Darkening skies loom over Asia
Recent events underscore the playing out of geopolitical rivalries among the united States, China, Russia and India.
HOW could a surprise visit to Tibet by Chinese President Xi Jinping be connected to an American goahead to Germany to proceed with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project to bring more natural gas from Russia?
Or the arrival in South-east Asian waters of HMS Queen Elizabeth and its strike group, with US Marine Corp F-35 attack fighters on board and an American destroyer as part of its flotilla, have anything to do with Beijing’s crackdown on Didi Chuxing just as the ride-hailing company sold shares in New York?
At first glance, to draw direct links between these developments taking place at different points around the globe would seem a bit of a stretch. Yet they could also be seen as movements on the chessboard that add up to a jigsaw puzzle taking shape as the United States concentrates its attention on the Indo-pacific in never before seen ways.
At a Fullerton Lecture in Singapore on Tuesday, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin described the Indo-pacific as having the “highest strategic priority” for the Pentagon.
“It is better,” he said, “to put out an ember than to try to put out a blaze.”
In America’s current playbook, that means using every military and non-military tool in the toolbox in lockstep with allies and partners and “deploying them all in new and networked ways”.
The ember-before-blaze characterisation suggests that the United States believes it has a window, perhaps of less than a decade – when China’s comprehensive power, including an economy that is soon poised to overtake the United States in nominal GDP size, has not reached its peak – to take the steps necessary to preserve the dominance over global affairs it has enjoyed since the end of World War II.
So why does Nord Stream 2 matter?
One key ingredient in that recipe for continued dominance is to decouple Russia, with its unquestioned strengths in advanced weapons and in cyber, considered the modern-day equivalent of nuclear power, from China.
The Sino-russian relationship is strong for the moment – their air forces even occasionally conduct strategic aviation patrol exercises over the overlapping Japanese and South Korean air defence identification zones over the Takeshima/ Dokdo islands claimed by both Seoul and Tokyo – and ties are cemented by strong personal bonds between President Xi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. However, the United States is convinced that this close connection cannot be an enduring one, and is by no means unshakeable.
There are signs that Moscow is discomfited by the Chinese presence in its Far East and Beijing’s eagerness to push its way into the Arctic, where Russia is the dominant power. Likewise, another sign of a possible wedge showed up during last year’s military confrontation in the high Himalayas between China and India when Moscow stood against Beijing’s pressure and opened its weapons stores to New Delhi with a “take what you need” approach.
This partly explains why the Biden administration gave Germany the nod to accept additional flows of Russian gas via the building of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, without fear of inviting US sanctions.
While the formal announcement on the pipeline deal came a little more than a month after the midJune Biden-putin summit in a lakeside Swiss villa, work on the pipeline had apparently restarted within weeks of Biden taking office on Jan 20. This suggests that key US administration officials had quietly given Russia the go-ahead much earlier.
Western commentary has tended to see the pipeline move as a Biden nod towards German Chancellor Angela Merkel but there is likely much more to it. Merkel is due to leave office in two months, after all.
So Biden is really making a deliberate overture to Putin. And in also handing the Russian President a list of 16 pieces of critical US infrastructure that he said should be “off-limits” to cyber attacks, he’s in essence conceding that Moscow had the wherewithal to attack the United Sates in that area at will. Little wonder that Putin’s body language at the summit suggested he was immensely pleased by where he had managed to place the United States.
Russia welcomes the wiggle room all this presents, of course. It wants its own profile in the IndoPacific, distinct from anyone else’s.
Moscow, the major weapons supplier to Vietnam and Myanmar, is seeking to widen its influence in South-east Asia and to open fresh markets for its weapons in countries like Indonesia and Laos.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in the capitals of both nations earlier this month. Indonesia and Russia also are said to be readying an announcement of a strategic partnership.
Similarly, with India. Outside of the Russian military, New Delhi, now a near-ally of the United States, traditionally has been the biggest buyer of Russian war equipment. Moscow is keen to preserve that relationship even as it has sold some key weapons systems to Beijing lately to ease the strategic pressure placed on it by successive US administrations, and partly for the money.
It possibly also thinks South-east Asian nations will be reassured if India, with its deep familiarity with Russian technology, can be coaxed to step in and assist with the maintenance and servicing of weapons sold to the region, such as Sukhoi and MIG warplanes, and Kilo-class submarines.
China’s interests
As for leaning on Didi Chuxing, it is now widely accepted that Beijing fears the mapping function of the app could reveal sensitive government locations because of its access to massive amounts of user data. Beijing doesn’t want the remotest possibility of this data being accessible to a hostile power.
And then of course there is the Taiwan issue, which is boiling up in worrisome ways.
It would be no surprise, therefore, if responsible people in Beijing feel they are faced with a pincer or that attempts are on to draw China into further strategic mistakes in Asia that could prove costly for itself militarily, and damage its image everywhere.
At his speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China, Xi, who is almost certainly likely to want to stay in power beyond his second five-year term that ends next year, said China would “never allow any foreign forces to bully, coerce or enslave us”.
All this, and the American emphasis on partners and network-centric defence, probably occasioned Xi’s Tibet visit on July 21-22. Xi’s trip took him to Nyingchi, opposite India’s eastern Arunachal state, and to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
Since the last Chinese president to visit the region was Jiang Zemin in 1990, it was about time that the region was given some high-level attention. However, that Xi was accompanied by the vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, which he chairs himself, gives the visit more than ordinary significance.
Of course, not all of this needs to be preparation for conflict.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama turned 86 earlier this month and sooner rather than later the world will confront the question of who will succeed him. His departure, when it comes, will almost certainly fuel disquiet and grief in the region he fled in 1959 in the face of occupation by troops of the People’s Liberation Army.
But China can handle all that. So the visit must have been occasioned by other factors as well. What would those be?
One factor surely must be the massive build-up taking place on either side of the undemarcated boundary dividing China and India.
India’s interests
In an uncommonly aggressive gesture, India, even as it battles the pandemic, has moved to an offensive military posture on the border, moving in 50,000 additional troops – a 40% increase since last year – in a strategy known as “offensive defence”, according to usually credible news sources.
As this column has noted before, the armaments India has placed close to the border are increasingly of US manufacture, including M777 howitzers, Apache Longbow helicopters with Hellfire missiles, heavy lift transport aircraft, and Reaper drones – all backed with bilateral agreements on logistics arrangements and sharing ultraprecise geospatial information. If needed, these weapons are interoperable with those of the American military.
Additionally, in Arunachal, where most of India’s border forces had been located and where much of the 1962 India-china war played out, newly acquired French-made Rafale fighter jets armed with longrange missiles are being deployed to support the boots on the ground, according to Bloomberg News, which also said the Indian Navy has lately been putting more warships along key sea lanes for longer durations.
This comes in the wake of tensions that continue to simmer following the first violent deaths on the undemarcated boundary in decades after soldiers of the two sides indulged in barbaric acts of violence in the Ladakh Himalayas in July last year.
So it is a good guess that Xi, China’s President and chairman of the Central Military Commission, wanted to be directly briefed on his garrisons.
Any which way you look at it, all these developments are worrisome to the extreme. Insecurity, a misstep, a misheard command, a rocket released without authorisation by a trembling finger on the button – and who knows where matters might hurtle towards. The rest of us can only close our eyes and pray. For decisionmakers, prudence and calm are advised. – The Straits Times/asia News Network