Two-Front Wars

 I found Sreejith Sasidharan’s analysis of the Indo-China skirmishes and standoffs in the Himalayas very interesting because it suggests that there’s a bigger picture here than just the obvious India-China aspect to such incidents.

 

Sasidharan starts by pointing to a Chinese defense white paper from 2019 that talks of their need to look at multiple “strategic directions”. Their “primary” strategic direction, says that white paper, is the US, and therefore, the Western Pacific. But India is their main challenger in the “secondary” direction:

“When China allocates military resources and deploys armed forces, Beijing’s main objective is to maximize the resources towards what it considers to be its primary strategic direction, the United States and its system of alliances. This can be achieved only by allocating the minimum possible resources in a secondary strategic direction towards New Delhi and the Himalayas.”

 

But if that is true, then why has the number of incidents in the Himalayas being rising of late? Aha, from India’s perspective, a two-front war (Pakistan on one, China on the other) is our nightmare scenario. The Chinese too fear a two-front war (US on the Pacific, India in the Himalayas). I guess this is one of those rare cases where everyone has learnt from history, specifically Hitler’s disastrous two-front war with the West and Russia at the same time…

 

Is that then China’s fear (and thus what dictates their policy)? That India should not be allowed to create any “advantageous tactical positions, such as building a feeder road to the Daulat Beg Oldie airfield, which may be leveraged in the future for logistics to open a second front”?

 

And while they are at it, are the Chinese then using those very India-China tensions, which are limited to “medieval-style weapons” (remember that no weapons policy on both sides?), to also “examine the degree of coordination that exists within the Indo-US strategic partnership”? Ironically then, are those very agreements between India and China to not carry firearms close to the border, allowing China to “probe the limits and red lines of both the United States and India without risking a larger conflagration”?

 

Around the same time as Galwan, China was also violating Taiwan’s airspace and increasing its posturing in the South China Sea. Sasidharan wonders if that is all part of China signalling to the world:

“By giving the illusion of opening simultaneous fronts without firing a shot and yet indulging in violence, China is trying to signal the world, that Beijing has ‘arrived’ as a major power.”

 

It’s all so very complicated, like 3-dimensional chess, except the “game” isn’t limited to 2 players…