Commodore S.L. Deshmukh

The South China Sea has become the testing ground for the future of global trade and the balance of power in Asia. For centuries, great powers have understood a simple truth that whoever controls the seas shapes the destiny of nations. In the twenty-first century, that proposition has acquired renewed urgency in the waters of the South China Sea, a vast maritime crossroads through which the arteries of global commerce flow. It has emerged as one of the world’s most consequential geopolitical...

China’s creeping conquest of the South China Sea is testing the limits of international law and the resolve of the world’s democracies. Few lines have caused as much anxiety in the cartographic theatre of our times as the one China insists on drawing across the sea. The “nine-dash line,” an ambiguous crescent looping deep into the South China Sea, transcends the limits of a mere maritime claim. It is Beijing’s geopolitical doctrine and a challenge to the post-war international order....

As Beijing lectures India on ecology in Great Nicobar, its own record in Tibet and the South China Sea tells a rather different story. There is something theatrical in China’s sudden environmental concern for India’s proposed infrastructure project in Great Nicobar. Beijing and its sympathisers in India have warned darkly of ecological destruction, seismic fragility, threats to indigenous communities and irreversible environmental degradation. One would imagine, listening to these...