Indian Strategic Studies: 10/21/24

21 October 2024

The Politics of China’s Land Appropriation in Bhutan

Robert Barnett

In dealing with its neighbors, China “always strives to find fair and reasonable solutions through peaceful and friendly consultations,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the United States told the New York Times in August. Why, then, has China appropriated part of a neighbor’s territory?

That neighbor is Bhutan, a country with which China has said for decades it is keen to have formal diplomatic relations, hoping to balance or reduce Bhutan’s close relations with its southern neighbor, India. Bhutan, for its part, has what it calls “friendly and cooperative relations with the People’s Republic of China” and has supported China consistently at the United Nations and elsewhere.

As China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has put it, in more poetic terms, “China and Bhutan are linked by mountains and rivers and enjoy profound traditional friendship.” And China signed a treaty with Bhutan in 1998 in which both parties proclaimed “mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and agreed “not to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border.”

Russia’s Deliberately Unclear Strategy for Iran

George Friedman

Readers have no doubt noticed that much of my writing over the past two-and-a-half years has focused on Russia. Some of the reasons for this are obvious: Russia is a global military power. It is not a great economic power, but it has the capacity, along with the United States, to shape and control events on many continents. I’m deliberately excluding China from this analysis, which I’ll explain in my next article. Other powers are less apparent but no less important, and you can see them in the map below – if you know where to look.

Iran is the center of what I call the northern crisis. Its government has a geopolitical imperative to retain its frontiers, and it pursues this imperative, as many do, through the deployment of armed forces and weapons (or, at times, the appearance of deployment). This pursuit potentially threatens the countries on its eastern frontier – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan – as well as Turkey to the northwest. Most important to me, however, is that it could also threaten Russia. Iran’s intentions and capabilities are often uncertain, but in a world of complex strategy you must prepare for the worst, and in this region the worst is what usually happens.

What We Can Tell From China’s ICBM Test

Anushka Saxena

China’s decision to test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) into the Pacific Ocean on 25 September 25 was unusual—but not very unusual, because the country has similarly tested shorter-range ballistic missiles over a variety of geographies.

Still, the event calls for explanation, since it was the first ICBM test into the Pacific since 1980, and an operational weapon of that class would be capable of delivering a strategic nuclear warhead. The test was not quite ‘routine’, as the armed forces called it.

Some possible explanations are geopolitical; another is simply that the armed services needed to demonstrate operational readiness.

The weapon deployed a dummy warhead that landed near French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean.

Images from the test, first shared on the official WeChat account of the People’s Liberation Army, suggest there was no fixed launch pad on which the launch vehicle was placed. China’s newest ballistic missiles are carried in vehicles that transport them, erect them for firing and launch them (and are therefore called TELs).

Risk and Retaliation: Israel, Iran, and the Evolving Situation in West Asia

Gaddam Dharmendra

Iran’s nighttime missile attack on Israeli territory on October 1 was another step up in the region’s escalating ladder of conflict, a scenario many were hoping to avoid but are now increasingly resigned to accept, given the developments of recent weeks.

Unlike the previous strike in April, this time, there was minimal telegraphing from Iran about its decision to launch another direct attack on Israeli territory—the second in six months. An Israeli response is expected and is generally assessed as only a matter of time. This time around, Israel is unlikely to demonstrate the restraint it had shown in April.

Iran’s Missile Strikes

Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari confirmed that Iran had launched over 180 ballistic missiles, with a “small number of hits” in the center and a few others in the South. Israel’s air defense systems had intercepted a “majority of the incoming missiles.” Hagari described the attack as a “severe and dangerous escalation” and emphasized, “Operational plans are ready. We will respond wherever, whenever and however we choose.” He further reminded the public, “Iran and its proxies have been attacking Israel since the seventh of October on several fronts. Iran and its proxies seek the destruction of Israel.”

Beyond Iran and Israel: The Unseen Gulf-Europe Connection

Stephen Blank

Iran's escalation shows America must bolster ailing Europe to prevail in the global ideological showdown. With Iran now on the brink of war with Israel, the situation could rapidly evolve into a global power struggle. In that case, the involvement of Iran, a close ally of China and Russia, highlights a geopolitical shift, as these nations have formed an ‘Axis of Upheaval’ to overthrow the century of American dominance. In response, America has just reaffirmed its ‘ironclad’ support for Israel. Even Europe, despite its reservations about how Netanyahu wages war, stands behind Israel in confronting the mullahs in Tehran. Therefore as the battle lines are drawn, the Middle East could quickly become the next superpower battlefield. China says it will defend Iranian sovereignty, neither will Russia stand idly by as one of its major drone suppliers buckles under Israeli airstrikes.

This polarization has thus also triggered a diplomatic push to win over regional powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Whatever happens here could shape the course of global confrontations, where the West faces Russia’s advances in Ukraine, seeks to limit its destabilising influence in Africa, and confronts China’s imperial ambitions over Taiwan the South China Sea. Yet, this showdown is more than a struggle for power. Despite what the moral relativists in academia say, this is a battle of values between two global systems: the established liberal order, empowered by globalization, and a rising authoritarian model, characterized by closed economies and centralized power structures.

Stopping the world’s newest forever war - Opinion

Jos Joseph

On Oct. 7, Hamas fired rockets into Israel. This wasn’t the Oct. 7 of one year ago, but rather the one this week.

Although the rocket attack was ineffective, the fact that Hamas is still firing rockets from northern Gaza into Israel should bring into question the effectiveness of Israel’s brutal response against the insurgent groups that surround its borders.

Americans, right and left, now have an aversion to the forever wars that we once took up in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. Now however, it seems that our ally is the one hell-bent on engaging in a forever war of its own, with Americans paying the bills.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now called his nation’s conflict a seven-front war. Of the fronts, only one is a politically recognized entity, Iran. The rest — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Iranian-armed militias in Syria and Iraq, and militants in the West Bank — can best be described as insurgent groups or terrorist organizations. These are not recognized governments, standing armies (although Hezbollah is very well trained and armed) or traditional militaries.

This isn’t Lebanon’s war

Fadi Nicholas Nassar and Ronnie Chatah

Fadi Nicholas Nassar is director of the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution, an assistant professor at the Lebanese American University and director of the Lebanon Program at the Middle East Institute. Ronnie Chatah is a political commentator and host of The Beirut Banyan podcast. He is the son of assassinated Lebanese diplomat Mohamad Chatah.

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri are calling for a cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel. This is a ruse.

It is a ruse aimed at exploiting international reluctance to confront the inconvenient truth: Lebanon isn’t a state broken by corruption and poor leadership, rather it is one coerced into failure by the world’s most powerful paramilitary force.

For two decades, Lebanon’s failed political class has proven only one thing — a consistent commitment to dismantling the state. Deliberately undermining the opportunities provided by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which was drafted with the goal of ending the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, they entrenched a status quo that all but ensured a perpetual cycle of war between Lebanon and Israel. And for the past year, they stood by Hezbollah’s gamble to turn the country into a battlefield, on the pretext of saving Hamas.

Zelensky presents 'victory plan' to Ukrainian parliament

James Waterhouse

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has presented MPs with a long-awaited "victory plan" that aims to strengthen his country's position enough to end the war with Russia.

Zelensky told parliament in Kyiv the plan could finish the war - which began with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 - next year.

Key elements include a formal invitation to join Nato, the lifting by allies of bans on long-range strikes with Western-supplied weapons deep into Russia, a refusal to trade Ukraine’s territories and sovereignty, and the continuation of the incursion into Russia's western Kursk region.

The Kremlin dismissed the plan with a spokesman saying Kyiv needed to "sober up".

Addressing MPs on Wednesday, Zelensky also criticised China, Iran and North Korea for their backing of Russia, and described them as a "coalition of criminals".

Zelensky unveils Ukraine's victory plan, says it's doable but 'depends on our partners'

Martin Fornusek

President Volodymyr Zelensky presented Ukraine's much-debated victory plan at parliament on Oct. 16, though some parts remained classified.

The proposal is comprised of five points: an invitation to join NATO, a defense aspect, deterrence of Russian aggression, economic growth and cooperation, and post-war security architecture.

The plan involves three secret addenda that have been shared with international partners. David Arakhamia, the ruling party's parliamentary leader, said the classified parts would be presented to faction leaders.

"If the plan is supported, we can end the war no later than next year," Zelensky said in the parliament in the presence of Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, and Western diplomats.

"Ukraine's victory plan is a plan to strengthen our state and our position. To be strong enough to end the war. To make sure that Ukraine has all its muscles," Zelensky said.

Assessing the Assessors

Lawrence Freedman

People in my strange line of work spend a lot of time considering wars that probably will not happen, or if they do will come about in forms that had not been anticipated and with correspondingly unexpected outcomes. They face the familiar problems that come with trying to predict events that depend on confluences of circumstances. One can never weight the known factors accurately or be sure of their interaction with each other, let alone the unknowns, or account for the eccentric choices made by key players or the chance developments that can affect their calculations.

At any rate many of these expert debates on future wars are not really about prediction. They are more about influencing policy choices, from weapons procurement to diplomatic initiatives. The direst scenarios are drawn up to show what will happen if the wrong choices are made. I explored all this in a book published in 2017 which charted the history of the ‘Future Wars’ literature.

America’s AI Leadership Depends on Energy

Jason Bordoff and Jared Dunnmon

Hollywood thrillers rarely change the course of history, but if they had their own category at the Academy Awards, a good candidate might be The China Syndrome. Released 45 years ago, the hit film depicts a disaster at a nuclear plant in California, sparking fears that the reactor’s core would melt down through the containment vessel—all the way to China (hence the name). Less than two weeks after its release, life imitated art as a partial nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania quickly turned public opinion against nuclear energy and effectively halted the expansion of nuclear power in the United States.

Yet after almost a half-century, the advent of artificial intelligence, described by Google CEO Sundar Pichai as “more profound than electricity or fire,” has achieved what many thought impossible. Last month, Microsoft and Constellation Energy announced they would spend $1.6 billion to restart the remaining functional reactor at Three Mile Island to fuel the tech firm’s plunge into AI, a technology with vast energy requirements due to its needs for computational power. With a global race underway to capitalize on AI’s economic and military potential—and as China quickly catches up to the United States—fears of another kind of China shock are trumping yesterday’s nuclear angst.

Drone attack on Israel puts spotlight on Iron Dome's limitations

Jonah Fisher

Slow, small and relatively cheap to make, drones have become a deadly headache for Israelis in this year-long war.

Hezbollah’s attack on an army base near Binyamina in northern Israel on Sunday, which killed four men and injured dozens more, was the most damaging drone strike on the country to date.

It’s led to fresh questions about how well equipped Israel’s hugely expensive air defence system is to stop them.

Visiting the damaged army base on Monday morning, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said “significant efforts” were being put into solutions that would prevent future drone attacks.

Some parts of the air defence system work well. Here in northern Israel we hear booms at regular intervals as the Iron Dome intercepts rockets that Hezbollah fires from southern Lebanon. Israel says it hits more than 90% of its targets.

But the Iron Dome works because Hezbollah’s rockets are crude – and it’s possible to calculate where its rockets will go at take-off and then intercept them.

Stopping drones is more complicated. And has in this war become a recurring problem.

America’s Foreign Policy Inertia

Christopher S. Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim

As the world evolves, the United States must adapt or suffer the consequences. The process of adaptation, however, is usually plodding, if it happens at all. Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden each attempted to steer U.S. foreign policy in new directions but met resistance from both domestic and foreign actors. The difficulty they encountered is no surprise. Since World War II, many U.S. leaders have attempted to change the country’s foreign policy, and their efforts have often fallen short. Inertia is a powerful force.

Battlefield and diplomatic odds stacking against Ukraine

Stefan Wolff

In May 2023, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, embarked on a whistle-stop tour of European capitals to shore up support from his Western partners in the run-up to Ukraine’s summer offensive that year. His tour was a relative success – the subsequent offensive less so.

Fast-forward 18 months, and Zelensky has once again been visiting London, Paris, Rome and Berlin in search of Western support. This time, he sought backing for his victory plan. But the odds now are clearly stacked against Ukraine on the battlefield while Zelensky also faces an uphill struggle on the diplomatic front.

The initial plan for Zelensky and his allies had been to convene at a meeting of the Ramstein group. This is the loose configuration of some 50 countries that have supported Ukraine’s defense efforts since the start of the full-scale Russian aggression in February 2022.

With the US president, Joe Biden, scheduled to attend after a state visit to Germany, the gathering at Ramstein Air Base in Germany had been pitched at the level of heads of state and government. It was expected that there would be some big announcements of continuing support for Ukraine.

Reverse racism ruined South Africa Today's wary coalition recognises difference

Brian Pottinger

Jan van Riebeeck, commander of the Dutch post at the Cape, ranted in a diary entry of 28 January 1654 that the indigenous people’s misdeeds were hardly bearable any longer: “Perhaps it would be a better proposition to pay out this guilty gang, taking their cattle and their persons as slaves in chains for fetching firewood and doing other necessary labour.”

Under orders from the Dutch East India Company not to antagonise the locals on whom it depended for trade, van Riebeeck restricted himself to planting a protective bitter almond hedge along the borders of his besieged encampment while continuing to negotiate with the enemy. Thus was early laid the pattern of future South African race relations: an equilibrium of teeth-gritting mutual tolerance mitigated by social distance and punctuated by sporadic violent irruptions, conquests and subjugation.

Remarkably, a single South African constitutional order emerged 340 years after van Riebeeck’s almond hedge through the Act of Union of 1910, and after another 84 years, in 1994, a functioning modern democracy. It is the one we have now, an imperfect and in many ways still teeth-gritting order, but somehow hanging together, somehow prevailing over a society where race may be the driving narrative but economic self-advancement, the consuming passion.

AUSA NEWS: Army Concerned About Kamikaze Robots in All Domains — Not Just Air

Allyson Park

With kamikaze drones being widely used in the Ukraine war, countering unmanned aerial systems remains a weapon of concern for the U.S. Army. However, the service is not only focusing on combating aerial systems, but those on land and sea as well, officials said Oct. 14.

The problem of armed drones — also known as loitering munitions — is not going anywhere, and the Army is faced with a lot of strategic choices regarding counter-unmanned aerial systems, Maj. Gen. David Stewart, director of the counter-unmanned aircraft systems and director of fires at the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, said.

“Number one up front, I would tell you the department is moving toward [counter-unmanned systems], so that’s air, sea and land, not just the air part,” he said in a panel discussion at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exposition. “So, when we wrap our arms around that as a department, we’re really seeing that this uncrewed, unmanned threat is coming from all different areas.”

Army races to widen the bottlenecks of artillery shell production

Jen Judson

The U.S. Army has started diversifying its supplier base for 155mm artillery shells, moving away from the bottleneck of a single source that has endangered the flow of fresh ammo, according to a top service official.

The service is racing toward a goal of shoring up all major single sources that provide parts or materials for 155mm munitions by the end of 2025.

“There’s going to be a lot of ribbon cuttings between now and the end of the year,” Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The Pentagon is investing billions of dollars to increase the capacity of 155mm munition production as it races to replenish stock sent to support Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, which began in early 2022, and to ensure the U.S. has what it might need should conflict erupt across multiple theaters at once. The Army planned to spend $3.1 billion in FY24 supplemental funding alone to ramp up production.

Vladimir Putin’s spies are plotting global chaos

“We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more: dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” said Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security and counter-intelligence agency, in a rare update on the threat posed by Russia and the GRU, its military-intelligence agency. “The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets,” he said on October 8th.

NSA’s Kristina Walter on How Cyber Has Changed the Battlefield

Ireland Degges

The nature of global conflict has changed, extending the battlefield beyond the physical realm and into the cyber domain. As physical barriers continue to fall and global tensions rise, the United States has recognized the need to master cyber combat, but so have its adversaries.

“Russia is a hurricane — you see them coming, you feel them. China is climate change. We are all starting to feel that now when you look at what’s happening in the world,” Kristina Walter, chief of the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center within the National Security Agency, said of today’s cyber threat landscape in her opening keynote address at the Potomac Officers Club’s GovCon International Summit on Thursday.

Today, Walter said, these competitors are leveraging the digital space to disrupt critical infrastructure, steal technologies from U.S. businesses, discover new cyber vulnerabilities in U.S. systems and conduct information warfare.

China, she said, is “unequivocally” the largest and most sophisticated threat in the cyber arena.

“We have seen over the last decade, while we were focused on counter-terrorism, that they have used cybersecurity as a means to an end that goes just below the threshold of war,” she continued.

TikTok executives know about app’s effect on teens, lawsuit documents allege

Bobby Allyn, Sylvia Goodman & Dara Kerr

Unredacted documents show TikTok is aware of the dangers caused by its app.Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images

For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns.

The confidential material was part of a more than two-year investigation into TikTok by 14 attorneys general that led to state officials suing the company on Tuesday. The lawsuit alleges that TikTok was designed with the express intention of addicting young people to the app. The states argue the multi-billion-dollar company deceived the public about the risks.

In each of the separate lawsuits state regulators filed, dozens of internal communications, documents and research data were redacted — blacked-out from public view — since authorities entered into confidentiality agreements with TikTok.

Social Media Tells You Who You Are. What if It's Totally Wrong?

Lauren Goode

A few years ago I wrote about how, when planning my wedding, I’d signaled to the Pinterest app that I was interested in hairstyles and tablescapes, and I was suddenly flooded with suggestions for more of the same. Which was all well and fine until—whoops—I canceled the wedding and it seemed Pinterest pins would haunt me until the end of days. Pinterest wasn’t the only offender. All of social media wanted to recommend stuff that was no longer relevant, and the stench of this stale buffet of content lingered long after the non-event had ended.

So in this new era of artificial intelligence—when machines can perceive and understand the world, when a chatbot presents itself as uncannily human, when trillion-dollar tech companies use powerful AI systems to boost their ad revenue—surely those recommendation engines are getting smarter, too. Right?

Maybe not.

Recommendation engines are some of the earliest algorithms on the consumer web, and they use a variety of filtering techniques to try to surface the stuff you’ll most likely want to interact with—and in many cases, buy—online. When done well, they’re helpful. In the earliest days of photo sharing, like with Flickr, a simple algorithm made sure you saw the latest photos your friend had shared the next time you logged in. Now, advanced versions of those algorithms are aggressively deployed to keep you engaged and make their owners money.

The deep-sea 'emergency service' that keeps the internet running

William Park

It was a little after 17:00 on 18 November 1929 when the ground began to shake. Just off the coast of Burin Peninsula, a finger-like protrusion on the south of Newfoundland, Canada, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake disturbed the evening's peace. Residents noticed only a little damage at first – a few toppled chimney pots.

But out at sea, an unseen force was moving. By around 19:30, a 13m-high (43ft) tsunami made landfall on the Burin Peninsula. In total, 28 people lost their lives as a result of drowning or injuries caused by the wave.

The earthquake was devastating for the local communities, but it also had a long-lasting effect further out at sea. It had triggered a submarine landslide. People did not realise this at the time, historical records suggest, because no one knew such underwater landslides existed. When sediment is disturbed by earthquakes and other geological activity it makes the water denser, causing it to flow downwards like an avalanche of snow down a mountain. The submarine landslide – called a turbidity current – flowed more than 1,000km (621 miles) away from the earthquake's epicentre on the Laurentian Continental Slope at speeds between 50 and 70 knots (57-80mph).

AI chip firm Nvidia valued at $2tn

Nvidia's market value has touched $2tn (£1.58tn), a new milestone in the chipmaker's rapid ascent into the ranks of the world's most valuable companies.

Shares in the Silicon Valley firm rose more than 4% in morning trade on Friday before dropping back a bit.

The gains extended a jump after the company's blockbuster earnings report this week.

The company is benefiting from advances in artificial intelligence (AI), which have powered demand for its chips.

Turnover at the firm more than doubled last year to more than $60bn, and boss Jensen Huang told investors this week that demand was "surging" around the world.

The company, which became worth $1tn less than a year ago, now ranks as the world's fourth most valuable publicly traded company, behind Microsoft, Apple and Saudi Aramco.

After shares retreated from their early Friday highs, the firm's market value ended the day just below $2tn.

Founded in 1993, Nvidia was originally known for making the type of computer chips that process graphics, particularly for computer games.

Submarine cables: the Achilles’ heel of cyberspace in the Asia-Pacific

PRISCILLA TOMAZ AND JULIA VOO

The Asia-Pacific has one of the world's greatest concentrations of publicly disclosed submarine cables, the highest rate of active volcanoes and earthquakes, and some of the busiest shipping and fishing lanes. In February 2022, the Matsu Islands, an archipelago governed by Taiwan, had its two cables cut by Chinese vessels. Beyond limited backup service, its population of 11,800 people was entirely cut off from the internet for 50 days. While there was no evidence that the damage was inflicted intentionally, since 2017 the Matsu Islands’ cables have been disrupted 30 times, and at least a third of those disruptions were caused by Chinese vessels.

Investment in cable maintenance, however, lags behind the boom in new cable systems that has taken place over the past decade and is insufficient to address the frequency of cable disruptions. Cables are a critical component of physical cyberspace, carrying 99% of the internet. And yet, when cables break – which is every other day on average, globally – the world’s cable owners have access to only a limited number of repair ships.

In 2023, the disconnect between demand and supply for maintenance ships meant that repair times averaged 40 days. Between perceived Chinese encroachment in the region, the complex national regulations that control the authorisation of repairs, and the crippled state of the cable-maintenance industry, cables are both a boon and an inescapable vulnerability for Asia-Pacific states.

SpaceX Made History Today

Rainer Zitelmann

This morning, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched a rocket dubbed “Starship” from a site near Brownsville, Texas.

SpaceX planned to bring the huge first-stage booster of “Starship,” called the “Super Heavy,” directly back to its launch pad and capture it with the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower in an unprecedented maneuver. Seven minutes after launch, the Super Heavy landed with pinpoint precision in the Mechazilla launch tower’s metal arms. After performing maneuvers, Starship landed in the sea. This is a historic moment in the annals of space travel.

Starship is a superlative spacecraft and a marvel of modern engineering. As space expert Eugen Reichl said in an interview with the author:

Almost nobody realizes just how revolutionary this spacecraft really is. Starship will dominate space transport for the rest of the twenty-first century. It’s huge, yet cheap to build, it blurs the lines between traditional aerospace and shipbuilding, and draws on influences from automotive engineering. It is versatile. It will be built in a wide range of configurations and has the potential to open up the entire solar system to human exploration.