The post-World War II democratic international order is on life support.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raises fears that China might try to take Taiwan by force. The United States did little, for example, after China shredded its treaty commitments on Hong Kong and extended China’s police state to the previously autonomous territory. The Biden administration may have encouraged China further when the White House walked back Biden’s off-the-cuff commitment that the U.S. would defend Taiwan. Biden’s willingness to ignore a “minor incursion” in Ukraine and prioritize the fight against climate change over efforts to counter both China’s genocidal campaign against the Uyghurs and Russia’s moves in Ukraine emboldens Beijing further.
Taiwan, however, is not the only country in mainland China’s sights.
Seventy years ago, Chinese Communist Party authorities gobbled up the entirety of Tibet in a violent, colonialist orgy. Today, mainland China has territorial disputes with 17 other countries. It is one thing to dispute a border but another thing to change it by force. In recent years, China has seized Filipino territory in the South China Sea and encroached by land into Bhutan. Two years ago, China began making similar incursions into Ladakh, an Indian region. That dispute may flare again as the winter snows melt in April and May.
Yet while pundits focus on Taiwan, the bigger danger of Chinese aggression may be 1,700 miles to its east in Arunachal Pradesh, a state in northeastern India bordering Bhutan, China, and Burma.
While Ladakh has a population of less than 300,000, Arunachal Pradesh has 1.2 million. In late December 2021, China signaled its ambitions when it renamed 15 areas inside the Indian state. A month later, Chinese troops abducted a 17-year-old Indian in the state. Just as China has invented out of whole cloth historical claims in the South China Sea, so, too, does it now say Arunachal Pradesh is within the boundaries of historic China. China has even refused to stamp visas onto the passports of Indians from the state in order to underscore Chinese claims that since the state was Chinese, there is no need for visas for its residents.
While any move on Taiwan might engender a broader response, China would not face the same problem with Arunachal Pradesh: It need not fear any U.S. naval deployments, and the state’s greater distance and location inland would make any emergency airlift more difficult than with Taiwan.
Perhaps it’s time for the White House to learn three lessons from Russia’s invasion.
First, distraction and weakness matter. It is doubtful Russian President Vladimir Putin would have made his move had Biden not signaled American impotence with his calamitous Afghanistan withdrawal.
Second, enemies of democracy may not coordinate, but they do seek advantage from distraction and weakness. That Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken telegraph both emboldens President Xi Jinping.
Finally, reactive foreign policy puts the U.S. and its allies at a disadvantage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had begged the West not to empower Russia by becoming reliant on its gas and also asked for arms prior to the invasion. Had Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Biden been more proactive, they might have headed off the land grab.
Putin calculates on some degree of immunity because Russia is a nuclear power. Xi may feel likewise. But unlike Ukraine, India never forfeited its nuclear deterrence nor put its faith in ephemeral Western promises. In hindsight, that was the right decision.
The White House is right to worry about China’s ambitions toward Taiwan, but expansionist states seldom limit their ambitions to a single territory. For China, Taiwan may be the feint; India could be the target.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
