India and China compromise over a third of the world’s population. Both maintain operable nuclear triads in addition to being the planet’s second and third highest spenders on conventional military arms. When the two countries’ militaries came to blows in May-June of last year, then, it is no surprise that the whole world took notice. Dozens of slain Indian and Chinese soldiers was a tragedy. A wider conflagration between the two nuclear powers could easily have become a catastrophe.
This piece originally appeared in the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, run by the U.S. Air Force