Sarah Paine — The war for India (Lecture & interview)
Naval War College professor Sarah Paine delivers a lecture analyzing the Cold War geopolitics of South Asia, focusing on how the US, Russia, and China competed for influence over India and Pakistan. She examines pivotal decisions—China's conquest of Tibet, US alliance with Pakistan, and the Sino-Soviet split—that shaped regional alignments and led to the 1962 Sino-Indian War and 1971 Bangladesh War. The lecture uses a 'cutthroat billiards' metaphor to illustrate how interventions produce unintended long-term consequences.
Summary
Professor Sarah Paine of the US Naval War College presents a strategic history of Cold War competition over India and Pakistan, organized around three protagonists—the US, Russia, and China—whose interventions repeatedly backfired. She identifies three pivotal decisions that structured the entire playing field: China's conquest of Tibet (1950), which eliminated the buffer zone between China and India and created disputed border territories like Aksai Chin; the US 'pactomania' under Eisenhower, which allied America with Pakistan via the Baghdad Pact and permanently poisoned US-India relations; and the Sino-Soviet split, which by 1969 transformed China and Russia from co-adversaries of the US into primary adversaries of each other, giving the US a valuable 'swing position.'
Paine traces how India's generous treatment of China in the 1950s—recognizing PRC sovereignty over Tibet, supporting China's UN seat, signing friendship treaties—was repaid with the 1962 Sino-Indian War, in which China seized the Aksai Chin Plateau while India lacked roads to deploy troops. This permanently embittered India, caused it to double its army, and foreclosed a potential China-India partnership that Paine argues could have fundamentally altered the world order. It also pushed Pakistan toward China as a counterbalance, with Pakistan ceding territory to China in 1963 in what Paine suspects was a nuclear-development bargain.
The US-Pakistan relationship is analyzed as inherently transactional and cyclical: the US needed Pakistan for U2 spy plane bases, listening posts, and later as a conduit to China and a base for Afghan insurgency funding, but repeatedly abandoned Pakistan when strategic needs shifted. The arms embargo during the 1965 India-Pakistan War, the U2 shootdown scandal, and the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad without Pakistani knowledge are cited as recurring betrayals. Meanwhile, the US consistently failed to align with India because befriending one South Asian power automatically alienated the other, and India's Fabian socialist orientation, non-alignment posture, and leaders' skill at insulting American VIPs made partnership difficult.
The 1971 Bangladesh War is presented as a case study in strategic moral compromise: Nixon and Kissinger suppressed condemnation of Pakistan's military genocide in East Pakistan (with casualties estimated between 300,000 and 3 million) because Pakistan was serving as the secret mail carrier for Nixon's opening to China. India, furious at US inaction, signed a military pact with the Soviet Union, invaded East Pakistan, and liberated Bangladesh—with Soviet vetoes blocking UN intervention. Paine argues this war triggered nuclear proliferation on both sides, as India concluded it needed nuclear weapons against China and Pakistan concluded it needed them against a now-dominant India.
Paine introduces the concept of 'frozen conflicts' as deliberate strategic tools: outside powers fund insurgencies (Tibet, Kashmir, Naxalites, Baloch) to pin adversaries without bearing costs themselves, while local populations bear catastrophic human and economic losses. She applies this framework to Korea and Palestine as well. The lecture concludes with strategic takeaways: identify primary adversaries before intervening, reassess assumptions frequently, recognize unfeasible problems, and understand that great power alignment can resolve conflicts that bilateral diplomacy cannot. In the Q&A, Paine discusses the second Cold War with China, Russia's strategic vulnerability in Siberia, the appeal of Marxism to decolonizing nations, near-misses with nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Able Archer, and why the Industrial Revolution originated in Europe rather than China.
Key Insights
- Paine argues that China's 1962 invasion of India to seize the Aksai Chin Plateau permanently foreclosed a potential China-India partnership that, had it formed, would have created a fundamentally different world order—making it one of the costliest strategic own-goals in modern history, since China gained territory but manufactured a permanent enemy out of a formerly generous friend.
- Paine contends that the US-Pakistan alliance under Eisenhower's 'pactomania' was self-defeating: arming Pakistan to contain the Soviets drove India toward the Soviet Union, meaning the US intervention directly produced the Soviet alignment it was trying to prevent—a dynamic Eisenhower himself later admitted was 'perhaps the worst kind of plan and decision we could ever have made.'
- Paine identifies the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict as the pivotal moment that reshuffled global alignments: when the Soviets asked the US if they could nuclear-strike China and the US refused, Mao concluded the Soviets were his primary adversary rather than the US, giving America the strategic 'swing position' it exploited by allying with China to overextend the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.
- Paine argues that Nixon and Kissinger's decision to suppress condemnation of Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh—killing an estimated 300,000 to 3 million people—in order to preserve Pakistan as a secret conduit to Beijing triggered a cascade of unintended consequences: India signed a military pact with the USSR, Pakistan's loss of East Pakistan pushed it toward nuclear weapons, and India's fear of China did the same, accelerating exactly the proliferation the US sought to prevent.
- Paine describes 'frozen conflicts' like Kashmir as deliberate strategic instruments where outside powers (China funding Kashmiri insurgency to pin India, Pakistan funding it to bleed India) bear no costs while local populations suffer catastrophic casualties and economic stagnation—and argues these conflicts become more intractable over time precisely because the veto players profiting from instability can derail peace with minimal effort, such as a single round of package bombs.
Topics
Full transcript available for MurmurCast members
Sign Up to Access