Category Archives: International Security

The Global Swing State

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India can be the bridge-builder in a divided world

Brahma Chellaney  | OPEN magazine

Few would doubt that India’s international profile and geopolitical weight have been rising, making it a key ‘swing’ state in the current transition from the US-led, post-World War II order to a new global order. Despite growing international turbulence, as underlined by crises, conflicts, wars and new threats, Indian foreign policy displays dynamism and confidence.

This is apparent from the close strategic partnerships India has built or reinforced with rival major powers, including the US and Russia. In fact, India is being courted by all the great powers.

Because India confronts what might be called the “tyranny of geography” in its own region—that is, serious external threats from virtually all directions—it must pursue extra-regional options to advance its economic and security interests. India, the region’s geographical hub, may be the world’s largest democracy but authoritarian structures have not been fully dismantled in neighbouring countries.

An unstable neighbourhood, to be sure, heightens the danger of spill-over effects for India, which would threaten its internal security. For example, the ethnic violence in Manipur state has been accentuated by the illegal influx of thousands of ethnic Chin from violence-torn Myanmar, which risks turning into a failed state because of crippling US-led sanctions and escalating armed attacks by insurgents attempting to overthrow the military junta.

Against this backdrop, India has little choice but to reach out beyond its immediate neighbourhood to help surmount the “tyranny of geography”. This explains the priority it attaches to expanding diplomatic and economic relations with other regions.

In the Middle East, for example, India’s expanding footprint owes a lot to the close relations Prime Minister Narendra Modi has forged with Israel and important Arab states. Modi, although accused by his critics of promoting Hindu nationalism, has built a strong personal rapport with the rulers of the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, which are the citadels of Wahhabi Islam, the source of modern Islamic fundamentalism.

Modi, who on his seventh visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently inaugurated the first stone-built Hindu temple in the entire Middle East, refers to the Emirati president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, as his “brother”. The UAE, the most liberal and forward-looking of the Gulf states, has rapidly emerged as one of the largest investors in, and a close trade and security partner of, India.

India, the world’s third-biggest importer of oil, sources 65 per cent of its crude imports from the Gulf states, which are also supplying fast-increasing quantities of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the country. The nearly 9 million Indian expats in the Gulf region, including the world’s largest Indian diaspora of 3.4 million in the UAE, account for about 30 per cent of the $90 billion global remittance flowing to India yearly. Known to be disciplined, dedicated, hard-working and peaceable, the Indian expats in the Middle East are one of India’s most distinct soft power assets.

With size comes geopolitical, economic and cultural power. And with power comes respect. With its cherished foreign-policy autonomy and willingness to break with conventional methods and shibboleths, India is well placed to serve as a go-between in the Ukraine war and as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Consider another region, East Asia, where India has bolstered trade and strategic ties with historic rivals Japan and South Korea. India has virtual free trade agreements (FTA) with these two countries, which today are seeking to overcome the historical baggage that still weighs down their bilateral relationship. India-Japan military exercises now extend to all three domains—air, maritime and land—and cover strategic, operational and tactical levels.

The neighbourhood constraints make it imperative for India to build stronger ties not just with the other major powers but also with important countries located in different regions.

KEY FACTORS

Several factors are central to a country’s international position, including its political and economic trajectory. Without political stability at home, economic growth will likely suffer.

Despite the plethora of political parties in India that largely team up in coalitions, especially before elections, the country has been fortunate to have enjoyed political stability under three successive prime ministers—Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh (more so in his first term than his scandals-filled second tenure), and Narendra Modi.

Contrast that with the unending political crisis in military-dominated, China-indebted Pakistan, with that nation now confronting the worst economic crisis in its history. Indeed, the phrase “international basket case” might better apply to Pakistan today than it did to Bangladesh in 1971 when it won independence despite the Pakistani military’s genocide, in which three million people were killed, 200,000 women were confined in rape camps, and 10 million more people were forced to flee to India.

Under Sheikh Hasina, who has led a secular government since 2009 that Bangladeshi Islamists detest, Bangladesh has had political stability and rapid economic growth. Bangladesh’s impressive-growth trajectory stands in stark contrast to the chronic political and economic turmoil in Pakistan, which is still teetering on the brink of default.

Against this background, India’s continued rise hinges on sustained political stability at home. A stable, forward-thinking government can frame and pursue long-term strategic goals, including further accelerating economic growth, advancing development of critical and emerging technologies (including semiconductors, which have grown into a key international geopolitical battleground), underpinning military prowess with an expanded weapons-manufacturing base at home, strengthening nuclear-weapon, missile and drone capabilities, and bolstering internal security and social cohesion.

The 1998 nuclear weapons’ tests proved to be a watershed moment for India, raising its international profile and setting in motion the process for the US to gradually lift most of its technology sanctions against New Delhi. For more than a quarter of a century, the US had kept the world’s largest democracy under sanctions, while it actively aided communist China’s rise and armed Pakistan against India. And, as the <New York Times> reported in 1998, the US and China covertly helped Pakistan to build its nuclear bomb.

It was fortunate for India’s security and upward trajectory that the nuclear weapons’ tests were carried out six weeks after Vajpayee took office. Had Vajpayee waited six months, there probably would have been no such tests, given how the heady allure of power and its corrupting effects can easily weaken political resolve.

The five underground nuclear tests in 1998 exposed the utter failure of US policy to keep India from going overtly nuclear by employing technology sanctions and diplomatic pressure. Predicting test yields accurately holds the key to manufacturing sophisticated nuclear weapons. And, as underscored by post-shot radiochemical analyses, the yields from the five tests were in line with what the Indian scientists had aimed for.

Left to lick its wounds, the US began quietly reversing its policy towards India through diplomatic outreach, including closed-door talks. In mid-1999, Bill Clinton became the first American president to openly side with India against Pakistan in wartime when he successfully pressured then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to pull back his forces from the areas that they had furtively encroached upon in Ladakh’s Kargil region. And about eight months later, Clinton heralded a new beginning in Washington’s relationship with New Delhi by paying a five-day visit to India, the first by a US president in almost a quarter-century.

Since then, America’s embrace of India has persisted (and strengthened) under four succeeding presidents—George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.

India’s rapid economic growth, with the Indian economy now the fastest growing among major countries, has reinforced bipartisan support in Washington for a closer partnership with New Delhi. US exports to India have boomed. Indeed, the US has become an important source of even crude oil and petroleum products for India, which is the world’s third-largest oil consumer after America and China.

UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Abu Dhabi, February 13, 2024 (Photo: PIB)

Meanwhile, the profound development that helped transform India’s global position—its going overtly nuclear—now figures little in the Indian or American discourse.

Yet India now faces an ongoing build-up of nuclear and missile forces in its neighbourhood, especially by China. The unprecedented speed and scale of the Chinese nuclear build-up appears to be linked to President Xi Jinping’s international expansionism as China seeks global primacy by 2049, the centenary of communist rule.

Modi refers to the Emirati President, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, as his ‘brother’. The UAE, the most liberal and forward-looking of the Gulf states, has rapidly emerged as one of the largest investors in, and a close trade and security partner of, India

The huge nuclear-weapons build-up is set to lengthen China’s shadow over Asia while heightening military tensions with its main Asian rivals—India and Japan. India, alas, has remained smugly content with the outcome of its 1998 tests, instead of seeking to enhance the credibility of its nuclear deterrent through a stockpile-stewardship programme that includes subcritical and other hydronuclear experiments. Today, India needs to pay close attention to Xi’s nuclear frenzy.

India’s global standing, in more recent years, has also benefited from two other factors, both China-related.

The first is the West’s belated recognition of Xi’s imperialist ambitions, which have spawned China’s aggressive expansionism almost since he came to power in 2012. Xi seems to believe that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to modify the international order in its favour before it confronts a deepening demographic crisis, stalled economic growth, and an unfavourable global environment. Accordingly, Xi has shown an increasing appetite for taking major risks.

President Biden, in his 48-page national security strategy released in October 2022, made clear that over the long term the US was more worried about China’s moves to “layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy” than it was about a sanctions-battered Russia, whose strategic ambitions are regionally confined. China “is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective,” the strategy report said.

It has become clear to many Americans that China is not a friend or a partner but rather an adversary bent on global dominance by supplanting the US. Multiple opinion surveys have shown that the number of Americans who view China as their country’s “greatest enemy” or “greatest threat” has more than doubled since 2020, increasing to over half of US adults. As an adversary in American eyes, Russia is now a distant second to China.

History will record 2020 as a watershed year for Beijing when international attitudes visibly changed and many economies learned hard lessons about China-dependent supply chains. The tide began to turn when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hid crucial information from the world about the Wuhan-originating Covid-19, even as it attempted to capitalise on the pandemic, first by hoarding medical products (a market China dominates) and then by stepping up aggressive expansionism. The April 2020 Chinese encroachments on key borderlands in Ladakh occurred while India was enforcing perhaps the world’s strictest pandemic-related national lockdown.

Today, Western companies’ growing interest in shifting production away from China so as to reduce risk through diversification opens opportunities for India to address its manufacturing deficit. The US, after all, confronts a troubling reality: Its biggest source of imported goods has emerged as its biggest strategic adversary.

More fundamentally, until the US began regarding China as a threat to its core interests and looking at India as a potential counter-balancer to Beijing, Americans tended to think about India as if it were linked by a hyphen to Pakistan.

The US now recognises the larger geopolitical importance of India, which has long been locked in a strategic rivalry with China. India may never formally align itself with Western powers but it will remain an independent, rising power whose strategic interests mesh more with the West.

The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force’s DF-41 ICBM launchers at a parade in Beijing (Photo: AP)

The second factor is the end of China’s US-assisted, four-decade-long economic boom. Economic growth has stalled to the point where China is being called a “drag” on world output by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others. In fact, China’s long-term economic prospects are dimming, with the country experiencing demographic decline and high youth unemployment. The property market that long fuelled its growth is now mired in a prolonged downturn.

Economists have compared China’s demographic crisis, which has resulted in its labour force already peaking, to the one that brought Japan’s economic boom to a standstill in the 1990s.

India, by contrast, has demographics on its side. With a median age of 28.4, India is one of the world’s youngest countries, with the promise of reaping a significant demographic dividend.

India faces an ongoing build-up of nuclear and missile forces by China. The speed and scale of the Chinese nuclear build-up appears to be linked to Xi Jinping’s international expansionism as China seeks global primacy by 2049

The Modi government, to help turn India into a global manufacturing hub, has invested enormously in infrastructure, while cutting red tape, relaxing rules and opening the way for more foreign direct investment. Leveraging India’s geopolitical clout, the government is inviting multinationals, which are looking to diversify manufacturing and supply chains, to set up their manufacturing base in India.

The push to turn India into a global manufacturing hub has included luring international chipmakers to the country with generous state subsidies. India is to bear half the cost of any semiconductor projects it approves.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (Photo: AFP)

This push also extends to local manufacturing of military equipment and munitions, given that India’s heavy dependence on imports for defence requirements constrains both the country’s economic potential and its strategic autonomy. For example, drawing on the lessons of the Ukraine war about the critical importance of munitions, two private-sector defence facilities built at a cost of $362 million outside Kanpur have just started producing small, medium and large calibre ammunition for the armed forces.

LEARNING ON THE JOB
Indian foreign policy, with pragmatism as its hallmark, may be geared towards reinventing India as a more competitive, confident and secure country claiming its rightful place in the world. Indeed, a non-doctrinaire foreign-policy approach powered by ideas, not ideology, has long defined Indian diplomacy.

However, this does not mean that India has had a distinct foreign-policy doctrine or vision. The fundamental weakness under successive prime ministers has been the excessive personalisation of foreign policy.

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, Napoleon’s famous foreign minister, prescribed a basic rule for foreign policy: “by no means show too much zeal”. In India’s case, oozing zealousness and gushy expectations have undermined realism recurrently. In this century alone, zeal has been to Indian prime ministers—from Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh to Modi—what grand strategy is to great powers.

Ill-served by obsequious bureaucrats, Indian leaders have rushed to believe what they wanted to believe. Consequently, India has repeatedly and jarringly cried betrayal, not by friends but by adversaries in whom it chose to repose trust. Instead of acknowledging their own naïveté, Indian leaders, when taken for a ride, have cast the entire blame on the opponents’ duplicity.

A key reason why India, to its chagrin, has repeatedly found history repeating itself is that virtually every prime minister, although unschooled in national security at the time of assuming office, has sought to reinvent the foreign-policy wheel, rather than learning from the blunders of the preceding prime ministers. To make matters worse, intellectuals and the media usually shrink from closely scrutinising foreign policy moves.

Consider Vajpayee’s record: In just five years, between 1999 and 2004, several major policy U-turns were executed. Under Vajpayee—who formally surrendered India’s Tibet card during a 2003 Beijing visit—personal rather than professional characteristics came to define India’s foreign policy.

Vajpayee’s roller-coaster policy on Pakistan exposed India’s glaring inadequacy to set and unwaveringly pursue clear goals. His Pakistan policy traversed multiple U-turns—from his bus ride to Lahore, the war in Kargil, the hijacking to Kandahar of an Indian jetliner, and the summit in Agra to the Pakistan-scripted attack on the Indian Parliament. It then culminated in his second trip to Pakistan as prime minister. It was Vajpayee’s 2001 Agra summit invitation that helped dictator Pervez Musharraf to come out of the international doghouse for staging a military coup.

The Modi government, to help turn India into a global manufacturing hub, has invested enormously in infrastructure, while cutting red tape, relaxing rules and opening the way for more foreign direct investment

In an operation with no parallel in modern world history, the Indian Army, under <Operation Parakram>, was kept in a war-ready position against Pakistan through forward deployments for 10 months, avowedly to force Pakistan to dismantle its state-built terrorist infrastructure. Yet, without accomplishing any objective, Vajpayee called off the costly, self-debilitating operation, which the then Navy chief later labelled the “most punishing mistake”. Worse still, Vajpayee during his 2004 Islamabad visit hailed as a big gain Pakistan’s commitment on paper to not let its territory be used for cross-border terrorism—the very empty assurance General Musharraf had given before Vajpayee initiated <Operation Parakram>.

Vajpayee’s swinging policy pendulum emboldened his successor, Manmohan Singh—a foreign-policy greenhorn—to pursue a blinkered approach that blended his unvarnished naivety with open appeasement, thereby inviting greater acts of aggression against India. Mistaking tactics for strategy, Singh treated the process of engagement with the country’s regional adversaries as an end in itself, losing sight of the purpose—putting an end to acts of aggression.

Singh’s fixation on quasi-failed Pakistan paralleled Vajpayee’s quest to make peace with that implacable enemy. Singh, however, took appeasement to unmatched levels.

For example, at Havana in 2006, he equated the state sponsor of terrorism (Pakistan) with the victim of its terrorism (India), agreeing infamously to set up a joint anti-terror mechanism. Then, three years later at Sharm El-Sheikh, Singh permitted Pakistan to include Balochistan in the bilateral agenda. This blunder—which immediately became grist for the Pakistani propaganda mill—allowed Pakistan to try and externalise the Baloch problem by turning its terrorism target, India, into the principal accused, by claiming that India was behind the separatist insurrection in Balochistan.

Even the savagery of intruding Pakistani troops, who chopped two Indian soldiers and took away one severed head as a ‘trophy’, failed to stop Singh from returning to business-as-usual with Pakistan. The result was that Singh’s policy of engagement with Pakistan yielded increasingly daring and brutal acts of cross-border terrorism.

Then came Modi at the helm. In seeking to befriend the country’s regional adversaries, did Modi draw any lessons from India’s bitter (and costly) experiences under the leadership of Manmohan Singh and Vajpayee? Absolutely not.

Like his predecessors, while learning on the job at the expense of the nation, Modi indeed set out to reinvent the foreign-policy wheel.

For example, Modi’s unannounced visit to Lahore in late 2015, as part of his personal outreach to then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, resulted in the Pakistani military’s orchestration of a series of terrorist attacks on Indian military bases and camps in Jammu & Kashmir and Punjab. Today, the India-Pakistan relationship is virtually frozen.

Furthermore, Modi did not see the Chinese incursions into Ladakh coming because his vision seemed to have been clouded by the hope that, by appeasing China and its leader, Xi Jinping, he could reset the bilateral relationship and weaken China’s ties with Pakistan.

Modi met Xi 18 times over five years, with the hype over the meetings helping to lull India into a false sense of complacency. In the run-up to the April 2020 Chinese encroachments, India ignored various warning signs, including China’s unusual combat exercises in wintertime with new types of tanks and howitzers designed for high-altitude warfare, as well as its frenzied construction of new military installations along the Himalayan frontier.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Munich Security Conference, February 17, 2024 (Photo: Getty Images)

Although deception, concealment and surprise have often accompanied Chinese aggression in Asia, the Modi government ignored the lesson from its own bitter experience over the Doklam Plateau in 2017. After the India-China troop standoff at Doklam ended with the August 2017 disengagement accord, China built permanent military structures and seized control of most of the Bhutan-claimed Doklam in ways that had echoes of its expansionism in the South China Sea. It then sought to apply the same model of expansionism against India, which is what led to its Ladakh land grabs.

The result is that India now confronts the worst border crisis with China since the 1962 war, with the major military standoff between the two Asian giants about to enter the fourth year. The standoff is imposing major costs on India and China while raising the spectre of armed conflict.

India’s rapid economic growth, with the Indian economy now the fastest growing among major countries, has reinforced bipartisan support in Washington for a closer partnership with New Delhi. US exports to India have boomed

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar recently contended that the Modi government follows Sardar Patel’s “realism”, not Jawaharlal Nehru’s “romanticism”. But Modi’s “realism” has come the hard way—after his own “romanticism” backfired.

This background underscores why India needs to shift from excessive personalisation of policy to institutionalised policy-making. Such a shift will ensure a more clearheaded and goal-oriented foreign policy that is focused on an assertive promotion of national interests and on long-term objectives.

INDIA’S SIZE MATTERS

India’s geopolitical importance is likely to only grow, despite Modi’s critics at home and abroad claiming democratic backsliding under his leadership. India is a raucous democracy that confronts intensifying partisanship and polarisation. In this hyper-partisan setting, Modi has become a lightning rod for critics that accuse him of being a strongman pursuing divisive policies and favouring populism over constitutionalism. Such criticisms mirror the attacks on Donald Trump when he was in the White House.

But while opinion surveys show that most Indians hold their democracy in high regard, more than two-thirds of Americans think their country’s democracy is broken, despite Biden being in the White House. Indeed, a study by an international think-tank has designated the US as a “backsliding” democracy.

The plain fact is that India, a country the size of a continent, will remain an important factor in the global balance of power.

Who can ignore India’s massive population (now the world’s largest), its nuclear weapons and growing military might, its expanding and relatively young labour force (even as those in most industrialised countries are ageing and, in some cases, shrinking), its tradition of a strong elite education, its culture of entrepreneurialism, and its ties to the big and influential Indian diaspora that extends from Southeast Asia and the Middle East to North America?

With size comes geopolitical, economic and cultural power. And with power comes respect.

The upward trajectory of the world’s largest democracy will continue, unless it slips into serious political instability that leads to internal disarray.

India has long been a powerful voice for the Global South. But, in an increasingly divided world, India can be the bridge-builder between the East and the West, and between the North and the South. With its cherished foreign-policy autonomy and willingness to break with conventional methods and shibboleths, India is well placed to serve as a go-between in the Ukraine war and as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

China’s economic and geopolitical rise since the 1990s helped reshape the world. Now India, if it can get its act together, has an opening to change the world again with its own economic and geopolitical rise.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books.

Biden’s neglect of the Quad carries Indo-Pacific risks

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

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Quad leaders meet on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May 2023: Another summit is unlikely to happen until early 2025. (Pool via Reuters)

When U.S. President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he ardently embraced the Quad initiative that had been revived by his predecessor, Donald Trump, elevating discussions in the four-nation grouping with Australia, India and Japan to the level of summits of national leaders instead of just meetings of foreign ministers.

Biden first brought his counterparts together in March 2021 online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House then hosted the first in-person Quad summit six months later.

Yet after a flurry of similar meetings, including an informal gathering in Hiroshima, Japan last May on the sidelines of a Group of Seven summit at which the four leaders committed to jointly “meet the challenges” facing the Indo-Pacific region, there is no tangible plan in place now for another summit.

Indeed, U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti has suggested that the next summit will likely have to wait until after November’s presidential election.

This in effect probably rules out any fresh summit before early 2025 even as regional security challenges mount, with China applying increasing coercive pressure on Taiwan in the wake of the presidential election victory of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lai Ching-te and further tensions building along China’s frontiers with India and Bhutan, and with the Philippines in the South China Sea.

If that was not discouraging enough, it must be noted also that little concrete progress has been made in the six Quad working groups established over the last three years, covering critical and emerging technologies, climate change, cybersecurity, infrastructure, space and COVID-19 vaccines.

To be sure, an overly ambitious agenda, as underscored by the working groups’ focus on diverse global issues, has constrained the Quad’s ability to produce tangible results.

The Quad, as a grouping of just four democracies, is in little position to manage universal challenges. Yet this is the course Biden has taken the Quad on, with the result that the group’s Indo-Pacific security objectives have sometimes taken a back seat to discussion of global challenges.

The Quad’s core agenda, as affirmed by the U.S. in 2019, is supposed to center on realizing members’ vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region. This should mean effectively acting as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensuring a stable balance of power in a region that brings together the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

But Biden’s policy of engagement with China may explain why, despite a changing geostrategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, the Quad now lacks clear strategic direction and resolve.

With the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East claiming America’s attention and resources, and draining stocks of critical munitions and air defense systems, the last thing Biden wants is conflict or even greater tensions with China.

This likely explains his moves to ease Chinese concerns.

“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden declared while visiting Hanoi last September. “We’re not trying to hurt China.”

The goal, he said, is “getting the relationship right” between the world’s two leading powers. Biden earlier assured Chinese President Xi Jinping that the U.S. would not seek to change China’s political system nor direct alliances against it.

After sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing for discussions, Biden made a promise to “responsibly manage the relationship” during talks with Xi in San Francisco on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.

The stepped-up effort to steady the fraught Sino-U.S. relationship thus may have contributed to U.S. soft-pedaling of the Quad. Indeed, the four Quad leaders pointedly did not convene when they were all together at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi last September as they did in Hiroshima four months before.

The question then is whether Biden’s policy of coexistence and cooperation with China is paying dividends.

It would not seem so. Xi, seeing America distracted with Europe and the Middle East, has upped the ante by stepping up coercion of Taiwan. There have also been more frequent Chinese provocations and maritime incidents in the South China Sea, including with U.S. aircraft and ships.

Xi may even see a window of opportunity for more dramatic action over Taiwan. At the same time, the new U.S. cold war with Russia has pushed Moscow closer to Beijing and turned China into its banker and most important trade partner, risking the creation of a pan-Eurasian axis that could further overstretch America and accelerate its relative decline.

While Xi is still willing to talk to the U.S., his actions suggest that, despite a slowing economy, he believes China, with a ramped-up nuclear arsenal, is in a position of strategic strength that it must leverage.

Against this backdrop, it would be a mistake to relegate the Quad to the periphery or turn it into a mere showpiece.

If anything, it is time to refocus the Quad’s attention on the strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, as it remains critical to the global balance of power and world peace. This means reaffirming the Quad’s strategic mission of preserving the present regional order. Without that, the goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific could become illusory.

Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Does Biden really stand up for human rights?

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

President Joe Biden meets Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at Alsalam Royal Palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on July 15, 2022. (Photo by Royal Court of Saudi Arabia/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

President Joe Biden has made democracy promotion a key element of his foreign policy, declaring from the outset that the United States would stand up for human rights and freedoms wherever they are under attack. Biden faced his first test shortly after he entered the White House, when a coup brought the military back to power in Myanmar. Biden promptly reimposed heavy sanctions on that country.

But as Biden nears the end of his term, his record on promoting or defending human rights and democracy globally is patchy at best. Still, in his reelection campaign, he has retained protecting the forces of human dignity and freedom as a core theme.

Unfortunately for Biden, nothing has been more damaging to that theme than his political and military support for Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, including his repeated refusal to push for a cease-fire. Such strong backing, while allowing the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in Israel’s history to expand its military assault across Gaza, is bleeding support from Biden’s base at home. More significantly, it has left the U.S. as diplomatically isolated as Russia was when it first invaded Ukraine.

Long before Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist atrocities led Israel to unleash war, Biden had been using promotion of democratic rights selectively — to target America’s adversaries and weak, strategically unimportant states, while condoning authoritarian practices in countries that matter to American interests. The pursuit of moral legitimacy in support of democracy promotion, meanwhile, has contributed to making sanctions the tool of choice for U.S. policymakers, despite being a blunt instrument to bring about political change.

Biden, for example, has been silent on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s lurch toward authoritarianism, because acknowledging that reality would run counter to the American president’s narrative that the war in Ukraine symbolizes a “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”

The truth is that Zelensky has effectively choked Ukraine’s nascent democracy by banning opposition parties, jailing political opponents, shutting independent media outlets and deferring elections indefinitely under martial law. Zelensky has essentially followed in the footsteps of his nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Consider another example: While ratcheting up sanctions on military-ruled Myanmar — now reeling under a deepening humanitarian crisis — the Biden administration is mollycoddling Pakistan’s domineering military, which has long blocked a genuine democratic transition in the country. With the U.S. implicitly endorsing the Pakistani military’s viselike grip on national politics, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin in December hosted Pakistan’s army chief at the Pentagon, while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken invited the visiting general to his office.

Meanwhile, confounding those who believe in Biden’s rhetoric, the president, in practice, does not hew to his own narrative of a “global battle between democracy and autocracy,” thereby implicitly conceding that such a simplistic or rigid approach would crimp the wider pursuit of U.S. diplomatic interests. This is apparent from Biden’s strategic outreach to autocracies at a time when America’s sharpening competition with China is increasingly shaping its diplomacy.

One example stands out in particular. On the campaign trail in 2019, Joe Biden vowed to punish Saudi Arabia for its murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi crimes in Yemen, saying he intended to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” He also asserted that there is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.” 

Yet, even at the risk of exposing the hollowness of his moralizing, Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia in July 2022 in order to mend frayed ties with the kingdom. And, despite the backlash he faced at home for fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during that visit, Biden gave the de facto Saudi leader a hearty handshake during the G-20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023.

In fact, after the summit, Biden directly flew from India, the world’s largest democracy, to Vietnam, one of the more authoritarian countries in the world, to upgrade strategic ties, despite Vietnam’s widening crackdown on dissent and peaceful protests.

To be sure, Biden’s outreach to non-democracies is advancing American interests. His embrace of the Saudi Crown Prince helped produce a multinational agreement in New Delhi on an ambitious, U.S.-promoted rail and shipping corridor that would extend from India to Europe via the Middle East. In Vietnam, Biden signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” a status that the U.S. had long wanted.

Few would question Biden’s effort to pursue a more balanced and pragmatic approach to the overseas promotion of democratic rights, given that more than two-thirds of Americans think that U.S. democracy itself is broken. Building new or closer partnerships with other states, even if they are non-democracies, has become imperative for the U.S. to help counter China’s global influence game. So it is scarcely a surprise that America today maintains close cooperation with a wide array of undemocratic or democratically-backsliding governments. 

The problem lies in the Biden administration’s open use of human rights promotion as a geopolitical tool to bring pressure on the countries it targets, including through U.S. government-funded organizations. On occasion, human rights concerns are raised as leverage even against a friendly state like India. This approach blunts the effects of rights promotion by undermining American credibility.

Blending promotion of democratic rights with the application of sanctions, meanwhile, often only reinforces the authoritarian conduct of the targeted regimes. Examples extend from Myanmar, Iran and Syria to Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.

Worse still, sanctions against non-democracies almost invariably advance the commercial and strategic interests of America’s main rival, China. This means that the U.S. continues to aid China’s accumulation of economic and military power, while letting Beijing escape scot-free over abuses such as Muslim gulag in Xinjiang, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi era.

Simply put, the geopolitics of human rights and democracy promotion contribute to America’s strategic overreach, which, in turn, accelerates the relative decline of U.S. wealth and power.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

The Coming Taiwan Crisis

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When US President Joe Biden was asked last September whether American forces would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, he replied in the affirmative, but included a caveat: “if, in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.” But an “unprecedented attack” is precisely what Chinese President Xi Jinping is likely to avoid.

GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

The more US President Joe Biden’s administration has sought to ease tensions with China through high-level dialogue, the more brazenly Chinese President Xi Jinping has applied coercive pressure to Taiwan. Never was this pattern more obvious than late last month, when China sent 33 warplanes and seven combat ships toward Taiwan, just as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan were holding talks in Bangkok. Fears that Xi will soon launch an even more overt push for “reunification” with Taiwan are rising. 

Taiwan was never part of the People’s Republic of China. It is a self-governing island that, for most of its history, had no relationship with China and has remained fully outside Chinese control for the last 129 years. Even so, Xi has made no secret of his intention to enforce China’s claim to the island. In fact, Xi has called “reunification” with Taiwan his “historic mission.” 

Xi reportedly reaffirmed his intentions to Biden at their recent summit in San Francisco, noting that the only matter left to be decided is when to take over the island. And there are good reasons to believe that the time might be near. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza claiming America’s attention and resources, and the world undergoing a broader geopolitical reconfiguration, Xi might see a window of opportunity. And Taiwanese voters’ delivery of a third consecutive presidential term to the pro-sovereignty Democratic Progressive Party has likely bolstered Xi’s motivation to assert control over the island. 

Already, Xi has been stepping up intrusions into Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island with warships. China has also fired missiles into the waters around the island and carried out large-scale war gamessimulating attacks on it. According to a recent survey by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, two-thirds of US experts now believe that a Taiwan Strait crisis is likely this year. In November, the bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned that China is preparing to wage war over Taiwan – and position itself to launch cyberattacks against the United States that would “wreak havoc” during such a conflict. 

One might expect the Biden administration to respond to such developments by strengthening deterrence, by both bolstering Taiwan’s defenses and stating unambiguously that the US has the strategic intent and political will to defend the island against a Chinese attack. Yet there is a $14 billion backlog in US military sales to Taiwan, with weapons deals announced as long ago as 2017 still unfulfilled. And Biden has repeatedly declared that the US is “not looking for conflict” with China. 

Although Biden’s policy of engagement with China – including two face-to-face meetings and five virtual talks or phone calls with Xi since 2021 – has so far yielded no dividends, his administration apparently is unwilling to change course. The result is a paradox: the stronger established power, in attempting to preserve the status quo, is seeking to appease the revisionist power, which continues to expand its frontiers. In the South China Sea, China has turned its contrived historical claims into reality without incurring any international costs. 

The ineffectiveness of US-led sanctions against Russia has probably emboldened Xi yet further. If unprecedented Western sanctions cannot bring down Russia’s economy, they certainly cannot destroy China’s, especially given Chinese countermeasures. Even if the West could crush China economically, doing so would amount to shooting itself in the foot. China’s central position in the global economy may well explain why the country has faced no meaningful Western sanctions for maintaining its Xinjiang gulag, where it is holding more than one million Muslim detainees, or for snuffing out Hong Kong’s autonomy. 

To be sure, when Biden was asked last September whether US forces would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, he replied in the affirmative. But he added a caveat: “if, in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.” And an “unprecedented attack” is precisely what Xi is likely to avoid. Not only does China probably lack the amphibious-assault capability to seize all of Taiwan; a full-scale attack, akin to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, would also be out of character for the country, which has typically preferred quieter, more gradual aggression anchored in stealth, deception, and surprise. 

Just as China has made great strides in the South China Sea and the Himalayas with this strategy of incremental expansionism, it will probably use hybrid warfare to squeeze Taiwan. The Chinese military has already simulated the imposition of a quarantine or blockade on the island. China could also announce the “lawful” closure of the Taiwan Strait to foreign vessels or periodically block shipping routes to choke the Taiwanese economy. 

As former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has warned, such measures could, over time, “bring Taiwan to its knees and create huge incentives for Taiwan to have a very different attitude toward China.” But the measures are also subtle enough that they are unlikely to elicit a concerted US-led response until it is too late. 

A majority of Taiwanese believe that, in the face of a Chinese invasion, the US would abandon them, just as it did in 1979, when it terminated bilateral diplomatic relations and a mutual defense treaty with the island, in order to restore ties with China. If the US were to forsake Taiwan again, the international credibility of US security assurances would lie in tatters, effectively ending America’s global preeminence.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2024.

A World Without Order

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A profound geopolitical reconfiguration is in the making, especially as the erosion in America’s leadership role accelerates. 

Brahma Chellaney  | OPEN magazine

The crises, conflicts and wars that are currently raging underscore that we are living in fraught times. Indeed, 2024 could bring greater turbulence that intensely impacts the geopolitical landscape.

The wars that Ukraine and Israel are fighting should not obscure Taiwan’s vulnerability to a Chinese attack. The two wars actually increase the risk of a third. If Chinese President Xi Jinping perceives that China has a window of opportunity to act during the US presidency of Joe Biden, he will likely move on Taiwan.

Between the new war in the Middle East, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s aggressive expansionism from the Himalayas to the South and East China Seas, the global order since the end of World War II appears not only finished; we are seeing the advent of a world without order.

Few, however, are going to mourn the demise of the “rules-based international order”, other than the Western power elites. This order was neither centred on rules nor was it truly international. It was a power-based order that was established by the US with the help of its Western allies. Those states that dared to defy the order were punished by the West, including by slapping sanctions on them and staging regime-change military interventions, as happened in Iraq and Libya.

The US not only largely made the rules on which that order was based; it also seemed to believe itself exempt from key rules and norms, such as those prohibiting interference in other countries’ internal affairs. Its interference extended to military invasions. The “rules-based” order, if anything, underscored that international law is powerful against the powerless, but powerless against the powerful.

The withering away of the “rules-based” order, however, is bringing greater instability in international relations, with 2024 likely to highlight growing global dangers and a changing geopolitical landscape, including a return to great-power rivalries. Amid greater international divisiveness, the North-South and East-West divides are set to widen.

The possibility of sustained conflicts between the long-dominant West and China, Russia and the Islamic world cannot be discounted. The competition between the US and China is already shaping up as the main geopolitical axis of the new era. And new alliances and coalitions are increasingly challenging the West’s hold on international institutions, including the financial architecture.

KEY ELECTIONS THAT COULD RESHAPE OUR WORLD

The outcome of a series of major elections in 2024 would likely reverberate across the world. Countries that are home to more than half the global population will hold elections in 2024. They include eight of the 10 most populous countries in the world—Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, and the US. Key democracies in the Global South—from South Africa and Mexico to India and Indonesia—will go to polls in 2024.

Taiwan’s vote on January 13 will have an important bearing on cross-strait relations. China-Taiwan relations are already very tense because Beijing has regularised coercive pressure on Taipei. Taiwan, with almost as many people as much-larger Australia, is a technological powerhouse that plays a central role in the international semiconductor business. A Chinese annexation of Taiwan will not only make China a more formidable economic power but also threaten global peace and accelerate the global chip shortage. China could ratchet up pressure on Taiwan if the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Lai Ching-te wins. Lai is committed to defending Taiwan’s sovereignty.

Some of the 2024 elections are unlikely to spring a surprise. In Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League party is expected to retain power in the January 7 national election, especially as the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is boycotting the polls. Leading a secular government since 2009 that Bangladesh’s Islamists detest, Hasina has given the country political stability and rapid economic growth, although the global economic fallout from the Ukraine war is now weighing on the country’s finances.

The US rightly wants Bangladesh’s election to be free and fair. But ramped-up US pressure on Hasina’s government has had the effect of emboldening opposition activists and Islamists, as the largescale political violence in Dhaka on October 28 showed. Even the residence of the country’s chief justice came under attack. The violence flared when BNP and the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, staged “grand rallies” in the capital to demand that Hasina cede power to a caretaker administration to manage the polls.

The Biden administration has made Bangladesh a focus of its democracy promotion efforts by dangling the threat of visa sanctions against officials who undermine free elections. Yet, at the same time, Washington has condoned the military’s indirect rule in Pakistan, where mass arrests, disappearances and torture have become political weapons. Indeed, Washington has done little to ensure that Pakistan’s forthcoming elections in February would be free and fair.

While continuing to reward Pakistan by prioritising short-term geopolitical considerations, the Biden administration has been criticising democratic backsliding in Bangladesh. In 2021, citing “widespread allegations” of human-rights abuse in the Bangladeshi war on drugs, Washington slapped sanctions on Bangladesh’s elite Rapid Action Battalion and six of its current and former leaders. Bangladesh was excluded from Biden’s Summits for Democracy but military-dominated Pakistan was invited.

Whatever the outcome of Pakistan’s February 8 election, one reality will not change: The country’s domineering military will remain the ultimate hand wielding political power behind a civilian-led government. Pakistan essentially is a one-party state: The only party that has ruled the country directly or indirectly since the first coup in 1958 is the military.

The February 14 general elections in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, are set to help tighten the hold of dynasties on politics. With his term coming to an end, President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has chosen dynasty over party loyalty: He is supporting not his own party’s presidential candidate but Minister of Defense Prabowo Subianto, his rival in the previous two presidential elections who was linked to the 1967-98 Suharto dictatorship. Indonesia’s Constitution Court, headed by Widodo’s brother-in-law, ruled controversially that Widodo’s son was eligible to run as Prabowo’s running mate, despite not meeting the minimum age requirement of 40 for presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

Turning to Russia, its March 17 presidential election will further cement Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. Under President Putin, Russia is a resurgent power that has been able to ride out unparalleled Western sanctions against it. With the US and its allies deeply involved in the war in Ukraine, even if indirectly, Russia has remade its economy to focus on defence production.

Given his high approval ratings at home, Putin is likely to easily win a fresh term in office, allowing him to pass Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as the longest-serving Russian ruler since Catherine the Great. But, given the West’s gradually escalating proxy war with Russia, the risks of a direct NATO-Russia conflict are growing.

Several countries in Africa with a combined population of more than 340 million, from South Africa and Mozambique to Ghana and Algeria, are scheduled to hold elections in 2024. The general election in South Africa, due between May and August, could possibly spring a surprise, given the corruption scandals and divisions roiling the ruling African National Congress (ANC). ANC risks losing its parliamentary majority for the first time since it took power in 1994. But the fact that the opposition is weak and split could help bail out ANC.

Turning to Europe, there will be multiple parliamentary or presidential elections in 2024 across the continent—from Finland and Belgium to Belarus and Lithuania. The right seems poised to make major gains in several of these elections, especially in Portugal and Austria. An important shift to the right is also likely to emerge from the European Parliament elections from June 6 to 9, which will be the first polls since Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU).

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s term ends in March, yet he has said that it would be “irresponsible” to hold elections while the war is raging. Zelensky (the West’s poster boy for democracy) has banned opposition parties, jailed political opponents, shut down independent media outlets, and clamped down on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church because it is canonically linked to the Moscow Patriarchate. He governs by martial law.

Yet Zelensky is more vulnerable than ever. After the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia, the long-simmering rift between him and the country’s military leadership has become public, with Zelensky criticising the overall commander of Ukrainian forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, for aptly describing the war as deadlocked. By undermining his political legitimacy through refusal to hold elections, Zelensky is inviting the risk of being ousted by the military. For Zelensky, 2023 was a tough year but 2024 is likely to be even tougher.

Looking at Latin America, Mexico is set to elect its first woman president, with both major political sides fielding women candidates for the June elections. In Venezuela, which is locked in a bitter border feud with Guyana over oil rights, President Nicolás Maduro will seek a fresh term after the US broadly eased sanctions on the country on the back of assurances that the 2024 election would be competitive.

But no 2024 election will have a greater impact on the world than the one in the US on November 5, when voters elect the country’s next president, as well as the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Biden’s poll numbers are already dismal, even as questions swirl over his mental acuity and physical health. A second term for Biden seems increasingly unlikely. If the weak poll numbers prompt the 81-year-old Biden to drop out of the race, it would not only spark a messy intra-Democratic Party battle over the replacement nominee, but also throw the election into unfamiliar territory.

Biden, like his predecessors, has aggressively promoted democracy in countries that are strategically inconsequential to Washington, such as Myanmar and Bangladesh, while building closer strategic ties with important autocracies, from Saudi Arabia to Vietnam. Such selective promotion of democracy, paradoxically, has come even as more than two-thirds of Americans think US democracy is broken. Indeed, America has been designated by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) as a “backsliding” democracy.

India’s General Election, for its part, will be critical for the continued upward trajectory of the world’s largest democracy, including its accelerated economic growth, rising international profile and growing clout. India’s economy, the world’s fifth largest, is today the fastest growing among major countries. India has emerged as a powerful voice for the Global South. But without political stability, India cannot hope to sustain its political and economic rise.

More broadly, the elections of 2024 will be spread across all the continents. The outcome of these elections could have a profound impact on our world.

WILL 2024 BE A GLOBE-CHANGING YEAR?

The two raging wars in Ukraine and Gaza, by pitting rival coalitions against each other, have essentially shaped up as great-power conflicts. On one side are the US and its allies that are supporting both Ukraine and Israel, and on the other side are China, Russia, Iran and their partner states.

The two wars actually increase the risk of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. To help contain that danger, Biden is seeking to mend fences with China, as was underlined by his November bilateral summit with Xi in California on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum meeting. Biden’s conciliatory moves have included sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing and emphasising that the US-led effort is to “de-risk” the relationship with China but not to “decouple” from it.

But with America’s attention focused on Europe and the Middle East, Xi must be observing how Biden’s transfers of artillery munitions, smart bombs, missiles and other weapons to Ukraine and Israel are depleting American stockpiles. Xi would prefer the Ukraine and Israel wars to last as long as possible so that US military stocks are furthered drained and China is better positioned to forcibly incorporate Taiwan.

Make no mistake: Taiwan is on the frontline of international defence against expansionist authoritarianism. The defence of Taiwan must assume greater significance for international security, given that three successive US administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, whose geopolitical map Beijing has fundamentally altered. Having already swallowed Hong Kong, China may be itching to move on Taiwan, whose incorporation Xi has called a “historic mission”. By rehearsing amphibious and air attacks, China has displayed a willingness to seize Taiwan by force.

Deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan ought to assume greater priority in US policy. Taiwan cannot be allowed to become the next Ukraine or Hong Kong. Taiwan’s subjugation would significantly advance China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia and upend the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region, not least by enabling China to break out of the so-called first island chain.

A US that fails to prevent Taiwan’s subjugation would be widely seen as unable or unwilling to defend any other ally, including Japan, which hosts more American troops than any other foreign nation. Such failure, in turn, would likely unravel American alliances in Asia.

Still, Biden places greater emphasis on placating Beijing than on strengthening deterrence, including by taking the possibility of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan seriously. The US needs to urgently bolster Taiwan’s defences by stepping up arms sales and military training. But with Biden continuing to prioritise weapons deliveries to Ukraine, US arms transfers to Taipei are lagging years behind orders.

One illusion in Washington is that the risks of Chinese aggression against Taiwan can be mitigated through regular US-China dialogue, including military-to-military contact. Such thinking misses the fact that China’s strategy centres on stealth, deception and surprise. These three elements have characterised China’s expansionism from the South China Sea to the Himalayas.

Success in the South China Sea, in fact, has made Xi more determined to annex Taiwan on his watch, especially as China erodes America’s military edge in the Indo-Pacific. Worse still, America’s entanglement in the Ukraine war is making Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.

Xi could impose war on Taiwan in 2024, knowing that the next American president would be tougher than Biden, who already seems a lame duck president. Biden’s declining health, in fact, symbolises America’s own declining power and influence.

More fundamentally, what is clear is that the world is on the cusp of major geopolitical change, which could also reshape the global financial order as well as investment and energy-trade patterns. Trade and investment flows are already changing in ways that suggest the global economy may split into two major blocs. Growing trade restrictions are one indicator of a de-globalisation trend. Economic fragmentation will hold profound implications for the world economy.

Lest we forget, the US has yet to absorb the lessons of how it undermined its own long-term interests by aiding China’s economic rise over more than four decades. Today, China not only fields the world’s largest navy and coast guard but also is challenging the Western domination of financial and economic organisations. As part of its push for an alternative Sino-led order, China is quietly decoupling large sections of its economy from the West. It now trades more with the Global South than the West.

In modern history, wars, not peace, have helped shape the international order and international institutions. The present US-led global order, including the monetary order as symbolised by the Bretton Woods institutions, emerged from World War II. The United Nations (UN), too, come out from that war. This explains why meaningfully reforming the UN in peacetime has proved problematic.

The UN today appears in irreversible decline, with its role in international affairs marginalised. The hardening gridlock at the UN Security Council, paradoxically, is increasing the role of the structurally weak UN General Assembly, which can make only recommendations as it lacks the power to pass legally binding resolutions on international issues. For example, with the Security Council deadlocked, the General Assembly adopted a resolution on the Gaza war that called for a “humanitarian truce” and an end to Israel’s siege.

The geopolitical churning is happening at a time when the world is at a crossroads, with its future direction uncertain. The challenges we face range from the lack of global leadership and widening inequality and growing authoritarianism across much of the world to the use and misuse of artificial intelligence and the global impacts of environmental degradation and climate change.

More ominously, too often those that cite international law are the ones breaching international law or rules, including the norms against territorial conquest, targeted assassination of foreign officials, and non-intervention and non-interference in other nations’ domestic affairs. The oft-mentioned imperative to uphold a “rules-based order” refers to the rules that even the rule-makers don’t observe when they come in the way of their perceived interests.

Meanwhile, America’s own close allies may be underscoring its waning power and influence. For example, in spite of America being their largest military, political and economic backer, Israel and Ukraine have spurned US advice. US officials have blamed Ukraine’s wide dispersal of forces for its stalled counteroffensive, which has resulted in a deadlocked war with Russia.

Israel rebuffed American counsel to scale back its counterattack and limit the mounting civilian death toll and devastation in Gaza, where the situation—in the words of Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—resembles “hell on Earth”. In its bid to destroy Hamas, Israel has already destroyed vast swathes of the Gaza Strip. By failing to restrain Israel, the US and its Western allies, in the eyes of much of the world’s population, have exposed the hollowness of their commitment to upholding basic human rights.

There may be no direct link between the Ukraine and Gaza wars, yet each is impinging on the other. For example, after the start of hostilities in the Middle East, scepticism about Ukraine aid has increased in the West, with Zelensky acknowledging that the new “conflict takes away the focus” from his country’s war. This is apparent from the stalemate in the US Congress over Biden’s request for $64 billion more in support for Ukraine. Even an EU decision on a $54 billion, multi-year financial assistance package for Ukraine has been delayed. As for the war in Gaza, the longer it continues, the greater will be the risk of a wider Middle East war, which would carry major global impacts just like the war in Ukraine has done.

Even without a wider war, a protracted conflict in Gaza could set in motion a geopolitical reordering in the Greater Middle East, where, with the exceptions of Iran, Egypt, and Turkey, every major power is a modern construct created largely by the British and the French. Israel’s war, for example, is already increasing the geopolitical role of gas-rich Qatar, a regional gadfly that has become an international rogue elephant by funding violent jihadists, including Hamas. Today, Qatar has become central to Israel-Hamas negotiations, including over the hostages.

Other developments, too, portend major shifts in the international order, including the West’s weakening power, Russia’s increasingly militarised economy, China’s stalling growth, and the growing weight of the Global South, where most of the world’s fastest-growing economies are located. Geopolitical risk has never been higher.

In this light, 2024 could be a pivotal year in charting the future direction of our world. The present turbulent times could bring about profound geopolitical reconfiguration, especially as the erosion in America’s leadership role accelerates. The growing weaponisation of trade and the use of sanctions, meanwhile, are undermining the multilateral system.

A new global order, however, is unlikely to emerge anytime soon. What the world is likely to witness is greater instability, including “might makes right” policies.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Sikh militancy casts a shadow over U.S.-India relations

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and First Lady Jill Biden wave during an arrival ceremony at the White House on June 22, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Sikh militancy may be practically dead in India, but it’s gaining traction among sections of the Sikh diaspora in America and in Canada. With California and British Columbia serving as their operational base, Sikh radicals glorify political violence, including honoring convicted or slain terrorists as “martyrs,” as they campaign for an independent Sikh homeland of “Khalistan.”

Sikh extremists have in recent months erected billboards advocating the killing of Indian diplomats (identified with photos), threatened attacks on the Indian Parliament and New Delhi Airport, staged a parade float on which the 1984 assassination of then–Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was reenacted, and mounted attacks on Indian diplomatic missions in Canada and California.

Cash rewards have been offered for providing home addresses of Canada- and U.S.-based Indian diplomats, who have been labeled “killers.” The militants have also held referenda in Canada on the secession of India’s Sikh-majority Punjab state.

Bands of Sikh radicals staged two separate attacks on the Indian consulate in San Francisco last March and July. The FBI says it is still probing the attacks, which included arson, but it has made no arrests so far. India’s National Investigation Agency, meanwhile, has released pictures of 10 militants it has linked to the first attack on the consulate.

Largely because the anti-India Sikh militants pose no direct threat to American or Canadian security, local law enforcement authorities have treated them leniently. But this approach is only emboldening the extremists, as underscored by the December 22 vandalism in Newark, California, of a Hindu temple, whose walls were defaced with pro-Khalistan graffiti.

Against this background, recent U.S. allegations about an Indian murder-for-hire plot that have buffeted Washington and Ottawa’s relations with India obscure the deep roots of a problem that burst into shocking view in 1985 when Canadian Sikh bombers targeted two separate Air India flights, killing 331 people.

While one bombing misfired, taking the lives of two baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, the other killed all 329 people, mostly of Indian origin, on a flight from Toronto. It was the deadliest act of aviation terrorism until 9/11. Two separate Canadian inquiries found that the bombings were carried out by Canada-based Sikh extremists led by Talwinder Parmar, whose extradition to India on terrorism-related charges Prime Minister Gandhi had earlier sought unsuccessfully.

Eight months before the twin Air India bombings, Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh sentries at her New Delhi residence, almost five months after Indian forces stormed the Sikhs’ Golden Temple to flush out armed militants. But before her assassination, she accused the CIA of seeking to destabilize India by aiding Sikh militancy. In that Cold War era, the U.S. was allied with Pakistan’s military regime, while nonaligned India was viewed in Washington as tilted toward the Soviet bloc.

The dramatic improvement in U.S.-India ties in the 21st century was underlined by President Joe Biden in June when he called the partnership with New Delhi “among the most consequential in the world, that is stronger, closer and more dynamic than any time in history.”

Yet the issue of Sikh militancy is again bedeviling U.S.-India relations today.

Unlike in the 1980s, when they waged a bloody insurgency in Punjab that was eventually crushed, Sikh militants now draw little support in India and are largely based in the Anglosphere, principally the U.S., Canada and Britain. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Sikhs in India are nearly universally opposed to secessionism, with 95 percent saying they are “very proud to be Indian.”

Simply put, Khalistan is almost entirely a demand in the Sikh diaspora. The separatists constitute a small minority of the Sikh diaspora, but wage a strident campaign that seeks to sanctify violence.

In September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada — home to the world’s largest Sikh diaspora, numbering 770,000 — said in Parliament that were “credible allegations” about the Indian government’s “potential link” to the June killing on Canadian soil of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh separatist who had been designated a terrorist by India. Trudeau’s bombshell accusation has strained Canada’s traditionally friendly ties with India, which categorically denied any involvement and forced out 41 Canadian diplomats on grounds that there must be parity in the two countries’ diplomatic staff strength. New Delhi also called Canada “a safe haven for terrorists.”

Then, in November, a potential rift opened in the U.S.-India relationship following an indictment that alleged an unnamed Indian official’s involvement in a failed plot to murder a New York–based Sikh separatist wanted in India on terrorism charges. The larger plot, according to the indictment in Manhattan, was linked to the June killing in Canada. The indictment alleged a murder-for-hire scheme that was remarkably amateurish: an Indian operative, at the Indian official’s direction, tried to arrange the killing on U.S. soil, but the hitman he hired long distance from India turned out to be an undercover law enforcement officer.

Despite the indictment, the White House declared that “we’re going to continue to work to improve and strengthen that strategic partnership with India.” India has set up a high-level committee to probe the alleged plot. But in an interview, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticized the lack of action against Anglosphere-based Khalistan militants who, “under the guise of freedom of expression, have engaged in intimidation and incited violence.”

The episode may just be a wrinkle in the U.S.-India relationship, yet the fact remains that the growing anti-India militant activities of Sikh separatists in America and Canada are starting to cast a shadow over Washington and Ottawa’s ties with New Delhi. They are also reopening old Indian wounds, not least those created by the Air India bombings.

The New York target of the alleged Indian murder plot, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, warned Air India passengers in November that their lives were at risk while threatening not to let the flag carrier operate anywhere in the world. Pannun had previously threatened to also disrupt Indian railways and thermal power plants, according to India’s National Investigation Agency.

How would the U.S. react if an India-based militant designated by Washington as a terrorist were to make such terrorist threats without India seeking to prosecute him? Ominously, mass-murderers, including the mastermind of the Air India bombings, have become the poster boys for Khalistan radicals operating out of North America.

If the U.S. wishes to deepen strategic ties with India — a country central to a stable balance of power in Asia — it must not ignore New Delhi’s growing concerns over the activities of American Sikh militants. By locking horns with China through a border military standoff for over 43 months, India is openly challenging Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done in this century. India is indispensable to America’s Asia strategy.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

Kissinger’s corrosive legacy still weighs on U.S. policy in Asia

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Strategy of aiding China’s rise has come back to bite Washington and its allies

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, with Henry Kissinger in Beijing in 2018: A lingering Kissingerian mindset still crimps U.S. policy toward an increasingly muscular China. (Pool via Reuters)

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Henry Kissinger’s biggest diplomatic achievement — orchestrating America’s opening to China — led to a 45-year U.S. policy of aiding Beijing’s economic rise which, in turn, created the greatest strategic adversary Washington has ever faced.

The costs of this approach included empowering a more aggressive and expansionist China and perpetuating Communist Party rule.

When strongman Deng Xiaoping brutally crushed a student-led, pro-democracy movement in Beijing in 1989 through the military assault that came to be known as the Tiananmen Square massacre, Kissinger opposed imposing sanctions on China.

“China remains too important to U.S. national security to risk the relationship on emotions of the moment,” the former secretary of state wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “The U.S. needs China as a possible counterweight to Soviet aspirations in Asia, and needs China to remain relevant in Japanese eyes as a key shaper of Asian events.” He added a prediction: “China will exercise a moderating influence in Asia and not challenge America in other areas of the world.”

By that point, Kissinger had accumulated not just influence with the Chinese leadership but also personal financial interests.

Shortly before the fateful events of June 4, 1989, he had established a $75 million investment fund together with Chinese state-owned group CITIC. In addition, his private advisory company, Kissinger Associates, had already then been working in China on behalf of American businesses for seven years.

More fundamentally, the flawed policy initiated by Kissinger led the U.S. to continue strengthening China even after the Cold War had ended with the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991. By the time the U.S. began reversing course during the presidency of Donald Trump, its relative decline had already set in.

Kissinger’s foreign policy was based on the rampant exercise of American power but was devoid of concern for human lives. Across large sections of Asia, Kissinger’s legacy still rankles because of disastrous decisions that resulted in the deaths of countless numbers of people and destruction across vast regions.

As national security adviser to then-President Richard Nixon, Kissinger extended the Vietnam War by derailing a planned peace conference and ordered the carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos. The U.S. dropped more than7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, twice the amount dropped around Europe and Asia during World War II.

Under the following administration of President Gerald Ford, Kissinger aided Indonesia’s bloody invasion and occupation of East Timor as secretary of state.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, right, and U.S. President Joe Biden in June: Despite an improved relationship, U.S. strategic objectives still diverge from core Indian interests. © Reuters

The corrosive legacy of this modern Machiavelli has long weighed on U.S. policy in Asia. Nowhere is this truer than in America’s relations with India, the world’s largest democracy.

Developments during 1971 had a profound impact on the bilateral relationship and India’s strategic calculus. That year, the Pakistani military brutally resisted Bangladeshi efforts to seek independence, slaughtering up to 3 million people, holding 200,000 women in rape camps and forcing 10 million to flee to India.

Kissinger and Nixon were more than complicit in the Pakistani military’s rampage. They provided political cover for then-military dictator Gen. Yahya Khan to continue the massacres. With the help of Khan’s regime, Kissinger then made a secret trip from Pakistan to China in July 1971, paving the way for a Sino-U.S. rapprochement.

The opening to China thus came at a fatal cost to untold numbers of Bengalis while others were forced to flee to India. But that was not all. To try to prevent Bangladesh from breaking away from Pakistan, Nixon and Kissinger even urged China to take military action against India.

In December 1971, after the massive refugee influx led India to intervene in the final stage of the nine-month independence conflict, the U.S. deployed a nuclear-capable naval task force led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise off the southern tip of India in a show of force.

Anticipating Sino-U.S. collusion, India’s then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had concluded a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union barely four months before Indian forces midwifed the birth of Bangladesh. The friendship treaty signed with Moscow in August 1971 helped deter China from military action against India.

The developments of that year cast a long shadow over U.S.-India ties. The U.S. tilt toward Pakistan and its opening to China not only spawned Indo-Soviet strategic cooperation, but America’s gunboat diplomacy also spurred India into conducting its first underground nuclear test just two and a half years later. This, in turn, led the U.S. and China to help Pakistan build its own nuclear bomb.

For the following quarter century, India remained under U.S.-led technology sanctions, as America cozied up to China and Pakistan, New Delhi’s regional adversaries.

The U.S.-India relationship has been dramatically transformed in this century. But Kissinger’s legacy has not been fully purged from the relationship.

In India’s neighborhood, U.S. strategic objectives continue to diverge from core Indian interests, especially in regard to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and counterterrorism.

The U.S. maintains close ties with Pakistan’s domineering military, condoning its current indirect rule over the country. Under a $450 million deal, it is modernizing the cash-strapped country’s fleet of Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter jets, which will make the aircraft more lethal to India.

There may be a greater convergence now of U.S. and Indian interests on China. Yet Kissinger’s China fantasies, to some extent, persist in U.S. policy, complicating the pursuit of a clear-eyed strategy to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping from moving against Taiwan.

For over 42 months, Indian and Chinese troops have been locked in a standoff along the two countries’ Himalayan frontier, but U.S. President Joe Biden has yet to utter a word about the confrontation, despite fatal clashes. This is a reminder that a lingering Kissingerian mindset still crimps U.S. policy toward an increasingly muscular China.

With the Kissinger-initiated rapprochement with Beijing having paved the way for China’s rise to dominance over parts of Asia, only India and Japan are today in a position to forestall Beijing’s hegemony across the continent. It did not have to be this way.

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.”

Biden’s Flawed Myanmar Policy

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It was America’s abandonment of a failed sanctions policy in favor of calibrated engagement that helped bring about the formal end of Myanmar’s military dictatorship in 2015. Today, US President Joe Biden’s administration must adopt a similar strategy – or risk allowing Myanmar to become a failed state.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

As the Israel-Hamas war rages, the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza is grabbing headlines – as well it should. But another armed conflict, in Myanmar, is also causing mass suffering, with more than two million people internally displaced and over a million more streaming into neighboring Bangladesh, India, and Thailand. And it is attracting far less international attention.

This is not to say that outside forces are not engaged in the conflict in Myanmar. On the contrary, the United States seems to view supporting the rebel and pro-democracy groups attempting to overthrow the military junta – which returned to power in a February 2021 coup – as a kind of moral test. But its approach is doing Myanmar little good.

After the military overthrew Myanmar’s nascent civilian government – to which it had begun ceding power barely six years earlier – US President Joe Biden’s administration re-imposed wide-ranging sanctions, which it has since ratcheted up. But, so far, the sanctions have left Myanmar’s military elites relatively unscathed, even as they have unraveled the economic progress made over the last decade and inflicted misery on ordinary citizens.

The Biden administration has also deepened engagement with the so-called National Unity Government that was formed as an alternative to the junta. Though the US, like the rest of the world, has refrained from formally recognizing the shadow government, this has not stopped the Biden administration from providing “non-lethal aid” to its notional army, the People’s Defense Force, as well as to ethnic insurgent organizations and pro-democracy groups, under the BURMA Act. And the US has a history of interpreting “non-lethal” rather loosely. Non-lethal support for Syrian rebels, for example, included enhancing their operational capabilities on the battlefield.

The groups the Biden administration supports in Myanmar do not share a common cause, let alone a single political strategy. The shadow government has failed to win the support of all major ethnic groups, and its armed wing lacks a unified military command. The ethnic insurgent groups – some of which have records of brutality – are often more interested in securing autonomy for their communities than in building an inclusive federal democratic system, and some are willing to collaborate with the junta to get it. Complicating matters further, these groups’ territorial claims sometimes overlap.

It is impossible to say for certain whether growing US aid flows have fueled more violence in Myanmar. But there is no doubt that rebel attacks have lately intensified, with serious consequences not only for civilians, who often are caught in the crossfire, but also for neighboring states. Just last month, a major offensive – which enabled the rebels to gain control of several border towns and dozens of military outposts – drove at least 72 government soldiers to flee to India in just one week. The junta responded by intensifying its own lethal force, including punitive air strikes and artillery barrages.

Meanwhile, more than 32,000 ethnic Chin from Myanmar have taken refuge in India’s Chin-majority Mizoram state, where they live mostly in refugee camps. Thousands more have fled to another Indian border state, Manipur, fueling an increasingly violent conflict between the local population’s two main ethnic groups.

US aid to armed groups around the world has often fueled disorder and suffering, undercutting the quest for democracy. Judging by Myanmar’s deteriorating humanitarian situation, it seems that this may well be happening again. And Myanmar’s neighbors are being affected in much the same way the US would be affected if faraway powers sought to punish Mexico and aid rebel groups there. Yet, far from letting the neighboring countries take the lead in setting policy toward Myanmar, the Biden administration has insisted they toe the US line.

America’s uncompromisingly punitive approach to Myanmar’s military junta has hopelessly divided the ten-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations, preventing it from playing a constructive role in the conflict. Paradoxically, the US has sought to co-opt ASEAN to promote democracy in Myanmar, even though the majority of the group’s members remain under authoritarian rule.

India, the world’s most populous democracy, is increasingly concerned that the US approach is pushing resource-rich Myanmar into China’s arms. India not only shares long land and sea borders with Myanmar, but also views the country as a strategic corridor to Southeast Asia. Given the cross-border movement of people and guerrillas – some trained and armed by China – close counterinsurgency cooperation with Myanmar is vital for India’s security.

Biden’s misguided Myanmar policy seems to align with his public rhetoric about a “global battle between democracy and autocracy.” But elsewhere, his administration has adopted a more pragmatic foreign-policy approach, deepening strategic relations with non-democracies in order to counter China’s growing influence. For example, during the G20 summit in New Delhi this past September, Biden sought to mend ties with Saudi Arabia. He then visited Vietnam, calling it a “critical Indo-Pacific partner.”

Such realism should be welcomed: if the promotion of democracy and human rights overrode all other considerations, US diplomacy would have very few partners outside the West. But this approach needs to be extended to Myanmar. The US would stand a better chance of helping to end direct military rule there by opening up lines of communication with the junta and offering it incentives to reverse course.

It was the abandonment of a failed sanctions policy in favor of calibrated US engagement that helped bring about the formal end of Myanmar’s military dictatorship in 2015. If Myanmar is to avoid becoming a failed state, the Biden administration must adopt a similar strategy today.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2023.

Israel’s historical role in the rise of Hamas

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times

Hamas fighters take part in a military parade in Gaza in July to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel. | REUTERS

Israel, which withdrew from Gaza in 2005, has come full circle with its invasion of that territory in response to the atrocities perpetrated by the Hamas militants.

But, just as the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to oust from power a terrorist militia whose rise it had facilitated via its Pakistani intelligence connections for Afghanistan’s stability sake, Israel is tasting the bitter fruits of a divide-and-rule policy that helped midwife the birth of the Hamas “Frankenstein monster” that it is now seeking to subdue.

Treating the Hamas slaughter of innocent civilians as a kind of Pearl Harbor moment, Israel has vowed to “wipe out” the Gaza-based militia group through a military offensive that is one of the most intense of the 21st century, according to the New York Times. The terrorism-glorifying ideology of Hamas, however, cannot be crushed by military means alone, raising the question whether Israeli forces could get bogged down in Gaza the way America’s Afghanistan invasion turned into a costly quagmire.

The international focus on the war in Gaza has helped obscure the fact that Israel in the 1980s aided the rise of the Islamist Hamas as a rival to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel’s policy was clearly influenced by the U.S. training and arming of mujahideen (or Islamic holy warriors) in Pakistan from multiple countries to wage jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

The multibillion-dollar American program from 1980 to create anti-Soviet jihadis represented what still remains the largest covert operation in the Central Intelligence Agency’s history. In 1985, at a White House ceremony attended by several mujahideen, then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan gestured toward his guests and declared, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.”

Out of the mujahideen evolved the Taliban and al-Qaida. As then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton openly admitted in 2010, “We trained them, we equipped them, we funded them, including somebody named Osama bin Laden … And it didn’t work out so well for us.”

Hamas, for its part, is alleged to have emerged out of the Israeli-financed Islamist movement in Gaza, with Israel’s then-military governor in that territory, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, disclosing in 1981 that he had been given a budget for funding Palestinian Islamists to counter the rising power of Palestinian secularists. Hamas, a spin-off of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, was formally established with Israel’s support soon after the first Intifada flared in 1987 as an uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

Israel’s objective was twofold: to split the nationalist Palestinian movement led by Arafat and, more fundamentally, to thwart the implementation of the two-state solution for resolving the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By aiding the rise of an Islamist group whose charter rejected recognizing the Israeli state, Israel sought to undermine the idea of a two-state solution, including curbing Western support for an independent Palestinian homeland.

Israel’s spy agency Mossad played a role in this divide-and-rule game in the occupied territories. In a 1994 book, “The Other Side of Deception,” Mossad whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky contended that aiding Hamas meshed with “Mossad’s general plan” for an Arab world “run by fundamentalists” that would reject “any negotiations with the West,” thereby leaving Israel as “the only democratic, rational country in the region.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official involved in Gaza for over two decades, told a newspaper interviewer in 2009 that, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

To be sure, some others, including the U.S. intelligence establishment, have not endorsed the Israeli connection to the rise of Hamas, portraying it simply as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

About seven years before U.S. special forces killed bin Laden in a helicopter assault on his hideout near Pakistan’s capital, an Israeli missile strike in 2004 assassinated Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic and partially blind cleric. By drawing specious distinctions between “good” and “bad” terrorists, Israel and the U.S., however, continued to maintain ties with jihadis.

While Barack Obama was in the White House, the U.S. and its allies toppled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, creating a still-lawless jihadi citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep. They then moved to overthrow another secular dictator, Syria’s Bashar Assad, fueling a civil war that helped enabled the rise of the Islamic State, a brutal and medieval militia, some of whose foot soldiers were CIA-trained. And apparently shocked by the brutality of some of those U.S.-backed militants, and amid questions over the effectiveness of the policy, then-American President Donald Trump in 2017 is reported to have decided to shut down the covert Syrian regime-change program.

Israel, by contrast, persisted with its covert nexus with Hamas. With the consent of Israel, Qatar, a longtime sponsor of jihadi groups, funneled $1.8 billion to Hamas just between 2012 and 2021, according to the Haaretz newspaper.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for much of the past decade and a half, told a meeting of his Likud Party’s Knesset members in 2019 that, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” adding, “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

Israel, like the U.S., may have been guided by the proverb, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But, as history attests, “the enemy of my enemy,” far from being a friend, has often openly turned into a foe.

America’s longest war ended with the Taliban’s return to power. The reconstitution of a medieval, ultraconservative, jihad-extolling emirate in Afghanistan has no direct bearing on a distant America. But Israel’s war against the monster it helped spawn will greatly shape Israeli security.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Biden’s policies make Taiwan more vulnerable

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Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

American fantasies about China helped create the biggest strategic adversary the US has ever faced. For over 45 years, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, successive American presidents aided China’s economic rise as a matter of policy. Even as Beijing cheated on trade rules, stole technology, and flexed its military muscle, including against Taiwan, the US looked the other way, in the naive hope that a more prosperous China would liberalize economically and politically.

Despite the fundamental shift in America’s China policy introduced by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, US fantasies, to some extent, still persist, complicating the pursuit of a cleareyed strategy to deter Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) from moving against Taiwan.

Consider, for example, President Joe Biden’s greater emphasis on placating Beijing than on strengthening deterrence, including by taking the possibility of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan seriously. The US needs to urgently help bolster Taiwan’s defenses by stepping up arms sales and military training. But with Biden continuing to prioritize weapons deliveries to Ukraine despite its failed counteroffensive against Russian forces, US arms transfers to Taipei are lagging years behind orders.

This year has stood out for Biden’s conciliatory moves toward China — from sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing and holding a summit meeting with Xi in California to emphasizing that the US-led effort is to “de-risk” the relationship with China but not to “decouple” from it.

While keeping the door to diplomacy with Russia shut, Biden has beseeched China to stabilize bilateral ties. By presenting the US, the stronger power, as more zealous than China to improve relations, Biden could embolden Xi’s risk-taking.

In dealing with China, Biden has a weaker hand that he would like. The deepening US involvement in the Ukraine and Israel wars is sapping America’s diplomatic and military resources. This could tempt Xi to move on Taiwan, especially because he knows the US would struggle to deal with a third war simultaneously. In fact, the longer the Ukraine and Gaza wars rage, the greater would be the likelihood of Beijing launching aggression against Taiwan.

Yet, while letting hope drive his overtures to China, Biden has not only doubled down on his Ukraine strategy but also is raising the specter of “American troops fighting Russian troops” if the US Congress does not approve US$61 billion in additional assistance for Kyiv. A US mired in a protracted Ukraine war would open greater opportunity for Beijing to move on Taiwan.

Despite the China-policy debate in the US reflecting more realism in recent years, illusions continue to guide Biden’s approach. One illusion is to believe, as Biden apparently does, that China would cooperate with the US on major global issues. Another illusion is that risks of aggression against Taiwan or miscommunication can be mitigated through regular dialogue, including military-to-military contact.

Such thinking misses the fact that China’s strategy centers on stealth, deception and surprise. These three elements have characterized China’s expansionism from the South China Sea to the Himalayas. Xi’s unpredictability demands greater US attention to shoring up deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Unfortunately, the China fantasies extend to some American scholars. For example, three China specialists argued in a recent essay that averting Chinese aggression against Taiwan demands that the US “reassure, not just threaten, China.” Their thesis effectively calls for rewarding China for steadily regularizing its coercion of Taiwan.

This is redolent of how the US looked the other way as China created and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. Indeed, at the height of Xi’s island-building drive, Obama argued in his final year in the White House that “we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.” Such appeasement helped turn China’s contrived historical claims to the South China Sea into reality without Beijing incurring any international costs.

Success in the South China Sea has made Xi more determined to annex Taiwan on his watch, especially as China erodes America’s military’s edge in the Indo-Pacific. Worse still, America’s entanglement in the Ukraine war has made Taiwan more vulnerable to Chinese aggression. Ukraine has secured key war materiel that could have gone to Taipei.

Yet, some Americans still argue that the US must first defeat Russia in Ukraine before pivoting to deter China. It is as if Xi would wait on Taiwan until the US has humiliated Russia on the battlefield and turned its attention to containing China!

Taiwan’s continued autonomous status is central to America’s safeguarding of its global preeminence. Yet, at a time when more than two-thirds of American voters worry about the 81-year-old Biden’s mental and physical health, the lack of US strategic clarity on how to deter or respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan is striking.

If Xi perceives that China has a window of opportunity to act during the Biden presidency, he will likely move on Taiwan. If that were to happen, China would likely emerge as a pressing military threat to the US itself.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).