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photo: BMN Network
Strategic Vision vol. 10, no. 49 (May, 2021)
Sober Assessment New Delhi remains clear-eyed on ongoing threat posed by Beijing’s ambitions Ilias Iliopoulos
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apan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is widely credited with coining the term “IndoPacific,” or at least injecting it into the modern geopolitical, strategic, and maritime conversation, when he first used the term in his 2007 “Confluence of the Two Seas” speech to the Indian parliament. Truth be told, it was a brilliant officer of India’s Navy, Captain Dr. Gurpreet S. Khurana, former executive director of the National Maritime Foundation of India and a visiting professor at the Naval War College in Goa, who resurrected the “Indo-Pacific” designation, which was introduced almost eight decades ago by another soldier-scholar, Karl Haushofer. Statesmen, diplomats, military officers, and policy analysts in India, as well as in Russia, understand historical and geopolitical realities much better than
many of their American and Western European counterparts. India’s foreign policy and defense community is not fooled by Beijing’s façade of neighborliness. Almost a decade ago, then Chief of India’s Army General Staff General Vijay Kumar Singh warned that India must “wake up” to her military shortcomings and the threat posed by China, adding that unresolved border disputes could be used as a pretext to “put India down” anytime China perceived that India was becoming too powerful. General Singh advocated increased spending on defense and referred to Beijing’s subjugation of Tibet, its wooing of Nepal and Myanmar, and its use of Pakistan as a cat’s paw. One must bear in mind that China’s border disputes with India during the period of 1960–1962 left 3,000 Indian soldiers dead. Notably, the border dispute re-
Dr. Ilias Iliopoulos is a professor of History and International Relations at the National University of Athens and a visiting scholar at the Taiwan Center for Security Studies. He can be reached at iliasmunich@hotmail.com