‘America loves India’, declared US President Donald Trump on this week’s visit to the Indian state of Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s power base. Before a crowd of more than 100,000 in the world’s largest cricket stadium, the two leaders triumphantly celebrated the deepening friendship between their countries—or, to be more precise, between their brands of charismatic populism. Not even Trump’s repeated mangling of Indian names during his speech could dampen Modi’s glow.

But Trump’s visit to India wasn’t the major historical moment of which he and Modi boasted. Although Modi described the US–India relationship as ‘the most important partnership of the 21st century’, it may never match the ever-deepening ties between China and Russia. After all, conventional authoritarians find it far easier than populists to unite behind a common vision of their global interests. The China factor is of course important for both the United States and India, but it is not sufficient to transcend their cultural differences and deeply divergent economic interests (especially regarding trade).

Having said that, another type of history was in the making during Trump’s visit. But it was very different from the sort that he and Modi had envisaged.

When trying to describe the two leaders’ recent meetings in India, the expression ‘bonfire of the vanities’ inevitably comes to mind. In an atmosphere of abject flattery and rarely matched pomposity, Trump and Modi recognised similar qualities in each other. Watching them live on television, I could only think back to the iconic scenes from Charlie Chaplin’s cinematic masterpiece, The Great Dictator. Chaplin’s farce, it seems, is now repeating itself—this time as tragedy.

For Trump, who is gearing up for his re-election campaign, India was a perfect place to test his message to US voters—and in particular to America’s successful four-million-strong Indian diaspora, which tends to vote Democratic. Trump’s message was simple: if India, the world’s largest democracy, is welcoming him like a hero and a star, then why should some (clearly unpatriotic) Americans reject him as if he were a threat to democracy? Indeed, Trump seemed to be claiming the protection of both Modi and Mahatma Gandhi.

The US president’s visit brought similar benefits for Modi. Many Indians detest the prime minister’s brand of religious nationalism, and Delhi currently is experiencing its worst Hindu–Muslim violence in decades. But Modi can now say to his opponents that the leader of the world’s most powerful democracy doesn’t seem to mind how India treats its Muslim minority or how it behaves in Kashmir.

Having thus bolstered each other’s legitimacy with kudos and absolution, Trump and Modi could move from public pageantry to the more serious and divisive matters of China and trade. That brought to mind conversations I had in the early 2000s with Robert Blackwill, a seasoned diplomat who was the US ambassador to India at the time. Blackwill’s main goal was to make America recognise (or, arguably, rediscover) the vital importance of India, the world’s largest democracy, to the US. For him, democracy was not a vague, empty word, but rather the key to building a privileged relationship with India. But at that time, of course, neither country’s politics had yet been overrun by illiberal populists.

To be sure, US–India relations have always been complex. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, both countries viewed China as a threat. After India lost a 1962 war with China, it signed an air-defence agreement and shared intelligence with the US, while America also provided economic and military assistance.

But the two countries soon began to fall out regarding the urgency of the Chinese threat. Indian leaders felt betrayed when the US, under President Richard Nixon, began a process of rapprochement with China. As a result, Russia and India moved closer towards each other, leading America in turn to shift its regional attention to Pakistan.

Then came India’s decision to become a nuclear power. The US initially was angered by Indian stubbornness over the issue, but subsequently resigned itself to a reality it was unable to prevent. And although US leaders thought that a nuclearised India was probably bad for the world, the country’s arsenal was at least a useful deterrent vis-à-vis China.

Yet, while a shared mistrust of China may be a necessary precondition for a successful US–India relationship, it is not a sufficient basis for a close and durable alliance between two complex giants. In fact, if the US and India are no longer united by a deep and sincere commitment to democracy, then India may one day decide that its interests lie in seeking its own rapprochement with China, a more predictable global power.

Finally, US–India trade frictions will persist, despite the warm relations between Trump and Modi. Perhaps tellingly, the event in the Gujarat cricket stadium ended with the Rolling Stones song ‘You can’t always get what you want’.

Economic nationalism is on the rise and democracy is on the wane. Given these worrying trends, what happened in Gujarat between Trump and Modi may yet come to be seen as dystopia’s apotheosis.

Two events in recent weeks have refocused attention on the South China Sea. First, Malaysia approached the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf claiming waters beyond the 200-kilometre limit of its exclusive economic zone in the northern part of the South China Sea, leading to Chinese accusations of an infringement of China’s sovereignty. The Malaysian claim came as a surprise, considering that the last time Kuala Lumpur made a similar submission was almost a decade ago (on that occasion, for a part of the continental shelf that lay in the southern part of the South China Sea). Yet it is China’s extended presence in and around the Luconia Shoals in Malaysia’s EEZ that seems to have driven Kuala Lumpur to the international body. Malaysia claims that the entire Spratly Islands are part of Malaysia’s continental shelf.

Second, Indonesia sent warships and a submarine to the waters off the Natuna Islands after an encroachment by Chinese fishing boats and coastguard ships. Indonesian President Joko Widodo toured the islands on a naval ship, apparently to warn Beijing that Jakarta wouldn’t countenance a challenge to its sovereignty. Since 2016, when Indonesia began fending off Chinese poachers and fishermen in the waters off the Natunas, Jakarta’s resentment against Beijing has grown stronger. Despite claims that Indonesia is a neutral party in regional territorial disputes, its tilt away from China has been in clear evidence.

Indonesia isn’t the only country protesting Chinese aggression. The Philippines is upset that a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Filipino fishing boat last year, and Vietnam has announced its intention to establish militias in 14 provinces to counter China’s presence. The declaration follows Beijing’s deployment of an oil survey vessel in Vietnamese waters in October 2019 that disrupted offshore drilling activity licensed by Hanoi. Observers say China is yet to come to terms with the 2016 UN arbitration tribunal’s rejection of its ‘historical rights’ in the South China Sea. Beijing has since used increasingly violent methods in seeking to enforce its writ over waters within the ‘nine-dash line’.

China’s assertive operations seem intended to dominate ongoing negotiations with ASEAN for a code of conduct in the South China Sea. Beijing’s wish list includes such impracticable demands as a bar on joint military exercises with countries outside the region without prior consent of all parties and a moratorium on resource development with extra-regional entities. Beijing perhaps believes robust maritime posturing will create leverage to bargain from a position of strength.

From an operations standpoint, the more relevant aspect of China’s South China Sea presence is the ‘grey zone’ tactics on display. Notably, Beijing hasn’t sent regular warships into the disputed waters, instead using militias comprising Chinese fishing boats, coastguard ships and survey vessels. Chinese crews seem well briefed, with clear instructions on how (and how much) to push opponents, when to pause and retreat, and when to reappear and resume harassment—tactics aimed at subtle intimidation, in a way that ensures the threshold of full-scale conflict isn’t ever breached.

The developments in littoral Southeast Asia seem linked to those in the eastern Indian Ocean, where Indian observers have noted a marked increase in Chinese constabulary presence, in particular maritime survey ships. In September 2019, a Chinese research vessel operating in Indian waters in the Andaman Sea withdrew swiftly when challenged by an Indian warship. At a time when there’s talk of a China-backed plan to construct a canal across the Thai isthmus and a secret agreement for a Chinese naval base on the Cambodian coast, growing Chinese survey ship operations in the eastern Indian Ocean have triggered disquiet in India’s security establishment.

Unlike in the South China Sea, where Beijing is uncompromising with opponents, Chinese operations in the Andaman Sea appear more considerate of Indian interests. Notwithstanding the recent deployment of the Chinese research vessel, China’s maritime activities in South Asia have kept clear of Indian ‘red lines’. There have been no instances of Chinese vessels challenging Indian sovereignty or venturing close to Indian islands with malign intent. Nor have Chinese warships and submarines impeded the passage of Indian merchant vessels in regional sea lanes.

Yet, China’s maritime moves in South and Southeast Asia portend an uncertain future for India. Chinese port-building activity in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, Beijing’s submarine and warship deals with Thailand and Bangladesh, the growing Chinese navy and constabulary presence in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, and President Xi Jinping’s announcement of a new economic corridor in Myanmar have all contributed to a sense of siege in New Delhi.

As Indian analysts see it, Beijing’s firming grip over island territories in the South China Sea would allow it to project greater military power in the eastern Indian Ocean, shrinking India’s space for political and operational manoeuvres. That may not necessarily take the form of provocative naval exercises in India’s near seas, but it could involve undertaking complex missions, including cooperative capacity building, humanitarian drills and data gathering. New Delhi’s real fear is that a greater Chinese presence in its maritime neighbourhood could end up attenuating India’s authority and leverage in its perceived sphere of influence.

The Indian government’s recent decision to revoke Kashmir’s special semi-autonomous status has raised fears of yet another conflict with Pakistan over the disputed territory. But in order to understand the implications of the events unfolding in Kashmir—a heavily militarised geopolitical tinderbox situated at the crossroads of central Asia—it’s essential to dispel the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding it.

The first myth relates to the name itself. While news reports focus on the ‘Kashmir region’, they often fail to note that Kashmir is only a small slice of the affected territory, called Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), which also includes the sprawling areas of Ladakh and Gilgit–Baltistan.

Moreover, calling J&K a ‘Muslim-majority region’ fails to reflect just how ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse it is. Indeed, while Kashmir is majority Muslim, Jammu is majority Hindu; and the vast, sparsely populated Ladakh is traditionally Buddhist. Gilgit–Baltistan is also predominantly Muslim—Shia Muslim, to be precise (though Pakistan’s government has for decades been encouraging Sunni Muslims to relocate there and gradually form a majority).

J&K residents who speak the Kashmiri language of Koshur are concentrated mainly in the Indian-administered, densely populated, predominantly Sunni Kashmir Valley, which has become a hotbed of Pakistan-backed jihadists fighting to establish an Islamic emirate. In early 1990, the jihadists launched a rapid and bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing, which drove virtually the entire native Hindu community out of the territory. Since then, the Islamists have been systematically replacing the valley’s syncretic traditions with Wahhabi/Salafi culture.

Yet another common misunderstanding is that India and Pakistan are the only actors vying for control in J&K. In reality, the region is split among India (which holds 45%), Pakistan (which controls 35%) and China (which occupies 20%).

Only India claims the entire region, as well it should: the princely state of J&K lawfully merged with the country under the 1947 Indian Independence Act, which partitioned British India into independent India and Pakistan. (Thus, the notion that in revoking Kashmir’s special status, India has effectively ‘annexed’ the territory is just another myth.) The Pakistani- and Chinese-held portions of J&K are essentially the spoils of separate wars of aggression waged by Pakistan and China against India in the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.

Yet Pakistan and China, both revanchist states, are not only committed to retaining control over the territories they already grabbed; they want to seize even more. Pakistan’s terrorism-driven asymmetric warfare is aimed at securing the Kashmir Valley. (The military conflicts Pakistan initiated against India in 1965 and 1999 failed to deliver territorial gains.) China, for its part, advances its claims to several Indian-administered areas of Ladakh through furtive, incremental and increasingly frequent territorial incursions.

As the J&K issue has undermined both countries’ relations with India, it has cemented their longstanding strategic nexus with each other. In 1963, Pakistan ceded a segment of its own territory in the J&K region to China, which had earlier occupied Ladakh’s Switzerland-sized Aksai Chin plateau. It is the only case of one country giving another a sizeable chunk of the territory that it captured in a war with a third country (India, in 1948).

Today, China has thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops stationed in the Pakistani-held part of J&K. So, beyond controlling its own section of J&K, which serves as a vital link between Xinjiang and Tibet, China benefits from an ‘economic corridor’ through Pakistani-held J&K territory to Pakistan’s Chinese-controlled Gwadar port. The corridor connects the overland and maritime routes of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

China and Pakistan have hypocritically protested India’s revocation of J&K’s special status, even though neither country has granted any autonomy to its portion of the region. And, in fact, it was Pakistan’s relentless support for terrorism in the region that drove India to make the change, which will enable its federal government to take greater responsibility for J&K’s security.

J&K’s new structure—with Jammu and Kashmir as a union territory with an elected legislature and Ladakh as a territory ruled directly by India’s central government—aims specifically to compartmentalise the region’s territorial disputes and could support India’s ability to counter aggression from China or Pakistan. The change was approved overwhelmingly by India’s parliament.

Overseas critics, however, have condemned the move, including India’s efforts to ensure security during the potentially tumultuous transition. But it’s worth noting that India allows members of the media free access to its J&K territory, whereas Pakistan requires foreign journalists to obtain a military-approved ‘no-objection certificate’. China has never allowed international media into its portion of J&K.

To be sure, it’s a difficult time for local people: telecommunications and internet services have been disrupted, a virtual curfew has been imposed in some areas, and thousands of troops have descended on the region. But these measures are a response to the presence of large numbers of Pakistan-backed terrorists. If Pakistan halts its destabilising activities, India will have no need to exert such forceful control over J&K.

The fact is that India is wedged between two nuclear-armed allies that routinely defy fundamental international rules and norms, including respect for existing frontiers and territorial sovereignty. Until China, the world’s most powerful autocracy, and Pakistan, a mecca of jihadist terrorism, change their ways, India will have little choice but to take all necessary steps to protect itself.

The failure of the Indian state to provide basic public services and implement job-creating infrastructure projects was a prominent theme in the country’s recent general election. In this regard, critics often compare India unfavorably to China’s seemingly purposeful and effective authoritarian government, despite the recent excesses of President Xi Jinping in consolidating his personal power. At a time when confidence in liberal democracy is weakening worldwide, this question has taken on global importance.

The standard contrast between Chinese authoritarian efficiency and Indian democratic dysfunction is, however, too simplistic. Authoritarianism is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for some of the special features of Chinese governance. Similarly, not all of the Indian state’s shortcomings are inherent in the country’s democratic system. Failure to appreciate such nuances risks overlooking three especially important governance issues.

For starters, unlike in many other authoritarian countries, China’s bureaucracy has had a system of meritocratic recruitment and promotion at the local level since imperial times. Although the Indian state also recruits public officials on the basis of examinations, its system of promotion—which is largely based on seniority and loyalty to one’s political masters—is not intrinsic to democracy. India’s bureaucrats are less politically insulated than their counterparts in the United Kingdom, Denmark and New Zealand, but much more so than officials in the United States (even before the current president’s rampant practice of firing-by-Twitter).

Yet in meritocratic China, plenty of evidence suggests that promotion at the provincial level and above is largely dependent on political loyalty to particular leaders. Furthermore, there is quantitative evidence of quid pro quo transactions in Chinese official promotions. For example, a provincial party secretary’s chance of promotion to the upper echelons rises with the size of the discount offered when selling land to a firm connected to members of the national leadership. Although Xi’s recent anti-corruption campaigns have curbed some of these deals, the crackdown is often more vigorous when the officials involved are suspected of having links with the current leadership’s rivals.

Second, the Chinese state is usually seen as having much greater organisational capacity than India’s. But here, too, the reality may be more nuanced. The Indian state, despite all the stories about over-bureaucratisation, is surprisingly small in terms of the number of public employees per capita; for example, the number of employees in the tax administration per thousand members of the population is more than 260 times higher in the UK than in India, and five times higher in Turkey. Moreover, the country’s police, judiciary and bureaucracy have numerous unfilled vacancies. To a considerable extent, this is a consequence of India’s sizeable informal sector, with more than 80% of the country’s workers, which is unusually large for a major economy, and it limits the state’s ability to generate tax revenue to fund the government.

Moreover, the Indian state has an extraordinary ability to organise large, complex events, such as the world’s largest election, its second-largest census and some of the world’s biggest religious festivals. Public officials also prepared the unique biometric identification of more than one billion citizens in a relatively short period.

India’s bureaucracy is less effective, however, in carrying out routine essential activities such as cost‐effective pricing and distribution of electricity. This isn’t because the state lacks capable people, but rather because local political sensitivities make it hard to recover the costs of supplying power. The state’s political constraints thus limit its organisational effectiveness. Besides, the police and bureaucracy are often deliberately incapacitated and made to serve leaders’ short-term political goals.

Finally, China’s governance is, and has historically been, surprisingly devolved for an authoritarian country. Its system combines political centralisation, through the Chinese Communist Party, with economic and administrative decentralisation. India’s system is arguably the opposite, combining political decentralisation, reflected in strong regional power groupings, with a centralised economic system in which local governments depend heavily on transfers from the central government. For example, sub-provincial levels of government tend to account for about 60% of total government budget spending in China, compared with less than 10% in India. This difference helps to explain the far worse performance of Indian local government in the last-mile provision of public services and facilities.

In addition, China’s regions compete more strongly with one another in business development and in experiments with new ventures than their Indian counterparts do. This is mainly because Chinese local officials’ promotion is tied to performance, although the pace of regional experimentation has slowed under Xi, as loyalty-based promotion has increased.

Yet, although one must avoid oversimplification when comparing Chinese and Indian governance, democracy—or its absence—does still make a difference. The lack of downward accountability and electoral sanctions in China allows the country’s leaders to avoid the pandering to short-term interests that characterises Indian politics, particularly at election time. This, in turn, makes it easier for Chinese leaders to take bold long-term decisions relatively quickly, and also somewhat independently of the corporate and financial interests that commonly wield influence in democratic systems.

On the other hand, high-level mistakes or outright abuses of power in China take longer to detect and correct in the absence of political opposition and media scrutiny. Chinese leaders’ anxiety about losing control results in too much rigidity and lockstep conformity. Ultimately, therefore, the Chinese system is more brittle: when faced with a crisis, the state tends to overreact, suppress information and behave heavy-handedly, thereby sometimes aggravating the crisis.

The Indian system of governance, for all its messiness, is more resilient. Yet this resilience has been severely strained under the regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has sought to polarise voters along religious and social lines, encourage a strong leader, and weaken democratic institutions and processes. Let us hope that the BJP will now spend the political capital from its landslide victory on changing course, improving democratic governance, and respecting the immense diversity of India’s population.

The danger of a nuclear war, with catastrophic consequences for life as we know it, may be higher today than it was during the Cold War. The world got a sharp reminder of the threat in late February. For the first time in history, one nuclear-armed state attacked a target inside another and the two fought an air battle across the Line of Control in Kashmir.

The risk of another flare-up remains real because of the unresolved territorial dispute; Pakistan-based jihadist groups that wage hybrid war in India; growing nuclear stockpiles and expanding nuclear platforms; the dominance of the army in controlling Pakistan’s nuclear, security and Kashmir policies; the rise of militant Hindu nationalism in India; and a strategic reset in India’s default response matrix against terrorist attacks.

Most international analysts focus on the India–Pakistan nuclear equation as a bilateral issue, but it’s essentially triangular in its origin and core dynamics. China has largely escaped accountability for its cynical role in nuclearising the region. Beijing’s irresponsibility needs to be called out.

A major research report published by the Brookings Institution in 2017 concluded that the Cold War nuclear dyads have morphed into interlinked nuclear chains, producing complex deterrence relations among the nuclear powers. With simultaneous threat perceptions between three or more nuclear-armed states, changes in the nuclear posture of one can have a cascading effect on several others.

Consider the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with parallel suspensions by the US and Russia. Because the treaty helped to underwrite strategic stability in Europe for 30 years, many European allies were miffed by the US decision to exit it. Unlike the Europeans, however, the US has a global train of nuclear interests. With over 90% of its missiles in the INF-prohibited range, China enjoys a huge competitive edge in the contest for strategic primacy in the Asia–Pacific. If the US develops and deploys such ground-based missiles in the Pacific, however, nuclear assets deep in China’s interior will become vulnerable.

China has militarised islets and engaged in aggressive posturing in the South China Sea, but its nuclear policy has been remarkably restrained. Despite dramatic growth in the country’s economic size and technical sophistication, China has fewer than 300 nuclear warheads; by comparison, the US and Russia have around 6,500 to 7,000 each.

If new ground-based US missiles threaten China’s assured retaliatory capability, Beijing will counter with nuclear force expansion and modernisation. But any increase in nuclear capability is inherently multi-adversary. The heightening of China’s threat perceptions will provoke countermeasures by India, with a further cascading effect on Pakistan’s nuclear force posture.

The nuclear chain argument was implicit in a letter that Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee sent to US President Bill Clinton in 1998 justifying India’s nuclear tests. Vajpayee gave three reasons. China, ‘an overt nuclear weapon state’, had ‘committed armed aggression against India in 1962’. Second, China had ‘materially helped’ Pakistan ‘to become a covert nuclear weapons state’. And third, ‘for the last ten years we have been the victim of unremitting terrorism and militancy sponsored by’ Pakistan.

In a major policy decision made as early as 1982, China identified Pakistan as a worthy client-recipient of atomic know-how. Pakistan’s first nuclear-weapon test was carried out for it by China in May 1990: ‘That’s why the Pakistanis were so quick to respond to the Indian nuclear tests in 1998. It only took them two weeks and three days.’

That’s the conclusion not of Indian intelligence officials or analysts, but of two veterans of the US nuclear establishment. Thomas Reed is a former nuclear-weapon designer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and secretary of the air force under presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Danny Stillman is a former director of intelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They made these startling claims in their 2009 book The nuclear express.

In an interview in January 2009, Reed speculated on the explanation for China’s nuclear assistance to Pakistan: ‘a balance of power: India was China’s enemy and Pakistan was India’s enemy’. In turn, Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan network became a nuclear Walmart for the export of sensitive materials and technology to countries like Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Since 1998, Pakistan has waged subconventional warfare against India under the subcontinent’s nuclear ceiling. State-sponsored cross-border militancy and extremism involving nuclear-armed states is another contemporary reality, as is the fear of nuclear terrorism. This is where the attack on an Indian paramilitary convoy in Kashmir on 14 February, killing 40 soldiers, comes in. The attack was carried out by a home-grown suicide militant, but the Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) claimed responsibility for it. Hence India’s retaliatory missile strikes against the alleged JeM terrorist training camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistan, on 26 February, followed the next day by the aerial dogfight between the two countries’ air forces.

France, the UK and the US revived their effort to get the UN Security Council to designate JeM chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, which would require all countries to impose mandatory sanctions on him. In a major pathology of the UN system, that required a unanimous decision. China derailed the effort by placing a ‘technical hold’, in effect imposing a veto. It was China’s fourth such thwarting of otherwise unanimous support for the move. Angered by China’s obduracy, Western allies circulated a draft resolution in the Security Council for listing Azhar as a terrorist.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was right to call out China’s two-faced duplicity in a tweet on 27 March: ‘The world cannot afford China’s shameful hypocrisy toward Muslims. On one hand, China abuses more than a million Muslims at home, but on the other, it protects violent Islamic terrorist groups from sanctions at the UN.’ Placing the item on the agenda for open Security Council debate and decision would have deepened the reputational damage to China for running a diplomatic protection racket for Pakistan-origin terrorists.

On 1 May, China lifted its technical hold and Azhar is now subject to UN sanctions that require all countries to impose an assets freeze, foreign travel ban and arms embargo on him.