A STRATEGIC TRIANGLE
For many analysts there is comfort in thinking of the South Asia nuclear competition as a two-player game. Such comfort derives from a sense that the US-Soviet Cold War experience offers appropriate lessons that will help India and Pakistan avert an arms race or, far worse, use of nuclear weapons.
Many analysts in Islamabad and Delhi go out of their way to stress the dissimilarities between the Cold War and modern eras, from disparity in resources and polarity of the international system, to geographic proximity. But the most important difference between the Cold War and modern security environment is that the strategic reality in South Asia is triangular, not bipolar or dyadic.
The recent dynamism in the Sino-India security competition, punctuated by a seeming surge in Chinese incursions in Ladakh and a quickening pace of Indian testing of ballistic missiles with intermediate range, points directly to the need to think through how China fits into the picture. To the extent Indian analysts have been more preoccupied with China for the last decade, if not longer, there is not yet a deep literature on the India-China dyad (compared to libraries on India-Pakistan). One recent edited volume with contributions from both Indian and Chinese analysts, The China-India Nuclear Crossroads (in the interest of full disclosure it was published by the Carnegie Endowment), usefully surveys the landscape, and raises innumerable issues deserving further analysis. In the analytical community there is now increasing interest in Sino- Indian CBMs and understanding deterrence dynamics. But the focus only on dyads (Pakistan-India; India-China) tends to obscure important drivers of competition.
Contemporary and historical Chinese actions within the subcontinent argue for considering the Southern Asia security dynamic in terms of a triad or — so as not to be confused with a nuclear triad — a strategic triangle. As the dominant competitor, China sits at the apex of the triangle. It has strategic relationships with India and Pakistan, who occupy the end points of the base. The Sino-Indian leg is competitive; the Sino-Pakistani leg is cooperative. Developments on one leg influence what happens in the others. For instance, India’s efforts to achieve some level of strategic parity with China motivate Pakistan’s nuclear developments in order to close perceived deterrence gaps, and to seek closer relations with China to balance perceived threats from India. This model better captures the directionality of deterrence objectives and the interrelationship between them than simple d
Rahul singh 2nd
pgdm 1st
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