact, the US targeting of Hasina’s government served as a reminder for New Delhi of the wider divergence of American and Indian interests in India’s own neighbourhood, including in relation to Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.
After Myanmar—which is racked by an internal war that has been fuelled by stringent US-led sanctions and “non-lethal aid” to insurgents—Bangladesh could become the second immediate neighbour of India to be destabilised by short-sighted policies of the Biden administration. Greater turmoil in the region would seriously crimp Indian interests.
A destabilised Bangladesh would be India’s geopolitical nightmare. It would impose sustained costs on Indian interests, including potentially subverting the security of India’s vulnerable Northeast. It could also open the floodgates to the flow of Bangladeshi refugees to India, which is already home to countless millions of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on Earth, if one excludes micro-states and mini-states.
The rise of violent Islamism in Bangladesh, including scores of incidents of Islamist terrorism in this century, has been a growing Indian concern. Extremists linked with ISIS (Islamic State), Al Qaeda and the Bangladeshi, Pakistan-backed Jamaat-e-Islami have a long record of assaulting religious and ethnic minorities as well as secular, liberal activists. In a destabilised Bangladesh, such forces would proliferate and pose cross-border challenges to India’s security.
No sooner had the army chief announced Hasina’s fall than rioters systematically sought to erase symbols of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and statehood, including burning down the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka and toppling or defacing the statues and portraits of the father of the nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
Meanwhile, New Delhi’s ‘Act East’ policy, already reeling from the growing turmoil in Myanmar, has suffered another blow from the regime change in Bangladesh, which has put at risk connectivity and transit links with India.
HAVING PLAYED A CENTRAL role in forcing Hasina to flee the country, the army has re-emerged as the final arbiter in Bangladesh politics. The interim government, made up of ‘advisers’ with little experience in handling national matters, is just the civilian façade for military rule.
The army chief, General Waker-uz-Zaman, despite being related to Hasina by marriage, was instrumental in her downfall. Like her late father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader who ignored warnings in 1975 that army officers in Dhaka were plotting to stage a coup and kill him, Hasina disregarded advice that appointing the ambitious, Islamist-leaning Zaman as army chief could invite an army takeover. Hasina took comfort in the fact that Zaman was married to her cousin.
But just six weeks after Zaman became the army chief, Hasina fell from power. As street protests intensified, it became apparent that Zaman was wavering in his support for the Hasina government.
Through deliberate inaction, Zaman allowed the situation to deteriorate to the point that the police and paramilitary forces could no longer contain widespread looting, vandalism and arson, including attacks on public infrastructure and the Hindu minority. The army chief then used the violent upheaval to force the prime minister to leave the country on August 5. The night before, he bluntly conveyed to Hasina the army’s refusal to enforce the lockdown she had ordered, telling her that his soldiers would not fire on protesters, many of whom by then were rampaging through the streets of Dhaka.
But with “mission accomplished”, Zaman ordered his soldiers to fire on Awami League activists protesting against Hasina’s forced departure from the country. In Gopalganj, Hasina’s home district with a sizeable Hindu minority, the military action left several people killed or wounded.
The army brass saw forcing Hasina to flee to India as a better choice than killing or imprisoning her. Bumping off Hasina in the way her father was murdered would have made her a martyr in the eyes of the millions who still support her, while jailing the sitting prime minister would have created a constitutional crisis impeding the army’s appointment of a successor administration.
Hasina’s forced departure, however, triggered greater lawlessness, extending from widespread looting and revenge killings to atrocities against the long-persecuted Hindu minority, which had faced Islamist attacks periodically even under the Awami League government. In the recent protests, armed rioters, according to the official count, killed 42 policemen and looted 7.62mm rifles from law enforcement personnel. Only members of Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion and police carry this type of rifle. After the bloody mayhem, Bangladesh is struggling to fully restore order.
The total collapse of government authority in Bangladesh was redolent of the 2022 chaos in Sri Lanka when the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic regime fell apart. Just as Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country on a military jet without resigning, Hasina arrived in India suddenly aboard a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J Super Hercules military transport plane without formally tendering her resignation to the president. And just as protesters in Colombo occupied the presidential palace, mobs in Dhaka ransacked the prime minister’s sprawling official residence, looting each and every article that could be carried away.
But, unlike in Sri Lanka, the army played a key role in the regime change in Bangladesh, including handpicking members of the new interim administration.
There is also one ominous parallel between the upheaval in Bangladesh and the 2012 political turmoil in the Maldives, in terms of what the rioters sought to accomplish.
Sheikh Hasina leaves Dhaka on a military helicopter, August 5, 2024
The total collapse of government authority in Bangladesh was redolent of the 2022 chaos in Sri Lanka when the Rajapaksa brothers’ dynastic regime fell apart. Hasina arrived in India aboard a Bangladesh Air Force C-130J super hercules military transport plane without formally tendering her resignation to the president
When the Maldives’ first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, was forced to resign at gunpoint, Islamists ransacked the country’s main museum in Malé, the capital, smashing priceless Buddhist and Hindu statues made of coral and limestone, virtually erasing all evidence of the Maldives’ pre-Islamic past before Maldivians converted to Islam in the 12th century. “The whole pre-Islamic history is gone,” the museum’s director then lamented.
Similarly, no sooner had the army chief announced Hasina’s fall than rioters systematically sought to erase symbols of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and statehood, including burning down the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum in Dhaka and toppling or defacing the statues and portraits of the Father of the Nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The museum was central to the history of how Bangladesh was created—a violent birth that occurred after up to 3 million Bangladeshi civilians (mainly Hindus singled out by Pakistan’s army) were slaughtered, some 200,000 women were coerced into rape camps, and about 10 million people fled to India.
The August 5 vandalism against national symbols was an attack on Bangladesh’s identity, its history and its statehood. It showed that, more than half-a-century after the country’s birth, there are still elements within Bangladesh that have not reconciled to its secession from Pakistan.
Since 1975, Bangladesh has experienced more than two dozen army coups or coup attempts. By assassinating the father of the nation, the army became the most powerful political player, ruling Bangladesh directly or indirectly for extended periods. It was the ‘iron lady’ Hasina who kept the military (and Islamists) in check—until the recent violent uprising against her rule led the army chief to compel her to leave the country.
Today, General Zaman is the power behind the throne. When decisive power rests with an extra-constitutional authority, democratisation can hardly gain traction.
The interim government has no constitutional mandate. The Bangladesh constitution calls for elections to be held within 90 days of the dissolution of parliament, yet the duration (or the scope of powers) of the interim government has not been defined. Political discontent will grow if the constitutional deadline passes without the holding of elections.
The country’s president holds a largely ceremonial position. And the interim government consists only of advisers. Advisers are not the same as decision-makers. Despite a US-friendly chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, nominally heading the interim government, Hasina’s overthrow has left a major power vacuum in the country that is being filled by the military—and Islamists.
The army is puppet-mastering the moves and decisions of the interim government advisers, who, in any case, owe their positions to General Zaman.
Against this backdrop, purges are in full swing, spurring greater uncertainty and fear in Bangladesh. The country’s chief justice and the next five senior-most justices of the Supreme Court were made to resign virtually at gunpoint. The purges have extended to all institutions, from the military, intelligence agencies and police to the central bank and universities.
One can expect more purges and crackdowns, some silent ones and some possibly violent ones. The aim is to stifle all support for Hasina and demolish her family’s political legacy. The Awami League has already been directed to “reorganise” itself (that is, rid itself of Hasina’s influence) in order to participate in the next election.
US President Joe Biden, Sheikh Hasina and First Lady Jill Biden in New York, September 21, 2022
The Biden administration’s hard line toward Hasina began with its December 10, 2021 imposition of sanctions on its Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on grounds that RAB committed alleged human rights abuses as part of its war on drugs
RUDYARD KIPLING’S PORTRAYAL of strategic skulduggery in his 1901 novel Kim popularised the “Great Game” of the time between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia for control over Afghanistan and Central Asia. Since then, several other Great Games have been played out or continue to be at play.
The de facto coup d’état in Bangladesh and the externally fuelled internal war in Myanmar hint at a new Great Game at play in southern Asia, despite the risks that the machinations could extend Myanmar’s destabilisation to Bangladesh and Northeast India, thereby spurring greater regional tensions and an upsurge of radical Islamism. This Great Game is being played on several levels, including diplomatic, espionage and economic, as well as through political manoeuvrings.
The US and China have separately sought to enhance their interests in southern Asia in ways that are generating acute security and economic risks for India, the regional power. But while China sees India as an adversary, the US and India are friends, yet on regional issues of core Indian interest, Washington and New Delhi are not on the same page.
The US-India strategic divergence over Bangladesh began in 1971 when US President Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to the Pakistani genocide in East Pakistan and sought to prevent the birth of Bangladesh, including by urging China to open a military front against India. The US grudgingly recognised Bangladesh as an independent nation in April 1972 after a majority of countries had already done so.
In the subsequent years, even as India-US relations improved, the strategic dissonance between the two powers over Bangladesh never disappeared. US interests, after all, never aligned with Indian interests. Indeed, the dissonance became more pronounced when the Biden administration started gunning for Hasina, ignoring Indian concerns about the growing Islamist menace and political volatility in India’s neighbourhood.
In the name of seeking to restore democratic governance, the US has maintained cosy ties with every military or military-backed regime in Bangladesh since 1975.
Now, after the ouster of Hasina, Washington has said its approach to the military-chosen interim government would be based on “Bangladeshi people’s democratic aspirations and … a path to democratic governance”. It has welcomed the new interim government in Dhaka, saying it will work with it “as it charts a democratic future for the people of Bangladesh”.
But the new administration, with a radical Islamist leader as one of its advisers, is just a civilian setup for army rule. In a nod to the growing power of Islamic fundamentalists and extremists in Bangladesh, the army chief included in the interim administration a leader of the Hefazat-e-Islam, a coalition of Islamist organisations that seeks a system based on Sharia (Islamic law). The Hefazat-e-Islam has been linked to attacks on the Hindu minority and to last year’s killing of a young blogger.
Muhammad Yunus being sworn in as head of Bangladesh’s interim government in Dhaka, August 8, 2024 (Photo: AFP)
The interim government consists only of advisers. Despite a US-friendly chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, nominally heading the interim government, Hasina’s overthrow has left a major power vacuum in the country that is being filled by the military
The Biden administration’s hard line toward the Hasina government began with its December 10, 2021 imposition of sanctions on Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on grounds that RAB committed alleged human rights abuses as part of its war on drugs. Bangladesh was excluded from the Summits for Democracy convened by Biden in December 2021 and March 2023, while military-dominated Pakistan was invited both times though it did not attend either.
Bangladesh’s impressive economic growth trajectory under Hasina stood in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil in Pakistan. But, while continuing to reward Pakistan by prioritising short-term geopolitical considerations, the Biden administration sharply stepped up its criticism of democratic backsliding in Bangladesh.
It also started wielding the visa-sanctions stick against the Hasina government. Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled a new US policy on May 24, 2023 to restrict the issuance of visa for any Bangladeshi individual believed to be involved in undermining the democratic election process in Bangladesh. Washington’s increasing hard line approach emboldened anti- Hasina political forces in Bangladesh, including Islamists and the largest opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had allied itself with the Jamaat-e-Islami.
Now Hasina, alleging a US role in her overthrow, has reportedly claimed that, “I could have remained in power if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin’s Island and allowed America to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal.” Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed, who holds an American green card, apparently came under immediate pressure to recant her mother’s allegations. Hours after confirming to WION television channel Hasina’s remarks about the US and St Martin’s, Wazed posted on X denying that she made any such statement.
The White House, asked about Hasina’s allegation that she was overthrown because of her refusal to lease St Martin’s to the US, stated flatly that “we have had no involvement at all” in the events in Bangladesh.
It was on June 21, 2023 that Hasina openly raised the St Martin’s issue, telling a news conference at her official residence in Dhaka that if she were to “lease the island of St Martin’s to someone, then there would be no problem” with her staying ensconced in power. But, she added, such a lease “won’t happen” on her watch.
The US sought to build close defence ties with Bangladesh by urging the Hasina government unsuccessfully to sign the General Security of Military Information Agreement (or GSOMIA) and the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (or ACSA). But the US has never acknowledged wanting to lease St Martin’s, a small island that is closer to Myanmar than to Bangladesh’s coast.
There are already around 750 American military bases spread across at least 80 countries. The US may be seeking to expand its strategic foothold to new areas where its presence is non-existent or weak, including the Bay of Bengal.
St Martin’s, with its vantage location just eight kilometres from the Myanmar coast, could serve as a US listening post. Such a listening post, however, would be more useful for electronic surveillance of sanctions-battered Myanmar and friendly India than America’s sole challenger at the global level, China.
The new Great Game, of course, also includes Russia and China. The Hasina foreign policy embraced the concept of “equidistant diplomacy” in relation to China and India to help underscore Bangladesh’s neutrality in the Sino-Indian geopolitical rivalry. Beijing, however, saw a pro-India tilt in Hasina’s foreign policy, a perception reinforced by her more recent announcement that Dhaka would chose India over China for the multibillion-dollar Teesta River development project, which is to come up on Bangladeshi territory close to India’s narrow Siliguri Corridor known as the ‘chicken neck’.
Yet, like Russia, China sees a likely American hand in the regime change in Bangladesh, with Chinese state media stating that if any foreign power deserves blame for Hasina’s overthrow, it is the US. Three weeks before the January 7, 2024 Bangladesh election, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman had warned that, if Hasina were re-elected to a third term in office, the US would create an Arab Spring-type of upheaval to bring about regime change in Dhaka.
Strategic skulduggery rarely leaves any political fingerprints. The truth may never be known, including whether, as some suggest, the CIA worked through its longstanding partner, Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, to foment an uprising against Hasina’s rule. In Pakistan, Imran Khan has blamed the US for helping to topple his own government in 2022 in league with the Pakistani military and his political opponents.
In the post-Hasina era, Bangladesh is likely to bolster its ties with China and Pakistan, which could come largely at India’s expense, including the security of the northeastern Indian states. At stake also are India’s transit rights through Bangladesh, Indian security and counterterrorism cooperation with Bangladesh, Indian investments in Bangladesh, and cooperation with Dhaka to control illegal migration to India, including by the Rohingya
What is clear, though, is that, despite Washington and New Delhi pledging in a joint statement last year to become “among the closest partners in the world”, American interests do not align with India’s core interests in the arc extending from Myanmar to Iran. Bangladesh is just the latest wake-up call for New Delhi.
Dealing with this unpalatable reality puts India on the horns of a dilemma, with no easy choices. Although India will continue to cultivate deeper ties with the US, the Indo-US strategic dissonance in India’s own neighbourhood is already quite jarring, given that Narendra Modi is widely seen as the country’s most pro-US prime minister since Indian independence.
As for Bangladesh, its recovery from the political turmoil is likely to be an extended and difficult process. This is apparent from the retribution campaign extending to expanded purges and crackdowns.
Political upheaval or prolonged instability imposes major economic costs. Consider the case of Pakistan, which has repeatedly sought International Monetary Fund bailouts in recent years.
In Bangladesh, the political upheaval, by stalling economic activity and creating unrest in the banking sector, is likely to usher in hard times, with inflation already spiralling and foreign-exchange reserves dwindling fast. It will not be easy to restore the confidence of foreign investors after the large-scale looting, vandalism and arson, including attacks on public infrastructure and setting ablaze hotels, hospitals and homes.
In the post-Hasina era, Bangladesh is likely to bolster its ties with China and Pakistan, which could come largely at India’s expense, including the security of the northeastern Indian states. At stake also are India’s transit rights through Bangladesh, Indian security and counterterrorism cooperation with Bangladesh, Indian investments in Bangladesh, and cooperation with Dhaka to control illegal migration to India, including by the Rohingya.
India’s longest land border is with Bangladesh, not with Tibet or Pakistan. And this is a porous border. India has no choice but to make major investments in strengthening the security of its borders, including with Bangladesh and Myanmar. India’s open border with Nepal poses a different set of challenges, which also need to be addressed.
The alliance of convenience between Russia and China threatens not only to accelerate an increasingly overstretched America’s relative decline, but also to erode Indian security. India now must take advantage of its relationship with Russia to mediate an end to the Ukraine war and drive a wedge between Russia and China.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to Russia in five years underscored the strategic importance India attaches to its relationship with Moscow. Indian leaders view that relationship as essential to a balanced foreign policy – especially at a time when India seems, at least to some, to be subtly tilting toward the West – and to provide strategic leverage against China.
Russia and India started holding annual summits in 2000. After Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2021 trip to New Delhi, it was Modi’s turn to visit Moscow in 2022. But in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – which spurred the United States and its partners to impose unprecedented sanctions on the country – Modi kept deferring his visit. (He did meet Putin in 2022 on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan, where he told the Russian leader that it was no time for war.)
Today it is apparent that Russia has neither been isolated internationally nor hobbled economically, despite the West’s best efforts. So, after narrowly winning a third term last month, Modi announced that he would take his long-delayed trip to Moscow. The objective is not to take Russia’s side; on the contrary, at last month’s G7 meeting in Italy, Modi embraced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and engaged in bilateral discussions with him. Rather, Modi seeks to affirm India’s enduring foreign-policy independence, while reaping the strategic benefits of closer ties with Russia.
India’s relationship with Russia dates back to 1971, when India was at its most vulnerable. The Pakistani military was attempting to crush the independence movement in then-East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – by any means necessary. Up to three million Bangladeshi civilians (mainly Hindus singled out by Pakistan’s Muslim army) were slaughtered, some 200,000 women were coerced into rape camps, and about ten million people fled to India.
The US was more than complicit in the carnage. Far from pushing back against Pakistan’s military dictator, General Yahya Khan, US President Richard Nixon’s administration maintained friendly relations with him, in order to advance US interests in Asia. While Khan’s army carried out the genocide in East Pakistan, Nixon sent his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, from Pakistan to Beijing on his now-famous secret trip, which led to Nixon’s own visit to China in February 1972.
At a White House meeting, Kissinger credited Khan for the success of his “cloak and dagger” diplomacy with China, joking coldheartedly, “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” On a memorandum from Kissinger regarding the crisis, Nixon wrote, “To all hands: Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.”
But that was not all. In an effort to prevent Bangladesh from achieving independence, Nixon pressed China to open a military front against India. It was Kissinger’s job to goad the Chinese into initiating troop movements toward the Indian border, according to declassified White House tapes and documents. Nixon went so far as to tell Kissinger that India needed a “mass famine.”
Faced with such hostility, India’s then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi concluded a friendship treaty with the Kremlin. The pact’s security provisions helped to deter China from opening a front against India when Indian forces eventually intervened to help Bangladesh gain independence in a swift, 13-day operation.
Nixon’s dissatisfaction was obvious: in a show of force aimed at coercing India into limiting its involvement, the US deployed a nuclear-capable naval task force off the southern tip of India. This gunboat diplomacy led India to conduct its first underground nuclear test in 1974; the US responded by imposing technology sanctions on India that remained in place for almost three decades. Meanwhile, the US and China helped Pakistan to build its own nuclear bomb.
Today, India maintains deeper and broader ties with the US than with Russia, but Nixon’s China opening still haunts the bilateral relationship. With its decades-long policy of aiding China’s economic rise, the US not only created the greatest strategic adversary it has ever faced, but also saddled India with a formidable military foe that is aggressively striving for regional hegemony. One manifestation of this is the Sino-Indian military standoff in the Himalayas, which is now in its fifth year.
This is a key motivation behind India’s efforts to strengthen its relationship with Russia, which India believes can counterbalance China. After all, Russia extends across 11 time zones and possesses huge reserves of natural resources, an enormous nuclear arsenal, increasing space prowess, and veto power at the United Nations Security Council. Moreover, Russia and China are natural competitors, with sharply diverging interests in Central Asia, Northeast Asia, and the Arctic, which each country regards as part of its strategic backyard.
Even so, Russia and China have been growing progressively closer in recent years – and it is largely America’s fault. This alliance of convenience – which Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have termed a “no-limits partnership” – threatens not only to accelerate an overstretched America’s relative decline, but also to erode Indian security. Already, China has leveraged its position as an economic lifeline for Russia to gain access to advanced Russian military technologies, which were previously sold only to India. In fact, no country is profiting more from the Ukraine war than China.
Someone must drive a wedge between Russia and China. With the US unwilling to take the lead, it is up to India to convince Russia not to align itself too closely with the People’s Republic. Fortunately, this is hardly an unrealistic proposition: though Russia’s promise to provide North Korea with immediate military assistance in the case of war is not good news, its new defense pact with China’s estranged client does suggest that Putin is willing to chart his own course.
The first step for India must be to try to mediate an end to the Ukraine war. This would allow the US to focus on bolstering security in the Indo-Pacific, thereby improving Taiwan’s chances of survival.
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.
India appears to be having second thoughts about its involvement in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as the group’s anti-Western orientation is increasingly at odds with the subtle pro-Western tilt of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy.
New Delhi’s creeping doubts about the SCO were first evident last year when as rotating host of the group’s annual leaders’ summit, Modi chose to convene the meeting online rather than in person. And this month the prime minister skipped the latest summit held in Astana.
India’s growing discomfort stems in part from the fact that rival China is increasingly in the driver’s seat at the SCO. In fact, except for India, the other members of the SCO are all participants in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which New Delhi has opposed since its launch as a neocolonial enterprise. India can also be said to be the only full democracy among the SCO’s nine member states.
The SCO was launched in Shanghai in 2001 by the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. China has spearheaded the subsequent evolution and expansion of the group, while calling on other members to uphold shared values that it labels as the “Shanghai Spirit.”
Much as China has blocked India from joining the 48-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group pending agreement that its strategic ally Pakistan be simultaneously admitted, Beijing also made sure Islamabad was brought into the SCO alongside New Delhi in 2017.
The Sino-Pakistan strategic alliance against India is just one example of the disparate interests at play in the SCO, hindering its transformation into a more powerful and cohesive bloc like the Group of Seven.
Against this backdrop, why did the Modi government agree to join the SCO in the first place?
The decision related in part to India’s known proclivity to hedge its bets. In an era of sharpening geopolitical competition, New Delhi has remained loath to be associated with any power bloc, preferring to be seen as the world’s ultimate “swing state” amid the transition from the post-World War II U.S.-led international structure to a new global order whose contours are still not clearly visible.
In this way, India likely believed SCO membership could help balance its international relationships, including the perception that it was tilting toward the West. The SCO was also viewed as the only multilateral forum that could link India with the countries of Central Asia.
In line with the ancient saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” advocates of India’s entry argued that the presence of China and Pakistan in the SCO should not be a reason to hold back from participating.
Seven years later, however, it is becoming apparent that the SCO carries diminishing value for Indian foreign policy.
To be sure, the participation of India, the world’s largest democracy and now the fastest-growing major economy, has helped confer a new level of international legitimacy on the SCO, which can otherwise be branded as an anti-Western club of autocracies, especially following Iran’s admission last year.
For Beijing and Moscow, the SCO is a symbol of their deepening cooperation, which has included holding joint military exercises with other bloc members, including drills with Iran in the Gulf of Oman in March.
Indeed, China and Russia see the SCO as constituting an Eurasian alliance to counter Western domination. It serves as their response to U.S. President Joe Biden’s narrative that the world is witnessing a “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”
India’s presence in the SCO not only undermines the framing of global tensions as pitting democracy against autocracy, but also helps to blunt the tagging of the SCO as an anti-Western grouping.
But what does New Delhi get in return? In truth, India secures little tangible strategic benefit. At best, the SCO holds just symbolic value for India by underscoring the independence of its foreign policy and its commitment to multialignment.
In the new global divide between the Western bloc and the emerging China-Russia strategic axis, India wants to serve as a bridge. But India, Russia and China are also members of the BRICS bloc, launched in 2009, so New Delhi does not need to be in the SCO to act as a bridge between world powers.
Furthermore, India’s membership of the SCO, originally established as a regional security bloc, appears incongruent with its close ties with the West and its support for a free, open and democratic-led Indo-Pacific region. Notably, China and Russia reject the very term “Indo-Pacific,” insisting that the region still be called the Asia-Pacific.
In fact, China’s championing of the Shanghai Spirit, which it says is anchored in mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality and consultation, seems hollow, given how its furtive encroachments on Indian borderlands have triggered a tense military standoff for more than four years.
In this light, Modi has made a good call by deciding to give the Astana summit a miss. Government officials are offering the excuse that he will be tied up with parliamentary proceedings. But Modi has previously traveled overseas even when Parliament has been in session.
India increasingly appears to be a misfit in a grouping whose aims and objectives it does not fully share. Even as it hews to its independent approach to international affairs, Modi has come to be seen as the country’s most pro-U.S. prime minister ever.
India has now ratified the four “foundational” agreements that all close U.S. defense partners are expected to sign. Under Modi, India has also become more closely integrated into the Quad, including hosting its fellow members in drills wrapped into its annual Malabar naval exercises.
Modi’s withdrawal from the Astana summit does not mean of course that India intends to opt out of the SCO. Rather, it signals that India recognizes not only the SCO’s limitations but also the grouping’s declining salience for its foreign policy.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
The alliance of convenience between Russia and China threatens not only to accelerate an increasingly overstretched America’s relative decline, but also to erode Indian security. India now must take advantage of its relationship with Russia to mediate an end to the Ukraine war and drive a wedge between Russia and China.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to Russia in five years underscored the strategic importance India attaches to its relationship with Moscow. Indian leaders view that relationship as essential to a balanced foreign policy – especially at a time when India seems, at least to some, to be subtly tilting toward the West – and to provide strategic leverage against China.
Russia and India started holding annual summits in 2000. After Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2021 trip to New Delhi, it was Modi’s turn to visit Moscow in 2022. But in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – which spurred the United States and its partners to impose unprecedented sanctions on the country – Modi kept deferring his visit. (He did meet Putin in 2022 on the sidelines of a regional summit in Uzbekistan, where he told the Russian leader that it was no time for war.)
Today it is apparent that Russia has neither been isolated internationally nor hobbled economically, despite the West’s best efforts. So, after narrowly winning a third term last month, Modi announced that he would take his long-delayed trip to Moscow. The objective is not to take Russia’s side; on the contrary, at last month’s G7 meeting in Italy, Modi embraced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and engaged in bilateral discussions with him. Rather, Modi seeks to affirm India’s enduring foreign-policy independence, while reaping the strategic benefits of closer ties with Russia.
India’s relationship with Russia dates back to 1971, when India was at its most vulnerable. The Pakistani military was attempting to crush the independence movement in then-East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – by any means necessary. Up to three million Bangladeshi civilians (mainly Hindus singled out by Pakistan’s Muslim army) were slaughtered, some 200,000 women were coerced into rape camps, and about ten million people fled to India.
The US was more than complicit in the carnage. Far from pushing back against Pakistan’s military dictator, General Yahya Khan, US President Richard Nixon’s administration maintained friendly relations with him, in order to advance US interests in Asia. While Khan’s army carried out the genocide in East Pakistan, Nixon sent his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, from Pakistan to Beijing on his now-famous secret trip, which led to Nixon’s own visit to China in February 1972.
At a White House meeting, Kissinger credited Khan for the success of his “cloak and dagger” diplomacy with China, joking coldheartedly, “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” On a memorandum from Kissinger regarding the crisis, Nixon wrote, “To all hands: Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.”
But that was not all. In an effort to prevent Bangladesh from achieving independence, Nixon pressed China to open a military front against India. It was Kissinger’s job to goad the Chinese into initiating troop movements toward the Indian border, according to declassified White House tapes and documents. Nixon went so far as to tell Kissinger that India needed a “mass famine.”
Faced with such hostility, India’s then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi concluded a friendship treaty with the Kremlin. The pact’s security provisions helped to deter China from opening a front against India when Indian forces eventually intervened to help Bangladesh gain independence in a swift, 13-day operation.
Nixon’s dissatisfaction was obvious: in a show of force aimed at coercing India into limiting its involvement, the US deployed a nuclear-capable naval task force off the southern tip of India. This gunboat diplomacy led India to conduct its first underground nuclear test in 1974; the US responded by imposing technology sanctions on India that remained in place for almost three decades. Meanwhile, the US and China helped Pakistan to build its own nuclear bomb.
Today, India maintains deeper and broader ties with the US than with Russia, but Nixon’s China opening still haunts the bilateral relationship. With its decades-long policy of aiding China’s economic rise, the US not only created the greatest strategic adversary it has ever faced, but also saddled India with a formidable military foe that is aggressively striving for regional hegemony. One manifestation of this is the Sino-Indian military standoff in the Himalayas, which is now in its fifth year.
This is a key motivation behind India’s efforts to strengthen its relationship with Russia, which India believes can counterbalance China. After all, Russia extends across 11 time zones and possesses huge reserves of natural resources, an enormous nuclear arsenal, increasing space prowess, and veto power at the United Nations Security Council. Moreover, Russia and China are natural competitors, with sharply diverging interests in Central Asia, Northeast Asia, and the Arctic, which each country regards as part of its strategic backyard.
Even so, Russia and China have been growing progressively closer in recent years – and it is largely America’s fault. This alliance of convenience – which Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have termed a “no-limits partnership” – threatens not only to accelerate an overstretched America’s relative decline, but also to erode Indian security. Already, China has leveraged its position as an economic lifeline for Russia to gain access to advanced Russian military technologies, which were previously sold only to India. In fact, no country is profiting more from the Ukraine war than China.
Someone must drive a wedge between Russia and China. With the US unwilling to take the lead, it is up to India to convince Russia not to align itself too closely with the People’s Republic. Fortunately, this is hardly an unrealistic proposition: though Russia’s promise to provide North Korea with immediate military assistance in the case of war is not good news, its new defense pact with China’s estranged client does suggest that Putin is willing to chart his own course.
The first step for India must be to try to mediate an end to the Ukraine war. This would allow the US to focus on bolstering security in the Indo-Pacific, thereby improving Taiwan’s chances of survival.
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.
Photo by AFP: Supporters of Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister and leader of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), celebrate vote counting results for India’s general election, at BJP headquarters in New Delhi on June 4, 2024.
India’s election, the world’s largest democratic exercise, may have delivered a stunning surprise by denying Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party an outright majority in parliament, but this setback is unlikely to affect the stability or direction of his third-term government.
The primary reason is that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, contested the election in alliance with several small political groups, with the coalition winning a majority of seats in parliament’s ruling lower house.
Still, the BJP’s loss of its commanding majority in the lower house represents a blow to Modi’s political standing, including puncturing his air of invincibility. After stacking up political win after win, an overconfident Modi had predicted even before the campaign formally began that the BJP would secure more than two-thirds of the seats in the lower house.
The BJP’s failure to win a simple majority on its own, however, is unlikely to have a direct bearing on Modi’s national agenda or foreign policy. The allied parties Modi will depend on are provincial groups with no national vision or ideas.
Moreover, while the fragmented opposition may have unified to stop Modi’s juggernaut in the election, it lacks a common agenda or leader, which raises the question of whether its unity will endure. In fact, the combined number of seats won by the multiple parties in the opposition coalition is slightly less than what the BJP secured on its own.
Modi, 73, is entering a second decade as prime minister, despite a strong anti-incumbency sentiment in Indian society. Only one other Indian leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, secured a third term decades ago.
Modi’s leadership has given India political stability, robust economic growth and accelerated military modernization. India’s international profile and geopolitical weight are rising, partly because the end of China’s economic boom has thrown into relief the emergence of Asia’s other demographic giant as a geopolitical and economic force. India is now the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
After the election results, Modi declared that his third term would represent a “new chapter of big decisions.” But, given India’s fractious politics, big decisions often tend to fuel division and polarization, especially when they challenge entrenched interests. In his second term, Modi, for example, was compelled to repeal farm reform laws after a year of opposition-backed grassroots protests.
With his pro-growth and pro-market agenda, Modi is aiming to transform India into a global manufacturing hub at a time when Western companies are interested in shifting production away from China. Consequently, his new term is likely to see greater government spending not just in manufacturing and infrastructure but also on human capital, particularly in education and training.
The new government will have to urgently consider the nation’s foreign policy challenges, above all the military standoff with China, which recently entered its fifth year. The tense standoff, triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments on some Indian borderlands, may not be grabbing international headlines, but China persists with a frenzied buildup of force deployments along the Himalayan border, as if it is preparing for war. China recently deployed its most advanced J-20 stealth fighter jets near the India frontier.
India’s most-pressing foreign policy challenges relate to its troubled neighborhood, not least a strengthening strategic axis between China and Pakistan, with both these nuclear-armed allies staking claims to swaths of Indian territory. India is already the world’s third-largest defense spender, behind the U.S. and China.
More fundamentally, Modi has helped shape a pragmatic foreign policy vision. Shorn of ideology, Indian foreign policy has sought to revitalize the country’s economic and military security, while avoiding having to overtly choose one power over another as a dominant partner.
In practice, however, closer cooperation with the U.S. has remained Modi’s signature foreign policy initiative, despite some new irritants in the bilateral relationship, including the role of U.S.- and Canada-based Sikh militants.
While tilting toward the West, India remains loath to enter into a formal military alliance with the Western bloc. President Joe Biden’s reluctance to say anything on the Sino-Indian military standoff, let alone side with New Delhi, reminds India that it must defend itself all on its own.
India’s independent approach to international affairs is unlikely to change given that New Delhi believes in friendship without dependence. This makes India the world’s ultimate “swing state” in the current transition from the post–World War II American-led order to a new global order whose contours are still not clearly visible.
In contending with China, its sole challenger at the global level, the U.S. needs a degree of adaptability in forging partnerships, instead of hewing to the Cold War–style “us versus them” approach. A country as large as India cannot become just another Japan or Britain to America. Yet no anti-China alliance can play a strategically meaningful role without India, which has locked horns with the Chinese military in a way no other power has done in this century.
To be sure, India’s size and diversity pose enormous challenges. It is now the world’s most populous nation and is demographically and culturally very heterogeneous.
Still, as the latest election highlights, India’s democratic framework serves as a pillar of inclusion, stability and strength. By empowering people at the grassroots level through participatory processes and open dialogue, the Indian political system has enabled members of historically marginalized classes and castes to gradually gain prominence in politics and bureaucracy. Modi’s own humble beginnings illustrate this.
India today is an ascendant global player, and Modi’s focus in the third term will likely be on enabling India to play a bigger role on the world stage. India’s accelerated rise will not only increase its salience in the global balance of power but also help advance American goals in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s new economic and geopolitical hub.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
U.S. has pushed natural competitors into becoming strategic collaborators
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on May 16: Their countries are more firmly aligned now than at any time since the 1950s. (Pool via Reuters)
The strategy of driving a wedge between China and Russia helped the West win the Cold War, not militarily, but geopolitically.
Richard Nixon’s most lasting achievement as U.S. president was orchestrating a diplomatic opening to China two years after Beijing had engaged in seven months of bloody border clashes with the Soviet Union.
Nixon’s co-optation of China, crowned by his February 1972 visit to Beijing, resulted in an informal alliance geared toward containing and rolling back Soviet influence and power. This two-against-one tag-teaming contributed to the Soviet Union’s imperial overstretch and ultimately to the West’s triumph in the Cold War without global combat.
Today, however, the U.S., instead of playing China off against Russia, is becoming the glue that holds the pair together. As a result, an already overextended U.S. seriously risks accelerating its relative decline through strategic overreach.
Alas, it is U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy that has helped turn two natural competitors into strategic collaborators.
A forward-looking approach would have avoided confronting Russia and China simultaneously, lest it drive the two nuclear-armed powers into an unholy alliance. But Biden has managed to lock horns with both Moscow and Beijing simultaneously, though it should be noted that his China policy is comparatively softer and more conciliatory.
It is striking that China and Russia today are more firmly aligned than at any time since the 1950s. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin openly share a vision of reshaping the world by ending the era of Western dominance.
The outcome of the recent Xi-Putin meeting marked a defining moment in the two leaders’ commitment to bringing about a “new era.” Their joint statement cast the U.S. as an aggressive hegemon with a Cold War mindset that fosters global insecurity and divisions. “The U.S. must abandon this behavior,” the statement demanded.
China and Russia seem to be providing cover to each other’s expansionism, with Putin extending support to Beijing over Taiwan and Xi endorsing Russia’s efforts to ensure its “sovereignty and territorial integrity” in oblique reference to Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the rapid advance of Chinese and Russian space capabilities has prompted the Pentagon to quietly embark on a new “Star Wars” plan.
At the global level, the U.S. has only one real challenger — China, which dwarfs Russia in terms of economic output, military spending and other material measures. It is Beijing that seeks to supplant America as the world’s foremost power.
Yet China has been the main beneficiary of Biden’s forceful response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unprecedented sanctions, which have included the weaponization of international finance, have been a boon for Beijing, turning it into Russia’s banker and expanding international use of the yuan. Russia now generates much of its international export earnings in the Chinese currency and keeps these proceeds mostly in Chinese banks, in effect giving Beijing a share of the returns.
The sanctions, and America’s deepening involvement in the Ukraine war, have left Russia with little choice but to move closer to China, with which it has had a checkered history marked by periods of both cooperation and bloodstained rivalry.
Bilateral trade reached $240 billion last year, a jump from 2020’s $108 billion level. In return for providing a lifeline to the sanctions-stricken Russian economy, China has gained access to some of Russia’s most advanced military technologies.
China has racked up strategic win after win. Nixon’s rapprochement with Beijing led to a 45-year U.S. policy of aiding China’s economic rise, which resulted in the creation of the greatest strategic adversary America has ever faced.
Biden’s punitive approach toward Russia is now effectively further strengthening an aggressive and expansionist China by helping it to accumulate greater economic and military power.
With Russia’s Ukraine aggression tying the U.S. down in Europe, Xi might believe that China has a window of opportunity to achieve the “historic mission” of forcibly annexing Taiwan. Xi recently made his Taiwan goal clearer by declaring that the essence of his national rejuvenation drive is “the unification of the motherland.”
Still, there are limits to how far Beijing is likely to go to cement its “no limits” partnership with Moscow, given the underlying competitive dynamics between the two neighboring powers, including in regions like Central Asia, Northeast Asia and the Artic which each side regards as part of its strategic backyard.
America’s sanctions on Moscow might have spurred China to strengthen its energy security through greater overland imports from Russia that could not be interrupted even if Xi invaded Taiwan. Yet China is wary of overreliance on Russia, which is why it continues to look to other sources of energy supply, in the Middle East and even the U.S.
Russia, for its part, is doing what it can to avoid being seen as China’s junior partner. To Xi’s chagrin, Putin has openly co-opted North Korea as a strategic partner.
Yet the perceived strategic imperative to join forces against their common American enemy, is tying Beijing and Moscow closer together.
Biden’s personal diplomacy with Xi has achieved little in terms of stemming Beijing’s growing alignment with Moscow, which threatens to unravel America’s global preeminence and undermine its national security.
A formal strategic and military alliance between China and Russia, by effectively spawning a pan-Eurasian colossus, would be America’s worst geopolitical nightmare come true.
To forestall that scenario, the U.S. must recalibrate its foreign policy by focusing its attention less on regionally revanchist Russia and more on globally ascendant China. This should include shoring up its deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific region. If it puts its mind to it, Washington can find a strategy to exploit the historical strategic mistrust between Moscow and Beijing.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
The U.S. should use diplomacy to achieve a cease-fire in Ukraine as a prolonged conflict could reshape global power dynamics and strengthen China. | RIA NOVOSTI / VIA REUTERS
U.S. President Joe Biden has steadily deepened America’s involvement in what is now a war of attrition with Russia in Ukraine. The U.S. congressional approval, after months of wrenching debate, of a $95.3 billion foreign assistance package came after CIA Director Bill Burns warned that, without additional American aid, Ukraine could lose the war to Russia by this year-end.
The assistance package reflects the Biden administration’s skewed strategic priorities: It provides $60.8 billion to help sustain Ukraine’s war effort (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 stepmotherly $8.1 billion for Taiwan and other security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s center of gravity.
Strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific are mounting, with China stepping up coercive pressures on Taiwan and pursuing aggressive tactics in the South and East China Seas. Meanwhile, the tense military standoff along the long Himalayan frontier between China and India — triggered by furtive Chinese encroachments — is entering its fifth year.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, after snuffing out Hong Kong’s autonomy and redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea, appears to be preparing his country to unify Taiwan by force, although that self-governing island, for most of its history, had no relationship with China and has remained fully outside Chinese control for the last almost 130 years.
Under Xi, China has invested heavily in building up amphibious-assault and other sea power and missile capabilities to overwhelm Taiwan’s defenses and deter the U.S. from coming to its aid. Xi bluntly told Biden at their summit meeting last November that his regime will absorb Taiwan and that the only matter left to be decided is when to take over the island. And recently, Xi cautioned Biden during a phone conversation that Taiwan is “the first red line that must not be crossed in China-U.S. relations.”
One would expect the Biden administration to respond to the looming threat by strengthening deterrence, including urgently bolstering Taiwan’s defenses. Yet, there is a huge backlog in U.S. military sales to Taiwan, with weapons deals announced as long ago as 2017 still unfulfilled.
In fact, Biden is the third straight U.S. president to commit to shifting America’s primary strategic focus to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific, a region central to the global balance of power and peace. Yet, as he nears the end of his term, Biden, too, has been unable to make that pivot, with U.S. attention and resources now focused squarely on the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.
The congressional breakthrough on the security assistance package, after a monthslong logjam, will help to shore up Biden’s credibility when his leadership has been questioned on the global stage. But this likely will be a short-lived boost unless Biden uses his new political capital to persuade Europe to take a leadership role on Ukraine and get Israel to end its devastating war in Gaza, whose staggering human toll is also affecting America’s moral standing in the world.
The new Ukraine-related funding can become a significant political asset for Biden in his reelection campaign if he leverages it to push Moscow toward a peace deal, thereby yielding a cease-fire before November. If not, Biden could open himself to political attack at home for sinking tens of billions of additional tax dollars in an endless war that, by deflecting America’s attention away from the pressing Indo-Pacific challenges, is making Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.
Indeed, without a peacemaking component, Washington’s new funding for Kyiv could take the pressure off European governments to step up and take primary responsibility for Ukraine.
Without a cease-fire effort, there is also the risk — given how Russia’s military-industrial complex is churning out new missiles and munitions at a frenetic pace — that Russian forces could triumph over Ukraine in a longer war of attrition, despite the fresh U.S. assistance package.
The Biden administration has already provided Ukraine more than $44 billion worth of weapons, maintenance, training and spare parts since the 2022 Russian invasion. Ukraine has also been receiving battlefield targeting data from Western powers.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has faced some flak for inadvertently exposing the role of Britain, France and possibly the U.S. in militarily helping direct attacks on Russian targets from Ukraine through “target control.” Scholz said that if Germany followed Britain and France in supplying Ukraine long-range missiles, it would make it a “participant in the war,” too.
Ukraine, however, is losing hope of regaining the 20% of its territory already occupied by Russia. The additional massive U.S. assistance of $60.8 billion may help Ukraine to stave off defeat but it is unlikely to dramatically reverse its fortunes. Indeed, the longer the war extends, the greater the devastation in Ukraine, making reconstruction very costly and onerous.
It would be in America’s own interest to encourage quiet, back-channel diplomacy to explore ways to bring about a cease-fire in a war that continues to have an adverse global impact, including through higher energy and food prices.
A long war could profoundly reshape America’s position in the world, especially by further emboldening its main rival, China, which, despite U.S. threats of punitive action, has become the principal contributor to strengthening the Russian military-industrial complex.
An extended Ukraine war could even formalize a Sino-Russian strategic axis while opening greater space for Xi to accomplish his “historic mission” of incorporating Taiwan.
The plain fact is that the more the U.S. has deepened its involvement in the proxy war against Russia, the more it has hamstrung its China policy, compelling the White House to pursue an approach that is now clearly more carrot than stick.
Faced with difficult choices, leveraging the latest $60.8 billion U.S. funding for Ukraine to bring Russia to the negotiating table is the least bad option for Biden. A cease-fire will create a frozen Ukraine conflict that will keep Moscow preoccupied while letting the U.S. focus less on Russia, the world’s most-sanctioned country, and more on a globally expansionist China.
Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
With conflicts in Europe and the Middle East draining US attention and resources, US President Joe Biden seems to hope that a more conciliatory approach toward China will be enough to maintain stability in the Indo-Pacific. Strengthening the Quad grouping of regional democracies would be a much better bet.
When four of the Indo-Pacific’s leading democracies – Australia, India, Japan, and the United States – revived the long-dormant Quad in 2017, their objective was clear: to create a strategic bulwark against Chinese expansionism and reinforce a stable regional balance of power. But the coalition is now adrift, and the security risks this poses should not be underestimated.
The Quad’s resurrection reflected a paradigm shift in US foreign policy. After decades of engagement with China, including aiding its economic rise, US policymakers – Democrats and Republicans alike – realized that America’s biggest trade partner had become its biggest strategic adversary, bent on replacing it as global hegemon. As US President Joe Biden indicated in his 2022 National Security Strategy, China is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”
Biden, like his predecessor, Donald Trump, viewed the Quad as an essential instrument to uphold a “free and open Indo-Pacific” – a concept formulated by the late Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō. So, Biden elevated Quad discussions from the level of foreign ministers – who had been meeting annually since 2019 – to heads of state or government, initiating a flurry of leaders’ summits in 2021-23. But it has been more than a year since the Quad leaders last met, and with the US focused on the upcoming presidential election, their next summit is unlikely to be held before 2025.
The reason for this drop-off is simple: America’s priorities have changed. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine – together with the hybrid war the West is waging in response, not to mention renewed conflict in the Middle East – has stymied US efforts to position the Indo-Pacific at the “heart” of its grand strategy. It is striking that the latest US foreign-assistance package provides $60.8 billion for Ukraine but only $8.1 billion for security in the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan, on which China has set its sights.
With limited resources to dedicate to the Indo-Pacific, Biden seems to hope that he can prevent a war over Taiwan through personal diplomacy with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Last month, in a telephone call with his Chinese counterpart, he stressed the importance of maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait.
Biden seems to believe that a more conciliatory approach toward China can also forestall the emergence of a comprehensive Sino-Russian alliance. The “no-limits partnership” between China and Russia, reaffirmed during Russian President Vladmir Putin’s recent visit to Beijing, is problematic enough; China already has undercut Western sanctions by providing an economic lifeline to Russia, in exchange for cheap energy and some of Russia’s most advanced military technologies, including air-defense and early-warning systems. A full military alliance, with China supporting the Kremlin’s war machine directly, would be America’s worst geopolitical nightmare.
The problem for Biden is that appeasing China and strengthening the Quad – which Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has decried as the “Indo-Pacific version of NATO” – are fundamentally incompatible. It might not be a coincidence that the Quad leaders have not met since Biden sent a series of cabinet officials to Beijing and met with Xi in California last November.
In fact, Biden has lately shifted his focus to less provocative initiatives like the “Squad,” an emerging unofficial regional grouping involving Australia, Japan, and the Philippines – countries that already have mutual defense treaties with the US. But what good is an anti-China alliance without India? It is, after all, the only power that has truly locked horns with the People’s Liberation Army this century: the tense military standoff along the disputed Himalayan border, triggered by China’s stealthy territorial encroachments, has just entered its fifth year. Moreover, as the leading maritime power in the Indian Ocean, India must play a central role in checking China’s westward naval march from its new citadel, the South China Sea.
The US has also been touting its AUKUS security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom. But this grouping will not be able to play a meaningful role in Indo-Pacific security until Australia is equipped with nuclear-powered submarines, and that will not happen for another decade.
So far, Biden’s overtures to China have yielded few positive results. On the contrary, Xi has lately intensified coercive pressure on Taiwan, and Chinese provocations in the South China Sea have been increasing. Unless the US changes its approach, it may well fail to deter China from attacking Taiwan or cementing a strategic axis with Russia, just as it failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine.
To maintain security in the Indo-Pacific, there is no substitute for a strong Quad with a clear strategic mission. Rather than unraveling years of efforts to build a coherent and credible regional strategy, thereby enabling yet more Chinese expansionism, Biden and his fellow Quad leaders must get to work defining such a mission and then commit to pursuing it. Otherwise, the Quad risks becoming a kind of Potemkin grouping. The façade of an alliance will not fool China.
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.
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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