US–India–China Relations in the Indian Ocean: A Chinese Perspective

However, the scenario changed during the Cold War and the US and the Soviet Union hastened to fill the power vacuum left by the withdrawal of Britain. [...] After the end of the Cold War, the US followed a ‘forward deployment’ maritime policy, terming the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf ‘places to which we rou- tinely deploy naval expeditionary forces’.6 Thus, relying on the Diego Garcia military base and the fifth fleet positioned there, the US is still the strongest military presence in the IOR. [...] Due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the global financial crisis and the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in the Middle East, the comprehensive power of the US has been adversely affected to some extent. [...] The Indian peninsula juts about 1,000 miles into the Indian Ocean and is the ‘only feasible linkage’ between the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Malacca and the Andaman Straits. [...] The economic life of India will be completely at the mercy of the power which controls the seas’.17 ‘It may truly be said that India never lost her independence till she lost the command of the sea in the first decade of the sixteenth century’.18 Thus, he concluded from the Indian history that ‘the future of India has been determined not on the land frontiers, but on the oceanic expanse which wash.