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CHINA’S COST-FREE GULAG FOR MUSLIMS

FEATURED

Posted on September 14, 2022 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

Guard towers stand on the perimeter wall of the Urumqi No. 3 Detention Center in
Dabancheng in western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on April 23,
2021. China’s discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other Muslims in the
western region of Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity, the U.N.
human rights office said in a long-awaited report released on Aug. 31, 2022. (AP
Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

China’s prolonged detention of more than 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang
represents the largest mass incarceration of people on religious
grounds since the Nazi era. Yet, disturbingly, China has incurred no
international costs.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, the brain behind the scheme, and his inner circle
have faced no consequences for sustaining the Muslim gulag since at least March
2017. Despite two successive U.S. administrations describing the unparalleled
repression in Xinjiang as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” Western
actions against China have largely been symbolic.

The just-released report on Xinjiang by the United Nations’ human rights office
cites serious human-rights violations there and recommends that Beijing take
“prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty”
in that sprawling ethnic-minority homeland.

Yet this report, paradoxically, is a fresh reminder that China has escaped
scot-free, with little prospect that it will be held to account for its mass
internment of Muslim minorities, including expanding detention sites in Xinjiang
since 2019. The Xinjiang repression also includes forced sterilization and
abortion, torture of detainees, slave labor and draconian curbs on freedom of
religion and movement.

The report’s release came after nearly a yearlong delay and just minutes before
the four-year term of Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human
rights, ended. U.N. investigators had compiled the Xinjiang report almost a year
ago, but Bachelet kept stalling its release, despite growing pressure from
Western countries.

In May, after lengthy discussions with Beijing on arrangements, Bachelet
undertook a controversial official visit to China, the first by a U.N. high
commissioner for human rights since 2005. During her tenure, Bachelet – a former
Chilean president and political detainee under dictator Augusto Pinochet –
stayed mum on the Chinese repression in Xinjiang (and Tibet). She said nothing
on the crackdown in Xinjiang even when she briefly visited that region during
her restrictive China tour, which glossed over abuses by Xi’s regime.

Bachelet had earlier acknowledged that she was under “tremendous pressure” over
the report, with China asking her to bury it. The eventual release of the
report, minutes before Bachelet’s retirement at midnight on Aug. 31, indicated
that she did not want her successor or temporary replacement to take credit for
publishing it. Failing to release the report would have left a glaring black
mark on her tenure.

Days before her retirement, Bachelet sent a copy of the report to Beijing
because, as she explained in a Sept. 1 statement, she “wanted to take the
greatest care to deal with the responses and inputs received from the (Chinese)
government last week.” In response to the 48-page U.N. assessment, China wrote a
131-page rebuttal, with its foreign ministry calling the report a “farce.”

China has been emboldened by the international community’s indifference and
indulgence. It successfully hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics, probably the most
divisive games since the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, which helped strengthen
the hands of Germany’s Adolf Hitler.

Underscoring China’s growing economic power and geopolitical clout, even Muslim
countries, by and large, have remained shockingly silent on the Xinjiang
repression. As if that weren’t bad enough, the 57-nation Organization of Islamic
Cooperation in March honored Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi as a speaker at
its foreign ministers’ forum in Pakistan.

Xi’s Muslim gulag has made a mockery of the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which
China acceded in 1983 (with the rider that it does not consider itself bound by
Article IX, the clause allowing any party in a dispute to lodge a complaint with
the International Court of Justice). The Genocide Convention requires its
parties, which include the United States, to “prevent and punish” acts of
genocide.

Chinese authorities have subjected Uyghur and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang,
including ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, to Orwellian levels of surveillance and
control over many details of life. As Secretary of Commerce Gina M.
Raimondo warned, China is weaponizing biotechnology to “pursue control over its
people and its repression of members of ethnic and religious minority groups.”

The Xinjiang repression is aimed at indoctrinating not just political dissidents
and religious zealots but entire Muslim communities by imposing large-scale
deprogramming of Islamic identities. A gulag archipelago of 380 internment
camps (or “reeducation hospitals,” as Beijing calls them) has become integral to
this larger assault on Islam.

It is against this background that the carefully worded U.N. report warns that,
“The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and
other predominantly Muslim groups … and deprivation more generally of
fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute
international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” The report cited
“patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or
punishment” in the detention centers, including “credible” allegations of sexual
violence.

The U.N. report may carry the imprimatur of the world’s only truly universal
organization and its member states, yet China was quick to pour scorn on it.
Just as it rubbished a 2016 international arbitral tribunal ruling that
invalidated its territorial claims in the South China Sea, China ridiculed the
U.N. report, calling it a pack of “disinformation and lies.”Could long COVID
finally make us take chronic pain seriously?It’s crucial to reintegrate Taiwan
into the ICAO

The 1945-46 Nuremberg Military Tribunal, set up after Germany’s surrender in
World War II, prosecuted those involved in crimes against humanity, the same
crimes now being perpetrated in Xinjiang. Yet, with China a rising power, there
seems little prospect that Chinese officials behind the Muslim gulag will face
similar justice.

Indeed, just as China responded to the tribunal’s ruling by accelerating its
expansionism in the South China Sea, including militarizing the region, it could
step up its repression in Xinjiang until it manages to fully Sinicize and tame
Muslim groups.

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

Posted in International Security

INDIA HAS A STAKE IN TAIWAN’S DEFENSE

FEATURED

Posted on August 27, 2022 by Chellaney

Chinese territorial claims in Himalayas are much bigger than the island

Indian military trucks move toward forward areas in Ladakh in September 2020:
New Delhi is helping Taiwan’s defense by tying down a complete Chinese theater
force. © Reuters

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Chinese military drills are rarely empty shows of force.

In 2020, China’s unusually large winter exercises on the Tibetan Plateau became
the launchpad for stealthy land grabs in the northernmost Indian territory of
Ladakh. This triggered a military standoff between the two Asian giants at
multiple sites across a long and inhospitable stretch of the Himalayas, leading
to deadly clashes and China’s first combat casualties since its 1979 invasion of
Vietnam.

This month’s live-fire military drills around Taiwan, which effectively
simulated an air and sea blockade, demonstrated China’s combat capability to
accomplish President Xi Jinping’s “historic mission” of absorbing the island
democracy.

The drills allowed Chinese troops to practice enforcing a quarantine around
Taiwan that would result in its gradual economic strangulation, suggesting Xi
may prefer a strategy of calibrated squeeze to force the island to unify with
China.

In a reminder that any Chinese operation to cut off access to Taiwan would
likely intrude into Japanese airspace and perhaps pull Tokyo into a war over the
island, five Chinese missiles sent over Taiwan during the drills landed in
Japan’s exclusive economic zone. Taiwan, Imperial Japan’s first colony, is,
after all, geographically an extension of the Japanese archipelago.

Could Chinese aggression against Taiwan also embroil India? It is important to
remember that Chinese and Indian forces have remained on a war footing along the
vast glaciated heights of the Himalayas for more than two years now, with tens
of thousands of troops on each side facing off in the biggest military buildup
ever in this area.

Given Xi’s efforts to regularize and intensify coercive pressure on Taiwan,
joint U.S.-India military exercises planned for October in an area at an
altitude above 3,000 meters in the Himalayas have assumed greater significance.

As if to signal that Beijing could potentially face a second front if it were to
move against Taiwan, the latest edition of the annual U.S.-India high-altitude,
cold-climate drills is being held barely 100 kilometers from the Chinese
frontier, closer than ever before.

Taiwan, a technological powerhouse with the world’s 22nd-largest economy by
gross domestic product, plays an important, if indirect, role in Asian security:
its autonomous existence ties up a sizable portion of China’s armed forces.

India likewise is helping Taiwan’s defense by tying down a complete Chinese
theater force, which could otherwise be employed against the island.

Given the looming specter of a sharp uptick in Chinese aggression, deterring an
attack on Taiwan has become more pressing than ever. Philip Davidson, testifying
to Congress last year when he was leading the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said he
believed a Chinese invasion could be launched by 2027.

U.S. intelligence now reportedly believes that Xi could move against Taiwan much
earlier, specifically within the two-year window between the Chinese Communist
Party congress due to take place in the next couple months and the 2024 U.S.
presidential election.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan to a terrorist militia a
year ago and his growing involvement in the Ukraine war after failing to deter a
Russian invasion of that country have left Washington in a weakened position.
Xi’s designs on Taiwan have been further encouraged by the failure of Western
sanctions to force Russia to retreat from Ukraine.

The fall of Taiwan to Beijing 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 that
encloses its coastal seas from the Japanese archipelago southward.

But the largest Asian territory Beijing covets is the northeastern Indian state
of Arunachal Pradesh, which is almost three times as large as Taiwan. Beijing’s
maps already show it as part of China.

After Beijing began giving its own names to places inside Arunachal Pradesh last
year, the staid foreign ministry in New Delhi hit back with uncharacteristic
firmness, calling it “a ridiculous exercise to support untenable territorial
claims.”

Against the background of China’s designs on Arunachal Pradesh and perhaps even
Okinawa, it is imperative that India and Japan step up consultations with each
other, as well as with Taipei and Washington, on how they could contribute to
shoring up Taiwan’s defenses and deterring a Chinese attack.

While India would not get directly involved in defending Taiwan, it could
potentially play a useful role in activating another front against China in the
event of a Taiwan Strait crisis, but only in close collaboration with the U.S.

India holds more annual military exercises with the U.S., its largest trading
partner and an increasingly important strategic partner, than with any other
country. But Biden has still not uttered a single word about the last 28 months
of Himalayan border aggression by China. Nor has the Biden administration shown
urgency in fortifying Taiwan’s defenses.

To be sure, America’s role is central to Taiwan’s autonomous future. A U.S. that
fails to prevent Taiwan’s subjugation would be widely seen as unable or
unwilling to defend any other ally.

The status quo on Taiwan is more likely to be preserved if the U.S. coordinates
its island-related defense plans with Japan, India and Australia, including how
to respond to potential Chinese moves to restrict access to Taiwan, whether
physically or digitally. The only thing that can deter China from aggression
against Taiwan is the expectation that it would incur high concrete costs.

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

THE AFGHAN ABYSS

FEATURED

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Chellaney

The Taliban regime is behaving as expected, turning the country into a breeding
ground for international terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and mass migration.
There is no justification for attempts by US President Joe Biden’s
administration to engage with it.

By Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

In the year since the United States’ disgraceful abandonment of Afghanistan to
the Taliban, the country has gone down precisely the path any logical observer
would have predicted: a medieval, jihadist, terrorist-sheltering emirate has
been established. The US will incur costs for betraying its Afghan allies for a
long time to come. But nobody will pay a higher price than Afghans.

The geopolitical fallout of America’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan –
after President Joe Biden followed through on the withdrawal commitment of his
predecessor, Donald Trump – is still growing. By exposing the US as a power in
decline, the withdrawal gave a huge boost to militant Islamists everywhere,
while emboldening Russia and China. It is no coincidence that, not long after
the fall of Kabul, Russia began massing forces along Ukraine’s borders, and
China sent a record number of warplanes into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense
identification zone.

But things are much worse in Afghanistan. Women and girls have lost their
rights to employment and education, with many girls subjected to sexual slavery
through forced marriages to Taliban fighters. Taliban death squads have been
systematically identifying and murdering those who cooperated with US forces.
Torture and execution have become commonplace. Afghanistan’s Hindus and Sikhs –
descendants of those who withstood the medieval-era conversions to Sunni Islam
by the country’s Arab conquerors – have been fleeing to India to avoid
slaughter.

The regime’s cabinet is a veritable who’s who of international terrorists
and narcotics kingpins. Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is responsible for Afghanistan’s
internal security and preventing the country from becoming a safe haven for
international terrorists, is the leader of the ruthless Haqqani network. The US
has designated him a “global terrorist” and placed a $10 million bounty on his
head.

Not surprisingly, the Taliban continues to shelter known terrorists, as the
recent Biden-ordered assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in
central Kabul showed. While Biden was quick to take a victory lap after
al-Zawahiri’s killing, the assassination hardly reflects well on him. A year
ago, when ordering US troops to beat a hasty retreat, he claimed that the US no
longer had any interest in Afghanistan, because al-Qaeda was already “gone.” (No
matter that, just weeks earlier, a United Nations Security Council report had
shown that al-Qaeda militants were fighting alongside their Taliban associates.)

Compounding the danger to Afghanistan and its neighbors, the US left behind $7.1
billion worth of weapons in its chaotic withdrawal from the country. According
to a recent Pentagon report, the US has no plans to retrieve or destroy the
equipment, despite recognizing that the Taliban has already “repaired some
damaged Afghan Air Force aircraft and made incremental gains in its capability
to employ these aircraft in operations.”

In short, Biden’s decision to overrule his generals and withdraw from
Afghanistan – a month before his own target date of September 11 – has created a
security and humanitarian nightmare. And Biden is nowhere near finished making
foreign-policy blunders in Afghanistan.

After Kabul’s fall, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the US
would judge its future engagement with the Taliban-led government based on “one
simple proposition”: whether it helps the US advance its interests, including
“seeing that women’s rights are upheld,” delivering humanitarian assistance, and
pursuing counterterrorism. But even though the Taliban has failed on all three
counts, the Biden administration is gradually easing sanctions on the regime.

At the UN, the US spearheaded a resolution providing for a humanitarian
exemption to the sanctions imposed on Afghanistan. The US Treasury Department’s
General Licenses, aimed at facilitating the provision of humanitarian relief,
now allow financial transactions involving the Taliban and the Haqqani network.
And the US is currently negotiating with the Taliban over the release of $3.5
billion of Afghan central-bank reserves.

Meanwhile, the US refuses to target Haqqani or other leading terrorists in
Kabul. Yes, al-Zawahiri was assassinated, but, contrary to the Biden
administration’s narrative, he was not all that influential. He was largely
retired, living with members of his extended family in a Kabul house under
Haqqani’s protection.

What’s next? Will the US now reward Pakistan – one of America’s 18 “major
non-NATO allies” – for opening its airspace to the drone that killed
al-Zawahiri? True, Pakistan reared the Taliban and engineered the US defeat in
Afghanistan, but now it wants an early International Monetary Fund loan
dispersal to help it avert a debt default.

Likewise, will the US now continue to pursue the release of Afghanistan’s
central-bank reserves to the Taliban, despite its indisputable harboring of
terrorists and establishment of an oppressive and violent Islamic state? The
Biden administration defends its engagement with the Taliban by
speciously contending that the top terrorist threat in Afghanistan is the
Islamic State-Khorasan. But ISIS-K has relatively few members, no state sponsor
or Afghan allies, and controls no territory.

The Biden administration seems committed to striking a kind of Faustian bargain
with the Taliban. But to what end? The Taliban’s political power and Islamist
ideology make it a critical link in the international jihadist movement. And its
rule is threatening to turn Afghanistan into a breeding ground for international
terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and mass migration. There is no justification
for engaging with it.

Through its precipitous and bungling withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden
administration handed Islamists worldwide their greatest victory. But the war in
Afghanistan is hardly over. As the Taliban’s self-styled emir, Mullah
Haibatullah Akhundzada, recently declared, “This war never ends, and it will
continue till judgment day.”

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 Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New
Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

Posted in International Security, Terrorism

WILL US-CHINA TENSIONS BOIL OVER?

FEATURED

Posted on August 11, 2022 by Chellaney

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, PROJECT SYNDICATE

China’s strategy has been to advance its foreign-policy objectives largely
through bluff, bluster, and bullying. Without sparking direct armed conflict,
China’s leaders have sought to intimidate and coerce neighboring countries into
yielding to their demands.

In contrast to Russia’s frontal assaults on Ukraine, China’s expansionism in
Asia – from the South China Sea to the Himalayas – has been pursued
incrementally. For example, China’s ongoing military standoff with India along
the two countries’ disputed Himalayan border was triggered by its stealthy land
grabs in Indian Ladakh in April 2020.

The last thing China wants is to get into an armed conflict with the United
States, a superior military power, because this would expose chinks in its
armor.

By going to Taipei recently, US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called China’s
bluff. But her visit also served as a pretext for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
regime to step up coercive pressure on Taiwan by carrying out provocative
military drills in a dress rehearsal for a blockade. Long before Pelosi
considered visiting Taipei, China had been ramping up its campaign of
intimidation, with its warplanes regularly crossing the median line in the
Taiwan Strait.

Xi’s increasing troubles at home, including economic growth slowing almost to a
halt, amplify the risk that he will resort to nationalist brinkmanship as a
distraction. The odds are increasing that he will move against Taiwan in
the two-year period between securing a norm-breaking third term as Communist
Party chairman this November and the 2024 US presidential election.

But, rather than order a full-scale invasion, Xi is more likely to throttle
Taiwan slowly. That will leave US President Joe Biden with difficult choices,
with inaction likely to prove fatal for the island. A Taiwan fiasco on Biden’s
watch, after his Afghanistan debacle and failure to deter Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, would gravely undermine America’s global power.

Posted in International Security

WILL TAIWAN BE THE NEXT UKRAINE ON BIDEN’S WATCH?

FEATURED

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

President Biden has still to grasp that Taiwan is far more important than
Ukraine to the future of American power in the world. Yet the likelihood
is growing that, on Biden’s watch, Chinese President Xi Jinping would move on
Taiwan, just as Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

In a forewarning of that, China has recently started claiming that it owns the
critical international waterway, the Taiwan Strait. Just as it did earlier in
the South China Sea — the strategic corridor between the Pacific and Indian
Oceans, through which one-third of global maritime trade passes — Xi’s regime is
seeking to advance its expansionism by laying an expansive claim to the Taiwan
Strait, which, by connecting the South and East China Seas, serves as an
important passage for commercial shipping as well as foreign naval vessels.

The new claim signals that Xi is preparing to move on Taiwan at an opportune
time — an action that would involve exercising maritime domain control.

By forcibly absorbing Taiwan, China would drive the final nail in the coffin of
America’s global preeminence. A takeover of Taiwan would also give China a
prized strategic and economic asset.

The defense of Taiwan has assumed greater significance for international
security because three successive U.S. administrations have failed to credibly
push back against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, relying instead
on rhetoric or symbolic actions.

Biden, rather than working to deter and thwart a possible Chinese attack on
Taiwan, is seeking to shield his tentative rapprochement with China, which has
been forged through a series of virtual meetings with Xi and by offering Beijing
important concessions. This explains why Biden publicly pushed back against a
Taiwan visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It is important to remember that, much before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden had
begun to ease pressure on China. He effectively let Xi’s regime off the hook for
both covering up COVID-19’s origins and failing to meet its commitments under
the 2020 “phase one” trade deal with Washington. Biden also dropped fraud
charges against the daughter of the founder of the military-linked Chinese tech
giant Huawei. U.S. sanctions over China’s Muslim gulag remain essentially
symbolic.

And now Biden is planning to roll back tariffs on Chinese goods, which will
further fuel China’s spiraling trade surplus with America. After swelling by
more than 25% last year to $396.6 billion, the trade surplus with the U.S. now
makes up almost three-quarters of China’s total global surplus.

The mammoth surplus is helping to keep the Chinese economy afloat at a time when
growth has slowed almost to a halt, triggering rising unemployment and mortgage
and debt crises. The situation has been made worse by Xi’s lockdown-centered,
zero-tolerance approach to COVID-19, which is breeding anger and resistance amid
a property implosion.

Xi’s growing domestic troubles at a critical time when he is seeking a
norm-breaking third term as Communist Party chairman heighten the risk of the
Chinese leader resorting to nationalist brinkmanship as a distraction. After
all, initiating a foreign intervention or crisis to divert attention from
domestic challenges is a tried-and-true technique of leaders of major powers.

In his latest virtual meeting with Biden on July 28, Xi sharply warned against
U.S. interference in the Taiwan issue, saying that those who “play with fire
will perish by it.” Biden, by contrast, struck a defensive tone, reaffirming the
U.S. commitment to a one-China policy and reassuring Xi that American “policy
has not changed and that the United States strongly opposes anyone who will
change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan
Strait.”

Having swallowed Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party seems itching to move on
Taiwan, a technological powerhouse that plays a central role in the
international semiconductor business. Annexing Taiwan will make China a more
formidable rival to America and advance its goal of achieving global preeminence
by the 100th anniversary of communist rule in 2049.

Against this background, Biden’s conciliatory approach toward China threatens to
embolden Xi’s designs against Taiwan.

Taiwan’s imperative is to expand its global footprint in order to help safeguard
its autonomous status. Instead of aiding that effort, Biden inexplicably
excluded that island democracy from his recently unveiled Indo-Pacific Economic
Framework — an economic platform that seeks to promote cooperation among its
member-states.

Biden’s pursuit of a rapprochement with China also explains his administration’s
proposal to roll back tariffs on Chinese products, an action that would break
his promise not to unilaterally lift tariffs unless Beijing’s behavior improved.

Not once, not twice, but at least three times Biden has said in recent months
that he is willing to get militarily involved to defend Taiwan, only to have his
senior officials walk back his comments on every occasion. The last time when he
sowed international confusion afresh, Biden himself walked back his Taiwan
comments, telling reporters a day later, “My policy has not changed at all.”

In seeking to placate China, Biden is sending out contradictory signals, leaving
Taiwan vexed and confused.

Instead of privately advising Pelosi against visiting Taiwan, Biden gratuitously
told a reporter that “the military” thinks a Pelosi visit to Taiwan is “not a
good idea right now.” Pelosi then told the media, “I think what the president is
saying is that maybe the military was afraid our plane would get shot down or
something like that by the Chinese.”

The president’s unusual remark conveyed American weakness by implying that the
U.S. military was not capable of securing the flight path of the Pelosi-carrying
military aircraft to Taiwan or effectively responding to any Chinese
provocation. The comment also encouraged Xi’s regime to escalate its bullying
threats to stymie a Taiwan visit by the person second in line to the U.S.
presidency.

More fundamentally, if Biden fears a Pelosi visit to Taipei would set back his
nascent rapprochement with China and ignite new tensions, it raises serious
doubts whether he will have the political will to help defeat a Chinese attack
on Taiwan.

Xi is also likely encouraged by Biden’s failure to force Russian forces to
retreat from Ukraine, despite Washington spearheading unprecedented Western
actions against Russia, including weaponizing finance, slapping wide-ranging
sanctions and arming Ukraine with a plethora of sophisticated weapons.

With Biden’s poll numbers already in the tank, the president is likely to emerge
further weakened from the approaching midterm election. By contrast, a
strengthened Xi securing a precedent-defying third term is likely to be bolder
and more assertive in pursuing his geopolitical ambitions.

Instead of ordering a full-scale invasion, Xi may begin to slowly throttle
Taiwan so as to force it to merge with China. A strangulation strategy would
likely include blockading the Taiwan Strait (which will close off Taiwan’s main
port, Kaohsiung) and seeking to cut off Taiwan’s undersea cables, internet
connections and energy imports.

Make no mistake: Xi perceives an advantageous window of opportunity to
accomplish what he has called a “historic mission” to incorporate Taiwan. And,
in the style recommended by ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, Xi’s
aggression will likely begin with stealth, deception, surprise and innovative
methods.

For Xi, taking Taiwan is essential to achieving larger strategic goals,
including making China a world power second to none by displacing America from
regional and global order.

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

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

UKRAINE WAR HASTENS SRI LANKA’S ECONOMIC MELTDOWN

FEATURED

Posted on July 17, 2022 by Chellaney

Internal factors alone cannot explain Sri Lanka’s economic collapse. In a
forewarning of wider international instability, Sri Lanka slid from a serious
balance-of-payments crisis to bankruptcy due to the spiraling global fuel and
food prices triggered by the Western sanctions against Russia.

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Auto rickshaw drivers line up to buy gas near a fuel station in Colombo on April
13: A forewarning that more vulnerable countries could go bust. © AP

Sri Lanka’s economic collapse exemplifies how poorer countries are paying the
price of Western sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.

Instead of focusing on how the sanctions are fueling a global energy and food
crisis, much of the international attention is on the new Cold War between the
West and Moscow. Unable to pay for basic imports and crippled by domestic
shortages of fuel, food and medicine, Sri Lanka is facing its worst financial
crisis since independence in 1948.

After hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Colombo over the weekend,
and the risk of violent unrest intensified, Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya
Rajapaksa and interim Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe separately announced
they were stepping down. Gotabaya, however, fled the country on a military jet
without handing in his resignation.

Rooted in fiscal imbalances, external debt and government mismanagement, Sri
Lanka’s economic crisis predates the Western imposition of unparalleled
sanctions on Russia over its attack on Ukraine.

But, thanks to spiraling international fuel and food prices in recent months,
Sri Lanka has slid from a serious balance-of-payments crisis to bankruptcy, with
Wickremesinghe declaring that the national economy had “completely collapsed.”

By taking out a crucial chunk of the global energy supply, the sanctions against
Russia have triggered a surge in inflation in Western nations, which now
confront cost-of-living crises. But in poorer countries, the sanctions are
compounding national debt woes and threatening livelihoods and social stability.

Russia, the world’s largest exporter of oil and gas before the war, has been
critical to stability in international energy markets, while its fertilizer
exports remain vital for global food production, in which energy accounts for up
to 30% of the cost.

Financial sanctions have made it so difficult to make payments to Russia that
supplies of even sanctions-exempt commodities such as fertilizers and wheat — of
which Russia is also the world’s biggest exporter — have been disrupted. Russia,
for its part, has blocked shipments of Ukraine’s leading exports: sunflower oil,
corn and wheat.

It is these unintended consequences that have hastened Sri Lanka’s economic
meltdown. The rapid depletion of foreign exchange reserves has left its citizens
without basic necessities. Rolling electricity outages and queues for fuel that
run for miles have forced authorities to temporarily shut schools and offices.

Sri Lanka’s debt crisis first caught international attention in 2017 when,
unable to repay Chinese loans, the nation handed a strategic port complex at
Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease. Despite slipping into a debt trap, Sri
Lanka went ahead with other grandiose Chinese projects, including a massive
development project across the bay from Colombo on reclaimed land.

Other factors also contributed to making Sri Lanka’s debt unsustainable. A
terrorist bombing spree on Easter Sunday in 2019 that killed nearly 300 people
and led to a near cessation of foreign tourist arrivals, followed by the COVID
pandemic, devastated the resource-poor nation’s revenue stream.

The Rajapaksa family, which has long dominated Sri Lanka’s political landscape
and was instrumental in opening the door to China, racked up debt on a grand
scale by committing to an array of ambitious infrastructure projects, several of
which continue to bleed money. Worse still, drastic tax cuts in 2019 wiped out
about a third of the government’s revenues.

More recently, after violent protests toppled Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s
government in May, his brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, appointed an old
political rival, former Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, to head an interim
government and help rescue the nation from the economic death spiral.

Wickremesinghe, whose private home was set on fire by arsonists on Saturday,
earlier described the national situation as unprecedented. “We’ve had difficult
times [before]… But not like this. I have not seen… people without fuel, without
food.”

Sri Lanka has confronted multiple economic crises in the past — since 1965 the
country has secured 16 International Monetary Fund loans — but its current talks
with the IMF for a bailout package are difficult because, in Wickremesinghe’s
words, “we are participating in the negotiations as a bankrupt country.” An IMF
approval appears months away.

China, now the world’s biggest official creditor, has balked at paring Sri
Lanka’s debt, saying it would set a precedent for other borrowing countries to
demand similar relief. With China’s typical loan contract compelling a borrowing
country to keep confidential even the loan’s existence, Sri Lanka is reeling
under a hidden debt problem, with its actual debt to Beijing perhaps making up
as much as 20% of its total external debt.

To stay afloat in recent months, Sri Lanka has largely relied on help from
India, which has provided over $4 billion in credit lines and other aid. But
Wickremesinghe says Sri Lanka urgently needs more assistance, especially from
India, Japan, the U.S. and China.

Sri Lanka’s economic meltdown, which has forced it to seek Russian oil, wheat
and fertilizers on credit, may be an extreme example of the global fallout from
the U.S.-led sanctions on Moscow.

But violent demonstrations from Latin America to Africa over the dizzying spiral
in fuel and food prices are a forewarning that more vulnerable countries could
go bust. “I think by the end of the year, you could see the impact in other
countries” as well, Wickremesinghe said.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in International Security

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF RAJAPAKSA

FEATURED

Posted on July 12, 2022 by Chellaney

Through a combination of authoritarianism, nepotism, cronyism, and hubris, the
Rajapaksa family weighed down Sri Lanka’s economy with more debt than it could
possibly bear. The country’s next leaders will have to address shortages of
basic necessities, rebuild a wrecked economy, and reestablish the rule of law.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

For much of nearly two decades, the four Rajapaksa brothers and their sons have
run Sri Lanka like a family business – and a disorderly one, at that. With their
grand construction projects and spendthrift ways, they saddled Sri Lanka with
unsustainable debts, driving the country into its worst economic crisis since
independence. Now, the dynasty has fallen.

Mahinda Rajapaksa was instrumental in establishing the Rajapaksa dynasty. After
becoming president in 2005, he ruled with an iron fist for a decade, attacking
civil liberties, expanding presidential powers (including abolishing term
limits), and making bad deal after bad deal with China. Throughout this process,
he kept his family close, with his younger brother Gotabaya holding the defense
portfolio.

But in 2015, Mahinda narrowly lost the presidential election, and the Rajapaksas
were briefly driven from power. During that time, parliament restored the
presidential term limit, ruling out another Mahinda presidency. Yet the family
quickly devised a plan to restore their dynasty: Gotabaya would renounce his US
citizenship and run for president.

Gotabaya was well-positioned to win. After all, he had been defense secretary in
2009 when Mahinda ordered the final military offensive against the Tamil Tiger
rebels, bringing a brutal 26-year civil war to a decisive end. With that, the
Rajapaksa brothers emerged as heroes among Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority.

To be sure, the final offensive killed as many as 40,000 civilians and sparked
international accusations of war crimes. The United Nations described it as a
“grave assault on the entire regime of international law.” According to Sarath
Fonseka, the wartime military commander, Gotabaya ordered the summary
execution of surrendering rebel leaders. In California, where he was previously
domiciled, Gotabaya faces civil charges over alleged war crimes.

But the Rajapaksa brothers simply presented themselves as hardheaded custodians
of Sinhalese interests. And, thanks largely to his ethno-nationalist
credentials, Gotabaya won the 2019 election – at which point he immediately
appointed Mahinda as his prime minister. Mahinda then appointed his two sons,
his other two brothers, and a nephew as ministers or to other government
positions.

The same year, 277 people were killed, and hundreds more wounded, in bombings
carried out by Islamist extremists on Easter Sunday. The attack highlighted
tensions that had been simmering since 2009: though the military offensive
marginalized the Hindu-majority Tamils, the war’s end sowed the seeds of
religious conflict between the Buddhist-majority Sinhalese and Sri Lanka’s
Muslims, who constitute one-tenth of the country’s population. The Easter Sunday
terrorist bombings provided new ammunition for the Rajapaksas to whip
up Sinhalese nationalism.

Beyond deepening ethnic and religious fault lines, Gotabaya followed his brother
in establishing an imperial presidency, exemplified by the passage in 2020 of
a constitutional amendment expanding the president’s power to dissolve the
legislature. And he helped to push Sri Lanka further into the economic death
spiral that his brother had helped create, not least through his dealings with
China.

During Mahinda’s rule, as China shielded the Rajapaksas from war-crime charges
at the UN, it won major infrastructure contracts in Sri Lanka and became the
country’s leading lender. Debt to China piled up, incurred largely over the
construction of monuments to the Rajapaksa dynasty in the family’s home district
of Hambantota.

Examples include “the world’s emptiest” airport, a cricket stadium with more
seats than the district capital’s population, and a $1.4 billion seaport that
remained largely idle until it was signed away to China in 2017 on a 99-year
lease. The most extravagant China-backed project is the $13-billion “Port City,”
which is being built on land reclaimed from the sea close to the center of the
capital, Colombo.

China’s modus operandi is to cut deals with strongmen and exploit their
countries’ vulnerabilities to gain a strategic foothold. China’s larger aims in
Sri Lanka were suggested in 2014, when two Chinese submarines made separate
unannounced visits to Colombo, docking at a newly built container terminal owned
largely by Chinese state companies.

So, China gained leverage over a country located near some of the world’s most
important shipping lanes, and Sri Lanka became increasingly mired in debt,
including “hidden debt” to China from loans whose public disclosure was
prohibited by their terms. But hubris prevented the Rajapaksas from recognizing
the looming crisis. On the contrary, they enacted a sweeping tax cut in 2019
that wiped out a third of the country’s tax revenues.

Then the pandemic hit, crushing the tourism and garment industries – Sri Lanka’s
two main foreign-exchange earners. More recently, the war in Ukraine, by
triggering soaring international energy and food prices, helped to drain Sri
Lanka’s foreign reserves, creating fuel, food, medicine, and electricity
shortages. It was the final straw for many Sri Lankans, who took to the
streets in droves.

On May 9, Mahinda reluctantly resigned from his post as prime minister, in an
effort to appease protesters. But protests continued to rage, culminating in
the storming of the seaside presidential palace by demonstrators.
Gotabaya fled minutes earlier before conveying his decision to resign.

Within Sri Lanka, photos of protesters lounging on the president’s bed and
cooking in his backyard have become a symbol of people’s power. But they should
also serve as a warning to political dynasties elsewhere in the world, from Asia
to Latin America. When a family dominates a government or party, accountability
tends to suffer, often leading to catastrophe. This can cause even the most
entrenched dynasty to fall – and swiftly.

There is also a lesson for other heavily indebted countries. Unless they take
action to make their debts sustainable, they could quickly be overwhelmed by
crisis.

As for Sri Lanka, its next leaders will have to address shortages of basic
necessities, rebuild a wrecked economy, reestablish the rule of law, and hold
responsible those who caused the current disaster. But in a country where
politics is a blood sport, one should not underestimate the challenge of
overcoming the Rajapaksas’ corrosive legacy.

Posted in Asian Security, Diplomacy

HAVE WESTERN SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA BOOMERANGED?

FEATURED

Posted on July 6, 2022 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine now in its fifth month, Western leaders are
beginning to recognize, if not openly acknowledge, that their unprecedented
sanctions against Moscow are hurting their own countries’ economies without
significantly crimping the Kremlin’s war machine. As the recent back-to-back
Group of Seven and NATO summits underscored, Western leaders are straining to
find new ways to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In fact, the fallout from the U.S.-led sanctions on Russia has ended the era of
cheap oil and gas and contributed to surging inflation, supply-chain disruptions
and a looming recession in the West. In poorer countries, by sending fuel and
food prices higher, the sanctions are threatening livelihoods and political
stability.

Sanctions historically have produced unintended and undesirable consequences,
yet they have become the policy tool of choice for the United States.

U.S.-led sanctions on relatively small and economically vulnerable nations like
Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela have essentially failed to change
their behavior. But that reality did little to temper Western leaders’ strategic
expectations when they launched a comprehensive, sanctions-centered hybrid war
against Russia, a commodities powerhouse with the world’s largest
nuclear-weapons arsenal.

The greater the size and capability of the target country, the lesser is usually
the deterrent effect of sanctions. As the West is now discovering, sanctions
against a large, powerful state not only entail significant costs for the
countries imposing them, but they also reward nations that refuse to enforce
them. Indeed, the sanctions have delivered Russia a windfall from high-price
energy exports that no Western-sponsored price cap can significantly roll back.

Today, the increasingly apparent limits of the sanctions approach against Russia
are highlighting the limits of Western power. With economic power moving east,
the West needs a broad range of international partners more than ever to make a
difference. But much of the non-Western world has not joined the West’s
sanctions campaign, with all the major democracies in the Global South, Israel
and the Gulf Arab states declining to take sides in the NATO-Russia conflict.

The principal lesson from the Russian aggression is that President Biden’s
threats to inflict severe economic punishment failed to deter Putin from
launching an all-out invasion. And that the Western imposition of sanctions has
had little effect on Russia’s war effort.

Yet, ignoring that lesson, the clamor for more and more punitive actions has led
to a steadily increasing number of sanctions against Russia and a greater flow
of lethal aid to Ukraine, as if there is no threshold that would satiate the
Western urge for reprisals or military involvement in the conflict.

Russia already occupies one-fifth of Ukraine, the largest country located
entirely within Europe, as Avril D. Haines, the director of national
intelligence, acknowledged last week. What Haines didn’t disclose is that Russia
now controls Ukraine’s mineral-rich industrial heartland, more than 90% of its
energy resources (including all offshore oil), and much of its port and shipping
infrastructure. Russia has also created a strategically important land bridge to
Crimea and turned the Sea of Azov into its inland waters.

Biden boasted too soon in March that sanctions were “crushing the Russian
economy” and that “the ruble is reduced to rubble.” The sanctions campaign
against Russia has scarcely been effective, with Putin’s war machine showing no
sign of easing up.

One key reason is that Russia’s finances remain strong. Despite Western
governments freezing about $400 billion in Russian central bank assets and at
least $240 billion in private wealth, Moscow has roughly $300 billion in foreign
currency and gold reserves. The ruble has now hit a seven-year high against the
dollar.

The Western discourse is finally beginning to face up to the unpalatable
realities. Claims that “Russia is losing” and that “Putin is running out of
options to avoid defeat” have given way to open concern that, despite the
unparalleled sanctions on Moscow and the frenzied arming of Ukraine, Russia will
end up gaining permanent control over sizable Ukrainian territories, thereby
unambiguously demonstrating that aggression works.

This, in turn, is likely to encourage China to move on Taiwan, potentially
embroiling the U.S. and its ally Japan in a conflict whose geopolitical fallout
and economic and human toll could be greater than that from the Ukraine war.
Just as Putin was clear about his plans for invading Ukraine, so has Chinese
President Xi Jinping been clear about forcibly absorbing Taiwan — a development
that would drive the final nail in the coffin of America’s global preeminence.

That the Western sanctions campaign against Russia has largely been ineffective
will only embolden Xi’s expansionist agenda. Xi just took a victory lap in Hong
Kong after rapidly turning one of Asia’s freest cities into a repressive police
state. Like his expansionism in the South China Sea and the Himalayas, Xi
brought Hong Kong to heel without incurring any international costs.

When sanctions have proved ineffectual in changing Russia’s behavior, any
similar sanctions would fare even worse against China, whose economy is about 10
times larger than Russia’s. Indeed, the damage to Western economies from
Russia-type sanctions against China would likely dwarf the current economic pain
that the West is bearing from its sanctions on Moscow.

The West’s economic pain from sanctions that are doing little to hurt Russia’s
war effort or push Putin to the negotiating table represents a classic example
of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Western leaders clearly
overestimated their capacity to undermine the Russian economy and Putin’s hold
on power, while underestimating the resilience of a country that historically
has endured extraordinary economic and human toll (including in World War II) to
pursue strategic objectives.

Some of the West’s economic pain is self-inflicted. At a time when global
supplies are already tight, Europe’s decision to switch from cheap Russian
energy to alternative supplies has led to stratospheric international prices and
a scramble to find new sources of supply, besides stoking a costly competition
with the thriving economies of Asia, the world’s largest energy consumer.

The European Union (EU) has agreed on a time frame to wean itself off Russian
oil and gas. But Moscow is intent on not letting the EU dictate the timetable
for phasing out Russian supplies. With European gas prices already six times
higher than a year ago, a possible Russian cutoff of gas supplies to punish the
EU for sanctions will compound the already-grim European economic situation.

In the U.S., the soaring prices of gasoline, diesel and natural gas, which have
fueled runaway inflation, are due to rising energy exports, with American energy
producers seeking to profit from the skyrocketing global prices by selling their
products to the highest bidders in international markets. The profits bonanza
for the U.S. exporters of crude oil, gas and refined petroleum products is
proving costly for American consumers.

Meanwhile, spiraling international food prices are contributing to an alarming
hunger problem in poor countries. The Russian invasion has blocked shipment of
Ukraine’s leading exports — sunflower oil, corn and wheat. But worse in global
impact is the sanctions-linked disruption in supplies of fertilizers and wheat
from the world’s No. 1 exporter of both, Russia.

In the face of the global food and energy crises, the West risks losing the
international battle of narratives.

This may explain why the Biden administration, despite a wholly punitive
approach toward Russia, is now offering to write “comfort letters” for
international companies reassuring them that they won’t face penalties for
importing Russian fertilizers and grains. But, given the sweeping sanctions
against Moscow, such an offer may provide little comfort for Western importers,
many of whom have reduced their exposure to Russian commodities because of the
sanctions-related difficulty of making payments into Russia.

Having played all his major economic cards, Biden’s sanctions drive has run into
a dead-end, even as U.S. and European economic woes worsen.

This is redolent of how America’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, by substantially
raising import duties and prompting other countries to retaliate, deepened the
Great Depression and contributed to the rise of political extremism, which then
enabled Adolf Hitler to gain power. The risk now is that, instead of the
wished-for economic collapse and regime change in Russia, the Western sanctions
campaign could transform global geopolitics by provoking a Russian nationalist
backlash and cementing the Sino-Russian axis.

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

Posted in International Security

THE GLOBAL DAM FRENZY

FEATURED

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Chellaney

There is no question that the world must cut its reliance on fossil fuels. But
building more hydroelectric dams – especially in highly biodiverse river basins,
such as the Amazon, the Brahmaputra, the Congo, and the Mekong – is not the way
to do it.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

The era of cheap oil and gas is over. Russia’s war in Ukraine – or, more
specifically, Europe’s ambitious effort to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels
at a time when international supplies are already tight – is driving up global
energy prices and raising the specter of a global energy crisis. Alternative
sources of energy are looking more appealing by the day, as they should. But the
embrace of hydropower, in particular, carries its own risks.

Hydropower is currently the most widely used renewable, accounting for almost
half of all low-carbon electricity generation worldwide. Its appeal is rooted in
several factors. For decades, it was the most cost-competitive renewable, and
many hydropower plants can increase or decrease their electricity generation
much faster than nuclear, coal, and natural-gas plants. And whereas wind and
solar output can fluctuate significantly, hydropower can be dependably produced
using reservoirs, making it a good complement to these more variable sources.

But there is a hitch. The most common type of hydropower plant entails the
damming of rivers and streams. And hydroelectric dams have a large and
lasting ecological footprint.

For starters, while hydroelectric generation itself emits no greenhouse gases,
dams and reservoirs emit significant amounts of methane, carbon dioxide, and
nitrous oxide. Under some circumstances – such as in tropical zones – they can
generate more greenhouse gases than fossil-fuel power plants. One study found
that methane – a greenhouse gas that is at least 34 times more potent than CO2 –
can make up some 80% of emissions from artificial reservoirs, though a wide
variety of geographical, climatic, seasonal, and vegetational factors affect
reservoir emissions.

Moreover, while hydroelectric dams are often touted for delivering clean
drinking water, controlling floods, and supporting irrigation, they
also change river temperatures and water quality and impede the flow of
nutrient-rich sediment. Such sediment is essential to help re-fertilize degraded
soils in downstream plains, prevent the erosion of the river channel, and
preserve biodiversity.

When dams trap the sediment flowing in from the mountains, deltas shrink and
sink. This allows salt water to intrude inland, thereby disturbing the delicate
balance between fresh water and salt water that is essential for the survival of
critical species in coastal estuaries and lagoons. It also exposes deltas to the
full force of storms and hurricanes. In Asia, heavily populated deltas – home to
megacities like Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Bangkok, and Dhaka – are
already retreating fast.

Dams also carry high social costs. In 2007, then-Chinese Prime Minister Wen
Jiabao revealed that China had relocated 22.9 million people to make way for
water projects – a figure larger than the populations of more than 100
countries. The Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower station, which
became fully operational in 2012, displaced more than 1.4 million people.

To top it all off, there is good reason to doubt hydropower’s reliability. If
mitigation measures prove unable to slow global warming adequately –
an increasingly likely scenario – the frequency and intensity of droughts will
continue to rise. As water levels in rivers and reservoirs drop – exacerbated
by evaporation from open reservoirs – so will the water pressure needed to spin
turbines, resulting in less electricity. And this is to say nothing of giant
dams’ ability to compound downstream droughts, as has been seen in the Mekong
River Basin.

Given that dams are expensive, years-long undertakings, the wisdom of investing
in building more of them is questionable, to say the least. But the world’s love
affair with dams continues. Almost two-thirds of the Earth’s long rivers have
already been modified by humans, with most of the world’s almost 60,000 large
dams having been built over the last seven decades. And, global dam
construction continues at a breakneck pace. In 2014, at least 3,700 significant
dams were under construction or planned. Since then, the dam boom has become
more apparent, with the developing world now a global hotspot of such
construction.

While dam-building activity can be seen from the Balkans to South America, China
leads the way as both the world’s most-dammed country and its largest exporter
of dams. From 2001 to 2020, China lent over $44 billion for the Chinese
construction of hydropower projects totaling over 27 gigawatts in 38 countries.

China is not hesitating to build dams even in seismically active areas, despite
the risk of triggering a devastating earthquake. And China really should know
better: its own scientists linked the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which killed
more than 87,000 people in the Tibetan Plateau’s eastern rim, to the new
Zipingpu Dam, located near the quake’s epicenter.

There is no question that the world must cut its reliance on fossil fuels. But
building more hydroelectric dams – especially in the Earth’s most biodiverse
river basins, such as the Amazon, the Brahmaputra, the Congo, and the Mekong –
is not the way to do it. On the contrary, the global dam frenzy amounts to a
kind of a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our planet’s long-term health for
a fleeting sense of energy security.

Posted in Energy-Environment, International Security

INDIA’S FRONT-LINE BATTLE AGAINST AUTOCRACY MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER

FEATURED

Posted on June 23, 2022 by Chellaney
Chinese troops dismantling their bunkers at Pangong Tso region in Ladakh in
February 2021: China has turned other captured areas into permanent all-weather
military encampments. © AP

The risk of renewed skirmishes with China is growing

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Two years after nighttime hand-to-hand combat with Indian troops resulted in
China’s first combat deaths since its 1979 Vietnam invasion, the Chinese and
Indian militaries remain locked in multiple standoffs over some of the most
inhospitable terrains on Earth.

The war in Ukraine may be obscuring China’s border conflict with India,
including the largest Himalayan buildup of rival forces in history. But as U.S.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reminded the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in
Singapore last weekend, “we see Beijing continue to harden its position along
the border that it shares with India.”

With tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian troops facing off against each
other, the risks of renewed skirmishing, if not outright war, are significant.

The clashes of June 15, 2020, were the bloodiest of a series of skirmishes or
scuffles that began more than six weeks earlier after China, taking advantage of
India’s preoccupation with enforcing the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdown,
stealthily infiltrated key border areas in the high-altitude Indian region of
Ladakh and established heavily fortified bases there.

The surprise encroachments were not nearly as clever a plan as Chinese President
Xi Jinping probably thought when he gave his go-ahead. Far from handing China an
easy win, they have plunged Sino-Indian relations to a nadir, kept the border
crisis simmering and made the fact of a major Indian military buildup
inevitable.

The June 15, 2020, clashes not just marked a watershed in India-China relations;
they also stood out for their savagery. With a 1996 bilateral agreement
prohibiting the two countries’ soldiers from using guns at the border in
peacetime, encroaching Chinese soldiers employed metal fence posts and clubs
wrapped in barbed wire in a post-sunset ambush attack on an Indian army patrol.

Some Indian soldiers were beaten to death, others were thrown from the soaring
cliffs into the fast-flowing Galwan River before Indian reinforcements arrived
and fought pitched hand-to-hand battles with the intruders under a moonlit sky.

After the hours-long fighting, India quickly honored its 20 fallen soldiers as
martyrs and then established a war memorial to commemorate their sacrifices. But
China has still not disclosed its death toll, which U.S. intelligence reportedly
placed at 35 and Russia’s government-owned Tass news agency estimated at 45.
More than eight months after the clashes, Beijing announced posthumous awards
for four Chinese soldiers without revealing the full death toll.

This should not be a surprise, as the Chinese Communist Party rarely reveals the
full truth: it disclosed the Chinese death toll from the 1962 war with India
more than three decades later in 1994 after significantly lowering the figure.

With the world’s most powerful propaganda machine, the CCP seeks to manufacture
reality. While releasing a propaganda video of the clashes, it jailed at least
six Chinese bloggers for criticizing its death toll cover-up, with one blogger
who had 2.5 million followers on Weibo sentenced to eight months in prison. More
recently, it picked the military commander who led the ambush attack as a
torchbearer of the Beijing Winter Olympics, provocatively feting him as a hero.

The border crisis has also cast an unflattering light on India, which has
instituted no inquiry into why its army was taken unawares by the multiple
Chinese intrusions, some of them deep into Indian territory.

India is the world’s third-largest defense spender after the U.S. and China,
with the army continuing to appropriate the lion’s share of the defense budget.
Yet over the years, the Indian army has repeatedly been caught napping by the
cross-border actions of China and Pakistan.

Indeed, it has become somewhat of a tradition in India that, whenever an
adversary springs a military surprise, the army generals take cover behind the
political leaders, and the ruling politicians hide behind the generals, allowing
accountability to go unenforced.

Chinese forces braved harsh weather to intrude into forbidding landscapes, just
before thawing ice reopened access routes. But the Indian army ignored warning
signs from China’s heightened military activities near the frontier, including
an unusually large, wintertime troop exercise that became the launchpad for the
aggression.

Yet not a single Indian army commander was relieved of his command for the
fiasco. Worse still, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has maintained a conspicuous
silence on the military crisis for the past two years.

Instead, Modi has put faith in negotiations, with Beijing using endless talks to
string India along while frenetically building new warfare infrastructure that
General Charles A. Flynn, head of the U.S. Army Pacific, recently called
“eye-opening” and “alarming.”

While withdrawing from some positions it seized, China has turned other captured
areas into permanent all-weather military encampments, with large combat-ready
forces and newly built roads and heliports that allow front-line positions to be
quickly reinforced with fresh troop inductions.

Xi’s aim against India, as in the East and South China Seas, is for China to
ultimately win without fighting by employing coercion under the shadow of its
deployed military might. To Modi’s credit, India appears determined to frustrate
that goal, vowing to sustain the military standoffs, despite the risk of a
full-scale war, until China rolls back its encroachments.

India, the world’s largest democracy, is on the front-lines of the battle
between democracy and autocracy. If China is able to coerce India into
submission, it will open the path for the world’s biggest autocracy to gain
supremacy in Asia and reshape the international order in its favor. No wonder
Secretary Austin said in Singapore that India’s “growing military capability and
technological prowess can be a stabilizing force in the region.”

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

WHY IS BIDEN APPEASING CHINA?

FEATURED

Posted on June 22, 2022 by Chellaney

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

President Biden is yet to make his long-anticipated China strategy speech to
define his approach to a country that has emerged as the greatest rival that the
United States has ever faced. Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid
out the administration’s approach in a speech that acknowledged that China poses
“the most serious long-term challenge to the international order.”

In Blinken’s words, “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape
the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military
and technological power to do it.”

The president, however, has been fixated since taking office on the weaker of
America’s two main foes, Russia, while letting China escape scot-free
for covering up the COVID-19 virus’s origins and for detaining more than a
million Muslims in internment camps. Indeed, the Biden administration labels
only Russia as an adversary, while calling China merely a competitor.

A careful examination of Blinken’s speech, the White House’s “Indo-Pacific
Strategy” released in February and Biden’s own actions since last year confirms
that a conciliatory approach toward China is taking root, despite occasional
tough-sounding rhetoric.

Under President Trump’s administration, a fundamental shift in China policy
occurred with the aim of reining in a country that, with U.S. help, became
America’s main rival. The paradigm shift formally ended America’s “China
fantasy,” which lasted over 45 years — a period in which successive presidents,
from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, aided China’s rise in the naive hope that,
as China became increasingly prosperous, it would naturally pursue economic and
even political liberalization.

Backed by a broadly bipartisan consensus in favor of ending China’s free ride,
this policy change promised to reshape global geopolitics and trade.

Biden, however, has unobtrusively undertaken a course correction, with Blinken’s
speech offering more evidence of the administration’s efforts to “coexist and
cooperate” with the world’s largest autocracy.

Blinken’s soothing message for Beijing was that the U.S. does not seek to block
China’s “role as a major power,” or hinder its economic growth or “transform”
its totalitarian system. “We are not looking for conflict or a new Cold War. To
the contrary, we’re determined to avoid both,” he declared.

In contrast to the Trump administration’s launch of an ideological offensive
against China as a predatory communist state without political legitimacy or the
rule of law, Team Biden has repeatedly forsworn any intention to transform that
country’s political system in any way.

Biden himself assured Chinese President Xi Jinping in a virtual summit meeting
last November that the U.S. will not seek to change China’s political system
or direct its alliances against it. And when he telephoned Xi last September,
Biden, according to a U.S. background briefer, sought to explain American
actions toward China “in a way that [is] not misinterpreted as … somehow trying
to sort of undermine Beijing in particular ways.”

Similar reassurances are embedded in the Biden Indo-Pacific strategy document,
which declares that, “Our objective is not to change the PRC [People’s Republic
of China] but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates…” Contrast
that with the administration’s publicly declared goal to “see Russia weakened,”
including triggering its economic collapse and degrading its military
capabilities.

With Biden willing to give China a pass on its expansionist policies, the risk
is growing that Xi will make Taiwan his next target after his
regime’s success in swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the
South China Sea and changing the territorial status quo in the Himalayas.

Not once, not twice, but three times in recent months Biden has said that the
U.S. will militarily defend Taiwan, only to have his senior officials on each
occasion walk back his comments. While creating international confusion afresh
on that issue during his Tokyo visit, Biden played down the possibility of China
invading Taiwan, saying, “My expectation is that it will not happen.”

But by appeasing China, Biden may invite such aggression. Indeed, Biden’s
deepening of U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict offers Xi an opening to
move on Taiwan at an opportune time when a distracted America is taken by
complete surprise. Through rising bullying, Xi is already normalizing China’s
hostile pressure on Taiwan.

Nothing better illustrates Biden’s efforts to appease China than Taiwan’s
exclusion from his newly unveiled Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for
Prosperity. The White House has offered no credible explanation for omitting
this economic powerhouse, which is a hub of global semiconductor production.

Taiwan’s exclusion shows how Biden, by bending over backwards not to antagonize
Beijing, is sending mixed messages about U.S. commitment to that island
democracy. Prioritizing Ukraine’s defense over Taiwan’s, Washington has informed
Taipei that the 2022 scheduled delivery of an important U.S. artillery system
would be delayed until 2026 at the earliest. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo,
meanwhile, referred to Taiwan by the demeaning name of “Chinese Taipei” while
listing it as one of the founding members of the newly established Cross-Border
Privacy Rules Forum.

Make no mistake: Xi is unlikely to be deterred by the harsh U.S.-led sanctions
against Russia. The Chinese economy is 10 times larger than the Russian economy,
and enforcing sanctions against China would cause serious economic disruptions
in the West and upend global supply chains.

In this light, the mixed messages from Washington could lead Xi to believe that
Biden lacks the strategic vision and political will to defend Taiwan against a
Chinese attack.

More fundamentally, Biden is quietly dismantling, brick by brick, the Trump
administration’s China policy without drawing attention to it. U.S. pressure on
Xi’s regime is gradually being eased. Examples include letting it off the
hook over its great COVID-19 stonewall and dropping fraud charges against the
daughter of the founder of China’s military-linked Huawei Technologies.

Despite the FBI director publicly warning that Chinese spying in the U.S. has
reached unparalleled levels, Biden has effectively disbanded the “China
Initiative,” which was intended to empower the Justice Department to combat
Beijing’s vast espionage campaign.

Biden may now target the Trump-era trade tariffs on $370 billion worth of
Chinese goods, telling reporters in Tokyo that he was considering rolling them
back. As a first step in that direction, his administration has initiated a
legally required review of the tariffs, which were slapped on as part of a
strategy to use economic levers to weaken China — a kind of death from a
thousand cuts.

Rolling the tariffs back would break Biden’s promise not to unilaterally lift
them unless China improved its behavior on issues of U.S. concern — from its
unfair trade practices to its theft of intellectual property. Team Biden has
already condoned Beijing’s failure to meet commitments in the so-called Phase
One trade deal with Washington. It also has reinstated exemptions from Trump-era
tariffs on 352 products imported from China.

America’s trade deficit with China, meanwhile, continues to swell, jumping over
25 percent in 2021 to $396.6 billion. It now makes up nearly 60 percent of
China’s total global trade surplus, which has become the main engine of its
economy, besides financing its warfare machine.

Continuing to underwrite China’s economic and geopolitical power not only means
that the U.S. has yet to learn from how it aided the rise of a hostile giant; it
also is likely to accelerate America’s relative decline.

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

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

INDIA SHOULD INVITE MYANMAR’S FOREIGN MINISTER TO ASEAN MEET

FEATURED

Posted on June 8, 2022 by Chellaney

Giving Naypyitaw the cold shoulder is not in New Delhi’s interests

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Min Aung Hlaing is greeted by an Indonesian official upon arrival at the airport
on the outskirts of Jakarta in April 2021: The presence of the Senior General at
the leaders’ meeting in Jakarta emphasized the ASEAN family. © Indonesian
Presidential Palace/AP

India not only shares long land and maritime borders with Myanmar, but it also
sees the country as a strategic corridor to Southeast Asia. Given the porous
state of the frontier and 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.

Yet, as the host of the June 16-17 Association of Southeast Asian Nations-India
foreign ministers’ meeting, New Delhi is giving Myanmar the cold shoulder.

Falling in line with double standards practiced by the U.S., India will host the
foreign minister of Thailand, where the army chief who staged a coup in 2014
remains in power in civilian garb, but not Myanmar’s foreign minister after the
military there seized power 16 months ago.

The military has long dominated politics in Myanmar and Thailand. But
Washington, while seeking to isolate and squeeze Myanmar, has deepened
cooperation with the Thai government, despite its crackdown on pro-democracy
protesters, including use of lese-majeste laws to imprison anyone deemed to have
insulted the king.

The 10-nation ASEAN has traditionally favored a policy of engagement and
noninterference, which explained the presence of Myanmar military chief Min Aung
Hlaing at its April 2021 leaders’ meeting in Jakarta that emphasized “the ASEAN
family.” But later, wilting under stepped-up U.S. pressure, ASEAN excluded him
from its annual summit last October.

Here is the irony: In the name of promoting democratic rights, U.S. President
Joe Biden’s Myanmar policy has sought to win the cooperation of ASEAN, most of
whose member states are under authoritarian rule.

They include Brunei, an absolutist monarchy; communist-ruled Vietnam and Laos;
Singapore, governed by only one party since independence; and Cambodia, where
the ruling party holds all the parliamentary seats.

Indeed, Biden invited only three ASEAN states — Indonesia, the Philippines and
Malaysia — to his democracy summit last December, while at his recent special
summit with ASEAN leaders, Myanmar was represented by an empty chair.

The bigger paradox centers on India, whose security over the years has come
under pressure from specious U.S. distinctions between “good” and “bad”
terrorists and “good” and “bad” autocrats.

For example, despite Pakistan’s politically dominant military maintaining a
close nexus with terrorist groups, Washington still retains that state as a
“major non-NATO ally,” a special status conferred on 17 other countries but not
India.

Yet, by not inviting Myanmar’s foreign minister to a meeting during the
officially proclaimed India-ASEAN Year of Friendship, New Delhi is giving
credence to Washington’s geopolitically driven distinction between Myanmar and
the other ASEAN states.

In justifying Myanmar’s foreign minister’s exclusion, India’s foreign ministry
has sought to hide behind the U.S.-shaped ASEAN stance of inviting a
nonpolitical Myanmar representative. In response to India inviting just its top
foreign ministry bureaucrat, Myanmar will likely boycott the New Delhi meeting,
as it has done with other ASEAN meetings since last October.

More fundamentally, Biden’s sanctions against Myanmar affect that country’s
neighbors in the same way the U.S., already confronting a southern border
crisis, would be affected if it sought to punish and isolate Mexico. Still,
without consulting Myanmar’s neighbors that face an influx of refugees, Biden
has stepped up his sanctions drive against Myanmar, even as he eases sanctions
pressure on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Biden’s use of economic and political levers to help unseat Myanmar’s military
regime has only worsened the situation in that strategically located country,
emboldening some opponents to take up arms and hardening the military regime’s
crackdown while exacerbating cross-border impacts.

And just as the deepening U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict to help
inflict a strategic defeat on Russia is beginning to fracture European unity,
Biden’s uncompromisingly punitive approach toward Myanmar has hopelessly divided
ASEAN, unraveling its long tradition of a consensus-based decision making.

Meanwhile, in less than six months, a feckless India has gone from sending its
foreign secretary to Myanmar to meet the military ruler to excluding that
country’s foreign minister from its upcoming meeting with ASEAN.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s yielding to U.S. pressure has already
undercut India’s once-growing relationship with a key neighbor, Iran. The U.S.
used its Iran sanctions to deprive India of cheaper oil and turn it into the
world’s largest importer of American energy — a development that allowed India’s
rival, China, to become Iran’s almost exclusive buyer of oil at a hefty
discount, as well as becoming top security partner and investor.

Now Modi could be making a similar mistake with Myanmar, which China views as
its gateway to the Indian Ocean. Myanmar has historically been a peaceful
neighbor for India, never posing a threat to its security. But the Modi
government’s snub could jeopardize Indian projects in Myanmar and
counterinsurgency cooperation.

Biden’s Myanmar policy has had the perverse effect of weakening America’s hand
while strengthening China’s. And by nudging India into giving Myanmar the cold
shoulder, Biden is pushing that resource-rich nation into China’s arms.

Modi, for his part, is forgetting that a country that allows its policies toward
its own neighbors to be influenced by a distant power will inevitably be seen as
weak.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Asian Security, Diplomacy

THE CLASH OF ASIA’S TITANS

FEATURED

Posted on June 6, 2022 by Chellaney

Chinese President Xi Jinping has picked a border fight that he cannot win, and
transformed a previously conciliatory India into a long-term foe. This amounts
to an even bigger miscalculation than Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
failure to see it coming.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

With global attention focused on Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s territorial
expansionism in Asia – especially its expanding border conflict with India – has
largely fallen off the international community’s radar. Yet, in the vast
glaciated heights of the Himalayas, the world’s demographic titans have been on
a war footing for over two years, and the chances of violent clashes rise almost
by the day.

The confrontation began in May 2020. When thawing ice reopened access routes
after a brutal winter, India was shocked to discover that the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) had stealthily occupied hundreds of square miles of the
borderlands in its Ladakh region. This triggered a series of military clashes,
which resulted in China’s first combat deaths in over four decades, and
triggered the fastest-ever rival troop buildup in the Himalayan region.

India’s counterattacks eventually drove the PLA back from some areas, and the
two sides agreed to transform two battlegrounds into buffer zones. But, over the
last 15 months, little progress has been made to defuse tensions in other areas.
With tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian troops standing virtually at
attention along the long-disputed border, a military stalemate has emerged.

But stalemate is not stagnation. China has continued to alter the Himalayan
landscape rapidly and profoundly in its favor, including by establishing 624
militarized border villages – mirroring its strategy of creating artificial
militarized islands in the South China Sea – and constructing new warfare
infrastructure near the frontier.

As part of this effort, China recently completed a bridge over Pangong Lake –
the site of past military clashes – that promises to strengthen its position in
a disputed area of India’s Ladakh region. It has also built roads and security
installations on territory that belongs to Bhutan, in order to gain access to a
particularly vulnerable section of India’s border overlooking a narrow corridor
known as the “Chicken Neck,” which connects its far northeast to the heartland.

All of this, China hopes, will enable it to dictate terms to India: accept the
new status quo, with China keeping the territory it has grabbed, or risk a
full-scale war in which China has maximized its advantage.
China’s expansionism relies on deception, stealth, and surprise, and on apparent
indifference to the risks of military escalation. The aim of its brinkmanship is
to confound the other side’s deterrence strategy and leave it with no real
options.

China learned from its strategic folly of invading Vietnam in 1979 and has
become adept at waging asymmetric or hybrid warfare, usually below the threshold
of overt armed conflict. This enables it to advance its strategic objectives,
including land grabs, incrementally. Coercive bargaining and overt intimidation
also help to overcome resistance.

This salami-slicing strategy has already enabled Chinese President Xi Jinping
to redraw the geopolitical map in the South China Sea. And the terrestrial
application of this approach being deployed against India, Bhutan, and Nepal is
proving just as difficult to counter. As India is learning firsthand, countries
have virtually no options other than the use of force.

One thing is certain: simply hoping that China will stop encroaching on Indian
territory will do India little good. After all, India got into this situation
precisely because its political and military leadership failed to take heed of
China’s military activities near the frontier. On the contrary, while China was
laying the groundwork for its territorial grabs, Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi was bending over backwards to befriend Xi. In the five years before the
first clashes flared in May 2020, Modi met with his Chinese counterpart 18
times. Even a 2017 standoff on a remote Himalayan plateau did not dissuade Modi
from pursuing his appeasement policy.

Seeking to protect his image as a strong leader, Modi has not acknowledged the
loss of Indian territories. India’s media enables this evasion by amplifying
government-coined euphemisms: China’s aggression is a “unilateral change of
status quo,” and the PLA-seized areas are “friction points.” Meanwhile, Modi has
allowed China’s trade surplus with India to rise so rapidly – it
now exceeds India’s total defense budget (the world’s third largest) – that his
government is, in a sense, underwriting China’s aggression.

But none of this should be mistaken for unwillingness to fight. India
is committed to restoring the status quo ante and is at its “highest level” of
military readiness. This is no empty declaration. If Xi seeks to break the
current stalemate by waging war, both sides will suffer heavy losses, with no
victor emerging.

In other words, Xi has picked a border fight that he cannot win, and transformed
a conciliatory India into a long-term foe. This amounts to an even bigger
miscalculation than Modi’s policy incoherence. The price China will pay for Xi’s
mistake will far outweigh the perceived benefits of some stealthy land grabs.

In a sense, China’s territorial expansionism represents a shrewder, broader, and
slower version of Russia’s conventional war on Ukraine – and could provoke a
similar international backlash against Xi’s neo-imperial agenda. Already,
China’s aggression has prompted Indo-Pacific powers to strengthen their military
capabilities and cooperation, including with the United States. All of this will
undercut Xi’s effort to fashion a Sino-centric Asia and, ultimately, achieve
China’s goal of global preeminence.

Xi might recognize that he has made a strategic blunder in the Himalayas. But,
at a time when he is preparing to secure a precedent-defying third term as
leader of the Communist Party of China, he has little room to change course, and
the costs will continue to mount.

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

THE QUAD’S MOMENT OF TRUTH HAS ARRIVED

FEATURED

Posted on May 28, 2022 by Chellaney

BIDEN’S EMPTY TAIWAN RHETORIC REVEALS QUAD’S CORE WEAKNESS

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Anthony Albanese, Joe Biden, Fumio Kishida and Narendra Modi at the Prime
Minister’s Office of Japan in Tokyo on May 24: The Quad’s moment of truth has
arrived. © Reuters

Nearly five years after it was resurrected from a decadelong dormancy, and then
integrated as a strategic coalition of the Indo-Pacific’s leading democracies,
the Quad is struggling to make a difference in a region whose rising economic
and geopolitical heft promises to reshape the international order.

Amid the deepening global fallout from the Ukraine war and the NATO-Russia proxy
coflict, this week’s Quad summit in Tokyo showed that the group comprising the
U.S., India, Japan and Australia has its work cut out if it is to make a
meaningful impact, which will be measured in terms of deliverables, rather than
the number of times its leaders get together and make promises.

While the Quad is trying to get its act together, the geostrategic dynamics are
changing rapidly in the Indo-Pacific, where the world’s fastest economic growth
is incongruously juxtaposed with fast-rising naval capabilities and the most
dangerous strategic hot spots.

Intended to serve as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism, from the South and
East China Seas to the Himalayas, the Quad has done little to rein in China’s
unilateral moves to alter the regional status quo, with Beijing’s wide-ranging
security accord with the Solomon Islands just the latest example.

In Tokyo, U.S. President Joe Biden stole the summit’s thunder with various
pre-summit announcements or assertions, including unveiling his
administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — an economic platform that
seeks to promote cooperation among its 13 member-states on global issues such as
supply chains, clean energy and digital rules, but without reducing trade
barriers or tariffs.

Biden’s indication that the U.S. would use force to defend Taiwan grabbed global
headlines, yet, paradoxically, Biden has gradually been easing pressure on
China. Examples include letting China off the hook over the COVID-19
origins, dropping U.S. fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of
China’s Huawei Technologies, and allowing Beijing to escape scot-free over its
failure to meet commitments in the so-called Phase One trade deal with
Washington.

Further, Biden revealed in Tokyo that he was considering rolling back trade
tariffs on Chinese products, an action that would break his promise not to
unilaterally lift tariffs unless Beijing’s behavior improved.

Not once, not twice, but three times Biden has said in recent months that the
U.S. will militarily defend Taiwan, only to have his senior officials walk back
his comments on every occasion. A day after sowing international confusion
afresh, Biden himself walked back his Taiwan comments, telling reporters, “My
policy has not changed at all.”

Lost was the exclusion of Taiwan from Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework,
with the White House offering no explanation for omitting the global
semiconductor hub.

The defense of Taiwan has assumed greater significance for Indo-Pacific
security, given that three successive U.S. administrations have failed to
credibly push back against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, relying
instead on rhetoric or symbolic actions. Beijing’s swallowing of Hong Kong also
has essentially been cost-free.

All of this has renewed questions about the Quad’s strategic direction and
mission. While it remains integral to the U.S. strategy of a free and open
Indo-Pacific, Biden’s September 2021 launch of the AUKUS alliance with Australia
and Britain signaled the Anglosphere is back and confirmed a shift in the Quad’s
focus under him to everlasting universal challenges, from climate change and
cybersecurity to global health and resilient supply chains.

Biden, after taking office in January last year, initiated the practice of Quad
leaders holding summit meetings, with the Tokyo meeting representing the fourth
such summit in just 14 months. But under Biden’s leadership, the group has also
taken on an expansive agenda.

Given its small size, the Quad is in no position to deal with larger
international challenges. Yet the first Quad summit in March 2021, held
virtually, launched working groups on climate change, vaccines and critical and
emerging technologies.

When the Quad leaders met in person at the White House last September, three
more working groups were established on cybersecurity, infrastructure and space.
With the Quad unable to meet its own target of delivering one billion
Indian-manufactured doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the developing world by the
end of this year, this raises the danger that the group will underdeliver on
other core promises.

This week’s summit in Tokyo was a reminder that a very broad and ambitious
agenda not only dilutes the Quad’s Indo-Pacific focus but also makes it more
difficult to produce results.

The leaders’ joint statement was heavy with pious declarations about cooperating
on issues extending from peace and security to climate, space, global
health security and cybersecurity, but light on concrete plans, including on
combating what it acknowledged were “coercive, provocative or unilateral actions
that seek to change the status quo” in the region.

The Quad’s moment of truth has arrived. The group today faces a clear choice:
start translating its rhetoric into action by leveraging its members’ strengths,
or risk becoming a mere talking shop. Given that the Quad is now more integrated
than ever, it ought to focus on deliverables to help underscore its strategic
value.

Unless the Quad gets cracking, an illiberal hegemonic order in Asia could
emerge, creating significant risks for international security and global
markets.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

EUROPEAN SCRAMBLE FOR ENERGY COMES AT ASIA’S EXPENSE

FEATURED

Posted on May 13, 2022 by Chellaney

EU MOVES TO WEAN ITSELF OFF RUSSIAN OIL AND GAS IS CREATING A SELF-DEFEATING
TRAP

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

A man rests while waiting in a line to buy diesel in Colombo on April 7:
Europe’s frenzied efforts to secure alternative sources spells trouble for
importing states with lower-paying power such as cash-strapped Sri Lanka. ©
Reuters

The era of cheap oil and gas is over. In an increasingly risky and turbulent
world, geopolitics more than supply chain issues has driven up fossil fuel
prices and spurred growing energy insecurity.

The war in Ukraine has also made global inflation worse, increased debt and
slowed economic growth. Financial markets have become more volatile as they
start to price in the dual risk of stagnant economic growth and persistently
high inflation.

Yet here’s the paradox: as many as 37 advanced economies, from Japan to
Australia and Canada, have joined the unprecedented U.S.-led sanctions campaign
to isolate and squeeze Russia. Unwittingly, these countries have created a
self-defeating trap: their punitive campaign is raising international energy and
commodity prices, as well as Russia’s revenues, despite a significant decrease
in its energy exports.

And by fueling inflation at home and cutting into their citizens’ standard of
living, those imposing sanctions are imposing costs on themselves, with the
International Monetary Fund expecting global growth to slow to 3.6% this year
from 6.1% last year.

Against this background, Europe’s ambitious mission to wean itself off Russian
fossil fuels has been hailed as a “geostrategic game-changer.” In reality,
Europe’s scramble to find alternative energy sources is stoking the further rise
of international prices and compounding the debt woes of poorer countries.

More fundamentally, Europe’s energy shift, given the scale of its planned supply
switch, is set to trigger costly competition with the thriving economies of
Asia, the world’s largest energy consumer.

The 27-country European Union, which consumes 11% of the total global energy
supply, currently relies on Russia for 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil.

With OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo already stating that there is not
sufficient global oil capacity to compensate for the loss of Russian supply, it
is no wonder that oil prices immediately jumped 4% earlier this month when the
EU proposed a phased ban on imports of Russian oil.

Brent crude futures are currently trading more than 50% higher than last year’s
annual average of $70.40. Diesel, meanwhile, is already in short supply, with
its price soaring as European distributors move away from Russian supplies,
while American and other producers of Liquefied Natural Gas are already
struggling to meet the increased demand from Europe.

The U.S., the world’s second-largest natural-gas exporter after Russia, is on
track to become the world’s largest LNG exporter this year, overtaking Qatar and
Australia. Yet, thanks to Europe’s scramble, U.S. natural-gas prices at home
have more than doubled this year, pushing up inflation to a four-decade high of
8.3%.

Still, no region will be more affected by Europe’s shift to non-Russian sources
of energy supply than Asia.

By severing its energy ties with Russia and decoupling two interlocked parts of
the global energy system, Europe will become the main competitor for the energy
that otherwise supplies Asia.

The EU has also opened a path for China to build an energy safety net through
greater land-based imports from Russia that cannot be blockaded, even if it were
to invade Taiwan.

Rewiring European economies that have long depended on cheap Russian energy will
be a costly and lengthy process, requiring the building of new or expanded LNG
infrastructure and the recalibrating of oil refineries that are configured for
processing only Russian crude.

Meanwhile, the specter of Russia cutting supplies through counter-sanctions has
led Europe to frenetically stock up on imported LNG, crude and diesel, often by
outbidding Asian buyers.

Since last month, European energy imports from Africa, the Middle East and North
America have hit a record high and commanded premium prices. Ironically, the EU
is also stocking up on Russian gas, oil and coal, paying Moscow 44 billion euros
in just the first two months of the war for such imports, compared with about
140 billion euros for the whole of 2021.

The changing dynamics compound the challenges for Japan, whose companies have
invested in the Russian Sakhalin-1, Sakhalin-2 and Arctic LNG 2 projects, each
of which has been deemed essential for Japanese energy security. Japan, which
relies on Russia for just 4% of its total crude imports and 9% of its gas, is
loath to find alternative sources at this stage, despite slapping its own
sanctions on Moscow.

A Japanese-made carrier is anchored near an LNG plant on Sakhalin island: The
changing dynamics compound the challenges for Japan. © Reuters

Replacing just its Sakhalin-2 LNG with spot-market LNG could raise Japan’s total
yearly import bill by as much as 50% on current trends. India, one of the
world’s largest energy consumers and heavily reliant on foreign supplies, has
already seen its energy-import bill rise by billions of dollars per week.

Energy markets today can ill-afford a large economy like Japan joining Europe’s
scramble. Europe’s frenzied efforts to secure alternative sources already spell
trouble for importing states with lower-paying power, such as cash-strapped Sri
Lanka, which has declared an unprecedented nationwide curfew to deal with
violent street protests.

The risk is growing that the EU, in seeking to hurt Russia, may end up hurting
itself while severely penalizing developing economies. Higher energy prices will
benefit all the world’s major energy exporters, from the U.S. to Russia.
According to the Oslo-based Rystad Energy, despite Russian crude production
projected to decline sharply in 2022, Moscow’s total income from oil alone is
likely to soar to $180 billion, up 45%.

At a time of such geopolitically driven market disruptions, a Europe competing
with Asia for securing greater energy supplies will not only continue to drive
up prices but also could derail the economic recovery from the pandemic.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Energy-Environment, International Security

THE QUAD AT A CROSSROADS

FEATURED

Posted on May 10, 2022 by Chellaney

The Indo-Pacific’s four leading democracies can hold as many leaders’ summits as
they want, but without a clear strategic vision – and an agenda to match – they
will have little impact. The group’s purpose is to act as a bulwark against
Chinese expansionism and ensure a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

When the Quad was first conceived as a strategic coalition of the Indo-Pacific’s
four leading democracies, many doubted that it would amount to much. Chinese
Foreign Minister Wang Yi mocked it as a “headline-grabbing idea” that would
dissipate “like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean.” But continued
Chinese expansionism, combined with former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s
determination to build broad resistance to it, has produced an increasingly
consolidated group, with real potential to bolster regional security. The
question is whether it will deliver.

One thing is certain: all four Quad members – Australia, India, Japan, and the
United States – are essential to realize the vision of a “free and open
Indo-Pacific” introduced by Japan in 2016 and affirmed by the US in 2017. While
the Quad took some time to get off the ground – it was resurrected during US
President Donald Trump’s administration but leaders’ summits began only after
Joe Biden took office – it has gained considerable momentum. Its members have
held three summits since last year (two of them virtual) and are set to meet in
person in Tokyo on May 24.

But the Quad still has a long way to go, not least because its members’ own
actions are undercutting its strategic rationale – the need to prevent China
from upending security in the Indo-Pacific. A key problem is that all four
countries have allowed themselves to be seduced by the Chinese narrative that
economic relations can be separated from geopolitics.

China’s trade surplus, which reached a record $676.4 billion last year, is now
the main engine of its economy. Without it, Chinese growth would likely stall,
especially as President Xi Jinping strengthens state control over private
companies. This would also hinder China’s ability to invest in its military and
finance its aggressive maneuvers in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

And yet the US and India are major contributors to China’s trade surplus. The US
leads the way: its trade deficit with China swelled by more than 25% in 2021, to
$396.6 billion, and now comprises over 58% of China’s total surplus. India’s
trade deficit with China – which hit $77 billion in the 12 months through this
March – exceeds its defense budget, even as the two countries are locked in a
dangerous military confrontation on their long Himalayan frontier.

China’s stealth encroachments on some Indian border areas in 2020 triggered
deadly clashes, setting in motion a buildup of forces and border infrastructure
that continues to this day. This should have been a wake-up call for Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had been so committed to appeasing China that
he was blindsided by its aggression. But India’s large and growing trade deficit
with China suggests that he is still asleep.

Australia and Japan have similarly built up significant dependency on Chinese
trade. China accounts for nearly one-third of Australia’s international trade
and is Japan’s largest export market. Moreover, both countries are members of
the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. For them, enabling
China to shape trade rules in the Indo-Pacific is apparently a small price to
pay for the economic benefits of increased regional commerce.

Rather than continuing to underwrite China’s economic and geopolitical power,
the Quad should be making economic cooperation – including increased trade among
its members – a central feature of its agenda. Unfortunately, though Biden
has pledged to unveil an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework covering everything
from infrastructure to the digital economy, his administration’s unwillingness
to commit more resources to the region or offer regional partners better access
to US markets severely limits the initiative’s potential. Moreover, Biden has
pushed an expansive Quad agenda covering topics that have nothing to do with the
group’s core objectives – everything from climate change to COVID-19 vaccine
delivery to supply-chain resilience.

America’s deepening proxy conflict with Russia further muddies the strategic
picture. Biden is the third successive US president to commit to shifting
America’s primary strategic focus to Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific. But the
Ukraine war – which he believes “could continue for a long time” – may well
cause him, like his predecessors, not to complete that pivot.

The war might also spur Biden to take a more conciliatory approach to China.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden had begun to ease pressure on China.
He effectively let China off the hook for both obscuring COVID-19’s origins and
failing to meet its commitments under the 2020 “phase one” trade deal with the
US. He also dropped fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of the
military-linked Chinese tech giant Huawei. US sanctions over China’s Muslim
gulag remain essentially symbolic.

Now, as Biden attempts to ensure that Xi does not offer Russian President
Vladimir Putin an economic lifeline, thereby neutralizing the impact of Western
sanctions, he is likely to adopt an even more conciliatory approach. Already,
the US Trade Representative has reinstated exemptions from Trump-era tariffs on
352 products imported from China. And now the White House is considering a
broader reduction of tariffs on non-strategic goods from China.

The Quad can hold as many leaders’ summits as it wants, but without a clear
strategic vision – and an agenda to match – it will have little impact. The
group’s purpose is to act as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism and ensure a
stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. At its May 24 summit, all other
issues should take a backseat to this objective.

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

WHY SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA MAY NOT WORK

FEATURED

Posted on May 2, 2022 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR, THE HILL

The unprecedented U.S.-led Western sanctions against Russia have been likened
to economic weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that would ultimately destroy the
Russian economy. In reality, the sanctions are like a double-edged sword — they
inflict pain on Russia but also impose costs on their imposers.

The West, in fact, is caught in a trap: The sanctions and the deepening
conflict, by helping to raise global commodity and energy prices, translate
into higher revenues for Moscow in spite of a significant decrease in its
exports. And the higher international prices, by fueling inflation, mean
political trouble at home for those behind the sanctions.

Look at another paradox: Despite Russia being cut off from the world’s financial
arteries, the Russian ruble has dramatically recovered through state
intervention. But, as if to signal that Japan is paying a price for following
the U.S. lead on Russia, the Japanese yen (the world’s third-most-traded
currency) has sunk to a 20-year low against the U.S. dollar, ranking this year
as the worst performing of the 41 currencies tracked — worse than the ruble.

Meanwhile, the runaway inflation and supply-chain disruptions are threatening
Western corporate profits, while the interest-rate hikes to rein in inflation
make a bad situation worse for consumers. With economic trouble looming large,
April became the worst month for Wall Street since the pandemic-triggered March
2020 plunge. The S&P 500 fell 8.8 percent in April.

In the first two months of the war in Ukraine, those imposing the sanctions
ironically helped Russia to nearly double its revenues to about €62 billion from
selling fossil fuels to them, according to a report of a Finland-registered
think tank, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. The top 18
importers, with the sole exception of China, were the sanctions imposers, with
the European Union (EU) alone accounting for 71 percent of the purchases of
Russian fuels in this period.

While Turkey, South Korea and Japan also remain reliant on Russian energy
supplies, the EU’s imports of gas, oil and coal from Russia totaled around €44
billion in this two-month period, compared with about €140 billion for the whole
of 2021.

Russia, even as its economy takes a hit from the Western sanctions, is doing its
bit to keep international energy and commodity prices high, including by cutting
off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. Moscow could raise prices further
through broader counter-sanctions and yet manage to cushion its export earnings.

The fact is that Russia is the world’s richest country when it comes to natural
resources, including serving among the world’s largest exporters of natural gas,
uranium, nickel, oil, coal, aluminum, copper, wheat, fertilizers and precious
metals such as palladium, which is more precious than gold and used largely in
catalytic converters.

Through no fault of theirs, the real losers from the Russia-NATO conflict,
sadly, are the poorer countries, which are bearing the brunt of the economic
fallout. From Peru to Sri Lanka, rising fuel, food and fertilizer prices have
triggered violent street protests, which in some states have spiraled into
continuing political turmoil. The debt woes of many poor nations have deepened.

In employing the full range of its economic weaponry, the West sought
to unleash “shock and awe” on Russia, as if to underscore that sanctions are a
form of war. But like armed conflict, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
illustrates, sanctions are unpredictable in shaping outcomes and often lead
to unintended or undesirable consequences.

Squeezing a major power, especially one that has the world’s largest
nuclear-weapons arsenal, with a raft of harsh sanctions is fraught with danger,
especially as increasingly sophisticated and heavier Western weapons pour into
Ukraine, with the United States also supplying battlefield intelligence,
including targeting data.

Almost every day brings a fresh reminder that this conflict is not just about
the control of Ukraine or its future status. Rather, this is a full-fledged new
Cold War between Washington and Moscow, with Europe as the theater of the
growing confrontation. President Biden’s strategy of Containment 2.0 against
Moscow is designed to ensnare Russia in a military quagmire in Ukraine, trigger
the collapse of the Russian economy and bring about the overthrow of President
Vladimir Putin.

As the war has progressed, Biden has become bolder, including deepening
America’s involvement in it. Biden’s implicit call for regime change in Moscow
and his administration’s publicly declared goal of a “weakened” Russia, however,
run counter to what the president said about two weeks into the war: “Direct
confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive
to prevent.”

Unfortunately, there has been little American debate on whether sanctions can
weaken Russia or whether the generous military assistance to Ukraine can really
bog down the Russian military in a protracted conflict. What if, instead of a
weakened Russia, a nationalistic backlash spawns a more militarily assertive,
neo-imperial Russia?

After its initial missteps that resulted in heavy Russian casualties, Russia is
now militarily focused on consolidating its control in the resource-rich east
and south of Ukraine. Russia has carved out a land corridor to Crimea and gained
control of regions that hold 90 percent of Ukraine’s energy resources, including
all its offshore oil and much of its critical port infrastructure. The Ukrainian
ports on the Sea of Azov and four-fifths of Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline are
now with Russia, which earlier established control over the Kerch Strait that
connects those two seas.

Can the flood of weapons the West is sending to Ukraine undo these new military
realities? If Russia stays focused on narrow military objectives centered on
establishing a buffer zone in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s south and east, it
could avert a quagmire, while remaining free to continue systematically
targeting military infrastructure across that expansive country.

Let’s be clear: Sanctions historically have worked better against small,
vulnerable states than large or powerful ones. But they have rarely produced
timely change. The current Western sanctions could take years to seriously hurt
the Russian economy.

The irony is that, despite employing all possible coercive economic instruments
against Russia and making it difficult to negotiate an end to the war, the Biden
White House doesn’t believe that sanctions alone will work, which explains why
it has increasingly turned to weapons supply, including asking Congress for a
staggering $33 billion in additional military and economic funds to fuel the
conflict and stymie Russian war objectives.

But the sanctions, by signaling the advent of a new era of U.S.-led
unilateralism, are likely to weaken and ultimately even undermine the
Western-controlled global financial architecture that they are meant to defend.
The sweeping sanctions, by spurring broader concerns about the weaponization of
finance and its implications for any country that dared to cross a U.S. red
line, have created a new incentive for non-Western states to explore
establishing parallel arrangements. China will not only lead this process but
also is set to emerge as the real winner of the NATO-Russia conflict.

Biden’s belief that “this war could continue for a long time” is backed by
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, who testified that he
expects it to last years. But as the conflict drags on and the boomerang effects
of the sanctions deepen the cost-of-living crisis, the divides in the Western
camp will widen and “Ukraine fatigue” will set in.

The West will be left with little choice but to negotiate with Putin to end the
conflict, as predicted by Javier Solana, a former NATO chief who also served as
Spain’s foreign minister. Such negotiations will be vital to halt Ukraine’s
destruction and avert Europe from paying the main price.

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

Posted in Energy-Environment, International Security

WASHINGTON’S CLUMSY ATTEMPTS TO BULLY INDIA MUST STOP

FEATURED

Posted on April 21, 2022 by Chellaney

Undermining its relationship with New Delhi will cost the U.S. dearly

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Joe Biden meets virtually with Narendra Modi in Washington on April 11: It is a
challenging time for U.S.-India relations. © AP

U.S. President Joe Biden’s concerted effort to cajole nations into joining the
American-led coalition against Russia recalls the famous words of the legendary
anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, who said the grievous mistake some
Westerners make is to insist that “their enemies should be our enemies.”

In the conflict between the West and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,
much of the non-Western world has declined to take sides. So why has Biden
especially bristled at India’s independent stance when the world’s major
non-Western democracies — from Brazil and Mexico to South Africa and Indonesia —
have all chartered a course of neutrality?

Because India is the world’s largest democracy, its neutrality undermines
Biden’s narrative that the conflict symbolizes a “battle between democracy and
autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one
governed by brute force.” Never mind that Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy’s regime is no less autocratic than Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s.

The fact is that whichever side the U.S. has armed over the decades was
invariably portrayed by it as “fighting for freedom” — from the anti-Soviet
Islamist guerrillas in Afghanistan from whom al-Qaida and the Taliban
evolved, to Syria’s anti-Bashar Assad jihadists who gave rise to ISIS. Biden’s
“new battle for freedom,” as he calls it, has led to increasingly sophisticated
Western weapons pouring into Ukraine, with the U.S. also supplying battlefield
intelligence, including targeting data.

Here’s the paradox: While seeking to co-opt New Delhi in his new Cold War with
Moscow, Biden has still not uttered a single word on China’s two-year-long
border aggression against India, which has triggered the largest Himalayan
buildup of rival forces in history. In keeping with Biden’s outreach to Beijing,
his State Department, equating the victim with the aggressor, has urged India
and China to find “a peaceful resolution of the border disputes.”

India holds more annual military exercises with America, its largest trading
partner and an increasingly important strategic partner, than any other country.
U.S. arms sales to India went from near zero in 2008 to over $20 billion in
2020. India’s almost $150-billion goods and services trade with the U.S. dwarfs
New Delhi’s $12.8 billion trade with Russia, its largest defense partner.

Indian and U.S. soldiers take part in a joint combat exercise in Ranikhet,
India, in September 2016: India holds more annual military exercises with
America than any other country. © Reuters

Team Biden’s growing warnings to countries intent on sitting out the new Cold
War to pick a side or face economic consequences could undermine the blossoming
partnership with India, which stayed neutral even when the U.S. and its allies
invaded Iraq or waged regime-change war in Libya. Biden’s top economic adviser,
Brian Deese, touched a raw nerve in India when he threatened that “the costs and
consequences” for it would be “significant and long-term.”

However, the more positive tone emanating from Washington following the latest
U.S.-India discussions suggests that the White House may have secured an Indian
assurance on “sanctions compliance,” as an American background briefer phrased
it.

On April 11, Biden held an hourlong virtual discussion with Prime Minister
Narendra Modi as a prelude to the “two-plus-two” discussions that Defense
Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken jointly had with
the visiting Indian defense and foreign ministers.

Encouraged by how America’s Iran sanctions have helped undercut India’s
relationship with Tehran, Biden sees his Russia sanctions as opening a major
opportunity to undermine the traditionally strong New Delhi-Moscow ties.

The U.S. used its Iran sanctions to deprive India of cheaper oil and turn it
into the world’s largest importer of American energy. The main beneficiary of
those sanctions has been India’s rival, China, which, without facing American
reprisals, has been buying Iranian oil at a hefty discount, besides becoming
Iran’s security partner and top investor.

Now Washington seems intent on employing its Russia sanctions to downgrade
Indian defense ties with Moscow, with Austin calling on India to cut defense
transactions with Russia and turn to America for all its military requirements.
Indeed, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told Congress that the U.S. sees
“a great opportunity” for defense sales to India to “surge.”

Energy purchases and payments are exempt from America’s Russia sanctions. Yet,
as if heeding Biden’s call to India not to accelerate or increase imports of
heavily discounted Russian oil, the state-run Indian Oil Corporation, the
country’s leading refiner, recently dropped Russia’s flagship Urals crude from
its newest tender. And Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, by saying that “we
won’t be in the top 10” buyers of Russian oil, has signaled that India will not
significantly go beyond its traditionally modest imports of Russian energy.

Still, Biden is not easing pressure on India. While appeasing communist China,
his administration is paradoxically trying to employ human-rights issues as
leverage against India. After the two-plus-two discussions, Blinken took a swipe
at India, alleging “a rise in human rights abuses.” But barely nine months
earlier, Blinken had sung a different tune, saying “both of our democracies are
works in progress.”

These are challenging times for U.S.-India relations. Undermining what should be
America’s most important strategic partnership in Asia makes little strategic
sense, especially if the U.S. wishes to genuinely pivot to the Indo-Pacific.

India’s neighborhood is already troubled, with a crisis-torn Sri Lanka
suspending foreign debt payments and mounting Chinese repression triggering
fresh self-immolations in Tibet. Yet, Biden surrendered Afghanistan to the
Taliban terrorists, thereby strengthening Pakistan at India’s expense. And he is
pushing military-ruled Myanmar into China’s arms with his sanctions policy.

Biden’s overriding focus on punishing Russia threatens to exacerbate India’s
regional-security challenges, especially by aiding the further rise of an
expansionist China. The U.S.-led sanctions will effectively put Russia, the
world’s richest country in natural resources, in the pocket of a resource-hungry
China.

The main brunt of the rise of a more powerful and aggressive China will be borne
by its neighbors, especially India. Unlike Japan and Australia, which are under
the U.S. security and nuclear umbrella, India must deal with China on its own,
as the current Himalayan military crisis shows.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

CAN PUNISHING RUSSIA BECOME AN END IN ITSELF?

FEATURED

Posted on April 9, 2022 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, THE HILL

Getty Images

President Biden’s gaffes during his recent European tour – from suggesting to
American troops in Poland that they would be in war-torn Ukraine and saying NATO
would respond “in kind” if Russia used chemical weapons to seemingly calling
for regime change in Moscow – led to considerable clean-up efforts by his
team. Biden, by his own admission, has a record of being a “gaffe machine.”

But the president’s misstatements on issues of war and peace in this perilous
time carry significant risks, which explains why his top officials were quick to
walk back his apparent regime-change call, lest it further erode U.S.-Russia
relations. U.S.-Russia ties are already at an all-time low.

More fundamentally, Biden’s propensity for making misstatements that land his
administration in difficult situations is detracting attention from the larger
question of whether the president has a strategy to end the war in Ukraine.

Biden’s statements, in fact, are making it increasingly difficult to negotiate
an end to the war. Washington’s overriding focus on punishing Russia for its
brazen invasion suggests that top U.S. officials are not thinking of how to
terminate the war, even as Moscow and Kyiv hold talks.

Punishing Russia for invading Ukraine, while essential, has ceased to be a means
to an end and has apparently become an end in itself.

This may explain why Biden has discarded some key tenets of diplomacy, including
avoiding insulting another country’s head of state or conveying an unintended
policy message to preserve space for direct negotiations.

Biden has increasingly personalized the conflict by hurling a steady stream of
insults at Russian President Vladimir Putin, while vowing to make him “a pariah
on the international stage.” In the days before declaring, “For God’s sake, this
man cannot remain in power,” Biden called Putin “a butcher,” “a murderous
dictator,” “a pure thug” and “a war criminal” — a term whose past use against a
foreign leader (for example, Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad) was usually accompanied by a U.S.-led campaign to topple him from
power.

The use of aggressive language began long before the Ukraine war. Just weeks
after entering the White House, Biden said Putin is “a killer,” vowing that the
Russian leader will “pay a price” for allegedly meddling in the 2020 U.S.
presidential election.

By contrast, Biden has treated Chinese President Xi Jinping with respect.
Despite Xi’s coverup of the origins of the COVID-19 virus, his Asian
expansionism and his Muslim gulag (which represents the largest mass
incarceration of people on religious grounds since Adolf Hitler), the president
has not hurled any personal insult at him. Nor has he imposed any sanctions on
the Chinese leader or those in his inner circle.

The unintended consequence of Biden’s vilification of Putin is to seriously
crimp space for the U.S. and Russia to reach a modus vivendi to rein in their
conflict. Putin now has a greater reason to double down and continue his
invasion until the Russian forces carve out a strategic buffer against NATO that
effectively partitions Ukraine into two, with the Dnieper River possibly serving
as the approximate dividing line.

Biden, going beyond the traditional tools of deterrence and diplomacy, is
relying entirely on his unprecedented sanctions to shape the behavior of a rival
nuclear power, which has a long record of enduring economic hardship. In the
post-World War II period, the U.S. has generally relied on sanctions to help
bring weak states to heel. Regime change likewise has been imposed only on weak,
vulnerable nations.

Squeezing a major power with a raft of harsh sanctions is fraught with danger.
The unforeseen consequences could trigger an escalating spiral leading to
devastating armed conflict. It was U.S. sanctions against Imperial Japan that
ultimately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading to the Pacific war and
eventually the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Today’s Biden-initiated Western sanctions on Russia are the largest, coordinated
punitive measures ever rolled out against any country in history. But just
as Biden’s threat to impose such sanctions failed to deter Russia from invading
Ukraine, their actual imposition, far from chastening Moscow, is likely to
resurrect the Iron Curtain and spur the emergence of a remilitarized,
neo-imperial Russia.

The U.S.-led sanctions that followed Russia’s 2014 Crimea annexation, while
fueling Russian nationalism, compelled Moscow to pivot to China, turning two
natural competitors into close strategic partners. Those sanctions
also led Russia to build a parallel payments system that has now helped take the
sting out of the recent exit of Visa and Mastercard, thereby setting an example
for other nations to invest in building their own payments infrastructure.

Today, the rise in international oil and gas prices, by directly contributing to
inflation and political trouble at home, is underscoring that sanctions also
impose costs on their imposers. Those costs would escalate and possibly even
engender recession if the cycle of sanctions, counter-sanctions and fresh
sanctions substantially diminished Russian energy exports.

In a further reminder that sanctions are blunt instruments and often
produce unintended and undesirable consequences, the West’s comprehensive hybrid
war against Russia is helping boost Putin’s popularity at home. According to
a poll by the Levada Center, an independent, Moscow-based pollster that has been
designated a “foreign agent” in Russia, Putin’s approval ratings shot up from 69
percent in January to 83 percent in late March.

Biden’s primary strategic focus ought to be on preserving America’s global
preeminence. For years, the U.S. waged self-debilitating wars in the Islamic
world, allowing China to emerge as its primary challenger globally. Now, as it
pours military resources into Europe, America’s renewed focus on European
security threatens to distract it from its long-term strategic objectives.

After losing Afghanistan to sandal-wearing terrorists, Biden should not allow
the impulse for revenge against Moscow to drive his foreign policy. Ukraine is
Europe’s problem, and he should exert pressure on Europeans to take greater
ownership of their security so that the U.S. can single-mindedly focus on
arresting its relative decline.

If a war-torn Ukraine were to become another Syria or Libya, the grave
implications for Europe’s security would extend far beyond the refugee flow
turning into a torrent. In such a scenario, some of the lethal arms the West is
pouring into Ukraine could eventually flow back westward to haunt European
nations’ internal security.Behind the negotiations, Russia’s elites are pulling
strings of their ownAs social media turns 25, we’re still perplexed about
regulating bad actors

The current crisis represents the most dangerous period since the end of the
Cold War. Stable Washington-Moscow relations can help to avert a wider conflict
and reach a NATO-Russia agreement on Ukraine modeled on the 1955 treaty under
which Austria established itself as a buffer state between the East and West and
declared its neutrality.

More broadly, the U.S. should seek to drive a wedge in the China-Russia axis,
instead of becoming a bridge that unites them. The deepening China-Russia
entente is perhaps the biggest U.S. foreign-policy failure of the post-Cold War
era.

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

Posted in International Security, WMD

CHINA CONTINUES ITS TERRITORIAL ADVANCES IN ASIA

FEATURED

Posted on March 29, 2022 by Chellaney
Chinese troops at their mountaintop bunkers in Ladakh’s Pangong region in
February 2021: what stands out is the speed and scale with which China is
redrawing facts on the ground without firing a shot. © AP

Strategy relies on a steady progression of actions to outmaneuver rival states

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is helping to obscure China’s expansionism in Asia,
where it continues to redraw its land and maritime borders and exert growing
pressure on Taiwan. Unlike Russia’s frontal military assault, China’s preferred
mode of expansionism is salami-slicing, or altering the status quo in its favor,
little by little.

In the latest example, the Chinese government’s news website Tibet.cn reported
earlier this month that the People’s Liberation Army had quietly completed the
624 villages that China had set out to build in disputed or captured Himalayan
border areas.

China’s militarized villages in the Himalayan borderlands, that India, Bhutan
and Nepal consider to be within their own national boundaries, are the
equivalent of its artificial islands that it is turning into forward military
bases in the South China Sea.

What is remarkable about its village-building spree in the Himalayas is that
China has reportedly managed to complete it despite the specter of armed
conflict raised by its ongoing military confrontation with India. The Indian and
Chinese militaries have remained locked in multiple Himalayan standoffs for the
past 23 months after China stealthily encroached on some key border areas in the
northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh, leading to the first deadly
Chinese-Indian military clashes since 1975.

Recent talks to defuse the military crisis, including between military
commanders and later between the foreign ministers, made little headway. Chinese
Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s New Delhi trip on Mar. 25 was the highest-level visit
between the two countries since the standoffs in the frigid Himalayan heights
began.

Effective control is the most vital element of a strong territorial claim in
international law. This explains why establishing new facts on the ground,
whether in the form of high-altitude artificial villages with planted settlers
or human-made islands, is integral to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s territorial
aggrandizement.

Xi’s expansionism has not spared even tiny Bhutan, with a population of barely
800,000. In disregard of a 1998 bilateral treaty that obligated its parties “not
to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border,” several
of China’s militarized villages have come up in Bhutan’s northern and western
borderlands.

More broadly, China’s territorial revisionism follows a cabbage strategy:
gradually wrapping a claimed or contested area in multiple layers of security,
like the concentric leaves of a cabbage, thereby denying access to any rival.

Just like the concentric layers of occupation around the South China Sea islands
by Chinese fishing boats, coastguard ships and naval ships, expansionism in the
Himalayas has involved bringing in people from afar to settle in desolate,
previously uninhabited areas, with civilian militias, paramilitary police and
regular PLA forces forming multilayered security.

China’s strategy of territorial creep relies on a steady progression of actions
to outmaneuver a rival state, in keeping with the ancient Chinese game of Go, in
which the goal is to incrementally gain more territory through unrelenting
attacks on the opponent’s weak points. Before initiating a jurisdictional claim
through a rising tempo of incursions, Beijing has a history of constructing a
dispute.

In the East China Sea, China succeeded in getting the world to recognize the
existence of a dispute over the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands by steadily
increasing the frequency and duration of its intrusions into their territorial
waters and airspace and by popularizing the islands’ Chinese name Diaoyu.

Chinese marine surveillance ship cruising in the East China Sea near Senkaku
Islands in February 2021. (Photo by Hitoshi Nakama) © Kyodo

Even as Beijing started dispatching armed ships and larger vessels, Japan has
recoiled from purely defensive steps like building a lighthouse on the Senkakus.
Indeed, no Japanese defense minister has conducted an aerial survey of the
uninhabited Senkakus in order not to provoke China.

By keeping opponents off-balance, Xi’s strategy bears all the hallmarks of
brinkmanship, including reliance on stealth, surprise and an indifference to the
risks of military escalation. Camouflaging offense as defense, it casts the
burden of starting a war on the other side.

In international law, a territorial claim must be based on continuous and
peaceful exercise of sovereignty over the territory concerned. But even after an
international arbitral tribunal’s 2016 ruling invalidated its territorial claims
in the South China Sea, Beijing imposed “might makes right” in that region.

In more recent years, however, China has increasingly employed new domestic law
both as a cover for unlawful actions and to underpin its territorial claims in
international law. Through domestic legislation, Xi has sought to legitimize
Chinese actions ranging from the human-made militarized islands and new
administrative districts in the South China Sea to the Himalayan border
villages.

China’s shadowy expansionism in the Himalayas extends far beyond the 624 border
villages whose construction a 2017 Chinese government document unveiled. To
project power and enable more rapid movement of troops, weaponry and equipment,
Beijing has pursued frenzied construction of new military infrastructure,
including in disputed borderlands. New Chinese roads through Bhutanese territory
have opened an axis against India’s most vulnerable point — the Siliguri
Corridor, which connects the country’s far northeast to the Indian heartland.

What stands out is the speed and scale with which China is redrawing facts on
the ground without firing a shot. China’s territorial creep is contributing to
increasing insecurity in Asia, the world’s most dynamic region economically.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

PUTIN’S WAR AND THE MIRAGE OF THE RULES-BASED ORDER

FEATURED

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Chellaney

For all the talk of a rules-based order, the world’s rule-makers have reverted
unhesitatingly to unilateralism during the Ukraine war. While this will leave
Russia and the US worse off, it will enable China to advance its interests and
bolster its global influence.

By Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s unprecedented response, represent a
watershed in international relations, marking the formal end of the post-Cold
War era and setting the stage for seismic geopolitical and geo-economic shifts.
But one defining feature of international relations will remain: to paraphrase
Thucydides, the strong will continue to do what they can, and the weak will
continue to suffer what they must.

It is true that leaders and observers around the world often speak of
strengthening or defending the “rules-based international order.” But that order
was always more aspirational than real. Countries that possess military or
economic might reserve the right not only to make and enforce the rules, but
also to break them.

It is when the rule-makers disagree that the greatest risks arise. The Ukraine
war – the first conflict of the post-Cold War period that pits great powers
against each other – is a case in point. On one side, Russia has been carrying
out a brutal conventional military assault on Ukraine, in an apparent effort to
bring the country – which Russian President Vladimir Putin believes is rightly
part of his country – back into the Kremlin fold. On the other side, NATO, led
by the United States, has been waging a comprehensive hybrid war against Russia.

The West’s war has included the supply of huge quantities of weapons to
Ukrainian forces: US President Joe Biden alone has authorized the transfer of
$1.35 billion worth of lethal weapons since the war began, with much more to
come. The West has also implemented ever-escalating economic and financial
sanctions, virtually expelling Russia from the Western-led financial order and
sequestering the assets of many wealthy Russians. And it has sought to shape
international opinion, with many countries now blocking access to Russian state
media.

For all the talk of a rules-based order, the world’s rule-makers have reverted
unhesitatingly to unilateralism. The risks are legion. The flood of weapons the
West is sending to Ukraine – a country with a long history of weak governance
and widespread corruption – could eventually flow westward, fueling organized
crime, narcotics trafficking, and terrorist violence across Europe. And the Iron
Curtain’s revival may hasten the emergence of a militarily robust, neo-imperial
Russia. Putin, who has called the Soviet Union’s collapse a “tragedy” and the
end of “historical Russia,” has indicated that Kazakhstan, like Ukraine, is not
a country.

And it is not just Russia that will become isolated. The Ukraine war could
trigger the unraveling of decades of broader global economic engagement, long
viewed as a key deterrent to great-power conflict.

Of course, the notion that countries would rather trade than invade has never
been unassailable. Economic interdependence has not stopped China, for example,
from engaging in relentless expansionism, from the South and East China Seas to
the Himalayas.

Even today, however, economic interdependence has forced rule-makers to exercise
some restraint. Despite the raft of financial and economic sanctions it has
imposed on Russia, Europe continues to support the Russian economy’s mainstay:
oil and gas exports. This undermines the West’s own mission, especially as the
confrontation drives up energy prices. But Europe’s longstanding dependence on
Russian energy supplies has left it with no good alternatives – at least for
now.

Such a tradeoff may not arise in the future. The European Union has already
vowed to eliminate its dependence on Russian energy by 2030. At the same time,
countries that want to uphold trade ties with Russia are seeking solutions
outside Western-controlled channels. For example, India is buying Russian oil
with rupees. Similar moves elsewhere – for example, Saudi Arabia is considering
renminbi-based oil sales to China – threaten to erode the US dollar’s global
supremacy.

This is probably the beginning of a broader bifurcation of the global economy.
At a time when economic power has shifted eastward but the West still controls
the world’s financial architecture – including the main international payments
system, the primary currencies for trade and financial flows, and the leading
credit-ratings agencies – the establishment of parallel arrangements seems
imminent.

China, which dwarfs Russia in terms of both economic power and military
spending, will likely lead this process. In fact, China is set to emerge as the
real winner of the NATO-Russia conflict. An overstretched America’s renewed
preoccupation with European security will create strategic space for China to
press its strategic objectives – its leaders have been as clear about absorbing
Taiwan as Putin was about claiming Ukraine – and bolster its global influence,
at the expense of the US.

Chinese global dominance would amount to the final nail in the coffin of the
rules-based order. Since its establishment in 1949, the People’s Republic has
displayed blatant contempt for international law, more than doubling its land
mass by annexing Xinjiang and Tibet and currently detaining over a million
Muslims. Yet China has paid no tangible price. The Kremlin, for its part,
probably did not think twice about rejecting the International Court of Justice
order to suspend its military operations in Ukraine.

International law may be powerful against the powerless, but it is powerless
against the powerful. The League of Nations, created after World War I, failed
because it could not deter important powers from flouting international law. Its
beleaguered successor, the United Nations, may be facing a similar reckoning.
How can the UN Security Council fulfill its mandate of upholding international
peace and stability if its five veto-wielding permanent members are arrayed into
two opposing camps?

The world is headed for an era of greater upheaval. However it plays out, the
pretense of a shared commitment to international law will be the first casualty.

Posted in International Security, WMD

THE NEW US-RUSSIA COLD WAR WILL ACCELERATE CHINA’S RISE

FEATURED

Posted on March 19, 2022 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, THE HILL

President Biden has made clear that the United States has embarked on a strategy
of Containment 2.0 against Russia with what he calls “the broadest sanctions in
history.” But Biden is unlikely to have factored in the possibility of a
boomerang effect. The unintended consequences could bifurcate the global
economy, polarize international politics and strengthen China at America’s
expense.

Over the years, the relative ease of imposing economic sanctions has turned them
into a grossly overused tool of American diplomacy. The efficacy of U.S.
sanctions has been eroding with the relative decline of American power, and a
growing body of evidence suggests that such measures have often proved
counterproductive to America’s own economic and geopolitical interests.

The U.S. has virtually ejected Russia from the Western-led financial order at a
time when economic power is moving east. Expelling the world’s 11th-largest
economy from an order that the U.S. seeks to uphold could intensify the search
for a viable alternative system that isn’t dominated by the West.

What is more certain is that the new U.S.-led hybrid war against Russia,
centered on unparalleled sanctions, will help deepen the undeclared
Beijing-Moscow axis against Washington and make China the big winner financially
and geopolitically, thereby aiding its expansion of economic and military power.

The West’s heavy economic penalties on Moscow, including unplugging key Russian
banks from the international SWIFT payments system, are set to turn China into
Russia’s banker, enabling it to reap vast profits. In structural terms too,
Russia’s sanctions pain will be China’s gain: To help insulate itself from
similar Western sanctions if it were to invade Taiwan, Beijing is seeking to
boost the payments and reserve role of the yuan and the international use of its
competitor to the SWIFT network — the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, or
CIPS. The West’s Russia sanctions are likely to provide a fillip to both
efforts.

Furthermore, the sanctions have opened the path for China to build an energy
safety net through greater land-based imports so that it can withstand a
potential U.S.-led energy embargo or blockade in the event of a Chinese invasion
of Taiwan. The re-imposition of sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is
welcome news for Beijing, which is seeking to further boost energy imports from
Russia after concluding new oil and gas deals worth a whopping $117.5
billion during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Beijing visit last month.

Here’s the paradox: China has faced no Western financial or other meaningful
sanctions despite swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the
South China Sea, expanding its land frontiers in the Himalayas and establishing
a Muslim gulag with more than one million detainees in what two successive U.S.
administrations have called “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.” By
contrast, as Biden’s two rounds of sanctions last year underscored, Russia has
remained an easy target for escalating American sanctions over the past decade
because the U.S. has little stake in the Russian economy.

In this light, the West’s targeting of just Russia is certain to make China the
main beneficiary of the sanctions, thus aiding Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
“China dream” of supplanting the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power.

The new Biden-led sanctions against Russia will likely be undercut by Xi’s
regime — unless the West goes after China too. But that possibility seems
remote.

As part of a diplomatic strategy to extract important concessions from the West,
Beijing will play the same cat-and-mouse game with Washington over the Russia
sanctions that it has long played vis-à-vis the North Korea sanctions. It will
pretend to cooperate with the U.S. while quietly undermining the Western
sanctions, including by helping Russia to find China-centered financial
workarounds.

The outrage over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should not obscure one key fact:
China, with about a 10 times larger population and economy than Russia, poses
the biggest challenge to America. Whereas Russia’s strategic priorities and
ambitions are concentrated in its neighborhood, China is working to supplant the
U.S. as the dominant global power.

As FBI Director Christopher Wray said last month, “There is just no country that
presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation and our economic security
than China.” And the “scale of their hacking program…is greater than every other
country combined.” China has expanded its spying in the U.S. to such an
extent, according to Wray, that the FBI is launching one new counterintelligence
investigation on average every 12 hours.

For China, whose global image is at a historic low, the new Washington-Moscow
cold war (with Russia reemerging as the “evil empire” in Western perceptions)
couldn’t come at a better time. Xi has shown an increasing appetite for taking
major risks, believing China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to
modify the international order in its favor before it confronts a demographic
crisis, stalled economic growth and an unfavorable global environment.

Putin, through his war of aggression, is unwittingly helping Beijing, including
distracting the U.S. from its China challenge. The war, which has the makings of
a drawn-out and dangerous confrontation between Russia and NATO, will help Xi’s
pursuit of his “China dream.”

Biden is likely to live up to his pledge to make Russia pay “dearly,
economically and strategically.” Taming a largely hostile Ukraine could mire
Russia in a quagmire, especially as Western lethal weapons continue to flow to
Ukrainian resistance forces. Biden’s request to Congress for a staggering $10
billion in additional Ukrainian assistance shows that his Containment 2.0
strategy includes an Afghanistan 2.0 plan to replicate in Ukraine the CIA-led
covert war of the 1980s that ultimately drove Soviet forces out from
Afghanistan.

America’s increasing entanglement in European security, however, will open
greater space for Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific, a region that will
shape the new world order. In fact, U.S. policy, instead of driving a wedge
between Russia and China, is serving as a bridge that unites them against an
overstretched America.

More fundamentally, U.S. policy has learned little from its strategic blunder
in aiding China’s rise under successive American presidents from Richard Nixon
to Barack Obama, which has resulted in that country today posing a military,
economic and technological challenge on a scale America has not seen before.
Almost every time the U.S. has slapped any country with sanctions in the
post-Cold War period, it has helped advance Chinese commercial and strategic
interests.

The Russia sanctions, although they hold no promise of changing Putin’s
behavior, constitute one of the biggest gifts American policymakers have
delivered to Beijing. By effectively putting Russia, the world’s richest country
in natural resources, in Beijing’s pocket, the sanctions will yield major
dividends for a resource-hungry China, including allowing it to dictate the
terms of the bilateral relationship and secure greater access to Russian
military technology.

After Biden’s Afghan debacle and failure to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,
could Taiwan become his next foreign policy disaster? Xi will likely bide his
time and wait for an opportune moment before moving on Taiwan, taking a
distracted U.S. by utter surprise and bringing down the curtain on the West’s
long ascendancy.

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

Posted in International Security

THE US AND INDIA IN A NEW WORLD

FEATURED

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Chellaney

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, THE SPECTATOR

The world’s center of gravity is shifting to the Indo-Pacific. The new global
order will be shaped by developments in a sprawling region where interstate
rivalries and tensions are sharpening geopolitical risks. Building a stable
balance of power in the Indo-Pacific has become more important than ever, but
China’s territorial and maritime revisionism, and its heavy-handed use of
economic and military power, are causing instability and undercutting
international norms.

Against this background, the expanding strategic partnership between the world’s
most powerful and most populous democracies — the United States and India — has
become pivotal to equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific. With India’s closer
integration, the four-nation Quad — Australia, India, Japan and the US — is
blossoming as a strategic coalition of the leading Indo-Pacific democracies.

The Quad is central to the US’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy. As
American preeminence erodes, the US must augment its power with that of allies
and partners. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi famously mocked the Quad in 2018
as a “headline-grabbing idea” that will dissipate “like the sea foam in the
Pacific or Indian Ocean.” Instead, and thanks to China’s expansionist policies,
the Quad continues to gain strength — despite the new, US-initiated AUKUS
alliance with Australia and Britain. The US cannot build an Asian power
equilibrium without India, Japan and Australia — and they cannot build it
without the US.

Today, the US is also close to achieving a long-sought goal: a “soft alliance”
with India that needs no treaty. The US has already emerged as the largest arms
seller to India, leaving its traditional supplier, Russia, far behind. US
defense transactions with India went from near zero in 2008 to over $20 billion
in 2020. Furthermore, India has signed the four “foundational” agreements that
the US maintains with all its close defense partners. These accords range from
providing reciprocal access to each other’s military facilities and securing
military communications to sharing geospatial data from airborne and satellite
sensors.

India, a founder and leader of the Nonaligned Movement that sought to chart a
neutral course in the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, now makes little
mention of nonalignment. Instead, it is multi-aligned and building close
partnerships with democratic powers from Asia to Europe. India now holds more
annual military exercises with America than any other country.

The main driver of the growing US-India strategic collaboration is China’s
neo-imperial expansionism. President Xi Jinping believes that China has a narrow
window of strategic opportunity to modify the international order in its favor
before it confronts a demographic crisis, stalled economic growth and an
unfavorable global environment. Accordingly, Xi has shown an increasing appetite
for taking major risks.

American and Indian strategic priorities regarding China are, however, not the
same. The US has never considered fighting a land war against China. The primary
American objective is non-military: to counter China’s geopolitical, economic
and ideological challenges. By contrast, China poses a pressing military
challenge for India. The spotlight on the Chinese threats against Taiwan has
helped obscure China’s more serious military confrontation with India along the
long Himalayan frontier — a confrontation that is still raging.

The US and India, however, are united by other shared strategic interests. These
include the rule of law, respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty,
freedom of navigation, peaceful dispute resolution and a rules-based
Indo-Pacific free of coercion. The biggest challenge to all these principles
comes from China.

In May 2020, a shocked India discovered that China had stealthily encroached
on several key border areas in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh. The
discovery led to the first deadly Chinese-Indian military clashes in the
Himalayas since 1975, including China’s first combat deaths in over four
decades. The Indian and Chinese militaries remain locked in multiple standoffs,
and the steadily increasing introduction of new weapons and troops by both sides
has amplified the risk of renewed border skirmishing, if not outright war. Xi
has picked a border fight with India that China cannot win. A war between these
two nuclear- armed demographic giants is likely to end in a bloody stalemate
with heavy losses on both sides. This is not the only instance in which Xi’s
aggressive policies have proved to be counterproductive.

For India, China’s territorial aggression proves the importance of building
close strategic collaboration with the US and likeminded powers. India today
seems more determined than ever to frustrate China’s ambition to achieve Asian
hegemony. By locking horns with China in tense military standoffs despite the
risk of a full-scale war, India has openly challenged Chinese capability and
power in a way no other power has done in this century. Since 2020, when India
let Australia join the annual Exercise Malabar war games with the American,
Japanese and Indian navies, the Quad has possessed a platform for an annual
military exercise involving all its members.

Xi must now also contend with the strengthening US-India relationship. In a
pivot to Asia that much of the US media either ignored or derided, the Trump
administration gave India pride of place in its Indo-Pacific strategy. It also
instituted fundamental shifts in US policies on China and Pakistan, two close
allies whose strengthening strategic axis in southern Asia imposes high security
costs on India, including raising the specter of a two-front war. Trump reversed
the forty-five-year US policy of aiding China’s rise; with bipartisan support,
he designated China as a strategic rival and threat. His administration also cut
off security aid to Pakistan for not severing its ties with terrorist groups.

Relations between the Indo-Pacific’s two largest democratic powers thrived
during the Trump presidency. Trump built a personal rapport with India’s prime
minister Narendra Modi, with whom he shares a love for big audiences and
theatrics. Trump joined Modi’s September 2019 public rally in Houston, which was
attended by 59,000 Indian Americans and a number of US congressmen and senators.
Then, during his February 2020 standalone visit to India, Trump spoke at the
largest rally any American president has ever addressed — at home or abroad.

More than 100,000 people packed the world’s largest cricket stadium, in Modi’s
home state of Gujarat. “America loves India, America respects India, and America
will always be faithful and loyal friends to the Indian people,” Trump declared.
After returning home, Trump called India an “incredible country,” saying, “Our
relationship with India is extraordinary right now.”

The US and India are both bitterly polarized democracies. In each, rival
political forces are self-segregated into their own ideological silos. Trump and
Modi have faced similar accusations from critics. Both are accused of being
blinkered demagogues, of pursuing divisive policies and choosing populism over
constitutionalism. Each consciously avoided saying anything that could give a
handle to the other’s domestic critics.

President Biden, by contrast, entered the White House after criticizing Modi’s
government on issues like Kashmir and a new Indian law on citizenship for
non-Muslim refugees who had fled religious persecution in neighboring Islamic
countries. Biden’s election victory created uncertainty over the future
direction of US-India ties. Indeed, as a senator, Biden had spearheaded a
congressional sanctions move in 1992 that helped block Russia’s sale of
cryogenic-engine technology for India’s civilian space program, setting it back
many years.

Yet President Biden has sustained the momentum in the growth of the bilateral
relationship. As with tacit acceptances of Trump’s other unorthodox
foreign-policy initiatives, Biden has no choice but to recognize India’s
centrality in an Asian balance of power. Despite his party’s hostility to Modi
and Hindu nationalism, Biden’s interactions with Modi have been characterized by
ease and warmth. In September, Biden welcomed Modi to the White House as “my
friend” and said, “I’ve long believed that the US-India relationship can help us
solve an awful lot of global challenges.”

Booming US exports to India — one of the world’s fastest-growing markets
—reinforce bipartisan support in Washington for a closer partnership with New
Delhi. The US has rapidly become an important source of crude oil and petroleum
products for India, which is the world’s third-largest oil consumer after the US
and China. But the US and India are not entirely on the same page.

America’s self-inflicted defeat and humiliation in Afghanistan at the hands of a
Pakistan-backed terrorist militia have compounded India’s security challenges at
a time when it should be fully focused on countering China’s Himalayan
expansionism. Worse still, Team Biden, unlike the Trump administration, has
placed outreach to Beijing as a high priority, and has been wary of publicly
supporting India against Chinese aggression. The Democrats’ Russia fixation,
meanwhile, is only strengthening under Biden.

Nevertheless, India will continue to quietly gain greater salience in US policy
— especially as Russia and China deepen their entente. Instead of driving a
wedge between these two natural competitors, US policy has helped turn them into
close strategic partners. If the US is not to accelerate its relative decline
through strategic overreach, it needs India more than ever. It would be doubly
ironic, given Vice President Kamala Harris’s Indian heritage, if Biden did not
seize the opportunity to formalize the US’s de facto and deepening security
alliance with India.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2022 World
edition.

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

LEVERAGE WATER TREATY TO TAME PAKISTAN’S TERRORISM

FEATURED

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney, The Times of India

One paradox in Asia stands out: China, by occupying water-rich Tibetan Plateau,
dominates Asia’s water map, yet it refuses to enter into a water-sharing treaty
with any neighbour. But water-stressed India has a water-sharing treaty with
each of the two countries located downstream to it — Pakistan and Bangladesh.
And each of these treaties has set a new principle in international water law.

The 1996 Ganges treaty set a new standard by guaranteeing Bangladesh specific
cross-border flows in the critical dry season. And the 1960 Indus treaty with
Pakistan still remains the world’s most generous water-sharing arrangement, in
terms of both the sharing ratio and the total volume of cross-border flows.

Under this treaty of indefinite duration, India foolishly reserved 80.52% of the
aggregate water flows in the six-river Indus system for Pakistan, with that
arch-nemesis securing 90 times greater volume of water than Mexico’s share under
a 1944 pact with the US.

In fact, the treaty effectively partitioned the rivers in the Indus Basin, with
India’s full sovereignty rights limited to the three smaller rivers in the lower
section and Pakistan bagging the bigger rivers of the upper basin. It remains
the world’s only water pact embodying the ‘doctrine of restricted sovereignty’
in which the upper riparian state defers to the interests of a downstream state.

To make matters worse, only four of the six Indus-system rivers originate in
India; the other two start in Tibet, with China free to reengineer cross-flow
flows.

Against this background, the Indus treaty remains a millstone around India’s
neck. India should be seeking to mitigate the burdens of a treaty that carries
no benefits for it but which emboldens Pakistan’s sponsorship of cross-border
terrorism. Pakistan repays India’s unparalleled water generosity with its
self-avowed “War of a Thousand Cuts”.

How can India allow its water largesse to be repaid with blood? A feckless India
continues to shore up the treaty, including by sending a 10-member delegation to
Pakistan for a Permanent Indus Commission meeting from March 1. For the first
time in the commission’s history, female officers (all from India) will
participate.

The commission’s meetings can be suspended, as they have been in the past, but
India clings to the treaty’s letter and spirit, even as Pakistan flouts
international norms without incurring any costs. In fact, by failing to build
sufficient storage, India allows unutilized waters from its meagre share to flow
to Pakistan as a continuing bonus.

Other world powers have dumped binding accords at will. One of Russia’s
grievances contributing to the present crisis with the US, with Ukraine as the
theatre of Russian invasion, has been Washington’s unilateral termination of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (which was of unlimited duration) and the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. China has demonstrated its contempt
for bilateral pacts through its current border aggression against India and by
its 2017 withholding of data from India on upstream river flows.

A scofflaw Pakistan wants rights without responsibilities. It demands eternal
Indian water munificence while its military sustains export of terrorism to
India. Leveraging the Indus treaty to help reform Pakistan’s behaviour offers
India a bloodless path.

Pakistan’s use of state-reared terrorist groups could be invoked by India under
international law as constituting reasonable grounds for withdrawal from the
treaty. The International Court of Justice has upheld the principle that a
treaty may be dissolved by reason of a fundamental change of circumstances.

But without withdrawing from the treaty, India can seek to balance the scales by
invoking its treaty rights to enforce Pakistan’s responsibilities. For starters,
it should condition further consultations and information exchanges, including
on project-related design data, to Pakistan’s verified severing of ties with
terrorist groups. Keeping its Indus commissioner’s post vacant for some years
would effectively suspend riparian consultations with Pakistan. Given India’s
proverbial red tape, such a vacancy will be easy to explain.

India’s approach should be to speak softly but carry a big stick. It should shun
meaningless hyperbole and let its actions speak for themselves. India, however,
must make clear that it has no intention of turning off or even restricting
water flows to Pakistan. Indeed, India doesn’t have the hydro-infrastructure to
limit river flows. The issue is about ending Pakistan’s roguish actions.

Building basin leverage can serve as a potent instrument in India’s arsenal
against Pakistan.

The worst option for India is to continue hewing to its present approach by
mechanically bearing all the burdens of the treaty without any tangible benefits
accruing to it. Instead of advertising that its bark is worse than its bite, an
imaginative India should work to remake the terms of the Indus engagement.

The writer is a geostrategist.

Posted in Energy-Environment, Terrorism

THE NEW GLOBAL COLD WAR CLOUDS INDIA’S TIGHTROPE WALK

FEATURED

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Chellaney
* BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, THE JAPAN TIMES

India, having confronted Chinese border aggression over the past 22 months, has
taken a restrained stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, underscoring its
focus on countering Beijing’s military actions without affecting its close
relationships with the United States and Russia. The new U.S.-Russia Cold War,
however, promises to compound India’s strategic challenges.

India is the only member of “the Quad” to refrain from openly condemning Russia
for invading a sovereign country. In fact, like its archnemesis China, India
abstained from the Feb. 25 vote at the United Nations Security Council on a
U.S.-sponsored resolution deploring the Russian invasion as a violation of the
U.N. Charter. India, however, has implicitly criticized Russia’s abandonment of
the path of diplomacy and called for an end to all violence.

Unlike Japan and Australia, which are under the U.S. security (and nuclear)
umbrella, India has to deal with China on its own, as the current Himalayan
border conflict has highlighted. And while China poses a pressing military
challenge for India along a more than 4,000-kilometer-long land frontier, the
U.S. has never considered a land war against China and its primary objective is
nonmilitary — to counter China’s geopolitical, economic and ideological
challenges to its global preeminence.

India’s solo struggle to rein in an expansionist China in the icy Himalayan
region has helped influence its measured response to the Russian aggression
against Ukraine. After all, which head of a Western government has condemned
China’s aggression against India or even urged Beijing to pull back its forces
from the Himalayan frontier?

U.S. President Joe Biden has not uttered a word on the subject. His State
Department on Feb. 3 urged India and China to find “a peaceful resolution of the
border disputes,” and then added in general terms, “We have previously voiced
our concerns of Beijing’s pattern of ongoing attempts to intimidate its
neighbors.”

The Biden administration, unlike former President Donald Trump’s administration,
has placed outreach to Beijing as a high priority, and has been wary of publicly
supporting India against Chinese aggression. Indeed, Biden’s recently unveiled
Indo-Pacific Strategy refers to China’s military actions against India since
2020 not as “aggression,” but in neutral language — as “the conflict along the
Line of Actual Control with India.”

By locking horns with China in tense military standoffs despite the risk of a
full-scale war, India has openly challenged Chinese capability and power in a
way no other power has done in this century. China has massed up to 200,000
soldiers along the frontier, but India has more than matched the Chinese force
deployments — with the steadily increasing induction of new weapons and troops
by both sides amplifying the risk of renewed border skirmishing, if not outright
war.

The U.S.-India strategic partnership, meanwhile, continues to strengthen. The
U.S. has already surpassed Russia as the largest arms seller to India. American
defense transactions with India, according to the State Department, went from
“near zero in 2008 to over $20 billion in 2020.”

Still, in an effort to make India its sole arms client, the U.S. has sought to
leverage a domestic law — the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through
Sanctions Act — to downgrade Indian defense ties with Moscow. Russia, however,
remains a critical source of arms and military technology for India.

In the current Himalayan military crisis, Russia, despite its deepening entente
with China, has transferred weapons to help strengthen India’s defenses. It is
advancing the delivery of its S-400 air and anti-missile defense system that
India urgently needs as a protection against China’s forward deployment of an
array of lethal missiles.

The latest Western financial sanctions on Moscow, however, threaten to affect
Russia-India defense trade by complicating the issue of payments. The escalating
sanctions could also impede India’s plans for greater investment both in the
Russian oil and gas sector and in Russia’s Far East.

The U.S., with the aid of its energy sanctions on Iran, has emerged as an
important source of crude oil and petroleum products for India, the world’s
third-largest oil consumer after America and China. And its new sanctions on
Russia are expected to facilitate greater American arms exports to India.

More fundamentally, the advent of the new Cold War promises to make India’s
neutrality more challenging. Biden has made clear that he has embarked on a
strategy of Containment 2.0 against Russia.

The new U.S. sanctions, which Biden has called “the broadest sanctions in
history,” seek to disrupt the Russian economy. Simultaneously, Biden is planning
to ensnare Russia in a military quagmire in Ukraine through massive arms
supplies to the Ukrainian armed forces and other resistance forces. He has asked
Congress for a staggering $6.4 billion for this mission.

However, U.S. power now faces a double whammy: China’s military, economic and
technological challenge on a scale the U.S. has not seen before and a
re-militarized Russia challenging the NATO creep to its borders.

But with its strategic focus shifting to shoring up European security, the U.S.
is pouring military resources into that theater — and the main casualty of such
a shift is likely to be Asian security.

By compounding America’s strategic overstretch and distracting it from the China
challenge, the new Cold War will open greater space for Chinese President Xi
Jinping’s aggressive revisionism. It will also likely advance China’s economic
power and energy security by making Beijing the main beneficiary of the new
Western sanctions on Russia.

India may have no dog in the fight, yet — like Japan — it will not be able to
escape the larger strategic ramifications of the conflict over Ukraine. This
could prove a watershed moment in international relations and complicate India’s
ability to walk a diplomatic tightrope.

Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is a geostrategist
and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground”
(Georgetown University Press).

Posted in Asian Security, Diplomacy

UKRAINE WAR PUTS U.S. INDO-PACIFIC STRATEGY IN JEOPARDY

FEATURED

Posted on March 13, 2022 by Chellaney

Focus on Russia will curtail efforts to limit Chinese expansionism

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Joe Biden meets virtually with Xi Jinping from the White House in November 2021:
Biden has sought to stabilize the geopolitical competition with China so as to
focus on containing Russia. © AP

The Indo-Pacific region — home to the world’s most populous nations, largest
economies and largest militaries — has emerged as the world’s economic and
geopolitical hub. This vast region will shape the new world order, including
America’s geopolitical standing, in the coming years.

Greater volatility in the Indo-Pacific, however, seems inevitable as a result of
the deepening international crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and
the Western retaliation in the form of an unprecedented hybrid war against
Moscow.

Sanctions are a form of warfare whose unforeseen consequences have,
historically, set in motion an escalating spiral leading to devastating armed
conflict. It was a raft of U.S. sanctions intended to squeeze Imperial Japan
that ultimately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading to the Pacific war
and eventually the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Russia, now the world’s most-sanctioned country, remains a nuclear and cyber
superpower, as well as the world’s richest country when it comes to natural
resources, and its own likely reprisals to the West’s hybrid war will increase
the risks of a wider conflict.

The new Cold War will constrain an overstretched Washington from genuinely
pivoting to the Indo-Pacific or robustly countering the challenge to its global
preeminence from China, which dwarfs Russia in economic power and military
spending.

Since taking office, U.S. President Joe Biden has sought to stabilize the
geopolitical competition with China so as to focus on containing Russia, in
keeping with what he told CBS “60 Minutes” just before being elected: Russia is
“the biggest threat to America” and China “the biggest competitor.”

As part of that approach — a reversal of the Trump administration policy of
treating the Chinese Communist Party as an existential threat to U.S. interests
— Biden last year poured a record $650 million in military aid into Ukraine.
Last autumn’s U.S.-NATO military exercises near Russia’s Black Sea coast
incensed Moscow, foreshadowing Russian aggression today.

To help stabilize relations with Beijing, Biden has taken a number of steps,
including a decision not to reinstate certain tariffs. Biden allowed Beijing to
escape scot-free over its failure to meet commitments in the so-called Phase One
trade deal with the Trump administration. China’s increased purchases of U.S.
goods and services fell far below its commitment of $200 billion over 2017
levels during the deal’s two-year period that ended on Dec. 31, 2021.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unrelenting expansionism from the South and East
China Seas to Hong Kong and the Himalayas has essentially been cost-free. Even
Xi’s mass incarceration of over a million Muslims in Xinjiang, which the Biden
administration acknowledges is “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” has
gone unpunished, with the U.S. imposing only symbolic sanctions.

Biden, after more than a year in office and barely two weeks before Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine, unveiled the “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United
States.” This followed criticism at home that he lacked clarity on a region
central to long-term U.S. interests.

Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy, while acknowledging that “our allies and partners
in the region bear much of the cost” of China’s “harmful behavior,” goes out of
its way to mollify Xi’s regime, stating that America’s “objective is not to
change the PRC (People’s Republic of China) but to shape the strategic
environment in which it operates.” It also says the U.S. will “manage
competition with the PRC responsibly” and “work with the PRC in areas like
climate change and nonproliferation.”

As if seeking to allay China’s concerns, Biden has also progressively diluted
the Quad’s agenda, broadening it, as his Indo-Pacific strategy attests, to
everlasting universal challenges like climate change, sustainability, “global
health” and “advancing common technology principles.” The Quad, however, was
designed as a bulwark against China’s expansionism.

Biden has yet to comment on China’s nearly two-year border aggression against
India. Nor has the U.S. asked Beijing to pull back the nearly 200,000 Chinese
troops it has massed along the Indian frontier. Yet Biden, seeking to co-opt
India in his new Cold War with Russia, hosted a special Quad summit by video
link on Mar. 3 to discuss the Russian aggression.

But the summit, as the unusually short White House statement indicated, achieved
little. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi put his foot down over extending the
Quad’s sphere to Ukraine, saying the group must “remain focused on its core
objective… in the Indo-Pacific region.”

India — the only Quad member not under the U.S. security and nuclear umbrella —
has taken an independent stance on Ukraine, calling for an end to hostilities
and a return to the path of diplomacy but abstaining from the United Nations
votes to condemn Russia.

As Biden steps up his hybrid war against Russia, his conciliatory approach will
become more pronounced toward China, which has the capacity to bail out the
Russian economy. But Xi is likely to work toward neutralizing similar Western
sanctions against China in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Xi is
expected to fast-track progress on parallel international financial arrangements
that are free from Western domination and weaponization.

Biden’s imperative to win Chinese cooperation on his sanctions against Russia
gives Beijing important leverage. Like a double-edged sword, it will wield that
leverage to extract U.S. and Russian concessions. With Biden’s characterization
of Russia as Enemy No. 1 becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, a major casualty
is likely to be America’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

UKRAINE CRISIS: PERILS OF A ‘WITH US OR AGAINST US’ APPROACH

FEATURED

Posted on March 12, 2022 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney, The New Indian Express

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is just the latest example of “might makes right”.
Despite claims to the contrary, the world has never had a rules-based order.
Just consider the history of this century, especially the number of military
invasions of sovereign states that have occurred since the year 2001.

International law is powerful against the powerless, but powerless against the
powerful. Both the Russian invasion and the West’s no-holds-barred retaliatory
economic war against Russia, including practically expelling it from the
Western-led financial order, mock a rules-based order. While Russia’s aggression
is violating Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, the West’s economic warfare is
violating Russia’s economic sovereignty.

Yet this conflict holds global implications, with the potential to remake our
world, including spawning the polarization of both the world economy and
international politics.

As a new Cold War dawns, the US appears returning to a “with us or against us”
approach. This promises to bring countries that take an objective and balanced
view under intense pressure. It is also likely to complicate, if not strain,
American ties with countries that insist on remaining neutral or taking a more
nuanced approach than Washington’s black-and-white portrayal of the situation.

In echoes of a familiar Manichaean logic, US President Joe Biden’s
administration is seeking to prod India to be on America’s side against Russia
by implicitly asking, “Are you with us or against us?”

Team Biden has bristled at India abstaining from the United Nations votes to
condemn Moscow, including at the Security Council on February 25 when Russia
vetoed a US-sponsored resolution deploring the Russian invasion as a violation
of the UN Charter. India, however, has implicitly criticized Russia’s
abandonment of the path of diplomacy and repeatedly called for an end to all
violence.

According to the US-based news website Axios, the State Department has recalled
a strongly-worded cable to American embassies instructing them to inform India
and the United Arab Emirates that their neutral stance on Ukraine put them “in
Russia’s camp”. US diplomacy has a record of using media “leaks” to convey
messages or warnings. In 1998, to spoil India’s ties with China, the White House
leaked Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s letter to President Bill Clinton
about the Indian nuclear tests.

The Axios story ended by saying that India “has faced allegations — rarely
discussed by the US in public — of democratic backsliding and repression of
religious minorities.” The implication is that, unless New Delhi falls in line,
the Biden administration could start discussing such allegations in public.

US pressure has already compelled the UAE to reverse course. After abstaining in
the Security Council, it voted in support of the March 2 non-binding resolution
in the General Assembly condemning Russia. However, 35 countries abstained on
the General Assembly resolution, including all of India’s major neighbours,
while a further 11 didn’t vote at all.

Here’s the paradox: No head of a Western government has condemned China’s nearly
23-month-long border aggression against India or even urged Beijing to pull back
the nearly 200,000 troops it has massed along the Himalayan frontier in
violation of binding bilateral accords. Yet the Western bloc demands that India
be firmly on its side over the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which is a
member of neither NATO nor the European Union.

When Donald Trump was the US president, his top officials, including Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, regularly
blasted China’s aggression against India, calling it “incredibly aggressive
action”, “unacceptable behaviour” and part of a “clear and intensifying pattern
of bullying”.

But the Biden administration, having placed outreach to Beijing as a high
priority, has been wary of publicly supporting India against the Chinese
aggression. Biden hasn’t uttered a word on that aggression. Indeed, Biden’s
recently unveiled “Indo-Pacific Strategy” refers to China’s military actions
against India since 2020 not as “aggression” but in neutral language — as “the
conflict along the Line of Actual Control with India”.

Even in the India-Pakistan context, Team Biden isn’t firmly on India’s side. It
has hedged its bets by retaining Pakistan as a “major non-NATO ally”, despite
America’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of Pakistan-backed
Taliban terrorists. Biden’s failure to impose any penalties on Pakistan also
explains why that country is still missing from America’s list of state sponsors
of terrorism.

Yet now Team Biden demands that India side with the US against Russia over
Ukraine, which historically has been viewed by Moscow as its strategic buffer.
Its unstated message to India is: “Do as I say, not as I do”.

India’s measured response to the Russian aggression enjoys bipartisan support at
home. For India, the US has increasingly become an important strategic partner.
But Moscow, which rescued India half a dozen times by vetoing UN Security
Council resolutions over the decades, remains an equally important friend.

Had India voted with the Western bloc to condemn Russia, it would have burned
its bridges with a country that remains a critical source of weapons and
military technology in projects ranging from the Brahmos missile to nuclear
submarines. To help shore up India’s defences against China, Russia has advanced
the delivery of its S-400 air and anti-missile system.

The US values its strategic autonomy. So should India. Undermining ties with
Moscow would make India dependent on America, whose unpredictability is
legendary.

The US is already bagging billions of dollars worth of Indian arms contracts
every year. Yet it is working to make India its sole arms client, including by
seeking to leverage its domestic law — the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries
Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) — to downgrade Indian defence ties with Moscow.
Given the advent of the new Cold War, it is likely to step up that effort.

India now holds more annual military exercises with America than any other
country. The US has already overtaken Russia as the largest arms seller to
India. New Delhi wishes to further deepen its ties with Washington. But such
cooperation cannot be exclusionary.

A “with us or against us” approach that seeks to compel India to make a choice
between the US and Russia will only bring the blossoming Indo-American
relationship under strain.

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

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

AMERICA IS FOCUSING ON THE WRONG ENEMY

FEATURED

Posted on February 21, 2022 by Chellaney

US President Joe Biden is treating a “rogue” Russia as a peer competitor, when
he should be focused on the challenge from America’s actual peer, China. Not
only is China more powerful than Russia; it also genuinely seeks to supplant the
US as the preeminent global power.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

Much of the democratic world would like the United States to remain the
preeminent global power. But with the US apparently committed to strategic
overreach, that outcome risks becoming unlikely.

The problem with America’s global leadership begins at home. Hyper-partisan
politics and profound polarization are eroding American democracy and impeding
the pursuit of long-term objectives. In foreign policy, the partisan divide can
be seen in perceptions of potential challengers to the US: according to a March
2021 poll, Republicans are most concerned about China, while Democrats worry
about Russia above all.

This may explain why US President Joe Biden is treating a “rogue” Russia as a
peer competitor, when he should be focused on the challenge from America’s
actual peer, China. In comparison to Russia, China’s population is about ten
times bigger, its economy is almost ten times larger, and its military
expenditure is around four times greater. Not only is China more powerful; it
genuinely seeks to supplant the US as the preeminent global power. By contrast,
with its military buildup on Ukraine’s borders, Russia is seeking to mitigate a
perceived security threat in its neighborhood.

Hastening the decline of US global leadership is hardly the preserve of
Democrats. A bipartisan parade of US leaders has failed to recognize that the
post-Cold War unipolar world order, characterized by unchallenged US economic
and military predominance, is long gone. The US squandered its “unipolar
moment,” especially by waging an expensive and amorphous “Global War on
Terrorism,” including several military interventions, and through its treatment
of Russia.

After its Cold War victory, the US essentially took an extended victory lap,
pursuing strategic maneuvers that flaunted its dominance. Notably, it sought
to expand NATO to Russia’s backyard, but made little effort to bring Russia into
the Western fold, as it had done with Germany and Japan after World War II. The
souring of relations with the Kremlin contributed to Russia’s
eventual remilitarization.

So, while the US remains the world’s foremost military power, it has been
stretched thin by the decisions and commitments it has made, in Europe and
elsewhere, since 1991. This goes a long way toward explaining why the US has
ruled out deploying its own troops to defend Ukraine today. What the US is
offering Ukraine – weapons and ammunition – cannot protect the country from
Russia, which has an overwhelming military advantage.

But US leaders made another fatal mistake since the Cold War: by aiding China’s
rise, they helped to create the greatest rival their country has ever faced.
Unfortunately, they have yet to learn from this. Instead, the US continues to
dedicate insufficient attention and resources to an excessively wide array of
global issues, from Russian revanchism and Chinese aggression to lesser threats
in the Middle East and Africa and on the Korean Peninsula. And it continues
inadvertently to bolster China’s global influence, not least through its overuse
of sanctions.

For example, by barring friends and allies from importing Iranian oil, two
successive US administrations enabled China not only to secure oil at a
hefty discount, but also to become a top investor in – and security partner of –
the Islamic Republic. US sanctions have similarly pushed resource-rich Myanmar
into China’s arms. As Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, whose country has faced
a US arms embargo over its ties to China, asked last year, “If I don’t rely on
China, who will I rely on?”

Russia has been asking itself the same question. Though Russia and China kept
each other at arm’s length for decades, US-led sanctions introduced after
Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea drove President Vladimir Putin to pursue a
closer strategic partnership with China. The bilateral relationship is likely to
deepen, regardless of what happens in Ukraine. But the raft of harsh new
sanctions the US has promised to implement in the event of a Russian invasion
will accelerate this shift significantly, with China as the big winner.

The heavy financial penalties the US has planned – including the “nuclear
option” of disconnecting Russian banks from the international SWIFT payments
system – would turn China into Russia’s banker, enabling it to reap vast profits
and expand the international use of its currency, the renminbi. If
Biden fulfilled his pledge to block the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is set
to deliver Russian supplies directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea, China would
gain greater access to Russian energy.

In fact, by securing a commitment from Putin this month to a
nearly tenfold increase in Russian natural gas exports, China is building a
safety net that could – in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan – withstand
Western energy sanctions and even a blockade. China could also benefit
militarily by demanding greater access to Russian military technology in
exchange for its support.

For the US, a strengthened Russia-China axis is the worst possible outcome of
the Ukraine crisis. The best outcome would be a compromise with Russia to ensure
that it does not invade and possibly annex Ukraine. By enabling the US to avoid
further entanglement in Europe, this would permit a more realistic balancing of
key objectives – especially checking Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific –
with available resources and capabilities.

The future of the US-led international order will be decided in Asia, and China
is currently doing everything in its power to ensure that order’s demise.
Already, China is powerful enough that it can host the Winter Olympics even as
it carries out a genocide against Muslims in the Xinjiang region, with limited
pushback. If the Biden administration does not recognize the true scale of the
threat China poses, and adopt an appropriately targeted strategy soon, whatever
window of opportunity for preserving US preeminence remains may well close.

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

BEIJING WINTER OLYMPICS WERE A TROUBLING REMINDER OF 1936 GAMES

FEATURED

Posted on February 20, 2022 by Chellaney

The success of the Beijing Winter Olympics is another feather in Xi’s cap. Like
Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, Xi’s Games succeeded after an international boycott
campaign collapsed. Will an emboldened Xi now embark on fresh repression and
expansionism?

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Xi Jinping on the screen during the opening ceremony at the Beijing National
Stadium on Feb. 4: murky politics can lurk beneath the surface. © Getty Images

While the Olympic movement seeks to promote “a spirit of friendship, solidarity
and fair play,” murky politics can lurk beneath the surface.

Powerful autocracies serving as hosts have a history of using the Olympics to
project themselves as friendly, peace-loving nations so as to advance their
geopolitical objectives and cloak their human rights abuses. Yet their actions
often speak for themselves.

As the 24th Winter Olympics in Beijing were opening, China warned foreign
athletes not to “violate the Olympic spirit” by speaking out on political
issues. Yet it has defended its own gross violation of the Olympic spirit by
feting as an Olympic torchbearer and national hero a Chinese military officer
who led an ambush attack in the Himalayas that killed 20 unarmed Indian soldiers
in June 2020.

The lionizing of such a military commander is a telling commentary on the
tactics and values of the Chinese Communist Party and its military wing, the
People’s Liberation Army. The action also showed that China mixes politics and
sports better than any other country.

Since China’s boycott of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, the CCP has
treated sports as politics by other means. It has engaged in bullying tactics
against, among others, America’s National Basketball Association (NBA) and
England’s Premier League. And it has used threats of withdrawing lucrative
sports contracts, broadcast deals and sponsorship opportunities to buy silence
regarding its human rights record.

The Beijing Winter Olympics, dubbed the “Genocide Games” by several
international human rights organizations, are probably the most divisive games
since the Berlin Summer Olympics. The 1936 Games helped strengthen the hands of
Germany’s Adolf Hitler, emboldening his expansionism. The 2022 Games follow
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s own expansionism, extending from the South China
Sea and Hong Kong, to the Himalayas.

In fact, Xi has taken a page out of the 1936 Olympics playbook: Just as Hitler
sought to camouflage his segregation and persecution of Jews by permitting one
Jewish athlete — fencing champion Helene Mayer — to join the German team, Xi has
tried to whitewash his atrocities in Xinjiang by presenting a Uighur skier as
the face of the 2022 Games.

Mayer’s inclusion in the German team not only helped end international calls for
a boycott of the Games but also allowed Hitler to project the image of a
peace-loving statesman. Xi, for his part, opened the 2022 Games with peace doves
and an obscure female Uighur skier, Dinigeer Yilamujiang, as the star of the
opening ceremony. Chinese state media quickly claimed Yilamujiang had “showed
the world a beautiful and progressive Xinjiang.”

There are some other troubling parallels between the two games. Before the 1936
Games, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp had been established and Hitler’s
army had marched into the demilitarized Rhineland. The 2022 Games have followed
Xi’s expansionism across Asia and what two successive U.S. administrations have
labeled “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang, where more than a
million detainees languish in a Muslim gulag.

Since 2015, when Beijing defeated Almaty, Kazakhstan, to win the bid to host the
2022 Games, China has, among other things, established forward military bases on
a chain of artificial islands in the South China Sea, set up the Xinjiang gulag,
militarized the Himalayan borderlands and encroached on Indian, Bhutanese and
Nepalese territories, weaponized debt and gobbled up Hong Kong.

And at home, Xi has established a globally unparalleled techno-authoritarian
state whose soaring budget for internal security has overtaken the country’s
massive military budget. A repressive internal machinery, aided by an Orwellian
surveillance system, is fostering a state strategy to culturally smother ethnic
minorities in their traditional homelands, including through demographic change
and harsh policing.

With “Xi Jinping Thought” enshrined in the national constitution and turned into
the central doctrine guiding the CCP, China’s destiny is now in the hands of one
party, one leader and one ideology.

More broadly, just as a long debate has raged over how Western powers had played
into Hitler’s hands by participating in the 1936 Games, the failed boycott of
the 2022 Games is likely to be a subject of intense discussion in future years.

To be sure, a number of Western countries, including Australia, Belgium,
Britain, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Kosovo, Lithuania and the U.S., refused to
send officials to Beijing for the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies in
protest against China’s human rights abuses.

India, too, at the last minute decided not to grace the ceremonies with its
official presence. But such diplomatic boycotts have essentially been symbolic
as athletes from those countries are participating fully in the Games, including
in the opening and closing ceremonies.

Xi’s Olympic Games are being held under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, now
in its third year. China’s refusal to cooperate with international efforts to
determine the origin of the virus first detected in the city of Wuhan — despite
the pandemic’s devastating global impact — underlines the international costs of
Xi’s rule.

The U.S., as the world’s leading sports nation and preeminent power, could have
undercut the credibility of the Winter Games by deciding not to send its
athletes and by leading a wider international boycott. But, as in 1936, it
decided to allow its athletes to participate.

Meanwhile, by highlighting that Wall Street remains China’s powerful ally, some
of America’s biggest corporations — from Coca-Cola and Visa to Intel and Proctor
& Gamble — are underwriting the global spectacle. Very vocal when it comes to
political rights at home, such sponsors have kept silent on Xinjiang, the
repression in Tibet and Beijing’s clampdown on Hong Kong.

Three years after the 1936 Games, World War II began. Will the 2022 Games also
come back to haunt the world? Buoyed by the success of the Games, Xi could
embark on fresh repression and expansionism.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in International Security

THE US IS LETTING CHINA OFF THE HOOK OVER ITS COVID-19 COVERUP

FEATURED

Posted on February 16, 2022 by Chellaney
A medical worker takes a swab from a previously recovered COVID-19 coronavirus
patient in Wuhan, China on March 14, 2020. © Getty

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

America’s death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic, now in its third year, is
closing in on one million, with Americans continuing to succumb to the disease
at internationally high rates. Both in total case counts and number of deaths
since 2020, the United States has led the world. New data show that Americans’
life expectancy in the first year of the pandemic fell 1.8 years — the sharpest
decline since at least World War II.

Given the extent of its pain and suffering, the U.S. should have a major stake
in unraveling how the COVID-19 virus originated. Knowing the origins of this
virus has become imperative to forestall the fourth coronavirus pandemic of the
21 Century after SARS, MERS and COVID-19.

In this light, isn’t it odd that the U.S. government is no longer seeking to get
to the bottom of how the virus first emerged in the central Chinese city of
Wuhan? In fact, by relieving pressure on China to come clean on the virus’s
origins, President Biden’s administration is effectively letting that communist
behemoth off the hook despite the costliest government coverup perhaps of all
time.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored all news about the initial spread
of COVID-19, including hiding evidence of human-to-human transmission, resulting
in a local outbreak morphing into a global health calamity. Even today, by
covering up the truth on how the virus emerged, Xi’s regime disrespects the
memory of the more than 5.7 million people who have died thus far. The only
probe China has allowed was a 2021 “joint study” with the World Health
Organization (WHO) that it controlled and steered.

Because of Beijing’s stonewalling of investigations, the world still does not
know whether COVID-19 evolved naturally from wildlife or was triggered by the
accidental escape of a genetically engineered coronavirus from a lab in Wuhan,
the center of Chinese research on super-viruses. Xi’s regime has frustrated all
efforts, including by the WHO, to conduct an independent forensic inquiry into
the Wuhan labs, labeling such an audit “origin-tracing terrorism.”

The only concession Xi has made is that last September, after the pandemic had
already devastated much of the world, he ordered enhanced oversight of Chinese
labs handling lethal viruses.

Against this background, China has been comforted by Biden’s easing of pressure
on it. Soon after Kabul fell to the Taliban last August, marking America’s
humiliating defeat at the hands of terrorists, a weakened Biden appeared to bow
to the Chinese demand that the U.S. stop investigating the virus’s origins
by not extending the 90-day term of the intelligence inquiry that he had
instituted, despite the probe failing to reach a definitive conclusion.

Since then, Biden has avoided any reference to the pandemic’s origins. And after
having prematurely proclaimed on the Fourth of July that “we’re closer than ever
to declaring our independence from a deadly virus,” Biden is
now preparing Americans for the “new normal” of living with COVID-19, not
conquering it.

Biden’s first misstep occurred just after his inauguration as the 46th president
when he announced America’s immediate rejoining of the WHO. He could have
leveraged his predecessor’s withdrawal from the WHO to make that international
organization take steps to separate itself from the malign influence of China
before formalizing America’s reentry.

The WHO led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was complicit in China’s coverup.
Indeed, it made important concessions to Beijing that may have compromised the
search for the virus’s origins. So, America’s unconditional return to the WHO
did little more than advertise U.S. weakness and harden Xi’s intransigence.

Then, on Jan. 26, 2021, Biden signed a presidential memorandum that ordered
federal agencies to stop referring to the virus by the “geographic location of
its origin,” saying that such references contribute to “racism.” So, as a matter
of official U.S. policy, the virus could no more be linked to China.

Consequently, official U.S. reports, including the last annual unclassified
intelligence report on threats to America, stopped mentioning the virus’s Wuhan
origin. Yet, oddly, it has been okay to refer to the virus’s variants by their
geographic origins or even slap on a racially tinged travel ban, as Biden did
with eight southern Africa countries for five weeks after the omicron variant
emerged.

More recently, the Biden administration’s inexplicable decision not to field a
candidate against Tedros left his bid unopposed for a second five-year term as
the WHO chief. Indeed, France, Germany and 15 other European Union countries,
with possible U.S. acquiescence, took the lead in nominating Tedros for a second
term, even as his home country of Ethiopia denounced him.

Here’s the paradox: Further undermining the WHO’s credibility, Tedros attended
the Beijing Winter Olympics, despite a U.S.-led diplomatic boycott, and heaped
renewed praise on China’s COVID-19 handling. In fact, Tedros carried the Olympic
torch in a relay that also prominently featured another torchbearer, a Chinese
military officer who led the ambush killing of 20 Indian troops in June 2020 and
who, in gross violation of the Olympic spirit, is now being feted by China as
a national hero. Yet, thanks to Western support, Tedros’s reelection in May has
become a mere formality.

To Biden’s credit, last May he helped end the long suppression of an open debate
on a possible lab leak by calling that hypothesis one of “two likely scenarios”
on how the pandemic originated. Until then, the hypothesis was treated as a pure
conspiracy theory by major U.S. news organizations, social-media giants and some
influential scientists who hid their conflicts of interest. Facebook and
Instagram even suspended accounts that repeatedly referred to the virus’s
possible escape from a lab.

The concerted effort to obscure the truth also extended to U.S. scientific and
bureaucratic institutions, largely because U.S. government agencies – from
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to USAID – funded dangerous research on
coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from 2014 to 2020. The
long suppression of a debate only aided China’s designs, including giving it
sufficient time to conceivably eliminate any incriminating evidence of its
negligence or complicity in the worst disaster of our time.

One key question remains unanswered: Why were official U.S. agencies funding
research on viruses at the WIV, which, according to the U.S. government’s own
admission, was linked to the Chinese military? A January 2021 State
Department fact sheet raised concern over “whether any of our research funding
was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.” But why did the
funding proceed despite that risk?

It appears likely that Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and his then-boss, Francis Collins, former
director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), began funding risky
experiments at the WIV so as to circumvent the restrictions in the U.S. on “gain
of function” research — or altering the genetic make-up of pathogens to enhance
their virulence or infectiousness. The NIH money was routed through the New
York-based EcoHealth Alliance, whose largest source of funds is the Pentagon.
The Pentagon has yet to unequivocally deny that any of the almost $39 million it
gave to EcoHealth Alliance ended up in Wuhan.

The NIH, for its part, has sought to obfuscate its role by scrubbing its website
of the “gain of function” definition.

The Beijing Winter Olympics, meanwhile, symbolize an ascendant China that is too
powerful to be punished for its COVID-19 coverup, its genocide in Xinjiang and
its expansionism across Asia.

Relieving U.S. pressure on China is clearly a mistake. The Biden White House
would do well to rebuild pressure on Beijing by lifting the veil on the precise
role the U.S. played in supporting WIV research on increasing the transmissivity
of bat coronaviruses to human cells. For starters, the U.S. should disclose the
full extent of its WIV funding. America’s own transparency is essential for
credible pressure on an opaque China.

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

Posted in International Security

INTERNATIONAL COSTS OF BIDEN’S AFGHAN DEBACLE MOUNT

FEATURED

Posted on February 16, 2022 by Chellaney

China and Russia up the ante, violent Islamists become more emboldened, and
allies are restive

U.S. Marines stand guard during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International
Airport in August 2021: the costs of the Afghan blunder are becoming
increasingly apparent. (Handout photo from U.S. Marine Corps) © Reuters

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

History will remember U.S. President Joe Biden for consigning Afghanistan to the
dark age of terrorist rule.

Yet Biden still says he has “no apologies” for his Afghan debacle. America’s
self-inflicted defeat and humiliation at the hands of a brutal, Pakistan-backed
Islamist militia spawned the greatest victory for terrorists in the modern
history of global jihadism.

“I make no apologies for what I did,” Biden defiantly stated at his recent news
conference, his first in months. By simply washing his hands of the humanitarian
and security nightmare that he created in Afghanistan, Biden has compounded the
greatest U.S. foreign-policy disaster in decades.

At a time when global affairs are already in a precarious state, the costs of
the Afghan blunder are becoming increasingly apparent, including weakening
Biden’s hand against America’s principal adversaries, China and Russia.

While highlighting the decline in American power, the Afghan fiasco has created
greater space for China’s muscular revisionism in Asia and enhanced Russia’s
geopolitical ambitions in the former Soviet republics extending from Ukraine to
Georgia and Kazakhstan.

Worse still, the Taliban’s triumph over the “Great Satan” is serving as a real
shot in the arm for Islamic terrorist groups across the world, inspiring jihadi
attacks.

One example was the Jan. 15 hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue by a British
Pakistani man who sought to free a convicted female Pakistani terrorist, Aafia
Siddiqui, serving an 86-year sentence at a nearby prison.

Emboldened militants in Syria in recent days attacked a major prison housing
thousands of former ISIS fighters, triggering a six-day wider fight with
American ground troops that included U.S. airstrikes. Hundreds reportedly died.
It was the biggest confrontation involving the U.S. military in three years
since ISIS lost the last remaining portion of its so-called caliphate.

Meanwhile, in the deadliest attack in several years on an Iraqi military base,
jihadis recently killed 10 soldiers and an officer. Such attacks raise concerns
over the possible rebirth of global terrorism, including the re-emergence of
ISIS.

America’s retreat from Afghanistan, meanwhile, is proving a strategic boon for
Russia and China, which have ratcheted up their military threats against Ukraine
and Taiwan, respectively.

Whereas Russia has massed some 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border as if
poised to invade Ukraine, a record number of Chinese warplanes have intruded
into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense identification zone since October.

The U.S. may still be the world’s preeminent military power, but it is in no
position to meaningfully take on China and Russia simultaneously. So the
U.S.-NATO tensions with Moscow over the Russian military buildup around Ukraine
risk whetting Chinese President Xi Jinping’s appetite for risk-taking,
especially against Taiwan, his possible next target after notching up successes
in the South China Sea and Hong Kong.

Biden’s Afghan disaster, meanwhile, has exacerbated security challenges for
America’s regional friends, especially India, which now confronts a
strengthening China-Pakistan-Taliban nexus. The rejuvenated epicenter for
terrorism in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt threatens to detract from India’s
current efforts to counter China’s border aggression, which began with stealth
incursions into the northern Indian territory of Ladakh in April 2020.

While Biden has elevated the Russian military threat against Ukraine to an
international crisis, he, in jarring contrast, has not uttered a word on China’s
larger-scale Himalayan military buildup that threatens to ignite a war with one
of America’s most vital strategic partners, India.

Xi’s summit this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing — the
Chinese leader’s first face-to-face meeting with a head of state in nearly two
years — underlines the deepening strategic axis between China and Russia, which
are now “more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s,” according to a
U.S. intelligence assessment.

Warships attend a joint naval exercise of the Iranian, Chinese and Russian
navies in the northern Indian Ocean on Jan. 19. © West Asia News
Agency/Reuters

This may be little more than a marriage of convenience so as to jointly
collaborate against their common foe in Washington. But since the U.S. defeat in
Afghanistan, Beijing and Moscow have surprised America with major joint military
exercises, including naval war games off Russia’s Far East coast in October and
recent naval drills with Iran in the Gulf of Oman. The Sino-Russian
collaboration reportedly extends to hypersonic-weapons technology.

Afghanistan may no longer be grabbing headlines in the West, yet it is ordinary
Afghans who are paying for Biden’s blunder, as highlighted by the Taliban’s
arbitrary detentions and killings, sexual enslavement of girls through forced
“marriages” to their fighters, and stripping women and girls of their rights to
education and equality.

The Taliban’s narco-terrorist state, serving as a haven for al-Qaida and other
violent jihadi groups, is a threat to regional and international security.

The U.S., for its part, has suffered lasting damage to its international
credibility and standing from Biden’s strategic folly in Afghanistan, including
throwing America’s allies — the Afghan government and military — under the bus.

The damage is not only emboldening Russia, China and violent Islamists; it also
has a bearing on America’s alliances, given that Biden rejected allied demands
for a conditions-based withdrawal from Afghanistan.

This adds greater urgency to a question pending since earlier U.S. blunders in
Iraq, Syria and Libya: How to reform alliances so that there is less U.S. diktat
and more prior consultations with its allies?

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in International Security

THE GREAT COVID COVERUP

FEATURED

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Chellaney

As the world attempts to figure out how to live with COVID-19, it must also
commit to identifying the missteps – accidental and otherwise – that caused the
pandemic. That means, first and foremost, turning a critical eye toward China.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

As the pandemic enters its third year, questions about COVID-19’s origins appear
increasingly distant. But if we are to forestall another coronavirus pandemic in
the twenty-first century, understanding the causes of the current one is
imperative.

Already, COVID-19 has caused more than 5.4 million deaths. But that is just the
beginning: the toll of the pandemic includes increased rates of
obesity, unemployment, poverty, depression, alcoholism, homicide, domestic
violence, divorce, and suicide. And, as the Omicron variant fuels record
infection rates and disrupts economies in many parts of the world, pandemic
fatigue is morphing into pandemic burnout.

Our chances of eliminating COVID-19 now appear increasingly remote. But, as we
attempt to figure out how to live with the virus, we must also identify the
missteps – accidental and otherwise – that led us here. And that means, first
and foremost, turning a critical eye toward China.

It is well known that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored early
reports that a new, deadly coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan and hid evidence of
human-to-human transmission, thereby enabling a local outbreak to become a
global calamity. What remains to be determined is whether COVID-19 emerged
naturally in wildlife or was leaked from a lab – namely, the Wuhan Institute of
Virology (WIV).

Here, too, China has embraced obfuscation rather than transparency. Xi’s regime
has blocked an independent forensic inquiry into COVID-19’s origins, arguing
that any such investigation amounts to “origin-tracing terrorism.” After
Australia called for a probe into China’s handling of the outbreak, Xi’s
government punished it with a raft of informal sanctions.

China had help covering up its bad behavior. Early in the pandemic, World Health
Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus parroted the Chinese
government’s talking points and praised its handling of the outbreak. Instead of
verifying China’s claims, the WHO broadcast them to the world.

Yet far from condemning this failure of global health leadership, France and
Germany took the lead in nominating Tedros for a second term at the WHO’s helm,
and the United States decided not to field a candidate to challenge him. Having
run unopposed, Tedros will now lead this critical institution for another five
years.

The West also helped China to divert attention from the lab-leak hypothesis. Not
only are several labs in the West engaged in research to engineer super-viruses;
Western governments have ties to the WIV – a French-designed institute where
US-funded research has been carried out. Both the National Institutes of
Health and USAID have issued grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a group studying bat
coronaviruses in collaboration with WIV researchers.

The US government has not disclosed the full extent of its funding to WIV
projects, let alone explained why its agencies would fund research at an
institution linked to the Chinese military. A January 2021 State Department fact
sheet proclaimed that the US has “a right and obligation to determine whether
any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at
the WIV.” But why was that risk deemed acceptable in the first place?

The conflicts of interest surrounding the lab-leak hypothesis distorted early
discussions about the origins of COVID-19. A letter published in the Lancet in
February 2020, signed by a group of virologists, is a case in point. The letter
“strongly condemned” those “suggesting that COVID-19 did not have a natural
origin.” The message was clear: to lend any credence to the possibility of a lab
leak would be unscientific.

The letter turned out to be organized and drafted by the president of EcoHealth
Alliance. But by the time the conflicts of interest came to light, it was too
late. Major US news organizations and social-media giants were treating the
lab-leak hypothesis as a baseless conspiracy theory, with Facebook, Instagram,
and Twitter censoring references to a lab accident.

It should always have been clear that the lab-leak hypothesis had merit: the
2004 outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in
Beijing resulted from such a leak. Instead, frank discussion of the possibility
was suppressed until May 2021, when US President Joe Biden announced that a lab
accident was one of “two likely scenarios” on which US intelligence agencies
would focus, as they carried out a 90-day inquiry into the pandemic’s origins.

By then, however, Chinese authorities had had plenty of time to cover whatever
tracks there may have been. Add to that its unwillingness to cooperate in a
probe, and it should not be surprising that the inquiry’s results were
inconclusive.

But the exercise was apparently enough to convince Biden to take the pressure
off China. Despite pledging to “do everything [possible] to trace the roots of
this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world,” he did
not extend the intelligence inquiry, and he has since avoided any reference to
the pandemic’s origins.

Xi announced last September that Chinese labs handling deadly pathogens would
face closer scrutiny, but he continues to denounce any insinuation that the
coronavirus could have been leaked. Meanwhile, China is profiting from the
pandemic; exports are surging. The country has capitalized on the crisis
to advance its geopolitical interests, including by stepping up its territorial
aggression, from East Asia to the Himalayas.

But a reckoning may yet come. Nearly three-quarters of Americans
now believe that it is “likely” that COVID-19 was leaked from the WIV. Moreover,
as China’s neo-imperialist ambitions have become clear, unfavorable views of
China have reached record highs in many advanced economies. If world leaders
wanted a mandate to pursue further inquiries into the pandemic’s origins, it is
safe to say they have it.

This is not the first made-in-China pandemic – the country also produced SARS in
2003, the Asian flu in 1957, the Hong Kong flu in 1968, and the Russian flu in
1977. If the world keeps letting China off the hook, it will not be the last.

Posted in International Security

INDIA MUST GIVE TAIWAN A HELPING HAND

FEATURED

Posted on January 19, 2022 by Chellaney

Do you know that Taiwan plays an indirect role in the defense of India because
its autonomous existence ties up a sizable portion of China’s armed forces? If
China succeeds in recolonizing Taiwan, India’s security will come under greater
pressure.

Brahma Chellaney, The Times of India

After swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the South China Sea’s geopolitical map and
encroaching on Indian and Bhutanese borderlands, an expansionist China is
itching to move on Taiwan. This island democracy is a technological powerhouse
central to the international semiconductor business. Taiwan also plays an
indirect role in the defence of India because its autonomous existence ties up a
sizable portion of China’s armed forces.

Beijing’s claim that Taiwan has “always been” part of China is dubious, at best,
and based on revisionist history. For most of its history, Taiwan was inhabited
by Malayo-Polynesian tribes and had no ties with China until the island’s Dutch
colonial rulers in the 17th century invited Chinese workers to emigrate.
Geographically, Taiwan is closer to the Philippines than China.

The world cannot afford to let Taiwan go the way of the once-autonomous Tibet,
which was gobbled up by Mao Zedong’s regime in the early 1950s. Tibet’s
annexation remains one of the most far-reaching geopolitical developments in
post-World War II history, which resulted in China imposing itself as India’s
neighbour and waging unending aggression.

Today, Taiwan has all the attributes of a robust independent state, and most
Taiwanese want it to stay that way. But China’s new Mao, Xi Jinping, calls the
island’s incorporation a “historic mission”. Xi is working to implement the
expansionist agenda that Mao left unfinished, which explains why he has not
spared even tiny Bhutan.

In the way a porcupine’s quills protect it from larger predators by making it
difficult to digest, Taiwan needs to create porcupine-like defences with weapons
like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. By turning a Chinese invasion into a
bloody and protracted guerrilla campaign, a porcupine Taiwan would inflict high
costs on China, including major military casualties.

But no less important than bolstering its defences is Taiwan’s imperative to
carve out greater international space for itself. If Taiwan gains greater
presence on the global stage, it will be able to shore up its status as a de
facto nation, making it more difficult for China to seize the island in the way
it occupied Tibet and Xinjiang soon after coming under communist rule in 1949.
The then-independent Tibet, for example, should have applied for United Nations
membership shortly after that international body came into existence in 1945,
but it never did.

China, as a step towards annexing Taiwan, is working to wipe out its
international identity by bribing countries to break off diplomatic ties with
Taipei and by vetoing Taiwan’s presence even in international forums. Its
poaching has left only 13 nations and the Vatican still recognizing Taiwan.

But recently, China has been forced to eat humble pie by a puny nation.
Lithuania, with just 18,500 active military personnel, has set an example for
bigger countries on how to stand up to the global Goliath’s bullying. Undeterred
by China’s sanctions campaign against it, Lithuania has allowed Taiwan to open a
de facto embassy. With some other European states — from the Czech Republic and
Poland to Slovakia — already seeking to deepen ties with Taiwan, Lithuania
indeed promises to serve as a bellwetherof sorts.

India, locked in several military standoffs with China, needs to think and act
creatively, including helping Taiwan by learning from its historical mistake on
Tibet. When China invaded Tibet in 1950, India opposed Tibet’s desperate plea
for a UN discussion before acquiescing in the Chinese annexation of the buffer,
including withdrawing its military escorts from Tibet and handing over Tibet’s
postal, telegraph and telephone services that it was running.

If Taiwan is not to go Tibet’s way, India must do its part to help Taiwan
reinforce its defences and self-governing status. India must follow the lead of
Japan and the US in strengthening ties with Taipei. And it should emulate the
example set by minnow Lithuania and allow Taiwan to rename its “Taipei Economic
and Cultural Centre” in New Delhi as the “Taiwanese Representative Office”,
while rebranding its own mission in Taipei as the “India Representative Office”.

Make no mistake: Taiwan is on the frontline of international defence against
Xi’s totalitarianism and expansionism, which have spawned a Muslim gulag in
Xinjiang, brutal repression in Tibet and Himalayan aggression. Major democracies
must act before it becomes too late to save Taiwan, a democratic success story.
If China succeeds in recolonizing Taiwan, India’s security will come under
greater pressure.

The writer is professor of strategic studies, Centre for Policy Research.

Posted in Asian Security, Diplomacy

THE QUAD NEEDS AN ECONOMIC PILLAR TO STAND ON

FEATURED

Posted on January 13, 2022 by Chellaney

The Quad, a partnership of democracies that had once appeared more concept than
reality, has been fortified. But it faces important challenges, including an
expansive agenda that could dilute its focus and the absence of an economic
pillar to lend support.

Joe Biden hosts a Quad leaders summit at the White House in September 2021:
American, Australian, Indian and Japanese interests are not entirely congruent.
© Reuters

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Resurrected in November 2017, the Australia-India-Japan-United States Quad has
come a long way toward cementing a strategic coalition of the leading
democracies of the Indo-Pacific region.

But the question of where the Quad is headed has gained greater salience in the
wake of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) taking effect
with Japan and Australia included in it.

RCEP, billed as the world’s largest trade bloc, and the separate Comprehensive
and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) seek to promote
economic integration around China and Japan, even as Beijing pursues its
neo-imperial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that has already ensnared some
vulnerable states in sovereignty-eroding debt traps. The U.S. and India were to
be members of CPTPP and RCEP, respectively, but then both decided not to join.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi famously mocked the Quad in 2018 as a
“headline-grabbing idea” that will dissipate “like the sea foam in the Pacific
or Indian Ocean.” However, the Quad, anchored in the free and open
Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision, continues to gain in strength, largely in response
to China’s muscular revisionism.Leaders of participating nations at the Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership meeting in Singapore, pictured in November
2018: the question of where the Quad is headed has gained greater salience in
the wake of RCEP taking effect on Jan. 1. © Reuters

The change of administrations in the U.S. and Japan in 2021 and in Australia in
2018, far from slowing momentum, has helped build continuity, making the Quad’s
future more durable.

The past year will be remembered for the first-ever Quad leaders summits — a
virtual summit in March, and then an in-person summit at the White House in
September. The summits yielded the first-ever Quad joint statements, which
articulated a clear-eyed vision. Until then, the pattern was for each state to
issue its own statement at the end of a meeting of officials from the Quad
countries.

To be sure, when U.S. President Joe Biden was elected, there was uncertainty
over the Quad’s future, including whether Biden would carry forward his
predecessor’s FOIP strategy. Only after being sworn in did Biden embrace the
FOIP concept and speak about the Quad.

There is a reason why the Quad remains central to America’s Indo-Pacific
strategy, despite the new, Biden-initiated AUKUS alliance with Australia and
Britain. The U.S., given its relative decline, needs its allies more than ever
so that, in seeking to address international challenges, American power is
augmented with that of its allies and strategic partners. Asian power
equilibrium cannot be built without Japan, India and Australia.

In contrast to the AUKUS alliance’s security mission, the Quad now has an agenda
extending to geoeconomic issues. While then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s
administration helped give the Quad strategic meaning, the Biden administration
has sought to reorient the group toward dealing with geoeconomic challenges.

The Quad initiatives since 2021 reflect this new focus. The initiative to build
resilient supply chains, for example, extends from the technology and
public-health sectors to semiconductors and clean energy. It draws strength from
the hard lessons many economies have learned about China-dependent supply
chains.

The Quad is also seeking to deliver transparent, high-standard infrastructure by
coordinating technical assistance and capacity-building efforts with regional
states. The objective is to set up public-private partnership projects that are
properly planned and financially and environmentally sustainable, in contrast to
China’s BRI projects, many of which have also faced allegations of corruption
and malpractice.

The Quad Vaccine Partnership, the most-visible initiative, is aimed at fostering
equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines by expanding vaccine manufacturing
capacity in the quartet and by donating vaccines to other countries. Vaccine
donations collectively by the quartet already rank the largest in the world.

Such initiatives show that the Quad, although catalyzed into action by China’s
aggressive actions and irascible behavior, has become more directed toward
larger geoeconomic issues.

A partnership of democracies that had once appeared more concept than reality
has been fortified, with its leaders pledging to promote a rules-based
Indo-Pacific that is “undaunted by coercion.”

However, the Quad’s new attention on global issues, from climate change —
Biden’s pet concern — to cybersecurity and the pandemic, risks diluting the
group’s Indo-Pacific focus. Its expansive geoeconomic agenda could also weigh it
down.

Furthermore, American, Australian, Indian and Japanese interests are not
entirely congruent. For example, India, facing the China-Pakistan strategic
axis, maintains a land-based defense posture, whereas Australia, Japan and the
U.S. are all focused on the maritime domain. And while America’s main objective
regarding China is nonmilitary — to counter its geopolitical, ideological and
economic challenge to U.S. preeminence — Japan and India confront a direct
Chinese threat.

According to Chinese state media commentary, Japan and Australia’s participation
in RCEP has taken “the wind out of the Quad’s anti-Chinese sails.” Australia and
Japan have consistently refused to bend to Chinese pressure. But they have been
lured by the billions of additional dollars that they will likely earn from
RCEP’s boosting of regional trade, even as China gains a greater say in shaping
trade rules in the Indo-Pacific.

Arrangements like RCEP, CPTPP and BRI, in fact, underscore the imperative for an
economic pillar for the FOIP vision in order to give the Quad more comprehensive
meaning. The Biden administration says it will unveil an economic framework that
will go beyond these arrangements.

The Quad’s security role needs to be complemented with a concretized
Indo-Pacific economic dimension so that security and economic interests are
fused. Otherwise, if its members pick economic interests over security
interests, the Quad’s relevance will erode.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

A DAVID NATION PUTS THE GLOBAL GOLIATH IN ITS PLACE

FEATURED

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is intrinsically totalitarian, belligerent,
arbitrary, expansionist and contemptuous of international law. And under Xi
Jinping, the CCP has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. With its
“tribute nation” approach to weak, vulnerable states, it seeks to influence
their sovereign decisions.

But now a midget nation, with just 18,500 active military personnel, has set an
example for bigger countries on how not to succumb to the efforts of the world’s
largest, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy to impose its will through
coercive pressure.

Lithuania, with a population smaller than the smallest second-tier Chinese city,
has stood up to China by defying its threats and letting Taiwan open a
representative office in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. This action was
preceded by Lithuania’s withdrawal from the 17+1, which groups 17 countries of
East and Central Europe with China to help promote Xi’s neo-imperial Belt and
Road Initiative. And after its defense ministry found that Chinese mobile phones
had built-in censorship capabilities, Lithuania advised consumers to ditch such
devices.

With Lithuania now set to open its own representative office in Taipei, Taiwan’s
capital, China has ratcheted up its punitive campaign against the Baltic nation
of 2.8 million people that prides itself on its role in promoting human rights
and democracy. The angry vitriol spewed by the Chinese state media has extended
to mocking Lithuania’s puny size.

Yet, it is particularly galling for the CCP leadership that even translating
threats into action and persisting with high-octane denunciations have not
brought that minnow to heel.

China’s diplomatic sanctions have included withdrawing its ambassador from
Vilnius and expelling the Lithuanian ambassador and then creating a situation
that led Lithuania to shut its embassy in Beijing. China has also slapped
informal trade sanctions on Lithuania, including imposing a customs block on its
exports. And in a bid to disrupt production in Lithuania, China has
been denying export permits for items needed by that country’s producers.

More importantly, the CCP’s weaponization of trade extends
to banning multinational companies from using Lithuanian-produced parts and
supplies or risk being shut out of the Chinese market. German companies with
manufacturing facilities in Lithuania have the most to lose from this ban, with
automotive supplier Continental under pressure to close operations there.

Lithuania, a member of the European Union and NATO, may have received little
more than verbal support from Washington and Brussels thus far, yet it has
refused to buckle under Chinese pressure.

Lithuania’s oversize place in Chinese diplomacy extends beyond its role as a
transit corridor for freight trains from China to Europe. The CCP, as part of
its strategy to annex Taiwan, is working to wipe out that island democracy’s
international identity by bribing countries to break off diplomatic ties with
Taipei.

China has already poached several of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies – including
Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Kiribati, Panama, the Solomon
Islands and, most recently, Nicaragua – leaving only 13 nations and the Vatican
still recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. To squeeze Taiwan, Beijing has
been vetoing its participation even in international forums where Taipei was
earlier present, such as the World Health Organization’s decision-making World
Health Assembly.

In this light, the CCP is enraged that Lithuania is moving in the other
direction by allowing Taiwan to open a de facto embassy. And it worries that
Lithuania could serve as a bellwether of sorts for Taiwan securing greater
international cooperation.

The CCP is right to be concerned on that score. Some East and Central European
nations, from the Czech Republic and Poland to Slovakia, are already seeking to
deepen economic and cultural relations with Taiwan. No wonder Lithuania has
been labeled by the CCP media as the “anti-China vanguard” in Europe.

If Taiwan gains greater presence on the international stage, it will be able to
shore up its status as a de facto nation, making it more difficult for China to
seize the self-governing island in the way it occupied Tibet and Xinjiang soon
after coming under communist rule in 1949. The then-independent Tibet, for
example, should have applied for United Nations membership shortly after that
international body came into existence in 1945, but it never did.

Taiwan, a technological powerhouse with the world’s 22nd-largest economy by
gross domestic product, has all the attributes of a robust independent state,
and most Taiwanese want it to stay that way. In addition to bolstering its
defenses with weapons like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to deter a
Chinese invasion, Taiwan needs to expand its global footprint to help safeguard
its autonomous status.

Recognizing Taiwan’s imperative to win broader international support, major
democracies – from the United States to Japan – are strengthening ties with
Taipei, even as China steps up its campaign to isolate Taiwan. President
Biden invited two Taiwanese officials to join the virtual “summit for
democracy” that he recently hosted.

Against this background, Lithuania, setting a rare European example of fealty to
democratic principles over other interests, has challenged China’s effort to
turn Taiwan into an international pariah by permitting a representative office
bearing the name “Taiwan” rather than “Chinese Taipei” (used by many nations and
the International Olympic Committee) or “Taipei Economic and Cultural Office”
(as in Canada and the U.S., for example). About 14 other nations host a “Taipei
Representative Office.” But the “Taiwanese Representative Office” in Lithuania
is the first such named office, which, according to the Chinese foreign
ministry, supplants the one-China principle with “one China, one Taiwan in the
world.”

The CCP’s campaign to bully Lithuania into submission was destined to fail
because Beijing lacks real leverage over that nation: Lithuania’s exports to
China accounted for just 1 percent of total exports, and the Lithuanian imports
of Chinese products can be sourced from elsewhere. The CCP campaign was more
about sending a warning to the rest of Europe not to follow Lithuania’s lead.

However, by showcasing its hectoring behavior and heavy-handed tactics, the CCP
could impel some other nations to follow the Lithuanian example, thereby helping
Taiwan to carve out more international space for itself. In other words, winning
the geopolitical battle in Lithuania could be a turning point for Taiwan.

More broadly, by opening too many fronts simultaneously through its aggressive
actions, the CCP has already dented China’s image, alienated the country’s
partners and provoked an international backlash, thus leaving Beijing with only
one lever of power — brute force. Simply put, the unbridled ambition, muscular
revisionism, international bullying and hubris of the Xi-led CCP is turning it
into China’s own worst enemy.

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

Posted in International Security

REGIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF BIDEN’S AFGHAN DEBACLE

FEATURED

Posted on December 27, 2021 by Chellaney
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, InsideOver

Afghanistan represents more of an American political capitulation to a terrorist
organization (the Taliban) than a U.S. military defeat. By overruling his
military generals, who forewarned that a precipitous American withdrawal would
facilitate Taliban’s conquest, U.S. President Joe Biden has sent Afghanistan
back in time, to the “dark age” of terrorist rule.

The greatest costs of Biden’s blunder are being counted in Afghans tortured and
killed, girls sexually enslaved through forced “marriages” to Taliban fighters,
and women and girls losing their rights to education and equality. The damage to
America’s international credibility and standing pales in comparison to the
costs ordinary Afghans are paying for the biggest U.S. foreign-policy disaster
in decades.

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan is the greatest jihadist victory in modern
times. It is an unprecedented boost for jihadists everywhere, from Europe to
Africa and Asia. It will inspire other terrorist groups, thus promising the
rebirth of global terror.

The regional impact is already apparent. For example, there has been a spurt of
terrorism in the Indian-administered part of disputed and divided Kashmir and
increasing seizures of Afghan-origin heroin in India, which is located between
the world’s two main opium-producing centers — the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran
“Golden Crescent” and the Myanmar-Thailand-Laos “Golden Triangle.”

Pakistan has effectively gained proxy control of Afghanistan by masterminding
the Taliban’s conquest of that country. The Taliban, along with their special
forces, the Haqqani Network, are a wing of the Pakistani “deep state.” The
Haqqani Network chief, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who now serves as Afghanistan’s
interior minister, is a deputy leader of the Taliban. Even before the Taliban
formed their government, the head of Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) agency reached Kabul, as if to advertise that the real boss
had stepped in.

Pakistan’s celebrations, however, are unlikely to last long. An unstable,
economically bankrupt and terrorist-ruled Afghanistan will likely exacerbate
violent jihadism in Pakistan, whose ethnic and sectarian fault lines have
already made its future uncertain.

Pakistan’s military, meanwhile, has expanded its role from strategic matters to
economic management, with its commercial empire valued at more than $100
billion. Its domineering role ensures a weak civilian government. As former
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said, the military has progressed from
being a “state within a state” to becoming a “state above the state.”

It is Pakistan’s military that has long reared terrorist groups because it
employs terrorism as an instrument of state policy against neighboring
countries. Ironically, the U.S. has long served as Pakistan’s top aid donor.
General Hamid Gul, a former chief of Pakistan’s military spy agency,
once boasted that, when history is written, it will be recorded that, “The ISI,
with the help of America, defeated America.” That boast came true when Kabul
fell to the Taliban on August 15.

Given Afghanistan’s strategic location at the crossroads of Central, South and
Southwest Asia, it is no surprise that the greatest geopolitical fallout from
Afghanistan’s security and humanitarian catastrophe is being felt in the region
extending from Russia and China to the Middle East. The void opened by America’s
humiliating retreat has given greater strategic space for an assertive China in
particular to expand its strategic footprint.

China, with its long-standing ties to the Taliban, including supplying weapons
via Pakistan, has taken the lead in portraying the U.S. as a declining power
whose ditching of the Afghan government demonstrates that it is an unreliable
partner for any country. After Kabul’s fall, China’s victory lap included a
state-media warning to Taiwan that the U.S. would abandon it too in the face of
a Chinese invasion.

The Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan helps China in other ways, too. Given that
Pakistan is a Chinese client, the U.S. defeat paves the way for China to make
strategic inroads into Afghanistan, with its substantial mineral wealth and
location between Iran and the Pakistan-India belt. China has sought to achieve
this by offering the Taliban the two things it desperately needs: international
recognition and economic aid. Beijing has been demanding that
Washington unfreeze Afghanistan’s financial assets.

One definite loser from America’s Afghanistan debacle is India, whose security
risks coming under siege from the Pakistan-China-Taliban coalition. India, one
of the largest aid donors to Afghanistan, had a big presence in that country,
but its diplomats and civilians were among the first to flee.

Since last year, India has been locked in military standoffs with China along
their long Himalayan border following furtive China incursions across the
frontier. But if India now faces a greater terrorist threat from across its
western borders, it will have less capacity to counter an expansionist China.

When the Taliban was previously in power, from 1996 to 2001, it allowed Pakistan
to use Afghan territory to train terrorists for missions in India. Its return to
power thus opens a new front for terrorism against India, which may be forced to
shift its focus from the intensifying military standoffs with China in the
Himalayas. Simply put, Afghanistan’s fall is likely to strengthen the anti-India
axis between the Taliban’s sponsor, Pakistan, and Pakistan’s main patron, China.

Meanwhile, thanks to the Taliban’s defeat of the world’s leading power, radical
Islam is again on the march, a development that carries security implications
even for Western countries. The Taliban, for its part, is turning Afghanistan
into a narco-terrorist state. According to a recent UN Security Council report,
the production and trafficking of poppy-based and synthetic drugs remain “the
Taliban’s largest single source of income,” contributing “significantly to the
narcotics challenges facing the wider international community.” The criminal
profits from this trade lubricate the Taliban’s terror machine.

The Taliban’s “Islamic emirate” is likely to serve as a magnet for violent
Islamists from around the world. The Taliban regime’s cabinet includes a who’s
who of international terrorism, including some of the world’s most-notorious
narcotics kingpins. The U.S.-led global war on terror, which was already
faltering before Biden took office, may not recover.

Brahma Chellaney, author of nine books, is Professor of Strategic Studies at the
independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a Richard von Weizsäcker
Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

Posted in International Security, Terrorism

CHINA’S TROJAN GIFT: CREDITOR IMPERIALISM

FEATURED

Posted on December 25, 2021 by Chellaney
Brahma Chellaney, CEPA

We are witnessing the end of China’s happy days when a positive image and almost
unlimited capital helped its push for global influence and assets.

The scale and ambition of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is
staggering. Credible estimates suggest it has now lent $1.5 trillion of state
money to 150 countries, more than the International Monetary Fund or the World
Bank, let alone any other nation state. Is that sustainable and, given the
recent slump in Chinese lending, is the decline an issue that will simply melt
away?

What China’s President Xi Jinping hails as the “project of the century” is
better described as debt-trap diplomacy. By extending huge loans with strings
attached to financially vulnerable states, the BRI has boosted China’s political
leverage over debtor states, ensnaring some in sovereignty-eroding debt traps.
China has also secured favorable access to their natural assets, such as mineral
resources and ports.

BRI loans continue until a borrower nation faces a debt crisis, which then arms
China with considerable leverage to wrest political and economic concessions.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won its first overseas naval base at Djibouti,
for example, as a result of debt entrapment. The more desperate a borrower’s
situation, the higher the interest rates China will seek to impose.

Paradoxically however, the China-originating coronavirus pandemic has taken its
toll on the BRI by contributing to a sharp drop in lending. Since peaking in the
second half of 2019, BRI financing has continued to decline. The pandemic’s
socioeconomic disruptions and adverse impacts on GDP have crimped many
developing nations’ capacity to undertake new infrastructure projects.

Other factors are also at play, including the international spotlight on China’s
predatory lending practices. Xi’s regime, while refusing to come clean on the
origins of the covid virus, has utilized the pandemic to step up muscular
revisionism and other scofflaw actions, from the East and South China Seas to
the Himalayas.

All of which has dented China’s global image, with China’s reputation
reaching new lows. This has given confidence to a number of BRI recipient
countries, including some that have slipped into debt servitude to China, to
oppose unfavorable terms for fresh loans or seek renegotiation of existing loan
contracts.

China has invariably refused to renegotiate the terms of existing contracts. But
with a number of states scrapping or scaling back BRI projects, it is being
compelled to re-strategize and recalibrate lending. The increasingly precarious
financial situations of a growing number of BRI partner states have also
dampened Chinese state lenders’ appetite for risk-taking.

These factors collectively explain the downward trend in BRI finance and
investments, which in the first half of 2021 declined 32% to $19.3
billion compared to the previous six months. In the pre-pandemic boom time, BRI
financing had reached a record $63.3 billion in the second half of 2019.

To be sure, the BRI (whose official name at launch was One Belt, One Road)
continues to make inroads in the developing world, as illustrated by the newly
completed high-speed railway connecting Laos to China. Ironically, Laos was
compelled just about a year ago to hand over control of its debt-laden national
power grid to a majority Chinese-owned company

And yet the BRI’s glory days are unlikely ever to return, even if the pandemic
comes under control. The dangers of China’s creditor imperialism can no longer
be ignored by borrowing countries — unless their debt entrapment is beyond
redemption. Cash-strapped Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, for example, have
taken fresh Chinese loans to pay off old loans, despite earlier ceding strategic
assets to creditor China.

Make no mistake: The BRI faces a growing image problem.
The corruption and malpractice in many of its projects are compounded by a
pervasive lack of transparency, including on financing and construction. Many
completed projects are not financially viable. There is also increasing
international awareness that slipping into debt bondage to China will likely
mean losing valuable natural assets and perhaps even sovereignty.

Even where governments remain China-friendly, many citizens are beginning to
view the BRI as potentially representing the advent of a new colonial era — the
21st equivalent of the East India Company that paved the way for British
imperialism in the East, initially through trade.

Meanwhile, the Australia-India-Japan-U.S. “Quad” grouping, as a counter to the
BRI, is working to deliver transparent, high-standard infrastructure by
coordinating technical assistance and capacity-building efforts with regional
states. The objective is to set up public-private partnership projects in the
vast Indo-Pacific region, including through the Blue Dot Network, that are
properly planned, and financially and environmentally sustainable. The European
Union seeks something similar through its Global Gateway.

The Quad effort notwithstanding, the BRI will continue to win new projects.
Indeed, U.S. policies to punish or isolate countries — from Zimbabwe and Iran to
Myanmar and Cambodia — ensure that China will continue to bag lucrative
contracts because there are no alternatives.

However, the damage to the BRI brand may be beyond repair, even if the
initiative were renamed a second time. In the coming years, the BRI is likely to
encounter stronger headwinds.

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

THE QUAD’S GEO-ECONOMIC AND GEOSTRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS

FEATURED

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Chellaney

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi famously mocked the Quad as a
“headline-grabbing idea” that will dissipate “like the sea foam in the Pacific
or Indian Ocean.” But far from dissipating, the Quad is strengthening, largely
in response to China’s muscular revisionism.

Brahma CHELLANEY
published by RIETI (Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry)

At a time when there is a life-and-death conflict between two systems of
governance — repressive and democratic — a loose strategic coalition of the
Indo-Pacific region’s four leading democracies, the Quad, is rapidly
solidifying. Comprised of Australia, India, Japan and the United States, the
Quad has received a lot of international attention, largely because of the
promise it holds toward underpinning the power equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific.
In fact, the increasing use of the term “Indo-Pacific” — which refers to all
countries bordering the Indian and Pacific oceans — rather than the traditional
term “Asia-Pacific,” underscores the maritime dimension of today’s challenges.
Asia’s oceans have increasingly become an arena of competition for resources and
influence (Note 1). It now seems likely that future regional crises will be
triggered and settled at sea.

As is apparent from the websites of the White House and the foreign ministries
of its four member-states, the Quad’s official name is the Quad, not
“Quadrilateral Security Dialogue,” as some publications keep calling it on first
reference. The Quad’s origins date back to the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that
devastated large parts of Asia, killing hundreds of thousands across Indonesia,
Thailand, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa. The four countries joined hands to
coordinate disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. The idea of formalizing
a Quad emerged from that humanitarian initiative.

After lying dormant for nine years, the Quad was resurrected in November 2017
and began regular working-level meetings. It started gaining momentum after its
consultations were elevated to the foreign-minister level in October 2020. Under
U.S. President Joe Biden’s initiative, the Quad leaders convened for the first
in-person summit at the White House in September 2021. In fact, just weeks after
assuming office, Biden organized a virtual Quad summit that yielded the Quad
leaders’ first joint statement, which articulated a clear-eyed vision (Note 2).

China has long viewed the Quad with suspicion, with its misgivings reinforced by
the more recent formation of the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS) alliance, which
President Biden called “a historic step.” The plain fact is that China’s
aggressive actions have driven India closer to America, compelled Japan to
strengthen its security alliance with the U.S., and forced Australia to abandon
hedging and openly align itself with Washington.

China sees the Quad as a threat to its expansionist ambitions (Note 3). But,
publicly, China has been dismissive of the Quad. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang
Yi famously mocked the Quad as a “headline-grabbing idea” that will dissipate
“like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean.” Far from dissipating like
“sea foam,” the Quad is strengthening, with its four democracies forging closer
bonds in response to China’s increasingly muscular actions, which extend from
the East and South China Seas to the Himalayas. In fact, opposing China’s
coercive expansionism is the Quad’s unifying theme.

The next logical step would be for these democracies to play a more concerted,
coordinated role in advancing broader Indo-Pacific security. The idea, however,
is not to create an Asian version of NATO, but rather to develop a close
partnership founded on shared values and interests, including the rule of law,
freedom of navigation, respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty,
peaceful dispute resolution, free markets and free trade.

China represents a growing challenge to these principles. At a time when the
world is still battling a deadly pandemic that originated in China, that
country’s muscular revisionism has lent new momentum to the Quad’s evolution
toward a concrete, institutionalized grouping. In fact, with India’s closer
integration, the Quad is beginning to blossom. And the Quad seems poised to
deepen its strategic collaboration.

The Australia-India-Japan-U.S. quartet has affirmed a shared commitment to
underpin an Indo-Pacific region based on clear and transparent rules, with
respect for international law. The Quad’s agenda is centered on building a
stable balance of power and a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a
concept authored in 2016 by then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. That
concept was later embraced by U.S. policy, becoming the linchpin of America’s
Indo-Pacific strategy under two successive administrations. The Quad’s focus,
however, extends beyond China and the security realm.

In fact, the media focus on the Quad’s geostrategic aspects has obscured the
important role that the group is playing to bring about geo-economic change. The
grouping’s geo-economic priorities are apparent from several of its initiatives,
including the following (Note 4):

* Build resilient supply chains. The Quad’s supply-chain initiative extends
from the technology and public-health sectors to clean energy. With Beijing
seeking to leverage its domination of international supply chains, many
economies, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, have learned hard
lessons about China-dependent supply chains. There is a growing recognition
of the imperative to diversify supply chains and make them more resilient to
interference or manipulation by any state. Toward that end, the Quad, among
other things, has sought to secure supply chains for vaccine production and
clean energy, as well as identify vulnerabilities and strengthen supply-chain
security for semiconductors and their vital components.
* Rally expertise, capacity and finance to expand regional infrastructure. The
Quad is working to finance and build infrastructure projects in the
Indo-Pacific that are properly planned and financially sustainable as a
counter to China’s debt-trap diplomacy, which is driving its “Belt and Road
Initiative” even as it increasingly ensnares vulnerable nations in
sovereignty-eroding debt traps (Note 5). Since 2015, the Quad partners have
provided over $48 billion to more than 30 regional states in official finance
for infrastructure related to public health, rural development, water supply
and sanitation, renewable power generation, telecommunications and road
transportation. Meanwhile, the Quad Infrastructure Coordination Group has
been established to help deliver transparent, high-standards infrastructure
by coordinating technical assistance and capacity-building efforts, including
with regional states.
* Help vaccinate the world against COVID-19. The Quad Vaccine Partnership,
launched in March 2021, is aimed at fostering equitable access to COVID-19
vaccines in the Indo-Pacific and the wider world by expanding vaccine
manufacturing capacity in the quartet and donating vaccines to developing
nations. This initiative is piloted by the Quad Vaccine Experts Group, which
coordinates the Quad’s collective response to the pandemic. As part of their
plan to donate more than 1.2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses, in addition to
the doses they have already financed through COVAX, the Quad countries seek
to leverage the vaccine-manufacturing heft of India, which supplies more than
60% of the world’s vaccines against various diseases. Japan, for example,
will invest some $100 million in India’s healthcare sector to help boost the
output of COVID-19 vaccines and treatment drugs.
* Foster an open, accessible and secure technology ecosystem. This goal extends
from 5G diversification and deployment to bolstering critical-infrastructure
resilience against cyber threats. The Quad partners have now extended their
cooperation even to outer space, including building a partnership for
exchanging satellite data to promote sustainable use of oceans and marine
resources and thereby protect the Earth. Critical and Emerging Technologies
Working Group has been established.
* Keep climate goals within reach through clean-energy innovation and
deployment as well as adaptation, resilience and preparedness. A Quad
shipping task force, for example, will seek to establish low-emission or
zero-emission shipping corridors between the Quad member-countries, including
by inviting Yokohama, Los Angeles, Sydney and Mumbai to form a green-shipping
network. The Quad is also aiming at a clean-hydrogen partnership to
strengthen and reduce costs across all elements of the clean-hydrogen value
chain and to boost trade in clean hydrogen across the Indo-Pacific. Another
objective of the Quad is improving critical climate information-sharing and
disaster-resilient infrastructure.

These initiatives show that the Quad, although catalyzed into action by China’s
aggressive actions and irascible behavior, has a broader agenda heavily focused
on geo-economic issues. After the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump
took the lead in reviving the dormant Quad and giving it strategic meaning, the
Biden administration, in partnership with Japan, India and Australia, has sought
to orient the Quad toward addressing the geo-economic challenges. Following the
G-7 summit in Britain in June 2021, President Biden revealed at a news
conference that, after he won the presidential election, a Chinese leader (whom
he didn’t name) sought to dissuade him from embracing the Quad (Note 6).

Today, its four members perceive the Quad as providing important new
architecture in the Indo-Pacific for advancing cooperation economically and
strategically. The Quad, through its geo-economic initiatives, including
generous vaccine donations, is also seeking to project soft power.

The fact is that the Quad is fostering greater cooperation between and among its
member-states, as well as with outside nations. By seeking to leverage both
public and private resources to achieve maximum impact, the Quad offers an
alternative model to China’s state-directed lending for infrastructure projects,
which has saddled a number of countries with onerous debts and increased their
dependence on Beijing. Australia has unveiled a $1.4 billion infrastructure fund
for the South Pacific, while Japan and India have agreed to develop a series of
joint projects along what they have called the “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor,”
which links the two continents via sea routes.

More fundamentally, the Quad member-states have come a long way toward cementing
a partnership of democracies that had once appeared more concept than reality.
The new AUKUS alliance is likely to complement the Quad. For the U.S., the Quad
is becoming the central dynamic of its Indo-Pacific policy, with National
Security Adviser Jake Sullivan calling the Quad “a foundation upon which to
build substantial American policy in the Indo-Pacific (Note 7).”

While recognizing the Quad’s utility, it is also important to understand its
limitations. Unlike the U.S. and Australia, which are geographically distant
from China, Japan and India face a direct China threat, which the Quad cannot
mitigate. While India in response has embarked on a major defense buildup, Japan
— already shaken out of its complacency by an expansionist China vying for
regional hegemony — is likely in the coming years to rearm and become militarily
more independent of the U.S., without jettisoning its security treaty with
Washington (Note 8).

Still, it is imperative that the Quad gain greater economic and strategic heft
so as to ensure power equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific. By cooperating in
economic, technological and security realms and coordinating their responses,
the Quad member-states can help put discreet checks on the unbridled exercise of
Chinese power. If China’s growing threats against Taiwan lead to military
action, then a grand international coalition, with the Quad at its core, could
emerge.

Footnotes:

1. ^ The White House, United States Strategic Framework for the
Indo-Pacific (Washington, DC: The White House, declassified on January 5,
2021); and U.S. Department of State, The Elements of the China
Challenge (Washington, DC: Policy Planning Staff, Office of the Secretary of
State, November 2020).
2. ^ The White House, “Quad Leaders’ Joint Statement: ‘The Spirit of the
Quad,’” March 12, 2021, available
at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/12/quad-leaders-joint-statement-the-spirit-of-the-quad/.
3. ^ Kevin Rudd, “Why the Quad Alarms China,” Foreign Affairs, August 6, 2021.
4. ^ The White House, “Fact Sheet: Quad Leaders’ Summit,” September 24, 2021;
and the White House, “Joint Statement from Quad Leaders,” September 24,
2021.
5. ^ Anna Gelpern, Sebastian Horn, et al, How China Lends: A Rare Look into
China’s Debt Contracts with Foreign Governments (Williamsburg, VA: AidData
at William & Mary, the Center for Global Development, the Kiel Institute for
the World Economy, and the Peterson Institute for International Economics,
March 2021).
6. ^ The White House, “Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference,” June
13, 2021, at Cornwall, United Kingdom, available
at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/06/13/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-conference-2/.
7. ^ Kyodo, AFP-Jiji Press, “U.S. national security adviser says ‘Quad’ key in
Indo-Pacific,” The Japan Times, January 30, 2021.
8. ^ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Full text of the Treaty of Mutual
Cooperation and Security Between Japan and the United States of America,
signed on January 19, 1960, available
at https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/q&a/ref/1.html.

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

CHINA’S GLOBAL HYBRID WAR

FEATURED

Posted on December 19, 2021 by Chellaney

China under Xi Jinping has found a clever way to expand its land and maritime
frontiers, all without firing a shot. China is showing that, just as the pen can
be mightier than the sword, so too can its hybrid warfare, officially known as
“Three Warfares.”

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

As the world’s largest, strongest, and longest-surviving dictatorship,
contemporary China lacks the rule of law. Yet it is increasingly using
its rubber-stamp parliament to enact domestic legislation asserting territorial
claims and rights in international law. In fact, China has become quite adept at
waging “lawfare” – the misuse and abuse of law for political and strategic ends.

Under “commander-in-chief” Xi Jinping’s bullying leadership, lawfare has
developed into a critical component of China’s broader approach to asymmetrical
or hybrid warfare. The blurring of the line between war and peace is enshrined
in the regime’s official strategy as the “Three Warfares” (san zhong zhanfa)
doctrine. Just as the pen can be mightier than the sword, so, too, can lawfare,
psychological warfare, and public-opinion warfare.

Through these methods, Xi is advancing expansionism without firing a shot.
Already, China’s bulletless aggression is proving to be a game changer in Asia.
Waging the Three Warfares in conjunction with military operations has yielded
China significant territorial gains.

Within this larger strategy, lawfare is aimed at rewriting rules to
animate historical fantasies and legitimize unlawful actions retroactively. For
example, China recently enacted a Land Borders Law to support its territorial
revisionism in the Himalayas. And to advance its expansionism in the South and
East China Seas, it enacted the Coast Guard Law and the Maritime Traffic Safety
Law earlier this year.

The new laws, authorizing the use of force in disputed areas, were established
amid rising tensions with neighboring countries. The Land Borders Law comes amid
a military stalemate in the Himalayas, where more than 100,000 Chinese and
Indian troops have been locked in standoffs for nearly 20 months
following repeated Chinese incursions into Indian territory.

The Coast Guard Law, by treating disputed waters as China’s, not
only violates the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; it also could
trigger armed conflict with Japan or the United States. The Land Borders Law
likewise threatens to spark war with India by signaling China’s intent to
determine borders unilaterally. It even extends to the Tibet-originating
transboundary rivers, where China proclaims a right to divert as much of the
shared waters as it wishes.

These recent laws follow the success of the Three Warfares strategy in redrawing
the map of the South China Sea – despite an international arbitral
tribunal’s ruling rejecting Chinese territorial claims there – and then
swallowing Hong Kong, which had long flourished under democratic institutions as
a major global financial center.

In the South China Sea, through which around one-third of global maritime trade
passes, Xi’s regime has stepped up lawfare to consolidate Chinese control,
turning its contrived historical claims into reality. Last year, while other
claimant countries were battling the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi’s government created
two new administrative districts to strengthen its claims over the Spratly and
Paracel Islands and other land features. And in further defiance of
international law, China gave Mandarin-language names to 80 islands, reefs,
seamounts, shoals, and ridges, 55 of which are fully submerged.

The Hong Kong National Security Law, enacted in mid-2020, is a similarly
aggressive act of lawfare. Xi has used the law to crush Hong Kong’s
pro-democracy movement and rescind the guarantees enshrined in China’s
UN-registered treaty with the United Kingdom. The treaty committed China to
preserving Hong Kong citizens’ basic rights, freedoms, and political
self-determination for at least 50 years after regaining sovereignty over the
territory.

The strategy’s success in unraveling Hong Kong’s autonomy raises the question of
whether China will now enact similar legislation aimed at Taiwan or
even invoke its 2005 Anti-Secession Law, which underscored its resolve to bring
the island democracy under mainland rule. With China escalating its
psychological and information warfare, there is a real danger that it could move
against Taiwan after the Beijing Winter Olympics in February.

Xi’s expansionism has not spared even tiny Bhutan, with a population of just
784,000. Riding roughshod over a 1998 bilateral treaty that obligated China “not
to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border,” the
regime has built militarized villages in Bhutan’s northern and western
borderlands.

As these examples show, domestic legislation is increasingly providing China
with a pretext to flout binding international law, including bilateral and
multilateral treaties to which it is a party. With more than one million
detainees, Xi’s Muslim gulag in Xinjiang has made a mockery of the 1948 Genocide
Convention, to which China acceded in 1983 (with the rider that it does not
consider itself bound by Article IX, the clause allowing any party in a dispute
to lodge a complaint with the International Court of Justice). And
because effective control is the shibboleth of a strong territorial claim in
international law, Xi is using new legislation to undergird China’s
administration of disputed areas, including with newly implanted residents.

Establishing such facts on the ground is integral to Xi’s territorial
aggrandizement. That is why China has taken pains to create artificial islands
and administrative districts in the South China Sea, and to pursue a militarized
village-building spree in Himalayan borderlands that India, Bhutan,
and Nepal consider to be within their own national boundaries.

Despite these encroachments, very little international attention has been given
to Xi’s lawfare or broader hybrid warfare. The focus on China’s military buildup
obscures the fact that the country is quietly expanding its maritime and land
boundaries without firing a shot. Given Xi’s overarching goal – to achieve
global primacy for China under his leadership – the world’s democracies need to
devise a concerted strategy to counter his Three Warfares.

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

XI’S NUCLEAR FRENZY AIMED AT SHIELDING CHINA’S EXPANSIONISM

FEATURED

Posted on December 17, 2021 by Chellaney

Weapons buildup casts doubt on whether U.S. can defend Taiwan

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

Military vehicles carrying DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles drive past
Tiananmen Square in October 2019: Beijing is relishing the international
attention its nuclear-weapons buildup is getting. © Reuters

Far from seeking to hide its frenzied nuclear-weapons buildup, China is
flaunting it, as if to underline that its rapidly growing arsenal is driven more
by political than military considerations. The unprecedented speed and scale of
the buildup appears to be linked to President Xi Jinping’s international
expansionism as China seeks global primacy by 2049, the centenary of communist
rule.

China’s neighbors need to pay close attention to this buildup, even though it
seems primarily aimed at dissuading Washington from challenging China’s actions
at home and abroad.

Just as Xi’s muscular revisionism has largely centered on Asia, from the East
and South China Seas to the Himalayas, the security-related impacts, as opposed
to the geopolitical implications, of the fast-growing Chinese nuclear armory are
likely to be felt principally by Asian states.

Neighboring countries, from Japan and the Philippines to India and Bhutan, are
already bearing the brunt of Xi’s recidivist policies. But with a larger nuclear
arsenal, Xi will be further emboldened to step up his conventional-military
tactics and hybrid warfare from behind China’s highly protective nuclear shield.

In such a scenario, China’s annexation of Taiwan could become difficult to stop,
even though such a development would fundamentally alter Asian and international
geopolitics.

Questions are already being raised in America about the strategic wisdom of
defending Taiwan against a potential Chinese invasion, with some analysts
contending that any U.S. plan to come to Taiwan’s rescue is far too risky and
that Taipei ought to do more for its self-defense. In simulated combat exercises
for the Pentagon, a RAND Corporation study found that China’s firepower in the
form of long-range missiles could already hold U.S. warships and aircraft at bay
in a Taiwan war scenario.

A China armed to its teeth with nuclear weapons would cast further doubt on
whether the U.S. could defend Taiwan, given the greater risks involved.

Xi’s regime has accelerated the production of nuclear warheads so rapidly that
the Pentagon, in just one year, has revised up its estimate of the number of
such weapons that China will deploy by 2030 from 400 to more than 1,000.

China has already fielded its first operational hypersonic-weapon system and
“intends to increase the peacetime readiness of its nuclear forces by moving to
a launch-on-warning posture with an expanded silo-based force,” according to the
Pentagon’s recent report to Congress.

Far from seeking to conceal its hyperactive nuclearization, China has
constructed two new nuclear missile fields in its remote northwest in ways
easily visible to overhead satellites. It is expanding its intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM) silos from about 20 to as many as 250. One of these new
missile fields is not far from the notorious Hami internment camp in Xinjiang
that holds Uighur and other Muslims for “re-education.”Satellite imagery of
suspected missile silos being constructed near Jilantai, pictured in November
2019. © Maxar Technologies/Getty Images

Chinese state media may have dismissed the new ICBM silos as windmills, but
Beijing is relishing the international attention its nuclear-weapons buildup is
getting because such publicity implicitly underscores its message that it is
emerging as a superpower whose plans cannot be stymied.

Xi himself took the lead in public messaging when the state media reported his
directive to the military in March to “accelerate the construction of advanced
strategic deterrent” systems, as if China’s moderately sized nuclear armory in
comparison to America’s was constraining its ambitious international agenda.

It is well understood that nuclear weapons are for deterrence, not for
warfighting. More nuclear warheads do not necessarily imply stronger deterrence,
which is why India appears content with its small but diversified arsenal. Xi’s
objectives, however, are essentially geopolitical, which explains his resolve to
narrow the gap with the massive, “overkill” arsenals of the U.S. and Russia.

The objectives extend from having an arsenal befitting an emerging superpower to
building leverage in future arms-control negotiations with Washington and
Moscow. The principal objective, however, is to stop the U.S., as the leader of
the largest alliance of countries the world has ever known, from challenging
China’s “core interests.”

As a Beijing-based Chinese analyst has put it, “Beijing’s nuclear buildup is
ultimately an attempt to force Washington to drop the perceived strategic
assault and accept a mutual vulnerability relationship.” According to him,
Beijing sees “growing U.S. pressure on China over human rights, the rule of law,
Hong Kong and Taiwan as evidence that Washington is willing to take greater
risks to stop China’s rise by delegitimizing the government, destabilizing the
country and blocking national unification.”

Whether Xi’s nuclear frenzy can tame U.S. reaction or win greater respect for
China is questionable. If anything, it is likely to accelerate the fundamental
shift in America’s China policy set in motion by Xi’s scofflaw actions.

Regionally, however, the nuclear-weapons buildup is set to lengthen China’s
shadow over Asia while heightening military tensions with its main Asian rivals
— Japan and India.

The buildup’s security implications are starker for non-nuclear Japan than for
nuclear-armed India, which has stood up to China’s aggression in the Himalayas
by locking horns in tense military standoffs over the past nearly 20 months,
despite the risk of a full-scale war.

Japan, already shaken out of its complacency by an expansionist China vying for
regional hegemony, is likely in the coming years to rearm and become militarily
more independent of the U.S., without jettisoning its security treaty with
Washington.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in International Security, WMD

CHINA WILL REGRET WEAPONIZING SPORTS

FEATURED

Posted on December 7, 2021 by Chellaney

China has long mixed sports and politics. From its boycott of the 1956 Olympics
to its more recent bullying tactics against the N.B.A., England’s Premier League
and others, Beijing has treated sports as politics by other means. Now its
Winter Olympics face a diplomatic boycott.

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

The approaching Beijing Winter Olympics – the most divisive games since the 1936
Berlin Olympics – face several challenges: Boycott calls in the West; a Muslim
gulag with more than one million detainees in Xinjiang; the new omicron variant
of COVID-19; and a silenced #MeToo accuser, Peng Shuai, who is China’s top
tennis player. No wonder Beijing is lobbying U.S. businesses, warning that they
cannot expect to make money in China if they stay silent.

The calls for a coordinated boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics (labeled by
critics the “Genocide Games”) raise the question of whether such action can help
influence China’s behavior under a president whose record in power is
increasingly drawing comparisons to the past century’s most brutal rulers.

Robert O’Brien, national security adviser to then-President Trump, last
year equated Xi Jinping to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Some others have
compared Xi to Adolf Hitler, even coining the nickname “Xitler.” Xi, for his
part, has cultivated a Mao Zedong-style personality cult and embarked on
completing the expansionist agenda that the communist China’s founder left
unfinished.

Indeed, Xi has sought to model himself on Mao, the 20th century’s top butcher.
Like Mao Zedong Thought, Xi Jinping Thought has been enshrined in China’s
constitution and made the central doctrine guiding the ruling Chinese Communist
Party (CCP). Xi, like Mao, is reverently referred to as renmin lingxiu, or
“people’s leader.”

China’s new Mao, while ideologically committed to classical Marxism-Leninism, is
apparently seeking to build fascism with Chinese characteristics.

Under Xi, China has emerged as a wrathful, expansionist power that pursues “wolf
warrior” tactics and debt-trap diplomacy and flouts international law at will.
Two successive U.S. administrations have described as genocide Xi’s Xinjiang
gulag, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the
Nazi period.

The international costs of Xi’s despotism are apparent from the devastating
consequences of the China-originating pandemic. Two years on, the world still
does not know whether COVID-19 began as a natural spillover from wildlife or was
triggered by the accidental leak of a lab-enhanced virus in Wuhan. What is
apparent, though, is that Xi’s regime lied about the initial spread of the
disease, hid evidence of human-to-human transmission and silenced doctors who
sought to warn about the emergence of a novel coronavirus.

More ominously, a massive cover-up in China to obscure the genesis of the virus
suggests the world may never know the truth. Beijing has refused to cooperate
with international investigations, characterizing them as “origin-tracing
terrorism,” and instead peddled conspiracy theories.

Thanks to Xi’s scofflaw actions, China’s global image has been badly dented,
forcing the country to increasingly rely on its coercive power. According to
a global survey, unfavorable views of China are at or near historic highs in
most advanced economies.

But instead of undertaking a course correction, Xi is doubling down on his
renegade actions, as underscored by China’s stepped-up bullying of Taiwan. After
Beijing’s success in swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the
South China Sea and changing the territorial status quo in the Himalayan
borderlands with India, Nepal and Bhutan, risk is growing that Xi’s expansionism
could make Taiwan its next target.

Beijing will have the honor of becoming the world’s first city to host both a
summer and winter Olympics. But since the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, the
human rights situation in China has worsened, with Xi establishing a
techno-authoritarian state whose soaring budget for internal security
has overtaken the country’s massive military budget. An increasingly repressive
internal machinery, aided by an Orwellian surveillance system, has fostered a
state strategy to culturally smother ethnic minorities in their traditional
homelands, including through demographic change and harsh policing.

It was in 2015 that Beijing defeated Almaty (Kazakhstan) to win the bid to host
the 2022 Winter Olympics. Just in the period since 2015, China, among other
things, has established forward military bases on human-made islands in the
South China Sea, set up the Xinjiang gulag, militarized the Himalayan
borderlands, weaponized debt and gobbled up Hong Kong.

The world must not turn a blind eye to such actions, which thus far have not
invited any meaningful Western sanctions. Xi has only been emboldened by
the fact that his draconian, expansionist actions have essentially been
cost-free.

Just as other powers’ appeasement emboldened Hitler’s expansionism, leading to
World War II, the international failure to impose tangible costs for Chinese
aggression is likely to beget more aggression. Indeed, the present
business-as-usual approach to China is tantamount to appeasement.

If the Beijing Winter Olympics were held without any censure of the Xi regime,
it would be an insult to every Uyghur, every Tibetan, every jailed Hong Kong
democracy activist and every imprisoned Chinese political dissident. A
boycott-free Games that wrap up smoothly would only encourage Xi to embark on
fresh repression and expansionism.

Make no mistake: If Xi’s China stays on its present path, open conflict with the
West and with its neighbors, from Japan to India, would become inevitable.

For the CCP, sports and politics have long been inseparable. From its boycott of
the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne (Australia) to its more recent bullying
tactics against the N.B.A., England’s Premier League and others, the party has
treated sports as politics by other means. It has used threats of withdrawing
lucrative sports contracts, broadcast deals and sponsorship opportunities to buy
silence on its human rights record.

When China can wield sports as a political weapon, is there any reason why
democratic powers should avoid giving it a taste of its own medicine to help put
the CCP on notice? A coordinated boycott of the Games would convey to the
Chinese people that the CCP’s rogue actions risk isolating China.

Harmonized action on the Games, even if largely symbolic, could serve as a first
step toward galvanizing a larger international movement against Xi’s regime, if
not triggering a “boycott China” movement along the lines of the sustained
global boycott that helped end the apartheid system in South Africa.

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

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

CHINA’S BULLYING OF TINY BHUTAN RISKS SOUTH ASIAN STABILITY

FEATURED

Posted on November 24, 2021 by Chellaney

David and Goliath struggle exposes Beijing’s expansionist intent

The Merak village, Eastern Bhutan, pictured from the footpath heading towards
Sakteng in May 2015: Xi Jinping’s expansionism has not spared China’s smallest
neighbor. © Corbis/Getty Images

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

China has failed to settle the frontier with its tiny neighbor Bhutan, despite
holding talks with Bhutan since 1984. Now, after nearly four decades, it is
trumpeting a newly signed memorandum of understanding with the kingdom to
“expedite” the border negotiations.

The MOU cannot obscure the fact that China has in recent years incrementally
encroached on Bhutan’s territory, one of the world’s smallest and
least-populated nations, with just 778,000 people. Such aggression violates a
1998 bilateral treaty committing China and Bhutan “not to resort to unilateral
action to alter the status quo of the border.”

Druk Yul, or the land of the thunder dragon, as Bhutan is known, lies sandwiched
between the elephant of India and since 1950 when Beijing swallowed Tibet, whose
religion and culture has greatly influenced Bhutan, the giant Chinese dragon on
the other side.

Despite popularizing the concept of gross national happiness as a measure of
development, Bhutan’s own happiness is coming under pressure from Chinese
aggression under President Xi Jinping, who is implementing the expansionist
agenda that Mao Zedong left unfinished.

While China under Mao more than doubled its size, making it the world’s
fourth-largest country by area, Xi’s expansionism has not spared China’s
smallest neighbor.

Several newly built Chinese villages, unnoticed by the world, have cropped up
inside internationally recognized Bhutanese territory, demonstrating how Xi has
taken his South China Sea strategy to the Himalayas. With the villages have come
planted settlers, roads and military infrastructure.

China’s program to build militarized villages in Himalayan borderlands it
claims, or has seized, from Bhutan, Nepal and India gained momentum after Xi in
2017 called on Tibetan herdsmen to settle in frontier areas and “become
guardians of Chinese territory.”

Establishing such facts on the ground has become integral to Xi’s strategy of
territorial aggrandizement because international law recognizes civilian
settlements as evidence of a country’s effective control over an area. This
explains why artificial villages have been created in inhospitable Himalayan
terrain, just like the human-made islands in the South China Sea.

Satellite images reveal new Chinese villages on land in Bhutan’s west and north.
After the Colorado-based Maxar Technologies disclosed one such village named
Pangda, Chinese state media claimed it was on Chinese territory.

Meanwhile, China has built military roads through Bhutanese territory to open a
new axis against India’s most vulnerable point — the Siliguri Corridor, which
connects its far northeast to the heartland. Known as the Chicken Neck, the
corridor, at the intersection of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, is barely
22 kilometers wide at its narrowest point.

Not content with such stealth encroachments, Xi’s regime has upped the ante by
opening a new territorial front against Bhutan. Out of the blue, China last year
laid claim to Bhutan’s rhododendron-laden Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, which
spreads across 741 sq. kilometers and is known for its unique flora and fauna,
including endangered species such as the red panda, Himalayan serow, gorals,
capped langurs, Himalayan black bear and barking deer.

The new claim to Bhutan’s easternmost territory is unusual because China has no
common border there, it being a region that can only be accessed through the
Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. This is the first time since the end of World
War II that one country has laid claim to another state’s territory that can
only be accessed via a third nation.

In doing so, Beijing has sought to simultaneously advance its designs against
Bhutan and India. Its maps already show the entire area of Arunachal Pradesh —
more than two times larger than Bhutan — as being part of China. To be sure,
this is not the first time that Xi’s regime has targeted Bhutanese territory to
bolster China’s military advantage over India.

In 2017, China occupied most of Bhutan’s Doklam Plateau overlooking India’s
Chicken Neck, following a 73-day military standoff with India, the de facto
guarantor of Bhutanese security. In fact, China is currently locked in another
standoff with Indian forces that was triggered more than 19 months ago by
Chinese encroachments on India’s northernmost territory of Ladakh, located
almost 1,500 kilometers to Bhutan’s west.

Beijing has long pressed Bhutan to open diplomatic relations with it and accused
India of blocking the kingdom from establishing such ties. In the absence of
diplomatic relations, China has used the protracted border talks as a channel of
communication with Bhutan on issues extending beyond their shared boundary.

Indeed, China’s new claim to the wildlife sanctuary appears aimed at
intensifying its discussions with Bhutan to woo the kingdom away from India’s
embrace. This may also explain the new MOU, whose text has not been released
thus far. Chinese state media reports suggest that the MOU is more about getting
Bhutan to establish diplomatic ties with China than about settling the border.

Xi, however, is giving Bhutan ample reason to resist subordination to China. The
MOU was signed at a virtual event by the Bhutanese foreign minister and an
assistant Chinese minister, as if Bhutan were a client state.

More fundamentally, by employing its South China Sea tactics to unilaterally
change facts on the ground, China is presenting a territorial and military fait
accompli to a helpless Bhutan.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Asian Security, Diplomacy

THE NARCO-TERRORIST TALIBAN

FEATURED

Posted on November 23, 2021 by Chellaney

By allowing the Taliban to enrich and sustain itself with drug profits during
the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the US contributed to its own humiliating defeat
at the hands of a narco-terrorist organization. But it is not too late for the
US to start targeting the Taliban as a drug cartel through its federal courts.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

The strategic folly of US President Joe Biden’s Afghan policy has been laid bare
in recent weeks. First, the country came back under the control of the
Pakistan-reared Taliban. The announcement of the interim government’s
composition then dashed any remaining (naive) hope that this Taliban regime
would be different from the one the United States and its allies ousted in 2001.
Beyond the cabinet including a who’s who of international terrorism, narcotics
kingpins occupy senior positions.

Afghanistan accounts for 85% of the global acreage under opium cultivation,
making the Taliban the world’s largest drug cartel. It controls and taxes opioid
production, oversees exports, and shields smuggling networks. This is essential
to its survival. According to a recent report by the United Nations Security
Council monitoring team, the production and trafficking of poppy-based and
synthetic drugs remain “the Taliban’s largest single source of income.” So
reliant is the Taliban on narcotics trafficking that its leaders have at
times fought among themselves over revenue-sharing.

The Taliban is hoping to expand its drug income as much as possible. Since its
takeover, prices of opium in Afghanistan have more than tripled. In India –
which is situated between the world’s two main opium-producing centers, the
Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran “Golden Crescent” and the Myanmar-Thailand-Laos
“Golden Triangle” – seizures of Afghan-origin heroin have increased. As the UN
Office on Drugs and Crime warns, the economic crisis Afghanistan currently faces
will only increase the appeal of illicit crop cultivation for local farmers.

The problem extends beyond opioids. In recent years, Afghanistan has drastically
expanded its production of methamphetamine. The appeal lies in the fact that
meth offers producers a higher profit margin than heroin, owing to lower
overhead costs and inexpensive ingredients, especially now that its chemical
precursor, pseudoephedrine – a common ingredient in cold medications – is being
produced locally.

Last year, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug
Addiction warned that Afghanistan’s meth industry could soon be as large as its
heroin industry. While the Taliban was not yet in control of Kabul at the time,
it controlled the majority of Afghanistan’s small, clandestine meth labs.

The Taliban uses several smuggling routes to move opiates. It moves output to
Western Europe via the Caucasus and the Balkans, and from there all the way to
North America. With the help of the Tajikistan-based terrorist group Jamaat
Ansarullah, it also uses a northern route to Russia. The southeastern route,
which snakes through Pakistan, is enabled by Pakistani security officials, who
cooperate with the Taliban and smuggling syndicates, known locally as
“tanzeems,” in exchange for bribes.

In 2008, a Taliban drug trafficker was recorded boasting that most of his
product ended up abroad. “Good,” he gloated. “May God turn all the infidels into
dead corpses. Whether it is by opium or by shooting, this is our common goal.”
With the Taliban channeling profits from drug sales directly into its terror
machine, the connection between Islamist violence and drug trafficking could not
be starker.

This is not exclusive to the Taliban; Islamist groups like Boko Haram,
al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda are also linked to drug trafficking. But not all
terrorist groups are on board with this approach. As a 2020 UN Security
Council report points out, the Islamic State-Khorasan – ISIS’s Afghan arm –
opposes the drug trade.

This is one reason why the outfit is an enemy of the Taliban, despite the two
groups’ longstanding personal relationships, common history of struggle, and
shared belief in violent Islamism. In fact, when ISIS-K had control of the
Afghan border province of Nangarhar, it blocked the Taliban’s trafficking routes
into Pakistan. The link was restored only when the US and Afghan government
forces smashed the ISIS-K stronghold there.

This highlights the failure of the US – and the West more broadly – to recognize
the complex but clear links between drug trafficking and Islamist terrorism. Had
the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan been followed by a US campaign to arrest and
prosecute Taliban leaders for their narcotics-trafficking activities in American
courts, the group’s appeal among fundamentalist Muslims might have been severely
diminished.

Such a plan was proposed in 2012. In a 240-page memo, the US Drug Enforcement
Administration and several Justice Department officials recommended prosecuting
26 senior Taliban leaders and allied drug lords for criminal conspiracy.
A similar approach worked in Colombia, and helped to force the narcotics-funded
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to make peace with the Colombian
government in 2016, after 52 years of guerrilla war.

But successive US presidents refused to use this strategy against the Taliban,
which was a strategic mistake with costs that are only beginning to be revealed.
By allowing the Taliban to enrich and sustain itself with drug profits during
the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the US contributed to its own humiliating defeat
at the hands of a narco-terrorist organization.Sign up for our weekly
newsletter, PS on Sunday

It is not too late for the US to start targeting the Taliban as a drug cartel
through its federal courts. After all, Afghan-origin opioids have resulted
in high rates of drug addiction and deaths around the world, from the US and
Europe to Africa and Asia. And, given Afghanistan’s economic woes, the Taliban
has a strong incentive to ramp up production and trafficking.

By highlighting the nexus between Islamist terrorism and the global narcotics
trade, US indictments of the Taliban’s drug kingpins would help to build
multilateral cooperation to crush the group’s primary source of income, such as
by blocking shipments and seizing illicit profits, often parked in banks and
real-estate investments abroad.

If the US does not lead an international effort to tackle Afghanistan’s opioid
and meth production, the Taliban’s power – and ability to commit atrocities –
will only grow, and its narco-state will serve as a haven for al-Qaeda and other
violent jihadist groups. As matters stand, the world can expect a major surge in
international terrorism and drug overdoses in the months and years ahead.

Posted in International Security, Terrorism

BIDEN’S TAIWAN TEST IS COMING

FEATURED

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

Chinese President Xi Jinping, in power since 2012, has become increasingly
emboldened in pursuing his expansionist agenda, in part because three successive
American presidents have allowed him to act with impunity. Having swallowed Hong
Kong, is China itching to move on Taiwan, the island democracy whose
incorporation Xi recently called a “historic mission”? By rehearsing amphibious
and air attacks, China has displayed a readiness to seize Taiwan by force.

Make no mistake: Taiwan is on the frontline of international defense against
tyranny. This small island with almost as many people as much-larger Australia
is a technological powerhouse that plays a central role in the international
semiconductor business. Its absorption will not only make China a more
formidable economic competitor to the United States, but also threaten global
peace and critically accelerate the global chip shortage.

Encouraging Xi’s unrelenting expansionism is the fact that his heavy-handed
actions at home and abroad thus far have essentially been cost-free. Take the
South China Sea, whose geopolitical map Xi has forcibly redrawn, despite an
international arbitral tribunal’s ruling invalidating China’s territorial claims
there.

Then-President Obama seemed content to look the other way as Xi built artificial
islands and militarized the South China Sea. This helped turn China’s contrived
historical claims to that critical corridor into reality without firing a single
shot.

Under President Trump, despite a paradigm shift in America’s China policy, the
administration prioritized a trade deal with Beijing and thus imposed largely
symbolic sanctions when evidence of Xi’s Muslim gulag in Xinjiang emerged.
Consequently, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds
since the Nazi era (which Washington acknowledges is genocide) has gone largely
unpunished, even though the 1948 Genocide Convention requires its parties, which
include the U.S., to “prevent and punish” acts of genocide.

When Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement was crushed and the city was brought into
political lockstep with the Chinese Communist Party in breach of China’s United
Nations-registered treaty with Britain, Xi and his inner circle remained
untouched by the sanctions the Trump administration imposed. And all the 24
Chinese targeted by President Biden’s administration in March for their Hong
Kong role had already been hit with sanctions by the Trump administration.

Now there is real danger that, encouraged by Biden’s recent shift toward a more
conciliatory approach toward China, Xi will move against Taiwan.

In fact, the exit of a vanquished America from Afghanistan, by underscoring the
irreversible decline of U.S. power, may make Xi believe that China has an
opening to seize Taiwan. Chinese state media have warned Taiwan that it will be
abandoned by America in the face of a Chinese invasion, just as the Afghanistan
disaster unfolded after the U.S. threw its allies – the Afghan government and
military – under the bus.

Biden has accentuated America’s credibility problems. Asked at an Oct. 21 CNN
town hall whether “the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacked,”
Biden said emphatically, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” Then the White
House quickly walked back his words, saying “there is no change in our policy”
on Taiwan, which is centered on “strategic ambiguity” about U.S. intentions.

Once a policy of ambiguity is described in virtually unequivocal terms by the
president, and then the White House dials it back, it sends the wrong message to
Beijing. Xi may read this as a lack of U.S. resolve to defend Taiwan and plan to
invade Taiwan at an opportune time when America is distracted.

With its increasing bullying, Xi’s dictatorship is seeking to normalize hostile
pressure on Taiwan. If not outright invasion, Beijing could seek to slowly
throttle Taiwan in order to force it to accept “reunification,” including by
cutting off its undersea cables, internet connections and liquified natural-gas
imports.

But if Xi perceives that China has a window of opportunity to act during the
Biden presidency without inviting a major blowback, he will likely employ
military force. In fact, the probability of a surprise Chinese invasion will be
greater if Biden is seen as lacking the strategic vision and political will to
defend Taiwan against an attack.

In this light, the imperative for Washington is not merely to embrace strategic
clarity by abandoning the outdated strategic ambiguity policy, which was
formulated when China was still backward and in no position to annex Taiwan.
Rather, the U.S. must shift from a “one China” policy to an overt “one China,
one Taiwan” posture that recognizes the island’s independent status. And Xi
should be left in no doubt that the U.S. would make China pay a heavy price if
it attempted to invade or choke Taiwan.

A U.S. 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 soldiers today than any other foreign country. Taiwan (Imperial Japan’s
first colony) is geographically an extension of the Japanese archipelago.

If the U.S. were to put up with a Chinese conquest of Taiwan, it would make the
same fatal mistake as the participants of the 1938 Munich Conference who,
yielding to Adolf Hitler, transferred the predominantly German-speaking
Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany. That concession paved the way for
World War II.

Taiwan’s fall would significantly advance China’s hegemonic ambitions in Asia,
including by triggering the unraveling of U.S.-led alliances there. And China
would emerge as a pressing military threat to the U.S. itself.

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

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

APP BANS NOT ENOUGH. INDIA MUST START IMPOSING CALIBRATED COSTS ON CHINA

FEATURED

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney, The Times of India

In 1962, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set out to “teach India a lesson” by
waging a surprise war. Now, by stealthily encroaching on border areas in Ladakh
and then deepening and broadening the border crisis, it seems intent on making a
permanent enemy of China’s largest neighbour.

From building a new axis against India’s so-called chicken-neck to advancing its
“salami slicing” through militarized border villages, the CCP has steadily upped
the ante. Its latest provocation is a “Land Borders Law”, primarily aimed at
furthering its Himalayan expansionism.

Instead of mutually settled borders, the new law enables unilaterally imposed
borders. Furthermore, the law’s assertion of absolute sovereignty over
cross-border waters means that China has a declared right to divert as much of
the shared waters of the Tibet-originating rivers as it wishes, regardless of
downstream impacts.

Yet Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government still employs euphemisms to
describe China’s 19-month-long aggression: “unilateral change of status quo” for
land-grabs; “friction points” for seized areas; and “full restoration of peace
and tranquillity” for rollback of the intrusions.

To Modi’s credit, though, India has refused to buckle. India has more than
matched China’s military deployments and said bilateral ties cannot return to
normal until China disengages and deescalates at the border.

China’s frenzied construction of new military infrastructure along the border,
however, signals its intent to hold on to its gains of aggression and turn the
once-lightly-patrolled frontier into a perennially hot border. The lengthy
negotiations since mid-2020 have only worked to China’s advantage, enabling it
to buy time and consolidate its land-grabs and build new military facilities and
fibre optic networks along the frontier.

Had India done to China what China has done to it (seize territories through
furtive aggression), the CCP dictatorship would have come down on it like a ton
of bricks. Yet India has remained loath to impose biting trade and diplomatic
sanctions, including as a means to address the largely one-sided trade and
contain China’s influence operations.

India’s actions last year — from banning Chinese mobile apps to restricting
Chinese companies’ access to Indian government contracts — may have helped
assuage public anger at home over the aggression but did little to influence
China’s behaviour. China’s exports to India are booming amid its aggression,
allowing it to have its cake and eat it too. It is a “win-win” for China; it is
literally winning twice.

By refraining from imposing substantive costs, India has allowed the military
confrontation to remain a low-risk strategy for China. The multiple standoffs
help China to keep India off-balance and stretched. Rather than India, it is
China that is imposing costs, including forcing the diversion of greater Indian
resources for frontier defence.

Meanwhile, India’s dual blunder in vacating the strategic Kailash Heights and
accepting Chinese-designed “buffer zones” in three Ladakh areas has further
emboldened China’s intransigence. Beijing has peremptorily dismissed India’s
call for a return to the pre-April 2020 positions as “unreasonable and
unrealistic”.

It is past time India sheds its risk aversion to build leverage over China. A
calibrated imposition of progressively escalating costs has become imperative.

China’s trade with India may be modest as a percentage of its global trade, but
its large trade surplus with India contributes significantly to its overall
trade surplus. China’s bilateral trade surplus this year is set to nearly equal
India’s total defence spending. The CCP has long waged economic war against
India through product dumping to kill Indian manufacturing.

India must start employing tariff and non-tariff trade restrictions to curb
non-essential imports from China. Indeed, China’s aggressive mercantilism has
made trade diversification and import substitution more exigent. While China
restricts market access to Indian firms, Chinese tech companies, for example,
remain active in India’s lucrative cloud-computing space.

China’s challenge to its territorial integrity must prompt India to finally
honour then-Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s 2014 promise to link its one-China
policy to Beijing’s adoption of a one-India policy. Geopolitically, Taiwan
should be to India what Pakistan is to China. If China swallows Taiwan, it will
advance its hegemonic ambitions and become a more pressing military threat to
India. Indian policy ought to subtly shift from a one-China stance to a “one
China, one Taiwan, one Tibet” posture in practical but undeclared terms.

It is also time for New Delhi to downsize China’s large diplomatic presence in
India, starting by shutting its Kolkata consulate, given the CCP’s designs on
the Siliguri Corridor and the inflow of Chinese arms to insurgents. Modi’s
predecessor played into China’s hands by letting it re-establish its Kolkata
consulate without India reciprocally being allowed to reopen its Lhasa
consulate, which Beijing shut in 1962.

The CCP is seeking to wear India out in order to impose a territorial and
military fait accompli. A punitive Indian diplomatic and economic campaign can
help internationally spotlight CCP’s strategic miscalculation in taking on
India.

The writer is a geostrategist.

Posted in Asian Security, Diplomacy

THE STEADILY INCREASING RISK OF WAR BETWEEN CHINA AND INDIA

FEATURED

Posted on November 12, 2021 by Chellaney
Chinese troops pictured in Ladakh along the India-China border on Feb.15:
China’s Land Borders Law effectively negates the possibility of peacefully
resolving its territorial disputes with India. © Indian Army/AP

Beijing’s use of domestic law underpins its international expansionism

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

The spotlight on the growing Chinese military threat against Taiwan has helped
obscure China’s more serious military confrontation with India along an
extended, mountainous frontier.

Although the intensifying multiple military standoffs between nuclear-armed
titans China and India have grabbed few headlines, the risk of renewed border
skirmishing, if not outright war, is increasing. Indeed, the Pentagon’s newly
released annual report on China says the Chinese military is bracing for a
two-front war scenario — “any escalation of border tensions with India, as well
as preparing to support a Taiwan contingency.”

A reminder of the looming risks is China’s latest provocation — the enactment of
a Land Borders Law — which appears primarily aimed at advancing its territorial
revisionism in the Himalayas.

The law effectively negates the possibility of peacefully resolving its
territorial disputes with India. Instead of mutually settled borders, the law
enables unilaterally imposed borders.

The ongoing military standoffs began more than 18 months ago when a shocked
India discovered that China had stealthily encroached on several key border
areas in the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh. The discovery led to the
first deadly Chinese-Indian military clashes since 1975, including China’s first
combat deaths in decades.

Unlike China’s expansionism elsewhere, including swallowing Hong Kong and
redrawing maritime frontiers in the South China Sea without firing a shot, its
Himalayan aggression has run into armed resistance. India has not only more than
matched Chinese military deployments, but in recent days, it test-fired a
nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile as a warning shot to China
and conducted daring border paratrooper exercises simulating territory capture
behind enemy lines.

The deepening military stalemate at the Himalayan border led Beijing to enact
its new Land Borders Law, which gives its imprimatur to assertive actions along
land frontiers. Those actions emulate China’s aggressive moves in the East and
South China Seas, including an intensifying campaign against the
Japan-controlled Senkaku Islands, claimed by Beijing as the Diaoyu, through
aerial and maritime incursions.

The Land Borders Law, which India’s foreign ministry slammed as a “unilateral
move,” extends to transboundary river waters. According to Chinese state media,
the law upholds China’s “legitimate rights and interests” over the
Tibet-originating transboundary rivers like the Brahmaputra and Mekong.

The law’s assertion of full sovereignty over cross-border waters means that
China has a declared right to divert as much of the shared waters as it wishes,
regardless of downstream impacts. Nikkei Asia has reported in an online article,
“China law tightens land borders amid regional tensions,” that Beijing is toying
with the idea of limiting the volume of cross-border water flows to India during
conflicts, by citing the “protection and reasonable use” stipulation of its Land
Borders Law.

In fact, underscoring its readiness to weaponize even the sharing of water data
on upstream river flows, China in 2017 inexplicably refused to supply
hydrological data to India in violation of the terms of two bilateral
agreements. The one-year data denial resulted in preventable deaths as the
monsoon-swollen Brahmaputra overran its banks, leaving a major trail of
destruction, especially in India’s Assam state.

The Land Borders Law is just the latest example of how an increasingly
aggressive China is using domestic law to underpin its expansionism. Beijing,
for example, used a new national security law to crush Hong Kong’s pro-democracy
movement and bring the city into political lockstep with the Chinese Communist
Party in breach of China’s United Nations-registered treaty with Britain.

The Land Borders Law came just months after China’s new Coast Guard Law took
effect. Several countries, including Japan, the United States, the Philippines
and Vietnam, have raised concerns about the Coast Guard Law, which clearly
violates the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

But just as the Coast Guard Law is aimed at accelerating China’s maritime
militarization, the Land Borders Law will speed up its militarization of the
Himalayas. And just as the Coast Guard Law authorizes the use of lethal force in
disputed waters claimed by China, the land law permits the use of force in
defending and furthering Chinese claims to contested lands.

Simply put, Beijing enacts domestic law to violate international law. China’s
success in unraveling Hong Kong’s autonomy through a national security law could
inspire it to enact a Taiwan-specific legislation or activate its 2005
Anti-Secession Law against that island democracy.

By employing domestic law as a cover for unlawful actions, China illustrates
that international law is powerless against the powerful, especially scofflaw
states. But China’s expansionism often breaches international law with the aim,
ironically, of asserting its own claims and rights under international law.

Examples include China’s human-made militarized islands in the South China Sea
and its current militarized village-building spree in disputed Himalayan
borderlands in order to extend or consolidate its control over strategically
important areas that India, Bhutan and Nepal maintain fall within their national
boundaries.

Effective control is the sine qua non of a strong territorial claim in
international law. Armed patrols do not prove effective control, but civilian
settlements do. So, the Chinese Communist Party is callously uprooting Tibetan
nomads and forcing them to settle in its artificial new Himalayan border
villages, where ethnic Han Chinese party members serve as resident overseers.

Whether China can legitimize unlawful actions retroactively in this manner is a
moot point. But lawfare, or the misuse and abuse of law for political and
military ends, is a key component of China’s asymmetrical or hybrid warfare.

This blends conventional and irregular tactics with incremental territorial
encroachment — salami-slicing — psychological manipulation, disinformation and
coercive diplomacy to help advance its expansionism.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Asian Security, Diplomacy

WHY THE U.S. LET PAKISTAN NUCLEAR SCIENTIST AQ KHAN OFF THE HOOK

FEATURED

Posted on October 30, 2021 by Chellaney

Decision could still come back to haunt Washington

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

The incredible story of A.Q. Khan, the Netherlands-trained Pakistani
metallurgist who — with impunity — ran an illicit global nuclear-smuggling
network for a quarter-century would make for a captivating thriller.

A key plotline would surely be the mystery of why Khan, who died on October 10
from complications caused by COVID-19, was never indicted by the U.S. for
stealing nuclear secrets from the West. Khan played a pivotal role in helping
Pakistan develop nuclear weapons and then selling crucial know-how to three
U.S.-labeled “rogue states” — Iran, North Korea and Libya.

Former Netherlands Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers revealed in 2005 that Dutch
authorities wanted to arrest Khan in 1975 and again in 1986 but that on each
occasion the Central Intelligence Agency advised against taking such action.
According to Lubbers, the CIA conveyed the message: “Give us all the
information, but don’t arrest him.”

After Khan was tried in absentia and sentenced to four years in prison in 1983
for stealing uranium enrichment secrets from the Netherlands, files held by an
Amsterdam court were mysteriously lost, with the main judge suspecting the CIA’s
hand in their disappearance.

When an appeals court overturned Khan’s conviction on a technicality, the
Netherlands — a key U.S. ally during the Cold War — declined to seek a retrial,
effectively letting Khan off the hook. As the Financial Times put it, the Dutch
“abandoned prosecution of the most consequential crime committed on their
territory since the second world war.”

Geopolitics partly explains why the CIA wanted to protect Khan.

While the U.S. and India are close partners today, at the time Dutch authorities
were seeking to arrest Khan, the U.S. was not averse to the idea of Pakistan
developing a nuclear-weapons capability to balance India, which had conducted
its first nuclear test in 1974. For years, the U.S. simply turned a blind eye to
Pakistan’s covert nuclear-weapons development.

American concerns, however, were stirred when Khan began selling nuclear items
to other renegade states. U.S. pressure compelled Pakistan to open
investigations into Khan’s activities in 2003 after Iran and Libya admitted to
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Pakistan-linked black
marketeers supplied them with the components they needed to advance their
nuclear research.

In 2004, Khan appeared on national television asking for forgiveness, saying he
had acted entirely on his own in passing on nuclear secrets to other countries.
“I take full responsibility for my actions,” Khan said, “and seek your pardon.”

After this orchestrated confession, Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf,
citing Khan’s status as a national hero, pardoned him. Musharraf also barred
U.S. or IAEA investigators from questioning Khan. Oddly, Washington went along
with this charade, which extended to Khan’s ostensible house detention.

Investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, in their
acclaimed 2007 book “Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret
Trade in Nuclear Weapons,” concluded that Khan was the fall guy. “The covert
trade in doomsday technology was not the work of one man, but the foreign policy
of a nation and supervised by Pakistan’s ruling military clique,” Levy and
Scott-Clark wrote, adding that Pakistan’s generals have long maintained a nexus
with terrorist groups.

The military’s collusion with Khan was underscored by the use of an army plane
in 2000 to transport centrifuges to Pyongyang. In return, Pakistan received
North Korean ballistic missile technology, helping it to build its first
intermediate-range, nuclear-capable missile, Ghauri.

While most technology transfers appeared to be state-sanctioned, Khan likely
sold some nuclear items for personal profit.

Still, despite exaggerated Western media reports then, no evidence has surfaced
to indicate that the Pakistani transfers significantly contributed to advancing
the Iranian, North Korean and Libyan nuclear programs. North Korea, the only
recipient to cross the nuclear threshold, has long relied on plutonium, which
the Khan network did not traffic.

Pakistan’s own nuclear weaponization benefited decisively from clandestine
transfers from China, another archrival of India. Such transfers began in 1982,
when, as Khan admitted, China supplied the blueprint for one of the nuclear
bombs it had tested, as well as enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic
weapons.

Yet the U.S., just as it has not penalized China for its continuing nuclear and
missile transfers to Pakistan, chose not to indict the rogue Pakistani scientist
that spearheaded an international smuggling enterprise. Washington, however, has
indicted a number of other individuals — including as recently as last year —
for conspiring to smuggle nuclear goods to Pakistan.

America’s shielding of Khan, a nuclear jihadist committed to payback for real
and imagined injustices against Muslims, was doubly ironic, because it set the
stage for Pakistan’s emergence as an epicenter for terrorism, with its own
nuclear weapons acting as enough of a deterrent to retaliation by another state.

Indeed, through its humiliating Afghanistan defeat at the hands of the Taliban,
America has tasted the bitter fruits of the Pakistani generals’ cross-border use
of jihadist proxies from behind their protective nuclear shield.

The U.S. maintains contingency plans to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if they
risk falling into terrorist hands. But if a 9/11 style terrorist attack with a
crude nuclear device were to occur anywhere in the world, the trail of
devastation would likely lead back to Pakistan.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in International Security, WMD

SAVING TIBET

FEATURED

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Chellaney

Chinese President Xi Jinping seems eager for Taiwan to go the way of
once-autonomous Tibet, which was gobbled up by Mao Zedong’s regime in the early
1950s. This would constitute the biggest threat to world peace in a generation,
and the United States cannot afford to allow it.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

China’s coercive expansionism may be taking its most dangerous turn yet.
Recently, record-breaking numbers of Chinese military planes have entered
Taiwan’s “air defense identification zone,” where the island’s authorities
assert the right to demand that aircraft identify themselves. China’s
muscle-flexing sends a clear message: it is serious about incorporating the
island – and “reunifying” China – potentially by force.

Though the international community has been reluctant to challenge the Chinese
claim that Taiwan has “always been” part of China, the claim is dubious, at
best, and based on revisionist history. For most of its history, Taiwan was
inhabited by non-Chinese peoples – Malayo-Polynesian tribes – and had no
relationship with China. Geographically, Taiwan is closer to the Philippines
than to the Chinese mainland.

It was not until the seventeenth century that significant numbers of Chinese
began to migrate to Taiwan, encouraged by the island’s Dutch colonial rulers,
who needed workers. Over the next 100 years, the ethnic Chinese population grew
to outnumber Taiwanese natives, who were increasingly dispossessed, often
violently. During this period, Taiwan came under the Qing Dynasty’s control. But
it was not until 1887 that Taiwan was declared a province of China.

Barely eight years later, China ceded Taiwan to Japan in perpetuity, following
its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. Taiwan remained under Japanese colonial
rule until 1945 – Japan officially renounced its sovereignty over it in the
1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty – and has been self-governing ever since. In
other words, for the last 126 years, Taiwan has been outside China’s lawful
control.

Today, Taiwan has all the attributes of a robust independent state, and most
Taiwanese want it to stay that way. But Chinese President Xi Jinping appears
eager to annex the island, as Mao Zedong’s regime did to Tibet in the early
1950s, in the name of “reunification.” A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would
constitute the biggest threat to world peace in a generation.

Beyond compromising freedom of navigation in a crucial region, a Chinese
takeover of Taiwan would upend the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, not
least by enabling China to break out of the “first island chain” that runs from
the Japanese archipelago, through Taiwan, the Philippines, and on to Borneo,
enclosing China’s coastal seas. It would also irreparably damage America’s
reputation as a reliable ally. If the United States cannot (or will not) prevent
Taiwan’s subjugation, why should anyone else count on US protection?

The risks are particularly acute for Japan, whose southernmost islands are
adjacent to Taiwan. As then-Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso observed in July,
“Okinawa could be next.” Unable to rely on the Americans, Japan would likely
remilitarize and even acquire nuclear weapons. Other US allies – such as South
Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand – would likely be brought into China’s
sphere of influence.

Yet the US does not seem particularly committed to preventing a Chinese takeover
of Taiwan and the subsequent collapse of the half-century-old Asian security
order. This is exactly what Xi is counting on. Successive US administrations
have let him get away with countless expansionist maneuvers – from militarizing
the South China Sea to demolishing Hong Kong’s autonomy – as well as cultural
genocide in Xinjiang. Why should Taiwan be any different?

US President Joe Biden’s recent shift to a more conciliatory approach toward
China has probably bolstered Xi’s confidence further. Xi currently may be
focused on China’s 17-month-long military confrontation with India in the
Himalayas, where Chinese territorial encroachments have triggered a
massive buildup of forces along the inhospitable frontier. But, if some
resolution can be found that reduces tensions in the Himalayas, it would free up
Chinese capabilities to deal with the fallout of any Taiwan-related operation.

At that point, the only thing that would deter China from attempting to
recolonize Taiwan would be the knowledge that it would incur high concrete – not
just reputational – costs. Biden must therefore make it crystal clear to Xi that
the US would mobilize its own military resources to defend Taiwan.

But will he? The US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific – a policy document
declassified by President Donald Trump’s administration before leaving office –
recommends that America help Taiwan develop “asymmetric” capabilities against
China. Such a strategy has recently been backed by some former American
government and military officials. As retired Admiral James Stavridis puts it,
just as a porcupine’s quills protect it from larger predators by making it
difficult to digest, weapons like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles would
turn any invasion of Taiwan into a bloody, protracted, and costly guerrilla
campaign.

It is true that bolstering Taiwan’s defenses is crucial to avert Chinese
amphibious and airborne operations. But even if the US and Taiwanese governments
reached an agreement on an asymmetric strategy, it would take several years to
build a “porcupine Taiwan” capable of choking the Chinese dragon. This process
would include training a large civilian corps to mount sustained guerrilla
attacks on invaders.

Until then, in keeping with the central paradox of deterrence, the only way to
discourage aggression by a revisionist power is for the status quo power to
threaten to go to war. That is how the US kept West Berlin – which had a
political status even more precarious than Taiwan’s – free throughout the Cold
War.

The worst stance the US could take would be to oppose a Chinese takeover of
Taiwan without credibly signaling a genuine willingness to defend the island
militarily. Such an approach could encourage Xi, who has grown accustomed to
acting with impunity, to order a surprise invasion. With that, the Indo-Pacific
order would be overturned, dealing a mortal blow to America’s global
preeminence.

Posted in Asian Security, International Security

BIDEN SHIFTS TO A MORE CONCILIATORY APPROACH TOWARD CHINA

FEATURED

Posted on October 9, 2021 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hill

In a defiant speech on Aug. 31, President Biden claimed that his precipitous
exit from Afghanistan, which facilitated the terrorist takeover of that country,
would allow the United States to focus on its “serious competition with China.”
But there are now growing signs that Biden’s Afghan blunder has weakened his
hand against China and opened greater strategic space for America’s main rival.

Illustrating his weakened position, the president has just capitulated to
China’s hostage-taking tactics. In a deal Biden finalized with Chinese President
Xi Jinping, the U.S. dropped its extradition case against Huawei executive Meng
Wanzhou, allowing her to return home from Canada, in exchange for China’s
release of Canadian hostages Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who spent 1,019
days in Chinese prisons on trumped-up charges.

The hostages-for-Meng swap is the latest example of Biden’s efforts to ease
tensions with China by propitiating Xi. By rewarding Xi’s use of rogue tactics,
the deal sends a chilling message to foreigners working in China.

Earlier, Biden bowed to another Chinese demand — that the U.S. stop tracing the
origins of the COVID-19 virus, even though the world has a right to know if
China caused the worst disaster of our time, which has already killed more than
4.7 million people. Twelve days after Kabul’s fall, Biden announced on Aug. 27
that the intelligence inquiry he initiated had ended, even though it failed to
uncover the genesis of the pandemic.

Xi’s regime, involved in one of the greatest cover-ups ever seen, doesn’t want
the truth to come out. After all, if China’s negligence or complicity spawned
the world’s worst public-health catastrophe in more than a century, it would
constitute a crime against humanity.

Biden should have ordered the U.S. intelligence community to keep searching for
the true origins of the virus until it reached a definitive conclusion. By not
extending the inquiry’s 90-day deadline, Biden met an important Chinese demand.

Since the Afghan debacle, Biden has gone to extraordinary lengths to alleviate
tensions with China. Last week began with the president’s
China-conciliatory address at the United Nations and ended with Meng’s return
home to a hero’s welcome.

During a recent 90-minute phone conversation with Xi, Biden sought
to explain U.S. actions toward China “in a way that [is] not misinterpreted
as…somehow trying to sort of undermine Beijing in particular ways,” according to
the readout from a senior U.S. official. In fact, during the call, Xi spurned
Biden’s face-to-face summit offer, demanding that the U.S. first soften its
China policy and tamp down rhetoric.

As if heeding Xi’s demand, Biden in his UN address never uttered the word
“China,” even as he called out Iran and North Korea. The address stood in stark
contrast with then-President Trump’s 2020 UN speech, which demanded the world
“hold China accountable” for unleashing the “China virus.” Biden’s speech
defensively stated, “We’re not seeking – say it again, we are not seeking – a
new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.”

Such fecklessness appears out of step with reality, given that an ambitious and
expansionist China is actively working to supplant the U.S. as the world’s
preeminent power while waging a cold war against it. Since Biden assumed the
presidency, the U.S. has initiated most moves for high-level talks with China,
including the latest phone call.

The White House’s dropping of fraud charges against Meng, the daughter of the
man who founded the military-linked Huawei, is a real shot in the arm for Xi,
whose increasing appetite for taking major risks poses an international
challenge. In a striking paradox, Meng departed for home from Canada on the day
Biden hosted the first face-to-face leaders’ meeting of the Quad, a
U.S.-India-Japan-Australia grouping catalyzed by China’s muscular foreign policy
and rogue behavior.

Deals with hostage-takers usually boomerang. For example, to secure the release
of Bowe Bergdahl, a captured U.S. Army sergeant who had deserted his unit in
Afghanistan, President Obama in 2014 freed five Taliban leaders from Guantánamo
Bay. The release of the five – “the hardest of the hardcore,” as the late
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said then – proved costly.

An emboldened Taliban sharply escalated its attacks in Afghanistan, bringing
Afghan and U.S.-NATO forces under increasing pressure. This eventually led to
Trump’s one-sided withdrawal deal with the Taliban in February 2020 and then to
Biden’s recent handover of Afghanistan to that Pakistan-backed terrorist
militia. Today, the five former Guantánamo inmates are senior officials of the
new Afghan regime, made up of a who’s who of international terrorism.

The Biden-arranged swap is likely to prove detrimental to the free world. The
deal may have unwittingly vindicated Chinese propaganda that the 2018 Canadian
arrest of Meng on a U.S. warrant was politically driven and that the U.S. and
Canadian judicial systems do not operate independent of political interests.

Indeed, the White House has shamed the rule of law by terminating a legal case
through a political deal with a hostage-holding regime, thereby setting a
terrible precedent in international relations.

The deal will inspire other hostage-takers, including the Taliban. To press for
sanctions relief and other demands, the Taliban is already obstructing the
evacuation of the remaining stranded foreigners from Afghanistan, including
Afghans with Western passports.

More ominously, America’s yielding to China’s thuggish diplomacy of
hostage-taking will encourage greater Chinese defiance of international rules
and norms. Xi’s regime doesn’t care about the costs to the country’s image,
which explains why, despite unfavorable views of China rising to near historic
highs, it is busy corrupting, coercing or co-opting other states.

In pursuing a more conciliatory approach toward China, Biden has given
respectability to the rogue-state tactic of taking hostages, making it virtually
certain that the two freed Canadians will not be the last foreigners seized by
Beijing as bargaining chips.

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

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

A STRIKING PARADOX: THE U.S. ENGAGES TALIBAN BUT ISOLATES MYANMAR

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Posted on October 1, 2021 by Chellaney
Taliban fighters stand guard outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul
on Aug. 16: the White House has praised the Taliban for being businesslike and
professional on evacuations. © Reuters

Naypyitaw’s generals treated as bigger threat than the terrorists controlling
Kabul

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

No sooner had the Taliban completed their lightning-quick conquest of
Afghanistan than U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that
Washington was ready to work on “counterterrorism” with the same marauding
Islamist force that has so much American blood on its hands.

No less shocking was the statement from the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, that it is “possible” the U.S. will coordinate with the
Taliban to conduct counterterrorism strikes on other Islamist terrorists.

British Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Nick Carter called the Taliban — responsible
for the killing of more than 2,000 American soldiers and hundreds of allied
troops — “country boys” that “live by a code of honor and a standard.” Carter’s
claim that the Taliban have “changed” and “want an Afghanistan that is inclusive
for all” has already been contradicted.

The Taliban’s all-male regime of hard-core extremists is a who’s who of
international terrorism, with 17 of the 33 cabinet ministers on the United
Nations’ terrorism-related sanctions list, and four former Guantanamo Bay
inmates and several others who remain U.S.-designated global terrorists. The
regime is headed by Mohammad Hassan Akhund, a U.N.-listed terrorist and
architect of the 2001 destruction of the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan.

The Anglo-American outreach to the Taliban stands in eerie contrast with U.S.
and British efforts to isolate and squeeze another of India’s neighbors —
military-ruled Myanmar. It is as if Myanmar’s military government is a bigger
threat to international security than a Kabul regime run by some of the world’s
deadliest terrorists.

Military rule is nothing new to Myanmar, one of the world’s most ethnically
diverse countries whose failure to construct an inclusive national identity has
allowed old ethnic insurgencies to fester. Directly or indirectly, the military
has always called the shots in Myanmar, a factor stifling the resource-rich
nation’s potential.Soldiers set up barricades in Yangon on Feb. 15: military
rule is nothing new to Myanmar, © NurPhoto/Getty Images

Yet, after the latest military takeover on Feb. 1, the U.S. and Britain took the
lead in slapping a series of sanctions on Myanmar, with America even suspending
bilateral trade ties. Washington says its 2013 Trade and Investment Framework
Agreement with Myanmar will remain suspended until the return of a
democratically elected government, of which there is currently little hope.

The U.S.-led efforts to use economic and political levers to unseat the military
regime have only emboldened insurgent groups to step up their violent campaigns.
A shadow government formed by opponents of military rule recently called for
taking up arms against the regime. More than 220,000 people have already been
displaced by internal conflict since the military takeover.

Yet, the U.S. and Britain appear reconciled to a terrorist regime ruling
Afghanistan. In an echo of Gen. Carter’s call to be “very careful about using
the term ‘enemy'” for the Taliban, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan
has declined to call the militia an enemy of the U.S., saying, “It’s hard to put
a label on it.”

In fact, Britain responded to the Taliban’s conquest by immediately announcing a
doubling of its aid to Afghanistan. And U.S. President Joe Biden — not content
with his Afghan surrender gifting troves of American-made weapons to the
Taliban, making them the first terrorist group to acquire advanced air and
land-based capabilities — is sending $64 million in aid to Afghanistan. As The
Wall Street Journal put it, the Taliban “have overnight turned into a courted
U.S. partner.”

The White House has praised the Taliban for being “businesslike and
professional” on evacuations. They have certainly been businesslike and
professional in detaining and executing perceived opponents, in ongoing ethnic
cleansing and in their Pakistan-aided brutal assaults on the Panjshir Valley,
the last resistance stronghold, where tens of thousands of residents have been
uprooted amid widespread killings.

Meanwhile, Taliban death squads, going door to door, have been hunting down and
killing those who assisted the previous government, including, in one documented
case, first pulling out all the victim’s fingernails. The Taliban have been
businesslike and professional too in their imposition of seventh-century Islamic
practices from the Arab world that are alien to Afghan culture.

The Taliban have “changed” in one respect: In place of the blue burqa that women
were made to wear during their 1996-2001 rule, they have now prescribed a
full-body covering of a different color, black.

The U.S. outreach to the Taliban, including drawing specious distinctions
between “good” and “bad” terrorists, is designed to soften the blow from Biden’s
handover of a mineral-rich country to a militia that is a wing of the Pakistani
deep state. But such an effort cannot camouflage the damage to America’s
international credibility and standing.

More fundamentally, the Anglo-American courting of the Taliban highlights the
selective, geopolitics-driven approach to combating terrorism, which is why the
U.S.-launched global war on terrorism has yielded little even two decades after
its launch. The scourge of transnational terrorism has only spread deeper and
wider.

The Taliban’s rollback of civil, human and women’s rights, brutal executions,
replacement of education and music with religious dogma, and enslavement of
prepubescent girls through forced “marriage” to their fighters ought to spur a
concerted global response.

The last thing the world can afford is condoning the Taliban’s medieval
practices, misogyny and barbarity. Yet the West remains a mute spectator to the
Taliban’s ongoing atrocities.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including “Asian
Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.”

Posted in Diplomacy, International Security

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