THE INDO-CHINA CON

These two Tibetan lamas blowing their tunchen horns, are calling the Buddhist faithful to prayer atop the Stok monastery in a remote Himalayan region called Ladakh. The river below is the Upper Indus. On the other side of the mountains in the distance is China – for Ladakh is in India, that part of Tibet that escaped seizure by the Communist Chinese. I took this picture in 1993.

The Chicoms’ courtship of India has been much in the news lately, with India usually portrayed as swooning over Beijing’s attention and flattery. Dire predictions are being made of India being suckered into a strategic Sino-Indo alliance with China the dominant partner. Analyses are being issued celebrating India jilting the US in favor of China, causing the “souring of the India-US honeymoon.” Don’t believe it.

India and China have populations of well over one billion each. Together they comprise over one-third of humanity. An anti-American “China-India Axis” is a frightful prospect – but we needn’t allow the very real threat of Chicom militarism to make us paranoid, because this Axis is not going to materialize.

We also needn’t allow those in the media who always root for America to lose (and not just liberals, but conservative apostates like those at the foreign desk of UPI) to con us into believing India is going to be our enemy.

Ever since Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao went on a smiley-face trip to India in April, hearts across the political spectrum in Washington have been a-flutter, worrying or hoping that Beijing’s wooing of New Delhi would result in a dramatic world-wide balance-of-power shift away from the US. The palpitations increased when the two countries announced an end to territorial disputes along their 2,500-mile border.

One of these disputes is over the Aksai Chin, an impossibly remote wasteland that China militarily seized from India in 1962. It’s on the other side of the mountains in the Ladakh picture above. I crossed the Aksai Chin in 1986. All the hills you see in the forefront are above 20,000 feet, those in the background even higher:

Yet resolving this no-man’s land frightened some folks along the Potomac. Thus they went into arrhythmia when a delegation of top Chicom Army brass led by General Liang Guanglie huddled with their Indian Army counterparts in New Delhi last week. Afterwards, top Indian Army General Joginder Jaswant Singh announced a series of peacekeeping training programs, joint mountaineering expeditions, and volleyball matches between Indian and Chinese soldiers. Scary stuff.

For all those worried or elated about China’s bonding with India to America’s detriment, here’s the reality without the filters and blinders: It is India that is playing China like a fiddle, not the other way around.

It is the Chinese who are worried, you see. What prompted Wen Jiabao’s Indian charm offensive in April was Condi Rice’s visit to New Delhi in March. The military technology she offered India, including the most advanced F-16 and F-18 fighter jets, leave anything China could possibly offer in the dust. And that’s just for openers.

The biggest military stakes in Asia lie in blue ocean naval power. India knows it must develop a first-rate navy to achieve major military status and not be pushed around by China. Only the US can enable this. More importantly, it is George Bush’s strategy to do so.

The US Navy cannot do the job of hemming in China’s growing naval threat alone – and only India is capable of building a navy consequential enough to help. The Chinese are feverishly at work on their naval base in Gwadar, Pakistan, from which their ships can threaten traffic from and to the Persian Gulf. Having India police the critical Indian Ocean sea lanes takes a heavy burden off us.

Where it all comes together, however, is the South China Sea:

80% by value of the world’s shipping goes through the South China Sea. China claims the whole thing as its own territorial waters, from Taiwan, all along the coast of the Philippines and Borneo, then along the coast of Vietnam. Here is the official Chinese government map of the South China Sea, with the dash-lines marking what it considers its national border:

Be thinking of this map when a major geopolitical event takes place on June 21: the Prime Minister of Vietnam, Phan Van Khai, will meet President Bush in the White House. This map is the purpose of their meeting.

Most Washington journalists are too blind to notice that George Bush is the greatest global strategist to ever sit in the Oval Office. Under their noses, he is constructing a multinational alliance capable of preventing China from dominating the oceans of Asia. The foundation of this alliance is a tripartite one between Taiwan, Japan, and the US. It has since expanded to include the militaries of Indonesia and Malaysia. Now comes Vietnam.

Vietnam was a tyrannized colony of China’s for a thousand years. Our short war with them means nothing to the Vietnamese compared to their antipathy towards China, particularly when it claims the waters off their coastline. Whether it will be announced immediately after the meeting or not, the purpose of Phan Van Khai in the White House is to create a military alliance between the United States and Vietnam, with the US Navy being granted a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. We’re back in ‘Nam, folks.

What’s this got to do with India? India was Bush’s go-between with Vietnam. Condi in Delhi had the Indian Foreign Ministry set up the Washington invite for Phan Van Khai. India is brokering the deal to get us back into Cam Ranh Bay – because the Indian Navy will have its ships there right along side ours.

Less than a month after Phan Van Khai’s visit, Washington will roll out the full length of the red carpet for the Prime Minister of India. Manmohan Singh. On July 18, he will speak to a Joint Session of the House and Senate at the Capitol, then be feted at the White House with a State Dinner. Won’t that make Wen Jiabao feel great?

You read about Manmohan Singh as the architect of India’s booming new economy a year ago in Sonia Ghandi’s Masterstroke. He’s a hero of capitalism Ayn Rand would be proud of. And he trusts China about as much as he can jump over Mount Everest.

No defense department in the world, including ours but possibly excepting Japan’s, worries more about China than India’s. So Indian and Chinese soldiers will play volleyball and engage in all manner of nicey-nice tension-lowering activities, most of which will be eminently sensible. But underneath all this surface, Indian strategists see China as their number one threat – just as we do – and are planning accordingly.

There is no way New Delhi is going to fall for the Indo-China Con. Far from “souring,” as a UPI report would have us believe, the honeymoon between India and America is going to blossom into a long-term relationship.