CHINA-LED ALLIANCE FORMED TO CHALLENGE U.S. MILITARY PRIMACY

India’s options are to join either a Us-led alliance or a China-led alliance. Non alignment is no longer an option.

Once the United States entered the 1939-45 war by the close of 1941, its outcome was sealed. The Japanese strike on Pearl Harbour was a classic “kamikaze” (suicide) mission that made the destruction of the Japanese Empire a certainty. Earlier, the military regime

which controlled policy in Tokyo made another fatal error, which was to attack populous China rather than conduct operations against the sparse Siberian territory of Russia (then known as the Soviet Union). Had Japan not been trapped in a quagmire of its own making in China, an attack on the Soviet Union in tandem with Berlin’s assault from the west would almost certainly have led to the defeat and occupation of Russia. Alongside, the European powers that had taken over vast territories in Asia could have been neutralised, including Britain, whose control over India was retained against Japanese might because of the fact that the China theatre had taken away much of the attention and muscle of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces. Both the Kuomintang as well as the Chinese Communist Party proved to be formidable foes, especially after getting logistical and aerial support on a massive scale by the United States. A thrust deep into India by Japanese forces together with Indian National Army (INA) forces (which would grow with every Japanese victory over the British) would have led to the meltdown of the British Indian Army and the forced withdrawal of Britain from India after London’s serial surrenders, including in Malaya, Singapore and Burma. As it is, the example of the INA had made Whitehall accept that the British Indian Army would not for long remain loyal to the conquerors rather than to their own people, who had been reduced to destitution by colonial plunder. Of course, whether exchanging rule by London with that of Tokyo would have been an improvement is an open question. The Japanese were expert at copying the Europeans, including in the way they treated the territories they had conquered. Their ally Adolf Hitler had made his own fatal errors, among them the elimination of the most brilliant minds in Germany through his psychopathic anti-semitism. Jewish talent was especially pronounced in the nuclear field, and those scientists from that persecuted faith who managed to escape to the US built a nuclear weapon by mid-1945, which knocked