Israel is often falsely accused of being a ‘colonial outpost’ with the objective of destabilizing the oil-rich and strategically important Middle East.
According to this theory, the West, primarily the US, but also Western European countries like the UK and France, arms Israel with the latest weapons, supports it financially, provides it with diplomatic cover at the UN, and shares its intelligence resources to ensure that Israel not only survives, but thrives in a difficult neighbourhood, to the collective determinant of the Middle East.
Arab countries often complain that when they fight Israel, they’re fighting the collective might of the Western states.
Take, for instance, the Qualitative Military Edge (QME) policy of the US, which refers to the US commitment to ensuring that Israel maintains a superior military capability compared to its potential adversaries. This means that Israel’s military should have a “qualitative military edge,” meaning its military is superior in terms of technical characteristics, such as advanced weapons, command and control systems, and intelligence capabilities.
In practical terms, it means that the weapons the US gives to Israel must be technologically superior to the weapons Washington provides to other countries in the Middle East.
For example, Israel is the only country in the Middle East operating the fifth-generation US combat aircraft, the F-35, even though countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, long-term American allies, have also requested Washington to sell these jets.
According to research by the Council on Foreign Relations, Israel has received the highest military aid from the US between 1946 and 2024, receiving over USD 228 billion in military assistance, despite not being a member of NATO, and even lacking a formal defense pact with the US.
As much as 78 % of Israeli weapons come from the US.
Further, in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the US has vetoed over 45 resolutions critical of Israel. Since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the United States has vetoed five UNSC resolutions related to Israel, specifically calling for a ceasefire or addressing the situation in Gaza.
Together, this support means that the US can destabilize the Middle Eastern countries by propping up Israel. Thanks to this policy, the Arab pan-nationalism of the early 1950s and 1960s was never able to succeed.
Instead, the Middle East today, despite its strategic geographical location and oil wealth, is a fractured polity with some countries critically dependent on US arms, while others oppose US influence in the region.
This US strategy of using Israel as a ‘colonial outpost’ on the hill in the Middle East is not lost on anyone. Now, as China aspires for a superpower status, it is propping up its own Israel.
China’s “Israel”
While China is competing with the US for hegemony, Beijing also recognizes that India is its long-term geostrategic and geopolitical competitor, both within Asia and globally.
India is currently the world’s fourth-largest economy. However, by 2027, India will become the world’s third-largest economy, overtaking Germany. Moreover, India is presently the world’s fastest-growing large economy and is set to grow faster than China for the foreseeable future.
India is already the world’s most populous country, having overtaken China in 2023. While the Chinese economy is nearly six times the size of the Indian economy, when it comes to human capital, New Delhi is a much more formidable challenger to China than the US.
As India becomes stronger, the interests of India and China are likely to clash in various regions, including Southeast Asia, the Indo-Pacific, South Asia, and Central Asia.
India enjoys historical cultural linkages and depth in both Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Though a weaker economic and military power than the US and China, India enjoys a cultural influence in these regions that is unrivaled.
Even within China, for instance, in regions like Tibet, India’s historical cultural influences are much more profound than those of China.
Most importantly, India and China share a nearly 3,500 km-long contested border. The two countries fought a bloody war in 1962. There was a major flare-up in 1967 at the Nathu La Pass.
More recently, a 73-day-long crisis occurred at Doklam in 2018, and a major bloody clash took place in the Ladakh sector in 2020.
As India’s economy and influence grow, this unsettled border dispute is set to flare up again.
However, China is developing a new strategy, one inspired straight from the US playbook, i.e., turning Pakistan into China’s Israel to keep India off-balance.
India’s Strategic Nightmare: Two-Front War Scenario
Over the last decade, the Indian military has been working on a nightmarish scenario. One, where India has to fight a war simultaneously on two fronts, with Pakistan on the north-western front and with China on the northern front.
However, during the latest India-Pakistan clash last month, New Delhi witnessed a new military doctrine taking shape.
This strategy involves China supplying Pakistan with its latest and most potent weapons system, supporting Pakistan’s war effort with its satellite network, leading Pakistan’s wartime strategy, using India-Pakistan clashes to combat test its weapons systems, supporting Pakistan financially with soft loans and deferred payments, providing it diplomatic cover at international bodies like the UN, and conducting joint military drills with the Pakistan Army.
In effect, arming Pakistan to the teeth and boosting its war-waging capabilities to keep India tied down in South Asia, so that New Delhi could not become a credible challenger to China on the international stage.
This isn’t a ‘two-front war’ scenario; rather, India is battling on a single front, the combined capacities and capabilities of two states. All this while, China can keep Indian forces distracted by maintaining aggressive deployments on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with India.
This strategy has its advantages for China. It allows Beijing to degrade Indian military capabilities without getting into actual combat, something the Western countries have done successfully in Ukraine against Russia.
It allows China to combat-test its weapons systems, thereby boosting its demand in the international market.
Most importantly, it will allow China to hurt India without having to deal with the blowback effects of having attacked a fellow developing country from the Global South. China is aware that a war with India would impact its credibility as a leader of the Global South movement against Western countries, as India has considerable goodwill among countries in the Global South.
However, harming India through Pakistan will solve this geopolitical public relations nightmare for China.
Pakistan, in this Chinese strategy, is nothing more than a pawn. However, Pakistan is more than a happy pawn as long as it helps Islamabad achieve a hyphenation with New Delhi.
Operation Sindoor And New Frontiers Of China-Pakistan Military Cooperation
According to SIPRI, between 2020 and 2024, nearly 81 % of Pakistani weapons came from China. This shows that Pakistan today is more critically dependent on Chinese arms than Israel ever was on US arms.
During Operation Sindoor, Pakistan not only used Chinese warplanes like JF-17 and J-10C, air-to-air missiles like PL-15, air defense systems like HQ-9 and HQ-16, and drones, but also used the Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System to complete its ‘kill-chain’.
The four-day India-Pakistan war has proved a boon for the Chinese combat jets, as many new countries, including Indonesia and Azerbaijan, are considering buying Chinese jets following the war.
The brief war has demonstrated to China the multifaceted advantages of fighting India through Pakistan.
However, the war also exposed many glaring vulnerabilities in Pakistan’s defense architecture. Chief among them was Pakistan’s inability to counter India’s BrahMos missiles, which penetrated Pakistani defenses and hit multiple airbases. Following the war, China is leading the effort to bridge those gaps.
China will supply Pakistan with fifth-generation J-35 fighter jets, HQ-19 AD systems, KJ-500 Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) aircraft, and additional CM-400 AKG Air-Launched Ballistic Missiles (ALBM). There is also speculation that China will supply its FK-400 mobile air defense system, which utilizes high-powered microwave weapons, to Pakistan.
China has also offered a debt deferment of $3.7 billion.
Additionally, Chinese telecom giant Huawei will train 100,000 Pakistanis in Information Technology (IT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
During the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars, and even during the 1999 Kargil conflict, Chinese support to Pakistan was mostly verbal. It was clear that while strategically empowering Pakistan, China also took care not to antagonize India completely. That strategic balancing was missing during the recent clash when China came out unequivocally in Islamabad’s support.
One main reason could be that till the 1990s, the Indian and Chinese economies were fairly similar in size. However, during the last two decades, the Chinese economy has grown nearly six times the size of the Indian economy, giving Beijing new confidence in its dealings with New Delhi.
Beijing is now much more confident in openly siding with Pakistan and arming it with its latest and most potent weapons. In all probability, this China-Pakistan nexus will only grow stronger in the coming years.
India should recognize quickly that the next time it battles Pakistan, it might be fighting the inexhaustible military-industrial complex of China.
The Limits Of Multi-alignment?
During the Cold War, India had a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union to counterbalance the Pakistan-China axis and the Pakistan-US axis.
Since the end of the Cold War, India has doubled down on its strategic autonomy. This geopolitical freedom has paid off well for India over the last two decades.
However, India may have reached a dead end with its multi-alignment policy. During Operation Sindoor, while China, Turkey, and Azerbaijan stood steadfast with Pakistan, hardly any country openly supported India’s narrative.
India is a founding member of the BRICS and a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the G-20, and the QUAD. India has also attended all G-7 summits since 2019.
India has a historical defense partnership with Russia and a strong defense relationship with France, the US, and Israel as well. However, New Delhi’s insistence on preserving strategic autonomy could also mean a lack of open diplomatic support at critical junctures.
As China and Pakistan transform their all-weather friendship into a strategic defense partnership, and Beijing props up Islamabad as a counterweight to check India’s rise, New Delhi must balance strategic autonomy with the need to cultivate reliable friendships that can deliver during testing times.
- Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK.
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- He can be reached at ahlawat.sumit85 (at) gmail.com
