China and US Battle For Influence in Pakistan

[Riaz Haq]

Top US and Chinese diplomats have visited Pakistan to meet with the country's new prime minister Mr. Imran Khan within days of his assuming office. The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the first to call on Prime Minister Imran Khan in Islamabad. Pompeo's visit was soon followed by a three-day visit by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. What is at stake in the battle between China and the United States in Pakistan is the prize of global superpower status, according to the US-based Wall Street Journal.

There is a lot of speculation in the western media about the objectives of Pakistan policies being pursued by the two great powers and their impact on the US-China competition for world dominance. Such speculations have centered on the debt related to China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the US leverage in potential IMF bailout of Pakistan.

American business publication Wall Street Journal has produced a short video explaining how its staff sees what it describes as "US-China conflict brewing in Pakistan". What is at stake in the battle between China and the United States in Pakistan is the prize of global superpower status. Here are the key points it makes:

1. The US-China conflict brewing in Pakistan is about global dominance sought by the two great powers.

2. If China succeeds, it could become the new center of global trade. If the US wins, it could frustrate China's push to become a global power. The impact of it will be felt around the world for decades.

3. China has already surpassed the United States as the world's biggest exporter of goods and services.

4. The biggest project in China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in which China is investing heavily and providing massive loans.

5. China could use the infrastructure built in Pakistan under CPEC to gain access to the Indian Ocean and supplant the United States in Pakistan.

6. CPEC-related spending is sinking Pakistan deeper in debt to China. It could force Pakistan to seek $8 billion to $12 billion bailout by IMF where US is the biggest shareholder with veto power.

7. US does not want the IMF bailout money to be used to repay Chinese debt. Not bailing out Pakistan is not an option because it could cost US an important ally in the region.

8. US could, however, use IMF bailout to limit what Pakistan can borrow from China. Such a condition will achieve the US objective of significantly slowing down CPEC and BRI.

9. Pakistan's dilemma is that it needs both the infrastructure improvements financed by China and the IMF bailout to ease pressure on its dwindling foreign exchange reserves.

10. Whoever wins in Pakistan will become the number one global superpower.

Can US "Spend Them (Chinese) Into Oblivion"?

Here's the Wall Street Journal video:

https://youtu.be/wvw-85CC1t4

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[Riaz Haq]

The #Hindu Right is turning against the #US. Until a few years ago, #Modi Bhakts were largely pro-US. Now, Joe #Biden is seen as antagonistic — if not to #India, then to the sort of India that Modi’s supporters want to create. #Hindutva #Islamophobia https://theprint.in/opinion/the-hindu-right-is-turning-against-the-...


By VIR SANGHVI


Even while the war in Ukraine rages, however, we should be asking ourselves deeper questions. A few days ago, at the ABP Ideas of India Summit in Mumbai, I interviewed Fareed Zakaria. Fareed’s view was that over the last decade or so, India has become so inward-looking and obsessed with its own issues and divisions that it has not spent enough time thinking about its place in the world, going forward.

While we have been obsessed with headscarves and caste arithmetic, the world has rearranged itself. No matter what happens in Ukraine, Russia will come out of the war damaged. If it makes peace, then some of the sanctions imposed on it by the West may be moderated but it seems unlikely that Putin’s Russia will become a full-fledged member of the global economy for a long time.

In that case, it will have no choice but to move into the Chinese sphere of influence. One scenario sees Russia as a classic vassal state of the Chinese, supplying energy and raw materials to feed the Chinese military machine and its industrial complex. Pakistan and China are longstanding allies, so we will probably see the emergence of a Russia-China-Pakistan alliance.

India will then have two choices. Either we agree to accept China’s suzerainty over the East. Or we look for other options.

Should we choose the second path (and I imagine we will have to), then there really is nowhere to go but the West. At present, the West understands how India is constrained by its dependence on Russian weaponry. But in the long run, it will expect a greater measure of alignment. Is that something we have considered? Or are we too blinded by the rhetoric about anti-Hindu America and hypocritical Washington?

Sooner, rather than later, we will have to rescue reality from the rhetoric.

[Riaz Haq]

Growing ties between #Pakistan and #China raise concern in #Washington and #NewDelhi. Just how close Sino-Pakistani ties have become can be seen in a 33-point document issued by the two countries in early February during #ImranKhan's visit to #Beijing https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/04/asia-pacific/politics-...

China’s engagement in South Asia has increased significantly in recent years, going beyond economic and development projects to encompass geostrategic and security interests.

And perhaps in no other country in the region has Beijing expanded its footprint more than in Pakistan, raising concerns in Washington and New Delhi about the geostrategic implications of this deepening partnership.

The latest example of this was the Pakistan Day Parade in Islamabad in late March, which saw the country’s military display several recently acquired, Chinese-made platforms such as J-10CE multirole fighter aircraft, battle tanks, self-propelled howitzers and air-defense equipment.

China’s supply of advanced military equipment to Pakistan — also including warships and submarines — is part of an intensifying military and intelligence cooperation that reflects the growing level of trust between the two sides.

The burgeoning military ties, which also include joint defense-industrial projects such as the JF-17 fighter aircraft, can largely be seen as an attempt by both sides to counter capability advancements by their common regional rival India, particularly as they both remain in territorial disputes with New Delhi.

“For Beijing, Pakistan serves as a buffer against India. And for Islamabad, China is a key source of arms and other support to strengthen Pakistani capacities to counter India,” says Michael Kugelman, the deputy director at the Asia program of the Washington-based Wilson Center.

Geopolitical developments in recent years have made this dynamic even stronger, as New Delhi has gradually drawn closer to Washington and its allies under “the Quad” grouping of countries, which also includes Japan and Australia. Kugelman argues that China lacks the capacity to contain the defense-industrial development of a regional giant such as India, which is why Beijing’s strategy is instead focused on countering India — as seen in the Himalayan border standoff in recent years — and outperforming it economically.


The growing Sino-Pakistani cooperation has set off alarm bells in New Delhi, especially as Chinese arms and money continue to flow into Pakistan. Moreover, the Indian military, which is preparing for a potential two-front war with China and Pakistan, is also concerned about the possibility of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) establishing a more robust logistics and basing infrastructure in the region.

Beijing is pursuing additional military facilities in foreign countries — beyond its base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa — to support naval, air, ground, cyber, and space power projection, according to the Pentagon’s 2021 China Military Power report. And one of the locations likely considered by China is Pakistan, along with Cambodia, Myanmar and other nations.

[Riaz Haq]

The U.S. Is Losing a Strategic, Nuclear-Armed Ally to China

https://time.com/6182411/us-pakistan-china-imran-khan/


BY HASAN ALI
MAY 29, 2022 11:23 PM EDT
A graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, Hasan Ali is a Pakistani journalist who divides his time between London and Islamabad.


In a rousing speech delivered on May 26, Pakistan’s recently ousted Prime Minister, Imran Khan, gave the ruling coalition until June 1 to hold fresh elections, which were originally scheduled for October next year. Speaking after a night of political turmoil, when thousands of his supporters had laid siege to capital Islamabad, the cricket-star-turned-politician doubled down on his claim that he had been removed from office through a U.S.-funded plot. “Our people will not accept under any circumstances an imported government foisted upon us by an American conspiracy,” he said.

Khan’s anti-American pitch marks the lowest ebb in U.S. relations with a country that used to be one of Washington’s strongest allies and a trusted Cold War partner. President Joe Biden concluded his first tour of Asia last week, with trips to Japan and South Korea to reinforce ties with old allies in the face of growing Chinese influence in the region—but with a former friend in another part of the continent, Washington has been steadily ceding ground to Beijing. Pakistan’s newly appointed foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, has already been touring China and calling it his “second home.”

The decline of American influence in this South Asian country has been precipitated by the end of America’s Afghanistan campaign, which has brought long-simmering tensions between the two countries to the surface, with each side holding the other responsible for its failure. Pakistan contends that it was coerced into joining the “war on terror,” and accused former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, of threatening to bomb the country “back to the stone age” if it refused to cooperate. (Armitage refuted the allegation.)

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But China was also the first country that Bhutto visited after his appointment, in yet another clear indication of the evolving geopolitical priorities for Pakistan. “I am particularly proud that all three generations of my family are firmly committed to the Pakistan-China friendship,” said the scion of the powerful Bhutto family on the trip. Pakistan, he added, is “heartened by China’s great achievements and firmly believes that no force can stop China from forging ahead.”

As far as Pakistan is concerned, the consensus across the political spectrum is that the future belongs to China, and with it, Pakistan’s own future. No matter when the next election is held and who wins, America is clearly losing in Pakistan.

[Riaz Haq]

The U.S. Is Losing a Strategic, Nuclear-Armed Ally to China

https://time.com/6182411/us-pakistan-china-imran-khan/

As a result of its involvement, Pakistan says it has lost 70,000 lives, incurred economic losses in excess of $150 billion and made itself a target of violent extremism. The U.S., meanwhile, blames the Pakistan Army and the country’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for harboring Osama bin Laden in a safehouse in Abbottabad, and for secretly helping the Taliban take back control of Afghanistan.

Relations between the U.S. and the Pakistan have ebbed and flowed since the 50s and early 60s, when Washington lavished Islamabad with millions of dollars in foreign aid as reward for joining its global campaign against communism, only to suspend the assistance as punishment for Islamabad’s hobnobbing with Egypt and China in 1965. Relations improved again in the 1970s, when the Nixon and Ford administrations used Pakistan as a go-between to court China, before souring again under President Carter’s administration, which cut off military aid to punish Pakistan for building a facility to enrich uranium.

With Pakistan becoming a front line state in Washington’s campaign against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, U.S.-Pakistan cooperation steadied again. But when that war ended in 1989, the U.S. sanctioned Pakistan under the Pressler Amendment for enriching uranium and hastily dialed down its engagement in the region. This firmly sowed the seeds of distrust between the two sides and led Pakistan to cultivate its relationship with China. As part of Washington’s global “war on terror,” Islamabad did, however, join the renewed U.S. campaign in Afghanistan post-9/11, this time against the Taliban—who took over after a protracted period of civil war following the Soviet withdrawal.

But the years leading up to America’s own withdrawal from Afghanistan last year have seen gradual distancing between the old allies, and Pakistan’s decisive pivoting toward China. The U.S. has simultaneously tilted toward Pakistan’s arch-enemy India, drawing it into regional coalitions against China, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, comprising the U.S. Australia, Japan and India. The economic engagement between India and the U.S. has also been increasing noticeably. India is one of the participating countries in the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framew

[Riaz Haq]

The U.S. Is Losing a Strategic, Nuclear-Armed Ally to China

https://time.com/6182411/us-pakistan-china-imran-khan/

China’s unstoppable rise in Pakistan
On the other hand, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)—a $62 billion program of infrastructure program that creates a trade and energy route between the Arabian Sea and China through Pakistan—has made China the linchpin of Pakistan’s economic development. Pakistan’s reliance on Chinese investment and its resentments against what it considers American duplicity, means that it now no longer matters who holds the reins of government in Islamabad. All major and minor political players are bound to prioritize Pakistan’s relationship with China over that with the United States. The only difference is the degree to which they will antagonize the U.S. publicly.

The Pakistan Army, which was instrumental in bringing Khan to power and is still very much the power behind the throne, would like the civilian government to have cordial relations with the United States, if for no other reason than to protect the country’s failing economy. Even as Khan leads the charge against the government and the U.S., Pakistan is negotiating an emergency assistance package with the International Monetary Fund, which will require Washington’s buy-in.


It is in this context that Khan’s America bashing is seen as a problem. The top brass of the military understands that a victory for Khan in the next general election would come with an implied mandate of creating an even greater distance between Islamabad and Washington—something the country can ill afford.

The present administration—a coalition led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif—appears committed to a policy of rapprochement with the United States and has already begun making overtures toward Washington. Foreign Minister Bhutto says the U.S. and Pakistan need “to engage in a far broader, deeper and more meaningful relationship.”

But the years leading up to America’s own withdrawal from Afghanistan last year have seen gradual distancing between the old allies, and Pakistan’s decisive pivoting toward China. The U.S. has simultaneously tilted toward Pakistan’s arch-enemy India, drawing it into regional coalitions against China, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, comprising the U.S. Australia, Japan and India. The economic engagement between India and the U.S. has also been increasing noticeably. India is one of the participating countries in the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework—just announced by Biden—that is aimed at countering China’s economic influence.

[Riaz Haq]

Handle the India-U.S. Relationship With Care
The world’s largest democracy often sees things very differently than America.

By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-handle-with-care-modi-china-russ...


Superficially, the U.S.-India relationship looks like a success. With both countries focused on China, business ties steadily deepening, and U.S.-Pakistan relations in a deep freeze, many of the old obstacles to the relationship have disappeared.

But an intense week of meetings in Bangalore and Delhi with politicians, think tankers, religious leaders and journalists made clear that while Americans and Indians share strategic and economic interests, and we both value democracy, we remain divided by important differences in values and perceptions. Unless managed carefully, these differences could derail U.S.-India cooperation at a critical time.

Americans and Indians often see the same problem in very different ways. India, for example, does not see Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a threat to world order. While Americans have been disturbed by India’s continued willingness to buy oil from Russia, Indians resent the West’s attempt to rally global support for what many here see as a largely Western problem in Ukraine. Pointing out that Europeans scarcely noticed China’s attacks on Indian frontier posts in 2020, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told a conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, last week that “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems.”

More generally, Indians bristle when they sense Americans and Europeans getting together to write global rules. The more that American Wilsonians talk about a values-based international order, the more that Indians worry about Western arrogance. Many Indians want a strong Russia and, within limits, a strong China precisely to help guard against the kind of world order President Biden and many of his advisers want to build.

This is more than the postcolonial suspicion of Western intentions that India has long shared with many other non-Western countries. The Hindu nationalist movement that has replaced the long-ruling Congress Party with a new political system built around the Bharatiya Janata Party and its charismatic leader, Narendra Modi, has brought a new dynamism to Indian foreign policy. This new nationalist India wants to increase and develop Indian power, not submerge Indian sovereignty in Western-designed international institutions.

The domestic agenda of the Hindu nationalist movement can also cause problems for the U.S.-India relationship. For Hindu nationalists, the rule of the Muslim Mughal emperors, some of whom destroyed ancient Hindu temples and built mosques on their ruins, was as much a disaster as British colonialism for Indian civilization. It is not enough to send the British packing; the liberation of India means placing Hindu civilization back at the center of Indian cultural and political life. Many BJP supporters want the Indian government to defend India’s Hindu civilization and culture from Islam, Christianity and Western secular liberalism.

This form of Hindu nationalism leads to controversial policy initiatives. Tough restrictions on the ability of foreign organizations to fund civil-society groups in India threaten to disrupt the activities of American charities ranging from the Ford Foundation to the Catholic Church. Anti-conversion laws put obstacles in the path of both Christian and Muslim missionary efforts, and Hindu women wishing to marry out of the faith sometimes face severe social and governmental pressures. Communal violence, a problem in India since the days of the British raj, has risen in recent years. Indian Muslims often express fears for their personal security.

[Riaz Haq]

#US led #G7 to raise $600 billion to counter #China's #Belt-#Road that involves #infrastructure development in over 100 countries. #Biden, other G7 leaders relaunch newly renamed "Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment". #CPEC #Pakistan https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/world/g7-aims-to-raise-600-billio...

Group of Seven leaders on Sunday pledged to raise $600 billion in private and public funds over five years to finance needed infrastructure in developing countries and counter China's older, multitrillion-dollar Belt and Road project.

U.S. President Joe Biden and other G7 leaders relaunched the newly renamed "Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment," at their annual gathering being held this year at Schloss Elmau in southern Germany.

Biden said the United States would mobilize $200 billion in grants, federal funds and private investment over five years to support projects in low- and middle-income countries that help tackle climate change as well as improve global health, gender equity and digital infrastructure.

"I want to be clear. This isn't aid or charity. It's an investment that will deliver returns for everyone," Biden said, adding that it would allow countries to "see the concrete benefits of partnering with democracies."

Biden said hundreds of billions of additional dollars could come from multilateral development banks, development finance institutions, sovereign wealth funds and others.

Europe will mobilize 300 billion euros for the initiative over the same period to build up a sustainable alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative scheme, which Chinese President Xi Jinping launched in 2013, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the gathering.

The leaders of Italy, Canada and Japan also spoke about their plans, some of which have already been announced separately. French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson were not present, but their countries are also participating.

China's investment scheme involves development and programs in over 100 countries aimed at creating a modern version of the ancient Silk Road trade route from Asia to Europe.

White House officials said the plan has provided little tangible benefit for many developing countries.

Biden highlighted several flagship projects, including a $2 billion solar development project in Angola with support from the Commerce Department, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, U.S. firm AfricaGlobal Schaffer, and U.S. project developer Sun Africa.

Together with G7 members and the EU, Washington will also provide $3.3 million in technical assistance to Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal as it develops an industrial-scale flexible multi-vaccine manufacturing facility in that country that can eventually produce COVID-19 and other vaccines, a project that also involves the EU.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will also commit up to $50 million over five years to the World Bank’s global Childcare Incentive Fund.

Friederike Roder, vice president of the non-profit group Global Citizen, said the pledges of investment could be "a good start" toward greater engagement by G7 countries in developing nations and could underpin stronger global growth for all.

G7 countries on average provide only 0.32% of their gross national income, less than half of the 0.7% promised, in development assistance, she said.

"But without developing countries, there will be no sustainable recovery of the world economy," she said.

[Riaz Haq]

‘My Order, My Rules’: China and the American Rules-Based Order in Historical Perspective
William M. Zolinger Fujii

https://www.e-ir.info/2021/12/28/my-order-my-rules-china-and-the-am...


The similarities between the process through which the US established its hemispheric dominance and the Chinese quest to become a regional hegemon in East Asia must not be exaggerated; not only are the two regions and historical contexts vastly different, but also China’s path towards that goal is in its very early stages, rendering it impossible to be meaningfully compared to that of the United States. This notwithstanding, the patterns of Beijing’s contestations of Washington’s position in East Asia find certain parallels with the US’ challenges to European ambitions in a region it regarded as its natural ‘sphere of influence’ in the nineteenth century. If the US leadership believed their country had the divine right to establish itself as a hemispheric hegemon, the Chinese can be seen as regarding China’s regional leadership as some sort of a historical right (Bandeira, 2005; Zhao, 2016)

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Despite the substantial academic and political attention that the crisis of the liberal international order has attracted over the past decade, Latin America and the Caribbean have been largely ignored by mainstream IR literature in the English language (Long, 2018). In part, this is due to the region’s relatively low geopolitical relevance – itself resulting from the absence of a potential regional rival to the US as well as of an external power with significant influence in the region – and Washington’s hemispheric hegemony. The fact that the effects of the rise of China and the relative resurgence of Russia are negligible in a nuclear-free Latin America further reduces its relevance in the debate on the crisis of the liberal international order, although Chinese economic and political influence in the region has grown enormously in the past two decades (Chen, 2021; Noesselt and Soliz-Landivar, 2013; Pini, 2015; Vadell, 2011) At the same time, as John Mearsheimer (2010) notes, the Western Hemisphere is the most important region for the US due to its geographical proximity, having thus greater potential strategic relevance than any other area on the globe.

[Riaz Haq]

‘My Order, My Rules’: China and the American Rules-Based Order in Historical Perspective
William M. Zolinger Fujii

https://www.e-ir.info/2021/12/28/my-order-my-rules-china-and-the-american-rules-based-order-in-historical-perspective/

Indeed, the very historical process of the United States’ emergence as a great world power is indissociable from its quest to become a dominant state in its region first, which is a necessary, though insufficient, condition for a country to become a global power. Seen in this way, China’s intentions to replace the US as East Asia’s hegemon are not particularly abnormal, but rather in line with patterns of behaviour of rising world powers. As the ‘strategic backwater’ of the very superpower in whose image the current order was made, and with that status appearing secure for the foreseeable future, there seems to be little reason for the current debate on contestations of the US-led global order to pay greater attention to the region. Such a tendency, however, may overestimate the extent to which Latin American states accept the current order (Long, 2018), while simultaneously obscuring important intraregional contestations of and contributions to that system, such as the principle of non-intervention, which was largely the result of the region’s jurists’ reaction to US and European interventions in the region (Orford, 2021; Vargas, 2005). Equally importantly, the region is closely linked to the process through which the US became a dominant power in East Asia in 1945, forty-seven years after it acquired a territorial base in the region after defeating a declining Spain in the late 1800s.

The foreign policy foundation of US hemispheric ambitions was laid by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which formalised Washington’s stance towards the European powers’ interests in the Americas, although its rationale was originally isolationist rather than expansionist (Campos, 2014; Modeste, 2020). At a time when new sovereign states were emerging throughout Ibero-America, US leaders feared a reaction from European monarchies that had been reorganised since the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which had given birth to a new, post-Napoleonic international order. Seeking to keep Europe’s perceived neocolonial ambitions at bay, US President James Monroe declared that the United States would oppose any European attempt to recolonise the Americas while accepting the existing situation as of 1823 (Bandeira, 2005). Seen from the perspective of the 1815 international order, the United States was a revisionist power. Yet, given Washington’s lack of capabilities to enforce it, the doctrine amounted to little more than a declaration of intentions instead of representing an effective policy. The world’s greatest power at the time, Britain initially welcomed the initiative because it too opposed the recolonisation of Latin America, where British capital and trade already held a dominant position without the need for direct territorial control. In that very particular sense, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2014 declaration that Asian affairs and problems should be run and solved by Asians rather than by external powers (Doshi, 2021) resembles President James Monroe’s statement made two centuries earlier

By the mid-1840s, British concerns had grown at the prospect of the US becoming a dominant hemispheric power, which led London to consider the extension of the balance of power concept to the Western Hemisphere (Murphy, 2005). Britain’s maritime dominance meant that while it acquiesced to the precepts of the Monroe Doctrine when these were directed against other European powers, it would ignore them when British interests were at stake, such as when London annexed the Malvinas Islands in 1833 or blockaded the River Plate in the 1845-1850 period. In spite of that, Britain’s aspirations failed to materialise, and by the end of 1848, the US had incorporated the Oregon Territory and annexed half of the Mexican land that corresponded to one-third of American territory (Langley, 2019). Hostile to European influence and interference, US president James Polk reaffirmed the principles of the Monroe Doctrine and gave it a more expansionist character consistent with the territorial expansion that the United States was undergoing in the 1840s. This period represented the beginning of the second wave of US imperial expansion that lasted between the late 1840s and 1870, during which Washington conducted twenty-four military interventions or annexations across the Americas (Go, 2011), up from sixteen in the first wave (1810-1825).

[Riaz Haq]

As the world lurches through the growing pains of massive geopolitical change, the US’ relationship with India will increasingly take center stage. Washington likes to see itself as providing a geopolitical center of gravity that is inherently attractive to nations like India, especially against regional competitors such as China. As the US is about to discover, however, India and China have a shared ambition about who should dominate the Pacific in the coming century, and it doesn’t include the US. Op Ed by Scott Ritter

https://www.energyintel.com/00000183-21d9-d467-adc7-21fdd54f0000

On Aug. 19, India’s minister of external affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, gave a speech at a university in Thailand where he stated that relations between India and China were going through “an extremely difficult phase” and that an “Asian Century” seemed unlikely unless the two nations found a way to “join hands” and start working together.

For many observers, Jaishankar’s speech was taken as an opportunity for the US to drive a wedge between India and China, exploiting an ongoing border dispute along the Himalayan frontier to push India further into a pro-US orbit together with other Western-leaning regional powers. What these observers overlooked, however, was that the Indian minister was seeking the exact opposite from his speech, signaling that India was, in fact, interested in working with China to develop joint policies that would seek to replace US-led Western hegemony in the Pacific.

Struggle for Leadership

More than six decades ago, then-US Senator John F. Kennedy noted that there was a “struggle between India and China for the economic and political leadership of the East, for the respect of all Asia, for the opportunity to demonstrate whose way of life is the better.” The US, Kennedy argued, needed to focus on providing India the help it needed to win that struggle — even if India wasn’t asking for that help or, indeed, seeking to “win” any geopolitical contest with China.

Today, the relationships between the US, India and China have matured, with all three wrestling with complex, and often contradictory, policies that are simultaneously cooperative and confrontational. Notwithstanding this, the US continues to err on the side of helping India achieve a geopolitical “win” over China. One need only consider the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad,” conceived in 2007, but dormant until 2017, when it was resurrected under US leadership to bring together the US, Japan, Australia and India in an effort to create a regional counterweight to China’s growing influence.

There was a time when cooler heads cautioned against such an assertive US-led posture on a regional response to an expansive, and expanding, Chinese presence in the Indo-Pacific region. This line of thinking held that strong Indian relationships with Tokyo and Canberra should be allowed to naturally progress, independent of US regional ambitions.

These same “cool heads” argued that the US needed to be realistic in its expectations on relations between India and China, avoiding the pitfalls of Cold War-era “zero-sum game” calculations. The US should appreciate that India needed to implement a foreign policy that best met Indian needs. Moreover, they argued, a US-Indian relationship that was solely focused on China would not age well, given the transitory realities of a changing global geopolitical dynamic.

The Asian Century

The key to deciphering Jaishanker’s strategic intent in his Thailand comments lay in his use of the term “Asian Century.” This echoed the words of former Chinese reformist leader Deng Xiaoping, who, in a meeting with former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, declared that “in recent years people have been saying that the next century will be the century of Asia and the Pacific, as if that were sure to be the case. I disagree with this view.” Deng went on to explain that unless China and India focus their respective and collective energies on developing their economies, there could, in fact, be no “Asian Century.”