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...