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| Chinese Army(PLA) Photograph: The Statesman |
1. The Tibetan Freedom Initiative (TFI) should become the Centre of the US Foreign Policy. This alone will ensure continued US Primacy in the global order. Therefore America’s Tibetan Policy and Support Act (TPSA), which became law recently, is a step in the right direction.
It highlights Tibet’s geostrategic importance. In consonance with above, the recent enunciation of the US foreign policy by Joe Biden has broadly indicated the same thrust line. However, the US has to ensure that they do not get distracted from other parts of the world disproportionately, like Trump frittered away his energy in engaging with North Korea or the Middle East.
Whereas, he should have concentrated more around the immediate periphery of China and should have engaged with Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar or even with Pakistan, who all are today under Chinese firm control. China had made decisive moves during the transition period (Change of US Presidency) to tie these countries to serve Chinese geopolitical and geostrategic interest. US needs to untie them from China as Phase one of their assertive drive.
2. The military application of new muscular posturing is the need of the hour to stymie China in the Tibet- the Himalayas, which has emerged as the key geopolitical-geostrategic-geo-economic and a ‘Game-Changing Geographical Height'(GCGH) for military force projection in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).
Because China’s navy is not sufficiently lethal to penetrate the South China Sea (SCS) towards the ‘Indian Ocean Region’ (IOR) after addressing the newly named Indo- Pacific fleet and the QUAD. The sea route from ‘SCS’ gets blocked at the Malacca Straits. Because the fact is that once SCS is blocked, then China’s trade routes get denied, thus forcing the Chinese to adopt a more nuanced strategic defensive posture.
They are trying to create two Passage Corridors astride the Parcels and Sprately islands and shaping the ‘SCS’ to become a Chinese strait, rather than an open component of the global maritime commons. This needs to be contested.
3. China had shown a long term strategic vision by seizing Tibet way back in 1950. They have now opened the land route through the Himalayas to bypass the allied nations strangulation strategy in the ‘SCS’. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) concept and the creation of the China-Pakistan-Economic-Corridor’ (CPEC) is the compulsion for offsetting China’s vulnerable Sea route.
Therefore, it has carved a maintenance link through the safer Himalayan land routes where no international powers can intervene other than an accommodative and vulnerable India. Thus, the PLA’S recent aggression on India along the ‘Line of Actual Control’ (LAC) has been a controlled operation to occupy disputed-unheld areas for widening their logistics corridor all across the LAC from North to the East.
The PLA aims to ensure the security of this land link from Western China-Xinjiang -Tibet-along the CPEC to Gwadar in the Arabian Sea. The natural resources in Tibet are in abundance and will make it the new Chinese manufacturing hub to exploit this route and double China’s existing trillion-dollar economy.
