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Guest Column

In November 2021, President Joe Biden proposed opening “strategic stability talks” with China during his virtual summit with President Xi Jinping. That proposal reflected Washington’s longstanding but repeatedly frustrated goal of starting an official dialogue with Beijing on issues related to the employment and escalation of nuclear forces. Biden’s proposal also reflected new US concerns about China’s rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal and development of delivery systems, including advanced hypersonic missiles.

Since then, the list of active disputes between China and the US has only gotten longer, reinforcing the logic for the two sides to seek “guardrails” against dangerous escalation. Drawing from Cold War experience with the Soviet Union, dialogues on nuclear matters seem a smart way to avoid unnecessary risks, even in what looks to be an increasingly adversarial relationship.

Yet, a purely bilateral US approach to strategic stability with China would prove inadequate to the task at hand. Today, some of the greatest threats to nuclear peace stem from the “cascading security dilemma” that links the United States and China to other nuclear powers, especially India and Pakistan. China’s latest investments in nuclear warheads and delivery systems—presumably made with the principal aim of deterring the US—will have immediate and direct consequences for India’s nuclear security calculations and investments. Those, in turn, will affect Pakistan’s.

Some of the Cold War’s most dangerous moments, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Able Archer war scare of 1983, came when the superpowers struggled with the complications of working with allies and partners. Misperceptions, mistakes, and coordination problems all multiply, as does the challenge of clarifying red lines and the nature of defensive commitments to allies and partners. Recent developments in Southern Asia, where nuclear-armed India, Pakistan, and China share contested borders, and where the US-India strategic partnership is tightening just as China-Pakistan ties are more important than ever, could pose similar if not greater challenges for escalation management.

In Southern Asia, both “arms race stability” and “crisis stability” face new threats. Although Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals are far smaller and apparently growing less rapidly than China’s (which is itself a fraction of the size of the US or Russian arsenal), New Delhi and Islamabad are actively developing and fielding new delivery systems and platforms that will materially alter the prospects for escalation in future crises. In the early 2000s, Pakistan’s focus on tactical nuclear warheads captured attention because it threatened to introduce nuclear weapons into the battlefield at the earliest stage of a conflict with India and raised worrisome questions about command and control under wartime conditions. Over the past decade, India has launched the INS Arihant, a nuclear ballistic missile submarine, as part of its effort to build a full nuclear ‘triad’. This nascent naval component to India’s nuclear arsenal also poses new escalatory risks, particularly as India fears ‘two-front’ threats from China and Pakistan across a vast swath of territory on land and sea. In sum, the current moment resembles the early stages of the US-Soviet Cold War, when the emergence of new nuclear capabilities far outpaced calls for restraint, and the terms and practices of deterrence were not clearly established.

Simultaneously, regional hostilities and mistrust are worsening. In 2019, Southern Asia became the first place where two nuclear armed states—India and Pakistan—launched air strikes on each other’s territories. And while the 2020 India-China border skirmishes saw the use of barbarically low-tech weapons, each side quickly brought considerable additional force to their disputed border, including tanks and artillery. Although the prospect of an India-China war remains low, and the intentional use of nuclear weapons even lower, it is hard to be as confident of their ability to peacefully manage differences without violent escalation as it was even a decade ago. Often cited “No First Use” commitments by both India and China tend to hold limited weight, especially as neither New Delhi nor Beijing has been entirely transparent about its nuclear doctrine and under what conditions it would consider using the weapons in its arsenal.

Official government-to-government discussion of strategic stability in Southern Asia is shockingly limited, given the risks and stakes at hand. India and Pakistan can claim some historical successes with risk reduction measures, such as missile test pre-notification and non-targeting of nuclear facilities agreements, but most of their dialogues are now moribund. The United States and Pakistan have held strategic stability dialogues in the past, and US officials have for many years attempted to engage in related conversations with counterparts in New Delhi. But India, China, and the United States have no recent experience of sustained official discussions on these sensitive issues.

The list of obstacles to starting these talks is long. Many of the world’s most prominent multilateral institutions devoted to nuclear nonproliferation and arms control exclude India and Pakistan, both non-signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Chinese experts routinely point to this issue as an insuperable barrier to opening talks on nuclear-related matters with India, although there have been attempted dialogues at the unofficial track-two level. And despite fifteen years of semi-official (Track-1.5) talks between Beijing and Washington, in 2019 the Trump administration chose to suspend that dialogue because the Chinese showed no sign of transitioning to an official format and, more than that, seemed to be stringing along the unofficial talks without a sufficiently constructive purpose or prospect of greater Chinese transparency.

India and Pakistan also express little enthusiasm for talks, despite obvious opportunities to update and refine their existing risk reduction mechanisms at relatively low cost. Deteriorating US-Pakistan relations, especially in the aftermath of the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, place a damper on talks between Washington and Islamabad. Finally, despite widely proclaimed improvements in the India-US relationship, there is little evidence that New Delhi is eager to entertain a detailed conversation about nuclear crisis management.

Given this context, prospects for constructive dialogue are most likely to advance along one of the following four tracks. First, within any nascent US-China strategic stability talks, topics related to crisis management in South Asia could be raised, as Chinese experts have in the past shown a greater openness to such conversations than to many others. Second, in those same conversations, US officials could encourage the start of separate bilateral talks between India and China, referring to compelling policy recommendations advanced by Chinese analysts in the recent past and, in addition, by suggesting that such a dialogue might serve, in itself, as a confidence-building measure at a difficult time in India-China relations. Third, as US officials move forward in talks with India to advance defence ties and even to help fill gaps created by Russia’s diminished manufacturing capabilities in the aftermath of the Ukraine War, they could aim to incorporate strategic stability talks into the process. Fourth, and last, Washington could use the diplomatic openings offered by a new, post-Imran Khan government in Islamabad as an opportunity to reopen a dialogue there too.

To be clear, strategic stability talks are not ends in themselves. At best, they can deliver insights that enable participants to avoid unnecessarily risky policies, open channels for crisis communication, and eventually pave the way to more substantive risk reduction measures if the geopolitical winds blow in a more favorable direction. Yet the Biden administration is smart to count even these as important aims, and it would be wiser still to seek them not just with Beijing, but in the wider context of Southern Asia as a whole.

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Daniel Markey is a senior advisor on South Asia at the United States Institute of Peace. He is the author of China’s Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia and one of the co-chairs of the 2022 USIP Senior Study Group report on “Enhancing Strategic Stability in Southern Asia”.

Image credit: Flickr/Public.Resource.Org

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