News reports indicating that the Chinese are heavily involving themselves in the business of India and Pakistan have become overwhelming during this administration. Obama’s commitment to India is clearly weaker than his predecessor’s, who in his White House was known as practically running the India desk. Obama’s interest seems to lie less in supporting India than in courting China and Pakistan whose alliance appears to be fairly solid, and exclusionary in nature. Who are they excluding? The US.
Much of the recent news has to do with the fact that China referred to Gilgit-Baltistan as “Northern Pakistan” in a media statement that denied that China had deployed troops to the region. Although China rescinded the statement and removed it from their state controlled news agency, Xinhua, the Economic Times reports that India’s response will be to investigate to determine whether there are in fact Chinese troops there for whatever reason, and that they would find it, “serious, if true.”
India is growing increasingly concerned that the relationship between Pakistan and China is growing to their detriment, especially because they don’t believe they can trust the United States as a long-term partner. Their concern is justified as it is well known that Pakistan’s nuclear program is less than organic and was carried on with much assistance by China. But why should we be concerned about this? Perhaps because this is another indication that China is becoming increasingly expansionary and is looking to assert authority by antagonizing India, and encouraging regional conflict with their neighbors in order to force India to divert resources from development and remain a second rate Asian power.
More importantly, we should be concerned with the event that the media is covering even less. This is that the recent Chinese antagonism of India is just a flea on the back of the major issue, the coming China-Pak nuclear deal, which was held off earlier by the diplomatic fortitude of the Bush Administration… now how’s that for you? According to the Global Security Newswire and The Times of India, India is now utilizing “back channels” for assistance in blocking the building of two new nuclear reactors in Pakistan by China.
These back channels are Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland. India has apparently noted the Obama Administration’s paralysis on the issue, because there has been no public ballyhoo by the administration about China violating Nuclear Supplier Group guidelines. China doesn’t see how building new reactors is a violation of the guidelines, as long as they are built at an old site. Asia Times reported in July that the administration has taken a relatively weak stance on the violation, in what appears to be more of a laying on the back, belly-up position. However, it’s clear that it’s one thing to alienate a rising power like India, but it is quite another to put on a Broadway-spectacle size display of weakness on the issue of Chinese nuclear proliferation. This is hardly an overstatement considering that denuclearization is supposed to be a hallmark of Obama’s foreign policy. Perhaps it is just the denuclearizing of America that he’s after, which could be the right assessment given what promises to be a disastrous START treaty.
For the critics who justify the China-Pak deal as being reactionary to and having moral parity with Bush’s US-India deal, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has an excellent article on why that is just plain false.
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