The Causes of the Vietnam War

How Indian Expansionism Led the U.S. into One of Its Biggest Foreign Policy Blunders of the 20th Century

The Vietnam War is recognized as one of the major foreign policy blunders in recent US history. Its casualties include more than fifty-eight thousand American lives lost, a hundred and fifty thousand US soldiers wounded, three million deaths in Vietnam, and a million deaths in Cambodia and Laos. The environmental damage to Vietnam and Laos still lingers to this day.

How did the US get involved in the Vietnam War? If you read up on the subject or ask ChatGPT, you'll get the usual reasons. While the conflict has been written about from all sorts of perspectives, with most participants and contemporaries still alive, what is incredible is that people today remain oblivious to one major factor that drove the US into a war with North Vietnam. These accounts of the war are not wrong; the problem is that these people were too close to the conflict. They saw the trees but missed the forest. What they wrote are the trees of the Vietnam War. This article is about the forest of the Vietnam War—and that forest is India. India is far removed from the region, both geographically and geopolitically, and its political clout does not extend beyond its immediate neighborhood. To the extent that anyone has an opinion of India, the worst of it is probably of a country that is extremely dirty, chaotic, and dysfunctional but otherwise harmless¹. So, how could India possibly have played any role in the Vietnam War?

To understand how this could have happened, we need to go back to the middle of the last century in Asia. At the time, geopolitically, many moving parts were shaping the region. Shortly after World War II ended in 1945, a latent civil war in China erupted into open warfare, culminating in the Chinese Communists taking control of mainland China, while the ousted government retreated to the island of Taiwan in 1949. Meanwhile, two years before the regime change in China, an exhausted Britain withdrew from the subcontinent in 1947, and its native people (what we now call Indians) were gifted an instant country. British largesse meant that, for the first time in the history of the subcontinent, its people were put in charge of an economy that was, by far, the most developed outside the Western sphere.

Historically, there has never been a single unified polity on the subcontinent. When the British first arrived, the region consisted of thousands of fiefdoms, each controlled by local strongmen. It was a world unto itself, operating on its own set of morals and social norms, very different from those of other civilizations. At that time, there was no such thing as India or the concept of being Indian². Winston Churchill later summed it up in his pithy remarks by saying, “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.” The people were a hodgepodge of disparate groups, speaking in myriad tongues, living in close proximity but suspicious of each other. In the north, the Mughal Empire was the largest ruler. The court language of the Mughals was Urdu, a transliteration of the dominant vernacular in the region using Persian/Arabic scripts. With the introduction of a written language by the Muslims, the subcontinent finally had a recorded history. The Hindi script had yet to be invented by the British³.

The Mughal Empire was the first foreign ruler in the subcontinent, and it brought law and order, along with a degree of organization, to the subcontinent. Under Mughal rule, commerce thrived, and the economy expanded. The fortunes of the subcontinent continued with the arrival of the next foreign rulers, who came from a land even farther away and had a higher level of cultural attainment than the Mughals. The British not only created a nation but also imbued civilization into the indigenous people. The British initially were only interested in trading, but what began as a company's commercial business eventually morphed into a political enterprise under the British Crown, known as the British Raj.

Over the next two hundred years, the British invested immense amounts of energy into nation-building, transforming the subcontinent from an amorphous state into a promising nation and unifying its mishmash of people into a national identity called "Indian," making them proud⁴. India came into existence because the British created the country from scratch and subsequently relinquished power to its subjects. Five decades later, in Africa, the white South African government also handed over a first-world country to its native people. The two momentous events not only bear similarities in their historical significance, but the dynamics affecting the two figures most associated with these events were also congruent⁵. In both cases, India's Nehru and South Africa's Mandela were persecuted by their colonial rulers as troublemakers. Yet, both were rehabilitated and admired, acquiring an aura of moral authority once their roles shifted from dissidents to leaders of their respective countries. There was genuine goodwill among Western elites and their populace for the two new countries. Jawaharlal Nehru was the Nelson Mandela of his time. But unlike Mandela's South Africa, Nehru's India was marked by hubris and far more ambitious in a nefarious way.

As the subcontinent transitioned from a colonial enterprise to an independent country, British historian Arnold Toynbee noted that while the people were subjects of the British Crown, they were largely indifferent to British India's borders and even condemned the British Empire's annexation of distant territories as immoral. In 1921, India's Congress Party went so far as to urge neighboring states not to enter into treaties with the Imperial Power (the British Raj). However, once Indians assumed sovereignty, their perspective underwent a complete reversal. Suddenly, the once-distant lands of the British Indian Empire were seen as sacred Indian territory. Even more alarmingly, India began asserting territorial claims over areas that had never been claimed, let alone controlled, by the British Raj. The British had left an indelible impression on their subjects, and the new rulers of the subcontinent were determined to perpetuate the glory of the British Empire in its perverted indigenous form⁶. In essence, aspiring to emulate the British Raj, India became expansionist in its own right.

In Arnold Toynbee's words:

"It is queer that lines drawn by British officials should have been consecrated as precious national assets of the British Indian Empire's non-British successor states. At the time when those lines were drawn, the transaction produced no stir among the ... Indian ... subjects, as they then were, of the British crown. If any of them paid any attention to what Durand and McMahon were doing, they would have written it off as just another move in the immoral game of power politics that the British Imperialists were playing at the Indian taxpayers' expense. The present consecration of these British-made lines as heirlooms in the successor states' national heritages is an unexpected and unfortunate turn of history's wheel."

Contrast this to China's approach with respect to its territorial settlement; let's juxtapose a different observation made by American political scientist M. Taylor Fravel in his study of China's boundary management with its neighbors:

"In its territorial disputes, however, China has been less prone to violence and more cooperative than a singular view of an expansionist state suggests. … Contrary to others who emphasize the violent effects of nationalism, which would suggest inflexibility in conflicts over national sovereignty, China has been quite willing to offer territorial concessions despite historical legacies of external victimization and territorial dismemberment under the Qing." ⁷

The worldview of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, exemplifies the sentiment noted by Arnold Toynbee. Nehru was quintessentially Indian—slippery, treacherous⁸, and a man of two faces. To his Western interlocutors, he was well known for being preachy, self-righteous, and eager to lecture about the immorality of Western colonialism⁹. Those who interacted with him might have found him self-righteous, while those who did not may have seen him as idealistic, if not naïve. But to India's neighbors, Nehru carried himself with more pomposity than a viceroy of old. To him, colonialism was bad only because India was at the receiving end of it. In words and deeds, Nehru saw India as the new hegemon in the region, a civilizational center with the right to put faraway lands under its dominion. The real India—a thuggish bully that coveted its neighbors' land and had a penchant for meddling in their internal affairs—has never entered the collective consciousness of the West. Quite the opposite, in the Western imagination, India is romanticized as a land of spirituality, where its people are often seen as more concerned with enlightenment than hegemony. Under Western propaganda, the fictional India had acquired a reputation as a peaceful nation despite the ample evidence to point to the contrary¹⁰.

One reason for this disconnection is that India came into being under the auspices of the British, which makes it innocuous as it was created under the world order sanctioned by the British. Another reason is British colonial guilt, which prevents them from being critical of India, much like how Germany is unable to chastise Zionist Israel. In the international arena, many Britons view India as their protégé, leading to a natural instinct to coddle the nation. Successive Indian leaders also played into the stereotype of India as a spiritual land. When Indian leaders visited Western countries, they would often clasp their hands together as if praying—an image of piety timed perfectly for the cameras. Finally, Indians are by nature glib; they can make whatever they say convincing. The proliferation of scammers and politicians of Indian ancestry in Western societies is testimony to this aptitude.

Nehru's arrogance and pretentious demeanor toward neighboring countries are deplorable but unsurprising. In India, the millennium-old caste mindset permeates every aspect of their culture, so just as society has hierarchies of people, the world has hierarchies of countries, too. Riding on the foundation laid by two hundred years of nation-building by skilled and industrious British civil servants and bureaucrats, India's standing among the community of nations at that juncture in history unquestionably positioned it as the most dominant country in all of Asia. At the time, East Asia had yet to emerge from the devastation brought on by World War II. China, in particular, India's eastern neighbor, was not only devastated by the war but was also derisively called the "Sick Man of Asia" as European colonial powers pushed it around during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Interestingly, the way the two nations viewed each other in those early days could not have been more different. China's perception of India was colored by their own history, and they saw India as an even bigger victim of Western colonialism than themselves. While the British and other colonial powers could only gain a foothold in China here and there, they were never able to subjugate it fully. In contrast, the entire subcontinent was under British rule. Some empathetic Chinese even felt a sense of camaraderie toward India due to their shared historical experience. India, on the other hand, saw itself as an up-and-coming imperial power in Asia and was determined to make sure the Chinese acknowledge it. In 1955, Nehru would put China in its place at an international gathering of third-world leaders in Bandung, Indonesia¹¹. There, Nehru was ostentatiously friendly to the Chinese delegation in a paternalistic manner, making a show of taking Zhou Enlai under his wing, much like an older brother looking out for his younger sibling. The whole exercise of Nehru's showmanship was aimed at establishing that China was subordinate to India¹².

At the beginning of the last century, the expansionist British Raj consolidated all of South Asia under its rule. The logical extension of its colonial ambitions was northward, which brought it into conflict with historic Tibetan homelands. In 1944, in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War, the British Raj annexed Dirang Dzong, a Tibetan administrative center subordinate to the Tawang monastery. "Dzong" means "fort" in Tibetan. Both the Chinese government (then the Nationalist Government of the Republic of China, based in Kunming at the time) and the Tibetan government in Lhasa protested this British action. In February 1947, six months before the British relinquished its rule in South Asia, the Chinese Nationalist Government (the government of the Republic of China) lodged a formal complaint with the newly established Indian mission in China, protesting British India's border incursions into Chinese territory. In August 1947, Britain left South Asia, and India was created as the successor state to the British. There was no lapse in institutional knowledge regarding British India's border dispute with China during the transfer of power from the British to the Indians, as Nehru later recalled that these protests were already on his desk when he took office. Two months later, in October 1947, the Tibetan government in Lhasa sent a formal request to New Delhi, urging the newly independent Indian government to withdraw all territorial claims made by the British Raj between the McMahon Line and the traditional border beneath the foothills. They also demanded the return of territories stretching from Ladakh to Assam, including Sikkim and the Darjeeling district. As the defeat of China's Nationalist government became imminent in the civil war, the Republic of China's ambassador in New Delhi reminded the Indian government that China did not recognize the McMahon Line and considered the Simla Convention invalid. This meant that Nehru was not only aware of the diplomatic protests made to its predecessor, the British Raj but also received repeated representations from both the Tibetan Lhasa government and the Chinese Nationalist government under his administration about India's territorial encroachments. Thus, there is no doubt that Nehru was fully aware that these regions were contested by India's neighbors. Moreover, the map of India in Nehru's own book Discovery of India, written while he was incarcerated before India's independence, does not include these regions¹³. In October 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), and its civil war rival, the Republic of China (ROC), retreated to Taiwan. Two months later, in December 1949, India recognized the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China, effectively cutting off the diplomatic channel that the ROC had used to protest to India. Communist China, for its part, ceased all diplomatic protests, unlike the Nationalist government. Whether this change was a quid pro quo or an independent decision by the CCP is a matter for future historians to consider.

On a cold February morning in 1951¹⁴, Nehru's India trekked up to Tawang, evicted the officials posted there by the Tibetan Lhasa government and annexed the town^{15, 16}. Tawang is the birthplace of the Sixth Dalai Lama¹⁷ and home to the four-hundred-year-old Tawang Monastery¹⁸. As the last major Tibetan frontier town before the area transitions into a tribal region inhabited by people of Sino-Tibetan-Burmese descent, Tawang's monastic authority historically maintained close ties with the central government in Beijing. During the Chinese Republican era, the flag of the Republic of China (the blue-sky, white sun, and a wholly red earth flag) flew in Tawang, just as the Qing dynasty flag had during the Qing dynasty. Predictably, the Tibetan authorities in Lhasa protested but were simply informed by the Indian political officer that India was taking over Tawang. The protests were ignored. The Republic of China (by then already relocated to Taiwan) also vehemently denounced India's action. Curiously, the Chinese Communist Party made no noise¹⁹. Communist China's baffling silence is troubling from the perspectives of the Tibetan Lhasa government and the Nationalist government in Taiwan, but it must have emboldened India. In 1954, New Delhi published a new map showing South Tibet as part of India, in addition to Sikkim and Bhutan—two of China's neighbors for hundreds of years²⁰. India would later annex Sikkim in 1975^{21, 22}. In 1959, in a series of letters exchanged between Nehru and Zhou, Zhou, after years of implying that China would respect the alignment of the McMahon Line, offered to concede South Tibet to India. Remarkably, this offer was rejected because Nehru also claimed Aksai Chin as Indian territory, a demand the Communists refused to accept. Any neutral observer would have concluded that the Communists were bending over backward to accommodate India's expansionism, even at the cost of betraying China's territorial integrity. To India, China's meekness only reinforced their belief that their country was the dominant power in Asia. After all, the only response China offered after India annexed territory three times the size of Taiwan was a letter of territorial concession from Zhou. Nehru and his officials must have interpreted China's behavior as a sign of submission, which, in Indian culture, weakness only invites contempt. The Communist Party's inaction in the face of India's territorial advances was likely a result of practical considerations, as it had only seized power a few years earlier by force and was still managing a restless population, the majority of whom had no affinity for the new regime. Diverting resources to safeguard a peripheral territory at its western extremities could risk spreading its forces too thin, as China's strategic concerns were primarily focused on the eastern front. Chinese land could be sacrificed to ensure the regime's hold on power. The old China could do nothing about India's territorial intrusion except complain. The new China didn't even complain.

The last time Nehru and Zhou met face-to-face was at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. According to the record, the boundary issue between the two countries was never addressed. Instead, Zhou used the opportunity to expound on the PRC's "Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence," one of which pledged that the PRC would never settle its boundary disputes by force²³. This must have sounded like music to Nehru's ears, as China had essentially declared a preemptive unilateral ceasefire. Nehru, in contrast, proclaimed that India had the right to defend itself against intruders into its territory. Speeches given at international conferences are often a way for leaders to express their country's position on various issues, but they also provide a window into the leader's state of mind and offer insights into their thinking. One might wonder why Nehru took such a defiant tone, considering that the borders between the two countries had been peaceful and India was the only one disrupting the status quo. Surely, the British were not going to recolonize the subcontinent, and India dwarfed all of its neighbors except China. Nehru's proclamation of India's right to self-defense was certainly not due to any perceived threat from China; rather, it was a smokescreen to feign victimhood in anticipation of India's own aggression toward China.

By the end of the 1950s, India's territorial expansion into its smaller neighbors had not been met with any meaningful resistance. China had effectively shown its weak hand regarding the status of South Tibet. Had Nehru accepted China's offer, India would have gained a new chunk of territory that the British Raj had in its later years coveted but had not yet made a reality. The problem, however, was that such an agreement would have locked India's northern borders into a binding treaty. Since China had already demonstrated that its territory could be compromised, Nehru calculated that if India were to continue pursuing land acquisitions beyond what the British Raj had aspired to, the best course of action would be to keep pushing India's territorial limits without committing to any formal agreement. The problem, though, was that barring the unlikely scenario in which China would remain silent in the face of India's continued intrusions, this approach would expose India as the aggressor. In other words, how could India seize land from its neighbor while still making its neighbor look bad and portraying India as reasonable in the eyes of the world? This is where Nehru's semantic slipperiness came into play. He often made two key statements: (1) that, in the cause of peace, he would talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and (2) that over India's sacred boundaries, he would absolutely never negotiate. Nehru's distinction between "talks" and "negotiations" allowed him to maintain an image of openness to dialogue while avoiding any settlement with China by effortlessly switching between the two statements²⁴. Meanwhile, Indian troops were quietly setting up posts further and further to the north.

In 1961, India scored another victory with the annexation of Goa, a Portuguese colony that predated the British Raj. While China had vowed not to settle its border disputes by force, India had no such constraint. Nehru ordered heavy bombings of Goa's airport, and the region quickly fell into India's hands. The annexation of Goa likely provided India with a morale boost, as it had defeated a European power. After this victory, Nehru shifted his focus back to China and began agitating for land north of the McMahon Line, launching what he called the Forward Policy. By the end of 1961, India's Forward Policy was in full swing, with border posts being established deeper and deeper into Chinese territory. China issued stern warnings that it would respond if India continued its incursions. Eventually, India began establishing a presence in areas that, by its own admission, were within China's borders (north of the McMahon Line). All the while, Nehru skillfully managed to create the impression that China was the aggressor, portraying India's actions as a mere response to China's encroachment—a testament to his verbal finesse²⁵.

In October 1962, after years of repeated warnings and failed attempts to bring India to the negotiating table, China launched an attack on India's positions in South Tibet, causing the Indian army to quickly fall into disarray and retreat. Tawang was returned to China’s control. In a state of panic, Nehru turned to Washington and London for help. In his letter to President John F. Kennedy, Nehru concluded with the following sentence²⁶:

"We on our part are determined to spare no effort until the threat posed by Chinese expansionist and aggressive militarism to freedom and independence is completely eliminated."

Nehru blatantly lied to JFK and the world. Let's pause for a moment and consider what transpired. A decade before Nehru's letter requesting US assistance, he followed through on the annexation of South Tibet—an action the British Raj had started but left unfinished due to its untimely departure from South Asia. The most charitable interpretation of Nehru's actions, the hypocrisy of which notwithstanding, is that he saw India as the rightful heir to the British Raj and, therefore, entitled to inherit all of its territorial claims, including those that existed only on paper. However, what Nehru did next, invading territory that the British Raj had never claimed, and by India's own reckoning, is within China, would be unjustifiable—other than India was what Nehru accused China of being: expansionist. Here, Nehru deployed another rhetorical trick. He began to assert that there was no territorial dispute with China and that all territory claimed by India was ipso facto Indian²⁷. This semantic sleight of hand—a legalistic claim that territory became Indian simply because India claimed it—became classic Nehru, designed to obscure India's territorial aggression with convoluted legal jargon. When China called for negotiations, Nehru responded with a hardline stance: India's "sacred territory" was non-negotiable. At the same time, Nehru portrayed India's border patrols, which were operating in areas the British Raj had never claimed, much less controlled, as simply defending against Chinese aggression, according to his twisted logic. Meanwhile, the United States, with its habitual bias toward supporting democracies, accepted Nehru's accusations without question. No one in JFK's administration ever critically examined Nehru's claims. His accusations were taken at face value.

As a result, President Kennedy swiftly ordered an airlift of weapons and supplies to India, with Britain joining in the effort to rush equipment to the country. American jet transports were landing in India at a rate of eight flights a day, each carrying roughly twenty tons of military equipment—automatic rifles, heavy mortars, and recoilless guns²⁸. Australia announced that it would supply weapons to help peace-loving India resist the Chinese aggressors. The democratic world appeared united in its support for India against an "expansionist" China. Three weeks later, in a second wave, China recaptured all of South Tibet. A month after that, China unilaterally withdrew to the north of the McMahon Line—an illegal line created through a diplomatic forgery and one that had never been recognized by any Chinese government, whether the Nationalist government of the Republic of China or the Communist People's Republic of China.

As Chinese forces routed Indian positions, the United States and the West pressured the Republic of China (Taiwan) to stand behind India and condemn its civil war rival across the Taiwan Strait. Instead, the Nationalist government of the Republic of China made it clear at the United Nations that the region was an integral part of the Republic of China and demanded that India withdraw from the areas it had illegally occupied²⁹.

As soon as the war ended, domestic recriminations in India began. The war was a national humiliation for India, as it not only exposed the impotence of the Indian military but also made the self-styled imperial power look pathetic in front of its smaller neighbors. To cover up his tracks, Nehru and his Congress party lied to their people and to the world by creating the narrative that China had backstabbed India—that a belligerent, expansionist China had attacked India unprovoked. By temperament, Indians are masters of obfuscation and sophistry. It took little effort for them to convince the world that India was a hapless victim minding its own business, only to be invaded by a warmongering China. The fact that China's unilateral withdrawal from a territory it had already captured is not something an expansionist would do mattered little to the Western mind. If the facts don't fit the narrative, facts are to be dismissed. All India needed to do was point out that it is a democracy, while China is an authoritarian Communist country, and sprinkle in some inversion of truth—and that would be enough to establish China's guilt. To the Americans, words like "democracy" and "communism" are not just political labels; they are emotive terms that stimulate primal feelings rather than rational thought. People in marketing know all too well that commercials appealing to the heart are far more powerful than those that appeal to the mind. Indians, being consummate salespeople by cultural disposition, understand this instinctively. In political discourse, whether foreign or domestic, facts don't matter; it's the narrative that counts. India has been pushing the narrative that it is an innocent victim against an expansionist China, sometimes with outright lies and other times with innuendo to this day. Americans, gullible as they are, took India's lie hook, line, and sinker.

The 1962 war was short, but its impact was long-lasting. In India, it marks the beginning of Indian hostility toward China. In the West, it was firmly established in the Western mind that China was a menacing threat to the world. By the time the United States engineered the Gulf of Tonkin false flag operation in 1964, the stage had already been set. A national consensus was taking shape among bipartisan policymakers that something needed to be done to thwart China's "expansion." After all, China had already invaded India and was poised to turn Southeast Asia into a Communist stronghold. So, sooner or later, China had to be confronted. McNamara, one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War, was on record saying that if China invaded India again, the United States would have to use nuclear weapons on China³⁰. Granted, distrust of Communism is an integral part of the cultural DNA of the United States, but without India's lie, no US president from the trigger-happy United States would have had enough political capital to go to war in Vietnam. It was the confluence of two factors—the fear of Communism and India's false narrative about an expansionist China—that provided the fuel and oxygen to ignite the Vietnam War. Without either component, the war would not have occurred. India's lie gave the Americans a raison d'être, and the rest is history. As Henry Kissinger is reported to have said at the time, if he had known the facts of the dispute earlier, his image of Beijing as inherently aggressive would have weakened, along with his support for US intervention in Indochina. Former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has also confirmed that the Washington view of China as aggressive was the key factor behind that intervention, with its three million deaths in Vietnam, plus another million or so deaths elsewhere in Indochina³¹. Similarly, William Bundy, former US Assistant Secretary of State, made one of the more perceptive comments on US Vietnam policy. Writing about the "Pentagon Papers" in the French foreign affairs magazine Preuves, he identifies "a fearful view of China" as the main factor behind the mistaken 1964/65 escalation in Vietnam³².

It's important to note that the nature of the India-China territorial dispute is very different from what people typically think of when it comes to territorial disputes between states. Territorial disputes in Europe, for example, usually involve a region's complex history, the waxing and waning of empires, shifting political alliances, and the jostling for power between competing ethnic groups, all of which eventually settled into a geographical equilibrium. India's territorial dispute with China has none of these characteristics. It is more akin to Turkey arguing with Sweden over the ownership of a piece of territory in Scandinavia. The disputed region has no connection to the Indian subcontinent. The people of the subcontinent and the people in the disputed regions are complete strangers to each other. In fact, until the area was occupied by the historically non-existent "India," the people of the subcontinent had never even set foot in the region. Why is India even there? Western apologists for India never question the absurdity of India's territorial stance. Yet, Indians to this day carry themselves as if they are the injured party in their dispute with China, despite the fact that India gained territory at China's expense.

The 1962 war concluded some sixty years ago, but the resolution to the territorial dispute is still nowhere in sight. Indians firmly believed that their country was in the right, while the majority of the Chinese are only vaguely aware, if at all, that their country fought a war with India. Over the years, the Communist Party's stance on South Tibet has hardened, and conceding it is no longer on the table³³. Today, the war still looms large in the Indian psyche but remains obscure history in China³⁴. Anyone even aware of it is most likely under the impression that the dispute is the legacy of the British Raj's expansionism—a relic of a bygone era before the People's Republic of China took power, with India merely inheriting the dispute. This is because the Chinese Communist Party has not been forthcoming with its people about how the two countries came to blows in 1962, as the truth would put it in a very bad light. After all, it is under the Chinese Communist Party's watch that a piece of territory was taken from China. This traitorous act is antithetical to the image the Chinese Communist Party projects to its citizenry—that China, under the new ownership of the Communist Party, is strong and able to stand up to foreign aggression. The reality is the opposite: unbeknownst to the Chinese general public, the "Century of Humiliation" didn't end with the founding of the People's Republic of China; it revived³⁵. A few years ago, the Communist Party promoted the "Wolf Warrior" image of China after a movie of the same name. This is clearly a feel-good propaganda piece designed for internal consumption, and the gullible Chinese public laps it up. Meanwhile, the Western and Indian media picked up on this and used it to ascertain the narrative of a belligerent China for their audience, resulting in a strange situation where a propaganda piece serves the utility of both sides. The reality is China under Mao was a nation that was indifferent to its territorial integrity and put the stability of the Communist regime above everything else. Every single neighbor of China has been able to capitalize on this.

The dynamics that drove the US into the Vietnam War are still in place today, and if anything, they are even stronger than they were in the 1960s. India continues to peddle the narrative that China is an expansionist power that needs to be confronted. However, unlike in earlier days, the United States today has a sizable Indian American community with strong ties to its home country. Americans of Indian ancestry are becoming more prominent in the political sphere. More and more Indian Americans are in the US Congress, and some are even presidential candidates. Some Indian American politicians have clearly operated with an India-centered agenda in the past. Meanwhile, the majority of White Americans remain as gullible to foreign manipulation as ever, and they are no match for the slick-talking Indians speaking with forked tongues. American pundits and academics alike are just as clueless as everyone else when it comes to China. Even many of the so-called China experts (academics with the right credentials) often don't know what they're talking about, and yet their opinions are sought after in think tank discussions—a case of the blind leading the blind.

Just as Americans are clueless about China, they are equally clueless about India. India, for the most part, is not the country Americans think it is. Except for the filthiness, chaos, rape, and dysfunction, it is neither spiritual nor peaceful. For reasons most likely rooted in its caste mentality, India has a predisposition to control its neighbors and make them subservient to it. In its short existence of seventy-eight years, India has demonstrated itself to be a bully and a land grabber. Every single one of its neighbors has part of its territories carved out by India¹⁰. People outside of South Asia are not cognizant that India is hated and resented in its neighborhood because of its overbearing manner. The country is too adroit to attract the attention of the international community regarding its expansionism and always provides a ready answer when its misdeeds are questioned³⁶.

In the grand scheme of things, what India did to its neighbors can be seen as committing property crimes, which is consistent with how Indians themselves behave when it comes to property. In India, everyone builds solid, high fences around their property the moment they buy it because neighbors will encroach on their land if given the opportunity³⁷. So, it is not surprising that when India came into existence and noticed its neighbor's land was unguarded, it began encroaching on it. However, in the case of China, India pushed too far and eventually received a slap on the wrist from China, and India has been feigning victimhood ever since.

One difference between today and in the past is that, back then, the Indian lie that got the US involved in the Vietnam War was a byproduct of India's dealings with China. The Vietnam War served no interest to India. Today, however, India has a self-interest in pushing the US into a war with China and presenting itself to the US as a counterweight to a menacing China. As China rises and grows stronger, India is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The "sick man of Asia" India once looked upon with contempt has now become India's biggest geopolitical challenge in the eyes of its strategic security community, surpassing its historic nemesis, Pakistan. Getting the US into a war with China would serve India on multiple fronts. First, it would significantly weaken China, which India sees as its primary threat. Second, India would like to see the two countries annihilate each other, paving the way for India to emerge as a superpower. As ridiculous as it may sound, most Indians suffer from the delusion of grandeur and are obsessed that their impoverished country, which can't even provide basic amenities to its people, is becoming a superpower. Third, Indians, to this day, are still nursing the wounds of the 1962 war and would like to get back to China if given the opportunity. Getting the US and China into a war of mutual self-destruction would be something India would like to happen.

Over the years, as China rises, another phenomenon is becoming more prominent on the internet that runs parallel to seeing China as India's enemy. It is the Indians calling for India and China to work together so they can rule the world. This is a troubling revelation, but it shows India's fetish to dominate others, only this time with a special twist that instead of India doing it alone, it wants to enlist China as its co-belligerent. India's fantasy is not going to happen as China has no intention of dominating its neighbors, let alone dominating the world. But this only reveals India's oversized ambitions.

Today, India is poor, dirty, angry, self-righteous, arrogant and defensive, yet it still harbors imperial ambitions. Many of its so-called security analysts call for India to become a "net security provider" for the region, which is just another way of saying that India should be a hegemon. India will never be a major power due to the low human capital of its population. Still, it can certainly exert influence on Western societies through the corrupt and deceptive nature of its people, especially those who have settled in Western countries.

The United States has paid a huge price for India's lie without even knowing it. Yet, to this day, India has not faced any consequences for its deception. It continues to lie with impunity because it knows its lies will never be challenged. Adding insult to injury, despite India having American blood on its hands, the Western media still props up India, thinking it is a benign force for the world simply because it is a democracy. In the American sophomoric and simplistic worldview, where countries are divided into good versus evil, with democracies seen as inherently good and authoritarian regimes as evil, there is little chance that China will receive a fair hearing in its dispute with India. There is a real danger that America may once again be manipulated into war in Asia—this time not with Vietnam, but with a resurgent China, with all the ramifications that entails. The best way to reduce the likelihood of this happening is to immunize Americans about Indians' deceptive nature to reduce their susceptibility, which shouldn't be difficult, given that Indians are well-known as scammers in Western society³⁸.

¹ The Worst Country on Earth!

² In his autobiography, Gandhi described how the first time he realized he was an Indian was when he was classified as one while boarding a train in South Africa. At the time, South Africa had racial segregation, and train compartments were divided by race.

³ The British invented the Hindu script, based on the Tibetan script, to give the majority Hindu population a language of its own, distinguishing it from Urdu—a language closely related to the vernacular Hindi, which was regarded as the language of the Muslim rulers.

⁴ Proud Indian is a phenomenon mostly associated with the internet that seems to only affect Indian nationals. In online spaces where people from all over the world can interact, one can easily spot people self-identified as Proud Indians bragging. Interestingly, these Proud Indians most likely reside in the West, and those Proud Indians in India would go to a Western country without skipping a heartbeat if they could.

⁵ Both Nehru and Mandela were lawyers, and both went to jail.

⁶ Unlike the British, which built up its colonized land, Indian colonialism of what is now India's northeast only brings the usual vice associated with Indian society, and that is poverty, brutality, and rape by the Indian occupiers.

⁷ In its territorial disputes, however, China has been less prone to violence and more cooperative than a singular view of an expansionist state suggests. Since 1949, China has participated in twenty-three unique territorial disputes with its neighbors on land and at sea. Yet it has pursued compromise and offered concessions in seventeen of these conflicts. China's compromises have often been substantial, as it has usually offered to accept less than half of the contested territory in any final settlement. In addition, these compromises have resulted in boundary agreements in which China has abandoned potential irredentist claims to more than 3.4 million square kilometers of land that had been part of the Qing empire at its height in the early nineteenth century. In total, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has contested roughly 238,000 square kilometers or just 7 percent of the territory once part of the Qing. Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China's Territorial Disputes (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics) by M. Taylor Fravel (2008-09-14): unknown author: Amazon.com: Books

⁸ Nixon, after interacting with the Indians remarked that Indian is a slippery treacherous people. Insults fly on Nixon tapes | World news | The Guardian

⁹ Nehru lecturing Kennedy on the colonial origin of the United States Historical Documents - Office of the Historian

¹⁰ Expansionist India — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal

¹¹ The 1955 Bandung conference in Indonesia was a conference of third-world countries from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Notable third-world countries at the time included Japan, ANC, India, China, and others. Nehru in Bandung is presumed to speak for the whole of Asia. He was ostentatiously friendly to the Chinese delegation in a paternalistic way but was viewed by Zhou as overbearing and condescending.

The Great Game Folio: China in Bandung | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

¹² Zhou said privately, ‘I have never met a more arrogant man than Mr. Nehru.’ Bandung Conference - Wikispooks Coming from Zhou, this statement says a lot, as Zhou met a lot of Western statemen, including the famous handshake snub by John Foster Dulles one year before Nixon Goes to China – Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training

¹³ The map of India was subsequently revised in the later editions of the book to include South Tibet.

¹⁴ That day happened to be the first day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year.

¹⁵ The taking of Tawang. Khathing & the taking of Tawang – Manipur News

¹⁶ The Pre-history of the Sino-Indian Border Dispute: A Note - Mainstream Weekly

¹⁷ 6th Dalai Lama - Wikipedia

¹⁸ Exploring Tawang Monastery Monks' Enlightening Life

¹⁹ Microsoft Word - NMaxwellTawangSevenSistersPostNov2011.doc

²⁰ In 1954, India published a map showing Bhutan and Sikkim as part of India. Today, India's map does not include Bhutan anymore, but the map of Ahkand Bharat, a fantasy map of India fetishes by Indian nationalists, shows Bhutan as part of India. The map of Ahkand Bharat is displayed prominently in the newly erected Indian parliament.

²¹ A Small Himalayan Kingdom Remembers Its Lost Independence - PassBlue

²² 25 years after SIKKIM- Nepali Times

²³ Renewed Tension India China Border Who's to Blame

²⁴ How Aggressive is China? | ChinaFile

²⁵ Nehru's soaring rhetoric about “historic Indian territory“, that China was really asking for the Himalayas, which were “the crown of India,” part of her “culture, blood and veins.” “any person with a knowledge of history…would appreciate that this traditional and historical frontier of India has been associated with India’s culture and tradition for the last two thousand years and has been an intimate part of India’s life and thought.” befuddle the outside world with the view that China was indeed being aggressive, as the West already assumed. How Aggressive is China? | ChinaFile

²⁶ In a letter to John Kennedy asking the US for help, Nehru feign victimhood and accused China as an expansionist. “We on our part are determined to spare no effort until the threat posed by Chinese expansionist and aggressive militarism to freedom and independence is completely eliminated.” Indian Prime Minister Nehru’s Letter to JFK on the Sino-Indian War – 11/19/1962 - 2/2 / Documents

²⁷ But the Indians now asserted that there were no true disputes, and no such thing as “disputed territory”: any and all territory claimed by India was ipso facto Indian and there could be no disputation about it, still less negotiation. NevilleMaxwellCAStudies2003Paper

²⁸ WINNOWED: Book Review: India’s China War by Neville Maxwell

²⁹ The Republic of China (Taiwan) is one of the founding members of the United Nations and one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council until 1971, when its civil war rival, the PRC, took over.

³⁰ McNamara wanted to nuke China to defend India

³¹ Remembering a War – The 1962 India-China Conflict – gregoryclark.net

³² William Bundy, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, has made one of the more perceptive comments on U.S. Vietnam policy. Writing about the “Pentagon Papers” in the French foreign affairs magazine, Preuves, he identifies “a fearful view of China” as the main factor behind the mistaken 1964/65 escalation in Vietnam. INDIA’S CHINA WAR – gregoryclark.net

³³ How South Tibet became Arunachal Pradesh

³⁴ The Chinese Communists do produce documentary films of the 1962 war in which Mao is portrayed as some kind of grand strategist winning yet another war and totally glosses over the sordid history of Mao's regime's traitorous actions leading up to the war.

³⁵ The Chinese Communist Party has its dubious origins as a puppet state called the 'Chinese Soviet Republic' established in 1930 and funded by the Communist International. This is why, when the Chinese Communists seized power in 1949, they announced that they would not recognize the unequal treaties imposed upon China by foreign powers, with the exception of those from Tsarist Russia. As a result, the PRC conceded vast tracts of land to the Soviet Union.

³⁶ Against China, India deftly played the victim card to great effect. Against Sikkim, a tiny Himalayan Buddhist kingdom that is very similar to Bhutan but smaller, Indians would tell people with a straight face that the Sikkimese voted overwhelmingly to join India. Instead of scrutinizing India's incredulous claim, the Western media slavishly parrot India's lie SIKKIM'S EX‐KING VIRTUAL PRISONER - The New York Times. As to why the people in Sikkim were so eager to be part of India, no explanation is needed. The truth is that India worked for years to annex Sikkim Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom by Andrew Duff | eBook | Barnes & Noble® . Sikkim was a neighbor of China for many centuries. In the 18th century, it was briefly overrun by the Nepalese Gorkhas. The Sikkim king fled to China and asked for help. The then Qing dynasty was at the zenith of its power, and the Qianlong emperor dispatched an expedition force to Sikkim, expelled the Gorkhas, and restored Sikkim's sovereignty and independence. Sikkim remained unmolested for the rest of its history until it was annexed by India in 1975. In the final moments of Sikkim's sovereignty in 1975, the Sikkim king once again appealed for China's help, but this time, China was too weak to defend its hapless neighbor. The next vulnerable neighbor of India is Bhutan. In 1954, India published a map that included South Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan as part of India. India annexed South Tibet in 1951 and Sikkim in 1975. Bhutan remains nominally independent but is militarily occupied by India. Today, the map of India no longer includes Bhutan, but the map of Akhand Bharat—a fantasy map favored by Indian nationalists, incorporating many of India's neighbors—includes Bhutan, along with other countries. The Akhand Bharat map is prominently displayed in the newly erected Indian parliament, a clear sign that the idea of Akhand Bharat is mainstream Why a map in India’s new Parliament is making its neighbors nervous | CNN. The way India treated Bhutan strongly suggests that India has territorial designs on Bhutan. Bhutan has diplomatic relations with only a few countries that India has approved. Due to India's deep-seated suspicions of the West, Bhutan does not have diplomatic relations with any Western countries. Bhutan also does not have diplomatic relations with its northern neighbor, China. A few years ago, the Bhutanese prime minister met with the Chinese prime minister in an impromptu side meeting at an international conference in Brazil. This angered India, as it considers Bhutan within its domain and is highly sensitive to Bhutan having extensive contact with major countries, especially China. India threatened to cut off heating oil to Bhutan. The diplomatic crisis subsided only with a change in prime minister in Bhutan. Today, the Indian playbook of accusing China of territorial encroachment continues. Every so often, India accuses China of land encroachment in Bhutan and positions itself as a guardian, defending Bhutan against a 'Chinese land grab' India Had Enough of China - Get Out of BHUTAN!. The purpose of these accusations is to prevent Bhutan and China from having any meaningful dialogue on demarcating the border between the two countries. Sometimes, individual Indians on the internet even advocate the "absorption" of Bhutan if Bhutan shows any sign of straying away from India. The Maldives archipelago is another one of India's neighbors that India tried to bully. India used the pretext of gifting some helicopters to the Maldives as a backdoor to deploy troops there. When the Maldives' president asked India to withdraw its troops, India repeatedly balked. When India finally withdrew its troops from the Maldives, it constructed a military port across the islands to continue putting pressure on the Maldives. With respect to Nepal, India has a territorial dispute with Nepal that dates back to the 1962 India-China war. At that time, India requested Nepal to grant access to a piece of territory situated on high ground, which could monitor the movement of Chinese troops. Since then, India has refused to leave the territory. In 2019, India published a new map incorporating that area as part of India.

Nepal backs new map as India land row escalates – DW – 06/14/2020

In 2015, the Nepalese parliament passed a law that was not to India's liking. A few months earlier, a devastating earthquake hit Nepal. India expressed its displeasure by enacting a blockade on landlocked Nepal, which increased the suffering of the Nepalese people to drive home the point that India was unhappy with Nepal.

³⁷ India: It’s Worse Than You Think, by Jayant Bhandari - The Unz Review

³⁸ (773) They want you to MISDIAL - YouTube