Foreign Policy - China, India, US

The End of the Affair? - Washington's Cooling Passion for New Delhi
By Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur - Foreign Affairs

One of the signature features, and generally acknowledged successes, of the George W. Bush administration's foreign policy was the close relationship forged between the United States and India. For decades, due to Cold War politics and mutual antagonism over India's quest for nuclear weapons, the U.S.-Indian relationship had languished. The Bush administration, however, identified India as a potential strategic partner early on and chose to build on the goodwill the Clinton administration had garnered with New Delhi in its closing days.

Think Again: Asia's Rise
By Minxin Pei - Foreign Policy

Don't believe the hype about the decline of America and the dawn of a new Asian age. It will be many decades before China, India, and the rest of the region take over the world, if they ever do.

"Power Is Shifting from West to East."
Not really. Dine on a steady diet of books like The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East or When China Rules the World, and it's easy to think that the future belongs to Asia. As one prominent herald of the region's rise put it, "We are entering a new era of world history: the end of Western domination and the arrival of the Asian century."

Sustained, rapid economic growth since World War ii has undeniably boosted the region's economic output and military capabilities. But it's a gross exaggeration to say that Asia will emerge as the world's predominant power player. At most, Asia's rise will lead to the arrival of a multi-polar world, not another unipolar one.

The China-India Border Brawl
By Jeff M. Smith - WSJ

The peaceful, side-by-side rise of China and India has been taken for granted in many quarters. But tensions between the two giants are mounting, and Washington would do well to take note. On June 8, New Delhi announced it would deploy two additional army divisions and two air force squadrons near its border with China. Beijing responded furiously to the Indian announcement, hardening its claim to some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory that China disputes.

To understand what the tussle is about, consider recent history: The defining moment in the Sino-Indian relationship is a short but traumatic war fought over the Sino-Indian border in 1962. The details of that conflict are in dispute, but the outcome is not: After a sweeping advance into Indian territory, China gained control over a chunk of contested Tibetan plateau in India's northwest but recalled its advancing army in India's northeast, leaving to New Delhi what is now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Relations have been characterized by mistrust ever since, but neither nation has shown any inclination to return to armed conflict.

Currency, culture, Confucius: China's writ will run across the world
By Martin Jacques - The Times

The rise of the East will change more than just economics. It will shake up the whole way that we think and live our lives.

The world is being remade but the West is only very slowly waking up to this new reality. In 2027 Goldman Sachs estimates that the size of the Chinese economy will overtake America's and by 2050 will be twice as big.

But we still think of the rise of the developing countries and the relative decline of the developed nations in almost exclusively economic terms. China's rise is seen as having momentous economic implications but being of little political and cultural consequence. This is a profound mistake.

Dancing with the dragon
By Brahma Chellaney - Japan Times

Nearly six months after U.S. President Barack Obama entered the White House, it is apparent that America's Asia policy is no longer guided by an overarching geopolitical framework as it had been under President George W. Bush. Indeed, Washington's Asia policy today appears fragmented. The Obama administration has developed a policy approach toward each major Asian subregion and issue, but still has no strategy on how to build enduring power equilibrium in Asia — the pivot of global geopolitical change.

China, India and Japan, Asia's three main powers, constitute a unique strategic triangle. The Obama administration has declared that America's "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with China, going to the extent of demoting human rights to put the accent on security, financial, trade and environmental issues with Beijing.

China's New (and Welcome) Foreign Policy
By Wen Liao - RealClearWorld

For two decades, Chinese diplomacy has been guided by the concept of the country's "peaceful rise". Today, however, China needs a new strategic doctrine, because the most remarkable aspect of Sri Lanka's recent victory over the Tamil Tigers is not its overwhelming nature, but the fact that China provided President Mahinda Rajapakse with both the military supplies and diplomatic cover he needed to prosecute the war.

Without that Chinese backing, Rajapakse's government would have had neither the wherewithal nor the will to ignore world opinion in its offensive against the Tigers. So, not only has China become central to every aspect of the global financial and economic system, it has now demonstrated its strategic effectiveness in a region traditionally outside its orbit. On Sri Lanka's beachfront battlefields, China's "peaceful rise" was completed.