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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   514 thread views

Transnational Thursday for April 24, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Shutting off the river is a very big deal if it stays that way. They didn’t even do that during the 2019 war IIRC.

The rivers are already shut off for all intents and purposes. Pushing it further can set scary precedents in the sub-continent.

India could go upstream and cut off rivers at the source, but Pakistan's best friend (China) controls even more important rivers upstream. If China did a tit-for-tat than India would lose a lot more than they'd gain.

It's the main reason I consider Indian inaction to the Chinese annexation of Tibet to be the worst strategic misstep of a newly independent India. And for those who say 'India did not have the resources', Tibet is a defenders dream. All supply lines are cutoff for half the year. You can't lay siege, you can't set up shop, you can't invade. Well, I have enough reasons to dislike Nehru already. But here's one more.

In the months surrounding the People’s Liberation Army’s October 1950 entry into Tibet, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru read the same cable traffic yet drew radically different conclusions. Patel’s 7 November 1950 memorandum to Nehru warned that Tibet’s fall would erase the Himalayan buffer, expose India’s “almost undefended” northern flank, and reveal “China’s carefully laid plan to establish its domination” across Asia. Nehru, by contrast, saw the episode as unwelcome but unavoidable; he registered a formal protest, yet pressed ahead with recognizing the People’s Republic of China, advocating its U.N. seat, and negotiating the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement. Their divergent assessments shaped Indian policy for a decade and still frame today’s debate on how the annexation might have been answered differently. (sauce - O3 mini with search)

Ofc Patel was on the right side of history. Everything I read about him makes him seem like a 'Lee Kwan Yew' style pragmatic statesman that India needed. But ofc, Nehru chose naive optimism as he always did. Oh, how I wish the man had just gone to Cambridge and been a brown Francis Fukuyama instead.

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