On 18 January, admirals from Australia, India, Japan and the US sat together on stage at the high-profile Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi. Their presence reflected the shared strategic assessment that China has become a disruptive force in the Indo-Pacific. Taking time out to deliver a lecture at India’s National Defence College, Australian Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne echoed remarks by Indian PM Narendra Modi to the Australian Parliament in 2014, affirming that India had shifted from the periphery to the centre of Canberra’s strategic frame.

Yet on 30 April, the Australian reported that Australia had failed in its push to secure an invitation to join Japan and the US in the annual Malabar exercises with the Indian Navy. The explanation provided was that New Delhi didn’t want to offend China ahead of the informal summit between Modi and Xi Jinping in Wuhan on 27–28 April. That’s misleading. India’s naval exercises with Japan and the US are a strategic challenge for China; Australia would add only modest capabilities.

There’s a threefold basis to India’s reluctance to invite Australia back into the Quad: the shadow of a previous abandonment of the Quad by Australia; an imbalance in the depth of bilateral relations with Australia compared with those with Japan and the US; and consideration of China’s sensitivity. The last is especially important because of perceptions about Australia’s seeming instinct for perpetual war and the Turnbull government’s turn to an anti-China posture over the past 18 months.

The origins of the Quad were entirely benign. In December 2004, in response to the massive earthquake and Indian Ocean tsunami, the four countries with the maritime capabilities, logistical resources, political will and decision-making capacity to act quickly and effectively came together in a core group to coordinate tsunami relief. The memory of that remarkable experience in multilateral cooperation on disaster relief and humanitarian assistance lingered and in time gave birth to the Quad.

The first informal quadrilateral summit was held on the margins of the ASEAN Regional Forum meeting in Manila in August 2007 between the PMs of Australia, India and Japan and Vice President Dick Cheney. The four joined Singapore the following month in a large naval exercise that drew Chinese diplomatic protests. In February 2008, PM Kevin Rudd pulled Australia out of the combined exercises.

However, years of subservience to Chinese sensitivities failed to soften Beijing’s growing assertiveness across the Indo-Pacific. India began aggressively pursuing diplomatic initiatives to the east, Washington announced an Asia pivot, and the Coalition government began to articulate public unease about aspects of Chinese behaviour in Australia’s primary strategic region.

The US national defence strategy alleges that China ‘is leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage’ in pursuit of ‘Indo-Pacific regional hegemony’. In response, says the national security strategy, the US will ‘increase quadrilateral cooperation with Japan, Australia, and India’. Australia’s 2017 foreign policy white paper similarly asserts: ‘The future balance of power in the Indo-Pacific will largely depend on the actions of the United States, China and major powers such as Japan and India.’

The Indo-Pacific frame integrates geography, the ‘free and open’ principle and democratic values into one strategic construct. The Indian Ocean covers a fifth of the world’s ocean area, with almost 50 countries around its littoral and immediate hinterland. With links to both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, it is of vital commercial, political and strategic importance to India.

India’s peninsular shoreline exposes it to seaborne threats from the east, west and south, while also giving it a major commercial and geostrategic location astride the sea lanes of communication between the Middle East and East Asia. Adding population, economic weight, military power and diplomatic clout gives India multiple roles in safeguarding sea lanes, countering piracy, containing Islamic militancy and mounting disaster relief operations.

The Australian continent is part of the geographical divide between the Indian and Pacific oceans. Australia is inextricably invested in the security of both regions. If the Indo-Pacific is accepted as the new organising principle of the foreign policies of Australia, India, Japan and the US, then the four coming together informally in the Quad is a logical outcome. Australia’s participation would have symbolic value in highlighting the entente cordiale between the long-established democracies but would add marginally to the cost in India’s relations with China.

India’s policy elite remains suspicious of Australia’s reliability. At a joint press conference in Canberra on 5 February 2008 with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said: ‘One of the things which caused China concern last year was a meeting of that strategic dialogue [with Japan and the US] plus India, which China expressed some concern with’ and ‘Australia would not be proposing to have a dialogue of that nature’ again. On 10 February, Smith explained that the 2007 quadrilateral meeting had been a ‘one-off’. While the trilateral dialogue with Japan and the US would continue, the ‘four-way conversation’ would not.

The optics of the announcement in the presence of China’s foreign minister, and the substance of the unilateral cancellation of the Quad, still colour India’s assessment of Australia’s credentials. This also explains why India spurned an invitation to Australia in 2017. India was uncertain of ‘Australia’s “strategic clarity” vis-à-vis China, particularly as China has made significant inroads into Australia’. Yet India was happy to hold bilateral AUSINDEX naval exercises with Australia in 2015 and 2017. The two have also agreed to a 2+2 dialogue involving their defence and foreign secretaries.

Growing nervousness at China’s assertiveness and latent apprehensions about the limits of its regional ambitions are the prime motivations for the Quad’s revival. The complementary security interests are given ballast by shared political values and a rhetorical commitment—often breached in practice—to an open rules-based order.

For each of Australia, India and Japan, the relationship with the US is the single most important and that with China the second most critical—outweighing the importance of the other two partners. That means there will always be strong pressures to subordinate ties with the lesser two partners to China’s sensitivities. As a military grouping with a China containment agenda, the Quad would polarise the region further and bend it in the direction of a tense, zero-sum competition.

Rather than a military alliance aiming for strategic deterrence, therefore, the overarching goal should be diplomatic dissuasion, underpinned by extensive working-level engagement in foreign and security policy and military-to-military interactions.

In January, Greg Sheridan wrote about a forthcoming report to the government by former foreign secretary Peter Varghese on how to elevate relations with India. Peter, who served also as high commissioner to India, gives three reasons why India’s economic turnaround is transformational for Australia: its sheer scale, the complementarity between the Australian and Indian economies, and the need for Australia to diversify the risk to its trade-dependent economy.

India’s economy is being transformed because of urbanisation; the shift away from an informal to a formal economy; the youth-based demographic dividend of workers and consumers; and the substantial upgrade of infrastructure. Australia, Peter will recommend, should give strategic priority to education, agribusiness, resources and energy, and tourism as the sectors in which it can do especially well in embracing India, to reciprocal benefits.

Peter’s choreography for the wallaby–elephant pas de deux dovetails neatly with the analysis of the bilateral relationship that Ashok Sharma and I offer in an article just published in Strategic Analysis, India’s premier journal on strategic affairs. The context for the strengthening Australia–India relationship is the broad structural shifts underway in global order. While there is turbulence elsewhere as well, the region experiencing a complete reconfiguration of the existing order is the Indo-Pacific.

There are three trend-lines behind this (with cross-linkages between them): the relative waning of US power and influence; the sustained rise of China as a comprehensive national power; and the simultaneous rise of India, even if a dozen or so years behind China.

The frame increasingly used in Australia, including in the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, to define the strategic arc connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans through Southeast Asia is ‘Indo-Pacific’. Where the previously preferred term ‘Asia–Pacific’ excluded India, ‘Indo-Pacific’ connects India not just to Australia across the Indian Ocean, but also to Southeast and East Asia.

Our analysis has a twofold argument. First, the main driver of the deepening Australia–India engagement is the changing regional geopolitical equation. But in addition, secondly, economic engagement, people movements and shared political values provide ballast and texture to the security underpinnings.

In the foreseeable future, India isn’t going to surpass China, Japan or the US as Australia’s most critical bilateral partner on any single dimension such as trade, investment or security. Indeed, India is unlikely to come even close to the security importance of the US, the economic importance of China or the critical relevance of Indonesia to Australia. Nor will India emerge as Australia’s single most important bilateral partner on any composite index.

Rather, for the foreseeable future, owing both to India’s scale and the low base from which the relationship starts, India could emerge as the single most critical Indo-Pacific country for Australia in the rate of growth in the breadth and depth in most dimensions of the relationship. In turn, the deepening and consolidation of Australia–India economic, security, diplomatic and cultural relations could prove a game changer in the balance of power around the Indo-Pacific.

In a major foreign policy speech on 18 October 2017, the since-fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson became the first senior US official to switch to the ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategic frame. He added that the US and India ‘must serve as the eastern and western beacons of the Indo-Pacific’. The following month a senior White House official explicitly justified the change of terminology by saying that the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ ‘captures the importance of India’s rise’. Also in November, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue among Australia, India, Japan and the US was revived on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Manila, attended by the leaders of the four democratic nations, to China’s chagrin.

More recently the four Quad members were also said to be exploring the creation of a joint regional infrastructure project as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Nevertheless the Indian policy elite remains suspicious of Australia’s reliability, given how Kevin Rudd suddenly cancelled participation in 2008 for fear of offending China. Today India is reluctant to offend China for the sake of a flip-flopping fourth partner and it refused to invite Australia to the 2018 Malabar naval exercises with Japan and the US.

All this said, some scepticism is warranted about India’s commitment to economic reforms, without which its growth trajectory will stall, the demographic dividend of a young population will turn into a public policy nightmare of mass youth unemployment leading to a deadly winter of discontent, and the world will again lose interest. India has a unique capacity to look every opportunity firmly in the eye, turn around and walk resolutely in the opposite direction. The Modi government came in on the promise of decisive action on pro-growth policies, but its tenure has been marked more by political calculations than by long-term economic strategy.

Demonetisation, whereby the two highest denomination currency notes (Rs 500 and 1,000) were withdrawn overnight as legal tender, was shock therapy rooted in quack economics. It caused massive disruption and lasting damage for very dubious structural economic benefits, but proved politically popular. Worse, it was incontestable proof of statism born of contempt for private property rights. As an old Indian joke has it, the economy grows mainly in the night when the government is asleep.

And the exemption given to political parties, which provided a clear pathway for black money to be laundered into white in bartered exchange for crony capitalism or other political favours, showed just how cynical the government is in deploying a fight against corruption as its political battle cry.

The introduction of a countrywide goods and services tax, by contrast, was a major structural reform that was totally botched in implementation, with up to six tax bands and loads of exemptions. The complexity and potential for arbitrariness increased the discretionary power of officialdom and thereby maximised the scope for bribery and extortion by tax officials instead of cutting it back. And the main reason for Australia being a major education destination for Indian students is the wide and growing gap between demand and supply for quality education in India, which the Modi government has also failed to acknowledge and address.

In other words, considerable promise but also still a few nagging doubts as policy action falls well short of the inflated rhetoric.

Beijing claims the South China Sea as China’s own. But it completely rejects any notion that the Indian Ocean should be treated either as India’s ocean or as an Indian preserve. The implications of these inconsistent positions may become increasingly important in the China–India relationship, and have important consequences for other countries in the region.

As Mohan Malik at the the Asia–Pacific Center for Security Studies has noted, Beijing wants to be a ‘resident power’ in the Indian Ocean—just like the US, the UK and France. Chinese naval ships and submarines are now making frequent forays into India’s near seas. Many on India’s maritime periphery have embraced China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

In the face of growing Chinese heft in India’s ‘front yard’, there’s an intensifying Sino–Indian geopolitical rivalry in the Indian Ocean. Delhi’s traditional influence there is now under serious challenge. Much of this was set out last month in Malik’s excellent two-part article in Inside Policy, published by Canada’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

New Delhi has long feared being encircled by China’s ‘string of pearls’ network of installations in the Indian Ocean, and many of its fears may now be coming true. Last year, China opened its first overseas naval base in Djibouti. China may be planning to open a new naval base at Jiwani, next to Pakistan’s China-controlled Gwadar port.

In Pakistan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, China is using the BRI to create client states. Beijing is using its infrastructure projects, while also creating debt dependency, with corrupt and weak regimes to increase China’s political leverage.

To give a recent example, the pro-Chinese leader of the Maldives, President Abdulla Yameen, declared a state of emergency in February. The Maldives has long been a foundation of India’s sphere of influence in South Asia. Nevertheless, China’s warnings against Indian intervention probably emboldened the autocratic leader of the Maldives to extend the state of emergency despite India’s strong opposition. It also seems to have cowed India, which sent aircraft and ships to its southern bases but didn’t follow up with action to restore democracy in the Maldives.

In the meantime, China is rapidly moving to increase its investments in the Maldives, which include an US$830 million upgrade of the airport, and a 1.3-mile bridge to link the airport island with the capital, which is a US$400 million project.

China has signed a free trade agreement with the Maldives and has leased the uninhabited island Feydhoo Finolhu for tourism use for 50 years. It has probably leased several other islands as well. Because of sea level rise, the Maldives also hopes to receive Chinese help in reclaiming land and creating artificial islands via dredging.

There are also reports of a Joint Ocean Observation Station that China is looking to establish in the Maldives’ western-most atoll in the north, not far from India. There are concerns that this would give the Chinese a vantage point to monitor an important Indian Ocean shipping route. Noted Indian strategic affairs analyst Brahma Chellaney argues that India should warn the Maldivian and Chinese governments that it won’t accept an ocean observation centre.

It’s too early to say whether any of these projects will end up like the Chinese-built international airport in Sri Lanka that’s a rarely used white elephant.

But all of this is a direct challenge to New Delhi in the Indian Ocean. And India is moving to shore up its position against a more assertive Chinse presence by developing its own ‘string of pearls’.

New Delhi recently signed a strategic pact with France, with each opening their naval bases to the other’s warships across the Indian Ocean. That gives the Indian navy access to strategically important French ports—including one in Djibouti that offers easy access to key oil supply and trade routes.

Apart from the French agreement, Prime Minister Narendra Modi this year finalised an agreement for a new base in the Seychelles and negotiated military access to facilities at Oman’s port and airfields. Last year India signed an agreement with Singapore to allow deployments from each other’s naval facilities. And India has expanded its bases on Andaman and Nicobar Islands at the end of the Malacca Strait.

Belatedly, India has realised that it needs to match China’s assertiveness, and that includes expanding its reach into the Pacific. For Delhi, having a counter power-projection capability in the South China Sea is now seen as critical to its strategic deterrence against Beijing. Indeed there has been a recent surge in India’s eastern naval deployments.

As Malik points out, India has also stepped up aid to littorals through its Project SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region), which is designed to revive India’s ancient trade routes and cultural linkages around the Indian Ocean—a counter-move to China’s maritime silk road.

To get a good understanding of all of these developments in the Indian Ocean and how China and India are increasingly bumping up against each other across the Indo-Pacific, there’s no better source than the recently released India & China at sea: competition for naval dominance in the Indian Ocean.

The editor of the volume, Australian scholar David Brewster, points out in his introduction that how India and China get along in the shared Indian Ocean—whether through cooperation, coexistence, competition or confrontation—will be one of the key strategic developments for the entire region.

The book has essays from scholars from Australia, the US, China and India. The essays examine Indian and Chinese perspectives of each other as major powers in the Indian Ocean, China’s growing security presence in the region, the evolution of Indian policymakers’ views towards China’s role in Indian Ocean, the reasons China doesn’t understand India’s concerns (there’s a suggestion that China is an ‘autistic’ superpower), China’s evolving naval strategy and security presence in the region, and how the Indian navy would respond in the event of a conflict, including an examination of subsurface capabilities.

There are valuable chapters on India’s maritime domain awareness strategy in the region, and on its naval interests in the Pacific. There’s also a skeptical view on China’s maritime silk road and the risks that China faces with that initiative.

This book is essential reading on the maritime great game in progress and has many useful insights on how China and India—each a rising power in its own right—are competing to gain relative advantage over the other in the Indian Ocean.

The Maldives—that beautiful Indian Ocean country comprising more than 1,000 coral islands—is known the world over as a tranquil and luxurious travel destination. But the country is now being roiled by a political crisis so severe that international advisories are cautioning against travel there.

The rule of law in the Maldives has been steadily deteriorating ever since President Abdulla Yameen came to power in 2013. The situation escalated sharply earlier this month, when Yameen refused to comply with the Supreme Court’s unanimous order quashing the convictions, which he had engineered, of nine opposition figures—including the exiled former president, Mohamed Nasheed—on terrorism charges. Instead of freeing those whose sentences were nullified, Yameen declared a state of emergency and jailed two of the Supreme Court’s five judges, including the chief justice.

To be sure, authoritarianism is not new to the Maldives. Indeed, Nasheed is the only democratically elected, non-autocratic president the country has had since it gained independence from Britain in 1965. His tenure lasted just over three years, until, in 2012, he was forced at gunpoint to resign.

But the Maldives’ sordid politics is having an increasingly far-reaching impact, not least because it is closely linked to radical Islam. On the day Nasheed was overthrown, Islamists ransacked the Maldives’ main museum, smashing priceless Buddhist and Hindu statues and erasing all evidence of the country’s pre-Islamic roots. On a per capita basis, the Maldives has sent the highest number of foreign fighters to support terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.

Moreover, the Maldives sits astride critical shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean, making it vital to security in the region. As a result, the country’s deteriorating political conditions are increasingly capturing the international community’s attention. Democratic powers, from the United States to India, are calling upon the United Nations to intervene in the crisis, while China, seeking to advance its own interests in the Indian Ocean, is defending the graft-tainted Yameen.

The increasingly close relationship between China and the Maldives represents a significant shift from the past, when India was the country’s primary regional partner. Maldivians are mainly of Indian and Sri Lankan origin, and have strong cultural and economic ties to those countries. Their country has traditionally been viewed as part of India’s sphere of influence.

But, in recent years, China has been eroding India’s influence in the Maldives, as part of its effort to build its ‘string of pearls’: a chain of military installations and economic projects aimed at projecting Chinese power in the Indian Ocean. Just as China recently secured the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota on a 99-year lease, it has, according to Nasheed, quietly acquired 17 islands in the heavily indebted Maldives for investment purposes.

But, betraying its strategic objectives, China has also sent warships to visit the Maldives. If China, which has stepped up military pressure on India along their Himalayan frontier, turned one of the Maldivian islands into a naval base, it would effectively open a maritime front against India—a milestone in China’s strategic encirclement of its neighbour.

The Maldivian crisis thus is a defining moment for India. Will India intervene militarily, as Nasheed and other Maldivian opposition leaders have requested, or will it allow Yameen to continue to enable China to pursue its strategic objectives in the region?

There is some precedent for an Indian military intervention in the Maldives. In 1988, India snuffed out a coup attempt against the autocratic Maumoon Abdul Gayoom engineered by a Maldivian businessman with the aid of armed mercenaries, especially Sri Lankan Tamil separatists. Thanks to India’s swift military action, Gayoom would hold onto power for another two decades.

Yet when the country’s first and only democratically elected president beseeched India in 2012 to rescue him from the Islamist forces laying siege to his office, India looked the other way. India’s government felt betrayed by Nasheed’s own burgeoning relationship with China. Not only had Nasheed awarded China its first infrastructure contracts; just three months before his ouster, he had inaugurated the new Chinese embassy in the capital, Malé, on the same day that India’s then-prime minister, Manmohan Singh, arrived for a regional summit.

Today, an Indian intervention could be dicey, not least because no legitimate authority is inviting India to send in forces. Indian paratroopers could gain effective control of Malé within a few hours. But what would the endgame be? Amid rising Islamist influence and shifting political allegiances among the handful of powerful families that dominate the Maldives’ economy and politics, finding reliable allies committed to—much less capable of—protecting democratic freedoms would prove a daunting challenge.

Moreover, even if Yameen were ousted and the country held a democratic election, it is unlikely that China’s influence could be contained. As the experiences of Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka illustrate, China has outmaneuvered India diplomatically, even when dealing with democratically elected governments. Indeed, it did so in the Maldives itself, with Nasheed. Because the country’s debt will continue to rise, regardless of its leadership, China will retain its favourite source of leverage.

India, with its proximity and historical ties to the Maldives, may seem to hold a strong hand. But it has a lot to lose if it aggravates an already volatile political situation in its maritime backyard by intervening militarily.

India’s best option is to hold out a credible threat of military action, while imposing, together with other democratic powers, economic sanctions that undercut support for Yameen among the Maldivian elite, many of whom own the luxury resorts that now have far too many empty rooms. With them on side, perhaps the international community would be able to ensure that the presidential election scheduled for later this year is fair and inclusive—and supervised by the UN. That is the only way to end the crisis, and restore peace to an Indian Ocean paradise.

The more power China has accumulated, the more it has attempted to achieve its foreign-policy objectives with bluff, bluster, and bullying. But, as its Himalayan border standoff with India’s military continues, the limits of this approach are becoming increasingly apparent.

The current standoff began in mid-June, when Bhutan, a close ally of India, discovered the People’s Liberation Army trying to extend a road through Doklam, a high-altitude plateau in the Himalayas that belongs to Bhutan, but is claimed by China. India, which guarantees tiny Bhutan’s security, quickly sent troops and equipment to halt the construction, asserting that the road—which would overlook the point where Tibet, Bhutan, and the Indian state of Sikkim meet—threatened its own security.

Since then, China’s leaders have been warning India almost daily to back down or face military reprisals. China’s defence ministry has threatened to teach India a ‘bitter lesson’, vowing that any conflict would inflict ‘greater losses’ than the Sino-Indian War of 1962, when China invaded India during a Himalayan border dispute and inflicted major damage within a few weeks. Likewise, China’s foreign ministry has unleashed a torrent of vitriol intended to intimidate India into submission.

Despite all of this, India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has kept its cool, refusing to respond to any Chinese threat, much less withdraw its forces. As China’s warmongering has continued, its true colors have become increasingly vivid. It is now clear that China is attempting to use psychological warfare (‘psywar’) to advance its strategic objectives—to ‘win without fighting’, as the ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu recommended.

China has waged its psywar against India largely through disinformation campaigns and media manipulation, aimed at presenting India—a raucous democracy with poor public diplomacy—as the aggressor and China as the aggrieved party. Chinese state media have been engaged in eager India-bashing for weeks. China has also employed ‘lawfare’, selectively invoking a colonial-era accord, while ignoring its own violations—cited by Bhutan and India—of more recent bilateral agreements.

For the first few days of the standoff, China’s psywar blitz helped it dominate the narrative. But, as China’s claims and tactics have come under growing scrutiny, its approach has faced diminishing returns. In fact, from a domestic perspective, China’s attempts to portray itself as the victim—claiming that Indian troops had illegally entered Chinese territory, where they remain—has been distinctly damaging, provoking a nationalist backlash over the failure to evict the intruders.

As a result, President Xi Jinping’s image as a commanding leader, along with the presumption of China’s regional dominance, is coming under strain, just months before the critical 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. And it is difficult to see how Xi could turn the situation around.

Despite China’s overall military superiority, it is scarcely in a position to defeat India decisively in a Himalayan war, given India’s fortified defences along the border. Even localised hostilities at the tri-border area would be beyond China’s capacity to dominate, because the Indian army controls higher terrain and has greater troop density. If such military clashes left China with so much as a bloodied nose, as happened in the same area in 1967, it could spell serious trouble for Xi at the upcoming National Congress.

But, even without actual conflict, China stands to lose. Its confrontational approach could drive India, Asia’s most important geopolitical ‘swing state’, firmly into the camp of the United States, China’s main global rival. It could also undermine its own commercial interests in the world’s fastest-growing major economy, which sits astride China’s energy-import lifeline.

Already, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj has tacitly warned of economic sanctions if China, which is running an annual trade surplus of nearly $60 billion with India, continues to disturb border peace. More broadly, as China has declared unconditional Indian troop withdrawal to be a ‘prerequisite’ for ending the standoff, India, facing recurrent Chinese incursions over the last decade, has insisted that border peace is a ‘prerequisite’ for developing bilateral ties.

Against this background, the smartest move for Xi would be to attempt to secure India’s help in finding a face-saving compromise to end the crisis. The longer the standoff lasts, the more likely it is to sully Xi’s carefully cultivated image as a powerful leader, and that of China as Asia’s hegemon, which would undermine popular support for the regime at home and severely weaken China’s influence over its neighbours.

Already, the standoff is offering important lessons to other Asian countries seeking to cope with China’s bullying. For example, China recently threatened to launch military action against Vietnam’s outposts in the disputed Spratly Islands, forcing the Vietnamese government to stop drilling for gas at the edge of China’s exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea.

China does not yet appear ready to change its approach. Some experts even predict that it will soon move forward with a ‘small-scale military operation’ to expel the Indian troops currently in its claimed territory. But such an attack is unlikely to do China any good, much less change the territorial status quo in the tri-border area. It certainly won’t make it possible for China to resume work on the road it wanted to build. That dream most likely died when India called the Chinese bully’s bluff.