From INDOPACOM to PACOM: Is There a Strategic Backstory?

Welcome to the Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Center in Sydney and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome back to the Asia Chess Board. I'm Mike Green joining you as always or almost always from Sydney, Australia at the US Study Center, but sometimes from Washington, Georgetown and CSIS. The Asia Chessboard tries to look at big strategic questions in Asia or the Indopacific if you prefer and not jump at the news of the day, but recently developments in Washington have suggested that some big pieces of American Asia strategy may be in flux. The role of NATO or Europe in the East Asian and Indopacific security equation is is in flux right now because of the transatlantic friction and now the role of India and the Indian Ocean with the name change of the Indopacific command back to its original title of Pacific Command. Would a rose by any other names smell as sweet? We'll see. There could be something deeper foot or it could just be window dressing. But it is a good time to reflect on why those parts of the chessboard that are not in the first island chain that are not Japan Taiwan matter. To help us unpack the Indian Ocean and Indopaccom name change, we're joined by one of the top thinkers on Indian Ocean strategy and Indian military affairs, Arzan Tarapur. Arzon, welcome. Great to have you. >> Thank you very much, Mike. A real honor to be on. Thank you. >> Yeah. and you're joining us from Northern California from the Hoover Institute at Stanford where you're a visiting fellow and I know you have affiliations with European University Institute in Florence and that you've been a lecturer and a professor at the Army War College, Aspie in Australia, Georgetown Rand East West Center of the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi but your career started in the Australian Department of Defense and how does a kid from Sydney I think you grew up in Sydney end up other than I some geographic proximity end up being one of the leading career officials in Australia and now scholars in the US and the region on Indian Ocean strategy. Were you a kid staring out at the sea from Sydney thinking there's an ocean out there? How did you get into this? >> I was a kid, Mike, and this is good advice I think for any parent. I was a kid whose first desk in his bedroom was one of those like laminated desks with a world map on it. And so by default, compulsorily, every time I sat at my desk, I was literally looking at a map. So that's why I really enjoyed playing games about quizzing capital cities of countries and stuff. So that was I mean, look, I grew up studying and loving history in high school. And when I got to uni, I I studied international relations, which was as close as you got to guns and bombs and international security. But that was all pre 911, right? And so pre 911 if you were studying IR and uni you had to be really interested in it. You had to be really dedicated to it because not a lot of people were or if they were they weren't studying international security. And so really it was when I did my junior year abroad at Georgetown no less at the school of foreign service where I was really inculcated into what they colloquially called guns and bombs. So, international security studies and also a real I think feature of Georgetown which is prizing the notion of public service. And so when I finished I joined the public service and I joined the department of defense actually as a China analyst way before it was cool. And when I joined this is how old I am. I joined in 2001. Very soon thereafter, a uh Chinese fighter jet bumped into an American ISR plane, the EP3 incident. And so there was a real sense that, you know, this was going to be the defining feature of our careers. But of course, a few months later, there was another incident, 9/11, which really did make that the defining feature of my government career. So as soon as 911 happened, as happened certainly in the US and certainly in Australia, everyone in my business, all my peers, all my colleagues, we all sort of our gaze turned immediately to Southwest Asia broadly. I deployed a couple of times to Iraq and Afghanistan and I finished my job there as a liazison officer in Washington DC. >> It's interesting. I I started in the White House on the NYSE staff right before that AP3 incident, April 2001, and everyone thought China was going to be the big strategic focus. >> Exactly. >> And of course, after 911, it was Southeast Asia. What was your take on that being in in CRA? You know, there's a line of thought, my friend Kurt Campbell and others, that we completely took our eye off the ball on China because of 911. I think it's more complicated in some ways. I do not think we were heading for a good China policy. In some ways 911 reduced the number of people who were thinking strategically about China and Asia to a pretty good group people like Rich Armitage Paul Wolfwitz but in camera do you feel like looking back on it we really took our eye off the ball on China and suffered for that or do you think it was unavoidable or there were people who always thinking about it and had the concepts ready? What's your take on that because you had some real whiplash in your own career? >> Yeah. No 100%. I think it definitely not having done any sort of serious in-depth study on what the emerging constellation of officials and scholars was like pre 911 on China. I haven't studied that in depth but 100% the sort of my lived experience was that what was previously seen as the burgeoning challenge and the organizing principle of defense policy and strategic affairs which was competition with China suddenly was completely changed to the GWAT wars and CT. And at the time I was young and I was dumb and I was I got whipped up in all of that and I became firmly convinced that that was the right thing to do, right? Because obviously people's lives were at stake and there was such a sense of hysteria, right? I remember literally leaving work in those days in the first phases after 9/11. You would leave work. I would leave Russell and we would literally be looking up at the sky to see if there were planes. >> Yeah. I was on the job on 911 and we also looked up for planes and there were planes. There were F-16s flying overhead >> immediately afterwards. And those who didn't have uh defense background thought we were under attack until people said those are ours. I think it's very easy in hindsight to say we should have been we collectively the national security communities in the US and Australia and elsewhere should have been less panicked. But honestly, we were on the cusp of looking at a world where those kinds of terrorist attacks were a daily or weekly event. And I started getting I never got them before 911, but shortly after the the intelligence community would produce these threat assessments. And they went from looking occasionally to looking at everything. So you get these thick binders of potential threats, some of them quite serious, everywhere, including places like Japan, you wouldn't expect from Islamic terrorists. And had that been the cadence, had we actually had what many expected, we would have been fully justified with the focus. I guess it's understandable. I think in the US and in Australia, there were also very big debates about China at that point. Like there was not a clear consensus on how to handle China, even if we had had no 911. >> That's right. I mean the the administration that you served in right when we saw it come in staffed by people like my current boss Condisa Rice, people who had made their scholarly and public service careers talking about great power competition and the US role of leadership in the world. There was a real sense pre 911 that that this was a very sort of intellectually deep, rigorous and sort of old-fashioned Kissingerian approach to American policy that got completely derailed in the blink of an eye. And all of a sudden all of the it seemed instruments of American national power and Australian national power sued to this new threat. And exactly as you said, there was in fact a cadence of attacks, right? We forget that things like Bali happened a year after 9/11. We forget that the London bombings happened. We forget that train bombings were happening constantly in India. In the first decade, it did seem that this was going to be just a fact of life. And then of course Iraq and Afghanistan and there was support to the war fighter and how could you possibly think of anything else aside from that? And so for a good decade it seemed chish to think of anything else. >> The other thing I would say is while there was real contestation about the nature of the China challenge within the Bush administration, I'm sure within the Howard government, I I could tell other governments as well and we didn't know we really did not know the trajectory China would be on. It's a bit rich retrospectively saying we should have predicted this trajectory. I think a lot of variables, the global financial crisis, the emergence of Xiinping, but the one thing President Bush said to me when I started was we don't know where China's going, but we know we're going to need allies. And I was basically hired into that role to work on primarily Japan, but also Korea, Australia, and this is my pivot to our topic, India, because through all of the pressures of 9/11 and then Afghanistan, then Iraq, keeping strong alliances was an essential tool. and a very high priority for the Bush administration and continue to be for Obama and for the first Trump administration. People forget and so the toolkit involved allies and one of the most important I guess innovations if you will or developments was India and through all of this the Bush administration was pretty disciplined about what we call next steps in the strategic partnership but building a strategic relationship with India for a new era not an alliance. The formative concept for most of us was that Indian power in and of itself contributes to a more stable balance of power and serves America's interests, Australia's interests, Japan's interests. We didn't require India to completely give up non- alignment. We required India to have the capacity to sanitize if you will the Indian Ocean and so forth. So this became a really important concept, something you worked on in your career subsequent to all the things we were talking about. It led of course to this debate about what we call the region. So I was a senior director for Asian affairs but it included India and Pakistan and often I had to work Afghanistan. So we had the mapping of the NYSE staff was the Indoacific even though we called it the Asia Directorate. The actual term Indopacific people like Rory Metaf Andrew Sher and others Andrew and I had a piece in the Washington quarterly in 2009 or so. They were names but they had some significance. It was a mental map. It's sort of going back to young Arzison with his map at his table. This was how we need to think about the geographic space and that's why the name change to Indopagom was so important and also of course reflecting India's importance and also Japan's importance because the free and open Indopacific was AB's framing. It's more than just a name. There's a lot of geography assumptions prioritization built into it and now the name's been changed. So, we should talk about why that might have happened, whether it means anything, whether it's lasting. Let's start with why you think it happened. We don't know. It's actually one of these things where surprisingly I haven't seen any credible news stories about why the name change happened, so we're guessing. But what do you think the logic might have been for going from Indopaccom to PCOM and basically seeming to reduce the sort of mental map of the region? Is there a case for it you could think of? Look, first of all, I think it's really important to recognize, and we often lose sight of this, that just because this one combatant command in the United States defense department has changed its name, doesn't mean that the concept of the Indo-Pacific has gone away. Right. I still think the concept of the Indopacific is as you said one that has a lot of analytic and policy purchase and implications and I think a lot of people around the region and around the world still obviously think of it in those terms and they should because it is an important concept with serious implications. So now this COCOM has changed its name from Indopaccom to pay. Why has it done it? I don't know. As you said, so much of what happens in this administration winds up being pretty idiosyncratic. I think it's not necessary or apt to read a lot of strategic theory into it. You know, I had a boss once who always used to say when given the choice, always choose up over conspiracy. Right. Not to suggest that this is a mistake exactly, but the point is that not everything that happens happens as a result of a wellthoughtout deliberative process with a coherent theoretical foundation. I don't think that's the case at all. I don't know, as you said, why this happened, and we can only speculate, but I would speculate that this is an administration and and in particular a Pentagon where optics matter, where branding matters. So, they changed the name from DoD to Department of War unofficially. The secretary cares a lot about grooming standards and whether generals are fat, right? This is a leadership that cares about things like that, prioritizes things like that. [snorts] So in my mind, the simplest and most convincing explanation is that it is just that it is a matter of optics that signals something that has always been true even when the name of the combatant command was Indoacon. And that is that in the American strategic map or at least the military map, it is Westpak First Island chain that has always been the priority for good reason. I'm not saying that that shouldn't be the priority. And this is essentially just an exercise in branding that is designed to underscore that fact, which has always been a fact is my guess. To be clear, we're guessing here, but behind every name is a little bit of a strategy or strategic assumptions. You can also speculate what those might be. I suspect there's a possibility, again, we're trying to guess here, with the Iran war contradicting the promises to the MAGA base, there may be some political utility in looking like restrainers in parts of the world, possibly reducing the commitment. That's possible. I don't know. >> I mean, yeah, sure. I see what you're saying, Mike, but I also I'm skeptical that people who and and I know people people who I served with who are sort of conservative leaning or aligned themselves with MAGA who have lost faith because of the Iran war. And so I get that some people might want to issue some corrective to that, but I really doubt that what was his name, the plumber, Joe, whatever his name was, Joe the plumber. I doubt that people who are annoyed by the Iran war are really keeping >> Yeah, I agree with that. I'm not thinking of Joe the plumber. I'm thinking of the small codery of restrainers that are looking for evidence of influence. But again, I don't have evidence that's the case. I'm just what I think may be the case and here I'm a little bit more on solid ground. I think is that the Pentagon under Hegath has focused on narrowing the definition of military operations and therefore strategy with a focus on lethality over engagement or the law of war or even alliances and a narrowing focus of geography to the warfighting epicenter in the inner Pacific meaning the first island chain. So there you can see in other decisions and in other rhetoric a preference for an almost reductionist approach and a disciplined focus on the war fight which is perhaps understandable military strategy. It's not great grand strategy. The historical analogy that comes to mind for me always is the German general staff before World War I which decided that to prevail in the Western Front they had to go through Belgium. railroad schedules, the mobilization schedule for the Russians, knocking the French out before the British could do anything about it. All of these things pointed to a military plan that sent you through the low countries. But a grand strategist would have warned and the German foreign office was very weak. If you go through the low countries, you really risk bringing the British in. You're bringing in the British, you bring in the Dominions, you bring in a million Indian troops, the Anzacs and the Canadians, and you very likely bring in the Americans and you lose. So there is a real danger in strategy in focusing so much on the narrow warf fighting scenarios and losing sight of the importance of cohesion with NATO as a dissuading factor even a deterrent for China India as a factor. So I think it's worth us now even though we don't know why this name change was made reinforcing why not just for the war fight but for geopolitics and therefore ultimately for the war fight why the Indian Ocean why India are pretty important. Maybe you've written on this for us, you've written on it for Hoover. What's the strategic case for keeping a focus on the Indian Ocean and on India in the context of a first island chain center of gravity? >> Okay, so there's there's a lot there. Um, let me let me I can't stay silent on this one point, which is that I completely agree that a narrower notion of what it means to fight a war is not necessarily sound grand strategy. But I would be even less charitable to say that it's not even sound military strategy, right? And we've seen that in Iran as well, right? This idea that putting bombs on targets equals military success because it doesn't. So it's not even military success, let alone grand strategic success. So that's point number one. But getting back to the getting back to Paycom and getting back to India on the map of the Indo-Pacific. Look, one of the one of the sort of grand strategic issues that I think the US confronts is the problem of span of control for Payon. Right? That's why this name change. But you know in the initial hours that it happened I was waiting for the other shoe to drop whether there would be a change in the AOS of Paycom and Sentcom whether they would move the boundaries and they didn't. And that leaves Paycom still with this really invidious problem of having an enormous span of control. So that god forbid if there is a war, the good people in Hawaii are going to have an enormous portion of the earth's surface to worry about. And a lot is going to happen there. Now that brings in the role of India both in peace time and in wartime if we're talking about a contingency in the first island chain. Look, it gets back to what you were saying about Washington's conception of why India matters, right? And going back to those Kissingerian real politic practitioners in the George W. Bush administration, their assessment was that India matters because it is a enormous country that you cannot ignore. Not just demographically but geographically, geopolitically. It sets a stride a really important highway in the world which will matter in a conflict in the first island chain and in peace time it matters because such a big country cannot be ignored by China right and so this is why we had this concept of the Indo-Pacific that by sort of unifying what were previously sub regions northeast Asia Southeast Asia South Asia by unifying them in in one grand region of the Indo-acific you could essentially pose those bigger challenges for China which is sound thinking and and India is a irreplaceable unignorable part of that. I think as you said as smart strategic theorists have said and written about for American purposes a powerful and independent India which has freedom of action to act in its own national interests is good for America. It's good for the region and it's good even through the narrow lens of strategic competition with China. So I think that's what drove decades of American policy sort of postcold war especially starting with the George W. Bush administration again that civil nuclear deal which you know which which is not just a civil nuclear deal right but it was a it was a massive diplomatic move right audacious diplomatic move that opened up the possibility for a bilateral relationship really reset alignments in the world in in the Indoacific all of that was motivated by this idea that India is a really important actor that matters and a strong India that can act in its own interests is good for India, is good for the region, and it's good for the United States. >> Very good point on Iran and an overiance of military tools in general, not just in thinking about the Western Pacific. Point well taken. If you were concerned and people should be concerned about the order of battle of the PLA about the increasing contestation of the first and second island chain that stresses on Indopaccom to address security concerns across an AO that goes all the way across the Indian Ocean from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean from California to the Indian Ocean. I suppose you would want ways to reduce the burden on the US military in places that are not the western Pacific and you would therefore want other allies and partners to be picking up more of a role sanitizing the security situation being net exporters of security and in the Indian Ocean that would be India and then you have to ask the question okay who in the US government and in the US coolcoms is going to make sure that India has the kit it needs has the capabilities it needs has the partnerships it needs, it's going to be paycom or indopom and then the last thing you'd want to do is say signal to the Indians we don't care about you. So it it is a bit of a I mean even if you're about reducing the Indopaccom Paycom level of effort geographically to now on this first island chain you would by definition need India to do more have more kit have more capabilities. It sort of doesn't make sense there either. >> It's kind of the worst of both worlds. You're signaling that India matters less without actually alleviating any of the real tangible spanner control problems that pay faces. >> Yeah. But on the other hand, this is not as far as we can see a core repurposing of what the command does. And in Delhi, there's a lot of heartburn, a lot of reaction to this. But I was in Tokyo two weeks ago and I'm in Australia now. There's much less conernnation about it. I think generally the view is a rose by any other name would smell as sweet because I think the perception of close US allies is the operational tempo it's interrupted by Iran for sure but the general level of effort level of attention with India is not going down the US does more exercises with India than any other country in the world almost more than the rest of the world combined I don't see that do you see any evidence or signaling from this that there will be a reduction in level of effort >> no certainly not I think you are correct to say that I have not been to Australia or Japan since the name change happened. But what you say sounds exactly what I would expect that countries that are more intimately familiar with the US system understand that this is not anything substantive. India is not intimately familiar with the US system and and is therefore has less evidence to understand that this is not any substantive change. And moreover when you do talk about the US India defense partnership there is zero evidence that there is any dimmunition in that certainly not as a result of the name change but also otherwise more importantly given the rupture in the bilateral relationship over the past 12 months or so. Defense has been thankfully one of those areas that has been the least disrupted and where the drum beatat of activities as you mentioned continues even in the sort of initial phases when the US India spat began at sort of late summer last year even soon after that things like UWS the army to army exercise things like the two plus two intercessional all of those things still happened and that has not changed changed and there's no indication that it will change. All that seems to be carrying along just fine. I don't think there is any substantive reduction. But the point you earlier made is also true and not insignificant which is that there is a lot of heartburn in India. Not only because of paycom but for a whole raft of reasons over the past 12 months. Everything from tariffs to the president's claim that he engineered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan to immigration issues, constant sort of threats over H-1B visas and let's not forget the seeming apparent bromance between the president and Field Marsh Maner of Pakistan. The sort of rebirth of a USPakistan relationship that had been pretty dormant for the past decade. All of these things, each one of them is is a major irritant and all of them happening all at the same time is unhelpful for the cause of convincing India that the United States is serious about nurturing and cultivating a strong and independent India. Especially when it all comes together, one thing after another, every time you wake up, there's some news. It all put together looks like a new almost hostile approach in Washington towards India and that's difficult and despite the fact that that drum beat of defense relations continues that sentiment is undeniably there. I was in Delhi just a couple of weeks ago. That sentiment is still there and it will remain there dare I say it for years even after this administration leaves office. The polling on the US and India is a little bit harder to find than polling on the US and Japan or Australia or Korea where there's every think tank, every newspaper is is doing surveys. Have you noticed beyond just the media narrative? One survey I saw did definitely show a decrease in favorability towards the US, but it was the one I saw was not a catastrophic collapse. >> So here's the thing, right? The other thing to recall is the US is the place where every striving middle class family in India seeks to send kids for education and for employment. They already have cousins and uncles who live here in the US. The people-to-people link, the personal bilateral link is extremely thick and healthy, right? despite the sort of uptick in racism here that is that is now sort of found public expression that sustains a flaw in Indian impressions of America and I don't think we're going to go beneath that flaw because there is that people-to-people link. The more concerning thing however is my impression and I grant you it is just an impression but my impression of how the strategic community in India including government officials but also non-government analytic community views the US and for them the US has just proven what many have suspected or some quarters have in India have constantly been saying which is that the US is unreliable. the US is self-interested. The US will betray you at the drop of a hat. All those things that I spent years arguing against saying no no no no no no no no it's it's firmly within American strategic interests to be a partner of of India all those suspicions have now been validated and my concern is that in the strategic community including inside and outside government there is now a sense which is hard to argue against that the US is at least at a minimum unreliable. Yeah, I mean even in the best of times in India US relations there has been a significant minority within the lock saba within the ministry of external affairs within the strategic community that was suspicious of the US pining for Nuvian non-alignment or multilateralism or global south identity or whatever the reason or the nuclear community or Russia or Russian bribes. It's always been there. So you know the current administration has handed those people a lot of ammunition. You look at the actual numbers though the US is the third largest investor in India. Mauritius is number one or two because of tax treaty reasons but the largest investor Maitius is the US. And I haven't broken the numbers down but I suspect if you work through that tax anomaly the US is actually the biggest investor in India. That's not nothing. And then the kit that the Indian especially navy and air force are buying but army as well in increasingly US not weaning themselves from the Russians that's problematic but growing and now for the first time in lethal areas not just C130 transports or maritime domain awareness and the exercise schedule very very robust. So the polling numbers are not great. The commentary is dreadful. The strategic community's views are bad. But the numbers, the sort of structure of the relationship is good. And then of course you mentioned the diaspora which is incredibly important. Look the way I view US India relations. The US will rebuild the relationship but we'll have to pay for it. It's a bit different from Australia or Japan or Korea where you just you come back with some flowers and you kind of forgive it. India the Indian system will make the next administration pay to demonstrate its feely. I don't know whether that's something on the UN security council or technology agreements, but that was certainly my experience working India in the NSC. The Indian system will make you pay for these before you can buy your way back into the good graces. >> Yeah, that's right. And I mean to be fair, you know, that that is a sort of costly signal that demonstrates commitment, right? Otherwise, you can you can mouth all the nicities that you want, but unless there is a costly signal of commitment, then it's all kind of hollow. You know, I I grew up professionally trained to be a pessimist. So, let me give you the sort of pessimistic spin on what you just said, which is I grant you all the points that you made about arms transfers, which by the way have been declining in recent years, but leave that aside. The defense relationship is is still ticking along healthfully. My concern however is not that things have been disrupted or turned off but my concern is the future that we could have had that we now will not have. Right? So this is something that is unprovable but I could have well imagined a future where the US India relationship went much deeper than it currently is which became much more interdependent which it is not and will not be now. And so I could imagine that the relationship could have gotten better, much deeper, qualitatively deeper. In the same way that the civil nuclear deal in the first decade of the century really was a step change in the relationship, there were tantalizing signs in the last couple of years that some similar sort of step change. We may have been on the cusp of another step change which now will not materialize. And so now just as I said the floor in the relationship will not give way that there is now a higher floor in the relationship. The concern that the sort of pessimistic take on your take is that the ceiling is also lower than it previously was and that yes things have not been turned off and things are ticking along but nor will they get qualitatively better. >> You know I'm in the national security space as well and therefore I should be a pessimist but I'm just a natural optimist. So I'll give you the glass halfapp full version which is yes you are absolutely right. Often when alliances or strategic partnerships with countries like India are discussed these days it's very binary. The commentary is either we have alliances or we don't. They're ruined and destroyed by Donald Trump or they're there and you frame it correctly which is the opportunity cost. Even if alliances survive, you pay an a significant strategic opportunity cost by not operationalizing them, integrating them to the degree you could, which is a very important factor in deterrence and stability. So you pay a cost. On the other hand, where I'm slightly more optimistic is I think the structural factors and the Chinese menace to India in the ocean in the Himalayas and in the global south is not going away. Xiinping is nothing if not consistent the opposite of President Trump and Bill Clinton in 1997 98 tried to rebuild US India strategic partnership and then the Indian nuclear test happened and the non-prololiferation Ayatollah as we used to call them in the US government the congress blocked it only took a few years and George W Bush to come in and it restarted so I think the US India relationship and American relationships with much of the world have an ability to reboot So, we definitely paid an opportunity cost. It may be years. It may not be many years. We'll just have to see. Now, we're speculating about the future. And as the saying goes, prediction is difficult. Especially about the future. >> Especially about the future. And yeah, and and there is no evidence about the future. Yeah. Look, you're right. I'm not that pessimistic. I don't think that the relationship is broken exactly for the reason that you mentioned right that because of China because the unavoidable unignorable fact of China and its power and aggression however the counter to your counter is that a generation ago the reason that the US India relationship recovered from the non-prololiferation pause was because of an enormously costly signal again in the form of the civil nuclear Right. >> That's right. >> The US had to pay enormous political costs and move mountains to essentially rehabilitate India after 98. And as you said earlier, that's the sort of major costly signal of commitment that it will take to recover from this. >> That's exactly right. I mean people thinking strategically about how to rebuild not from ruins but rebuild momentum in the US India relationship on the US side are going to have to start thinking about what the down payment is what the dowy is because with India marriage lasts for a year what have you done for me lately hey in your list of sins the bromance with Pakistan's chief general staff it's a long list I won't go through it again I don't think you mentioned China do you sense there is anxiety about the Trump she summit schedule the next summit presumably happening in September I mean that with an earlier administration with Obama for example as we know would have absolutely irritated or outraged Delhi and so just so much stuff happening that that's not making the cut or do you think that's also part of the part of the concern? >> No I mean it was not a considered an exhaustive list that I provided. You are right the sort of equivocation as it seemed the the equivocation on China definitely has been noticed is part of the frustration. I would however say that I think the reason it's not as egregious as other sins is that India has also committed this. You know Modi went to Tanzhen. Modi has sort of pushed for Raproma on the on the disputed border. Everyone in the world has done this right. Australia has done this. So the first point is that this is not an exclusively American quirk. This is something that everyone has done. And the second point is honestly it is much more debatable that that is a good or a bad move to make. Right? There is a strategic case to be made for doing this for stabilizing the relationship or whatever you want to call it. Maybe not sort of agreeing to sell them Nvidia chips. Maybe that's taking it a little bit far. But I think India should not have a veto on Washington talking to Beijing. Right? the sort of bogeyman of a G2 that is a sort of trope in India that the US and China will reach some sort of condominium and carve up Asia and India will suffer as a result. I think that is you know a figment of Delhi's imagination to the extent that people in Delhi fear that. But the idea that the US is not doing everything it can to compete vigorously against China is a legitimate complaint. Right? So especially when you're talking about cutting edge technology, right? This is the key to the future and the concern in India is that the US not just that that Trump and she are meeting but that the US may be seeding key terrain in this competition especially over critical technologies. >> Let's before we conclude come back to the first island chain question. If this name change reflects a desire by the Pentagon leadership to focus more narrowly on war fighting scenarios and concentrate effort on the center of gravity as it were then as we've discussed that's not smart strategy because you need a broader chessboard and we broaden the chessboard. The whole point of the Indopacific concept India was to broaden the chessboard to manage the problem in the first island chain and the problem with China. But if your concentration really is no, what do we get into the fight in the first island chain for those people who are focused on that? What's the India card that you see? Is it sanitizing the Indian Ocean? Is it horizontal escalation in the Himalayas? What can realistically expect it? And let me preface it really quickly by saying India surprises us. When I was in the Bush administration, I went around, I'm a Japan and Korea expert, so I went around to see India walla to get advice on this strategic partnership. And the traditional India hands I'd say 80 90% said India will never do this. It evaporated quickly but at quite senior levels in 2003 the Indian system was considering sending a division of troops to Iraq. So India will surprise you. It will frustrate you but India will surprise you. So I just preface my question with that. But in that sort of range of possibilities and a lot depends on the scenario. What and again also with a caveat that the war fighting piece doesn't matter. or we want to avoid the war and India is critical in that stable balance of power and influence. But in the acute fight, what's the way to think about India's role? >> The way I would think about it is to to think about it in several levels with the massive caveat that everything is very contingent on the specifics of how the war begins and what the shape of the war is. But the levels that I would consider are number one, non-military measures, right? So ideally, as you said, sort of before a war to deter a war, India has a role to play in essentially signaling to China that the conditions are not right to start the war. And there's a whole slew of non-military measures it could take. I wrote a paper for Aspie a couple of years ago on this topic. But most of the things that India could do are non-military and they involve things like diplomatic action, international legal arguments, etc. But if you are talking about the military dimension, then there's a bit of myth busting that needs to happen. The second level which is a real level is India as a essentially force in being right. Just the fact that India exists as a big and powerful country on China's western border means that China cannot entirely ignore it. Not just on the border but also in the Indian Ocean. So the the idea of India as a force and being placing stress on Chinese decision-m is the next level. There's a level after that which you mentioned which is sort of agitation, provocation, threat or action at the LAC on the land border. That is the one where I am most skeptical. I don't think India has anything to gain by doing that and a lot to lose by doing that. There is no sense that India would essentially do the US a favor by doing that in a scenario that would be enormously injurious for Indian interests without much gain for anyone really. It wouldn't have a huge effect on Chinese war fighting in the first island chain and it would just be basically all negatives. Then the next level which is the one which I think matters the most is the one that you alluded to as well which is its role in the Indian Ocean. And here we're not talking my sort of again anti-warning here is that we're not talking about India imposing some sort of distant blockade on China but rather helping in some way to assure sea control in the Indian Ocean essentially to allow everything from a US force flow across the ocean or to allow international sea lines of communication to remain open. essentially to ensure that that flank of the fight does not become something where the Chinese can pose problems for the United States. We recently a few colleagues of mine including Beck String at Latrobe ran a TTX where one of our scenarios was exactly this, right? What would happen in the Indian Ocean in case of a conflict over Taiwan? And we set it up in such a way that we posed the task of assuring sea control to the US and India and Australia. And the way it played out was that India for its own reasons out of its own national interests as we've seen in the Iran war needs to maintain sea control to assure its own slots. Not because it's doing the US a favor, not because it's part of a coalition with the US and Australia against China, but as a neutral actor even, it has its own interests to enforce freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean. And I think that is ultimately the most reasonable, the most sensible role that any planner in Hawaii can hope for. Anything more than that is, I think, getting into the realms of implausible. Let me conclude by saying I think that's right but I just add two thoughts. One is I don't think we should underestimate the consequences of a defeat for the US alliance system in East Asia for India geopolitically. So we do have to be we have to be a bit careful not to project peace time conditions and tolerance on an India that might be facing a potentially catastrophic shift in the global balance of power for their own interests. doesn't tell us exactly what India would do, but that's a dynamic to keep in mind. The second one is back to my German general staff in 1914. There's a very real possibility in my mind in a contingency that China will ride and drive right through anyone in their way in an effort to stop the US from having access to the Western Pacific. Of course, that's why we see so much activity by the PLA in Melanesia and the Pacific and the string of pearls. So um the old Lenin line you may not be interested in war but war was interested in you. India may find it wants to carefully calibrate but has no choice. But these are very much in the category of who knows. I think you captured the sort of general calculation just right. >> Yeah a lot of that would hinge on the specific dynamics of how the war starts and how it develops and the sort of political context around it. But the last thing I would say is that I'm not a China analyst, but the received wisdom is that it is in China's interests that if it seeks a military solution to gaining control of Taiwan, it's in China's interest to keep the war as short and as bounded as possible where it enjoys military advantages. And as the war becomes wider and more protracted, that's where the US along with its allies and partners and along with self-interested partners like India who may or may not be part of a US coalition would act in ways enimical to Beijing's interests. So, so who knows how it turns out. I take your points that there are competing impulses and incentives on how Delhi would act. But I think for any American planner or policy maker, we have to think very carefully about to what extent the US bases plans on predictions of Indian behavior. >> Right. And also this is not the time to muck up strategic relations with India. Terrific. Arzon Tarboard. Thanks for joining us from Hoover from Northern California. We'll do this again over coffee or beer in Cleavelli when you come down under in the southern hemisphere summer. So many many thanks. This was terrific. Thank you very much for having me and I look forward to seeing you in person down in Sydney. >> Cheers. Thanks. >> For more on strategy and the Asia programs work, visit the CSIS website at csis.org and click on the Asia program page. And for more on the US studies center in Sydney, please visit ussc.edu.auu.