September 18, 2024: India has long maintained friendly relations with most nations. One major exception is China, which has several territorial disputes with India and in the last decade has revived many claims that have been dormant for decades. Once India realized they were on the receiving end of major Chinese threats, they sought help from allies. Russia has long been a provider of weapons for India as well as a major trading partner. This chummy Cold War era relationship dissolved as Russia invaded Ukraine while China pressed its many border disputes with India. India needed more allies and the Americans were available. To make clear their alliance with the United States, Indian officials openly backed Ukraine and even visited Ukraine as a demonstration of support. This could lead to Indian military aid for Ukraine and/or India purchasing Ukrainian drones.

This process began in the 1990s when India finally realized that its socialist economic policies were not working and something new was needed. India noted that China in the 1980s had ditched socialism for a free market economy. This paid off in a spectacular fashion for China. India sought trade opportunities from the United States. During the Cold War India considered the United States an imperialist power and avoided any economic or military links with the Americans. Now China had become a major threat to India and the Americans were willing to help. The U.S. was facing a Chinese naval threat in the Pacific and Chinese naval forces were increasingly showing up throughout the Indian Ocean region. China was also selling warships, especially submarines, to many of India’s neighbors. India needed a similarly powerful ally and the Americans were willing to engage.

Meanwhile, the ongoing border disputes remain unresolved. There has been some violence, and deaths. Conventional weapons were not used. Both sides relied on soldiers armed with clubs, rocks and righteous fists. Both sides want to avoid a shooting war.

These disputes got going again back in 2020 when China revived the border war over Pangong Lake, which is largely in Tibet and patrolled by a small Chinese naval force. This is the longest lake in Asia and part of the 134-kilometer long lake extends 45 kilometers into the Indian Ladakh region. China is using its usual sneak and stay tactics to slowly move the border into territory long occupied by India. The portion of the lakeshore in dispute has no native population. The only people who visit the area are soldiers from India or China.

China and India both have had small armed boats patrolling their portions of the 4,200-meter high lake, except for the few months when the entire lake is frozen over. In the last decade, China has been building roads into remote and formerly inaccessible (via vehicle) portions of the lake coastline. China has built some of these roads into areas claimed by India but not regularly patrolled because special mountain troops must be employed to get into these areas without coming in by boat or on foot over the ice.

India admits that the Chinese aggression along its northern border is active again and the Chinese are now actually taking control of Indian territory and apparently plan to continue doing so. Despite Indian nuclear weapons, China believes it can get away with gradually gaining control over more than 100,000 square kilometers of Indian territory it claims. This will be done by grabbing a few square kilometers at a time without triggering a nuclear exchange. Fortune favors the bold, even in slow motion.

China and India have already fought a war, back in 1962. In a month of fighting (starting on 20 October) India lost 7,000 troops (57 percent prisoners, the rest dead or missing) compared to 722 Chinese dead. China declared a ceasefire that India accepted. China actually advanced in two areas, a thousand kilometers apart and ended up taking 43,000 square kilometers of Indian territory.

The source of the 1962 war and current border tension goes back a century and heated up when China resumed control over Tibet in the 1950s. From the end of the Chinese empire in 1912 up until 1949, Tibet had been independent. But when the communists took over China in 1949, they sought to reassert control over their lost province of Tibet. This began slowly, but once all of Tibet was under Chinese control in 1959, China had a border with India and there was immediately a disagreement about exactly where the border should be. That’s because, in 1914, the newly independent government of Tibet worked out a border called the McMahon line with the British who controlled India. China considers this border agreement illegal and wants 90,000 square kilometers back. India refused, especially since this would mean losing much of the state of Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India and some bits elsewhere there and all along the new northern border.

India, as a democracy with a free press, has a public discussion of Chinese tactics and possible Indian responses. China also tries to take advantage of Indian media freedom by buying favorable coverage in the Indian press. This is done via bribes, offers of investments and loans as well as economic concessions within China. Military strategy in China, since ancient times, has placed emphasis on having a powerful military but using it mainly as a threat and giving enemies an incentive to accept bribes and allow China to get what they want. Yet India has rarely been seen as an enemy of China. There is nothing valuable on their mutual border which for thousands of years has been along high mountains and thinly populated lowland jungles. Neither India nor China had any incentive to use large armies to threaten each other.

Because of this background, the border disputes of the last 60 years are seen by Indians as inexplicable and by Chinese as overdue restitution for centuries of humiliations inflicted by Western invaders. India, ever since it emerged from centuries of British colonial rule in 1947, insisted that India and China shared a background of oppression by the West. China sees India as trying to perpetuate Western crimes against China. To most Chinese Indians look and sound like Westerners so therefore India must be an enemy of China. India has come to accept that the Chinese are obsessed with making India pay for real or imagined wrongs inflicted by Western imperialists and see nothing wrong with using ancient Chinese imperialist methods to get their way. Suddenly British imperialism is not the worst thing that could ever happen to India. China is seeking to provide something much worse and much closer. India seeks new allies with mutual interests in the region and the United States proved to be an ideal nation to fulfill this role.