Reuters published a piece on Wednesday about “Why the Indian Ocean Could Be China’s Achilles’ Heel in a Taiwan War”. They reported that “A dozen military attaches and scholars say that vulnerability is now being scrutinised as Western military and academic strategists discreetly game scenarios about how a conflict with China over Taiwan, or elsewhere in East Asia, could evolve or escalate.” The gist is that the West might cut off China’s energy imports through this ocean in any potential war between those two.
The outlet added that “Four envoys and eight analysts familiar with discussions in Western and Asian capitals, some speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, said this enduring weakness gives China’s adversaries a ladder of escalatory options, especially in a drawn-out conflict, like Russia’s war on Ukraine. These scenarios range from harassment and interdiction operations against Chinese shipping that could divert Chinese naval vessels to the region, up to a blockade and beyond.”
They warned, however, that this might be easier said than done: “Even if China cannot achieve dominance, some factors might run in its favour, some analysts say. Blockades are difficult to implement given the fluidity of commerce, with oil sometimes traded en route. Tracking and policing shipments would be a vast job, as operations against China would need to secure shipments to destinations like Japan, South Korea and Australia.”
As compelling as the arguments for and against such moves might be, the West is nevertheless exaggerating the importance of the Indian Ocean in any potential war with China. The proposed cutoff of China’s energy imports can be carried out in the Strait of Malacca and the less popularly traversed straits that are located entirely in Indonesian waters, especially if that country pivots to the West after February’s election. Policing shipments are obviously much easier at chokepoints than on the high seas.
The military and academic strategists that are reportedly wargaming these scenarios in the Indian Ocean are obviously aware of this as well, thus raising the question of why they’re focusing on the high seas instead of on chokepoints, not to mention why their supposedly discrete work was leaked at this time. The larger context in which Reuters’ report was published concerns increasingly troubled Indo-US ties, which readers can learn more about here and here.
In brief, the scandal that erupted in late November after the Justice Department charged an unnamed Indian official and an Indian drug trafficker with allegedly attempting to assassinate a Delhi-designated terrorist-separatist with dual American citizenship inside the US has toxified their ties. Multidimensional pressure is now being placed on India by various American actors like the liberal–globalist policymaking faction, their media allies like WaPo, and the Soros network on this pretext ahead of spring’s elections.
Prime Minister Modi’s refusal to enact unilateral concessions on his country’s national interests, for which he was recently praised by his close friend President Putin, means that there’s no hope of the US turning India into its anti-Chinese proxy as long as he remains in office. Even so, that doesn’t mean that they won’t try to push him in that direction, ergo the timing with which the news about these supposedly discrete war games was just leaked.
To be sure, it’s in India’s national interests to monitor and manage China’s naval presence in its namesake ocean, but the US’ shared interests in this served to strengthen their strategic ties across the decades prior to the latest scandal throwing their future into uncertainty. For that reason, the US would prefer for India to go far beyond those two roles in the scenario of a war with China by intercepting that country’s vessels, which could expand the war to the Himalayas and thus divide China’s forces from the sea.
After all, the subtext from Reuters’ article is that the US requires Indian assistance to carry out such tasks in that ocean, which Delhi is unlikely to do at any foreign country’s behest and would only countenance in the event that its decisionmakers concluded that it’s truly in their national interests. As was already argued in this analysis, however, no such actions are even required in the Indian Ocean since they can more easily be carried out at the Strait of Malacca and other Indonesian chokepoints.
None of the insight that was shared is intended to imply that Indian doesn’t need to invest more in its naval forces, nor that it shouldn’t have its own contingency plans for what to do in its eponymous ocean should it become embroiled in a major war with China. Rather, all that’s being pointed out is that there’s no imperative for India to police Chinese ships in that sea if that country is at war with the West. Doing so would risk another Sino-Indo war all for the sake of alleviating pressure from the West at sea.
Circling back to the troubled state of Indo-US ties nowadays, it therefore can’t be ruled out that the timing of Reuters’ article and the details therein were meant to function as an indirect form of pressure upon India. The innuendo is that the West is considering military action against China in the Indian Ocean should a war break out between them, in which case the first would require Delhi’s policing support, with it being suggested that any refusal would be to Beijing’s advantage.
The purpose in pushing this narrative is to simultaneously exploit preexisting suspicions of China among Indian policymakers in parallel with getting them to reconsider any moves away from the US amidst those two’s spiraling dispute out of fear that doing so would undermine their shared goals against China. The reality is that the West could easily blockade China at the Strait of Malacca and other Indonesian chokepoints without India participating and risking another Sino-Indo war “out of solidarity”.
Looking forward, bilateral efforts will likely be made to preserve Indo-US naval and other forms of cooperation that are informally directed against China, but Delhi is unlikely to comply with Washington’s pressure that it “do more” against Beijing. Prime Minister Modi is too independent of a leader and too wise of one as well to be duped into doing any foreign country’s bidding, especially that which risks bringing war to his own, but that won’t stop various American actors from still trying to manipulate him.
