As I was
researching and writing the latest Contingency Planning Memorandum for CFR’s
Center for Preventive Action, “Armed Confrontation Between China and India,”
one of my top priorities was to avoid overstating the probability of the
contingency. Throughout most of my conversations with Indian, Chinese, and U.S.
policy analysts, I found a striking consensus about the relative stability
between these two giant Asian neighbors. This was reassuring, but also slightly
surprising given the lingering suspicions and growing competition between New
Delhi and Beijing.
Then I started reading a new book by
Bharat Karnad, Why India Is Not a Great Power (Yet), and
quickly observed that nearly all of the avenues by which I thought a
China-India conflict might conceivably emerge (land border skirmish, Tibetan
protests, India-Pakistan standoff, and maritime disputes) were also areas where
Karnad believes India should pursue far more aggressive policies. The one
exception is Pakistan, where Karnad suggests India should principally deploy
economic incentives to overcome longstanding hostilities (an approach he
recommends for all of India’s smaller neighbors).
Karnad, a professor of National Security Studies at the Centre for
Policy Research in New Delhi, is unusually strident in his call for India to
play an opportunistic power-balancing role in Asia without signing up to either
Washington or Beijing’s agenda. He expects that India will never find the
United States to be a reliable strategic partner and that China will inevitably
represent India’s chief security threat. To chart its own path, India will need
to play a more opportunistic and reckless game quite unlike anything we have
seen in its history since independence.
Karnad’s prescriptions go well beyond garden variety calls for
“nonalignment” or greater Indian “strategic autonomy.” He proposes that India
needs to take provocative measures if it wants to be taken seriously on the
world stage, and in particular, to “strategically discomfit” China. To these
ends, he argues for steps such as mining the Himalayan passes between India and
China with atomic demolition munitions, arming China’s neighbors like Vietnam
not only with Brahmos cruise missiles but nuclear weapons, and actively
bankrolling and assisting an armed uprising in Tibet. Each of these steps would
undoubtedly make an armed India-China confrontation more likely and more
dangerous.
Quite unlike Karnad, my Contingency Planning Memo assumes that the
U.S.-India partnership holds significant strategic value to both sides. As a
consequence, I argue that Washington should stand by New Delhi’s side in the
unlikely event of an armed confrontation between India and China, even at the
risk of heightened U.S. tensions with China. To be clear, however, I also
assume that India will not unilaterally pursue the sorts of policies that
Karnad advocates and I suggest that Washington’s interest in backing India
should apply only to defensive security measures.
These competing perspectives are worth considering because India has
important strategic choices to make as its material power grows. I suspect that
if India becomes more confident in its partnership with the United States, it
will be less likely to pursue risky foreign policy positions. Karnad’s India,
on the other hand, with growing power and ambition but deeply insecure about
its relations with Washington and convinced of the China threat, would be far
more likely to emerge as a dangerous new wild card in the international system.
Daniel Markey is adjunct senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South
Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Senior Research Professor and
Academic Director of the Global Policy Program at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies.
This piece appeared in CFR’s blog Asia Unbound here.
For more on preventing armed confrontation between China and India, please see
CFR’s recent Contingency Planning Memorandum in the following posting on Kerry’s
sites:
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