Category Archives: International Security

Averting a second cold war

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times

001ec949c22b128eb91d2aThat we live in a world of rapid change has been confirmed by the way recent developments over Ukraine have transformed international geopolitics in just a few weeks. The looming cold war triggered by the U.S.-supported putsch in Kiev that deposed Ukraine’s constitutional order and by Russia’s muscular riposte, including annexing Crimea, portends the advent of a new era.U.S. President Barack Obama’s new sanctions approach toward Russia indeed sets the stage for a potential clash between Western democracy and what American ideologues call “Putinism.”

The geopolitical tensions, military deployments and strident rhetoric point to the risk of preemptive moves and miscalculations sparking an accidental confrontation. We need only to recall how a spiral of actions and counter-actions led to World War I a hundred years ago.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s action in annexing Crimea violated Ukraine’s territorial integrity in breach of international law, even though it followed a referendum in this historically Russian region, where the majority of residents are indisputably with Russia.

Let us, however, not forget that the U.S. and NATO have flagrantly and repeatedly contravened international law in the past 15 years. It’s a long list — the bombing of Serbia, the separation of Kosovo from Serbia, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq without U.N. Security Council mandate, the overthrow of Moammar Gahdafi’s regime through aerial bombardment, the aiding of a still-raging bloody insurrection in Syria, and renditions and torture of terror suspects. The U.S. National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program also disregards international law.

An international system based on the rule of law cannot be good unless norms and rules are respected on all sides. Yet power often trumps international law. Neither the U.S. nor Russia respects international borders. America, for example, invoked its Monroe Doctrine to intervene, among others, in Panama, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

International law tends to take a back seat when a major power asserts a right to protect vital security interests. Indeed, when a great power needs a threat to justify its intervention in another state, it invariably finds one. There is thus a long political history of world powers quoting international law to others but ignoring it when it comes in their way. The Ukraine case illustrates the international law of convenience.

Yet it is difficult to see how Russian, American or European interests can be advanced by the ominous face-off over Ukraine, which has helped shift the international spotlight from Asia’s festering fault lines and territorial feuds to the new threat to European peace. The showdown, unless defused, is likely to spur significant shifts in geopolitical equations and policies.

For example, the latest developments leave less space for the U.S. to pivot toward Asia but compel Moscow to embark on its own pivot to Asia, particularly China, to promote energy outflows and capital inflows.

With both Obama and Putin actively seeking to woo China on Ukraine, the likely big winner from the turn of events is the country that has been relentlessly expanding its borders ever since it came under communist rule in 1949.

China’s geopolitical gains will solidify if the U.S. jettisons — as appears likely — its post-Cold War policy of seeking to influence Russia’s conduct through engagement and integration into global institutions. The U.S. is closing the door to Russian accession to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and effectively ousting Russia from the Group of Eight by making it the Group of Seven again — an action that can only accelerate that institution’s creeping irrelevance in international relations.

A slippery slope to greater sanctions would clearly signal a U.S. shift to a new Russian policy of selective containment and engagement. Such a shift would be accompanied by an intellectual and normative thrust to present the new policy as vital to rein in an autocratic and ambitious Russia — as if heralding the return of a Cold War-style ideological battle between autocracy and democracy to Europe. But with communism now dead in Russia, America’s ideological war would target “Putinism.”

The demonization of Putin is ironic, given that the Russian leader pursued a pro-Western policy in the initial years after he came to power. For example, he closed down Russian military bases in Cuba and Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, and voluntarily supported America’s Afghanistan invasion. Only after his extended overtures went unreciprocated — with the U.S. instigating “color revolutions” in some ex-Soviet states and expanding NATO to the Baltics and the Balkans — did Putin adopt a more nationalistic course.

Yet the new U.S. sanctions approach is premised on a need to check Putin’s capacity to utilize state instruments like military power and energy leverage to block states in Russia’s periphery from moving closer to the West. America is likely to bolster such frontline states, including by transferring military hardware, training and integrating their forces, and placing U.S. systems on their soil. NATO countries are already being urged to cut their reliance on Russian energy supplies.

Obama seems determined to use the tool of sanctions to subtly undermine the Russian economy, including by targeting key businessmen, entities and sectors in Russia and by encouraging a flight of capital and talent from Russia. There is also a push to bar Western firms from aiding Russia’s military modernization in any way.

This punitive approach, however, would not preclude Washington from cooperating with Moscow on issues where bilateral interests overlap. After all, such cooperation occurred even during the height of the Cold War, as in establishing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Still, seeking to economically squeeze Russia and isolate it internationally would mean a strategic boon for China, just as the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse opened the way for Beijing to rapidly increase its geopolitical space globally. Beijing will work to exploit Western sanctions against Russia for its own benefit, including securing Russian energy on favorable terms and gaining greater access to the Russian market for its goods.

America’s only genuine long-term rival now is an ascendant China, which is rapidly accumulating economic and military heft. By contrast, Russian military power today pales in comparison with Soviet might, with Obama admitting Russia is not America’s top geopolitical rival.

If a new cold war is to be averted, Ukraine’s neutrality must be guaranteed. Ukraine should remain neutral between NATO and Russia — a sort of a strategic, sovereign buffer, just as Tibet was before China gobbled it up. Such a diplomatic solution, while ensuring European peace, would also contribute to Asian and international security. Otherwise, a full-blown ideological war will generate a wide geopolitical fallout, stoking greater tensions and increasing risks of miscalculation.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist.

(c) The Japan Times, 2014.

How China gains from a U.S.-Russia face-off

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times, March 8, 2014

us-russiaThe U.S.-backed putsch that deposed Ukraine’s constitutional order and triggered the Russian military intervention in the Crimean Peninsula has shifted the international spotlight from Asia’s festering fault lines and territorial feuds to the new threat to European peace. The crisis over Ukraine cannot obscure Asia’s growing geopolitical risks for long.

In fact, the clear geopolitical winner from the U.S.-Russian face-off over Ukraine will be an increasingly muscular China, which harps on historical grievances — real or imaginary — to justify its claims to territories and fishing areas long held by other Asian states. Whether it is strategic islands in the East and South China Seas or the resource-rich Himalayan Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, China is dangling the threat of force to assert its claims.

China will gain significantly from a new U.S.-Russian cold war, just as it became a major beneficiary from America’s Cold War-era “ping-pong diplomacy,” which led to President Richard Nixon’s historic handshake with Mao Zedong in 1972 in an “opening” designed to employ a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China to countervail Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has followed a conscious policy to aid China’s rise — an approach that remains intact today, even as America seeks to hedge against the risk of Chinese power sliding into arrogance.

A new U.S.-Russian cold war will leave greater space for China to advance its territorial creep in Asia.

Asia’s geopolitical risks were highlighted recently by the comments of both Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — who noted that Britain and Germany went to war in 1914 despite being economically interdependent in the same way Japan and China now are — and Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III, who compared China’s territorial creep with Nazi Germany’s expansionism.

Two fault lines in particular are putting Asia’s sustained rise at risk, with the adverse geopolitical trends carrying significant ramifications for global markets.

With Asia’s political integration badly lagging behind its economic integration, one fault line is represented by the widening gap between politics and economics. Asia is the only continent other than Africa where political integration has failed to take off.

The other fault line is represented by the so-called history problem — or how the past threatens to imperil Asia’s present and future. Historical distortions and a failure to come to terms with the past have spurred competing and mutually reinforcing nationalisms. Asia must find ways to get rid of its baggage of history so as to chart a more stable and prosperous future.

Respect for boundaries is a prerequisite to peace and stability on any continent. Just as Russia’s Crimean intervention challenges that principle, renewed attempts in Asia to disturb the territorial status quo are stirring geopolitical tensions and fueling rivalries.

Aquino, drawing an analogy between China’s territorial assertiveness and the failure of other powers to support Czechoslovakia against Hitler’s territorial demands in 1938, pointedly asked in a New York Times interview last month: “At what point do you say, ‘Enough is enough’?”

At the root of the rising Asian geopolitical tensions is the fact that Asia is coming together economically but not politically. Indeed, it is becoming more divided politically. Even as the region’s economic horse seeks to take it toward greater prosperity, its political horse is attempting to steer it in a dangerous direction.

This dichotomy is a reminder that economic interdependence and booming trade by itself is no guarantee of moderation or restraint between states. Unless estranged neighbors fix their political relations, economics alone will not be enough to stabilize their relationship.

The slowing of Asian economic growth underscores the risks arising from this fault line. The risks are heightened by Asia’s lack of a security framework, with even its regional consultation mechanisms remaining weak.

That the risks posed by Asia’s new fault lines are serious can be seen from the situation that prevailed in Europe 100 years ago. Europe then was even more integrated by trade and investment than Asia is today, with its royal families interrelated by marriage. Yet Europe’s disparate economic and political paths led to World War I.

Abe, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, was thus right to warn that economic interdependence cannot by itself prevent war. But by implicitly comparing China with pre-1914 Imperial Germany, Abe sought to gain the moral high ground by depicting Japan as a democratic state that, like Britain a century ago, is seeking to checkmate the expansionist ambitions of a rapidly rising authoritarian power.

The paradox is that China, with its aggressive modernization strategy, appears to be on the same path that made Japan a militaristic state a century ago, with tragic consequences for the region and Japan itself.

Japan’s Meiji Restoration (1868 to 1912) created a powerful military under the national slogan “Enrich the Country and Strengthen the Military.”

The military eventually became so strong as to dictate terms to the civilian government. The same could unfold in China, where the generals are becoming increasingly powerful as the Communist Party becomes beholden to the military for retaining its monopoly on power.

China only highlights the futility of political negotiations by overtly refusing to accept Asia’s territorial status quo. After all, frontiers are significantly redrawn not at the negotiating table but through the use of force, as China has itself demonstrated since 1949.

Yet, U.S. President Barack Obama’s repeated warnings to Moscow over Crimea, including holding out the threat to isolate Russia politically, diplomatically and economically, contrasts starkly with his silence on China’s aggression, including its seizure of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal, and its establishment of an air-defense zone extending to territories it covets but does not control.

Obama has not said a word on these Chinese actions, even though they targeted U.S. allies, the Philippines and Japan. Unlike Ukraine, these are countries with which the United States has mutual defense treaties.

Obama’s “pivot” to Asia —rebranded as “rebalancing” — remains more rhetorical than real.

Make no mistake: Asia’s resurgent territorial and maritime disputes underscore that securing Asian peace and stability — like in Europe — hinges fundamentally on respect for existing borders. Unless that happens, it is far from certain that Asia will be able to spearhead global growth or shape a new world order.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of “Asian Juggernaut.”

Asia’s emerging democratic axis

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By BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times

The nascent entente between Asia’s richest democracy and its largest was powerfully showcased by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s presence as the chief guest at India’s Jan. 26 Republic Day, just weeks after the historic Indian tour of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko. Abe returned home with an invitation for Japan to join Indian-sponsored naval exercises with the United States and to invest in infrastructure development in India’s sensitive northeast, a sizable slice of which China claims.

The ascent of an increasingly assertive and revanchist China is beginning to trigger geopolitical realignments in Asia, in keeping with balance-of-power theory. The new bonds between a politically resurgent Japan and a strategically transforming India are an important example of this trend.

A Japan-India democratic axis, with U.S. support, can potentially reshape the Asian strategic landscape and block the rise of a Sino-centric Asia.

Deepening the strategic collaboration between Asia’s second- and third-biggest economies, however, must await the outcome of India’s national election by May. Like Japan before Abe’s return to power in late 2012, India currently is weighed down by its domestic politics. A rudderless India indeed is in search of its own Abe — a clearheaded, determined and dynamic leader to head its next government.

abeAbe, an admirer of India, has been the main driver of the Indo-Japanese entente, investing substantial political capital in forging closer ties on the recently articulated premise that these relations hold “the greatest potential of any bilateral relationship anywhere in the world.” In his 2007 book “Toward a Beautiful Country: My Vision for Japan,” Abe said it would not surprise him if “in another decade, Japan-India relations overtake Japan-U.S. and Japan-China ties.”

In fact, it was during Abe’s first stint as prime minister in 2006-07 that Japan and India unveiled their “strategic and global partnership” — a significant milestone that set in motion the rapid expansion of bilateral cooperation. In a 2011 speech in New Delhi, Abe said: “A strong India is in the best interest of Japan, and a strong Japan is in the best interest of India.”

Today no other leader of a major power underlines the centrality of building strategic bonds with India as Abe does.

The fact is that Japan has gone from aiding China’s economic rise through technology transfers and generous Official Development Assistance (ODA) to trying to balance China’s emergence as a military threat. Japan has emerged as India’s critical source of capital and commercial technology. India overtook China a decade ago as the largest recipient of ODA, which is currently funding more than 60 Indian projects.

China has absorbed much of Japan’s emerging-market investments, but Japanese investors are now beginning to increasingly view China’s rising labor costs and political muscle-flexing as significant risks. After years of focusing on China, Japanese firms are seeking to moderate the risks by tapping the markets in India and Southeast Asia. In this context, India — with its vast domestic market and large, young and cheap labor force — is seeking to position itself as Japan’s investment partner of choice.

An ongoing shift in Japanese foreign direct investment has turned Japan into India’s largest source of FDI among major industrialized nations.

The number of Japanese companies operating in India has almost doubled over the past five years. Bilateral trade could reach $25 billion this year, roughly double the level four years ago, thanks to a 2011 comprehensive trade pact that aims to remove duties on most goods.

India’s human capital and Japan’s financial and technological power can be a good match to propel India’s infrastructure development and great-power aspirations, as well as catalyze Japan’s revival as a world power. There is clear potential for strong synergies.

At a time when China barely disguises its ambition to carve out an Asian dominion, the logic for Indo-Japanese strategic collaboration is no less compelling. Referring to “changes in the strategic environment” — an allusion to the rise of China as a muscular, authoritarian great power — Japan and India pledged in their common statement to work for “freedom, democracy and rule of law” and “contribute jointly to peace, stability and prosperity.”

Abe’s push for closer strategic bonds with India is part of his broader strategy of “proactive pacifism” to put discreet checks on any unbridled exercise of Chinese power. He, however, has had to deal with a tottering government in India.

Discussions on Japan’s offer to sell its ShinMaywa US-2i amphibious search-and-rescue aircraft, for example, have made little headway, although further talks are scheduled for March. Similarly, despite the two countries forging an alliance to develop rare earths so as to reduce their dependence on China for these vital minerals, the planned joint production in India has still to begin. Toyota Tsusho completed building a rare-earths processing plant in India’s Odisha state last year but remains locked in a price dispute with the state-owned Indian Rare Earths Limited.

New Delhi has eagerly sought a civilian nuclear deal with Japan, similar to the one it clinched with the U.S. in 2008. At a time when public sentiment in Japan against nuclear power is growing, the Abe administration has little incentive to conclude such an accord with a lame-duck Indian government facing an almost-certain election rout. Consequently, three rounds of talks in the past seven months have failed to produce even a draft accord.

Still, the level and frequency of bilateral engagement has become extraordinary in recent years. Every year, the two countries hold a summit, several ministerial-level meetings, and a 2-plus-2 dialogue involving senior officials from their foreign and defense ministries. India holds a 2-plus-2 dialogue with no other nation and an annual summit with only one other country — Russia.

The fact is that Japan and India have moved from emphasizing shared values to seeking to protect shared interests, including through joint naval exercises. Their emphasis is on holding high-quality military exercises involving plausible scenarios. Japan is to join this year’s Indo-U.S. “Malabar” naval maneuvers in the Pacific. The last such trilateral naval exercises occurred in 2009. In extending the invitation to Japan for this year’s exercises, Abe’s Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, declared that, “Japan is at the heart of India’s Look East policy.”

In the next phase, Japan-India collaboration will likely extend to missions in space. Both India and Japan have formidable space capabilities. While Japan has sophisticated rocket and satellite capabilities for both civilian and military use, India has developed and placed in orbit Asia’s largest fleet of satellites for remote sensing and communication purposes. After its unmanned lunar mission, India, with a new Mars mission, has overtaken China’s efforts in space, with an Indian spacecraft currently on its way to the red planet.

New institutional mechanisms for collaboration indicate that the role of personalities as drivers of the partnership will gradually become less important. However, if the entente is to ensure a pluralistic, stable Asian order and help transform Asian geopolitics, India and Japan need to add greater strategic and economic bulk to their ties.

A Tokyo-New Delhi duet must lead the effort to build Asian power equilibrium and safeguard vital sea lanes in the wider Indo-Pacific region.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Arming India into dependency

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The government-to-government weapon contracts between the U.S. and India, with no competitive bidding or transparency, are deepening India’s import dependency without arming it with a decisive edge.

Brahma Chellaney, The Hindu, January 14, 2013

The blossoming of ties with the United States has become an important diplomatic asset for India in recent years. Yet the heady glow of the much-ballyhooed strategic partnership helped obscure prickly issues that arose much before the Devyani Khobragade episode. In truth, the Obama administration’s reluctance to accommodate Indian interests on major issues, coupled with the fundamental challenge of managing an asymmetrical relationship, has created fault lines that are testing the resilience of the partnership.

One aspect of the relationship, however, has thrived spectacularly — U.S. arms sales to India. In just a few years, the U.S. has quietly emerged as India’s largest arms supplier, leaving Russia and Israel far behind. This development is linked to the Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear deal. Although it remains a dud deal on energy, with little prospect of delivering a single operational nuclear power plant for years to come, it has proved a roaring success in opening the door to major U.S. arms sales. The 2005 nuclear agreement-in-principle incorporated a specific commitment to ramp up defence transactions.

The booming arms sales — rising in barely one decade from a measly $100 million to billions of dollars yearly — have seemingly acquired an independent momentum. Nothing better illustrates this than the fact that, at the height of the Khobragade affair, India, far from seeking to impose any costs on America, awarded it yet another mega-contract — a $1.01-billion deal for supply of six additional C-130J military transport aircraft. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the White House last September, among the gifts he took for President Barack Obama was a commitment to purchase $5 billion worth of new arms.

Today, India’s largely one-sided defence relationship with the U.S. is beginning to look akin to its lopsided ties with Russia, with weapon sales serving as the driving force. However, unlike the torpid Indo-Russian non-military commerce, the two-way Indo-U.S. trade has quadrupled in just seven years from $25 billion in 2006 to about $100 billion in 2013.

Still, few Indians are raising the key questions: How are India’s security interests being advanced by substituting the corrosive import dependency on Russia with a new dependency on the U.S., without progress to build a domestic arms-production base? What makes the strategic partnership “special,” given that Washington also has special relationships with India’s regional adversaries — a security alliance since 2004 and strategic partnership since 2006 with Pakistan, and a “constructive strategic partnership” with China since 1997 that predates the strategic partnership with India? Is a relationship locking India as a leading U.S. arms client sustainable in the long run?

Let’s be clear: India can never emerge as a major international power in a true sense, or acquire a military edge regionally, if it remains dependent on imports to meet even its basic defence needs. The capacity to defend oneself with one’s own resources is the first test a nation must pass on the way to becoming a great power.

Ominously, a still-poor India has emerged as the world’s biggest arms importer since 2006, accounting for 10% of all weapons sold globally. Such large-scale imports might suggest that India is pursuing a well-planned military build-up. In truth, such imports lack strategic direction, given the absence of long-term political thinking and joint tri-service planning and command. They are being made in a haphazard manner, although any imported weapon makes India hostage to the supplier-nation for spares and service for the full life of that system.

The rising arms imports, far from making India secure, are only exposing new gaps in its capabilities to decisively win a war. The inveterate dependency burdens Indian taxpayers, forcing them to subsidize foreign military-industrial complexes. Worse still, defence transactions remain the single largest source of kickbacks for India’s corrupt and compromised political elites. This factor alone explains why India has failed to replicate in the conventional-arms sector its impressive indigenous achievements in the fields where imports are not possible — the space, missile and nuclear-weapons realms. Consider the glaring paradox: India surprised the world by launching a spacecraft to Mars, yet it still imports rifles.

For the U.S., displacing Russia as India’s largest arms supplier has been a diplomatic coup. Rarely before has America acquired a major arms client of such size so rapidly. The U.S.’s India success indeed parallels what happened in the early 1970s when Egypt switched sides during the Cold War, transforming itself from a Soviet arms client to becoming reliant on American arms supplies. The difference is that unlike the perpetually aid-dependent Egypt, India buys weapons with its own money.

With U.S. military spending slowing and other export markets remaining tight, American firms are eager to further expand arms sales to India. The fact that the U.S. now conducts more military exercises with India than with any other country creates a favourable political milieu for its defence firms to aggressively push their wares for sale. Even so, the troubling lack of competitive bidding or transparency in the arms deals — all clinched on a government-to-government basis — has become conspicuous. In the one case where India invited bids — to buy 126 fighter-jets — American firms failed to make it beyond the competition’s first round.

The annual value of India’s arms contracts to the U.S. already surpasses American military aid to any country other than Israel. Diplomacy, to be effective, must be backed by leverage and cross-linkages to minimize the weaker side’s disadvantages. Yet New Delhi has not tried to leverage its contracts either to persuade the U.S. to stop arming Pakistan against India or to secure better access to the American market for its highly competitive information-technology and pharmaceutical companies, which are facing new U.S. non-tariff barriers. India’s new frontier of dependency has emerged even as the U.S. bolsters Pakistan with generous military aid.

To be sure, the U.S. signed a four-point declaration of intent with India last September to move beyond the sale of complete weapon systems to co-production through technology transfer. Translating that intent into practice won’t be easy, though. According to the joint declaration, efforts to identify specific opportunities for collaborative weapon-related projects will be pursued in accordance with “national policies and procedures.” But if U.S. policies and procedures do not evolve in the direction of facilitating such collaboration, the declared intent will remain little more than pious hope.

The declaration clearly sought to pander to India’s desire for a less inequitable defence relationship. By dangling the carrot of India being upgraded to the same level as America’s “closest partners,” the declaration also peddled a catchy slogan excitedly lapped up by the Indian media. The U.S. is now willing to co-produce some smaller defensive systems with India, such as the Javelin anti-tank missiles. Such restricted technology transfers, the U.S. believes, will pave the way for securing additional multibillion-dollar contracts to sell large readymade weapons to India.

Significantly, U.S. arms to India fall mainly in the category of defensive weapons. Russia, by contrast, has transferred offensive weapon systems to India, including strategic bombers, an aircraft carrier, and a nuclear-powered submarine. Will the U.S. be willing to sell high-precision conventional arms, anti-submarine warfare systems, long range air- and sea-launched cruise missiles, and other conventional counterforce systems that could tilt the regional military balance in India’s favour?

Another issue relates to the strategic benefits from a closer defence relationship. True, such a relationship will have a countervailing value vis-à-vis China. Yet, it is also true that America has a deeper engagement with China than with India. Indeed, China is now central to U.S. economic and strategic interests. This fact helps to explain why the Obama administration has chartered a course of neutrality on territorial disputes between China and its neighbours, shying away from holding even joint military exercises in Arunachal Pradesh.

A wake-up call for Asian states that rely on the U.S. as their security guarantor was Obama’s inaction on the 2012 Chinese capture of the Scarborough Shoal, located within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. America’s indifference to its commitment to the Philippines under their Mutual Defence Treaty emboldened China to effectively seize a second Philippine-claimed shoal. This is proof that despite its “pivot” toward Asia, the U.S. won’t act in ways detrimental to its close engagement with China. Obama’s foreign policy bears a distinct transactional imprint.

A wise India would consider declaring a moratorium on arms purchases from all sources to give itself time to strategize its priorities and clean up its procurement system. A moratorium of just three years will save the country a whopping $20 billion without compromising national security. With non-traditional threats — ranging from asymmetric warfare in the form of cross-border terrorism to territorial creep through furtive encroachments — now dominating India’s security calculus, procurement of more mega-weapons to meet traditional security challenges must wait until the nation has added strategic direction to its defence policy.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

(c) The Hindu, 2014.

The International Misrule of Law

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  examines two recent cases indicating that China and the United States are the world’s leading rogue states.

A Project Syndicate column internationally syndicated.

Houston presentationOn the face of it, China’s recent declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) extending to territories that it does not control has nothing in common with America’s arrest and strip-search of a New York-based Indian diplomat for allegedly underpaying a housekeeper she had brought with her from India. In fact, these episodes epitomize both powers’ unilateralist approach to international law.

A just, rules-based global order has long been touted by powerful states as essential for international peace and security. Yet there is a long history of major powers flouting international law while using it against other states. The League of Nations failed because it could not punish or deter such behavior. Today, the United States and China serve as prime examples of a unilateralist approach to international relations, even as they aver support for strengthening global rules and institutions.

Consider the US, which has refused to join key international treaties – for example, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (which has not yet entered into force), and the 1998 International Criminal Court Statute. Indeed, unilateralism remains the leitmotif of US foreign policy, and this is also reflected in its international interventions, whether cyber warfare and surveillance, drone attacks, or efforts to bring about regime change.

Meanwhile, China’s growing geopolitical heft has led to muscle-flexing and territorial claims in Asia that disregard international norms. China rejects some of the same treaties that the US has declined to join, including the International Criminal Court Statute and the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (the first law to establish rules on the shared resources of transnational rivers, lakes, and aquifers).

Indeed, despite their geopolitical dissonance, the world’s most-powerful democracy and its most powerful autocracy have much in common when it comes to how they approach international law. For example, the precedent that the US set in a 1984 International Court of Justice (ICJ) case filed by Nicaragua still resonates in China, underscoring that might remains right in international relations.

The ICJ held that America violated international law both by supporting the contras in their insurrection against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors. But the US prevented Nicaragua from obtaining any compensation by vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that called for enforcement of the ICJ’s judgment.

China still hews to Mao Zedong’s belief that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Indeed, while China ratified UNCLOS, it then reinterpreted the provisions to justify cartographic aggression in the South and East China Seas. Worse still, China has refused to accept the UNCLOS dispute-settlement mechanism, thereby remaining unfettered in altering facts on the ground. The Philippines has filed a complaint against China with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. China, however, has simply refused to participate in the proceedings, as if it were above international law.

Whatever the tribunal’s decision, China will simply shrug it off. Only the Security Council can enforce an international tribunal’s judgment on a noncompliant state. But China wields a veto there and will block enforcement of an adverse ruling, just as the US did in the Nicaragua case.

China’s new ADIZ, while aimed at solidifying its claims to territories held by Japan and South Korea, is similarly provocative, because it extends to areas that China does not control, setting a dangerous precedent in international relations. Japan has asked its airlines to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights, even if they are merely transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese territorial airspace.

By contrast, the US has advised American carriers to obey China’s prior-notification demand. There is a reason for this: Although the prior-notification rule in American policy applies only to aircraft headed for US national airspace, in practice the US demands advance notification of all flights through its ADIZ, regardless of their intended destination.

If other countries emulated the example set by China and the US by establishing unilateral claims to international airspace, a dangerous situation would result. Binding international rules are thus imperative in order to ensure the safety of fast-growing commercial air traffic. But who is supposed to take the lead when China and the US have pursued a unilateralist approach on this issue?

Now consider the case of the Indian diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, whose treatment India’s national security adviser called “despicable and barbaric.” True, as a consulate-based diplomat, Khobragade enjoyed only limited diplomatic immunity under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. But this convention guarantees freedom from detention until trial and conviction, except for “grave offenses.” Can a wage dispute qualify as a “grave offense” warranting arrest and humiliation? Would the US tolerate similar treatment of one of its consular officers?

The harsh truth is that the US interprets the Vienna Convention restrictively at home but liberally overseas, in order to shield even the military and intelligence contractors that it sends abroad. A classic case involved the CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who fatally shot two men in 2011 in Lahore, Pakistan. Claiming that Davis was a bona fide diplomat with its Lahore consulate, and thus enjoyed immunity from prosecution, the US accused Pakistan of “illegally detaining” him, with President Barack Obama defending him as “our diplomat in Pakistan.”

Despite a widely held belief that the current international system is based on rules, the fact is that major powers are rule makers and rule imposers, not rule takers. They have a propensity to violate or manipulate international law when it is in their interest to do so. If universal conformity to a rules-based international order still seems like a distant prospect, an important reason is that countries that should be leading the charge still so often behave like rogue states.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

The Chinese Art of Creeping, Covert Warfare

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Brahma Chellaney, Mint, December 25, 2013

With its increasingly powerful military calling the shots in strategic policy, China’s jurisdictional creep in Asia is manifesting itself in three distinct ways. One mode is by air, as illustrated by its new air defense identification zone (ADIZ) — an action that lays unilateral claims to international airspace over the East China Sea and covers territories that China does not control. Another method is territorial creep by sea. And the third approach is encroachment by land to strengthen its military position and claims against India.

China is working to alter the status quo in Asia little by little as part of a high-stakes effort to extend its control to strategic areas and resources and to gain Asian primacy.

China’s persistent territorial nibbling reflects a strategy of extended coercion against neighbors that aims simultaneously to neutralize America’s extended deterrence in the Asian theater. Unlike the U.S., which has multiple allies and strategic partners, including a hub-and-spoke framework centered on bilateral security treaties, China is a lonely rising power with no real allies, yet propping up two renegade states, North Korea and Pakistan, to secure narrow sub-regional geopolitical advantages.

Through extended coercion, China is waging creeping, covert warfare in Asia while keeping the U.S. at bay. Washington, far from coming to the aid of its allies and strategic partners, has chartered a course of neutrality on sovereignty disputes so as to protect its deep engagement with China.

In practice, the strategy of extended coercion translates into salami slicing. This involves a steady progression of small steps, none of which is dramatic enough to become a cause of war by itself, yet which cumulatively lead over time to a strategic transformation in China’s favor. By creating new facts on the ground by stealth, China seeks to grab the “salami” it covets in slices as part of a plan to bamboozle and outwit the opponent.

By moving slowly and quietly but inexorably, China undercuts the relevance of U.S. security assurances to allies and the value of building countervailing strategic partnerships between and among Asian states and America. More importantly, this salami-slice approach seriously limits the military options of rival states by confounding their deterrence plans and making it difficult for them to devise proportionate or effective counteractions.

China’s strategy seeks to ensure the initiative remains with it. Take India: It is locked in a very defensive and militarily challenging posture vis-à-vis China along what is the world’s longest and most-forbidding disputed border. Whether Beijing wishes to keep India under sustained pressure through cross-frontier incursions or catch India militarily by surprise through a Depsang-style deep but localized encroachment or a 1962-type multipronged invasion, it has ample leeway and capability.

In recent years, China has been pressing steadily outwards on its borders, intimidating its neighbors in a relentless territorial creep. The pace at which China’s bit-by-bit strategy proceeds depends on the extent to which its opponents marshal political will and the capability to resist it. The strategy, for example, has run into stiffer obstacles vis-à-vis an unyielding Japan than with a weaker Philippines.

Nearly 65 years after the communist takeover in China, the country is still seeking to expand its political frontiers, even though Han territorial power is now at its historical zenith. China has never been as large as it is today, except when it was ruled by the foreign Mongol and Manchu dynasties.

Yet China remains territorially a revolutionary power bent on upending the status quo in Asia. Its assertive claims springing from revisionist history — along with its unilateralist approach to international law and its penchant for brinkmanship — threaten Asian peace and stability.

Let’s be clear: Changing the territorial status quo has remained the unfinished business of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since its founding in 1949, when it set out to forcibly absorb the sprawling Xinjiang and Tibetan plateau — actions that increased the landmass of China by 44 percent.

An emboldened PRC then went on to seize the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the 1950s, the Paracel Islands in 1974, the Johnson South Reef in 1988, the Mischief Reef in 1995 and, most recently, the Scarborough Shoal (2012) and the Second Thomas Shoal (2013). Its growing military might has strengthened its expansionist impulse.

Yet the apologists for China in India — as elsewhere — are still seeking to whitewash its record of aggression. Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans — publishing under the pen name of Simon Leys — coined the phrase the “100 percenters” to describe the PRC fan club members who support whatever China does or says 100%.

The “100 percenters” in India have actually gone to the extent of blaming their own country for “inviting” the 1962 Chinese attack. These inveterate appeasers do not deny that it was China that attacked India, a historical fact beyond the pale of controversy. However, their thesis — relying on a controversial 1970 book by the Australian journalist Neville Maxwell, whose Marxist orientation and deep-seated prejudice against India colored his writings — is that China was provoked into attacking India to defend its honor and dignity and to stop further Indian provocations.

Blaming the victim for inviting the aggression echoes the argument of warped minds that rape victims often invite the assault. It is a thesis that only the true “100 percenters” could have propounded. The historical fact is that the PRC launched a forward policy of aggression from 1950 onwards, gobbling up Tibet and then nibbling at Indian territories, prompting India to belatedly forward deploy some ill-equipped and ill-trained forces.

How could India, with a ragtag military and no robust defense (let alone offensive capability), have itched to take on China in 1962? The Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has rightly dubbed 1962 “Mao’s India War,” detailing how the Chinese carefully planned the invasion and cleverly used Jawaharlal Nehru’s unguarded remarks (“our instructions are to free our territory”) to brand India as the aggressor.

Offense as defense has remained a core element in the PRC’s strategic doctrine. A Pentagon report published in 2010 has specific cases where China carried out military preemption in the name of a strategically defensive act. These examples include its intervention in the Korean War (1950), the 1962 attack, its initiation of a border conflict with the Soviet Union through a military ambush (1969), the Paracel Islands’ capture, and its invasion of Vietnam (1979).

Even in the more recent acts of aggression involving its seizure of the Johnson South Reef, the Mischief Reef, the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, China claimed it was provoked into carrying out those actions by Vietnam and the Philippines.

Changing facts on the ground is a strategy the PRC first honed at home by staging demographic aggression against ethnic-minority homelands, such as the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and gerrymandering Tibet. Today, China’s navy and new coast guard assert territorial and maritime claims in the South and East China Seas, while its army flexes its muscles in the high-altitude borderlands with India.

The pattern of Chinese territorial creep has become familiar: Construct a dispute, initiate a jurisdictional claim through periodic incursions, and then increase the frequency and duration of such intrusions, thereby establishing a military presence or pressuring a rival to cut a deal on China’s terms. This is in keeping with the PRC’s approach to territorial disputes: What is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable. If an opponent refuses to give in, China employs punitive instruments from its diplomatic toolbox, including economic warfare.

Along land frontiers, rodent-style surreptitious attacks usually precede salami slicing. The aim is to start eating into enemy land like giant rodents and thereby facilitate the slicing. This strategy is particularly focused on the two strategic Buddhist regions located on opposite ends of the Himalayan frontier — Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.

Consider another provocative action: China’s new ADIZ covers territories it claims but does not control, setting a dangerous precedent in international relations. If China prevails in the game of chicken it has started against Japan, India will likely come under greater Chinese pressure.

Japan has asked its airlines to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights even if they are merely transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese territorial airspace. This demand, unusual by international ADIZ standards, impinges on the principle of freedom of navigation of the skies. Yet Washington has advised U.S. carriers to respect China’s ADIZ, opening a rift with Tokyo.

President Barack Obama’s administration has responded to China’s ADIZ with words of cautious criticism but no castigatory step. Indeed, Washington is urging restraint also on Japan’s part, lest any escalation force it to take sides, undermining its policy to manage China’s rise without trying to contain it.

One handicap Washington faces in seeking to combat the Chinese hegemonic strategy is American consumerism and the U.S. debt to China that has now reached $1.3 trillion. Inflows of cheap Chinese capital remain critical for the U.S. to finance its supersized budget deficits.

The U.S. is not willing to defend its allies’ territorial claims by acting in ways that could damage its relations with China, now central to its economic and political interests. Take the Chinese seizure of the Scarborough Shoal, located barely 200 kilometers west of the Philippines’ Subic Bay.

After lengthy negotiations, the U.S. in June 2012 brokered a deal for a mutual withdrawal of Chinese and Philippine maritime vessels from the area. The Philippines withdrew first on Chinese insistence but on a clear understanding that China will follow suit. China instead pursued a game of deception, giving the indication that it was withdrawing, only to reinforce its muscle power in the area and occupy the Scarborough Shoal.

In this light, Japan faces a deepening security dilemma. To rely on the security treaty with the U.S. in the event of a war with China would be risky for Japan, given America’s strategic compulsions. It would not be the first time that the U.S. failed to honor a treaty with another country. In fact, the U.S., despite a Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines that obligates the two nations to defend each another in the case of an attack, has done precious little in response to China’s occupation of the Scarborough Shoal.

The Obama administration’s actions on the world stage have been marked not by resolute leadership but by hesitation and doubt. Its stance not to challenge China directly only aids the Chinese incremental aggression in Asia.

In the absence of any geopolitical blowback, an emboldened China will continue to subvert the status quo to create a hegemonic Middle Kingdom. China’s key neighbors must overcome their differences and collaborate strategically.  Separately, they are outclassed by China but, collectively, they have the potential to rein in its expansionism.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research.

(c) Mint, 2013.

Which conflicts will dominate the world in 2014?

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by Brahma Chellaney, Forbes, January 1, 2014
The three potential flashpoints for international conflict in 2014—East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa—are distinguished by the involvement of autocratic forces in regional troubles.

The world is becoming more interdependent not just in trade and capital flows; the interdependencies extend to technological, public-health, environmental, and climate spheres. Several challenges, extending from jihadist terrorism to climate change, are intrinsically international in character. But even regional challenges, such as in the Middle East or East Asia, carry important global implications.

The interdependencies have not reduced conflict in the world. Many regions remain torn by conflict, even as the ongoing economic and political shifts gradually alter power equations and maritime realities. There is no inter-country war raging currently, but the high number of internal wars—many fuelled by external players—point to the larger dangers.

Three factors will have a bearing on global conflicts in 2014. One is the rise of unconventional threats, which underscores the changing nature of conflict.

Brahma Chellaney.inddA second factor is the phenomenon of failing states, which continues to trouble international and regional security. This development is a direct consequence of the end of the Cold War. While the Cold War raged, weak states were propped up by one bloc or the other. After the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the United States got out of that game. That is why dysfunctional or failing states began to emerge from the 1990s in a significant way.

The phenomenon of failing states has contributed to making such nations a threat to regional and international security either because they are home to transnational pirates (Somalia) or transnational terrorists (the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt), or because of their defiance of global norms (North Korea) or their internal conflicts (Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya).

Compounding this phenomenon is the sanctity attached to existing borders, which has become a powerful norm in world politics. Yet, paradoxically, this has allowed the emergence of weak states, whose internal wars spill over and create wider regional tensions and insecurities. This norm, however, is likely to come under challenge in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere where the dangers of political fragmentation can no longer be dismissed.

A third factor is the growing power of autocrats. In a reflection of the changing balance of financial power, autocracies are increasingly funding democracies, with Western economies dependent on capital inflows from the cash-laden Chinese and Persian Gulf economies. As a result, the foreign assets of the world’s undemocratic governments are on the rise while those of the deeply rooted democracies are on the decline.

In this light, is it any surprise that the leading financiers of foreign jihadist groups are oil-rich Saudi Arabia and gas-exporting Qatar, two of the most oppressive states in the world?

In fact, the three potential flashpoints for international conflict in 2014—East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—are distinguished by the involvement of autocratic forces in regional troubles.

Take East Asia: The new geopolitical crisis there has been triggered by China’s muscular move in declaring an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) extending to territories it does not control. This is just the latest example of China’s territorial creep in Asia.

As China accumulates economic and military power, it has increasingly taken to flexing its muscles, ratcheting up territorial disputes with multiple neighbours and seeking to alter the status quo through surprise actions. It is nibbling at territories held by several neighbours, as highlighted by its growing military incursions across the long and disputed Himalayan border with India, its success in outwitting the Philippines to gain effective control of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal, and its aggressive moves against Vietnam over their unsettled maritime boundary.

China’s ADIZ, while aimed at solidifying its claims to territories held by Japan and South Korea, increases regional tensions and the risks of Sino-Japanese conflict. Japan has asked its carriers to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights transiting the new zone, while South Korea has responded by expanding its own air-defence zone. The overlapping air-defence zones of China, Japan, and South Korea increase the risk of armed conflict by accident or miscalculation.

China—in the absence of any geopolitical blowback over its creeping aggression—will continue to subvert the status quo in the East and South China seas, along its border with India, and even on the cross-border flows of Asia’s major rivers, which originate in the Chinese-annexed Tibetan plateau. But as China escalates its campaign of attrition against a resolute Japan over the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, it increases the chance of armed conflict.

China has also increased geopolitical risks in South Asia by needling India directly and through its ‘all-weather’ ally Pakistan. Despite a new democratically elected government in Pakistan, the military establishment there remains a state within a state, dictating strategic policy and nurturing terrorist groups that carry out cross-border attacks on Indian and Afghan attacks.

If Pakistan-based terrorists were to replicate their Mumbai-style attack in 2014, all bets would be off.

In MENA, with Arab monarchs and other autocrats well entrenched, the Arab Spring has turned into an Islamist Winter. A rising tide of Islamist militancy in the region has fuelled sectarian and tribal conflict and terrorist violence, as highlighted by the deadly attacks in Libya, Lebanon, and the Sinai Peninsula as well as the daily carnage in Syria and Iraq.

The Arab world plus Iran sit astride one of the world’s most active fault lines—a fault line that could trigger major geopolitical earthquakes with far-reaching international effects. The post-Gaddafi Libya has sunk into lawlessness; Egypt’s future political direction remains uncertain; a once-peaceful and secular Syria has been engulfed by a civil war with increasingly jihadist overtones; Yemen remains a sanctuary for transnational terrorists; Iraq and Lebanon continue to be battered by sectarian strife; and the political future of Saudi Arabia and the other oil sheikhdoms appears uncertain.

If there is any good news, it is the possibility of a thaw in relations between Iran and the United States, which has waged an indirect war to financially throttle Tehran by imposing an oil-export embargo. History attests to the linkage between an oil embargo and military hostilities. Although the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack took the United States by surprise, the attack was triggered by a US-British-Dutch oil-import embargo against Japan.

The potential for major conflict in MENA remains high, given the proxy war in Syria between Russia and the US-British-French combine. Moreover, the NATO-engineered regime change in Libya has turned that county into a breeding ground for transnational militants, while the aid to Syrian rebels by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and some Western powers has created a Frankenstein’s monster. Even a thaw in US-Iranian relations could set off conflict because of the existential threat such a rapprochement poses to jihad-bankrolling Arab monarchs.

It would be nice if 2014 passed without any nasty geopolitical surprise. But that would be an overly optimistic expectation.

(c) Forbes, 2014.

Do international rules apply only to weaker states?

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By Brahma Chellaney

On the face of it, there is nothing in common between China’s Nov. 23 declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) extending to territories it does not control and America’s Dec. 12 arrest, strip-search and handcuffing of a New York-based Indian diplomat for allegedly underpaying a nanny she had brought with her from India. Still, these actions epitomize these powers’ unilateralist approach to international law.

A just, rules-based global order has long been touted by powerful states as essential for international peace and security. Yet there is a long history of major powers using international law against other states but not complying with it themselves, and even reinterpreting or making new multilateral rules to further their interests. The League of Nations failed because it could not punish or deter some powers from flouting international law.

Today, the United States and China serve as prime examples of a unilateralist approach to international relations, even as they aver support for strengthening international rules and institutions.

Take the U.S.: Its refusal to join a host of critical international treaties — ranging from the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses to the 1998 International Criminal Court Statute — has set a bad precedent. Add to the picture its international “invasions” in various forms, including cyber warfare and Orwellian surveillance, drone attacks, and regime-change interventions.

Unilateralism has remained the leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy, regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. Forget international law, President Barack Obama bypassed even Congress when he militarily effected a regime change in 2011 in Libya — an intervention that has backfired, sowing chaos and turning that country into a breeding ground for Al Qaeda-linked, transnational militants, some of whom assassinated the American ambassador there.

Carrying out foreign military interventions by cobbling coalitions together under the watchword “you’re either with us or against us” has exacted — as Iraq and Afghanistan attest — a staggering cost in blood and treasure without advancing U.S. interests in a tangible or sustainable manner.

Meanwhile, China’s growing geopolitical heft has emboldened its muscle-flexing and territorial nibbling in Asia, in disregard of international norms. China rejects some of the same treaties that the U.S. has declined to join, including the International Criminal Court Statute and the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses — the first law that lays down rules on the shared resources of transnational rivers, lakes and aquifers.

China has established a hydro-supremacy unparalleled in the world by annexing the starting places of multiple major international rivers — the Tibetan plateau and Xinjiang — and working to reengineer cross-border flows by building dams, barrages, and other structures. Yet China — the source of transboundary river flows to more countries than any other hydro-hegemon — rejects the very concept of water sharing and refuses to enter into institutionalized arrangements with any neighbor.

At the same time, China has been pressing steadily outward on its borders, intimidating its neighbors through military incursions as part of a relentless territorial creep.

China has never been as large as it is today, except when it was ruled by the foreign Mongol and Manchu dynasties. Yet China remains territorially a revolutionary power bent on upending the status quo in Asia. Its assertive claims rooted in revisionist history, along with its penchant for brinkmanship, threaten Asian peace and stability.

Through a strategy of “extended coercion,” China is waging creeping, covert warfare in Asia while seeking to neutralize U.S. extended deterrence so as to keep America at bay. Washington, far from coming to the aid of its allies and strategic partners, has chartered a course of neutrality on sovereignty disputes to help protect its deep engagement with China.

America’s appeal to China to act as a “responsible stakeholder” in the global system undergirds the need for the two powers to address their geopolitical dissonance. Yet the world’s most-powerful democracy and autocracy have much in common on how they approach international law.

For example, the precedent that the U.S. set in a 1984 International Court of Justice (ICJ) case filed by Nicaragua still resonates globally, underscoring that might remains right in international relations, instead of the rule of law.

The ICJ held that Washington violated international law both by aiding the contras in their insurrection against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors. The U.S. — which refused to participate in the proceedings after the court rejected its argument that it lacked jurisdiction to hear the case — blocked the judgment’s enforcement by the U.N. Security Council, preventing Nicaragua from obtaining any compensation.

The only important country that has still not ratified UNCLOS is the U.S., preferring to reserve the right to act unilaterally. Yet it seeks to draw benefits from this convention, including freedom of navigation of the seas.

China, for its part, still appears to hew to Mao Zedong’s belief that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” So it will not consider international adjudication to resolve its territorial claims in, say, the South China Sea, more than 80 percent of which it now claims arbitrarily.

Indeed, it ratified UNCLOS only to reinterpret its provisions and unveil a nine-dashed claim line in the South China Sea and draw enclosing baselines around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Worse still, China has refused to accept the UNCLOS dispute-settlement mechanism in order to remain unfettered in altering facts on the ground.

The Philippines, which has lost effective control to a creeping China of first the Scarborough Shoal and then the Second Thomas Shoal since 2012, has filed a complaint against Beijing with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). Beijing, however, has simply refused to participate in the proceedings, as if it were above international law.

Whatever the tribunal’s decision, Beijing will simply shrug it off. Only the Security Council can enforce any international tribunal’s judgment on a noncompliant state. But China wields a veto there and will block enforcement of an adverse ruling, just as the U.S. did in the Nicaraguan case.

Even so, Beijing has mounted punitive pressures on Manila to withdraw its case, which seeks to invalidate China’s nine-dashed line. Beijing’s precondition that the Philippines abandon its case forced President Benigno Aquino to cancel his visit to the China-ASEAN Expo in Nanning three months ago.

Beijing’s new air-defense zone, while aimed at solidifying its claims to territories held by Japan and South Korea, is provocative because it extends to areas China does not control, setting a dangerous precedent in international relations. China and Japan, and China and South Korea, now have “dueling” ADIZs, increasing the risks of armed conflict, especially between Japan and China, in an atmosphere of nationalist grandstanding over conflicting claims.

Japan has asked its airlines to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights even if they are merely transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese territorial airspace. By contrast, the Obama administration has advised U.S. carriers to obey the prior-notification demand.

There is a reason why Washington has taken a different stance on this issue than its ally Japan: Although the prior-notification rule in American policy applies only to aircraft headed for U.S. national airspace, the U.S., in actual practice, demands advance notification of all civilian and military flights through its ADIZ, regardless of their intended destination.

If other countries emulated the example set by China and the U.S. to establish unilateral claims to international airspace, a dangerous situation would result. Before every country asserts the right to establish an ADIZ with its own standards, binding multilateral rules must be created to ensure the safety of the fast-growing commercial air traffic. But who will take the lead in this direction — the two countries that have pursued a unilateralist approach on this issue?

Now consider the case of the Indian diplomat, whose treatment India’s national security adviser called “despicable and barbaric.” The 39-year-old diplomat was arrested and handcuffed as she dropped off her daughter at a Manhattan school, then stripped and cavity-searched and kept in a cell with drug addicts and prostitutes for several hours before posting $250,000 bail.

True, this consular official enjoyed only limited diplomatic immunity under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR), unlike embassy-based diplomats who have broad protection under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR). But the VCCR guarantees freedom from detention until trial and conviction, except for “grave offenses.”

Can a wage dispute between a diplomat and her nanny qualify as a “grave offense” warranting arrest and humiliation? The U.S. would not have dared to arrest a Chinese or Russian diplomat for a similar offense. In fact, just days earlier on Dec. 5, when New York prosecutors charged 49 past or present Russian diplomats and their spouses for an alleged $1.5 million Medicaid fraud, no one was arrested, let alone strip-searched and handcuffed, although some of the defendants still worked in New York at the Russian Consulate and the Russian Mission to the United Nations.

The U.S. had no legal grounds to arrest the Indian diplomat because the alleged offense — violating an agreement on the wages of a single employee — cannot pass the “grave” test. The issue was not immunity but inviolability (from arrest, strip-search, and handcuffing) as guaranteed by the VCCR. Instead of treating her as a criminal, why didn’t the U.S. simply ask India to withdraw her? Would the U.S. tolerate similar treatment of one of its consular officers?

The harsh truth is that the U.S. interprets the VCCR restrictively at home but liberally overseas so as to shield even the spies and contractors it sends. A classic case involved the CIA contractor Raymond Davis — supposedly an “adviser” at the American consulate in Lahore, Pakistan — who fatally shot two men in 2011 on a Lahore street. Claiming that Davis was a bona fide diplomat who enjoyed immunity from prosecution, Washington accused Pakistan of “illegally detaining” him, with Obama defending him as “our diplomat.”

The U.S. included the name of Davis on the list of its diplomats serving in Pakistan only after he committed the double murder, according to Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s then ambassador to the U.S. The U.S. ultimately secured his release by paying “blood money” of about $2.4 million to the relatives of the men he killed.

When the U.S. invokes immunity for one of its diplomats, it is never for a trifling offense, such as underpayment to a nanny. In a case last July, the U.S. spirited out a diplomat from Kenya barely 24 hours after he rammed his speeding SUV into a full minibus, killing one and wounding eight others.

China, for its part, has not ratified even the U.N. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It persists with gross human-rights abuses.

Despite a widely held belief that the present international system is pivoted on rules, the fact is that major powers are rule makers and rule imposers, not rule takers. They have a propensity to violate or manipulate international law when it is in their interest to do so.

Given the innately self-calculating and self-aggrandizing human nature, nations — like individuals — have all through history sought to gain dominance over the weaker ones. The advent of new technologies and reduced transportation costs has made the world increasingly interdependent in trade and capital flows, with the interdependencies extending to technological, public-health, environmental, and climate spheres. Globalization, in turn, has spurred new international treaties and rules.

Yet the more the world has changed, the more it has remained the same in one basic aspect — the stronger still dominate the weaker.

While the weak remain meek, strength respects strength. The U.S. and China are careful not to tread on each other’s toes. Neither is willing to challenge the other directly.

China’s assertiveness has been largely directed at its neighbors. It did not veto the U.N. Security Council resolution on Libya that NATO used as a cover to oust the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. The U.S., for its part, has not only refused to take sides in the sovereignty disputes between China and its neighbors, but also failed to honor its Mutual Defense Treaty obligations with the Philippines despite China’s effective seizure of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal. Indeed, Washington has looked the other way as Beijing — in defiance of the guidelines of the U.S.-led Nuclear Suppliers Group (of which China is a member) — launched work on two new nuclear-power reactors in Pakistan in November 2013, in addition to the two reactors already in advanced stage of construction.

Universal conformity to a rules-based international order thus is still not on the horizon. Indeed, the real issue is as to who will guard the supposed guardians of the international system.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist. You can follow him on Twitter: @Chellaney.

China’s game of chicken

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times

China’s Nov. 23 declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) extending to territories it does not control is just the latest example of its jurisdictional creep that reflects a larger strategy to supplant the United States as the preeminent power in Asia. Yet U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has responded to China’s aggression with words of cautious criticism but no castigatory step, not even delaying Vice President Joe Biden’s Beijing visit. China gave no ground to Biden during his Dec. 4-5 visit.

Washington has not explicitly called on China to roll back the ADIZ. Indeed, with its advisory to U.S. airlines to respect China’s new ADIZ, it has opened a rift with ally Japan at a time when the imperative is for presenting a united front against an escalatory action that even Biden admits is “a unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea,” causing “significant apprehension in the region.”

Japan has asked its carriers to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights even if they are merely transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese airspace. This demand, unusual by international ADIZ standards, impinges on the principle of freedom of navigation of the skies.

Washington is signaling that if Beijing backed away from this unusual demand and set up a military hotline with Tokyo to forestall an accidental military flare-up, it may be willing to live with the Chinese ADIZ — a position certain to displease Japan.

Let’s be clear: At stake in the East China Sea are not just some flyspeck islands but regional power balance, a rules-based order, freedom of navigation of the skies and seas, and access to maritime resources, including seabed minerals. If China gets its way, the path to a Sino-centric Asia would open.

As China accumulates economic and military power, it has increasingly taken to flexing its muscles, ratcheting up territorial disputes with multiple neighbors and seeking to alter the status quo in Asia through surprise actions. This is alienating it from its neighbors and further calling into question its “peaceful rise” claim.

The ADIZ establishment was cleverly timed to coincide with the unveiling of the interim Iran nuclear deal in Geneva so as to take advantage of the U.S. and international distraction. Shrewdly timing an action and achieving a major tactical surprise against an opponent are key elements in China’s strategic doctrine.

China’s latest action is a reminder that Obama must turn his attention from the preoccupations of the Middle East to the potentially combustible situation in East Asia. To make the promise of his Asian “pivot” real, he must be willing to assert U.S. leadership in order to help tame China’s belligerence and reassure allies.

Sending two unarmed B-52 bombers on “routine” runs through the Chinese ADIZ was tokenism that cannot obscure the need for crafting a credible response. Unfortunately, Obama seems more interesting in balancing America’s relationships in Asia than in checkmating an aggressive China.

Obama’s Asia policy seeks to reap the benefits of building closer engagement with Asian states — including China, now central to U.S. economic and strategic interests — while charting a course of neutrality on sovereignty disputes. This delicate balancing act, however, implies strategic and moral equivalence, even though the coercion and aggression is largely by China against states that are America’s allies or strategic partners.

For example, in the current geopolitical crisis, Washington is urging restraint also on Japan’s part, lest any escalation force the U.S. to take sides, undermining its policy to manage China’s rise without trying to contain it. Washington is seeking to manage Sino-Japanese tensions, too, by urging both sides to tamp down their nationalistic rhetoric and reduce the risk of escalation or miscalculation through crisis-management and confidence-building measures. This is the message Biden took to Tokyo and Beijing.

Yet the focus on the dual management of China’s rise and Sino-Japanese tensions obfuscates the broader test of power in the Asia-Pacific that Chinese actions represent. It also obscures the then U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ January 2011 warning that China’s long-term goal is to push the United States and its military assets farther out in the Pacific.

In this light, the Obama administration’s stance not to challenge China directly only aids its creeping aggression in Asia.

China is nibbling at territories held by several neighbors, as highlighted by growing Chinese incursions across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India, its success in outwitting the Philippines to gain effective control of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal, and its aggressive moves against Vietnam over their unsettled maritime boundary.

Its self-declared ADIZ in the East China Sea even covers the sky over the South Korean-held Leodo Isle (“Suyan Rock” to Beijing), prompting Seoul to expand its own air-defense zone.

China’s ADIZ, while aimed at solidifying its claims to territories held by Japan and South Korea, increases regional tensions and the risks of Sino-Japanese conflict.

Compelling aircraft transiting the zone to accept the new Chinese rules won’t be easy for Beijing, given China’s limited early warning radar and in-flight refueling capabilities and the refusal of some neighboring states, especially Japan, to fall in line. As part of its step-by-step strategy, however, Beijing has no intention to enforce the zone immediately.

Efforts at enforcement will come later when circumstances are more favorable. Right now, the priority of China’s leaders is to prevail in the dangerous game of chicken that they have started.

If China is able to ride out international criticism while holding its ground, it will be emboldened to set up — as Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera has warned — a similarly expansive air-defense zone in the South China Sea, more than 80 percent of which it now formally claims. A Chinese government spokesman said Nov. 27, according to Xinhua, that “China will set up other ADIZs in due time after completing relevant preparations.”

That is why it is important for the U.S. to draw the line now over China’s territorial creep. Otherwise, China — in the absence of any geopolitical blowback — will continue to subvert the status quo in the East and South China Seas, along its border with India, and even on the cross-border flows of Asia’s major rivers, which originate in the Chinese-annexed Tibetan plateau.

Without a concerted U.S.-led effort to push back against China’s aggression in the East China Sea, it won’t be long before another Chinese encroachment occurs.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.

Draw the line now on China’s encroachment

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BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Special to The Globe and Mail, December 05, 2013

China’s declaration of a so-called air defence identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, extending to territories it does not control, is just the latest example of a jurisdictional creep that reflects a larger Chinese strategy to supplant the United States as the pre-eminent power in Asia. Yet U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has responded with words of cautious criticism but no castigatory step, not even delaying Vice-President Joe Biden’s visit to Beijing.

Worse still, with its advisory to U.S. airlines to respect the zone, Washington has opened a rift with ally Japan at a time when the imperative is for presenting a united front against an escalatory act that even Mr. Biden admits is “a unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea.” Japan has asked its carriers to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights even when they are transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese airspace. This demand, unusual by international ADIZ standards, impinges on the principle of freedom of navigation of the skies.

Let’s be clear: At stake are not just some flyspeck islands but regional power balance, a rules-based order, freedom of navigation, and access to maritime resources, including seabed minerals. If China gets its way, it will unlock the path to a Sino-centric Asia.

As China accumulates economic and military power, it has increasingly taken to ratcheting up territorial disputes with multiple neighbours. It’s seeking to alter the territorial and maritime status quo.

The ADIZ establishment was cleverly timed to coincide with the unveiling of the interim Iran nuclear deal in Geneva. Shrewdly timing an action and achieving major tactical surprise against an adversary are key elements in China’s strategic doctrine.

It is a reminder that Mr. Obama must turn his attention from the Middle East to the potentially combustible situation in East Asia. To make the promise of his Asian “pivot” real, the President must be willing to assert U.S. leadership in order to help tame China’s belligerence and reassure allies.

Sending two unarmed B-52 bombers on routine runs through the Chinese ADIZ was tokenism that cannot obscure the need for crafting a credible U.S. response. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems more interesting in balancing America’s relationships in Asia than in checkmating an aggressive China.

Mr. Obama’s Asia policy seeks to reap the benefits of building closer engagement with Asian states – including China, now central to U.S. economic and strategic interests – while charting a course of neutrality on sovereignty disputes. This delicate balancing act, however, implies strategic and moral equivalence, even though the coercion and aggression is largely by China against states that are U.S. allies or strategic partners.

For example, in the ADIZ crisis, Washington is also urging restraint on Japan’s part, lest any escalation force the U.S. to take sides. Washington is seeking to manage Sino-Japanese tensions by urging both sides to tamp down their nationalistic rhetoric and reduce the risk of escalation or miscalculation through crisis-management and confidence-building measures. This is the message Mr. Biden took to Tokyo and Beijing.

Yet the focus on the dual management of China’s rise and Sino-Japanese tensions obfuscates the broader test of power the Chinese actions represent. It also obscures then U.S. defence secretary Robert Gates’s 2011 warning that China’s long-term goal is to push the United States and its military assets farther out in the Pacific.

In this light, the U.S. position of not challenging China directly only emboldens creeping aggression.

China is nibbling at territories held by several neighbours, as highlighted by its growing incursions across the disputed Himalayan border with India, its success in outwitting the Philippines to gain effective control of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal, and its aggressive moves against Vietnam over their unsettled maritime boundary. Its self-declared ADIZ even covers the sky over the South Korean-held Leodo Isle, which Beijing calls the Suyan Rock.

China’s zone, while aimed at solidifying its claims to territories held by Japan and South Korea, increases the risks of Sino-Japanese conflict arising from miscalculation or accident. Compelling aircraft to accept the new Chinese rules won’t be easy for Beijing, given China’s limited early-warning radar and in-flight refuelling capabilities and the refusal of some neighbouring states, especially Japan, to fall in line.

As part of its step-by-step strategy, however, Beijing has no intention of enforcing the zone immediately. Enforcement will come later, when circumstances are more favourable. Right now, the priority of China’s leaders is to prevail in their game of chicken.

If China is able to ride out international criticism while holding its ground, it will be emboldened to set up a similar zone in the South China Sea, more than 80 per cent of which it now formally claims. According to Xinhua, a government spokesman “said China will set up other ADIZs in due time after completing relevant preparations.”

That is why it is important for the United States to draw the line now. Without a concerted effort to push back against aggression, it won’t be long before another encroachment.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author, most recently, of Water, Peace, and War.

(c) Globe & Mail, 2013.