South Asia in Strategic Competition: Tracing Chinese, Indian, and U.S. Footprints

Abstract

With the “International Security Studies” literature reiterating how geopolitical turbulence flows from systemic transitional fluidity, today’s South Asia, highlighting Sino-U.S., Sino-Indian, and Indo-Pakistani competitive tensions, depicts that pattern well. While the current strategic landscape displays some particularistic characteristics, their rooting in post-1945 systemic restructuring cannot be missed. Three key developments shaped that re-arrangement in the Indo-Pacific arena: de-colonization and the partition of British-India into successor states founded on mutually inconsistent ideational rationales; dominant-systemic polarization along a capitalist versus communist diarchy; and the renascence of China as a socialist-nationalist power-seeking agency within both the Soviet-led communist bloc and the post-war bipolar architecture fashioned by the superpowers. India and Pakistan, often belying declared policies, bandwagon with external protectors to advance conflicting interests, leaving Bangladesh to solitarily seek more balance. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, that historical pattern still informs the current systemic-subsystemic change versus continuity dynamic shaping South Asia.